Having summarily set out a parcel of the foundational considerations of occidental philosophy and spirituality, we pause here to look both back and forward in order to gage, to some degree, their impact on the items foremost in our interest: the fundament of world, the fundament of man, here in their religious vesture: the ideas of creation and fall, the “in the beginning”, Έν αρχή.
The Greek mind looked upon god and matter as two eternals. God was the wholly determined eternal, the pure act, the wholly actualized potentiality. Matter was the totally indeterminate eternal, pure potentiality awaiting actualization by the application of some idea, some form, accomplished by some power reflecting the divine as pure act. When Christianity turned to Greek thought to argue the reasonableness of the faith, it was confronted with a problem. Scripture spoke of a creating God, and Pure Act is, by definition, wholly self-contained, without external relations. Christian apologists moved on two fronts. First they looked to Aristotle’s theory of causality. Second, they argued that a Pure Act could not be wholly actualized if passive relative to matter. How can a totally actualized entity be related to the totally indeterminate? If there is in fact a relationship, even by decree of sovereign free will, where is the boundary? Is all creation in the mind of God? How could the eternal mind as the fully actualized contain the totality of the potential? Such questions are still unresolved. Philosophy is still honing theories to enwrap the disparity between the Absolute and the field of the relative, and ideas about the evolution of the divine through the world, be they from Hegel or Whitehead, are neither new nor totally satisfying. Karl Barth insisted, and rightly so, the realm of faith is not to be confounded by the realm of logic and rationalizations. The articles of faith ought to stand together in some intelligent form, but they cannot be plied into syllogisms to extract things reason is not made to manipulate.[i]
Plato envisioned a power, a demiurge, sculpting cosmic stuff out of non-being on the basis of eternal ideas or forms. Plotinus expanded that vision elevating the groundwork of the ideas to an inviolable unity made intellectually approachable in its emanation of Nous (Mind). The wisdom literature of the Hebrews spoke of Wisdom as an eternal helpmate of God. In the Gospel according to John that idea of Wisdom becomes the Logos (Word) of God in, by, and through whom all is made. These notions of Mind, Nous, Wisdom, Logos, Word all denote the same item: the divine mind. Augustine bundles these visions together and transmits them as a nascent Trinitarian theology in which the Holy in its varied aspects or personae creates, redeems and sanctifies the world.[ii]
In Hebrew scripture, however, we find two versions of the beginnings of the heavens and the earth, of creation. In chapter one of Genesis we encounter a divine power that summons the universe out of an abyss, a type of non-being, by pure decree, “let it be”, “let this happen”; only man is “formed”. In chapter two we encounter the divine power acting in more practical, more tactile form; we hear variants of “to make”, “to cause to rise up”, “to cause to spring up”, “to send”, “to fashion”, “to form”. Chapter one lends itself to Parmenides’ idea of “being is” and change is illusion, to a sense of creationism wherein everything is established here and now, once and for all. Chapter two has a differing dynamic; it lends itself to Heraclitus’ idea of flux. God makes, fashions, manipulates, adjusts; he forms man from the earth and breathes into him life from his own mouth.
Chapter one has inspired theologians to claim every soul is a direct and individual creation by God (creationism). Chapter two has lent itself to a more evolutionary attitude, wherein the soul is generated in and by the process of procreation (traducianism, generationism). [The present popular usage of “creationism” to describe the direct creation of everything is a logical extension of the idea, just as traducianism lends itself to the support of theories of evolution.] Among the first to take these sacred narratives and extrude a theory of soul-evolution from them was the mid-3rd century theologian Tertullian, who made the argument for traducianism. Augustine teeters back and forth, until his argumentations against Pelagius forced him to settle on the creationism side. Jerome considered creationism alone compatible with the faith, and his position held until the Reformation with the Calvinists holding the traditional line and the Lutherans looking back to traducianism. In the mid-19th century, Antonio Rosmini proposed a compromise (condemned by Rome) wherein the sensitive soul was generated in procreation, but was then transformed by an illuminative act of God into a spiritual soul.
We here are—at the root—confronted not so much with divaricating theories as with opposing attitudes, one treating non-material items as quantitative, the other understanding non-material items as qualitative. When the ideas of soul, life, love, grace, forgiveness, and indeed, God are understood to be the pre-eminently qualitative, they come alive and real in manners incomprehensible to the mind that tries to make them some sort of matter that can be weighed, counted, or ritually controlled.
Thus, I am not about to take sacred narrative as either science or history. That, most dolorously, does not mean others have not, do not do so, muchly to the discounting of the Holy, and of religion as the arena for encountering the Holy through the disciplines of spiritual development and growth. Sacred vision is sacred; something ex-ordinary to inspire, to excite us to rise above the everyday, the world of tangibles, of material factuality, of science. “God created the heavens and the earth” is a primal value statement about the sovereignty of the creativity of holiness and the goodness of being, not a scientific recounting of the how of existence. As noted, my reticence to make a gallimaufry of the sacred and the scientific is not universal among men. Crude versions of an extended creationism still persist.
Philosophy will, for the most part, insist God is a perfection, a fullness beyond direct comprehension or any alteration. Faith, informed by the testaments of its prophets, proclaims a God all perfect and yet all involved. The tension is logically unresolvable, for the terms, the definitions, the understandings of the items are radically different. Faith and its visions are fundamentally acts of love. Love is not rational; it can, and ought to be intelligent, but it is a giving away of self, and rationality means appropriating to self from outside of self.
Would that this theoretical beginning of world and self were the whole of it, but religion would not then need to exist. Man does not want only to know where everything starts and how, but why he feels divided within, why there arise questions concerning what one does, concerning why one does, concerning what one ought to do. Depth psychology has the daunting task of untangling and deciphering the evolution of the conscious mind from the unconscious, and applying its understandings to the cure of men. Anthropologists hold the task of collecting and comparing the store of myths that depict sundry cultures’ attempts to enunciate that development of mind, of spirit, of humankind in its individuality and its sociality. Religions, the cults of the cultures, as the guardians of the sacred narratives, the myths, must make them viable tools for the cure of souls and spiritual development. In Christianity, thus, arises the question of the wherefrom, of the beginnings of this sense of divisiveness within, and the sacred narrative that holds the vision, the reply, is the Fall.
