Charles Victor on Religion

In the recent exegesis on the book of Ruth, I omitted commentary on the final five verses. This was not because they are grounded in dereliction of duty, deception and prostitution, rather because they are generally acknowledged as a late addition to the text. However, I am persuaded a few words would complete the study.

Naomi, her husband and two sons are economic migrants. While in their adopted land, the sons marry native women. In time the three men die leaving the three women without means. Naomi and one of her daughters-in-law journey back to Naomi’s homeland and work to secure a future for themselves. Let us now look at the text of Ruth in more detail.

A few weeks ago, as Easter was upon us, myriad movie channels dug out that chestnut “The Ten Commandments.” In my childhood it was a cinematographic wonder with Charlton Heston outperforming everyone and everything including a sea being ripped apart. I would like to look upon that event more seriously, and briefly consider that sea of change that took a tribal macedoine and made it into a nation. In my accustomed translation of scripture (NRSV) chapter 14 is dubbed “Crossing the Red Sea.” Was it the Red Sea? The vast majority of scholars say no. Even some modern translations call it the Sea of Reeds. First, despite that which for centuries we were told, the Hebrew of that scripture is accurately translated not red but reeds. Second, while there are marshy areas around the Red Sea, it is debated as to exactly which of these was the crossing point. Bolstering the notion of a marsh rather than a sea is the mention of an east wind. In his campaign against Carthage Scipio was aided by a strong east wind that dried the marshes around the city and allowed his troops to advance. Thus, there is evidence a strong east wind can make a marsh hastily passable. On the other hand, the wind required to blast open a sea would have hurled both the Israelites and the Egyptians across the plain. A wall of water to the right and to the left is a dramatic way of expressing the profundity of the experience.

I apologize for the sensationalism of the title and editing. Had I quoted the full verse, you may not have continued with this page, for having sin is not something this world wants to hear. St. John knows that, and so he tells us plainly: “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves.” Sin is not a topic in vogue. Perhaps if it were, this world might not be where presently it is. Indeed, sin does not want us to talk about it. It prefers we be kept in the dark. Yet, in this forum my postings on sin have been amongst the most read.[i] Could it be a prurient interest flowing from the fascination the dark and evil hold for us? Why else would our mythic mother, the happy Eve, who had everything one could wish for stop to talk to slithering Satan ever wrapped in his darkled mantle?

Before I say more about sin, allow me a word about Carl Jung. In his analyses of the psyche he discerned levels or orbits of power. Among them was one he termed the Shadow. It is the reality of our constitution wherein is deposited, consciously or not, all those aspects of ourselves with which we would prefer not to deal, to bring to light. But only in bringing them to light, only in understanding their hidden power over us, can we harness that power into the creativity of our selves. In 1 John 1:5 we read: “God is light and in him there is no darkness.” But light can cast a shadow when something obstructs it. If we are called, by both God and the psyche he has created, to be transparent in all we do and say to ourselves and to the world, we need to be realistic enough to say we are not. Transparency—in all we do and say and are—is an ideal. Thus, we all have a shadow side to us, and we know it. Only the most hubris filled heart can deny it. But in that denial it needs be explained the raison d’etre of psychologists and psychiatrists whose labour is to reveal it.

If we are reading our scriptures sequentially before we ventured into St. John’s first epistle we would have read St. James’. There, sounding rather like Buddha, he speaks of desire as leading to sin, and sin to death. But desire is natural to us. We are not abiogenic and self-sustaining entities. We have needs, and needs pulse out desires. But desire, like unto any type of pulse, can go awry. Ask anyone wearing a pace-maker. St. Augustine, who loved to play with words and sounds, compared cupiditas and caritas. Caritas, most often translated as charity, but better understood as devoted care, is the desire natural to man. By it man is opened to his true needs: God and the panoply of world as God’s gift. Cupiditas, cupidity, is its corrupted form. It is not open towards others or things. It is acquisitive. As Martin Buber would say, it treats others and things not as venerable, not as relatable, not as a Thou, but as objects to be had, collected, used. Because it is a disorientation, it can rouse an attitudinal dilemma such as that the writer of Ecclesiastes bemoans when we speaks of all his toils and accomplishments as vanities. And where does that bemoaning bring him other than to a despair. Man can glory in his work and accomplishments, and shout them to the world, but as long as they are just objects he has set in orbit around himself to robe himself in his own self-glorification, they will always have a hollow ring. And, yes, some are so vain as to be content in their vanity, their hollowness.

