I consider myself a liberal on sexual ethics, by historic Christian standards, for all that I'm somewhat culturally conservative by the standards of modern America. There are some things that traditional Christianity frowned upon prior to the 20th century, that I think are morally OK, and can in fact be good and healthy things. Homosexual relationships, but also contraception and some long-term premarital sexual relationships as well.
However, there's one prohibition that even a liberal view cannot easily explain away. It's mentioned in today's reading: I'll use a different scriptural citation, though, which fleshes it out a bit more and adds a potential exception.
"It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery."
Matthew 5:31-32 (from "The Sermon on the Mount".)
And here too:
"The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and.....say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery."
Matthew 19: 3-9.
Backed up by Luke 16:18 "Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery".
And by Mark 10:12, and twice by St. Paul:
"But and if she depart, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife" (1 Corinthians 7:10-11)
And also Romans 7:2, "For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth".
Ouch. This is, indeed, a hard saying. One of the hardest Christian doctrines for our society to accept, as the high divorce rate shows. And it's one, further, that a great many good and decent people find cruel and inflexible. It has been, as the great Bishop Charles Gore conceded in his argument against divorce, "a law singularly hard to flesh and blood". St. Paul himself made a concession- making it clear he was doing so on his own authority, not on the basis of revelation- allowing Christians married to a pagan (before their conversion) to divorce if the pagan spouse wanted to. Taking a lead from St. Paul, different Christian churches since then have tried to make various concessions in the spirit of mercy, to soften the teaching.
Some churches forbid remarriage after divorce entirely, but allow marriages to be annulled if there were factors making it invalid from the beginning (which, especially these days, can be interpreted fairly liberally). Some will not perform remarriages after divorce, and frown on them, but do welcome divorced and remarried people and allow them to receive the sacraments (the Church of England was in this position until 2002, when it unfortunately liberalized the rules). Some allow divorce on the sole ground of adultery; or on the grounds of adultery, cruelty, or conversion to a different religion; some on the grounds that the marriage has irretrievably broken down. Some interpret Christ's words as expressing an ideal rather than an inflexible law. Some see his words as condemning men who unilaterally divorced their wives, and not couples who mutually and amicably agree to divorce. John Milton, notoriously, airily dismissed Christ's words as being deliberately hyperbolic, and approved total freedom of divorce- but only for men. I'm not particularly well informed on how evangelical Protestant churches handle this issue, but my understanding is that it's related to their not seeing marriage as a sacrament, which obviously is not a tack that Catholics, high Anglicans, Orthodox, Orientals and other can take.
I don't really want to get into, here, the topic of what exceptions there should be to Christ's hard saying. Because I don't know. On the one hand, mercy and charity cry out for exceptions. I don't believe that Christ would want a woman to be tied to a felon, a drug abuser, a cheater, or an abuser for life, and I think any ontological tie that there was must by definition be dissolved: not just in our eyes but in God's. And indeed the fact that St. Paul made an exception on his own authority- "But to the rest speak I, not the Lord...." (1 Corinthians 7:12) suggests that we should be able to, as well. On the other hand is the fact that most of the early church forbade divorce with no exceptions (e.g. in the Shepherd of Hermas) and that only a few church fathers in the West ever allowed it even for adultery. On the third hand, it's true that the Orthodox church permitted divorce in certain cases from early on. On the fourth hand, it can be argued (as Bishop Gore did) that this was because of political pressure from the Empire, which was stronger in the East than in the West. On the fifth hand, one could argue that the 'political pressure from the Empire' argument is false because the Armenian Church and the Assyrian Church, who were never part of the Empire, also allowed divorce on similar grounds to the Orthodox- an Assyrian text from the 13th century allows divorce for adultery, heresy, cruelty, murder and witchcraft. On the sixth hand the aformentioned Bishop Gore also argued, convicingly I think, that the 'saving for the cause of fornication' in St. Matthew was a spurious (if well meaning) addition by the Gospel writer, and that it doesn't reflect the true teaching of Jesus. It's always a bad idea when we try to 'correct' the sayings of Jesus and put forth "What Jesus Should Have Said." And on and on....
So in truth, I don't _know_ what types of exceptions there should be, though I'm sure there should be some, and I don't know what the best way is to reconcile this teaching with the interest of mercy and humanity. My own tentative feelings are that something like the pre-2002 C of E position is best- that churches should not _perform_ remarriages, but they should welcome people who are civilly remarried, if they've demonstrated that they are sorry their previous marriage failed, and that at the discretion of their spiritual director they should be allowed to participate fully in the life of the church. Christ loves us, even when we fail, and the church of Christ, like a loving mother, should have mercy on us and loves us unconditionally even when we can't live up to her teachings. This isn't logically very consistent, but then splitting the difference is something Anglicans are well known for. :)
There are certain aspects of what Christ said that do have to be culturally interpreted. As Lynn Gazis-Sax argues, Christ was speaking to men, and it's likely that if he was speaking to women, he would have made an exception for physical or emotional abuse. If divorce is possible for adultery, then it should be logically dissoluble on the grounds of anything that is as bad or worse than adultery, and abuse certainly counts as one of those. So let's acknowledge that an exception for adultery also implies an exception for abuse. The adultery exception may, though, be a spurious interpolation by St. Matthew- it's hard to tell. As for other exceptions, I think we should be very careful, and as I said above, I think my (Anglican) communion should generally stay out of the business of granting remarriages, except perhaps for abuse and adultery, while at the same time welcoming remarried people and dealing with their situations on a case-by-case basis with their priest.
But rather than define the exceptions- for love and mercy do call out for exceptions, just as St. Thomas Aquinas made exceptions to the prohibition against theft if your family was starving, I'd like to talk about the _rule_. Why is it important that Christians today view marriage being lifelong and indissoluble as an _ideal_? What's good about it? Weren't those words of Jesus addressed to a different time? Many of us have come to believe, like me, that the traditional teaching about homosexuality and other sexual acts doesn't necessarily reflect the true will of God for our age, and we need to try to figure out a new sexual ethics for our new era, based on the Bible and Tradition but also based on reason and experience. If we've updated our views on homosexuality, why not also on divorce?
Because let's be honest. There is a very, very powerful case that can be made against the ideal of indissoluble marriage. It was made by Blake in the nineteenth century, and by Yeats in the twentieth century. These were two of the greatest poets in our language, as well as great visionaries and good men. Both of them knew they were arguing a losing battle when they argued for free and easy divorce, but all three did it anyway because it was a cause they deeply believed in. Yeats in particular is an almost titanic and romantic figure in the way he stood in the Irish Senate, in the late 1920s, already well into middle age, wounded in love all his life, a man who had sacrificed and suffered for the cause of Irish freedom, now faced with a country that he felt was making a bad decision in completely banning civil divorce. Yeats was a Protestant, and though he never had any anti-Catholic antipathy, he felt that the Irish government for which he had fought long and hard was now making this law as a pure gesture of religious triumphalism. He stood on the floor of the Senate and argued the case of the Protestant minority against the Catholic majority, thundering memorably, "We against whom you have done this thing are no petty people. We are the people of Grattan, of Emmet, of Parnell, of Swift, of Burke", summoning up an ancient lineage of heroes of Irish nationalism. And he thundered that "Marriage is not to us a Sacrament, but, upon the other hand, the love of a man and woman, and the inseparable physical desire, are sacred. This conviction has come to us through ancient philosophy and modern literature, and it seems to us a most sacrilegious thing to persuade two people who hate each other...to live together, and it is to us no remedy to permit them to part if neither can re-marry." All his romantic fervor, all his aristocratic pride, all his Byronic heroism was evident as he stood there arguing for a lost cause. See here: http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/S/0005/S.0005.192506110009.html
In the nineteenth century, the case for free divorce was made powerfully not just by these eminent intellectuals but by any number of Christian radicals and Christian socialists whose vision of the world was one of freedom, where the only bonds between men and women were based on love, not on legalistic contracts, and that when love died so would the relationship. Because what could be more ugly, and more dehumanizing, then to be tied to someone you don't love? If love is our highest calling as human beings, the highest expression of our nature, the emotion that brings us closest to God, how could something that flows from love be wrong? After all, "God is Love" (1 John 4:8) and again, "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God" (1 John 4:7). Love, it's true, covers a multitude of sins and errors.
In our time, the mass media makes a powerful case that we would all be happier if we dropped the ideal of indissoluble marriage, and instead stayed together only as long as we loved each other. Powerful voices in our culture call for a world where people get divorced when they fall out of love, and find love, hope and joy in their new relationships. Mistakes can be wiped out and people can start over: and everytime they start over it's like everything is bright and new again, like the world is young, and every relationship is full of promise. No one is bound, by promise or contract, to anyone they aren't happy and passionate with. Everyone is free to follow their heart wherever it may lead them.
This is, indeed, a powerful and attractive view of the world, and of marriage, and there's a lot to be said for it. And for non-Christians, it's a compelling one. What I'm not sure of is whether it can be combined with a Christian view of the world. Because all the beauty, attractiveness, power, humanity, and compelling logic of the view of marriage held by Yeats, Blake, Milton, and Desperate Housewives, comes up against this hard saying of Jesus:
"But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery."
Is it plausible to try and explain this away by saying that it was a product of a particular culture and time? And how can we square fidelity to this ideal with the fact that in our fallen world, people fail? I'll get to that in the next half of his post.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
"If Thine Eye Offend Thee": Reflections on this week's reading, continued
"And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched."
As Rachael said in our Bible study on Tuesday, "Bummer."
When I was on the path to becoming a Christian, one of the major stumbling blocks was the doctrine of hell. This is a stumbling block for many people, probably the biggest thing that leads so many people to consider Christianity and then reject it. Which is sad.
Let's start with the most obvious question about hell- I don't think, and nor do the Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, or other major churches today, think that only Christians can be saved. Far from it. "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 7:21). I think that all of us will have the opportunity to experience God, and the Logos, after we die. Some of us may not believe in God, or in Jesus, during our lives but have devoted our lives to serving our fellow man, and to trying to better our world, and to live in a spirit of love. Others of us may be deeply imperfect and flawed people but place our trust in Christ to help us become better. I think that both kinds of people have used their lives to prepare for the world beyond, and both of them, when they die, will be ready to know and love Christ. Belief in Christ, or even in a God, is certainly not a necessity to enter heaven. I think there's an Orthodox saying: we know where Christ is, but we do not know where He is not. He works through many kinds of people, Christians and non-Christians, believers and atheists, in His own way.
There will be a hell, no doubt, and we can hope that relatively few people will be in it. Some think, or hope, that in time Christ may have mercy even on them. Origen believed this (he was the Church Father who took literally the line about 'if your eye offend thee..." and castrated himself with a clam shell). And we can be confident that ultimately, no one who really longs for the Love of God will be denied it: as it is said, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened" (Matthew 7:7-9). As long as free will exists, however, it's possible that some will choose separation from God, even for eternity: "And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever" (Revelation 14:11). If we are free to choose good, then we are also free to choose evil.
But what will that horrible, unspeakable state of separation be like? Jesus gives a hint, in the word he uses for hell, "Gehenna". A couple years ago a short but grisly videotape was released, of Saddam Husayn's preparation for death by hanging. Though I turned it off before the actual execution, I saw enough to hear him being taunted by Shia guardsmen, partisans of his mortal enemy Muqtada al-Sadr, who shout, "Ila Jahannam"- go to hell. "Jahannam" is the same as the Aramaic 'Gei Hinnom', and the Greek 'Gehenna', and they all refer to the same thing. The Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where the Canaanites, before the Jewish conquest, would offer human (specifically, child) sacrifices to the god Molech, pictured as a man with the head of a bull.
Yes, I mean it. The Canaanites (and their Phoenician and later Carthaginian coreligionists) would sacrifice their own infants to Molech, by roasting them alive. The whole valley was inflamed with huge fires, whose smoke and flames would reach to the skies; drums would drown out the cries of the sacrificial victims: and in the midst of it all stood the great idol, the bull-headed Molech, called Baal or Tophet, whose metal structure would convert the screams of the victims into roars. Our human race has a great capacity for evil, and the abomination of child sacrifice which took place at Hinnom was one of them. During those dark days, which were briefly brought back under Manasseh, who abandoned Judaism for Phoenician religion and sent his own son to the fire, the valley of Hinnom became like a little hell on earth, complete with flames, screams and roars, and Jesus uses this evocative and chilling image to give us a foretaste of what separation from Godwill be like. "Depart from me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matthew 25:41-42).
Many people ask "How can a just God impose torture on His enemies in Hell?" But to ask that, I think, is to miss the point. It's by no means clear, first of all, that hell was made by God to begin with. The Nicene creed says that God is "the maker of heaven and earth"; it doesn't say that He made hell, and I don't think He did. I think that Gehenna is the creation of the enemy, the evil power that Christ calls the 'ruler of this world' (John 14:30), and that an early Christian visionary called 'the lord of this world that has ruled it from the beginning", and it is the place- the only place in our universe- from which God, and His influence, are entirely absent (or nearly so- I'll get to that). God doesn't want anyone to be in hell. He 'preached to the spirits in prison' once, and He may do it again (1 Peter 3:18). The only souls to enter hell will be those who have chosen, knowing what God and the truth are, to reject them: not out of ignorance, but out of malice, and who have chosen to prefer something else other than God.