Man once existed in a wondrous state. All was well. God was at hand. Nature was at peace. It was paradise. Man made a decision. It was wrong. Everything unravelled. Everything fell apart. One need not a degree in psychology to see through the surface of this tale to the reality below. The child—here, the species–awakes from the womb. The conscious mind awakes, the conscience awakes. In-nocence (not-knowing, ignorance) is shattered. The forces within and without appear. All is not one, not at rest, at peace. The world and self need be negotiated and mastered. Power needs be understood, respected, and equally well wielded. The journey of life begins. A Fall? Yes. The unity of the mind, the psyche, the soul, is shattered, and the task is to put the whirling, circling pieces of it back into a whole, at once the same and yet radically different, transcendent. A Fall? Yes, and it is as much from grace as to grace, from the arms of love back to the arms of love, from the swaddling to the self freely giving. In Sacred Writ it stands a vision of man’s unfolding world, man’s quest for life, for meaning, for hope and the compatriots of all hope, trust (faith in all its varied forms) and love (the yes to here and now, to self, to other, to tomorrow, to forever).
Theologians are not given to leaving sacred visions untouched. They want to fit them together into nice little packages of all-encompassing theories. They want to explain them, often to death[iii]. Enter here the quantitative analyses of quality. Enter here the ideas concerning the degree of corruption man unleashes in the Fall, the ideas of divine predestination, divine foreknowledge, divine election, divine perseverance, of quantitative parcels of grace, of assurance of grace, of the imago dei (image of god) versus similitudo dei (likeness unto god). I shall—briefly—touch upon these ideas in so far as they impact the occidental mind’s prejudices, cultural inclinations, regarding god and soul, for all are agreed there was a Fall, be that understood as the birth of the species, the awakening of the mind as human, the loss of a golden age, an expulsion form a Paradise, or the terrifying result of a primal defiant act, an original declaration of “me”, be that understood as an item of psychology or spirituality.[iv]
Let us begin with this defiant self-declaration, in religious terminology, with sin. Sin, as stated in my publication on Sin (March 2013), is opposition to the Holy, the totally other-oriented self-giving (hence, Love). It is characterized by compartmentalization and selfishness. Scripture spoke of Adam and Eve (literally, Earthling and Mother) has having ruptured a boundary situation placed before them by the Almighty. It was an ill use of freedom, a biting of the hand that fed them. The punishment was life in the world, a loss of innocence, a need to work things out, figure things out, endure trial and error. The garden of God, who had said of all the world “it is good”, was no longer present to man. Man was at a distance from God, the creator, companion, comforter, provider. Theologians want to explain that.
Explanations require the building of rational structures, and just as we require materials and tools to construct a house or a computer, we require mental equivalents of sticks and stones and electrifying currents to make up our ideas. To picture life in Paradise theologians borrowed words from sacred writ: man as made imago dei (in the image of God), and man as made similitudo dei (in the likeness unto God). To these they added instruments from philosophy, ideas to expand and exalt human nature: an original righteousness, special preternatural gifts, an extraordinary state of grace (God’s vivifying presence), an abundance of blessings above and beyond human nature. The primal defiance, as a freely made act, exenterated that exalted state of being, and original humankind began a new chapter. It is not Adam and Eve as a primal couple, it is Adam and Eve as the totality of humankind that does so, and that has repercussions for all, for as St Paul marked “in Adam all men have sinned!” What does that mean?
One might be inclined to say it means we are all a sorry lot of self-centred, self-interested little ingrates running amok with one another’s lives and the world we must share. Theologians are considerably more subtle. What was lost with this Fall? Was it the image of God or the likeness unto God? What was transmitted to all men by the first couple? Was it the sin, the guilt, the punitive consequences, or some mixture of these? How is transmission possible? Did God know this was coming? Did God plan this? How detailed might God’s plan be?
While the earliest considerations looked upon the Fall as a loss of the ability to attain immortality, a shifting of human history in a direction radically divergent from the divine plan, or the inherent disorientation of human will, the topic did not command a great deal of attention until early in the 5th century when Pelagius decided to address another issue. He was not primarily interested in theories of original sin, immortality, or historical directionality. His concern was the refutation of a gnostic form of asceticism (Manichaeism) based on the belief that the world had been stolen from the good god by the evil lord, and the battle betwixt the forces of good and evil raged on every front to be escaped solely through secret enlightenment garnered in intricate austerities. His purpose was the defence of a budding Christian asceticism he believed required grounding in man’s freedom to act for good by the powers of his God-given nature. He contended man can freely and naturally do good; there is no loss of freedom resultant of Adam’s act. God does not make man and then demand of him that which man cannot do. Sin is a matter of a man’s freely taken action and the ill habits he constructs; sin is not a matter of inheritance.
Augustine did not account for either the locus or focus of Pelagius’ polemics. He charged full steam ahead and bluntly attacked Pelagius’ position on freedom and nature setting in his arguments the stage for much to follow. He pontificated (he not being the type to merely opine) the Fall is a fall in the very status of being unamendable by man. It is both a spiritual and a metaphysical reality, affecting every soul and the very structure of being human. Ignorance, passions, the senses, concupiscence (blind or inordinate desire)—all run riot over intellect and will. Mankind suffers the primal sin, its guilt, and all its consequences making man a massive malignancy of sinfulness worthy of damnation. All this passes from generation to generation through the act of procreation, itself caught up in the concupiscence of fallen, corrupted human nature, a nature no longer in the image of God. Yet, Augustine’s position is not logically consistent, for he shifts from traducianism to creationism and claims every soul is a unique act of divine creation. How then is this contagion passed? Does God actually create each soul “corrupted”? If Adam is essentially an archetype of corrupted human nature, how can the reality of the sin and its consequences be transmitted within human concupiscence? In another ambiguous argument Augustine claims man has not only lost the freedom to do good, but also lost the freedom to not sin, yet free will is not destroyed, rather radically crippled, radically in need of God’s interference in order to choose the good.
