As in many times past, the phenomenon of angels is upon us again as common religiosity looks to the heavens for some succor the visions of God and Jesus and saints have, for sundry reasons, ceased to provide. They appear as individually pliable succendanea for the traditionally defined icons of the holy. In Christianity, angels have customarily been pictured as members of the minor clergy, as the acolytes, canters and deacons at the heavenly altar. In concert with that ministerial role, they are seen today, with the panoply of its unmet pastoral needs, as avatars of the sacred and caring, supernal medics buoying humanity to well-being of body and soul as their “fallen members”, those denizens of hell, taunt and torment “fallen humanity” to irrevocably sink to their despicable spiritual destitution, their denial, not of God, but of his loving plan to sanctify humanity and all his work. Angels, both the heavenly and hellish, present the mind potent icons for those forces into which the moral mind divides reality–good and evil.
Recently, while discussing the iconography in a church window, a question arose concerning the distinction between cherubim and seraphim. I looked at the depiction of the cherubim in the window and was struck by the degree to which Western artists have in their portrayals changed the original visages of these celestial courtiers. If we look to the orient, we find terrifying looking beings as guardians of the spiritual realms. Ever concerned that its sacred icons illustrate in right-manner the images of the unimaginable or them transformed by being touched by the unimaginable, the aptly named Orthodox churches have retained the images of angels as rather severe looking beings. That appearance of intense and ferocious conscientiousness has been slowly ebbed away by occidental brush and chisel. Early occidental depictions give us serenely focused young men in dalmatics, copes or related liturgical robes. By the late mediaeval period, angels become increasingly pictured as benign, and by the 18th century decidedly doting and maternal. Contradictorily, our term “angel” is rooted in a word denoting a male figure, specifically, a young man at royal court sent as messenger, and the concept in our history, as in the orient, entered the imagination as referencing fearsome looking and acting beings.[i] By the Renaissance, cherubim, more anciently depicted as mere heads resting upon wings, become putti, chubby babies with wings and smiles, or at worst, quizzed expressions. With this transformation, they become fused with Cupid, that divine child of Venus ever want to sting someone with the arrow of sexual desire. Thus, the second most trepidatory creature ever made was spuriously reduced into a titillating hormone. Except for the Archangel Michael, the commanding general of the heavenly armies, angels of all types tend today to be represented as female, invariably leading to the assumption that heaven is not a closed patriarchy of Father and Son, but a most liberated place with its honour defended by regiments of warrior women.
As a child, I was given several small wood carvings of angels playing musical instruments, and every one of these wee works looks about as much a child as was I when they were given me. I have also a rather large early 19th century German sculpture of Michael holding down the devil with foot and sword. The expression on the angelic face is about as stoic and benign as the farmers it was carved to inspire. I have as well an angelic figure taken from a reformation era altar. The robes still glow in their gilding, but the ashen-gray face betrays a spirit one would be wise to take not lightly.[ii] The once formidable has been domesticated by the Western mind. Why have we taken the God who is Love and romanticised the awe out of the holy? Apart from a fear of commitment—to one another and to religion as a methodology of maturation—why have we lost the terror of love? Without the awe-some-ness, the tremendous weight, the tremendae majestatis [the jaw-dropping majesty] of Love, where goes the horror of sin? Have we lost our sensitivity for the “fearsomeness”, the silencing wonderment, of the holy, or do we simply more urgently need a new triage for our multiple spiritual and psycho-somatic wounds?
Scripture gives us the names cherubim, seraphim and other classes of the divine court, but no real information about what they daily do. Indeed, we need keep vigilantly aware that here we are discussing a realm in which there is no physicality or time-space duration, where, at best, we may broadly say being is doing, and being is symbolic. Often, angels simply appear as the bearers of a divine message. They come “out of the blue”, do what they must, and vanish. They are, in a sense, merely avatars of the divine in its worldly communications. The Apostle Paul refers to angels several times but each instance is merely to underscore the complete submission of all creation to God’s Christ and his mission.[iii] In the early fifth century, a Syrian monk, who aggrandized his authorship by penning under the name of the Apostle Paul’s star Athenian convert, Dionysius the Areopagite,[iv] wrote the definitive text on angels, their ranks, and their ministerial mandates. Of the nine “choirs” into which he divides them, only two, thanks to scripture and traditions, came with cachet: cherubim and seraphim. Cherubim hold up the throne of God, seraphim hide it from view. It sounds simple, congenial, even complaisant. It is not.
The cherubim are anciently often envisaged as mere heads amidst the clouds on which floats the divine throne, which is, of course, not other than the divinity itself.[v] The seraphim are likewise often bodiless, with three pairs of fiery wings, one pair downward where one would expect to see a body, one pair folded either in self-embrace or screening the face, one pair upward. At times, in place of body there descends from the bottom of the seraphic head a singular flame. These creatures surround the throne and its Lord, completely shielding it from view, for no creature can look upon the terrifying might and majesty of God and not be obliterated.[vi] These beings of flame and wing do not just stand in place, they each and in unison eternally roar one word: “HOLY”.[vii]
If one has ever watched a rocket launch to “outer space”, one has some groundwork to imagine the sheer awe of this spiritual portrait. But, imagine not one rocket blasting off, but a circle of a dozen or more so firing up simultaneously. Fire rains down from below them, clouds of smoke and dust stir at their bottom, and the roar and power of it all is deafening—cherubim of smoke, seraphim of flame and roar. Worthy is the seraphic vision: a God Impenetrable, a Power to say “Be!” and a trillion galaxies emerge, a myriad of stars alight, and fly across a void toward edges where time and space have not yet reached, while the seraphic roar, like the noise of a background radiation, resonates in every being of a potency so sheer it has no limit, no beginning, no end. Here is the God who descends to Sinai for Israel’s aid. Here is the God Jesus encounters in his desert retreat. Here is the Power Jesus, like Plato before him, comes to know as Itself the all-transcending Beauty, Goodness, Truth. Here is the Power, like Aristotle before him, he comes to know as Love. Here is the Power into which behind seraph wings, in desert heat, he loses his-self, and emerges calling “Father”. Here, the terror and awe of light impenetrable take on flesh, and Love becomes caritas, not charity as often it is translated, but considerate care and parental embrace that gives itself that it might for-ward-give the other, creating creature into Child of God, child of Love.