By using the image of Gehenna, Jesus connotes not just a place of suffering, but a place of hatred. The horrors that took place in the Valley of Hinnom were not acts of God, or of His angels: they were things that people did to each other. Jesus didn't simply analogize hell to a flood, or a fire, or an earthquake, or a plague or other natural evils: he analogized it to a place in which the only torments are those we imposed on each other. Similarly, I believe that whatever the torments of Gehenna may be, they are first and foremost torments imposed by the lost on each other. I don't think that God, himself, or His angels, torment anyone. They aren't _in_ hell; so how could they take on administrative or punitive roles there? The most powerful, and most chilling image of Gehenna I've seen is in the later chapters of Dante's Inferno, in which Dante and Virgil are making their way across the frozen lake of the ninth circle, the circle of the Traitors, populated by men like . Frozen in ice, gnawing on each other's flesh, are the Cannibal Count Ugolino of Pisa and his mortal enemy Archbishop Ruggiero. Imagine what Gehenna is like: a place where pairs of history's great villains, mortal enemies if there ever were, endlessly tear at each other's flesh. Hitler and Stalin, Pilate and Caiaphas, Al Capone and Bugs Moran, Saddam Husayn and Osama bin Laden. I have no idea if any of these people are actually there, but it gives you an idea. The other interesting thing is that the lost souls in Dante's hell are generally incapable of talking about anything except themselves and their past history on earth. While this is interesting for the reader, it also points to the truth that in Gehenna, any sense of mutuality and of love is absent.
Because the nature of Gehenna- of any place from which God is absent- is that it's a place without friendship, without love, without companionship, without affection. When we are separated from God in life, we still have our friends, family and people we care about. Not in Gehenna. Because love, friendship, affection, and all those good things come from and have their roots in him. If the lost could love, they wouldn't be in Gehenna: "Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love" (1 John 4:7-8). We can cultivate them but we can't create them. They are from God, and a place from which God was absent would be a place where love, friendship, affection and beauty were also absent. Because if anyone in Gehenna had any love left, even the smallest spark, God would work with it. God cares more for rescuing one lost sheep than for all the 99 that were never in trouble (Luke 15:7) and He can do it, even after we die. He and his helpers would blow on that spark until it was a fire. But everyone, even in life, is busy at work making themselves into a better, more loving person or a worse, more self-interested one. That process is usually imperceptible in daily life, but after we die it continues, more and more, until it reaches one of two endpoints. We either become full of the love of God, or full of the love of self: either full of love, or empty of it. A child of God, or a child of Gehenna.
In "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoyevsky, we find the story of a wicked peasant woman who dies and goes to Hell. Out of mercy, her guardian angel tries to think of the good she has done in her life, but can't think of anything- she has done almost nothing good. Then the angel remembers, and pleads before God, that she once gave an onion from her garden to a beggar woman. God says that if the angel can give her the onion skin and pull her out of the "lake of fire" (Revelation 20:14) , she can enter Heaven. And so the angel gives her the onion, and starts pulling. And miraculously, the onion is strong enough to support her and she starts rising into heaven. But the other lost souls in the lake of fire see this, and they grab her ankles and try to be pulled out as well, crying "Save us!" The old woman is furious and kicks them away, saying, "I'm saved, not you! It's my onion, not yours!" And the moment she says that, the skin of the onion breaks and she falls back into the lake of fire, where she remains to this day.
The power of this story, like the power of the Gospel reading, lies in the fact that it shows us God's love as well as the terrible consequences of evil. God is so loving that he will rescue a totally corrupt woman from Gehenna, for the sake of the one tiny deed of compassion she did in her life. For the sake of that one onion, He was willing to give her a second chance, even after death. That is the kind of love that God has for each one of us. God the Son shed His blood for us, and surely He will give us the opportunity to repent if we really want it. But the terror of this story is that it shows that some people don't really want it. They may say that they want salvation, and that they love God, but in truth they love themselves and their pride more, and they would rather stay in Gehenna, alone and self sufficient, than enter heaven along with their fellows. "It's my onion, not yours". This is the fundamental creed and premise of Hell. This is the dark side of free will: that there will always be those who use it to choose evil, and who choose selfishness rather than love. Even when God in his power extends mercy to us and allow us to be pulled into heaven by the skin of an onion, some of us may choose to stay in Gehenna and lord it over our fellows. Our free will is strong enough to break that onion skin that God of his own power would not allow to be broken.
"What is Hell?" asks Father Zossima in "The Brothers Karamazov" (which you all should read: a brilliant book by a tortured genius). And he answers, "It is the condition of being unable to love". Indeed. That is why Christ uses the immage of the Valley of Hinnom. Because Gehenna, like the Hinnom Valley, is first and foremost a place without love. It isn't just a place of suffering (Earth has plenty of that, as does the cleansing fire). Nor is it just a place where God is absent. First and foremost, it is a place where love is absent. And that, truly, would be the most terrible place it's possible to conceive.
But let's never forget that this isn't the fault of God. He wishes, more than almost anything else, that no one be in Hell. The only ones there will be, in the end, those who have chosen it. And he doesn't add to their torment. If anything, he makes it milder and gentler than it would be otherwise.
There are many apocryphal writings, visions of Heaven and Hell, from the early Christian and medieval eras, some of which I looked into once for a paper for a lit class in college. In a number of them, some figure- either St. Paul, or the Virgin Mary, or one of the saints- entreats Christ to have mercy on the lost souls, and He does. Some visions see Christ bringing their suffering to an end- this is what Origen believed would happen. Others see him allowing some repentant souls into heaven- there is a tradition that He did this for people like Emperor Trajan after he died. Some envision- including the fourth century poet Prudentius- the lost souls being granted temporary ‘vacations’ from Gehenna, and apparently there were medieval legends of saints who claimed to encounter Judas on such a ‘vacation’. Some see him granting a respite from suffering for the lost souls, for a day and a night every Easter. As the fourth century “Apocalypse of Paul” describes it, Christ says to the souls of the lost,
“Yet now because of Michael the archangel of my covenant and the angels that are with him, and because of Paul my dearly beloved whom I would not grieve, and because of your brethren that are in the world and do offer oblations, and because of your sons, for in them are my commandments, and yet more because of mine own goodness: on that day whereon I rose from the dead I grant unto all you that are in torment refreshment for a day and a night for ever.”
An vision called the ‘Descent into Hell of the Mother of God' (again quoted in the "Brothers Karamazov") says something similar, except here it is the Blessed Virgin Mary who pleads for the lost, and the lost souls are allowed two months of refreshment every year, from Good Friday to Trinity Sunday. Whatever the truth of such visions and legends is, and whatever core of genuine mystical experience there is, I think these are more than just pure fictions. I think there is something to the idea, and that in some way God through whatever residue of His influence continues to operate in Gehenna, makes it less horrible than it would otherwise be, and will save all who truly desire it. For His mercy can never truly end, even against those who hate him, whatever form that mercy finally takes. And if His mercy can reach, in small part, even to Gehenna, how much more will it infuse every aspect of life in heaven?
As Rachael said in our Bible study on Tuesday, "Bummer."
When I was on the path to becoming a Christian, one of the major stumbling blocks was the doctrine of hell. This is a stumbling block for many people, probably the biggest thing that leads so many people to consider Christianity and then reject it. Which is sad.
Let's start with the most obvious question about hell- I don't think, and nor do the Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, or other major churches today, think that only Christians can be saved. Far from it. "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 7:21). I think that all of us will have the opportunity to experience God, and the Logos, after we die. Some of us may not believe in God, or in Jesus, during our lives but have devoted our lives to serving our fellow man, and to trying to better our world, and to live in a spirit of love. Others of us may be deeply imperfect and flawed people but place our trust in Christ to help us become better. I think that both kinds of people have used their lives to prepare for the world beyond, and both of them, when they die, will be ready to know and love Christ. Belief in Christ, or even in a God, is certainly not a necessity to enter heaven. I think there's an Orthodox saying: we know where Christ is, but we do not know where He is not. He works through many kinds of people, Christians and non-Christians, believers and atheists, in His own way.
There will be a hell, no doubt, and we can hope that relatively few people will be in it. Some think, or hope, that in time Christ may have mercy even on them. Origen believed this (he was the Church Father who took literally the line about 'if your eye offend thee..." and castrated himself with a clam shell). And we can be confident that ultimately, no one who really longs for the Love of God will be denied it: as it is said, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened" (Matthew 7:7-9). As long as free will exists, however, it's possible that some will choose separation from God, even for eternity: "And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever" (Revelation 14:11). If we are free to choose good, then we are also free to choose evil.
But what will that horrible, unspeakable state of separation be like? Jesus gives a hint, in the word he uses for hell, "Gehenna". A couple years ago a short but grisly videotape was released, of Saddam Husayn's preparation for death by hanging. Though I turned it off before the actual execution, I saw enough to hear him being taunted by Shia guardsmen, partisans of his mortal enemy Muqtada al-Sadr, who shout, "Ila Jahannam"- go to hell. "Jahannam" is the same as the Aramaic 'Gei Hinnom', and the Greek 'Gehenna', and they all refer to the same thing. The Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where the Canaanites, before the Jewish conquest, would offer human (specifically, child) sacrifices to the god Molech, pictured as a man with the head of a bull.
Yes, I mean it. The Canaanites (and their Phoenician and later Carthaginian coreligionists) would sacrifice their own infants to Molech, by roasting them alive. The whole valley was inflamed with huge fires, whose smoke and flames would reach to the skies; drums would drown out the cries of the sacrificial victims: and in the midst of it all stood the great idol, the bull-headed Molech, called Baal or Tophet, whose metal structure would convert the screams of the victims into roars. Our human race has a great capacity for evil, and the abomination of child sacrifice which took place at Hinnom was one of them. During those dark days, which were briefly brought back under Manasseh, who abandoned Judaism for Phoenician religion and sent his own son to the fire, the valley of Hinnom became like a little hell on earth, complete with flames, screams and roars, and Jesus uses this evocative and chilling image to give us a foretaste of what separation from Godwill be like. "Depart from me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matthew 25:41-42).
Many people ask "How can a just God impose torture on His enemies in Hell?" But to ask that, I think, is to miss the point. It's by no means clear, first of all, that hell was made by God to begin with. The Nicene creed says that God is "the maker of heaven and earth"; it doesn't say that He made hell, and I don't think He did. I think that Gehenna is the creation of the enemy, the evil power that Christ calls the 'ruler of this world' (John 14:30), and that an early Christian visionary called 'the lord of this world that has ruled it from the beginning", and it is the place- the only place in our universe- from which God, and His influence, are entirely absent (or nearly so- I'll get to that). God doesn't want anyone to be in hell. He 'preached to the spirits in prison' once, and He may do it again (1 Peter 3:18). The only souls to enter hell will be those who have chosen, knowing what God and the truth are, to reject them: not out of ignorance, but out of malice, and who have chosen to prefer something else other than God.
By using the image of Gehenna, Jesus connotes not just a place of suffering, but a place of hatred. The horrors that took place in the Valley of Hinnom were not acts of God, or of His angels: they were things that people did to each other. Jesus didn't simply analogize hell to a flood, or a fire, or an earthquake, or a plague or other natural evils: he analogized it to a place in which the only torments are those we imposed on each other. Similarly, I believe that whatever the torments of Gehenna may be, they are first and foremost torments imposed by the lost on each other. I don't think that God, himself, or His angels, torment anyone. They aren't _in_ hell; so how could they take on administrative or punitive roles there? The most powerful, and most chilling image of Gehenna I've seen is in the later chapters of Dante's Inferno, in which Dante and Virgil are making their way across the frozen lake of the ninth circle, the circle of the Traitors, populated by men like . Frozen in ice, gnawing on each other's flesh, are the Cannibal Count Ugolino of Pisa and his mortal enemy Archbishop Ruggiero. Imagine what Gehenna is like: a place where pairs of history's great villains, mortal enemies if there ever were, endlessly tear at each other's flesh. Hitler and Stalin, Pilate and Caiaphas, Al Capone and Bugs Moran, Saddam Husayn and Osama bin Laden. I have no idea if any of these people are actually there, but it gives you an idea. The other interesting thing is that the lost souls in Dante's hell are generally incapable of talking about anything except themselves and their past history on earth. While this is interesting for the reader, it also points to the truth that in Gehenna, any sense of mutuality and of love is absent.
Because the nature of Gehenna- of any place from which God is absent- is that it's a place without friendship, without love, without companionship, without affection. When we are separated from God in life, we still have our friends, family and people we care about. Not in Gehenna. Because love, friendship, affection, and all those good things come from and have their roots in him. If the lost could love, they wouldn't be in Gehenna: "Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love" (1 John 4:7-8). We can cultivate them but we can't create them. They are from God, and a place from which God was absent would be a place where love, friendship, affection and beauty were also absent. Because if anyone in Gehenna had any love left, even the smallest spark, God would work with it. God cares more for rescuing one lost sheep than for all the 99 that were never in trouble (Luke 15:7) and He can do it, even after we die. He and his helpers would blow on that spark until it was a fire. But everyone, even in life, is busy at work making themselves into a better, more loving person or a worse, more self-interested one. That process is usually imperceptible in daily life, but after we die it continues, more and more, until it reaches one of two endpoints. We either become full of the love of God, or full of the love of self: either full of love, or empty of it. A child of God, or a child of Gehenna.