In the 11th century, Anselm (taking up an insight offered centuries earlier by Pseudo-Dionysius) wrote the minority view, veering away from Augustine’s position, and claiming the original sin is a privation of a righteousness that ought to reside in man. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas (devoted to Aristotle) likewise had a problem with Augustine’s centring on guilt and concupiscence transmitted through the conjugal act. He considers the Fall a loss of supernatural powers that would have strengthened the power of reason to control the senses and passion. The transmission of the consequences is a reality because this loss constitutes a structural defect within the species, a radical declivity within the organism that is humankind. The arguments about the what and how of transmittal of sin, guilt, and consequences continued even into the Reformation. Both Luther and Calvin hold the Augustinian viewpoint with an added rigour; they compact sin, guilt, and concupiscence together making for the radical loss of the free will to do any good. Calvin speaks of a “total depravity” or corruption of human nature such that no human action, no ecclesiastical rite can remedy the situation, a situation totally in God’s power. I will note that as a spiritual vision this is not unworthy, for the reverse of this pessimistic coin is this: all worth, all value and the ground of true valuation (freedom) reside in being held in love, in positive self-affirmation, before, with, in, and by the presence of God, of the holy. Unfortunately, such qualitative spiritual therapeutic rarely appears, being buried in the obverse—the pessimism of being perverted to the core. We look here upon an idea, a glorious spiritual insight, thought to Death.[v]
Rome countered the Reformers by restating Aquinas’ position and upholding free will. Neither Rome nor the Reformers could stop sundry members of their churches from embracing arguments of the other side. Modern theologians tend to stress the corporate nature of sin, the rather Thomistic position that the foundations of sin are inherent in man as man, not in a man as a particular individual.
The more dreadful inquiry than the root of man’s sinfulness was the question about God’s role. Did God know the Fall was coming? Did God will it?
The Hebrew scriptures speak in places about God preparing some for salvation and some for everlasting disgrace, of hardening hearts.[vi] Paul writes of some called according to God’s purpose, foreknowledge, predestination, election, of being chosen not by merit of works but faith, etc. (Romans 8, Ephesians 1, 2 Timothy 1). All of these texts are susceptible to being used as “proof texts”[vii] that God wills some to be saved and some to be damned. However, neither any one nor the lot of them can be taken for such meaning if read in context, a context that is always the sending of Christ to save the world, to redeem the whole cosmos—not this or that bit of it. Nowhere does Christian scripture have God bowing to sin, to evil. God in Christ acts that all be saved. If there be truth in the saying the Devil can quote scripture to his own ends, here be a proof, for this portrayal of whimsical divine favouritism has in too many hearts and minds sown the sins of anxiety, hubris, and adiaphora (John Wesley), wrecking faith and hope and love, exalting an idol of vengeance in the stead of the thrice Holy God and Father of Jesus Christ.[viii]
Once again, it is Augustine who sets the stage for the ages to come, claiming God is free and just, his decisions inscrutable, his will undefeatable, even in consideration of man’s free will. And this is true. Augustine failed to underscore that this divine freely willed and indefectible plan is Christ, the salvation of all. Once again, I note we filter the ineffable vision of God through ourselves and our histories. Augustine’s life and times were anfractuous, to put it mildly. Interestingly, in the Greek world there was a less pessimistic socio-political situation, and that attitude is reflected in church. The divine will for universal salvation does not supersede human free will and thus, damnation continues to be available for the reprobate, but there is quietly acknowledged the question: given the grace of Christ, is reprobation a probability for any (John Damascus)? Some were less equivocal and expected a final and total enfolding into blessedness that would shatter even the bounds of hell, an apocatastasis (Origen). In mediaeval times the Western church sought out a more embracing stance, and stress was placed upon the sovereignty of divine will (Peter Lombard), divine causality (Bonaventura), or divine love (Thomas Aquinas).
For most, until the Reformation, predestination (as a matter of spirituality and as a topic in academia) was neither a grave nor great concern. Members of the church were the saved, and the sacraments were both the instruments and the assurance of their salvation. If anxiety ought to have raised its head anywhere it ought to have been among the heathen and infidel.
Calvin, ejecting the sacramental, devotional, emotive, and organizational core of mediaeval spirituality, focuses his theology on the omnipotence of God to the point of dismissing the value of man. Whatsoever man does or does not is inconsequential before God’s will. Furthermore, God has, in his inscrutably wisdom, willed the salvation of some, and the damnation of others.[ix] This is neither ruthless nor unjust, for all men are sinful and deserving of damnation; some, mercifully, are granted a covering for their sins thanks to the merits gained by Christ specifically for them, and therein saved. This gracious allowance, this grace is irresistible, and so “assures” them who have been “elected” [x] the beatitude that would have been available to all by man’s natural powers had they not been utterly corrupted in the Fall, which event the omnipotent and omniscient God did will! As staggering and stupefying a spiritual vision this constitutes, some had the courage to ask on: when did God so will damnation for some and salvation for others, before (supralapsarianism, antelapsarianism) or after (sublapsarianism, postlapsarianism, infralapsarianism) the Fall (lapsus)? There were a few within this reformed church tradition that rejected the entire idea of predestination. Arminius held Calvin’s position made God the foundation and author of sin itself. He rejected the divinely appointed damnation of some, and stressed man has the ability to cooperate with the divine grace, that salvation is open to and possible for all men.
Post-Tridentine Rome tried to look away from the entire argumentation. It focused on man’s free will and divine grace. Some held God’s gift of efficacious grace[xi] to do good is founded in his foreknowledge of human cooperation or lack thereof (Molina), others stressed the pre-eminence and priority of the divine will for universal salvation over and above human merit (Suarez).
Such yearning gazes to comprehensive compromise do not silence questioning in every heart. What exactly does God foreknow? What does it mean to say God has foreknowledge?