This soaring “gospel”, this victory-yell of freedom and its joys is, of its nature, intoxicating, in equal part fascinating and terrifying, enticing in its beauty, perilous in its power. The Awesome One deigned to walk among men, act among men, and grant to man of its incomprehensible and creative Spirit. It is re-formative, but the excitation and liberty of any reformation, revolution, conversion, tends to escape itself. From the very beginnings, the preaching of the Christ-message, the embrace of the “freedom of the children of God”, was prone to careening over the edges of worldly realities. Not just morals, but sense and sensibilities needed to be attuned to practicalities. God may be able to say, “Let it be”, and be it shall, but even God allows time and history to unfold, and with and in them, man and world. The children of God must be so circumspect, allowing space to both prudence and temperance. Every potent turn in the human heart and history comes with an accelerated propulsion, and whether it be felt as providential or not, a consequent hitting of the brakes. By the end of the first century, the brakes of Christendom were being applied. Effort was made to keep man from turning liberty into licentiousness, godliness into godlessness. Effort was made to retain the God of awe and majesty inconceivable along side of the God who deigned to walk with us and the Spirit of God sent to lead us. The handbooks and treatises of Christianity were about to transform a large part of the world in a manner that has borne both favours and forfeitures.
While from these considerations emerge the Christian doctrines of the communicity of the divine nature, its inherent capacity for an eternal harmony of ever-transcending, incarnating, and dynamically drawing its incarnate reality forward as evolving creation, the machinations of the early church theologians will, Origen excepted, tend to lose sight of the scriptural vision that the point unto which all the incarnated work of the ever-transcending God moves, by the power of his self-same Spirit, is back into himself as satiated in sanctification, in the fullness of incarnation, that is, in more scriptural parlance, that the incarnate Son will, filled with the Spirit, hand redeemed creation back into the hands of the Father, and all will be one, or, better put, One. Between God Almighty and his redeemed work there shall be no bounds. In scriptural iconography, the end is the dichotomous preservation of all in an all-obliviating Light/Love. Scripture obviously understands here the nature of love to give of itself until it is lost in the other and the other in it.[viii] Were that the transversal of the diurnal world so un-requiring of explication. [Enter the theologs]
Toward the end of the first century, the church was confronted with forces seeking to divide reality in gnostic fashion: body/world/evil versus soul/spirit/good. Ignatius, a founding father of Christian theology, defends the unity of God’s work, noting that man cannot deny the body any more than the spirit. This is not a matter of philosophical argumentation; it is theological, incarnational. Christ, the Word of God, who is spirit, elected to become flesh, to be in the world, and act in the world for the world. By faith and charity, by word and deed, the believer is bound to Christ and to the eternal Father in love, the “silence of love”. There is an attempt to keep the transcending awe of the sacred in balance with the reality of its presence in and for the world. While he attempts to mark the boundaries of the holy, Marcion tries to divide them. He claims the God of the Hebrew scriptures is not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. He is a false God, a vengeful demiurge. Jesus comes from the true God to counter his power. Marcion, undoubtedly reacting to the Ebionite heresy that wanted budding Christianity to be received as a type of reformed Judaism in which the ancient rules and rites would be retained, is condemned as a heretic. His attempted abscission of Hebrew scripture from Christianity, however, had reactive repercussion. By the end of the second century, Tertullian receives the Hebrew scriptures and the gospels as equal in authority. The freedom of Spirit given in Christ stands side by side with the Law given through Moses. By this, the transformative power of existentially and deeply understanding self as beloved becomes suppressed to notions of law and order, and love’s creative spontaneity—so fearsome and feared—is placed in strictures wherein it, forlorn and captive, withers in a cage of “civility” which is understood to be “blessed” by God’s graciousness to accept it as whole-some. God’s acceptance and love of sinful man and the power of response it stirs is lost to a divine toleration for man’s goodly intended efforts. Tertullian opines man, made a unitary being, a unit of body-and-soul, because of the sin in Paradise has lost the primal unity of being, his integrity before the Creator. Man’s relationship to God now stands based on a justice defined by the Law, and it supersedes the love of God revealed in Christ-Jesus. Man must prove himself under the law. The love revealed in Christ is no longer understood to free man from the Law. It is meant to inspire man to fear God and his judgment, to astutely work to merit favour before God. While Tertullian denounces Gnosticism, and decries that too many turn to Greek philosophy rather than scripture for salvation, he himself turns to neo-Platonic moralism, to the need for man to ascend to God as the deeper truth of Christianity.
Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian’s contemporary, likewise adheres to moral legalism and the idea that there abides in the scriptures a deeper truth, a gnosis hidden under the literal understanding of the text. Like Tertullian, he is a disciple of Plotinus.[ix] There is a disparagement of the world, in even its seemingly innocent ways. He envisions Christ as passionless, stoic, the perfect Platonic contemplative. Faith directs the believer to the imitation of Christ, to a ladder of ascent and assimilation. Moral excellence must be pursued. All flesh must be mastered. By such mastery and excellence sin is cancelled. Belief in the letter of scripture gives way to the knowledge of the meaning of scripture (gnosis), which matures into a love (eros, a desiring-love) of God, which is, in sustained ascetical stringency, crowned by God with union. For all the kindness that seemingly stands behind his every argument, the love of God for man has been supplanted by the love man must give to God through his charitable acts and denunciations of this world, or at the very least, his faithful wariness of the world and its wonton ways.
Origen, who is approximately contemporaneous, will also look back to Plato’s Symposium, and its “ladder of ascent” aided by rightly directed eros. His devotion to Plotinus is more entrenched, for while he receives the fall in Paradise as an act of free will, it is, nevertheless, situated within the greater scope of a divine emanation, a divine loss of unity. Origen was consistently more philosophical than theological, and that merited him being labelled a heretic. However, his idea of a final return of all, hell included, into divine embrace continues to echo among mystics, and his overlapping of human free-will and divine “falling” into the world will decussate notions of predestination.
From the beginnings of Christian theology, there is sounded a warning regarding the soul. To the Greeks it was something eternal, it had a pre-existence to its worldly entrapment, and it could free itself to return to the eternal realm. In Hebrew thought, body and soul are a unity, and the resurrection is the cynosure of that proper unity of body and soul. By the end of the first century, Irenaeus warns against thinking of soul as enjoying a natural immortality. Such notions bespeak of pride, a wrongful wanting to be “like God”. Immortality is a gift in God’s giving. Irenaeus is not consistent in this matter, for he acknowledges in other arguments that the soul is self-evidently immortal. Tertullian follows him making the soul “corporeal”, born-with the body.[x] The Christian cannot receive the soul as the Greek inspired “spark” of the divine. Nevertheless, despite piecemeal disavowals of Greek philosophy, in large part we find Christianity’s nascent theology wobbling about in a world more informed by Platonism and Gnosticism than Jesus. God’s love made manifest, concrete, realized in the Christ-mission, gives way, not primarily to thankfulness and humble joy, but to the need to do something to earn this. Methodius (died circa 310), writes that virginity is the greatest gift man can offer God. There is in this a demeaned value to human life and its perpetuity. Gregory of Nyssa (died in 395), argued that while all desires are natural, all desires need to be purified by ascetics, and he sets out yet another ladder of ascent to God complimented with a “chain of love”, of good works, to merit the way up one rung at a time. This is an age not only of the gnostic overshadowing of the Christ-message, but of its concretization in action, in a retreat from the world, a leaving behind of this sensuous and tempting world. There flourish rules of behaviour demanding abstinence, control, and the degrading of all things non-rational, that is, non-spiritual. Christian life is the ascetic life. Christ is not the incarnation of God’s love. He is the exemplar of the humble and obedient life. Salvation is not from God, but in man’s hands, a matter of human will conforming itself to the great Exemplar that is the stoic, humble, long-suffering Jesus-Christ. Into deserts and other wildernesses go hermits, and monastic life takes root. Virginity is canonized as the new “martyrdom”, the new highest sign of witness to the love of God, a love once said to be “for this world”.