In "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoyevsky, we find the story of a wicked peasant woman who dies and goes to Hell. Out of mercy, her guardian angel tries to think of the good she has done in her life, but can't think of anything- she has done almost nothing good. Then the angel remembers, and pleads before God, that she once gave an onion from her garden to a beggar woman. God says that if the angel can give her the onion skin and pull her out of the "lake of fire" (Revelation 20:14) , she can enter Heaven. And so the angel gives her the onion, and starts pulling. And miraculously, the onion is strong enough to support her and she starts rising into heaven. But the other lost souls in the lake of fire see this, and they grab her ankles and try to be pulled out as well, crying "Save us!" The old woman is furious and kicks them away, saying, "I'm saved, not you! It's my onion, not yours!" And the moment she says that, the skin of the onion breaks and she falls back into the lake of fire, where she remains to this day.
The power of this story, like the power of the Gospel reading, lies in the fact that it shows us God's love as well as the terrible consequences of evil. God is so loving that he will rescue a totally corrupt woman from Gehenna, for the sake of the one tiny deed of compassion she did in her life. For the sake of that one onion, He was willing to give her a second chance, even after death. That is the kind of love that God has for each one of us. God the Son shed His blood for us, and surely He will give us the opportunity to repent if we really want it. But the terror of this story is that it shows that some people don't really want it. They may say that they want salvation, and that they love God, but in truth they love themselves and their pride more, and they would rather stay in Gehenna, alone and self sufficient, than enter heaven along with their fellows. "It's my onion, not yours". This is the fundamental creed and premise of Hell. This is the dark side of free will: that there will always be those who use it to choose evil, and who choose selfishness rather than love. Even when God in his power extends mercy to us and allow us to be pulled into heaven by the skin of an onion, some of us may choose to stay in Gehenna and lord it over our fellows. Our free will is strong enough to break that onion skin that God of his own power would not allow to be broken.
"What is Hell?" asks Father Zossima in "The Brothers Karamazov" (which you all should read: a brilliant book by a tortured genius). And he answers, "It is the condition of being unable to love". Indeed. That is why Christ uses the immage of the Valley of Hinnom. Because Gehenna, like the Hinnom Valley, is first and foremost a place without love. It isn't just a place of suffering (Earth has plenty of that, as does the cleansing fire). Nor is it just a place where God is absent. First and foremost, it is a place where love is absent. And that, truly, would be the most terrible place it's possible to conceive.
But let's never forget that this isn't the fault of God. He wishes, more than almost anything else, that no one be in Hell. The only ones there will be, in the end, those who have chosen it. And he doesn't add to their torment. If anything, he makes it milder and gentler than it would be otherwise.
There are many apocryphal writings, visions of Heaven and Hell, from the early Christian and medieval eras, some of which I looked into once for a paper for a lit class in college. In a number of them, some figure- either St. Paul, or the Virgin Mary, or one of the saints- entreats Christ to have mercy on the lost souls, and He does. Some visions see Christ bringing their suffering to an end- this is what Origen believed would happen. Others see him allowing some repentant souls into heaven- there is a tradition that He did this for people like Emperor Trajan after he died. Some envision- including the fourth century poet Prudentius- the lost souls being granted temporary ‘vacations’ from Gehenna, and apparently there were medieval legends of saints who claimed to encounter Judas on such a ‘vacation’. Some see him granting a respite from suffering for the lost souls, for a day and a night every Easter. As the fourth century “Apocalypse of Paul” describes it, Christ says to the souls of the lost,
“Yet now because of Michael the archangel of my covenant and the angels that are with him, and because of Paul my dearly beloved whom I would not grieve, and because of your brethren that are in the world and do offer oblations, and because of your sons, for in them are my commandments, and yet more because of mine own goodness: on that day whereon I rose from the dead I grant unto all you that are in torment refreshment for a day and a night for ever.”
An vision called the ‘Descent into Hell of the Mother of God' (again quoted in the "Brothers Karamazov") says something similar, except here it is the Blessed Virgin Mary who pleads for the lost, and the lost souls are allowed two months of refreshment every year, from Good Friday to Trinity Sunday. Whatever the truth of such visions and legends is, and whatever core of genuine mystical experience there is, I think these are more than just pure fictions. I think there is something to the idea, and that in some way God through whatever residue of His influence continues to operate in Gehenna, makes it less horrible than it would otherwise be, and will save all who truly desire it. For His mercy can never truly end, even against those who hate him, whatever form that mercy finally takes. And if His mercy can reach, in small part, even to Gehenna, how much more will it infuse every aspect of life in heaven?
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
"Whoever Is Not Against Us Is For Us: A Promise"
The Gospel reading from the lectionary this Sunday was Mark 9:38-48. It's a fascinating one: inspiring and chilling, and most of all paradoxical. How could it begin in such a spirit of light, welcome and ecumenism, and end with such a dark and terrifying vision of hell? Let's look at it closely.
"And John answered him, saying, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us."
One of the most interesting things about Jesus was the change that He worked in His apostles, turning them into something quite opposed to what they had been before. Thomas the semi-Dualist, who had a dim view of the body (read the apocryphal Gospel and Acts of Thomas for more on this) became inadvertently the most important witness to the physical resurrection of Christ's body. Peter, weak-willed and so timid he denied Christ three times, became the administrator of what was to be the largest and greatest of all the Christian churches (whether or not you accept its claim to be also the _truest_ expression of Christianity). Paul, the persecutor of the apostles, became the apostle to the Gentiles. And John, who here shows himself to be intolerant, became the preacher of Love.
"But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me."
The Latin phrasing here differs from the English, lit. "Nemo enim est qui virtutem faciat in nomine meo...": i.e. "there is no man which shall do a virtuous act in my name..." Jesus isn't talking about only those who drive out demons, or prophecy, or do other miraculous signs in the name of Christ. He is talking about anyone who does a virtuous act in the name of Christ. Those who, in Christ's name, heal the sick, and feed the hungry , and help the poor overcome the economic poverty that oppresses them, and who work towards a more just society, and plant trees and care for the natural world, in His name: all these are Christians, and the specific details of their theology, while important in themselves, should not make us despise each other over them. "In my house there are many mansions..." (John 14:2) Here Christ was saying, I think, that there isn't just one single branch of the Christian church, that there would be many expressions of the Christian faith, and that men could love and serve Christ- and come to know the truth- outside the structure that the Apostles set up. This verse is a proof that even during the lifetime of Christ himself there were multiple different Christianities, including Christians who were outside the apostolic fellowship. And Jesus seems to have been fine with that. Which should give us pause. Christ works predominantly, I think, through the apostolic church that He set up, and which later divided into Catholic, Armenian, Syrian, Orthodox and other branches (including later the Anglicans). But that doesn't prevent Him from working outside the church too. Sometimes He does- He did even during his own life, after all- and sometimes the orthodox can learn from the 'heretic', and the church as a whole from the light of individual reason and personal revelation.
"For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward."
In the desert Middle East, where this story unfolds, water meant the difference between life and death. I've lived in such an environment, in the drylands of western Madagascar. A drink of water is something precious and special, the more so because water was so hard to get. There are fewer things nicer and more pleasant on a hot, dry day then a cup of water. Christ makes a point of using this example because water was so important: the very source of life. Literally, as well: today we know that water is the indispensable compound on which all organic chemistry and all life depends. Certain kinds of life can survive without oxygen, without organic food, even without light, but nothing can survive without water. Christ invokes our need and thirst for water, and then repeats the phraseology from His Sermon on the Mount, "They have their reward."
"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea..."
Interesting, Christ suddenly shifts from the promise of something good to the warnings of something terrible. I could talk more about this metaphor, and sometime I'm sure I will, but let's skip to the end....
To be continued.....
"And John answered him, saying, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us."
One of the most interesting things about Jesus was the change that He worked in His apostles, turning them into something quite opposed to what they had been before. Thomas the semi-Dualist, who had a dim view of the body (read the apocryphal Gospel and Acts of Thomas for more on this) became inadvertently the most important witness to the physical resurrection of Christ's body. Peter, weak-willed and so timid he denied Christ three times, became the administrator of what was to be the largest and greatest of all the Christian churches (whether or not you accept its claim to be also the _truest_ expression of Christianity). Paul, the persecutor of the apostles, became the apostle to the Gentiles. And John, who here shows himself to be intolerant, became the preacher of Love.
"But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me."
The Latin phrasing here differs from the English, lit. "Nemo enim est qui virtutem faciat in nomine meo...": i.e. "there is no man which shall do a virtuous act in my name..." Jesus isn't talking about only those who drive out demons, or prophecy, or do other miraculous signs in the name of Christ. He is talking about anyone who does a virtuous act in the name of Christ. Those who, in Christ's name, heal the sick, and feed the hungry , and help the poor overcome the economic poverty that oppresses them, and who work towards a more just society, and plant trees and care for the natural world, in His name: all these are Christians, and the specific details of their theology, while important in themselves, should not make us despise each other over them. "In my house there are many mansions..." (John 14:2) Here Christ was saying, I think, that there isn't just one single branch of the Christian church, that there would be many expressions of the Christian faith, and that men could love and serve Christ- and come to know the truth- outside the structure that the Apostles set up. This verse is a proof that even during the lifetime of Christ himself there were multiple different Christianities, including Christians who were outside the apostolic fellowship. And Jesus seems to have been fine with that. Which should give us pause. Christ works predominantly, I think, through the apostolic church that He set up, and which later divided into Catholic, Armenian, Syrian, Orthodox and other branches (including later the Anglicans). But that doesn't prevent Him from working outside the church too. Sometimes He does- He did even during his own life, after all- and sometimes the orthodox can learn from the 'heretic', and the church as a whole from the light of individual reason and personal revelation.
"For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward."
In the desert Middle East, where this story unfolds, water meant the difference between life and death. I've lived in such an environment, in the drylands of western Madagascar. A drink of water is something precious and special, the more so because water was so hard to get. There are fewer things nicer and more pleasant on a hot, dry day then a cup of water. Christ makes a point of using this example because water was so important: the very source of life. Literally, as well: today we know that water is the indispensable compound on which all organic chemistry and all life depends. Certain kinds of life can survive without oxygen, without organic food, even without light, but nothing can survive without water. Christ invokes our need and thirst for water, and then repeats the phraseology from His Sermon on the Mount, "They have their reward."
"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea..."
Interesting, Christ suddenly shifts from the promise of something good to the warnings of something terrible. I could talk more about this metaphor, and sometime I'm sure I will, but let's skip to the end....
To be continued.....
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Reflections on the Anniversary of World War II: "The Man of Lawlessness"
A few weeks ago marked the 70th anniversary of the Second World War. On August 31, 1939 the Germans invaded Poland, and two days later France and Britain declared war on Germany. Just a week or so earlier had come the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact by which Stalin's Russia, betraying everything that communism was supposed to stand for, signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler and agreed to divide up Poland and the Baltic region between them. Dark days, indeed, and a period in history that more and more of us today seem on the verge of forgetting, and using as a cheap and irresponsible insult to hurl at our political enemies. In an age where American political commentators seriously compare Barack Obama to Hitler, where the government of Iran cheerfully denies the Holocaust, and where Pat Buchanan thinks it was a mistake to fight the Second World War, we appear to have learned nothing from that horrible era of history, which makes it more likely those horrors will return.
These events marked the beginning of a six-year global conflict that would drag in more and more countries, and be fought from the jungles of the Philippines to the frozen seas of Murmansk, and from the deserts of Egypt to the mountains of Norway. It would be fought with unimaginable savagery, against some of the most quintessentially evil forces that human history has ever seen, and the traditional restraints of war would go by the wayside. It would see Hitler's regime in Germany gradually show more and more of its true colors: a demonic state that made brutality, domination, torture and murder its primary values, and that replaced love and mercy with hatred and sadism. It would eventually draw together a bizarre alliance, including men as different as Marshal Tito, President Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Marshal Zhukov, Kimon Georgiev, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mahatma Gandhi, George Grivas, Menachem Begin....men who believed in very different things, had nothing in common, would happily have slit each other's throats, but were united by just one thing, that they realized that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were mortal threats to them. The war would see the majority of Europe's Jewish population murdered in the largest act of cold-blooded genocide in human history. It would see over 50 million people killed, half of them in the Soviet Union alone, and so many atrocities and horrors that we became used to hearing about them and no longer shocked. It would end with dropping of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, resulting in the horrible deaths of over 200,000 people (mostly civilians, and it's a testament to how bloody World War II was that that seems like just a minor footnote), and with the emergence of a world dominated by the rivalry between two powers that hated and feared each other, Moscow and Washington, and that fought a four-decade Cold War in which they both tried to export their ideology across the world by any means necessary. It was, all in all, one of the darkest chapters in the history of man's inhumanity to man. But inasmuch as good consists largely in the resistance and struggle against evil, it was also a time of a great deal of heroism and sacrifice, and a world in which people gave their lives to try to destroy one of the greatest evils the world had ever seen.