Until the advent of dialectical philosophy with Hegel in the 19th century and process philosophy with Whitehead in the 20th century, theology has usually been content to allow God to be omniscient in the sense of knowing the full expanse of time from his trans-temporal singularity of eternity. From time to time this was opened to question. Does God’s foreknowledge of the future determine the future? Does foreknowledge of an event necessarily cause the event if the knower is also the creator? Is creation wholly determined because God knows its every move, cosmic and individual, past, present and to come? Some mediaeval philosophers seemingly thought so (Duns Scotus). In the 14th century Occam attempted to find the pivot twixt man’s free will and divine knowledge. He suggested that the future is indeterminate, therefore, God’s knowledge of it is indeterminate, embracing, as it were, all possible worlds. This does not resolve the issue because the indeterminateness of the future is thus for man, but God would not be omniscient, in the classic sense of the term, if he merely had an inkling of things to come. The problem turns on considering history from the viewpoint of time, and considering history from a vantage point outside of time (eternity). The problem is concomitant with the problem of the boundary between God and creation. Is creation in God’s mind or is the cosmos exterior to the divine mind? How are Creator and creation temporally and spatially related? One might be inclined to claim God is non-temporal (eternal) and non-spatial (spirit), and thus, at once transcends, permeates, and animates his creation in its temporal and spatial fullness, that God is at once the first, efficient, and final cause, including of man’s free will. Indeed, a proper reading of the doctrine of the Trinity accomplishes this. Unfortunately, this vision of the spirituality and tri-unity of the creator is not usually invoked. Calvin exalted the divine will and knowledge to the point of ejecting the free will of man, and insisted the cosmos was wholly determined in its every aspect. Modern thought still grapples with the issue. Modern process theology (Whitehead, Hartshorne) usually depicts the divine evolving and growing with creation, knowing the actual as actual, the potential as potential, and according to some members of the school, also enjoying a more encompassing knowledge wherein it acts as a type of final or exemplary cause to the unfolding of creation. Some have suggested the term knowledge is applied to God cacologically, for knowledge indicates mind affected by object, and the essence of God is a self-beholding. This, however, skirts the entire issue. Brunner thinks the issue ought to be skirted, for the God and Father of Jesus Christ is not the god of Greek philosophical diagnostics. He, however, makes room for both reason and revelation. Barth disagrees, and believes theology belongs centred solely on revelation. Tillich is philosophically inclined, indebted to Schelling, and fond of speaking of the idea of symbol. Gustav Aulen speaks of love. Love indeed knows; it grasps everything in every manner, for it is a beholding by the will not a deciphering by the mind.
Is god God if shrived of omniscience? Is god God if the perfecting of his work is frustrated by his work itself? Is god God if he is not master of both good and evil? My mind turns to the quizzing given Job by God: who questions the mind and heart of God? It is to our peril and the denigration of the Holy to forget that in all the endeavours of theology, philosophy, and religion we speak of God by analogy or we speak of God in faith. According to faith, God’s word is creative—active, animating, omnipotent. It is not an object to study, it is a power by which to be possessed; it is personalizing, it is revealed in the person of Christ Jesus (whether one understand him as divine presence, teacher of a way, or exemplar of psychic wholeness). Whatsoever “system” man creates to personally vivify that must be open and faithful to that wholeness, that holiness, and must not be closed off from its power to contain and transform even the darkest of nights, the deadliest of forces.
Everyman needs to keep before him that no man is good, neither is any man evil, yet no man is not both good and evil. Both good and evil present primitive unspeakable potencies, and thus, they properly require us keep a ritual distance and gaze upon them with prophylactic masks. But both good and evil inform us, and thus demand our attention. That attention is requisite for our sane existence. Just as good needs to be nurtured into the fabric of life, so also does evil. That does not mean exercising or exalting evil. It does mean one cannot ignore it, hide from it, or repress it, for that would merely allow it to thrive, to fester. Evil flourishes in compartmentalization. This is why the tradition of spiritual examination and confession is of such deep value. One must acknowledge, accept, understand the evil (or as psychology would say, the shadow) within if it is to be transformed, transfigured, integrated, given new life as a constructive power within the whole. A believer who cannot look upon Christ and exclaim: “Happy fault that merited so great a Saviour! Blessed darkness that alone deserved to know the hour Christ from hell arose!”[xii]—denies God’s will to complete, to perfect his work in Christ, in newness of life, in his Holy Spirit. The man who cannot look within and acknowledge he harbours a heart of darkness that is redeemable in the integration of his being, his selfhood, is the man locked by his own ego into a deflation of self, a damnation of soul, quietly chained to the powers of that darkness and evil, the man who in ego-enlightened despair marches on believing himself fine in his illness or incurable of his hidden pain.
I knew once a man who suffered from abdominal pains for years. He self-medicated with all manner of things from herbs to over-the-counter concoctions. He never looked to the source of his pain, merely the symptoms. He never consulted an expert, one learned and wise in such matters. One day his gall bladder burst. The poisons released caused a crisis in all his bodily systems; he died. Such is the condition of the man who ignores the original sin, the shadow, the darkness, the evil within. It can be side-lined, it can be ignored, but that does not sap its power, it reinforces it, and eventually it will explode to the peril of spirit, soul, personality, and all them touched by this now fatal contagion. History drips with evidence of this illness. The unconfessed sin, the unacknowledged negativity, the “kept in the dark”, must be confessed, acknowledged, brought to light, suffered (allowed) to become tactile in both guilt and dismay, and laundered, if it is going to made into something that contributes to good health and well-being. If this is not done, the darkness will simply become a rot at the base of that which ought to be bringing forth wholeness and life.
As this article has been an interjection of Christian dogmatics into a consideration of philosophical ideas, I shall end where dogma begins, with Jesus. Sacred writ tells us Jesus submitted to the religiosity of his day, and was baptized into repentance by John in the Jordan. The narrative hints at the intensity he experienced, the release, the abreaction of that spirituality. It was as if the heavens opened, and God’s presence and embrace descended upon him, enveloped him, defined him: “You are my son”. But in that ecstasy he knows this is not a glorification, but a vocation, a call to go into the desert, into his secret places, his alone places, his wilderness, to deal with his demons, his dark powers. Thus, he wanders, explores, prays, and confronts the dark callings one by one until without doubt he knows who he is, what he is: one with his Father, the Holy One. He is become the integer, the integrated man who having suffered in the depths of himself the lies, the wildness, the darkness, and brought them to the light, can now lead others as the embodiment of truth and light, can now vicariously suffer for others, for all. Here is how man becomes begotten of God.
Nota Bene: My propensity to emanate tangents often causes items to fall from the orbit of consideration. Two of the following endnotes are not only tangential, but sufficiently substantial to stand as ancillary articles. They have, accordingly, been given titles, and situated here that their independent publishing not interrupt the progression of this series on occidental thought.
[i] Cf: on “Systems” and the proper use of language (Feb. 2012), on Dogma and Science (May 2013).
[ii] Cf: on Faith 2 (Feb. 2012), on “Masks” and its Christian heritage (Feb. 2012).