The English monk, Pelagius, had some ideas about man’s nature and the quest for wholeness. We can only assume his exact positions because he was on the losing end of a battle, most notably with the great Augustine, in an age not fond of preserving defeated arguments. Seemingly, Pelagius wanted to combat the dualistic and negative tendencies of gnostic systems. He seems to revive Plato’s idea of man, noble of spirit, arising to ever purer possession of his heart’s desire—the good, the beauteous, the true. In an age of rising socio-political anxieties, where man’s fallibility and frailty were rampantly obvious, Pelagius’ classic optimism about man’s nature coupled with his propensity to express his understanding of man in psycho-social terminology rather than religious idioms made him and his work easy targets for them that were doubly oriented, first, toward the omnipotent power of God, and second, toward the need for sinful man to—by grace—turn to and desire after God, and only God.
Augustine stands as the summit of ancient occidental theology and its Greco-Roman context. This great synthesizer of ancient thought was undeniably brilliant. Accounts have him warmly and well received by all. He was adored by his son, but that ought not to be unexpected when a father names the son “God’s gift” [Adeodatus]. He is recorded as having been less than virginal in his earlier years, but it has been debated how much of such reporting was simply empty youthful boasting. He never married his partner of many years, never refers to her by name, and he left her when a socially acceptable marriage was arranged by his mother. There is much about him that could warrant the judgment of being a “mama’s boy”. The plan of marriage was abandoned when Augustine underwent a conversion to Christ and decided to embrace a life of celibacy. A genuine humbleness defines him after his conversion. He retreated to his family’s estates in North Africa to live a monastic life, was pressed by the locals into being their bishop, and exhibited himself a fierce defender of his flock in both act and word. There were some items of his history he seems forever to lug about in all his ruminations. He was never free of his once attachment to a form of gnosticism. In its light he wore the sins of his past and the path of his salvation. By this, the spirituality, the spirit, he embraced was not an openness to the world, but a submission to Christ in his obedience to God, and God was for him more law and order than love. (This, in company with the ill-informed teachings and ill-considered disciplines of roaming monks ripens North Africa for another religion whose name is “submission”: Islam.) Iconic to the end, Augustine died as barbarians invaded his Roman city, signaling the end of an empire. On Augustine’s work will ride the seeds of a new empire: the Christian West.
Augustine is a complex man in a complex series of situations. Seemingly more introspective than affable, he speaks about existence as something enclosed in darkness, an aloneness from each other and from God. For Augustine, this is the factuality of man’s existential situation. In the fall of Paradise, man’s nature is radically broken, and this destruction at the root of man radiates through all aspects of man: intellect, will, body, and soul—man’s sociality, his relatability to his God and to his “other” of all types. Man has lost the power to rightly know, will, act, be, and be-with. Man has lost—on its most fundamental level—the power to love.
When Augustine speaks of love, he engrains into Christian spirituality a new term, not the Greek agape (freely given love) or eros (desiring love), but the Latin term: caritas. The accustomed translation has been “charity”, but that term has taken on new connotations, and does not capture the sense of “devoted caring” that was once the primary understanding in “charity”, and thus, I shall not attempt to find a translation. Many have opined caritas is neither agape nor eros, but, in Augustine’s writings it certainly functions as eros. Augustine speaks of it as the root of all good. It operates through desire. It is inspired by goodness, beauty, truth. It is corruptible. It can sink to being no more than a wanting for things, for pleasure, reducing man to a mere consumer, a user of things and persons for the satiation of ego. As such, it becomes the root of all evil.
Caritas is the love natural to man. God made man to long after something. The vital question is what ought man properly to desire, to what in authenticity of being, in truth, ought man be moved, directed, oriented. Caritas properly denotes a love that moves man toward his highest good, to God. Caritas was severely fractured in the fall in Paradise and is, thus, prone to deteriorate, its desire becoming the mere wanting and using of things for one-self. As such, caritas deforms into cupiditas, cupidity, de-socializing, destabilising, dis-orienting insularity of self. It voids the truth of man.[xi]
God made all that is out of nothing. To long for things as mere items of self-gratification is to move toward nothing. For Augustine and every other disciple of Plotinus, nothing is simply another name for evil. This cupidity, this dis-oriented wanting is not wrong because it is forbidden by divine ordinance, it is wrong because it is a distortion of the truth of man. Here man attempts to satisfy his senses in a manner ultimately senseless, man seeks meaning in actions meaningless. Here all potential means become falsely embraced as ends, and in that, the true end of man is lost.
Augustine acknowledges God has made the world and declared it good, but he understands “good” is a relative term. The good, the value of the world resides in its capacity as a means to God, the true end of all creation. However, Augustine continuously turns the “means” into the object that must be denied, overcome, the “trick question” in the test of life placed as a distraction to be ignored. The soul, locked in the darkness of its existential, its fallen, its sinful, its ego-centric reality, needs to be illuminated that man might rightly understand and use his faculties, that man might properly orient himself toward God. God comes to man’s rescue. By unmotivated, spontaneous, merciful goodness God gives to man the gift, the grace, of illumination, the light to rightly see, know, act, and be. The freely loving act of God supplies where human loves fails. God says: “I have chosen you”. God gives to his elected, his chosen. And here, the brilliant Augustine turns Christianity on its head.
Augustine read the Apostle Paul thundering like a prophet about God electing some to glory, some to perdition, and, for whatever reason one might want to dredge out of the psyche of Augustine, left it there, bare and out of context. By that he gave berth to too many too ready to curse the world a potent scriptural warrant to demote the God of Love to the lord of vengeance. Paul does, indeed, speak of perdition and salvation as alternatives, but they reside as potentials in the heart of man, in man’s response to God’s gift of maturation in grace, in being able to grow into wholeness of being by the certain knowledge that one is deeply, freely and truly loved. God’s will is that all his work be brought to perfection: the Word goes forth that all might be saved, sanctified (brought into fellowship with the Holy).[xii]
In fairness to Augustine, his argumentation is often ad hoc or ad hominem. Customarily careful with his words, Augustine knows where to discretely insert a caveat or leave a syllogism incomplete and dangling like Damocles’ sword. Predestination emerges in trying to counter positons in Pelagius’ thought. He treads a fine line between the freedom of man and the necessary illuminative grace of God to aright man’s existential distortion that causes man to spin out of proper orbit and into the void. He is not a determinist. Nor is he as open to Paul’s claim that man must humbly surrender himself to be transparent before the love of God, be the channel, the window, through which the love of God flows with healing and health into the world.
