The fallacy of the immutable centre
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold” wrote Yeats[i] as he portended the Western world slowly falling from faith both in itself, and its vesture of Christian cult. As with all brought face to face with the blunt factuality of our finitude—be it as individual, or some greater or lesser configuration of community—Yeats’ poem is permeated with a type of mourning, with melancholy, pessimism, resignation. It is a prescient work presaging the whereto a great cultural loss of communal vision and hope lead. It is a deathwatch for a civilization in extremis. The centre, however, never holds. The centre is an illusion, a transcendental ideal about, not immutability, but continuity.
The centre does not hold because it is alive. As long as it is alive, it sustains life by being life-giving, giving of its living self to remake itself in another, replicating into novelty, into something new and yet “in the image of”. We each exist because somewhere in time centres did not hold, cells fused and made a zygote which became an embryo which became a foetus. Again, the centre opened out, the womb broke, and its waters flowed. The natant became the nascent, and in the incessant fluvial processes of life, beyond any trepidation, our prayer stands always that the wells of travail will give way to tears of joy. One form of being dies in the thrust toward being other, being open to its otherness. The enfolded one is set upon a path to become the one who must unfold, grow, mature, ripen, develop into one free to give of self, sacrificing of body and soul, of self and self-world, to, on some level of body or spirit, enfold, to make a new one, one truly akin yet a novelty of being. It is on such understanding that all our scientific analyses of reality, all physics, biology, psychology, proceed.
The Freudian notions of Thanatos and Eros capture this internal dynamic in the psychic life. The Greek word, Thanatos [Θάνατος], translates literally as death but Freud uses the term to denote a “death wish”, a blind thrust of the psyche attempting a constancy through repetition. It repeats the starkest confrontation with finitude, and therein arouses frustration, anger, guilt. Eros [Ȅρως] is literally love as aroused by an object, desirous love. For Freud, it is the counterbalance of Thanatos. It is constancy in search of novelty. Even Freud’s instinctual evaluation of desirous love ultimately leads to an-other. Some have opined, that as in Plato’s analysis, Eros here is “terminated” in the acquisition of the “object” of love, literally objectified. For Plato, however, the highest goal of Eros is the all-transcending Ideals, and so its end is not an object, but an item above the subject-object divide of worldly experience.[ii] In Freud, in so far as the highest goal of Eros is a society, an-other, despite the libidinal thrust he finds in it, its terminus would seem to be not an objectification, but a transcending into inter-subjectivity, and that makes it a finite subject reaching its kenosis point, its threshold of leaving behind the desires of self for self for the desires of another, of maturing into self-sacrificing love (the Greek notion of Agape).
The general understandings of psychology and spirituality are not at variance here. The technical languages and contextualizations differ, but they analyze the same reality, and rather consistently, be it as cure of soul or healing of psyche/mind, similarly prescribe. In the science of psychology, beyond the aspect of self that deals with the world, beyond all aspects of psyche variably labeled as self conscious, pre-conscious, subconscious, animus, anima, ego, id, superego, etc., there is the all transcending force of, for want of more profound term, the “Self”, the pure, undiluted thrust to be an integrated and integrating presence in the world. The diverse schools of psychology have developed their distinctive languages to depict and analyze the psyche, but the symbolic remains the inherent language of the psyche, and thus, Jung, Freud, and their disciples need to keep returning to the great myths and symbols as the embodiments and enunciations of the life-force at the root of humanization.[iii] Nineteenth century thinkers spoke of the finite as an incarnation of an infinite or universal principle, a cosmic will to or for power or being. All such notions are posited but vaguely as a pragmatic foundation upon which to explain the fundamentally inexplicable. They are assumed as trustworthy, workable hypotheses for the thrust of life in the world. One may move beyond a philosophical speculation or a scientific faith in a hypothesis, enter the realm of religious language, name this speculatively and hypothetically posited source of animation “the soul”, and understand it as a gift of the creator-God, the cosmos-ruling One-Self that transcends all realities. One may move beyond the philosophical and scientific hypotheses of “Nature” or nature unfolding itself in creative and integrating thrust, and understand this power as the gift or grace of the self-generating creator-God working out the eternal plan. The matter is, however, one of terminology, not the reality considered. In either case, there is posited a faith in some power that is empirically non-testable. The hypotheses of philosophy and science, and the faith of religion both reveal an inclination of human self-understanding toward something bordering on an “intuition” seemingly connatural to man as a tool for empirical organization, for the navigation of the unfolding of self as a being-in-world. In brief, whether it be expressed through the medium of a philosophy, a science, or a religion, man invariably, if only on an automatically functioning pragmatic level, believes in the constancy of an “I” as the fundamental constituent of understanding both self and world. The issue at the heart of every system—philosophical, scientific, religious, spiritual—is how one evaluates and manoeuvres that finite “I”.