[iii] on the Evagination of Valuations
Philosophy and theology need be most cautious about the minatory ability to think a thing to death, for the human mind is circuitous, thrusting to contain in itself at once beginning and end, especially in its dealings with rarefied items and ideas. It is possible to think a thing into its opposite. Kant, in his deconstructive study of reason, marks four basic paradoxes within reason, the classic antimonies (functional contradictions): the infinity vs. the finitude of the universe, the indivisibility vs. the divisibility of matter, freedom vs. determinism, and a primal cause vs. such causal absence. Modern atheistic existentialism inverts the vision of a loving creator into its opposite, into an unbearable oppressive overlord that must be “killed” if “free” man is to live. Some schools within reformed theology turn that same loving creator of a world ajudged good into a vicious conspirator plotting from before the foundations of time the damnation of his work while hiding himself behind some elusive teasing called grace; all of man’s striving for good counted as sin because god who makes man really loves him not. The joy of spiritual serenity is made the dour glare of moralizing severity.
Too many have encountered and been asked to endure too many dubbed with reverential title and office in profound existential perturbation, repressing all manner of things, and therein deeply pained, purulent, peevish, and petty. There are some inclined to argue that prevents them not from God’s work, but if the work is the guidance and cure of souls, I avouch one does not, cannot lead others on a road one has not travelled. Such souls cannot nurture life in others. The problem here resides not in intelligence, although very well-read people often give evidence of being witless, but with the psyche, the soul. Just as one must assimilate and integrate external information to make for reasonableness, one needs assimilate and integrate the information received from within to make for wholeness. The soul needs to be informed and balanced, if it is not, there comes a tipping point at which the opposite of that held as the ideal manifests itself as the real. Thus, as example, an adamantine declaration that “God is love” wherein the divinity, the transcendence, the creativity of love is not freely allowed to excavate the depths of the soul will manifest as its opposite—the fearsome god whose tongue is “a double-edged sword”, and whose pleasure is the damnation of any and all who cross his path, a god exhibiting all the anger and judgement the soul fears to look upon within itself, fears to deal with, to open to light, to healing, to the God called Love. Thus, he who confesses the God of love but allows him no entry to the dark fire hidden within the soul becomes not loving but hellish, not whole, not holy, not properly oriented but hateful and self-righteous. Such self-righteousness is always acerbic in its every manifestation internal and external for the self knows it is a horrid and bitter lie told to self. Thus, the God of love and forgiveness becomes to self and to all them such “faith” touches the ferocious and fearsome god. To them that claim such is the Biblically given God I respond first, the Bible is not free of the testimony of broken souls, and part of its genius is the inclusion of the witness of the lame, the blind, the ill, of which the David story-cycle is a brilliant exemplar, but second and most vivaciously, such is not the God my Lord calls Papa (Abba)! I confess I was blessed with an earthly father who, while sometimes bewildered by me, never wagged his finger, never exhibited anger, and I realize that subliminal language translates when I look above or within.
The Latin term beatus is usually translated either as happy or blessed. Our daily usage has lost the feel for that connection twixt blessed and happy, and our spirituality, social and private, would be richer were that not so. Echoing Luther I have marked before that the happy man is the man free to do good. There are too many unhappy men spending too much time supressing things, inverting things, thinking things to death, turning truth to lie, knowledge to doubt, and love to hate.
[iv] This primal defiance is a rather feeble declaration, thus, I have used “me”, not “I”. Both Adam and Eve hide. Both are ashamed, embarrassed. Adam, called by Luke “the son of God”, blames Eve, Eve blames serpent. The child has been caught moving the boundaries of power. Power has been grasped. But power is a wild thing. Thus, as this sacred narrative of the beginning unfolds we hear of violence of brother against brother, of the relationship twixt man and nature deteriorating, of everything spiralling out of control until God intervenes with a levelling catastrophe. Power is wild, its wielding is an art, its taming is the will. A millennium after this tale is written, another child will come and give it its concluding verse: “Thy will be done.”
[v] The terms image of God (imago dei), likeness unto God (similitudo dei), preternatural gifts, supernatural gifts, original righteousness indicate the paradisial state of man. All are poetic images of a golden age of our being that are both a depiction of the primal, infantile state of the human mind, and a projection of the ultimate hope and thrust of all spiritual and psychic dynamic, the return to Paradise. However, churchmen in the process of their argumentations have assigned to each of these energizing mental and spiritual ideas a caboose laden with emotive fragments and opined insights.
In the argumentations of the Reformation, Roman theologians held image of God refers to human nature, which in the Fall is damaged, and likeness unto God refers to the bundle of supernatural gifts (sanctifying grace and the attendant virtues) and preternatural gifts (spiritual integrity and immortality) which in the Fall are lost. The Reformers thought the distinction betwixt image and likeness merely a matter of terms, both referencing human nature.
Luther thought the image/likeness, the free will was in some manner lost. Calvin thought the image/likeness was not lost but utterly corrupted, making man “totally depraved”. While Luther and Calvin both hold the Augustinian line, Luther tries to find a balance between divine power and human freedom. Thus his theology of the cross (theologia crucis) is balanced by his theology of glory (theologia gloria), sinful man by saved man (simul justus et peccator), salvation by God’s free giving (sole gratia) by a man’s trust in God’s gifting (sole fide). Calvin is not disposed to compromise; man is totally ruined, stupid, at a loss for reason to control lesser functions or to see to higher planes. The argument has not ended; the quizzing continues. Is what has been lost a matter of nature or gift? Where in man resides the root of the primal sin? If the image of God is lost, how can any man claim a natural ability to come to God, to understand God, to produce a natural theology (Barth vs. Brunner)?
Original righteousness was taken to refer to the state of propriety that existed twixt God and man before the Fall. The Romans equated it with the supernatural gifts which were lost, the Reformers again thought it another reference to the image/likeness that had empowered man to obey the singular voice of both reason and God, now either lost or unspeakably corrupted.
I am not a misologist! There are, however, times when all need to step back and confess their words have taken on too many meanings, too many nuances, and leave them behind, lest scholarly argumentation becomes no more than an endless bracketing of terms, lest the artistry, the power of the original narrative to inspire and transcend becomes lost in the logistics of contraindicative analyses, lest spirituality be lost to dogmatic trifling. Religion makes pictures of the consummate visions. Theology must examine them, but for gospel’s sake, for the sake of the cure of souls, not the confounding of hearts and minds by the pounding out of dots and tittles, not for the sake of dissecting vision into darkness.