God has revealed his love in Jesus Christ to the end that man might know how to rightly love God. Man can neither replicate nor transmit the divine love. Man’s love is not creative. Man cannot of himself rightly love his neighbour or the world, he can merely love them for “God’s sake”, because God has made them. Such love is acquisitive. It has merit. It blots out sin. It is dialectical: in philosophical terms, it negates, affirms, synthesizes; in theological terms, it repents, believes, comes to love with love understood as Platonic eros stabilized in conversion and faith, love as caritas correctly oriented by grace. The issue becomes then how man, converted man, acts out this faith and love. Man looks to Christ as the great example. Man humbles himself. Man prudently abandons all else that the road to God may be unencumbered. Paul’s vision of a humble openness becomes a submission. The immediate goal is apatheia, detachment that lifts man above desire, passion, reason, and knowledge. It is a three-part program of purging the senses in ascetical practices and thereby acquiring virtues, purging the intellect in the fires of religious consideration, and last, purging the will in mystical contemplation. A type of darkness within man remains, but here it is not from insularity, not from the corruption of human nature consequent of the Fall, but by turning from the false light of the world and its enticements toward him who alone is the Light, toward the world we were made for, the world of spirit.
EXCURSUS: It is understandable that in every life there are moments when one wishes the concerns of diet, dress, and nine-to-five were defenestrated, and a phantasy world of mindless bliss saturate every pore. Such may be indulged as a passing fancy. As a desideration parading about as holiness, it is a self-delusion, a closing off from reality, a retreat into oneself for no more than oneself–no matter the exalted name it be given. It is a spurious attempt to aflame oneself, but that which flames is ego and not love. Thus, it ends not in echo of the seraphic “Holy”, but in the demonic cry of “damn you”. The self despises being self-deluded, and so both interiorizes its anger in anxieties of sundry type, and externalizes the anger and its frustrations with a focus upon them most easily targeted. In this sacrilegious grasping for a fabricated holy, one defies the Holy both in its nature and its worldly incarnation, and thus, replicates exactly that which caused hell first to appear and Satan to descend—the denial of the divine plan to perfect the world and man in the world by having God become into the world. (Cf: endnote iii “on the Evagination of Valuations” in Occidental Ideas, Part 8, February 2014.)
We are psycho-social beings, beings whose souls exist to connect us to one another and the world shared. More than one writer on spirituality has ventured off into advising on matters of dress, conversation, the disciplines of table, and social manners of various types exactly because manners and morals, the codes giving directionality to our shared life and world, constitute a singular etiquette: the politic of how to be careful of oneself to the end that one be care-ful, consider-ate, of others and the world. The interior exercises of spirituality, the learning of focus, control and awareness, exist to bolster the capacities for worldliness, not delete them. Man was not created to become an angel. Man was created for this world wherein God has placed his soul, his Word, his Spirit. The Christian who thinks to be like God and fails to look upon Jesus-Christ crucified, upon God’s own flesh, looks to nothing. The Christian who looks to the apocalyptic visions of heaven and sees not the Body of Christ, the church, in its prayerful concern for the well-being of the world, has not under-stood the cross, and awaits in vain for a baptized pseudo-Nirvana to descend upon him and take him to a place that does not exist.
Augustine seems conflicted whenever speaking of human love. It is something man cannot truly do. Love of neighbour is something one can accomplish only as a duty to God by the grace of God. God has made the neighbour. God has enjoined man to love him. God supplies the power to so do. Conjugal love seems never to be free of a sexuality understood as something unworthy of man. It is disoriented, animalistic, unbefitting rational (spiritual) man. Augustine would be comfortable saying: “marriage is an honourable estate instituted by God”, but his fixation would be upon that line from Cranmer’s marriage liturgy that follows: “[it] is not to be enterprised nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding”. As with Freud, love expressing itself sexually seems to have been for Augustine more aligned to an instinct seeking satisfaction than the sheer aura of being that creates the creative relationship of self-giving commitment. In this mind-frame, man is understood as a composite of sundry libidinal elements. Love, the sexual expression of love, is not about a person, not personal, but about the other as a sexual object, as a reservoir of temporal libidinal release and satiation. Sex, even as an intimate expression of conjugal love, is an impersonal drive in search of satisfaction. With this excision of an essential aspect of the human, the personal, a fully personal relationship with God in faith is not a concept upon the horizon. Thus, with love, sex, and the impersonal muddled together, there is cemented the need to be prudent and long-suffering, and to “submit” through the exemplar, Christ, to the law of God, and therein merit favour and release from the vicissitudes of this existence. This attitudinal predisposition colours the morality, and specifically the sexual morality, that flows from Augustine through all Christian thought to the present.
There is, however, one junction at which Augustine rises to the purity and power of love, and it is within the tri-unity of the Godhead. He gifts Western theology the so-called “psychological” theory of the inner reality of God. He begins with Tertullian’s notion that the Father knows himself so perfectly that he projects (“begets”) his living image, the Son. He then adds that the Son and the Father in the mutuality of their understanding give rise to Love; they breathe out (“spirate”) the Spirit. Perhaps, Augustine had only one great love in his life—Adeodatus, his son. Adeodatus died a young man, and perhaps that loss affixed in Augustine’s mind the singular exemplar of the divinity of love as the like-minded, unencumbered power of bonding, the bond of a father and his son. Here resides neither the demand of duty nor the fire of sensual instinct. Here alone could Augustine see a love in its purity and sacred power. (Even a great heart can be so deeply wounded by its past that it cannot voice the joy of its graced present.)[xiii]
Augustine radically shifted the focus of both Jesus and Paul, and did so with an authority that still commands both philosophical and theological structuring. The essence of Christianity is not that “God so loves the world”, but that God reveals to us his love that we might learn how to rightly merit his love. Indeed, contrary to Jesus, God does not love man as he is, man the sinner. God loves man in the light of what he can become by grace. He can maintain man has always desired God, but that humankind wrecked itself in the primordial leap to be “like God”, that where this desire “wants” and cannot reach, the love of God “is”, and is inscrutably, paradoxically, freely given as grace illuminating man to move toward propriety of action and God. It is a delicately balanced series of statements. Augustine is more the pastor than the systematiser. To look to Augustine for insights into the human heart is a worthy endeavour, but to look for uniformity of position is an empty task, for he shifts his lenses according to the need of his audience. The story is told that Augustine was one day strolling along the ocean when he encountered a child. The child had dug a hole in the sand, and was going back and forth to the water with seashell in hand, gathering up some water, and depositing it in the hollow. Augustine questioned him as to the purpose of his activity. The child responded he was going to fill his little pit with the ocean. Augustine informed him that was an impossibility, and the child responded in kind about Augustine’s efforts to capture the Holy in his wee, if brilliant, mind. Expect of no man the final word—not, at least, until the Word has finally spoken.