Admittedly every finite creative move, every finite manoeuvre into novelty, is merely that, a finitude, an imaging of an ideal. Thus, Christian theology has rightly named the truly new making, the purely creative, the power to make ex nihilo, the divine One. And thus, in Christian iconography all finite nature’s ventures into novelty, all the leaps of evolution, be they of mind or heart or species, are but variations on a theme, an orbital shifting about an “already there”, a thought, a Logos, a pattern in the very heart of the divine One. It needs be kept vigilantly in mind that orthodox theology ever holds that the divine One, the holy centre, itself holds only as the alpha and omega points, only as the all transcending ideal before “in the beginning”, and only as the ideal reality surmounting the end of time and history. As soon as and as long as the creative Logos, the Word of God, speaks and the sanctifying Spirit of God acts, the face of God is always to be found and understood in and through creation and the salvation of creation—the “through Him (who is Logos), with Him, and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit”, a simultaneity of kenosis and grace.
The above reflections are not given to minimalize the great leaps of insight or soul that have propelled individuals and societies from those ancient days wherein we dwelt in tress to our present wherein we house ourselves in swaying towers and buildings framed, clad, and variously dizened in timbers of divers type. They are stated to station this enterprise within a Christian perspective, to define man as creative and that creativity as inspired and inspirational, as sharing in the cosmic power set free by a singular and eternal act of creation. Christian spirituality is radically an analysis of self wherein the primal and integral power of the Self is always depicted as the sustained gift of the Creator of all that is. More simply put, Christian spirituality is always set in a context of man called to his integrity as social man, as man-in-the-world, as cosmic man, man the creature of the Cosmocrator. It presents a constancy of providential grace and care moving outward from the ever-creating One who draws all things forth into the “new”, into novelty, even into a “new heaven and earth”. Such “overreaching” compass is not vacuous. An icon needs be open-ended, variably relatable and relating to be alive and life-giving.[iv] The image of man as a sustained act of the Creator renders a living ideal too great by any one or any group to be encompassed, and so it renders the reality of man pliable to time and circumstance. It frees action—both divine and human. Neither God nor man are in bondage to a law, but at liberty to relate to time and place, circumstance and person. Such freedom, such potentiality, presents as a type of Kantian categorial imperative, a vision that one must always act in such manner that the action hold a universal validity in the sense that, as Nietzsche might opine, the intent and consequence of the action can be morally embraced as eternally, as invariably, proper and vitalizing to the given parameters of the encounter. The constancy of Christian spirituality is an ideal, which by its sheer capacity for creativity and nurturing grace, is known as an unfolding revelation comprehensible only in and through the praxis, the practicality, the experiential reality, of embracing the work and personhood of being God’s Christ, God’s face and force to this time and place. God is knowable only in his incarnation, his ever-evolving reality of encounter in the world for the world. There can be no flying off to be lost in God. God comes to man—this is the scriptural root of the faith, this is the meaning of Emmanuel. Man may be “adopted by grace” in to the Christhood, into the Logos, but Christhood and Logos are always the Word coming forth from God, the Holy in its outward concern, its face set toward an-other.