There has been a lot of ink spilled and words exchanged over the last 70 years trying to explain Hitler. The Communists accused him of being the logical outgrowth of capitalism and of its reduction of human beings to mere economic resources; conservative capitalists accused him of being the logical outgrowth of socialism and its impulse to centralization. Christians accused him of being the logical outcome of atheist antinomianism; atheists accused him of being the heir of Christian anti-Semitism. Catholics and Lutherans accused each other of being responsible for the German anti-semitism that Hitler inherited. Republicans accused him of inheriting the most brutal tendencies of the Second German Reich; monarchists accused him of being the logical outcome of the popular will untrammeled by tradition.In all of this urge to blame the Nazis on someone else, we too often forget that they were the incarnation of something deep within us, and deep within the world.
Perhaps the closest thing written in recent years about the truth of Nazism was Mr. Norman Mailer's book "The Castle in the Forest". Mailer believed, very strongly, in the reality of a personal, evil spiritual being only slightly less powerful than God. Call it the Devil if you like, though Mailer wasn't an orthodox Christian- or call that power Lucifer, Satan, Ahriman, Ptahil, or any of the numerous other names that various religions have given to the power of evil. Mailer's book imagined that Hitler's birth and life had been literally presided over by the devil, just as the lives of numerous prophets and saints had been presided over by God. And if you think about it, that's not such a bad way to think about a man whose life embodied hatred, cruelty, and domination to the extent of Hitler's.
What could inspire someone, after all, to cold-bloodedly decide to put to death twelve million people- men, women and children, young and old, mostly Jews but with many homosexuals, Gypsies, and political prisoners as well. What could inspire someone to eliminate an entire ethnic group from the face of the globe (and if he failed, it wasn't for lack of trying). Through the most cruel and barbaric means imaginable: through poison gas, through injections, through freezing, boiling alive, working to death, starvation, disease. What could make someone do that? It wasn't merely the desire for something easily understandable that he was pursuing at the expense of other people. We can, to some extent, understand people who do evil things in pursuit of food, sex, money, comfort, or even deeper motives like passion or revenge. But this went beyond that. The Nazis were, quintessentially, a movement that was built on celebrating evil for its own sake, on reversing all that is highest and best in human nature- love, mercy, justice- and turning us into cruel and bestial animals. They worshiped, and craved, power and cruelty for their own sakes.
I remember once hearing a story from a friend. He was of Austrian descent, with some circumstantial evidence of Jewish ancestors, including a suggestive family name, but if they were ever Jewish they had converted to Catholicism generations ago. One of his relatives was in Vienna at the time of the Holocaust (the rest of the family had long since emigrated) and was investigated by the Nazis after the annexation of Austria. They couldn't verify that she was Jewish, and couldn't send her to a death camp, but they thought they might as well get rid of her anyway. They smashed her insulin, and left her to die a painful death from a diabetic coma, lingering for months while she gradually used up her remaining medicine, knowing that ultimately she was going to die.
What could lead men to do that, to so completely lose any sense of love, mercy, or kindness towards another human being? We would do well to remember this kind of thing happens in our age, too. A Liberian warlord, within the last fifteen years, killed about 20,000 people and practiced ritual sacrifice and cannibalism of children before going into battle. The German nation itself, less than fifty years before Hitler, committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people of German Southwest Africa: driving them into the desert, poisoning the wells, and abandoning them to a slow death from thirst. In the postwar period we have seen a grisly chronicle of one atrocity after another- in Cambodia, in China, in Rwanda, in Central America, in the Middle East. There is something literally inhuman about all this: something beyond humanity, and beyond nature. In these glimpses of man at his worst, just as it the glimpses of man at his best, we see something outside man and outside the physical universe: a brooding, dark power that thrives on hatred, evil, self-love, and cruelty, not as means to an end but for their own sakes. The Zoroastrians, in their sacred writings, identify the nature of this evil power as just this love of cruelty and destruction for its own sake:
"I will not depart, I will not provide assistance for thy creatures, I will not offer praise among thy creatures, and I am not of the same opinion with thee as to good things. I will destroy thy creatures for ever and everlasting; moreover, I will force all thy creatures into disaffection to thee and affection for myself" (Bundahishn 1:14).
I think the reason our age still hasn't come to terms with the legacy of the second world war is because we don't really believe in the reality of evil in the same sense as our ancestors did. They knew that such an evil power existed, though they weren't sure quite what to make of it- most of all, they weren't sure how evil had originated, and what the nature of evil was. But they were wise enough to know what our century came near to forgetting: that evil is very real, very personal, and very powerful.
Perhaps the most powerful prediction of the Nazi era was this, written almost 20 centuries ago:
"Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God..... For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now restraineth will restrain, until he be taken out of the way" (2 Thessalonians 2:3-7).
The identity of that person or force that St. Paul refers to as the "Restrainer" has been a matter of debate over the centuries. During the Middle Ages it was often taken to refer to the Roman Empire, and by inheritance to the Holy Roman Empire which governed central Europe, and which had its last capital in Vienna until it finally fell in 1806. About 80 years later, not far from Vienna, was born the child who would grow up to be history's greatest villain and mass murderer. St. Paul's prophecy is of course an apocalyptic one, but then I don't believe that the apocalypse is merely something that happens once, at the end of the world. I think that the visions of apocalypse given to us by Daniel, Paul, Christ, St. John, and various apocryphal sources are attempts to dramatize- not in detail but in essence- the eternal conflict of good and evil, and refer to a struggle that repeats itself in every age. Those visions apply to the end of the world but they also apply to the world of AD 70, of AD 476, and of AD 1933.
The Holy Roman Empire, and the medieval world of which it was an integral part, had many evils. But this can be said for it: that it restrained us, both for evil and for good. It set limits on humanity's capacity to accomplish good things and evil things: some of them were set by the lack of technological advancement, and some were set by the constraints of religion and tradition. The same dead hand of tradition and the lack of scientific knowledge that made it impossible to cure the plague or to avoid famines, also made it impossible to carry out or even to envision genocide of an entire people. There were plenty of pogroms and massacres in the medieval world, but at critical times men like Aquinas or Pope Clement VI, with the authority of scripture and tradition behind them, spoke out on behalf of the Jews to stop them from engulfing all of Christendom. As J.B.S. Haldane said, our world is greater in its capacities for good as well as evil than the world of the Middle Ages presided over by St. Paul's "Restrainer". A doctor can do so much more good today than a medieval doctor, and a scientist can discover so much more: and by the same token, a tyrant can do so much more evil. The leaders of the twentieth century claimed power over nature itself and over human bei The early modern world was shocked by the massacre of Glencoe in which a dissident Scottish clan of thirty people were wiped out by King William: they couldn't even think of the unimaginable horrors that were to arise in the twentieth century, in the name of Capitalism, Socialism, Civilization, Equality, Order, the Master Race, Freedom, Democracy, Progress, Security, and God, in which slaughters would involve not thirty but thirty thousand people at a time.
That restrained world, the world of the past, when our horizons were low and our visions were narrow, and our capacity to dream of both good and evil, began dying with the rise of modernity, and one pillar of that world ended in 1806 in Vienna. So many of the men of the Enlightenment dreamed that the new world would be a better one, that it would be a world of ease, comfort and leisure, that machines could do the work of men, that rationality would replace superstition, that prosperity would mean that material struggles were pointless and secularism would mean that spiritual struggles were unnecessary. How wrong they were. In Hitler we saw, as George Orwell puts it, the rise of "all the witch doctors and warlords in history rolled into one", and in Germany we saw "the tools of science at the disposal of ideas from the Stone Age". That combination of the worst aspects of the ancient- cruel and militant barbarism- with the worst aspects of the modern- the cool and reasoned application of the methods of science to ghoulish and demonic ends- made it difficult for people at the time, and since, to know what to make of the Nazis. Were they ancient, or were they modern? The answer of course is that they were both. In the first century the belief was widespread that the 'man of lawlessness' would be Nero risen from the dead: and this image of a spectral dead man risen from the grave, marching like a horde of zombies out of the past into the present, is a striking symbol for the Nazis' resurrection of all the barbarism of the ancient world in the middle of the twentieth century, empowered by modern science and philosophy. As new as the invention of mustard gas and the Haber process for fixing nitrogen: and as old as the ancient slave-empires which had carried out trade in " beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men", in the chilling words of St. John (Revelation 18:13). For this prediction, too, was upheld, that the Nazi empire would bring back forced labor in the heart of Europe, where it had not been seen for centuries.
An early second-century apocryphal vision of the apocalypse goes into more detail about the 'man of lawlessness', and seems strikingly applicable as a prediction of the twentieth century:
"After it is consummated, Beliar the great ruler, the king of this world, will descend, who hath ruled it since it came into being; yea, he will descent from his firmament in the likeness of a man, a lawless king, the slayer of his mother: who himself (even) this king, will persecute the plant which the Twelve Apostles of the Beloved have planted. Of the Twelve one will be delivered into his hands. This ruler in the form of that king will come and there will come with him all the powers of this world, and they will hearken unto him in all that he desires. And at his word the sun will rise at night and he will make the moon to appear at the sixth hour. And all that he hath desired he will do in the world: he will do and speak like the Beloved and he will say: "I am God and before me there has been none. And all the people in the world will believe in him. And they will sacrifice to him and they will serve him saying: "This is God and beside him there is no other." And they greater number of those who shall have been associated together in order to receive the Beloved, he will turn aside after him." (Ascension of Isaiah 4:2-9).
Indeed. The twentienth century tyrants, Hitler among them, attracted to them much of the same adulation and veneration that in the medieval world had been given to God and to the supernatural. In a world in which religion and God no longer seemed relevant, huge numbers of people found in political tyrants and demagogues objects for worship and self-sacrifice. The tyrants of the modern age boasted of their 'scientific, modern' capabilities: if they didn't promise to make the sun rise at night, they promised many other miracles of technology- better infrastructure, better agriculture, better medicine, and in time even the power to split the atom. "And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men..." (Revelation 13:13). They saw in themselves replacements for the religions of the past, destined to take the place of 'the Beloved" in men's hearts: particularly in Russia, where Stalin raised the cult of the embalmed Lenin to a virtual religion, and referred to his paid propagandists as 'engineers of human souls'. They appeared invincible in war, indomitable in the power over nature and over history, and for millions of people around mid-century it seemed reasonable to ask, "Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?" (Revelation 13:4). The apocryphal vision cited above further suggests that even the Church itself, those 'associated together in order to receive the Beloved", would become complicit in the crimes of the great modern tyrants, and indeed the Second World War saw all too many Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and other Christian leaders silent and weak in the face of the greatest evil in modern times.
These are the lessons of a horror-ridden twentieth century, that seven decades later we can look back upon and try to learn from. Have we learned from them? Maybe, and maybe not. As I said above, I think history repeats itself, and the struggle of good against evil repeats itself, in every age. But the stakes keep getting bigger and bigger. Every turn of the wheel good is more and more good, evil is more and more evil, and the struggle between the two is more cataclysmic. I don't know who the next embodiment of evil will be in the future, or what the next great global struggle will be, but I do know that if we don't keep the reality of human and superhuman evil always in our hearts and minds, and stay on guard against it, we will once again be faced with something too great and horrible in its evil to imagine.
These events marked the beginning of a six-year global conflict that would drag in more and more countries, and be fought from the jungles of the Philippines to the frozen seas of Murmansk, and from the deserts of Egypt to the mountains of Norway. It would be fought with unimaginable savagery, against some of the most quintessentially evil forces that human history has ever seen, and the traditional restraints of war would go by the wayside. It would see Hitler's regime in Germany gradually show more and more of its true colors: a demonic state that made brutality, domination, torture and murder its primary values, and that replaced love and mercy with hatred and sadism. It would eventually draw together a bizarre alliance, including men as different as Marshal Tito, President Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Marshal Zhukov, Kimon Georgiev, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mahatma Gandhi, George Grivas, Menachem Begin....men who believed in very different things, had nothing in common, would happily have slit each other's throats, but were united by just one thing, that they realized that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were mortal threats to them. The war would see the majority of Europe's Jewish population murdered in the largest act of cold-blooded genocide in human history. It would see over 50 million people killed, half of them in the Soviet Union alone, and so many atrocities and horrors that we became used to hearing about them and no longer shocked. It would end with dropping of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, resulting in the horrible deaths of over 200,000 people (mostly civilians, and it's a testament to how bloody World War II was that that seems like just a minor footnote), and with the emergence of a world dominated by the rivalry between two powers that hated and feared each other, Moscow and Washington, and that fought a four-decade Cold War in which they both tried to export their ideology across the world by any means necessary. It was, all in all, one of the darkest chapters in the history of man's inhumanity to man. But inasmuch as good consists largely in the resistance and struggle against evil, it was also a time of a great deal of heroism and sacrifice, and a world in which people gave their lives to try to destroy one of the greatest evils the world had ever seen.
There has been a lot of ink spilled and words exchanged over the last 70 years trying to explain Hitler. The Communists accused him of being the logical outgrowth of capitalism and of its reduction of human beings to mere economic resources; conservative capitalists accused him of being the logical outgrowth of socialism and its impulse to centralization. Christians accused him of being the logical outcome of atheist antinomianism; atheists accused him of being the heir of Christian anti-Semitism. Catholics and Lutherans accused each other of being responsible for the German anti-semitism that Hitler inherited. Republicans accused him of inheriting the most brutal tendencies of the Second German Reich; monarchists accused him of being the logical outcome of the popular will untrammeled by tradition.In all of this urge to blame the Nazis on someone else, we too often forget that they were the incarnation of something deep within us, and deep within the world.