The mass of theology that follows Augustine does so in his contrail. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (early 5th century) perfected the notion of analogy and applied it to Plotinus’ idea of descent of being from its primal unity into the cosmos. The soul must heed its call, focus itself, turn from outward things and, by grace, by divine illumination, return up the chain of being to its perfection, its deification. For some faith carries an optimism, and the turning from the world is not merely a matter of focusing faculties and ascetical practices. It is a thankfulness finding its tranquility (Basil, floruit mid-4th century). For many more, being Christian means a “baptism of tears”, a life of mourning to wash away the love of the world, to free man to apathia, to that detachment from all things that mirrors the (imagined) eternal rest of the creator God. (John Climacus, floruit mid-7th century). Maximus, contemporary of Climacus, insists the incarnation is not about God’s love for us, but the love God demands from us. Not every mind was producing variations on a singular theme. Two centuries later, Erigena, eschewing accusations of pantheism, will foreshadow modern dialectical and process theologies, postulating nature unfolds as God’s creative self-expression, everything flowing out from God, and everything eventually moving back to be enfolded into the uncreated God. In this, man’s love of God is but a manifestation in God’s loving of himself.
Despite novelties such as Erigena’s, the mediaeval mind remained very much under the influence of Augustine. The way to God, to perfection of human be-ing, is by human effort stimulated by and aided by the grace of God, by prevenient grace, actual grace, and assorted other parcelings of God’s love. Man must merit his salvation, his fullness of being, but there is no merit without grace. With the fall of Paradise man lost the ability to love God, and can only desire lesser goods. Man can, therefore, of his own nature, his broken nature, accomplish no true good. But God can redeem this situation by infusing love (grace) into man, allowing him to be rightly oriented and empowered. The love of God descends to allow man to ascend. The love of God descended in Christ, and Christ, the benefits of Christ, are available to man in Christ’s Church and in her acts, her teachings, her sacred rites. There is here, besides an aberration from the foundational scriptures, an opening to consider divine love, grace, something quantifiable, parcel-able, and magically applicable through the correct incantation and ritual. It is a consideration that will quickly gain in momentum and eventually rip Western Christendom open—in divers ways.
In the midst of the chorus ever rehearsing variations on Augustine, in the midst of the 13th century’s optimism, Aquinas attempted to put all things in reasonable order, and to do so turned to that ancient amender of Plato whose work was just being rediscovered by the West, that master of reason, Aristotle. Aquinas begins his considerations of God and man with love, and simply marks that all love is self-love. How then can man love God? Thomas Aquinas never asked a question he was not prepared to answer. In Aquinas’ work we find three approaches to answering the question: reason, the unity of being, and friendship.
All love moves toward the good of self. Reason informs man he is wise to pursue his highest, his greatest good, that it is his satiation and fulfillment. God is the highest good, and thus, man ought to focus upon God. As a rational being, to contemplate, to focus upon God, is the epitome of man’s self-love.
The most important argument is from the Aristotelean idea that being, existence, constitutes an integrated unity. The world, creation, is not a mere shadow of a higher world (Plato), it is not a distillation or a falling away from a primal unity (Plotinus). Being is a unity, an ecosystem. It is attuned to its own integrity. Each part has a natural tendency to work for the good of the whole. Each creature naturally loves God more than its isolated self because each creature as creature is rooted in the creator. Love, of its nature, is ordered according to the “being”, the existential reality, of the creature. Inanimate creation moves toward God by natural force, animate creatures by senses, and rational creatures by intellectual desire, that is, by will or its highest manifest, love. True love of God is simply a love of self because the creative love of God is internal to each creature, internal to self-love. It is the depth of soul, the fount of the intellect’s light, the natural sym-pathy toward being as such. Man is, thus, “capable” of God, has a capacity for God as the infinite in its finitude.
Aquinas understands that reason moves man toward the good, the beautiful, the true, and that only in focus (contemplation) upon these transcending goals does man find the path to satisfaction, joy, and perfection of his nature. If the impulse that leads man to self-perfection is self-love, is not God therein made an object of desire? Not satisfied with the Greek notions of love as freely giving (agape, ἀγάπη) and desirous love (eros, ἔρως), or Augustine’s Latin and baptized version of eros as caritas, Aquinas turns again to Aristotle, and argues there is a distinction twixt the love of things and the love of persons. Between the notions of agape and eros is the love of friendship, a familial-type love (philia, φιλία [as in philanthropy, the love of humankind, or philosophy, the love of wisdom]). It is an affection open to being effected by the subject-“object” of the affection. In concert with the ordering of love according to being, man’s love of God is about a fellowship with God. This it is not an ascent to God, but a partnership with God, and this constitutes a step toward humanism. The Apostle Paul frequently speaks of man as a partaker in God’s work in the Christ, of being made a partner in the spreading of divine healing throughout the world. In Aquinas’ arguments there resonates a nuance that elevates rational man and consecrates his powers of reason.[xiv] As in Augustine’s work, man is more rational-being than rational-animal, but rational here is not simply a synonym for spiritual, it is grounded in the world, it is spirit-in-the-world.
While one may speculate, that having moved thus far, Aquinas might have removed the notion of requisite merit and turned to speaking of being a channel of the divine. Certainly, Francis of Assisi, who died the year after Thomas Aquinas was born, had preached a return to that scriptural spirituality. Aquinas was, however, a scholastic and not a mystic, and so he conjoins merit and freely given grace. Good works and the grace that ignites them are simply two sides of one coin. God is the graciousness, man the action; God the spirit, man the body in the world. There is to this a certain felicity, that partnership of God and man that weaves its way through Aquinas’ work. Augustine had said: “When God crowns our work, it is only his own gifts he crowns”, and yet, in the context of the Augustinian corpus, it comes with the cyclorama of disoriented and corrupted man spinning out bits of worthlessness until God gives them his light, grace, direction, value. Aquinas grounds rational, reasonable, reasoning man in grace in a universe graciously made whole in Christ.