An Excursus: In a recent discussion of these ideas, it was observed with sadness that not every soul rises from innocence and not-knowing through the fulsome and integrating experience of world to that which is above all knowledge: wisdom. Such attitude, understandable in its compassion, captures a prevailing valuation of the individual as the primal thrust of reality. It is a valuation behind ideas of reincarnation. If the goal of transcending into wisdom is not in one life achieved, one continuously returns until the summit is reached. Not all value systems have been so focused on the individual. Hebrew thought placed the primacy upon the community. Abraham’s charism is not for himself but as the font of a nation. David was not “chosen” because of his personal excellency. He was chosen for a role in the life of the community. Both these men and their many confreres recorded in sacred writ were of importance only in the context of a chosen “people”, a community, which community the prophets would come to understand as the leaven to enfold all communities and consecrate the world. The individual in the community might well fail. The core value resides in the group as a whole. It is Hebrew though at its psychological, indeed, its cosmological richest: reality is social to the core. Christian understanding takes it even deeper than cosmic reality for it holds there would be no cosmos were God not a “society”. There would be nihil, nothing, without the Logos, the Living Word; there would be no incarnation of God, and no salvation of the world without the Holy Spirit of God. The individual and indivisible singularity of God is nevertheless a Holy com-unity. Sociality, not ego, is the primal force. Christianity inherited the inspiration for this insight from its parent religion, but too soon, on a practical level at least, lost it to the rising, rugged, individualistic stoicism of the Roman world.
In nature, not every seed takes roots, not every flower blossoms. A million sperm fly off, but only one will reach the mark; only one needs reach the mark. Not every individual—whatsoever the form—will form the lead, make the leap, transcend, because the sociality at the very heart of nature itself requires the dynamic of a society to function. Like the centre, the individual is a transitory illusion, a momentary buoyancy within the life-force of a greater mass, be it a species, a civilization, a galaxy, a cosmos. This is an affront to the modern ear. Every individual is of inestimable value, but no individual is an entity unto itself. Every individual exists with–in the context of a society. Like the myriad of figures that crowd the portals of the great gothic cathedrals, the walls of Hindu temples, the ancient tombs of Egypt, like the throng of photons sparking within the divine nimbus, we are but integral to a stylobate structure whose purpose and meaning is the whole, not an ego, but the Holy.
There must be cautioned the sociality of man is not a summons into either anonymity or a herd-mentality. It is an openness to the radical, to the root, reality of self and cosmos. It is, thus, a sad thing to see in too many places a surging storm of blind, mass anonymity. The world seems deluged with potent swathes of the unreflecting and untempered ever eager to elevate one of their own to lead them and their bits of this world.[v] They have no sensitivity for time, history, or the evolution of understanding and heart, and thus, urgently leap to re-action rather than response—that measured, dia-logical, personal and personalizing artistry of being-human. It is a sorrow upon body and soul to hear the teachers of children increasingly seek to excommunicate and deracinate the actors and actions of times past because they know not how to properly teach history. They cannot teach history because they have not absorbed it, integrated it. Rather than lead, they have fallen into the voiding vortex of the mass. The blind mass is both blind and the mass because it does not consider history, be it personal history, communal history, world history, cosmic history. The mass cannot comprehend history as the wherefrom we are meant to learn lessons. Greater and greater clumps of humanity seem to blithely bask in self-aggrandizing anger and the fatuus ignis of their lack of understanding. For all the resources to learn available at the click of a computer key, the masses are descended to troglodytes, gorged with information left undigested, and spit out with vehemence, vomited at every occasion, and despoiling what once was a world teetering upon becoming something egalitarian and humanistic. Rousseau, sitting upon the threshold of the rise of individualism, and its necessary polar concomitant, the rise of the anonymous masses, knew the ennui to which such gives stir. Hume feared it. Marx denounced it. Giambattista Vico more optimistically prognosticated we are better served to leave the mysteries of nature and heaven to secondary status that we might concentrate upon the one aspect of nature that defines us—our history. History repeats itself simply because we never manage to digest it, to learn its lessons, interiorize the nutrients of its dynamics, fore-give its shortcomings and move creatively beyond them. Rather than learn from history, rather than heal it, redeem it, vivify it, we seem content to allow it to sit there, and in that we make it an absolute past that hangs like a “dead” weight about our necks. With that there is left to us only to absorb ourselves in whatsoever moment of relief we find, and with fawning self-glorification stroke our unexamined insecurities and unresolved frustrations. We salute ourselves as rational, reasonable, bastions of common sense, and betray ourselves but of little minds and more so, little hearts. No small wonder than that religions call us to about-face (repent), to offer (sacrifice) of self for the well-being (salvation) of the world, the society of man and nature. Yet, even here, even in this great enterprise of religion as the servant light for man to navigate this world with respect and care, religions themselves get lost in their bureaucratic insecurities and grasp at the invariability of dogmas and morals rather than embrace the dynamic of Spirit that made them, that from the first caused them to appear. Obedience suppresses the artistry of living. Blind conformity becomes confused with continuity. Continuity is defined as immutability. Life ceases to be life-giving, and man curls up into a monastically induced coma, or at worst, a dead foetus gazing at a dead naval that never had opportunity of birth.