Perhaps the closest thing written in recent years about the truth of Nazism was Mr. Norman Mailer's book "The Castle in the Forest". Mailer believed, very strongly, in the reality of a personal, evil spiritual being only slightly less powerful than God. Call it the Devil if you like, though Mailer wasn't an orthodox Christian- or call that power Lucifer, Satan, Ahriman, Ptahil, or any of the numerous other names that various religions have given to the power of evil. Mailer's book imagined that Hitler's birth and life had been literally presided over by the devil, just as the lives of numerous prophets and saints had been presided over by God. And if you think about it, that's not such a bad way to think about a man whose life embodied hatred, cruelty, and domination to the extent of Hitler's.
What could inspire someone, after all, to cold-bloodedly decide to put to death twelve million people- men, women and children, young and old, mostly Jews but with many homosexuals, Gypsies, and political prisoners as well. What could inspire someone to eliminate an entire ethnic group from the face of the globe (and if he failed, it wasn't for lack of trying). Through the most cruel and barbaric means imaginable: through poison gas, through injections, through freezing, boiling alive, working to death, starvation, disease. What could make someone do that? It wasn't merely the desire for something easily understandable that he was pursuing at the expense of other people. We can, to some extent, understand people who do evil things in pursuit of food, sex, money, comfort, or even deeper motives like passion or revenge. But this went beyond that. The Nazis were, quintessentially, a movement that was built on celebrating evil for its own sake, on reversing all that is highest and best in human nature- love, mercy, justice- and turning us into cruel and bestial animals. They worshiped, and craved, power and cruelty for their own sakes.
I remember once hearing a story from a friend. He was of Austrian descent, with some circumstantial evidence of Jewish ancestors, including a suggestive family name, but if they were ever Jewish they had converted to Catholicism generations ago. One of his relatives was in Vienna at the time of the Holocaust (the rest of the family had long since emigrated) and was investigated by the Nazis after the annexation of Austria. They couldn't verify that she was Jewish, and couldn't send her to a death camp, but they thought they might as well get rid of her anyway. They smashed her insulin, and left her to die a painful death from a diabetic coma, lingering for months while she gradually used up her remaining medicine, knowing that ultimately she was going to die.
What could lead men to do that, to so completely lose any sense of love, mercy, or kindness towards another human being? We would do well to remember this kind of thing happens in our age, too. A Liberian warlord, within the last fifteen years, killed about 20,000 people and practiced ritual sacrifice and cannibalism of children before going into battle. The German nation itself, less than fifty years before Hitler, committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people of German Southwest Africa: driving them into the desert, poisoning the wells, and abandoning them to a slow death from thirst. In the postwar period we have seen a grisly chronicle of one atrocity after another- in Cambodia, in China, in Rwanda, in Central America, in the Middle East. There is something literally inhuman about all this: something beyond humanity, and beyond nature. In these glimpses of man at his worst, just as it the glimpses of man at his best, we see something outside man and outside the physical universe: a brooding, dark power that thrives on hatred, evil, self-love, and cruelty, not as means to an end but for their own sakes. The Zoroastrians, in their sacred writings, identify the nature of this evil power as just this love of cruelty and destruction for its own sake:
"I will not depart, I will not provide assistance for thy creatures, I will not offer praise among thy creatures, and I am not of the same opinion with thee as to good things. I will destroy thy creatures for ever and everlasting; moreover, I will force all thy creatures into disaffection to thee and affection for myself" (Bundahishn 1:14).
I think the reason our age still hasn't come to terms with the legacy of the second world war is because we don't really believe in the reality of evil in the same sense as our ancestors did. They knew that such an evil power existed, though they weren't sure quite what to make of it- most of all, they weren't sure how evil had originated, and what the nature of evil was. But they were wise enough to know what our century came near to forgetting: that evil is very real, very personal, and very powerful.
Perhaps the most powerful prediction of the Nazi era was this, written almost 20 centuries ago:
"Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God..... For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now restraineth will restrain, until he be taken out of the way" (2 Thessalonians 2:3-7).
The identity of that person or force that St. Paul refers to as the "Restrainer" has been a matter of debate over the centuries. During the Middle Ages it was often taken to refer to the Roman Empire, and by inheritance to the Holy Roman Empire which governed central Europe, and which had its last capital in Vienna until it finally fell in 1806. About 80 years later, not far from Vienna, was born the child who would grow up to be history's greatest villain and mass murderer. St. Paul's prophecy is of course an apocalyptic one, but then I don't believe that the apocalypse is merely something that happens once, at the end of the world. I think that the visions of apocalypse given to us by Daniel, Paul, Christ, St. John, and various apocryphal sources are attempts to dramatize- not in detail but in essence- the eternal conflict of good and evil, and refer to a struggle that repeats itself in every age. Those visions apply to the end of the world but they also apply to the world of AD 70, of AD 476, and of AD 1933.
The Holy Roman Empire, and the medieval world of which it was an integral part, had many evils. But this can be said for it: that it restrained us, both for evil and for good. It set limits on humanity's capacity to accomplish good things and evil things: some of them were set by the lack of technological advancement, and some were set by the constraints of religion and tradition. The same dead hand of tradition and the lack of scientific knowledge that made it impossible to cure the plague or to avoid famines, also made it impossible to carry out or even to envision genocide of an entire people. There were plenty of pogroms and massacres in the medieval world, but at critical times men like Aquinas or Pope Clement VI, with the authority of scripture and tradition behind them, spoke out on behalf of the Jews to stop them from engulfing all of Christendom. As J.B.S. Haldane said, our world is greater in its capacities for good as well as evil than the world of the Middle Ages presided over by St. Paul's "Restrainer". A doctor can do so much more good today than a medieval doctor, and a scientist can discover so much more: and by the same token, a tyrant can do so much more evil. The leaders of the twentieth century claimed power over nature itself and over human bei The early modern world was shocked by the massacre of Glencoe in which a dissident Scottish clan of thirty people were wiped out by King William: they couldn't even think of the unimaginable horrors that were to arise in the twentieth century, in the name of Capitalism, Socialism, Civilization, Equality, Order, the Master Race, Freedom, Democracy, Progress, Security, and God, in which slaughters would involve not thirty but thirty thousand people at a time.
That restrained world, the world of the past, when our horizons were low and our visions were narrow, and our capacity to dream of both good and evil, began dying with the rise of modernity, and one pillar of that world ended in 1806 in Vienna. So many of the men of the Enlightenment dreamed that the new world would be a better one, that it would be a world of ease, comfort and leisure, that machines could do the work of men, that rationality would replace superstition, that prosperity would mean that material struggles were pointless and secularism would mean that spiritual struggles were unnecessary. How wrong they were. In Hitler we saw, as George Orwell puts it, the rise of "all the witch doctors and warlords in history rolled into one", and in Germany we saw "the tools of science at the disposal of ideas from the Stone Age". That combination of the worst aspects of the ancient- cruel and militant barbarism- with the worst aspects of the modern- the cool and reasoned application of the methods of science to ghoulish and demonic ends- made it difficult for people at the time, and since, to know what to make of the Nazis. Were they ancient, or were they modern? The answer of course is that they were both. In the first century the belief was widespread that the 'man of lawlessness' would be Nero risen from the dead: and this image of a spectral dead man risen from the grave, marching like a horde of zombies out of the past into the present, is a striking symbol for the Nazis' resurrection of all the barbarism of the ancient world in the middle of the twentieth century, empowered by modern science and philosophy. As new as the invention of mustard gas and the Haber process for fixing nitrogen: and as old as the ancient slave-empires which had carried out trade in " beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men", in the chilling words of St. John (Revelation 18:13). For this prediction, too, was upheld, that the Nazi empire would bring back forced labor in the heart of Europe, where it had not been seen for centuries.
An early second-century apocryphal vision of the apocalypse goes into more detail about the 'man of lawlessness', and seems strikingly applicable as a prediction of the twentieth century:
"After it is consummated, Beliar the great ruler, the king of this world, will descend, who hath ruled it since it came into being; yea, he will descent from his firmament in the likeness of a man, a lawless king, the slayer of his mother: who himself (even) this king, will persecute the plant which the Twelve Apostles of the Beloved have planted. Of the Twelve one will be delivered into his hands. This ruler in the form of that king will come and there will come with him all the powers of this world, and they will hearken unto him in all that he desires. And at his word the sun will rise at night and he will make the moon to appear at the sixth hour. And all that he hath desired he will do in the world: he will do and speak like the Beloved and he will say: "I am God and before me there has been none. And all the people in the world will believe in him. And they will sacrifice to him and they will serve him saying: "This is God and beside him there is no other." And they greater number of those who shall have been associated together in order to receive the Beloved, he will turn aside after him." (Ascension of Isaiah 4:2-9).
Indeed. The twentienth century tyrants, Hitler among them, attracted to them much of the same adulation and veneration that in the medieval world had been given to God and to the supernatural. In a world in which religion and God no longer seemed relevant, huge numbers of people found in political tyrants and demagogues objects for worship and self-sacrifice. The tyrants of the modern age boasted of their 'scientific, modern' capabilities: if they didn't promise to make the sun rise at night, they promised many other miracles of technology- better infrastructure, better agriculture, better medicine, and in time even the power to split the atom. "And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men..." (Revelation 13:13). They saw in themselves replacements for the religions of the past, destined to take the place of 'the Beloved" in men's hearts: particularly in Russia, where Stalin raised the cult of the embalmed Lenin to a virtual religion, and referred to his paid propagandists as 'engineers of human souls'. They appeared invincible in war, indomitable in the power over nature and over history, and for millions of people around mid-century it seemed reasonable to ask, "Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?" (Revelation 13:4). The apocryphal vision cited above further suggests that even the Church itself, those 'associated together in order to receive the Beloved", would become complicit in the crimes of the great modern tyrants, and indeed the Second World War saw all too many Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and other Christian leaders silent and weak in the face of the greatest evil in modern times.
These are the lessons of a horror-ridden twentieth century, that seven decades later we can look back upon and try to learn from. Have we learned from them? Maybe, and maybe not. As I said above, I think history repeats itself, and the struggle of good against evil repeats itself, in every age. But the stakes keep getting bigger and bigger. Every turn of the wheel good is more and more good, evil is more and more evil, and the struggle between the two is more cataclysmic. I don't know who the next embodiment of evil will be in the future, or what the next great global struggle will be, but I do know that if we don't keep the reality of human and superhuman evil always in our hearts and minds, and stay on guard against it, we will once again be faced with something too great and horrible in its evil to imagine.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
A Lily among the Thorns: The Assumption of the Mother of God
Last Saturday, August 15, was the Christian feast celebrating the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is the day when, by tradition, the Mother of God is believed to have been raised up, body and soul, to heaven (or, in more fancy language, “corporeally assumed” into heaven). Opinions are divided on whether she died first, or whether she was lifted up into heaven without ever experiencing physical death, but the latter seems more compelling to me. The Assumption is celebrated by Catholics and some high-church Anglicans, and a similar feast is apparently celebrated by the Orthodox.
Some Christians find the teaching about the Assumption to be controversial because it “isn’t mentioned in scripture” or because it “overemphasizes Mary at the expense of Jesus”, and some secularists find it silly because they don’t believe dead people can be raised from the dead. Actually, there are strong reasons to believe that the Assumption of Mary really happened. Before I take a look at one of the early traditional accounts of the Assumption, I’d like to quickly explain why this teaching seems convincing to me.
The Christian Bible certainly contains some verses that can provide support for the Assumption of Mary. In the Wisdom of Solomon, it is said that “to be allied with Wisdom is immortality” (Wisdom 8:17). The Latin here for “allied” is actually “cognatio”, which connotes a blood relationship, and “Wisdom” has been traditionally interpreted as a prophetic figure of Christ, so taken together this suggests that the closest blood relative of Christ, i.e. Mary, would be “immortal”. The figure of Esther in the book of the same name has also been traditionally taken as a prophetic figure of Mary, and this line would seem to suggest that Mary would be spared from natural death: “Thou shalt not die: for this law is not made for thee, but for all others” (Esther 15:13). Christ himself promised to the Apostles (and presumably to Mary since she would have been present, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:3). Since we have traditional accounts of the deaths by martyrdom of the various Apostles, it seems unlikely that any of the Apostles were intended: on the contrary, the fulfillment of this promise would seem to be St. Mary. And make no mistake, inasmuch as this saying of Christ was intended to strengthen the Apostles’ faith as much as anything else, it would have had to be fulfilled in the lifetime of the Apostles in order for it to serve its intended purpose: and fulfilled it was.