But psyche, the soul, is no sluggard. It does not drop into ennui or rouse to despair as an end in itself. It does so to reveal the self- and world-wastefulness of cupidity, and to push towards the human righteousness of caritas, of devoted care. It wants to realign the psychic level, the spiritual level, upon which life is moving. It wants to reveal to the ego-driven man of many masks, personae, and shadow that the creative light that man truly needs, and therefore ought to desire, is not the possession of people and things, but the integration of self into the full range of one’s internal powers, and the giving, the sharing, of that self with others and the world in community.

Sin has gotten a bad name. We think of it muchly as murder, theft, lying. We forget it is something far worse. We do not see how deeply it holds onto to us, spins us in its orbit. We omit from consciousness that it is foremost about the worshipping, the con-forming to, false gods—gods of wealth, power, control, influence, prestige. It is from these false gods and their lack of charity, that all manner of falsehoods arise. We become self deceived not enlightened. We spin out of the proper orbit of creativity of self and world, out of orbit of care and integrating power. We spin out of our proper orbit around God who is Light. We spin into the darkness of self-absorption, eating up everything in our path, and slowing killing our-Self in gluttonous cupidity. St. James says it well. Desire grows into sin, and sin into death.

But we gather in church, we sit in prayer because we do not believe desire needs to be dis-oriented. We believe it bears the power of self correction. It bears an orientation to the creative, to the grace of the Creative One within. St. Augustine says desire was made in us primarily for God, for “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” St. Paul tells us the great moral dictates—starting with the ban against false gods—were given that we might be confronted with our inability to perfectly live up to them, to prepare the heart and mind for the revelation that we need the grace of a power greater than our everyday world-navigating and too often world-weary selves, “a power working in us that can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” We need a power to keep us in proper orbit, and that power is the God whose name is Love. Thus again it is St. Paul who tells us: “Whatsoever be your goals, make to be loving the first and highest of them all.”

When, by that we do or that we fail to do, we walk not in “Thy holy ways” we sin. But when we sin “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.”   On his cross, in his distorted body he reveals to us our distorted souls. In his rising out of death he offers us his unbounded life. God, the Son of God, atones for our disorientation. In so doing, in that cosmic tone of a God-man’s dying, he draws us back into the orbit of love. He makes us partakers of that love, which love alone creates this world, redeems this world, sustains this world. Yes, we sin, but sin does not define us, God does.

[i] Cf.: Occidental Ideas, Part 8, February 2014; Spirituality, Part 5, May 2017; Sin and Sinfulness, September 2023.

A few days ago the second lesson at Evening Prayer was from the 21^st chapter of the Gospel according to St John. It is among my favourite passages of scripture. But I have a problem with the translations of it. There is in the original Greek something that the English translations fail to transmit. Confessedly translations always fall short. The King James Version is excellent in keeping the idioms set out in the Hebrew and Greek. However, that often means some degree of exegesis is required to make the text comprehensible to the present day. Many newer translations convey the meaning at the cost of the original idioms, and therein the flavour of the culture in which the text was created. In John 21 two specific Greek verbs are consistently translated into one English verb, and I am at a loss to understand why this is the case.