A thirst for renewal
The centre never holds. The centre is an illusion, a transcendental ideal about, not immutability, but continuity. Kant, with his notion of a transcendental ego, knew this, as did Hegel, James, Husserl, and a host of others who dared delve into the depths beyond the quotidian conscious self. We—individually, communally, cosmically—are clusters of cells, each of which is merely a cluster of shifting, subordinate parts. Every cell finds its continuity and continuance in having its centre fall apart, divide, reproduce, adapt to its environment of time and space. The one unfolds itself. At times, the adaptation moves toward something seemingly radically different. This we have named evolution, and the history of man gives endless evidence that some evolutions can be considered, at least by some, as devolutions or corruptions in need of a re-volution. Between the idea of being the heart and hand of a loving parent to one’s time and place in history as incarnated in the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth, aptly therein called the “Christ”,[vi] and the end of the first Christian millennium, the cult that enshrined him seemed to become something radically different from the primitive and founding vision. For centuries the immediacy of love, care, and forgiveness meant to characterize the holy and true life of humanity was circumvallated in doctrines, inspissated in moral strictures, rarified in rituals, and calcified in institution and bureaucracies. Such structures and rules may well have been temporal aspects of our sociality requisite for the passing on of the vision, aspects requisite for the vivification of the vision in daily life, but in them and through them there was buried the immediacy, the force, the focus of Jesus that initiated them. A mode of evaluating the meaning of existence as proceeding from a loving parent, a mode of living with and for others such that that ideal was felt as pre-sent for the here and now was lost, overshadowed by the pomp of its guardian institution, and panoply of its rites and requirements. Spirit had morphed into System—of morals, doctrines, rituals. There was in many ways and forms evidence that a primitive purity needed be reclaimed.
Man, believing man, needed again to see, to feel, to be in-spired by that true spirit behind and below the fabric of transmittal, the institution, and its ceremonials and regulations. The faith of believing man was itself aching for a re-formation, a return to the ideal, to the heart of God. Tillich was of a mind that to be true to itself, the church, as an essential aspect of its being the continuance of Jesus’ work as Christ, as an essential aspect of its being the “body of Christ” risen for the world, must ever embody such a creative dynamic, such, as he termed it, “protest-ant principle”. G. K. Chesterton once opined the pagans were smarter than paganism and thus became Christians. It may then, in good company, be proposed that—in general–Christians are more perceptive than the institutions of church and so ever clamour for it to re-form. The texts of church history evidence this pining, this need to realign, renew. They that have read through any comprehensive treatment of church history in the West will be familiar with a common antiphonal given in every century: “it was a time of reform”—be it of institution, clergy, ritual, moral demands.
The church is always in a state of some realignment. The moral freedom of the “children of God” had no sooner been preached when the Apostle Paul sought to temper its enthusiasms. Moral rigourism appears within a few generations after Jesus. The ancient Donatists, akin to their mediaeval reincarnates, the Albigenses and Cathars, demanded austere and unfaltering continuity and purity of faith, particularly amongst the leaders of the church. Pelagius attempted to turn the tide that bedraggled the human valuation, denigrating man to an entity saturated in unworthiness, imbecility, and declivity, and reclaim for man the dignity inherent in his God-made, God-beloved, nature. Pope Damascus sought a renewed access to holy writ for all in having Jerome translate it from the Greek and Hebrew originals into the common tongue, the Latin, of the day. Constantine’s sanctioned entrance of the church into the power and prerogative of state gave berth to security, uniformity, and stability. Yet all that but excited many to fear the confines state would exert upon church, and thus, to flee the diurnal confines of state. They sheltered themselves in alone place, in wild places. They became hermits–the withdrawn from the world–albeit a world now “baptized”, “christianized”. The great monastic movements would emerge from their solitudes of one, becoming communities of solitudes. Through them, Christianity would see itself, rightly or wrongly, divided twixt the professionally holy and the common believer. And lest such pittance of examples fail to recognize the dire fact that humankind is never shorn of frustration and anger in search of self-sanctification, in the fourth-century, in a vein too familiar to this age, the people of North Africa were met with the terrorist tactics of the martyrdom-fixated Circumcellions who were wont to shout “Laudes Deo [Praise be God]” as they encircled their fellow Christians in their homes and churches, tormented and torched them for being not of a right manner of the faith. There were also, in many places, monks, more fevered than faith-filled, who let loose their unbridled wrath and terror upon whomsoever accorded not with their fanatical interpretations. Humanity seems ever too ready to react in self-righteous anger born of self-frustration than to respond with reason or with heart, to be given more to Thanatos than Eros, and thus, the God of Love becomes something reserved for them of like mind, or reduced to a reward for obedience to a law, a law invariably said to be from God but betraying every imprint of souls tortured in their own insecurities, fears, anxieties, and recalcitrance to self-examination and healing before the curative light of self-acceptance, self-sincerity, and love.