Finally and most clearly, St. John’s vision of the woman clothed with the sun, who represents St. Mary, seems to describe in figurative language how God preserved her from death and from the powers of evil: “And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child. And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished…” (Revelation 12:13-14). The “eagle’s wings” imply that St. Mary was lifted up into heaven just as the Assumption describes. It’s important to remember here that
We also have strong arguments from church tradition to persuade us. In the eighth century, St. John of Damascus devotes several long and beautiful homilies to the meaning of the Assumption. The Feast of the Assumption was celebrated in
Perhaps the strongest argument is the old ‘Habeas Corpus’ line of the lawyers. The early Christian church had a passion for relics and for noting the location of the deaths of early Christian apostles and martyrs. There are objects that were claimed, from very early on, to be the physical relics of each one of the Apostles, and there are traditions about the tombs of each one of them. Except that there have never been any purported ‘relics’ of Mary. Why not? Indeed, a contemporary narrative of the Council of Chalcedon claims that the Byzantine Emperor Flavian Marcian, who was attending the Council, requested the relics of Mary from the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and that he was denied on the grounds that such relics did not exist. It would have been easy to dig up the tomb and obtain the relics: the only good reason not to was that the Emperor found the arguments convincing, and so should we.
As for the argument that ‘venerating Mary detracts from the glory of God’, I completely disagree. The nature of the Trinitarian God is that He is a God who is characterized by community and sociality: in fact, the very existence of the Trinity tells us that God has always existed as a kind of divine community of three persons. God loves those that he has created with a perfect and total love, and when we love others we love God too. Likewise when we honor those who He has made worthy of being honor, we glorify God through giving glory to the order that he has established. God is most concerned, above all things, that all of His creatures receive what is good and right for them. In some cases, when he has chosen those creatures for special honor- whether they be the holy angels, the saints, or Mary- He is concerned that they receive that honor and glory due to them. The more we honor St. Mary the more we honor the God who chose her for that honor.
Why is the Assumption of St. Mary so important? What does it tell us? It tells us several things: about the nature of love, about the promise of redeemed humanity, and about how God overturns patriarchal and exploitive structures and exalts women. We know that love is the nature of God: “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16). The doctrine of the Assumption tells us that that love is not merely the disinterested beneficience (agape) but also filial affection (storge). Love in its highest form is not simply general but also particular. This is why loving God, and loving humanity in general, should not mean loving our family, our friends, and our romantic partners any less.
The Assumption of Mary shows us, too, that God intended to overthrow the patriarchal oppression of women in the past, and raise all women through raising one in particular. He raised one particular woman, the child of Anna and Joachim, to be the Queen of Heaven, the only human being (besides Christ the God-Man) to be free from sin, with a crown of stars and the moon beneath her feet, higher than all the angels (Revelation 12:1). So many ancient cultures had considered women and childbirth to be ritually impure: God chose a particular woman to be the purest and highest of all humans (again, with the exception of her son). In the assumption of Mary we have a promise of what will one day be true of humanity in general: that we will be free from sin, death, and the power of evil.
Let me take a quick look at one of the extra-biblical accounts of the Assumption of Mary, attributed to
This narrative isn’t scripture and we aren’t asked to believe it as scripture, but the early church found it convincing and I must conclude it’s based on genuine truth. Whether the apostles were brought together on clouds or whether they experienced a mystical vision of the event isn’t really important: what is important is that for those few days they experienced a mystical reunion with each other and with the holy Mother of God. What an amazing few days that must have been. All of us know what reunions are like. We’ve all experienced coming together with family at Christmas, with school friends at the end of summer, with people we once knew in college or at a job. It’s like overcoming not just space but time: like you are brought back, for a moment, to the simpler times of the past when things seemed so much easier and less complex, and before you went your separate ways. We come back to a reunion with stories of what we have seen and done since then, and look forward to the opportunity to tantalize our friends with those stories. When I first got to
In the medieval legends of the Grail, the twelve apostles are described as the forerunner of the Arthurian knights and as the greatest fellowship of friends that the world has ever seen. The mystical reunion of the apostles, whether in spirit or in the flesh, to share the vision of the Assumption was like the greatest and best high school reunion it’s possible to imagine, in which the apostles saw once again the presence of the One who had made them what they were and had lifted them out of their lives and given them a purpose. The story of the Assumption shows us not only the value of the love of family, but the love of friends too.
It shows us, too, how God always has something stored up for us, better than we can possibly imagine. The Greeks imagined a good life was the best thing you could have: a good life, and a quiet, pleasant death. The Old Testament Jews thought of the Messiah as a political savior who would overthrow tyranny. Neither was wrong but they saw only part of the truth: God had something better in store than either- or than any human being, in fact- could have imagined. Mary, likewise, wanted her son to return to her- she shared the common longing of any parent who has lost a child. God gave her not what she wanted, but something so much better: He granted her the special privilege of being corporeally assumed into heaven to be with her Son. Heaven will be something better than we can possibly imagine, and likewise God so often has plans for us that involve something higher and better than we could choose, or even dream of, on our own.
It shows us, finally, how God takes devotion to His followers and helpers as devotion due to Him. Mary knew that people would invoke her name, as she was a human being, and therefore could understand their plight, and she asked that God accept that honor as honor due to him. God, again, is a God of sociality and community, and He wants us to receive honor and glory to the extent that we are due. Love is, as
“How you have blossomed forth, how sweet you have become! You are the flower of the field, a lily among the thorns!” says St. John of Damascus in a homily, quoting the Song of Solomon in reference to St. Mary. It’s a great sermon and you should read it. Let me close by quoting it further: “But do thou graciously receive my desire, knowing that it exceeds my power. Watch over us, O Queen, the dwelling-place of our Lord. Lead and govern all our ways as thou wilt. Save us from our sins. Lead us into the calm harbour of the divine will. Make us worthy of future happiness through the sweet and face-to-face vision of the Word made flesh through thee. With Him, glory, praise, power, and majesty be to the Father and to the holy and life-giving Spirit, now and for ever.”
Amen.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Self-Emptying: The mystery of the Incarnation
In my last blog post I talked about these two miracles: the healing of the bleeding woman, and the raising of the daughter of Jairus, and I tried to make the case that miracles can and do happen. In this post I want to go into more detail about something I find interesting about this passage, and what it tells us about the mystery of the Incarnation.
What did Christ mean when he asked, “Who touched me?” Did he know the answer to this question, and was he simply trying to get the woman to confess her need? Or did he really not know? For that matter, what are we to make of the numerous instances in the Gospels in which Christ asked questions? As Christians, we believe that Christ was fully Divine (as well as human) to the same degree that the Father was divine, as the Creed of St. Athanasius says, “Equal to the Father as touching His Godhood, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.” As it is said, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). But we generally think of God the Father as all-knowing, however you qualify that. If God knows all things, and if Christ was fully God, then how could He ask a question to which He didn’t know the answer? And there are certainly, it would seem, things that Christ claimed not to know, most notably the day of the resurrection: “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36).
The question only gets more difficult when we consider that at least on one occasion, Christ appeared to make a statement that contravenes what we know of biology: “24Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). We know, today, that seeds are not ‘dead’ in any sense of the word: if they are dead, they can’t germinate, end of story. An omniscient God would know this- so if Christ was God, then why didn’t Christ? Even if we dismiss “Who touched me?” as a rhetorical question, we cannot dismiss the occasions when Christ appeared to concede that there were things He didn’t know, or simply showed us that He didn’t know things that science was to discover centuries later. What are we to make of this? Must we conclude that Christ was not omniscient, and therefore Christ was not truly the Son of God (or, alternatively, that God is not omniscient?)
The medieval Zoroastrian scholar Mardanfarrokh e Ohrmazdad certainly thought so. In a lengthy polemic against the various rival religions of his time and place (Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Manichaeanism) he argued that Christ’s confession of ignorance showed that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation was false. His arguments, incidentally, are rather interesting- so much more so than the tiresome arguments of the modern day antireligious intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens- precisely because he and the Christians shared so much in common. Mardanfarrokh didn’t doubt the reality of virgin births, angelic incarnations, miracles, saviors, heaven and hell, or an everlasting struggle between God and the Devil: in fact, his religion believed in all of these things. He simply doubted that Christ was the fulfillment of them, and he made closely reasoned arguments to that effect (he quotes liberally from Scripture, though given that we are presumably reading an English translation of a Persian polemic against a Syriac translation of the Greek New Testament, his Gospel citation sound extremely garbled to a western reader- almost like you fed the Gospels into Babelfish and then back out again).
Some would (on good grounds) quibble, right away, with the word ‘omniscient’ I used above. They would argue that no one, not even God, can know all future events with perfect accuracy. Rational beings have free will, and are able to choose between alternate courses of action- in other words, between alternate ‘futures’. This means that if free will exists (which it clearly does) then the future is not ‘determined’, and therefore doesn’t really exist in the strict sense, and therefore God cannot know it- omniscience, to these thinkers, would mean knowing all things that are knowable, not knowing the answer to every question that can possibly be posed. God cannot know the last digit of pi (since it doesn’t exist), nor can He know who you will choose to marry, since that depends on your free choice.
Now that’s a compelling argument (to me), but it doesn’t answer the question of Christ’s seeming ignorance. Even if God cannot know (perfectly) all future events, surely He knows all events in the past and future. And the question of who touched Christ, or whether seeds are dead or alive, was a question concerning the present, not the future.I found this question baffling for a long time. Recently, though, I found what seems to be a compelling answer to this paradox. It was put forth by Charles Gore, the Anglican bishop of Oxford, in the 1920s. Bishop Gore had a relatively liberal approach to the Old Testament, but in matters of tradition and morality he was staunchly conservative (he was a high-church Anglo-Catholic, and opposed divorce in all circumstances, and devoted his last two years to strongly condemning contraception, which should please those of you who oppose contraception!) So he cannot be dismissed as a loosey-goosey, wooly-headed hipster postmodernist Christian.
Gore argued essentially that when “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), he emptied himself of those of his divine attributes which were incompatible with taking on a human nature. What the Incarnation meant, in terms of the sacrifice of His divine attributes, is described here: “But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). Christ humbled himself, and being a perfect being (i.e. God) He humbled himself perfectly. What could it mean for a Divine being to become ‘humble’ while still retaining His Divine knowledge and His divine power? How could a being who could bring worlds into being and blot them out, who could know the fall of every sparrow from every tree (Matthew 10:29), take on the form of a servant except by (temporarily) giving up those attributes?
The essence of Christ’s mission to humanity was one of sacrifice. He became a man in order to make a perfect sacrifice, once and for all, of himself. But a perfect sacrifice would have to touch not only His death, but also His life. While living on this earth, for thirty years, Christ voluntarily gave up His awesome, ineffable, unfathomable abilities and powers, and accepted the role of a humble carpenter.
Christ came to earth, in part, to model what a perfect Man should be. He took on human nature so that human nature could, once and for all, be perfected and redeemed. Thus Christ had to have all possible human virtues. Yet one of the important human virtues is faith: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Now where there is perfect knowledge, there can be no faith: for faith by its essence involves a leap into the unknown, a willingness to believe what is revealed to us or handed down by those we are bound to trust. If we knew all things perfectly, there would be no need for faith. For “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). In order for the man Jesus Christ to have faith during his 33 years on earth, He had to (temporarily, at the moment of the incarnation) be stripped of divine omnipotence.
This, of course, gets to a more important point. The essence of human nature is limitation. All of the virtues that we associate with being human, all of the traits and attributes that we admire, stem in some way from the struggle against suffering, adversity and evil (or as it’s often put, against the world, the flesh, and the devil). We develop muscular strength by lifting weights, by running, by exerting ourselves against resistance. And as it is with the body, so it is with the soul. In a world in which there was no scarcity, there would be no meaning to generosity. We admire doctors and nurses for their hard work, often at personal risk, to save the lives of others and to heal the sick: but in a world without sickness, there would be no hospitals and no doctors, and no such virtues for us to admire.. In a world in which there were no wars and wild animals to fear, there would be no point to courage. In a world in which there was no deception, there would be no meaning to honesty. And in a world with no death, love itself could not reach its highest expression, for as it is said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should give up his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
People with dreams of a technologically advanced future sometimes imagine that in the future, machines will do all the work, and human beings will be free to enjoy all their time in leisure. That dream was largely smashed by the looming fossil fuel crisis, but even before that, sensitive people realized that it was not a dream but rather a nightmare. Human beings derive meaning in their lives from work, and work is a great part of how we create our identity. A society in which nearly all farming was done mechanically would be a society in which we had lost our connection to the land. That is why Berdyaev, last century, said that utopias are now technically feasible and the great question is how, at any costs, to prevent utopias from becoming reality. Limitation, suffering and adversity- and the struggle against them- are the root of all the human virtues, of all the talents, abilities, and excellences that we admire. Some of the most admirable people I know personally- I’m thinking of a half-dozen or so in particular- are those who faced terrible adversity, and hard conditions in life, and through it all kept their ability to love intact. It was necessary for Christ to be perfect in virtue: to surpass the most virtuous ordinary human. And therefore it was necessary for him to suffer, and to experience limitation: as it is said, “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered, and was made perfect” (Hebrews 5:8).
Christ had to share our nature in order to redeem and glorify it, and that means He had to share our limitations too, including our powerlessness and our lack of knowledge and vision. Before the Incarnation, and after the Ascension, He shared every bit of His father’s power, glory, and wisdom. But for those thirty years that He walked on earth, for that single moment in time that “the Word was made flesh”, He took on a human form, with human limitations and abilities. Over a half century before Christ, looking into the far future, Isaiah saw just what sort of human He would become: “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:2-3).We have a glimpse of what Jesus was like before and after the Incarnation. We know that through Him heaven and earth came into being: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). And we know that at the end of the world, He will appear in glory, crowned with many crowns, and able to effortlessly destroy evil on earth, as St. John the Divine tells us.