After Aquinas, his scholastic and reason-measured approach will be coopted by lesser minds and spirits, and reason will be made to perform silly circus tricks for the amazement of ivory-tower inmates. The stratospheric extensions to which they take “logic” within theology will cause dismay amongst many of sincere heart, engendering a distrust of reason in matters of religion. Thus, “by faith alone” will become the champions’ cry as they battle “reason, the devil’s whore”. But other items follow Aquinas. The incandescent glow of the 13th century is buried by plague and famine. People are forced to look upon death and destruction. Visions of judgement and Judge rise up among them. God and his Christ sit to adjudicate humanity and its sin, and this is not an idea. People know it. They live it. It is their reality. Everyman needs repent, mortify, and contemplate him who was the “man of sorrows”. The excruciating death of Jesus, the doleful sorrows of Mary, the ever-flowing blood of the martyrs occupy the mind, define the sacred icons. Life is abject. Man needs help, and the church is there to help him gain the requisite merits for release: penances, pilgrimages, sacraments, devotions to saints, and last, and not least, indulgences that augment everyone of these–sometimes a thousand-fold.[xv]
In the 12th century, Richard of St. Victor had argued that if God is love he cannot love man, only himself, for to love something other than himself in his perfection would reveal a “dis-ordered” love, and such would mean God is not God. Man can only strive to rid himself of his selfhood and become a transparency to God. While there is a nominal echo of the Apostle Paul here, there is here something radically contradictory of the scriptures which state God loves man, sinful man. This is Plato revisited, not “revelation”, not “gospel”, not a cry that God has overcome all deficiencies in his Christ, for he loves the world—not some image of the world made perfect—that he gives himself, even in death, for the world, for man—man the sinner. There runs through such systems of merit and the capping need for grace varied valuations of the material world. Man must in some manner gain control over the material world. Man must master his sundry wants, desires, passions, or utterly extinguish them, mortify (kill) them. This is a life of asceticism, sublimation, subjugation, suppression, extreme penance, perfect repentance, molded in relentless meditation upon the life, the passion, the suffering and death of Jesus (Cf: Suso [14th century], Kempis, and Tauler [15th century]). Jesus is the great exemplar. Life is a cross. The cross is not a sign of God’s self-gifting, but a burden given man to be endured, the price a man must pay to God. This idea of total mortification, the idea that man must annihilate all that detracts from becoming one with God saps of hubris, a falling into that primal temptation that: if you acquire this, “ye shall be like God”.[xvi]
[i] The celestial world in Christianity is usually pictured as both royal court and divine sanctuary, throne and altar forming a unity with Jesus acting both as high priest, the supreme pontiff (bridge maker) twixt God and man, and chief justice of the realm. The angels, serving both the Father and the Son, are depicted in the dual roles of courtiers at the throne and sacred ministers about the altar. It is notable that clerical vestments tend to supersede court attire but not military dress.
[ii] Confessedly, I have over the years been gifted many angels, undoubtedly to keep my mind on heaven, not hockey, history, humanity, or some other such frivolity.
[iii] Paul occasionally intimates an opposition among the angelic ranks to the divine plan regarding sin and sinful man, and the capitulation of this celestial resistance to the Lordship of the Christ (Colossians 1, Romans 8). He stresses all creation is made for the Christ and the Christ-mission, that is, for the salvation, the ultimate perfecting of all creation (Ephesians 1, 3).
[iv] The name of Dionysius “the Areopagite”, that is, member of the prestigious political body that sat at the Areopagus or Ares’ Hill, is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. Once it was discovered it had been covertly assumed by someone living centuries later to, undoubtedly, give cachet to treatises that can assuredly stand on their own excellence, that author was dubbed the felicitously euphonic Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
In Celestial Hierarchy, Dionysius conjures from passing reference in scripture and legend nine angelic ranks, orders or “choirs”, they being from highest to lowest: seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, angels. The first three constitute something akin to a living throne room. Seraphim are the “burning beings” of six wings, eternally aflame from their proximity to the Sacred One. They guard the throne and shield it from incinerating the cosmos. Cherubim, often depicted with two sets of wings, underpin or uphold the floating throne of God. They literally under-stand God, and are thus usually depicted as winged heads. Thrones radiate the divine order to the realm beyond the throne room. The second division can be considered the cabinet or privy council. Dominions govern the varied choirs. Virtues, the “shinning beings”, serve as channels of the divine power. They are involved in the workings of grace, miracles, and human conscience. Powers regulate the functioning of the cosmic forces, and provide the warriors against all irregularities. The final grouping constitutes the bureaucracy, the front-line officers of the realm. Principalities guide the nations and their institutions. Archangels guard the nations and their peoples. Angels, provide the celestial hierarchy its message-bearing proletariat. After Pseudo-Dionysius, there have been set out other considerations of the celestial ranks, their number and functions, but Dionysius is usually received as the fugleman.
[v] The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel begins with a vision of the sacred wherein are described four multi-winged creatures each with four faces. These have often been taken to be the cherubim, although they are not defined as such.
[vi] Regarding the Holy as the overwhelming/destructive, consider the stories of Zeus and Semele, of Moses and his Lord on Mount Sinai. Cf: Spirituality, Part 2.
[vii] The Prophet Isaiah renders this as the liturgical acclamation: “Holy! Holy! Holy is the Lord God of the heavenly hosts. His glory fills the heavens and the earth”.
[viii] We buck at the idea of losing individuality, but it is merely a stop on the road toward the true community of man. As one initiates worldly movement by separating from the womb and slowly unfurling through the de-fin-itions that are the pupae of identification: imitation, individualization, friendship, partnership, communicity, through the stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and the levels of commitment summoned out in adulthood, maturity and golden seniority, so, invariably, of the species. We fight this. The Renaissance consecrated the idea of individual as self-sustaining, self-consistent mind (intellect/reason). The 19th century contemporized its building frenzy with ideas of Will-to-power or Will-to-ego. Theories of existentialism and personalism consecrated it for a secular society. The present day vacuously manufactures it as “celebrity” in every conceivable triviality. Will we defeat ourselves, our nature, our destiny, in trying to hold onto a sophomoric adolescence that is fading? We may still but see “as if into a mirror darkly”, but childish things need be put away. It is always a leap of faith, but, as said Paul, leap, and choose love.
Stochastic as all this be, I am assured of the company of Aristotle, de Chardin, Telesio, Bruno, De Fiore, and a host of others philosophical or mystical of mind. In each of these minds was conjured a vision of humanity moving toward a unity of heart and head. Global forces are ensphering the species from particulates of nationals, each in their distinctive costumes of thought and manner, into earthlings. Languages, bearings, and gods of sundry type are all being sieved into a potion of whose potency we have no information, and many feel, many more fear, that we are not merely looking into a mirror darkly, but walking through it. The situation is cramped in distress and travail, and what creature will emerge of this heterogenetic exogamy leaves us all on a precipice dangling twixt shock and hope. But, as ever, tomorrow cometh.
[ix] Late in the fourth century, an astute pope realized that the scriptures were no longer in the language of the people, and so asked an esteemed linguist, Jerome, to translate them from the Greek into Latin, the new lingua franca. (This is an irony lost when the reformers, starting with Wycliffe, attempted the same for their times and places and often died for trying.) Jerome loved the great poets and orators of classical literature. In one of his many letters he recounts a dream he had while suffering a fever. In this dream, he died and stood before God. God asked: “Who are you?” Jerome, who thought he knew were salvation resided, replied: “I am a Christian”. God scowled back: “You, sir, are a liar. You are not a Christ-ian. You are a Cicero-nian.” Jerome awoke startled, and realigned himself to a richer vocabulary and a higher Word. Many of the early founding theologians of Christendom, both of East and West, the so-called “Fathers of the Church”, would have well profited had they had such a dream and heard the divine attainder: “You are a Platonist”—for indeed they were, and through them are many in pew and chancel still.