By the end of the first millennium, there was on the horizon a thrust for significant reform, renewal, change. Many were deeply in the orbit of that devaluation of the world Christianity had been dragging along since it became ensnared in the gnostic and stoic ideas it inherited from the ending ages of the Greco-Roman world, and the philosophies of Plato and Plotinus within which it had tried to work out its intellectual understanding of the pictograms of the Hebrew God and his creative agency in the world (the Christ). A God of law and order, a religion of law and order, can keep things tightly bound and in place for a time. But such a God, such a religion, is not given to creativity, to humanity, to the love which was for Jesus, his message, and his methodology the primal understanding of God and human happiness. A world God so loved could not healthfully sustain either itself or man if consistently held to be a demon-inspired delusion allowed by God merely as a test. There was a rupture in the psyche of Western Christendom. Many lapsed, some into hypocrisy, others into adiaphora or perverted notions of self-esteem and gratification. Some deeply both felt and knew God and the world he so loves had in his church, his “Body”, become disjointed. Man and world he was called to, as wrote the Apostle Paul, “perfume” with the love of God, were misaligned. The body was no longer soul-temple but soul-prison. Contrary to the founding vision of the resurrection, the soul no longer saved the body, it cozened it of any value beyond being fodder for the sacrificial fires of asceticism. And let us be honest here, that notion of necessary asceticism, an exaggerated and distorted form of a reasonable and requisite discipline and focus, is rooted not in holy writ or Jesus’ way, but the gnostic and stoic valuations of man ripened in the trepidatious and closing days of a world empire. A great reformation was needed, was, indeed, brewing. For many men of faith, the issues needed resolution in a correction of methodology, in “how” one ought to live out the faith of the church, and they were inclined to conjure new rules of behaviour and structure. For some the issue went deeper than “how” to be faithful. They were not primarily concerned with a “way”. The “way” was something subservient to, concomitant to the rediscovering, the uncovering, of the very foundation, the “truth” of Christianity: the living “gospel truth” of Christ-hood. They would seek in their preaching, their actions, their lives to respond to that great gospel query: “We would see Jesus”. For them, to be, to act as the presence of a loving parent to the encounter before them was the manifestation of the Christ-hood they by faith and grace shared with Jesus, and thus, in itself “the way, the truth, the life”.
The texts of church history usually celebrate the great reformation of Western Christendom as having begun in 1517 when Luther posted a list of ninety-five issues of form and function that needed to be immediately addressed. Some opine that the great reformative process began a century before in Bohemia with the protestations of Hus. But Hus, like the Lollards, was ostensibly a disciple of Wycliffe, who a generation before Hus had called for a return to the scriptural basics. At the heart of each of these reformers was the pressing, aching need to return to something “basic”, to cleave away the encrustations and deformations of time and age, and find again the heart of truth. They each suffered the stinging pain that “Christianity” had veered away from Jesus, his message, his vision, and the God he called Father. Yet, I would pre-date all these men and their efforts and claim the thrust of the great reformation began not in Wittenberg, Prague, or Oxford, not in 1517, 1404, or 1365, but in 1208 when the son of a prosperous silk merchant recently returned from his militia duties knelt in a ramshackle chapel, and heard reverberating from hidden depths “Francesco, repair my house”. The modern reformative spirit of Christendom was auspicated in the simplicities of spirit embraced by Francesco di Bernardone, one-time bon-vivant of Assisi.