Imagine having all that power, glory, and ability, and choosing to give it up, and to become a suffering servant. During that thirty year span of time, the powers that He had came from His father, working through him. When He was tempted to escape crucifixion, He did not say, “Don’t you know that I could destroy Pilate and his men with a flick of my fingers?” No, He said “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:52-53). When He suffered in the garden, He shared not only our pain but also our weakness and powerlessness, and that is why “there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him, and being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:41-44). I found this passage baffling when I read it: how could the Son of God be “weak”, and why would he need an angel to strengthen him?
We are almost compelled to acknowledge that during those thirty years, He had stripped himself of His divine powers, and had emptied himself of all power except that which His Father chose to give him. He loved us so much that, though He was possessed of unimaginable power and authority, equal in every way to His father, though He was the one “through [whom] all things were made” in heaven and on earth, He chose to strip himself of all that, and become the son of a carpenter, born in a stable, dying with vinegar on his lip, a fatal wound in his side, with thorns on his forehead, under a hot Jerusalem sun. He had stripped himself of His perfect wisdom, His perfect foresight, His perfect vision, His perfect power, His perfect ability to create, His perfect ability to destroy, His perfect ability to overcome the laws of nature. In His human form, he had left to him one reserve of perfection that He retained of His divine nature: his perfect virtue, and his perfect love. And through retaining His perfect, divine ability to love, even when subjected to human limitation and human imperfection, even when the future was veiled from him, when he was subjected to the lack of scientific knowledge of his time, even when he had deprived himself of the ability to know who had touched him or when the world would end, He perfected human nature through His own human form, and won for those he loved an eternal victory over death, evil, and the world.
“Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
What did Christ mean when he asked, “Who touched me?” Did he know the answer to this question, and was he simply trying to get the woman to confess her need? Or did he really not know? For that matter, what are we to make of the numerous instances in the Gospels in which Christ asked questions? As Christians, we believe that Christ was fully Divine (as well as human) to the same degree that the Father was divine, as the Creed of St. Athanasius says, “Equal to the Father as touching His Godhood, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.” As it is said, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). But we generally think of God the Father as all-knowing, however you qualify that. If God knows all things, and if Christ was fully God, then how could He ask a question to which He didn’t know the answer? And there are certainly, it would seem, things that Christ claimed not to know, most notably the day of the resurrection: “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36).
The question only gets more difficult when we consider that at least on one occasion, Christ appeared to make a statement that contravenes what we know of biology: “24Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). We know, today, that seeds are not ‘dead’ in any sense of the word: if they are dead, they can’t germinate, end of story. An omniscient God would know this- so if Christ was God, then why didn’t Christ? Even if we dismiss “Who touched me?” as a rhetorical question, we cannot dismiss the occasions when Christ appeared to concede that there were things He didn’t know, or simply showed us that He didn’t know things that science was to discover centuries later. What are we to make of this? Must we conclude that Christ was not omniscient, and therefore Christ was not truly the Son of God (or, alternatively, that God is not omniscient?)
The medieval Zoroastrian scholar Mardanfarrokh e Ohrmazdad certainly thought so. In a lengthy polemic against the various rival religions of his time and place (Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Manichaeanism) he argued that Christ’s confession of ignorance showed that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation was false. His arguments, incidentally, are rather interesting- so much more so than the tiresome arguments of the modern day antireligious intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens- precisely because he and the Christians shared so much in common. Mardanfarrokh didn’t doubt the reality of virgin births, angelic incarnations, miracles, saviors, heaven and hell, or an everlasting struggle between God and the Devil: in fact, his religion believed in all of these things. He simply doubted that Christ was the fulfillment of them, and he made closely reasoned arguments to that effect (he quotes liberally from Scripture, though given that we are presumably reading an English translation of a Persian polemic against a Syriac translation of the Greek New Testament, his Gospel citation sound extremely garbled to a western reader- almost like you fed the Gospels into Babelfish and then back out again).
Some would (on good grounds) quibble, right away, with the word ‘omniscient’ I used above. They would argue that no one, not even God, can know all future events with perfect accuracy. Rational beings have free will, and are able to choose between alternate courses of action- in other words, between alternate ‘futures’. This means that if free will exists (which it clearly does) then the future is not ‘determined’, and therefore doesn’t really exist in the strict sense, and therefore God cannot know it- omniscience, to these thinkers, would mean knowing all things that are knowable, not knowing the answer to every question that can possibly be posed. God cannot know the last digit of pi (since it doesn’t exist), nor can He know who you will choose to marry, since that depends on your free choice.
Now that’s a compelling argument (to me), but it doesn’t answer the question of Christ’s seeming ignorance. Even if God cannot know (perfectly) all future events, surely He knows all events in the past and future. And the question of who touched Christ, or whether seeds are dead or alive, was a question concerning the present, not the future.I found this question baffling for a long time. Recently, though, I found what seems to be a compelling answer to this paradox. It was put forth by Charles Gore, the Anglican bishop of Oxford, in the 1920s. Bishop Gore had a relatively liberal approach to the Old Testament, but in matters of tradition and morality he was staunchly conservative (he was a high-church Anglo-Catholic, and opposed divorce in all circumstances, and devoted his last two years to strongly condemning contraception, which should please those of you who oppose contraception!) So he cannot be dismissed as a loosey-goosey, wooly-headed hipster postmodernist Christian.
Gore argued essentially that when “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), he emptied himself of those of his divine attributes which were incompatible with taking on a human nature. What the Incarnation meant, in terms of the sacrifice of His divine attributes, is described here: “But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). Christ humbled himself, and being a perfect being (i.e. God) He humbled himself perfectly. What could it mean for a Divine being to become ‘humble’ while still retaining His Divine knowledge and His divine power? How could a being who could bring worlds into being and blot them out, who could know the fall of every sparrow from every tree (Matthew 10:29), take on the form of a servant except by (temporarily) giving up those attributes?
The essence of Christ’s mission to humanity was one of sacrifice. He became a man in order to make a perfect sacrifice, once and for all, of himself. But a perfect sacrifice would have to touch not only His death, but also His life. While living on this earth, for thirty years, Christ voluntarily gave up His awesome, ineffable, unfathomable abilities and powers, and accepted the role of a humble carpenter.
Christ came to earth, in part, to model what a perfect Man should be. He took on human nature so that human nature could, once and for all, be perfected and redeemed. Thus Christ had to have all possible human virtues. Yet one of the important human virtues is faith: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Now where there is perfect knowledge, there can be no faith: for faith by its essence involves a leap into the unknown, a willingness to believe what is revealed to us or handed down by those we are bound to trust. If we knew all things perfectly, there would be no need for faith. For “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). In order for the man Jesus Christ to have faith during his 33 years on earth, He had to (temporarily, at the moment of the incarnation) be stripped of divine omnipotence.
This, of course, gets to a more important point. The essence of human nature is limitation. All of the virtues that we associate with being human, all of the traits and attributes that we admire, stem in some way from the struggle against suffering, adversity and evil (or as it’s often put, against the world, the flesh, and the devil). We develop muscular strength by lifting weights, by running, by exerting ourselves against resistance. And as it is with the body, so it is with the soul. In a world in which there was no scarcity, there would be no meaning to generosity. We admire doctors and nurses for their hard work, often at personal risk, to save the lives of others and to heal the sick: but in a world without sickness, there would be no hospitals and no doctors, and no such virtues for us to admire.. In a world in which there were no wars and wild animals to fear, there would be no point to courage. In a world in which there was no deception, there would be no meaning to honesty. And in a world with no death, love itself could not reach its highest expression, for as it is said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should give up his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
People with dreams of a technologically advanced future sometimes imagine that in the future, machines will do all the work, and human beings will be free to enjoy all their time in leisure. That dream was largely smashed by the looming fossil fuel crisis, but even before that, sensitive people realized that it was not a dream but rather a nightmare. Human beings derive meaning in their lives from work, and work is a great part of how we create our identity. A society in which nearly all farming was done mechanically would be a society in which we had lost our connection to the land. That is why Berdyaev, last century, said that utopias are now technically feasible and the great question is how, at any costs, to prevent utopias from becoming reality. Limitation, suffering and adversity- and the struggle against them- are the root of all the human virtues, of all the talents, abilities, and excellences that we admire. Some of the most admirable people I know personally- I’m thinking of a half-dozen or so in particular- are those who faced terrible adversity, and hard conditions in life, and through it all kept their ability to love intact. It was necessary for Christ to be perfect in virtue: to surpass the most virtuous ordinary human. And therefore it was necessary for him to suffer, and to experience limitation: as it is said, “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered, and was made perfect” (Hebrews 5:8).
Christ had to share our nature in order to redeem and glorify it, and that means He had to share our limitations too, including our powerlessness and our lack of knowledge and vision. Before the Incarnation, and after the Ascension, He shared every bit of His father’s power, glory, and wisdom. But for those thirty years that He walked on earth, for that single moment in time that “the Word was made flesh”, He took on a human form, with human limitations and abilities. Over a half century before Christ, looking into the far future, Isaiah saw just what sort of human He would become: “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:2-3).We have a glimpse of what Jesus was like before and after the Incarnation. We know that through Him heaven and earth came into being: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). And we know that at the end of the world, He will appear in glory, crowned with many crowns, and able to effortlessly destroy evil on earth, as St. John the Divine tells us.
Imagine having all that power, glory, and ability, and choosing to give it up, and to become a suffering servant. During that thirty year span of time, the powers that He had came from His father, working through him. When He was tempted to escape crucifixion, He did not say, “Don’t you know that I could destroy Pilate and his men with a flick of my fingers?” No, He said “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:52-53). When He suffered in the garden, He shared not only our pain but also our weakness and powerlessness, and that is why “there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him, and being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:41-44). I found this passage baffling when I read it: how could the Son of God be “weak”, and why would he need an angel to strengthen him?
We are almost compelled to acknowledge that during those thirty years, He had stripped himself of His divine powers, and had emptied himself of all power except that which His Father chose to give him. He loved us so much that, though He was possessed of unimaginable power and authority, equal in every way to His father, though He was the one “through [whom] all things were made” in heaven and on earth, He chose to strip himself of all that, and become the son of a carpenter, born in a stable, dying with vinegar on his lip, a fatal wound in his side, with thorns on his forehead, under a hot Jerusalem sun. He had stripped himself of His perfect wisdom, His perfect foresight, His perfect vision, His perfect power, His perfect ability to create, His perfect ability to destroy, His perfect ability to overcome the laws of nature. In His human form, he had left to him one reserve of perfection that He retained of His divine nature: his perfect virtue, and his perfect love. And through retaining His perfect, divine ability to love, even when subjected to human limitation and human imperfection, even when the future was veiled from him, when he was subjected to the lack of scientific knowledge of his time, even when he had deprived himself of the ability to know who had touched him or when the world would end, He perfected human nature through His own human form, and won for those he loved an eternal victory over death, evil, and the world.
“Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Talitha Cumi: A reflection on the healing of the daughter of Jairus
“And, behold, there came a man named Jairus, and he was a ruler of the synagogue: and he fell down at Jesus' feet, and besought him that he would come into his house: For he had one only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she lay a dying. But as he went the people thronged him. And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any, Came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: and immediately her issue of blood stanched. And Jesus said, Who touched me? When all denied, Peter and they that were with him said, Master, the multitude throng thee and press thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me? And Jesus said, Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. And when the woman saw that she was not hid, she came trembling, and falling down before him, she declared unto him before all the people for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed immediately.And he said unto her, Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace. While he yet spake, there cometh one from the ruler of the synagogue's house, saying to him, Thy daughter is dead; trouble not the Master. But when Jesus heard it, he answered him, saying, Fear not: believe only, and she shall be made whole. And when he came into the house, he suffered no man to go in, save Peter, and James, and John, and the father and the mother of the maiden. And all wept, and bewailed her: but he said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead. And he put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway: and he commanded to give her meat.”
This passage from St. Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 8 (also found in St. Mark and St. Matthew) is one of the most powerful, and most compelling, in the Gospels. I heard it read a few weeks ago, and have been planning a reflection on it in the weeks since- it has been a busy fieldwork season though, and I’ve only now had time. There is a lot we can learn from this episode in the life of Jesus (which, like the Gospels in general, I would accept as historical and truthful). Three things, though, especially stand out to me. This passage is important because of what it tells us about the reality of miracles, about the nature of love, and about the mystery of the Incarnation.
This passage purports to be nothing other than it is: a truthful and accurate account of two miracles, a miracle of healing and a miracle of raising the dead. The story makes that plain. To a lot of modern people, of course, including to some Christians, miracles are outmoded and embarrassing, something to be explained away. As enlightened people of today, we know that miracles don’t happen. They can’t happen for three reasons. The laws of nature dictate that when death happens, the chemical changes and loss of thermodynamic order that immediately begin to take place are completely irreversible. And the laws of nature are absolutely unbreakable, if not they wouldn’t be laws, and modern science and technology couldn’t exist. Furthermore even if we grant that the laws of nature are not totally unbreakable, no one has ever credibly seen a miracle, and all the experience of humanity is that when we are dead, we are dead for ever. That was Hume’s argument against miracles, and it is as strong today as it ever was. Right?