Francis of Assisi might serve as a case example. He founded a community of “little brothers” to be a humble presence of Christ in the world. The community became an organization, a bureaucracy. Organizations, bureaucracies incline to self-idolization, and as scripture notes of idols: “they have eyes but see not, ears but hear not”. A flummoxed Francis climbed a mountain back to God, and returned literally stigmatized with Christ to manifest his vision anew. The organization co-opted him as icon. Organization needs bureaucracy needs internal directives needs rules needs insularity; vision is disruptive, inclusive, transcendental. The paradox: vision needs organization to become visible, yet organization obfuscates vision. Here be a paradise and paradise lost.
[vi] on the Evolution of Integration
The ideas of the divine and of self evolve with consciousness. In Occidental Ideas, Part 4 there was noted the gradual elevation of the Hebrew God from tribal deity to universal lord, and simultaneously the evolution of individual from member of the tribe (wherein identity and responsibility are held in trust and in common by the collective mind and its values) to member of a more expansive society (wherein identity is defined according to the individual’s responsible adherence to the value system of the community). Man moves from primitive association of family or tribe to more inclusive social groupings—physically and psychologically—and this expanse is reflected in the depictions of self and the Holy.
Because Judaism prohibited divine depictions, this evolution of divine image may not appear as evident as in other religions wherein we can trace the iconography from totem animal to the divine image as a mixture of both human and animal characteristics to a totally anthropomorphised divine being often accompanied by the ancient totem now rendered as a companion.
Man, likewise, moves from the primitive “an eye for an eye” wherein the eye of any member of family or tribe will suffice because all members are at base the same, identified and defined by membership in the family or tribe, to ever more precise ideas of punitive and retributional justice because membership within the community is by “contract”, by individual subscription to the pervasive and acknowledged value system.
In the primitive grouping, good and evil, responsibility and answerability are communal in nature. Where all are one, the dishonour of one is the dishonour of all, the reprimand of any is recompense to all, thus, honour killings and blood feuds are acceptable means of justice. The punishment, purification, or redemption of the entire commune is exemplified in the making of a scapegoat. Because this social construct is insular, both it and its divinity are vigilantly protective of the tribe, fiercely vengeful, conservative, xenophobic. As human self-consciousness expands, the family and tribe schema gives way to more expansive and inclusive forms of society, more expansive ideas of right and wrong, of social cohesion, of holiness, and of the Holy. The social bond is not family or tribe but agreed and accepted values. Responsibility is to others under, by, through “super-ego” (the internalized value system) reflecting its concomitant, the socially accepted rule. In situations wherein the connection of the individual to the social value system becomes disrupted or lost there happens either a regression to a more primitive form or a call to a higher level of cohesion.
We live in an age rampant with regressive social behaviour. Society has become clumps of masses, mobs, gangs, parties, tribes wherein the social coherence is fundamentally impersonal, fierce, xenophobic, partisan, and rude by standards of a few generations past. It is the failure of larger parts of society to rise to a more inclusive level. It is a retreat, a collapse of growth in the face of the psycho-social demands from within, and from without, from foreign cultures, cults, and ideas. It is the literally savage attempt to secure the tribal village. In this frenzy, as in the primitive situation, the culminating act of social purification demands a scapegoat be found.
There are, however, as always there must if we as a species are to move forward, them that walk beyond the deteriorating social contract of values, and answer to a higher power, a voice within. Such are the prophets, the visionaries, the true leaders of every age. They recognize responsibility must be not to the social grouping but for it. Their highest ethic is not “an eye for an eye”, not “love thy neighbour”, but “love thy enemy, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you…”. Unlike them that continue to abide under the social contract and suffer the tension that the clear divide between good and evil produces in a world wherein rare situation is simply “black or white”, these inspired individuals have fought within themselves that battle, resolved that disquietude, and are free now to become the vicarious victims for society that good might radically engage evil, transform it, redeem it, bring it and its powers into the open field of creativity. Their quest is divine: to go boldly where others fear to even look that they might bring light where there is darkness, life where there is death, be that within the soul of one or the world of all. (Cf: Luther’s consistent envisioning of Christ “for me”.)
To return to the point from which this reflection departed, sacred texts need always be considered in historical context. There is no point in proclaiming God immerses himself in time, reveals himself in and through history, if time and history are ignored or taken as constant. Preachers, painters, cinematographers, diseurs, artists of all types, may be at liberty to portray the seven day of Genesis, the burning bush of Exodus, the morn of Easter Day, a moment of ecstasy, a shattering spiritual insight, a plague, a volcanic eruption, or some other extra-ordinary event as depictive of divine presence and power, but we cannot claim such is the sole indicative or definitive of such power and presence; we cannot claim “We have seen!” and expect no other might have also seen—something else, somewhere else, somehow else, might not have been encountered of some potency less dramatic, some “still, small voice”. God is Emmanuel (God who is with-us), or god is not! The flow of history and the changeability of time do not cease because God enters them; they become ceaselessly and definitively open to their fullness, their unfolding meaningfulness, and as prophets, ancient and modern, tire not to say “for us”.
Allow me to turn from this need to integrate the spirituality of sacred writ, of times past, with the present, to the more direct issue of bringing the dark to light. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had room in the immortal soul for the fallible sensitive soul (the plant-like animating principle) or the blind concupiscible soul (the animal-like animating principle). The rational aspect of soul alone could reach the light of the essential, the universal, the intelligible and hence good, true, beauteous; sense and desire as wild, dark irrational powers were inadmissible to such a rarefied realm. Augustine was of like mind. However, believing himself Biblically informed of psychology, he held there was only one soul in man, it was made by God, and it enfolded all these aspects. Herein the blind and wild powers of being-human enter the immortal (or immortal-seeking) soul, and so Augustine must talk of sin, of some sort of constitutional declivity to darkness, an original psychic fault-line. Augustine, like so many others past and present, interpreted that primitive beast within in its most potent aspect: the sexual instinct. To them that wag their heads regarding this sin-sex connection made by a saint—read Freud.*
No thinking person is about to dismiss the fact we have within animalistic, anti-social tendencies, forces, powers. Licentiousness, greed, and violence run rampant over the attempts to “civilize” man. Social value systems and their accustomed keepers, religions, have done a questionable job of inculcating themselves. The clerisy of society may embrace the highest standards, but the ordinary man has usually been left to hear them pronounced on high, and told he must adhere to them without being told how. One cannot tell the savage to go out and slay the loin without a tool; one cannot be dismayed if the savage gets eaten or turns into a beast more fearsome than the lion in order to preserve himself. So we reach our present.