[x] There were two ideas about how the soul came into existence. Creationism claimed God made each and every soul at the moment of conception or quickening or birth. Traducianism (a type of evolutionary theory) claimed God planted all the seeds of the created cosmos at once to flower according to their time. The soul of each was, thus, produced as part of the unfolding of the world. Some claimed this naturally occurring soul was then “spiritualized” by God at conception or quickening or birth.
[xi] Augustine says cupiditas, man’s wanting, man’s saying “this is mine”, starts the world on the wrong path, and Rousseau, Hume, Marx, and a host of others have agreed, noting this quest to “own the world” or “my” bit of it is the root of all evil and social ill. In Genesis God says of one tree “this is mine”. It is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There were other trees in the garden, and God did not forbid the tree of eternal life. He did not reserve it to himself. It was a test. In this apologue, the moral stands: man choses the utility of knowing, the power of being able to manipulate and have (pick and eat), over the power of “limitless” life in concert with God and society.
[xii] Cf: on Sin, March 2013.
[xiii] It is of interest that the church, ever fearful of human passion and sexuality, the institution that elevated virginity and celibacy to sacred status, seems comfortable with personal love only when it involves father and son or mother and son. (Daughters, having the “misfortune” of being female, seem not to register in the patriarchal, ecclesiastical mind.) Religious art always presents the eternal Father-God and his Son locked in love. Indeed, this bonding is hailed as the very essence of the divine. Countless works depict Jesus adoringly crowning his mother, Mary, as the queen of heaven. There are considerably fewer illustrations of Joseph and Mary, or Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. In most, Joseph is usually pictured as an older male protecting the sacred mother and/or son. In later times, we find portrayals of Joseph and a young Jesus, but the Jesus presented is usually a very Johannine being, a child who quietly knows himself God, he who made heaven and earth, graciously allowing his human protector to teach him to make a chair or some other humble item. Sacred pictures of couples madly (divinely) in love are not found. Invariably, the depictions of marriage consecrate love in a manner that transforms passion and desire into sacramental saccharine. We find some couples of popular piety, such as Valerian and Cecilia, but again, their love is for God and another world more than for, with and in each other. (Indeed, legends relate that Cecilia’s virginity was miraculously preserved!) Love between a man and another man or woman and another woman is not ignored, simply and again consecrated out of this world. John Boswell did some interesting research into that which he opines was the blessing of same-sex couples in the ancient church, and concludes unions blessed in the examples of Cosmos and Damien, Felicitas and Perpetua, etc. were later contended to be “brotherhoods” or “sisterhoods” of two. Two persons of the same sex could live together in church-blessed familial charity, but they obviously would not, could not, and did not desecrate the faith by anything sapping of “base passion” between them. It is all a matter of the church playing not the resurging phoenix but the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. The church could bless the room but not the elephant sitting in its midst; in fact, it was inclined to rather blindly ask: “what elephant”? It was only in the last year that Rome proclaimed the sanctity of a married couple as a married couple and parents of a saint. Of course, the good and charitable (devotedly loving) care of others was always held in high esteem, and the church has always preached “God loves you”. However, theological ruminations and the estimation of good works are judgmental statements, propositions, items of their nature impersonal. It is one thing to write words in a theological text or propound them in a sermon, it is another to make them real, to flesh them out in the world to a person in the world. As one ought never to say “God hates you” unless one wishes to manifest one’s own self-hatred, anger and frustration, let no one ever utter “God loves you” to anyone unless that person understands and appreciates that faith-idiom, and it is patent to that person “I love you”, “I hold you personally in devoted care and concern”—because that is the entire practicality of the incarnation of God, the entire meaning of being a Christ-ian.
[xiv] The idea of a friendship with God is interesting. By it Aquinas can find a logical avenue to regulate love of God according to man’s capacity for love. Scripture, however, is concerned with God’s love for man, and while Jesus tells his disciples they are friends, God’s love is something more embracive. Friendship is a bonding and carries a level of commitment, but freely given love, agape, is creative, perfecting in its committed embrace. I may judge a friend, and friends, for divers reasons, may at times be closer than at others, but there is in my life one who is more than friend, more than companion, more than partner, and “the one” is neither judged nor ever distanced. How is it then that we speak of God judging them he holds in embracive love? Or is it we who judge God, make him to judge us for our insecurities, our shames, our failures? Is it not we who judge ourselves before God, and in that fail to love his constant love? Is not “God the Judge” our judgmental sin?
[xv] An “indulgence” is an allowance or leeway on a debt, a gratuity. The idea of a spiritual indulgence is founded in the idea that “merit for good works” before God is a “points” system. It quantifies how much a good deed earns. That idea is, in turn, based on the notion that one must pay for one’s sins, and the “merit points” can be applied against that amount. That, admittedly, states the case rather inelegantly, but accurately. The system operates within the understanding that a sin may be forgiven, but that it still has incurred a penalty that must be paid. When one dies and stands before the Judge, one’s sins and their penalties are tallied, the merits gained by good works are deducted, and if there is no balance owing, one gets a seat in heaven. If there is a superabundance of points, the balance goes into the spiritual treasury of the church. If there is a balance owing, one is sent to a place of purgation. There, through sufferings akin to hell’s, one must work off the debt owing before being allowed entry into heaven. If like Satan and his cohorts, one defies the divine system of justice, denies its validity, then one goes to hell—no points needed. One can gain merits and apply them to others, and this system started with devout people asking them about to be martyred to pray for them, to speak well of them when they stood the amici curiae triumphant over this world before the Judge of the world. Somewhere along the line, the church decided it had in its spiritual treasury an abundance of merit it could apply to anyone provided certain conditions were met. This superabundance was chiefly from the inestimable amount gained by Jesus in his obedience to God even unto death. The good deeds of the saints that follow him have continuously added to this.
The indulgences granted have usually been of two types: plenary (eradicating completely the debt owing on one particular sin), or partial. There was a period when a specific number of years was stated, but, confessedly, no one but God knew how that tallied against the amount owing—but it sounded good: do this, and it will be received as two years of some penitential practice. By the late mediaeval period, indulgences were granted for the giving of alms (a good work). Once, however, indult and money became tied together, the hounds were set free. What institution does not need more money? Who amongst men does not need points with God? Abuse led to anger, and while many complained, a priest in a German monastery complained in the right place at the right time, and a chunk of the system came crashing down.