Wrong. I don’t have too much space here to explain why it’s wrong, and arguing with agnostic materialists is really the least interesting part of this essay, so I’ll say just a few words as to why strict materialists (those who deny the existence of anything supernatural, including miracles) are wrong. No less a scientist then Alfred Russell Wallace, the codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, argued incisively in an essay that I’m currently reading, that Hume was full of sh*t. The laws of nature tell us how natural systems behave to the extent that they are self-contained. Conservation of energy and momentum, for example, can tell us how a ball will move around a pool table once we strike it. But they can’t take into account some joker passing by, picking up the ball, and placing it his pocket. The laws of nature work- infallibly and to the last decimal place- when natural systems are left to themselves. And almost always, they are. But not quite always. The existence of laws of nature- the fact that this universe is an orderly place, governed by laws of physics and chemistry that the mind of man can understand- is in itself evidence that there is something outside the physical universe. For you can’t have law without a lawgiver. Something must have caused the rational, explicable universe we live in that natural science has had so much success at explaining- some Person or set of Personal beings. And if that lawgiver is outside the universe, he isn’t bound by its laws, and can temporarily override them- in very rare instances, of course, for it is God’s nature to be orderly and discreet- but in important instances nonetheless. Like this one.
The tendency towards thermodynamic equilibrium that characterizes all systems- and that, in particular, describes what happens to us after we die, as we equilibrate with our environment- is a statistical law. As we know, chemical reactions are described in statistical terms: it’s not _impossible_ that, say, an iodide ion and a methanol molecule will react to produce methyl iodide and hydroxide: it’s just very, very, improbable and unlikely (such that only a tiny percentage of such products will be formed). But isn’t in the nature of God that He can make the improbable happen? God cannot overcome the laws of logic, He cannot make a sixth regular solid, or make a stone so heavy He cannot lift it, or calculate the last digit of the number e. But inasmuch as the laws of nature are more matters of probability than of logic- and this is true of most of them- He can intervene to override or reverse them. Science can never say that such rare, inexplicable, miraculous events don’t occur- it can only say that they are not part of science, and that science can have nothing to say about them, and can only be carried out during the 99% of the time that miracles don’t happen. The existence of miracles doesn’t contravene ‘science’ any more than the fact that we breed domestic animals contravenes the process of evolution, or any more than the existence of powered flight contravenes the law of gravity, or any more than the existence of electrolysis contravenes the fact that hydrogen and oxygen react “irreversibly” to produce water. Miracles are a temporary suspension of natural laws, not the denial of their existence.
That’s enough about miracles- read Wallace’s essay for more, including where he trenchantly said (I paraphrase) that if we were all as skeptical as Hume, we would never have credited the first man to describe a flying fish or a platypus: “Such a simple fact as the existence of flying fish could never be proved, if Hume's argument is a good one; for the first man who saw and described one, would have the universal experience against him that fish do not fly, or make any approach to flying, and his evidence being rejected, the same argument would apply to the second, and to every subsequent witness, and thus no man at the present day who has not seen a flying fish ought to believe that such things exist.” As the great book “Life of Pi” says, “Life is hard to believe, ask any biologist. Love is hard to believe, ask any lover.” Never deny something just because it seems unlikely. This story is an example of a miracle- two actually. The Gospels tell us- credibly, I think- that Christ performed many healing miracles. But He only performed miracles of raising the dead rarely, most notably with Lazarus. In both cases people who were recently dead. These were not corpses that had rotted away and disintegrated. God never carries out those kind of miracles- bringing back disembodied spirits, or half-disintegrated dead bodies. Those things _would_ actually be violations of nature, contraventions of the world the Lord has made; they would represent some alien power invading nature, not the coming home of the rightful sovereign of our earth. Whatever the return of Samuel represented it certainly wasn’t the power of God: “And Saul perceived that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and prostrated himself” (1 Samuel 28:14). Christ brought back- twice, only twice- the souls of two people who had just passed away, at a moment when their bodies were still in good condition. The Acts of Thomas, describing the life of Thomas the Apostle after he went to India, suggest that he did the same, bringing back to life a girl who had just been killed by her lover out of misguided religious sentiment. “And immediately, as he drew her hand, she sprang up, and sat, looking at the great multitude standing round.” The fact that these miracles happened only on a handful of occasions, under very specific circumstances, lends them an air of plausibility, once we acknowledge the possibility of very rare instances in which a supernatural power overcomes the laws of nature. But that’s all I will say: I’m less interested in arguing that miracles are possible than in understanding why they are important.
Why did Christ heal the daughter of Jairus? To ask that is to answer the question itself. Christ healed because He loved us, and because He could not bear to see people suffer. He looked on death, and was overcome by sympathy for its victims, and He wept. “They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Now Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!” (John 11:34-36). We are told that even when He was being led to His execution, He felt pity less for himself than for the city of Jerusalem whose end He foretold forty years before it happened: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children” (Luke 23:28). He didn’t do it for show, or to make people overawed at his power. In fact he specifically overcame the temptation to do just that: “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone” (Luke 4:9-11). He tried, in fact, to downplay the miracle saying, “She is not dead but sleepeth”. He did it because He loved us, and because He had sympathy for our suffering and pity for our weakness. He could not, when asked, turn away those who truly sought him. And neither will he turn away anyone who seeks him: neither in this life, nor in the next. Whether they be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Mandaean, Zoroastrian, even atheist or agnostic: all will, someday, find that which they truly seek, whether or not they know Him by name. As it is said: “To whoever asks, it will be opened.”
I haven’t even got to the most interesting question that this story raises in my mind, which is the question asked by Christ: “Who touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out of me.” Christ being God, does this mean he never asked a question to which He didn’t know the answer? Was He just kidding around when he asked this question- was it just rhetorical? I don’t think so- Christ was many things but He wasn’t ever a joker. And after some recent free-time reading I feel even more strongly that way- and hopefully I’ll explain why in a future blog post. But that is another story, for another time.
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
This passage from St. Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 8 (also found in St. Mark and St. Matthew) is one of the most powerful, and most compelling, in the Gospels. I heard it read a few weeks ago, and have been planning a reflection on it in the weeks since- it has been a busy fieldwork season though, and I’ve only now had time. There is a lot we can learn from this episode in the life of Jesus (which, like the Gospels in general, I would accept as historical and truthful). Three things, though, especially stand out to me. This passage is important because of what it tells us about the reality of miracles, about the nature of love, and about the mystery of the Incarnation.
This passage purports to be nothing other than it is: a truthful and accurate account of two miracles, a miracle of healing and a miracle of raising the dead. The story makes that plain. To a lot of modern people, of course, including to some Christians, miracles are outmoded and embarrassing, something to be explained away. As enlightened people of today, we know that miracles don’t happen. They can’t happen for three reasons. The laws of nature dictate that when death happens, the chemical changes and loss of thermodynamic order that immediately begin to take place are completely irreversible. And the laws of nature are absolutely unbreakable, if not they wouldn’t be laws, and modern science and technology couldn’t exist. Furthermore even if we grant that the laws of nature are not totally unbreakable, no one has ever credibly seen a miracle, and all the experience of humanity is that when we are dead, we are dead for ever. That was Hume’s argument against miracles, and it is as strong today as it ever was. Right?
Wrong. I don’t have too much space here to explain why it’s wrong, and arguing with agnostic materialists is really the least interesting part of this essay, so I’ll say just a few words as to why strict materialists (those who deny the existence of anything supernatural, including miracles) are wrong. No less a scientist then Alfred Russell Wallace, the codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, argued incisively in an essay that I’m currently reading, that Hume was full of sh*t. The laws of nature tell us how natural systems behave to the extent that they are self-contained. Conservation of energy and momentum, for example, can tell us how a ball will move around a pool table once we strike it. But they can’t take into account some joker passing by, picking up the ball, and placing it his pocket. The laws of nature work- infallibly and to the last decimal place- when natural systems are left to themselves. And almost always, they are. But not quite always. The existence of laws of nature- the fact that this universe is an orderly place, governed by laws of physics and chemistry that the mind of man can understand- is in itself evidence that there is something outside the physical universe. For you can’t have law without a lawgiver. Something must have caused the rational, explicable universe we live in that natural science has had so much success at explaining- some Person or set of Personal beings. And if that lawgiver is outside the universe, he isn’t bound by its laws, and can temporarily override them- in very rare instances, of course, for it is God’s nature to be orderly and discreet- but in important instances nonetheless. Like this one.
The tendency towards thermodynamic equilibrium that characterizes all systems- and that, in particular, describes what happens to us after we die, as we equilibrate with our environment- is a statistical law. As we know, chemical reactions are described in statistical terms: it’s not _impossible_ that, say, an iodide ion and a methanol molecule will react to produce methyl iodide and hydroxide: it’s just very, very, improbable and unlikely (such that only a tiny percentage of such products will be formed). But isn’t in the nature of God that He can make the improbable happen? God cannot overcome the laws of logic, He cannot make a sixth regular solid, or make a stone so heavy He cannot lift it, or calculate the last digit of the number e. But inasmuch as the laws of nature are more matters of probability than of logic- and this is true of most of them- He can intervene to override or reverse them. Science can never say that such rare, inexplicable, miraculous events don’t occur- it can only say that they are not part of science, and that science can have nothing to say about them, and can only be carried out during the 99% of the time that miracles don’t happen. The existence of miracles doesn’t contravene ‘science’ any more than the fact that we breed domestic animals contravenes the process of evolution, or any more than the existence of powered flight contravenes the law of gravity, or any more than the existence of electrolysis contravenes the fact that hydrogen and oxygen react “irreversibly” to produce water. Miracles are a temporary suspension of natural laws, not the denial of their existence.
That’s enough about miracles- read Wallace’s essay for more, including where he trenchantly said (I paraphrase) that if we were all as skeptical as Hume, we would never have credited the first man to describe a flying fish or a platypus: “Such a simple fact as the existence of flying fish could never be proved, if Hume's argument is a good one; for the first man who saw and described one, would have the universal experience against him that fish do not fly, or make any approach to flying, and his evidence being rejected, the same argument would apply to the second, and to every subsequent witness, and thus no man at the present day who has not seen a flying fish ought to believe that such things exist.” As the great book “Life of Pi” says, “Life is hard to believe, ask any biologist. Love is hard to believe, ask any lover.” Never deny something just because it seems unlikely. This story is an example of a miracle- two actually. The Gospels tell us- credibly, I think- that Christ performed many healing miracles. But He only performed miracles of raising the dead rarely, most notably with Lazarus. In both cases people who were recently dead. These were not corpses that had rotted away and disintegrated. God never carries out those kind of miracles- bringing back disembodied spirits, or half-disintegrated dead bodies. Those things _would_ actually be violations of nature, contraventions of the world the Lord has made; they would represent some alien power invading nature, not the coming home of the rightful sovereign of our earth. Whatever the return of Samuel represented it certainly wasn’t the power of God: “And Saul perceived that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and prostrated himself” (1 Samuel 28:14). Christ brought back- twice, only twice- the souls of two people who had just passed away, at a moment when their bodies were still in good condition. The Acts of Thomas, describing the life of Thomas the Apostle after he went to India, suggest that he did the same, bringing back to life a girl who had just been killed by her lover out of misguided religious sentiment. “And immediately, as he drew her hand, she sprang up, and sat, looking at the great multitude standing round.” The fact that these miracles happened only on a handful of occasions, under very specific circumstances, lends them an air of plausibility, once we acknowledge the possibility of very rare instances in which a supernatural power overcomes the laws of nature. But that’s all I will say: I’m less interested in arguing that miracles are possible than in understanding why they are important.
Why did Christ heal the daughter of Jairus? To ask that is to answer the question itself. Christ healed because He loved us, and because He could not bear to see people suffer. He looked on death, and was overcome by sympathy for its victims, and He wept. “They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Now Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!” (John 11:34-36). We are told that even when He was being led to His execution, He felt pity less for himself than for the city of Jerusalem whose end He foretold forty years before it happened: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children” (Luke 23:28). He didn’t do it for show, or to make people overawed at his power. In fact he specifically overcame the temptation to do just that: “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone” (Luke 4:9-11). He tried, in fact, to downplay the miracle saying, “She is not dead but sleepeth”. He did it because He loved us, and because He had sympathy for our suffering and pity for our weakness. He could not, when asked, turn away those who truly sought him. And neither will he turn away anyone who seeks him: neither in this life, nor in the next. Whether they be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Mandaean, Zoroastrian, even atheist or agnostic: all will, someday, find that which they truly seek, whether or not they know Him by name. As it is said: “To whoever asks, it will be opened.”
I haven’t even got to the most interesting question that this story raises in my mind, which is the question asked by Christ: “Who touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out of me.” Christ being God, does this mean he never asked a question to which He didn’t know the answer? Was He just kidding around when he asked this question- was it just rhetorical? I don’t think so- Christ was many things but He wasn’t ever a joker. And after some recent free-time reading I feel even more strongly that way- and hopefully I’ll explain why in a future blog post. But that is another story, for another time.
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
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