Religion has failed common man. Failure has raised the charge of hypocrisy, and common man has given up trying, pretending to try. In that at least there is a light of honesty; we have honestly failed. Telling someone to suppress or sublimate feelings does not shrive those feelings of their power; the power simply boils in the dark and emanates its hot steam. Telling someone to repress feelings does not purloin their power; the power, under intense pressure, simply abides its time until it can volcanically, disastrously, erupt. The callithump of avarice, greed, violence, gluttony, blood-lust, pleasure-lust, exhibitionism, the panoply of blind untamed desires—in games, in literature, in film, in music, in dress, in décor, in business, in politics—is evidence of the failure to deal intelligently, to bring to light, these dark forces within, these demons now poised to sink the very culture within which they have so long festered. The popular fascination with monsters that must be slain, with the dead that need to eat brains, the dead that must suck the blood, the life force, from others is prodromata of the psychic cachexia, and of the patent absence of knowledge to constructively address such a foundational spiritual dyscrasia. And while mobs of zombies and vampires run amok, celebrities bare ever more flesh to evidence the engrossed infantile cry of identity and value gone astray: “look at me”, “love me”, the amoebic scream: “me”.
Yes, the mouth of hell has opened, and only because we have not been honest about not hell’s existence, but the need to understand it, to bring it to light. Look at the common iconography of hell—a centrosphere of fire, a subterranean conflagration, and yet a darkness, protean, portent, potent. There is a reason hell’s master is called Lucifer, “the light-bearer”. Lucifer certainly has a light to shine, not a luminosity, not the awesome-ness of the transcendent, but a fascinum, a darkled shimmering, the fascination of the chthonic (understood both as the earthly and the infernal), the spellbinding-ness of the dark and wild, the orgiastic. Its taming and his reside in bringing them into the light, to intelligence, to understanding, and therein to personal, integrating, and social functionality.
Fire can still destroy us, but somewhere in the last two hundred and fifty thousand years of our history we have, for the better part, learned to use it constructively. The same has by some been managed with the fires within. It belongs to the clerisy to play Prometheus and bring the knowledge, the science of using the internal fires for good to all. We cannot say go to church, read your Bible, receive the sacraments, confess your sins, pray to God. All such are of value only as emblems of something the individual must do in his own soul, but the laborious, the sacrificial guidance as to the “how” of that soul-journey belongs to them that have made it, at least to a distance farther than others. Too many who have made that journey, are making that journey, have failed to turn and look back to others on the road, to others who know not even a road exists and are lost in thickets and thorns.
The ideology we inherit form Augustine is correct in this: sin does not vanish; it fails, however, to give the greater weight, joy, and life to the psychic, the spiritual, the Christocentric fact that it is redeemable, transformable. Look upon another pictogram: the risen Christ retains his wounds, but they drip not blood but radiate light. He has filled the divide twixt good and evil, conquered it, transcended it, died in the battle, and risen in the power of his victory. In this is Christ not made truly divine, for unlike the human Eve and Adam he not merely “knows” good and evil, but like God (cf: Genesis 2) he has allowed them, embodied them, in glorified and wounded flesh he “lives” them, and thus he returns not to Adam’s Paradise but ascends to God’s Heaven?
In discussing euthanasia (on Euthanasia, September 2013) I marked the dichotomy twixt good and evil constitutes a ground for moral delusion rooted in a vision of the divine at loss for an aspect of its essential nature as at once transcendent, immanent, dynamic. In the paradisial archetype man is exscinded from “life” as soon as the knowledge of good and evil is acquired, thus revealing the fatality inherent in the bifurcation of inner vision, a vision rendered catoptric, faulted, and capable henceforth of experiencing reality merely as bounded in an either/or, as either good or evil. I, however, put before you this consideration: the Christian depiction of Christ crucified between the two deceptors, one dubbed “the good”, the other “bad”, projects onto the human mind a great Christo-centric archetype, a living ground that bridges good and evil, that is the “proper”, that constitutes the enduring propitiation, the gracious act of making one, the atonement, the at-one-ment, for this primal flaw. The moral life, the ethical life, whatsoever one name it, is not a matter of following a set formulary of actions, of naming one thing good or right, another evil, bad or wrong, of enforcing a body of regulation upon either self or others. Such items, being resultants of serious reflection, may inform but cannot dictate. They are abstractions; life is not an abstraction. Thus proper action is always authentic interaction, dialogical, personal. It is the personal thrust to create the healthful-most possible integration, to be the propitious presence within the situation, to allow self, to suffer, if so required, to be the propitiating agent that the present resound with the Holy, the whole-making, and to thus engender the capacity to move, to live, to grow, to thrive. It is always transitional, considerate, unapologetic, dynamic; it does not impose upon a situation, it opens the situation to something fuller, to new avenues, new meanings, new life. Only such presence, such act, such sacrifice of self–and if need be–of items and ideas precious to oneself, only such full gift of self embraces both the joy and the burden of kenosis, of incarnation, of the temporalizing of the eternal, and makes tangible and real to the world the Christ in the world, makes visible, viable, and hope-filled the healing and health of the world.
*Note: As Augustine takes the paradisial narrative as a primordial, personal, empiric event with implications upon the psyche, the soul, the will and mind of man, so too—in broadest terms—does Freud take the ancient Greek narratives as indicative of empiric events in the life of the individual, events which carry deep psychic roots and implications. If, however, we look to Jung, and acknowledge such narratives as trans-personal symbols, as emblematic of the growth challenges within the evolution of psyche, both of the individual and the species, that need be faced and resolved within the psyche in order to open psyche to continuous growth in wholeness for the good health of both body and soul, then suddenly the common incredulity resultant of bluntly making sex equal sin, or obsession and hostility belie parental bonding is overcome.