The ancient Greeks understood there are varied types of love from the acquisitive and desirous to the altruistic, and they had distinct verbs for them. In the gospel narrative under consideration love is used to translate both φιλέω [phil-e-o] and ἀγαπάω [aga-pe-o]. Phil-e-o is properly used for a love characterised by friendship. The relationship is reciprocal, and marked by familiarity and a willingness to stand by or stand with another. Aga-pe-o is used for an unconditional love. It need not be reciprocal. It is a pure, no-strings-attached giving of self to another. It is a state of being unreservedly “for-you.” [i]

I make no pretense of being an authority in either scripture or Greek. Whatever facility in Greek I may have enjoyed sixty-plus years ago has regrettably faded from my head. I am left with little. However, I do remember a delightful evening in the mid-1960s spent in the company of a man who was considered a biblical scholar of note and an expert in the Johannine corpus. He disserted upon the distinction between aga-pe-o and phil-e-o as used in John’s 21^st chapter. Yet, several years later, when he published volume two of his commentary on the gospel, he decided translating both verbs as love was justifiable on the basis of the rest of the work. However, chapter 21 is a late addition to a text that had already been edited several times. The member of the Johannine school who produced this chapter may have written in the spirit of the Johannine tradition, but that does not necessitate that he was bound to every nuance of vocabulary used by his predecessors responsible for the first twenty chapters of the text. Unconditional love and friendship are not the same thing, and one does not purposefully select differing words unless one is trying to make a point. The point—in the Greek text—is made. It simply is not translated into the English.

In the Greek of chapter 21 Jesus asks Peter: Do you unconditionally love [aga-pe-o] me? Peter replies: I am your friend [the verb is phil-e-o]. This seems reasonable. In John’s gospel, the night before Jesus is executed he tells his disciples that henceforth he calls them friends. But much has happened between that evening and now. In a sense a new reality has begun, a new heaven and earth are on the horizon. This is a new day. Jesus has just issued an invitation to breakfast. In the narrative span of the gospel this is the last recorded encounter of Jesus and the disciples, and Jesus is raising the bar in his relationship with Peter. Thus, for a second time Jesus asks Peter: Do you unconditionally love [aga-pe-o] me? Peter again replies: I am your friend [phil-e-o]. But now Peter, being his irascible self, is getting a tad hot under the collar, and Jesus knows it, because in John’s gospel the divinity of Jesus is always front and centre. He knows everything that is happening and going to happen, and if he wills to do so, he can control it, manipulate it. Jesus makes a move. He comes down to Peter’s level. He meets Peter where he is comfortable. Jesus asks: Peter, are we friends [phil-e-o]? Peter rather heatedly replies: You know everything. I am your friend [phil-e-o].

Jesus always meets us where we are. But as is always the case, he is not done. He is, as St. Paul marks, a life-giving spirit. There is nothing static about him. Peter and Jesus move on together. Jesus then issues his challenge: “Follow me.” Jesus is always one step ahead of Peter, and of us all. That is part of his Risen reality: “He goes before you.” That is why the disciples never immediately recognize him. He is out of focus; he needs to be discerned. Now, lest Peter not see into the future where the following of Jesus will lead, Jesus offers what seems to be a cryptic message. Peter will be led to a place he would rather not go. He will die for Jesus. One thinks of St. Paul to the Romans: “Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.” In my mind’s eye, as Peter hung upon his cross and felt death enveloping his body, he looked to his Lord and at last met him on his ground. He said to him: “[aga-pe-o] Unconditionally, I love you.”

There is something about death here to consider. How often have we experienced one dear to us turn as death comes to the body and say: “I love you”? There is something there. It is as if as we experience the body fade away from us that we are freed to see into the soul, to see the soul, to see there the image of God, the image of Love, to realize our soul is love, the essence of us is love, and so we must pass it on before death comes. “I love you” to one near and dear is a reaching out to eternity, to the creativity and giving away of self that is eternity. It is a committal. Blest are the dying who have one to whom to say such. It is the capstone of a life shared and given. It is in such a moment that Peter becomes not simply a disciple, not just a friend. It is in this moment Peter becomes the saint.

St. Peter, pray for us.

[i] The essence of this is rehearsed in the apercu: on John, Reflections on a Vision, February 2016.