Francesco di Bernardone and his times
Francis of Assisi, as we are accustomed to name him, as were Luther, Hus, Wycliffe, as are we all, was a child of his times, and so not entirely culturally free of the colourations of understanding he stood to re-form. Indeed, every re-formation is by definition a re-arrangement, an editing, something novel but not ex nihilo. Thus, Francis’ “repair” of the church sought, within the established church and its ideals and disciplines, simply to walk anew in Jesus’ foot steps, to pragmatically, experientially, show forth Jesus to his time and place, an ideal and self-vision so zealously embraced, so permeating of his psyche, that in later life, he bore in hands and feet and side the marks of his crucified Lord.
Francis was a charismatic person. He had a flair for connecting with others. While from an early age encharmed by the dramaturgical capacities of fine clothes, refined manners, ideals of chivalry, and the songs of wandering troubadours, he was not by them defined. He was artist of his own art, and that art was his forthright humanity. There was no air of artificiality about him. He emanated a permeating sincerity, a detectable and fundamental sense of sym-pathy. The drama was not his ability to enthrall with improvised verse and song, to startle with the directness of act or word; the drama was his very presence. His gift of immediacy and connectivity made him and continuously remade him. In whatsoever society he entered, be it of lepers, prelates, ordinary Christians, or even that of a Saracen lord, he became notable.
His conversion to a life of dedication to others was constantly a work in progress. Indeed, his first response to “repair my church” was taken literally, and he took upon himself the restoration of the building. His life abounds with spontaneity. His acts are magnificent in their simplicity. His generosity, be it of goods or service, is constant. He gave away money. He tended to the severely ill and outcast. He went out of his way to bring, in varied forms, healing, peace, security. A lover of sociality and lovely things, he went off, ever more deeply, in search of solitude and detachment, only to keep returning more sincerely open and free. When faced with being disinherited, he stripped naked to return to his father everything he had from him received. When confronted with the growing “establishment” his humble band of “little brothers” had become, he ceded direction to others and retreated into his primal vision of being the “pre-sent” of his Lord. His is, indeed, a Theology of Presence. It is a spirituality of being present to and for and with the cosmic family of the one Lord, one Father, one Spirit. He was radically personal and personalizing. His re-formation does not entail a change of church doctrine, practice, or structure. He simply takes the ethos of Jesus he finds in the gospel and transforms his person and his personality in and by that “for-other” dynamic. Underhill spoke of him as a paradox of austerity and sweetness. He could embrace dis-ease, and suffuse comfort and peace. The religious organization of men he founded was certainly inspired by contemporary monastic institutions, but it was not a seclusion. The “brothers” were to go out into the world to help others. The organization for women, admittedly, did not have that same liberty, but, again in keeping with a boundedness to the times, this was an age wherein the role of women was one of domestic confinement. When his preaching excited an entire congregation into wanting to follow his example, he adjusted his “regulations” for brothers and sisters, and created a third “order” or organization for them that could not leave family and work but who still wished to devote themselves as best they could to following the ideals set out in the “orders” for men and women. “Lady Poverty”, as he called her, an incarnative poverty of self-interest, was his mistress, the help-mate he held up as exemplar to all who would live for others.
Beyond these “rules” or organizational directives, there is little extant of Francis’ writings. The few songs, poems, and prayers we have evidence his concern for connectivity and presence. Modern environmental and peace movements have rekindled knowledge of his embrace of nature in all its parts, of “Brother Sun” and even “Sister Death”, of his simple wish to be a “channel of Thy peace”. This is his dynamic of reform, the retrieval of the directness of Jesus to his time and place. It is a fading of self into selflessness, into otherliness simply for the other to bring comfort, understanding, forgiveness, healing, harmony, truth, trust, hope, light, love, joy. Its premise stands that by forgetting self one finds the truth of self, by forgiving one learns the meaning of acceptance, forgiveness, and love, by dying to self interest one awakens to appreciate and cherish the pure rarity of life in its every form.
The simplicity and directness of Francis to both man and nature has made him embraceable by all manner of Christians and non-Christians. He was indulged by Sultan al-Kamil when most thought the audacious entrance into his camp would be his end. In his lifetime he became a type of cult figure, and at least once was given civic guard lest a vying territory attempt his abduction. This “cult” appeal was itself an aspect of his presence to his time and place.