The problem, once again, resides in misinterpreting spiritual (psychic) items as empiric, the qualitative as quantitative. The divide twixt Plato and Aristotle ripples through this: is the world an idea become tangible, or is the tangible become an idea? Put otherwise, is the non-material the source of the material or does the material evolve into, ultimately manifest as the spiritual, the psychic, the non-material? Theologically, does God create the world or does the world create God? Are spirit and matter, God and world, two eternals? Do they operate in parallel? Are their operations synchronized? Do they inter-act? If they are in interaction, are they co-creative of one another? Philosophy asks: is there a basis for a sure and certain answer? How can man, how does man, live and grow in wholeness and happiness unless there is an answer? Can man fabricate an answer that defines himself? Can man devise a response so broad as to enfold the foundation and end of all that is? Can man make such answer, or is it the ultimate-ness, the absoluteness of being that causes the answer to arise within man? Why do some see chaos, blind chance, meaninglessness, yet others wonder, joy, creativity, love? Who has the rightful vision? Who has the practical most vision? Who holds the vision that opens the heart and mind of man to wholeness and growth? Is the prime question properly the quantitative “How does the cosmos work?” or is it the qualitative “How do I make the cosmos meaningful?” In what sense can we, may we, separate the functionality of the cosmos from the practicality of our existence?
God and soul are nouns, yet we rather superficially treat them as “things”; they are not. In thinking of them we analyse them, calculate them, reduce them to equations. We make God or soul the subject of a sentence, we predicate of them, apply an action to them, define them as acting, but in that we create a verbal bifurcation. We look upon the “subject” as an “object”, an item we cognize, and be-ing slips into simply a thing. The terms “God” and “soul” reference complexes of activity. Even to speak of them as animating principles of cosmos and self logically neutralizes their incessant dynamic. We need keep mindful of this dynamic constitutive of God and soul when we pin them to the table of intellectual dissection. The act whereby I obey (worship) and the act wherein I treasure (adore, love) the fullness beyond me, the fullness within me may be the principle nouns in the sentence we exist, we live to formulate for our self-definition, but they are the protactic verbids of our vocabulary, and their roots reside in the will not the intellect.
Lastly, is there within, behind, beyond these questions of spirit versus matter, quality versus quantity, God versus world some “unified field”, some point or pointlessness, some depictive basis of a heaven or nirvana, at which they are resolved, wherein the “opposites” are “coincided”, wherein creativity is simpliciter, purely at its root, vivaciously at rest? Is such a state of being not that which the “divine” is meant to ultimately connote? Is not such a state of action the fullness of propitiation?
[vii] Proof texts have been, sadly, a staple of theological argument. A snippet of scripture is quoted to support an idea. The fact other snippets of holy writ could serve as “proof” of the opposite position is usually dismissed with a wave of the hand that, without words, in no uncertain terms, tells the contradictors they know not what they say. Proof texts are proof of nothing more than an investigator unwilling to do the laborious, to look not at a line here or a phrase there, but the whole of the text, the whole of the Sacred Text as the prolegomenon to humble-most prayer. The Bible is not a road map; it is a doorway to the heart and mind of the Holy, a threshold recounted in the prayerful testimony of our ancestors in faith, a threshold upon which to kneel, not from which to yell.
[viii] Cf: on Sin (March 2013), on Kenosis and Eschaton (April 2013).
[ix] This idea that God deliberately wills some saved and deliberately wills others damned is termed “double-predestination”. It removes any loop-holes about the destiny of man. God has pegged, technically “elected”, every soul either for heaven or for hell. There can be no “by default” in the wisdom of an omnipotent, omniscient God. Yet here be a god who is defeated by his own wisdom, a god who wills his work to failure. In dealing with Job, God allowed evil its scope, but never the victory. Indeed, the ending of that tale is set in the very heart of God when Job looks God in the eye and attests: “I know my redeemer lives!”
[x] According to Calvin, the elected to salvation are thus by the indefectible will of God. They inwardly receive the “assurance” that God will preserve them for eternal blessedness in the face of all temptation and doubt. Calvin, however, cautions that the feeling of or even a belief in “assurance” may be illusive or delusive. Luther, having glanced upon the idea, was of a mind to step away from it, for salvation is received in faith, in day by day embracing a life lived with God in his Christ through the power of his Spirit. John Wesley not only stepped away, he objected to Calvin’s view of assurance. He taught true faith arouses in the soul the surety that one’s sins are forgiven, that one is indeed both held and lead by a gracious God.
[xi] Efficacious grace is a technical term. Too many theoreticians in theology have treated God’s abiding presence with and in man as something that can be segmented and examined in little logical parcels and points. Thus, grace, that abiding and illuminating presence, has been systematically divided into such items as: sanctifying grace (making holy), habitual grace (abiding), actual grace (activating for good), prevenient grace (preparing for action) efficacious grace (effected with man’s cooperation), sufficient grace (efficacious but untapped), and irresistible grace (totally effective and so without any human endeavour)—a quantum mechanics applied to the soul.
[xii] These verses (in my free translation of the Latin: O Felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem! O vere beata nox, quae sola meruit scire tempus et horam, in qua Christus ab inferis resurrexit!) are from the Exultet (Exult). This 7th century hymn, ensconced in the Roman Easter vigil liturgy, is sung by the deacon as he stands before the Paschal candle, the iconized light of the risen Christ, the flame tamed from the “primitive fire” struck outside the church as the protasis to this rite. It also found in liturgies of some reformed churches, sadly often without the Felix culpa (happy fault) verse! Is sin not brought into the light sin left to be free? Does not the joy of forgiveness, the blessedness of our redemption reach back to the root of our ill? But let us look at these verses. How, by what grace, is it that sin which merits damnation here merits Christ? How, by what sacred power or right, is it that Christ arises from hell? How is hell not fatally ruptured by this divine rising? Is not here hell not only defined, but defied, and delivered by the omnipotent joy and everlasting life of the Holy in its definitive self-giving inclusivity? Is this not the reason we proclaim the “Gospel”, “Ευαγγέλιον!”, “Good news: Victory!”? This is a total victory; there is no call for a cessation of hostilities, no truce, no treaty of concessions. This is God’s victory, it is complete, done, and we are given to live out its unfolding. Felix culpa! Christus victor!