The system was reformed mid-20th century, but I pre-date that, and so as a child I could gain an indulgence equivalent to several years’ penance for making the sign of the cross, and another for simultaneously saying the prescribed words, and another for doing so with holy water. In a matter of seconds I could accumulate the meritorious equivalency of years of ascetical practice. It sounds as if one could in a day wipe out a lifetime of debt on sin, but there were a lot of things that were sinful even for a child: do not think this, do not say that, do not touch this, do not go there, do not want that. Interestingly, it was not a sin to go into the neighbourhood pub with its noise and drinking, but it was to pass through the doors of the local Lutheran and Anglican churches. I suppose God tolerates drinking when so much is forbidden, but not making fun of him by going to fake-church. All things said, it was good to be a Catholic. Or so, as a child reading Augustine, I thought. We were all on the right side of God, had a well-endowed points system to pay for our sins, saints to pray to to help us top up our personal accounts, and a pope who would occasionally give out special points.
It is a system of quantifying the un-quantifiable. When something is forgiven, how can there be a debt to pay? When I say to someone, “I forgive you”, I do not expect a recompense. I merely hope a lesson has been learnt, and the consequences of the disruptive action can be integrated into our continued co-existence creatively. And I note, that the lesson to be learnt applies to all involved, for there is no solitary sin, no solitary good. We are social to the core, an ecosystem of action-reaction, and a system capable of evolution (transcendence). It is, however, in this sociality of our being that the entire idea of indulgences first took root. De-qualifying it, turning quality of life into quantification of spirit, deformed it. How simple it is to sin against one another and heaven. To paraphrase Jesus: may we be given to forgiveness, for as we do on earth, so shall it be in heaven.
Lest anyone think I subscribe to the ideology that a child should not be given rules and disciplines to observe, I—patently—do not. Such directives should, however, in accordance to the child’s age, be given the proper psycho-social contextualization: how does this affect others, what does such ingrain into oneself as a social being, etc. The utility of a rule for life in the world must never be set in the context of an angry or judgmental God. No child, no adult, ought ever be told God will punish, hate, or damn one to hell. The sad reality of the situation is that it is man, in his self-absorbing ego-centricity, who punishes, damages, and so damns himself in a hell of his own making. It is man, in his unresolved angers and anxieties that ties knots into the soul, the psyche, and thereby inhibits it from being a transparency to love, a pliable medium of bonding, integration, and integrity. There are myriads of adults who are fearful and distrusting of the sight of a church because they, their hearts and souls, were plowed down with heinous notions, and subjected to disgusting and literally anti-Christ nonsense. There are many adults who bravely come forward seeking spiritual counsel and must begin with the painful purging away of false gods of hate and damnation. Even “sin” ought to be used cautiously, and defined as a stumbling, a temporary state of failure that can be turned from, learned from. It ought always be set in the context of a personal relationship or the ability for such bonding. Unless a child is a psycho-path, such should suffice until sin can be understood in its full panoply as the destructiveness assaulting our shared life, our shared world.
[xvi] Many men have put forward arguments of subtlety and supple allure. One, however, needs ever to be cautious about submitting to an argument because it reads with angelic, crystalline clarity. Aquinas writes nothing without such pellucid enticement. It does not mean he is always correct in his analysis or his assessment of reality. In my early days as an Anglican, at a time when congregations were acclimatizing to women in the clergy, I was, true to the squirrel in my nature, rather fond of pointing out that Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan divine who provided the synthesizing foundations of classical Anglicanism, had in his magnum opus, of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, defended the practice of having the bride handed over by father or guardian to the husband-to-be because a woman needed to be always under the attention of a man owing to the “imbecility” of woman’s nature. Confessedly, “imbecility” had then a somewhat different nuance, but only “somewhat”. Aquinas provides more detailed, considered, and strictly logical arguments on the nature of woman, and concludes she is a misbegotten, defective male (Summa Theologica). He allows a woman can outshine a man (Scriptum super Sententiis) and that in the scheme of creation she provides for diversity (contra Gentiles), but his consideration of her nature is not by such points changed, merely addended. Aquinas was not about to argue the one cannot be defective and be still both resourceful and useful.*
The issue in both cases presented is not the logical flow of argument, or the beauty of the precision with which it moves, but the premise from which it begins. In my school days, I raised a professorial eyebrow by submitting a paper on the parameters, the use and abuse, of language in religion. It began with a syllogism, the first part from Aquinas (“The essence of God is existence.”), the second from Cajetan (“Essence does not exist.”), the conclusion based on the words of these two revered scholars of the church: “God does not exist”. This could simply bring one to the Apostle Paul’s idea of kenosis, the assertion that God is he who gives himself away, empties his existence, into creation. This could simply bring one to the silence captured by Buddha’s eye. It could also bring one to the founding premise of atheism, but atheism is, of course, founded on its own logical error, for the atheist says: “God is not”, and fails to appreciate that every theologian of wit and heft has noted that in every instance of “God is” the “is” is used analogically or symbolically. To borrow from the symbolic as used by Whittier, when Jesus looked to the silence that is Eternity for answer or identity he, like Buddha and atheist, found silence. Like Buddha, he dared to be transformed by it. His uniqueness amongst men is that he dared also interpret it as love. Anyone ever, if for a moment, lost in a silent loving embrace will for such interpretation need no explication. And thus, despite the sound of my school-day’s syllogism, I am a Christian. And thus, despite whatsoever of my arguments may fail, I pray they be the worst of my failings.
* We live in a time when political correctness often means judging everything and everyone from the perspective of our “evolved” and privileged moment in time. Apparently, history no longer has value as a medium for learning lessons, and everyone ought to be mindlessly free to adjudicate the sins of the past from the graced position of the present. Not everyone and everything past was ill-intentioned or ill-informed. We are and always will be, for most part, children of our times. Admittedly in times past, some men were more circumspect than others, some more insightful than others, and, of course, some as closed-minded as their present-day criticasters. Neither Hooker nor Aquinas enjoyed the liberalism and social egalitarianism of the 21st century West, and neither ought be pilloried for that heinous error of having been born in another age. Hooker, reportedly, had neither a felicitous wife nor marriage. In fairness to Mrs. Hooker, she was of an age when most women, in accordance with their social status, faired not well in terms of any education beyond whatsoever was proper to the running of a house. Women may not have been slaves, but they were not equals, and they were not in general by men treated as equals—intellectually or morally. They were, thus, fodder for excuse of every type, including everything considered irregular about sexuality. They were wonton, vacuous, plotting pools of temptation, ever distracting the rational, and the so very much superior male. In fairness to Aquinas, he, at an early age, joined a rather new organization of itinerant religious teachers and preachers, the Dominicans, and spent his life living and working in the company of men, most of whom were celibate. I doubt if he knew any women. We may wag our heads to read these men dissertate upon the “female sex” they knew not, but seven or five hundred years hence, what heads will wag when they consider the logic of our arguments for sexual “liberations” of sundry types? We are children of our times, and the word “children” is to be as emphasized as “times”. It is a humbling pro-spect every would-be critic of things past ought visit.