The gnostic tendencies within Christianity had flared up in the twelfth century. The Cathars in Italy, the Albigenses in France, the Bogomils in Bulgaria were all gnostic dualists. They held the world and its ways were the work of the devil, that redemption resided in an escape from the body, the flesh, the world. Jesus Christ was not a human being but a heavenly being. His human appearance was simply that, an appearance, and his saving work consisted only in teaching man that he must escape the world in the renunciation of the world, in abstinence, celibacy, veganism. The church, its clerics, the sacraments, and the great doctrines were all without value. The demanded disciplines of these groups were severe, and ordinary folk could only aspire to embrace the requisite rigours upon the immanence of death. But the few who could bear to here and now embrace the loss of all ecclesiastical and worldly comfort, and daily live the austerities became celebrated as living saints, “the Perfect”. They were considered to have received the consolation of a baptism of the Spirit. Thus, it was not considered as aberrant when Francis’ asceticism, his simple and yet dramatic care for others, garnered him something we would recognize as cult status. The aberration occurs in the insistent focus upon the familial nature of creation redeemed in grace for graciousness that he injects into the established Christendom of his day.
A flurry of piety
In a sense, Francis constitutes the pivotal moment when the rising tide of discontent with the church exemplified in the resurgence of gnosticism is turned. Within his lifetime, Dominic Calareuga founded an organization dedicated to preaching and teaching the faith of the church. Its thrust was to be pragmatic. There was to be no obsession with promoting ideas of “perfection”. Nevertheless, his Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, would come to clash with the followers of Francis, the Franciscans, over the ideal of poverty, raising it to a peerless perfection, and despite the openness many of its early members manifested in their academic accomplishments, would come to be the deeply associated with the unbending positions of the Inquisition. Bernard of Clairvaux examined the psychology of spirituality, differentiating the types of knowledge, the forms of love, and the progress of focus and material detachment, stressing that spiritual exercise exits to provide one with flexibility, openness to inspiration and to others. He underscored the need for the monastic to be continuously informed by the scriptures, and so cements in Christian spirituality the importance of a lectio divina, a patterned meditation upon holy writ. Joachim of Fiore speaks of a new age coming wherein love and freedom will transcend the increasing stress upon knowing and understanding. Meister Eckhart tends ever to blur finite and infinite. While soul and God seemingly lack sure and certain boundary in his thought, the soul ultimately exists to transcend unto God. Catherine of Siena, Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Geert Groote, Thomas a Kempis, each, with varied stress, summon to humility before God, obedience to the church, simplicity in manner of life. For some the love of God radiating through all creation expunges all other vision. For others the view is from the depths of one’s sinfulness, the austerities demanded are intense, and the focus is upon suffering—be it in the living of one’s own life or in the tearful contemplation of the sufferings of the crucified Jesus. A world briefly fulgurated in being “Thy channel” becomes turned more and more toward escaping one’s sins and finding shelter in God, his church, its devotions. Such turning toward escape and emotion, however, too easily becomes the stuff of saccharine and superstitions. Certainly, such shifts do not occur in a vacuum. The age had no paucity of war, death, and disease, and these deeply impact how man sees himself and his world, how man judges himself and his world. Anxieties and fears are more easily aroused than hope and trust and their eternal base—love. A pressure point was being reached. The moment was enantiodromic; there was about to take place a definite and detectable evaluative polar shift.
A re-birth and its denunciation
The Renaissance is the re-birth of an ancient optimism about man and his world. There is a focal shift from man the sinner before God to man the master of this world. The Renaissance is the place where man stands and sees God as the image of himself, where man eyes God as an equal. The theocentric cosmos is displaced by the anthropocentric world. Marcilio Ficino hails man Lord of the four elements–the earth, water, fire and air–and above these Lord of the heavens, for with heavenly mind he can thereto ascend. Man is not God’s image, not his representative on earth, he is “veritable” God on earth. Every idea about God incites in man a desire to imitate God, to become God. This is not about a mystical search for unity. This is not about a mortification is search of otherness. This is man straddling the earth and rising above it unhampered by any power. This is man proclaiming his own glory. While Ficino may say such things more boldly than others, this is the voice, the vision, of Renaissance man.
To Martin Luther this is beyond heresy, beyond paganism. It is insanity. In this, man reveals he has lost not only his mind, his grasp of reality, but his very soul, his very self-awareness. Man is the broken being, the one lost in selfishness. The word “Reformation” has become virtually fused to Luther because he wields his reform not simply at the Roman Church but as the counter-balance, the counter-culture, the counter-psychology, to the undiluted apogee of the individual at the heart of the Renaissance and the birth of “modern history”. Luther strives to return to the scriptures, and he does so through the lens of Augustine in his arguments against Pelagius. Christianity is the revelation that God comes to man the broken and sinful, justifies him, loves him, makes him holy, takes him into fellowship with himself. It is on this sacred revelation that Christianity lives, not on ideas about man’s self-sufficiency, his self-sanctification, his love for God, or his merit before God. Man lives by the mercy and grace of God. A man who strives to be holy is a man who disastrously plays at being God, forgets God does not come to laud the self-proclaimed “holy” man, but to save, to make whole, the sinful man.[vii] God comes to perfect his work in his freely given love. Man either accepts that grace as manifest in Jesus as the Christ, and embraces it, believes in it, or, to his peril, goes off to find his own way, his own truth, his own life, as did Adam who in his guilt and shame lost Paradise because he could not look upon God, look upon his naked and exposed self, his “soul-mate”, who could not face his reality and so caused all reality to spin out of control. There is no way to convert self-love, desire for good, even the highest good, into the grace that is God’s creative and free love for man and his world. All notions of a “highest good”, of eudaemonic motive, are errors, rationalizations, excuses covering fears and insecurities. There exists no power of human self-perfectibility. Man is made perfect only by faith, by trust that at his very core, despite all sin and disorientation, he is the sub-ject of an all-prevailing, unfaltering, devoted love. Man’s worth is not made by man, it is accepted–lovingly, humbly. This is the kernel of Luther’s reform.
God has come to man, and only in God incarnate and human is God to be seen, is God to be found. Man can idly dream about flying off to the highest realms but there would be nothing there for man to find, for God is the incarnate. Jesus was asked “Show us the Father” and he replied, “He who has seen me has seen the Father”. To see God, to come to God, is to acknowledge his graciousness, his love, his condensation to man. William James would theorize concerning such forces in terms of realms beyond the conscious stream. Here, then, we find Luther prescient not only of the foundational vision of holy writ, but of the psyche, its sundry aspects, and those endless internal scuffles and counter-forces Freud and Jung would variously name to sketch the locus and power of that primal all transcending thrust for integrity and integration. To paraphrase Luther’s psychology: God is the pure and purifying, the ultimate and ever-rectifying power residing as the core force of man’s psyche, man’s soul. To summarize Luther’s Christology: God is the integrating grace, a graciousness of presence made perfectly manifest in Jesus who is God’s Christ because he is the pre-sent for the other, “for-us”.
Luther’s vision of man and God, happiness and good works
In being shattered by the depths of his fears and self-doubts, in the detrital of his-self, Luther came to understand that hidden deep within the core of man is a creative, integrating outpouring—love. The God who is love stands firm in the core of man ever summoning him to integrity, integration, wholeness. If man deludes himself as to this, his truth, that does not, cannot, obliterate the factuality that God sustains all creation in his Word and summons it fore-ward, fore-giving it toward wholeness. Adam and Eve, those primal icons of the species, may have abandoned their work and passed the responsibility for it onto another, may have hid away from the consequences of their work, but God does not abandon his work, does do dissimulate his Word, does not “allow it to see corruption” or “return without bearing fruit, for it will accomplish all I desire”.
Luther understood man was not the glorified being of Renaissance optimism. Luther sees man a broken spirit, locked into himself, his own interest, his own welfare, his own satisfaction. He is full of self-deceit and denial. His love of self is a fallacy, a concentration upon a false centre. Man teems with disguises covering his self-frustration, self-loathing, self-hate. Any notions of “holiness” that dance in his head are the delusions of a distorted soul.
Between God, even God at the core of man, and man there is a radical, a fundamental chasm. The initiating historical moment divides the divine selflessness of creativity, the “Let it be!”, from the selfish assertion, the “I”.[viii] Man, who wants always to cry out “I”, cannot bridge that abysmal reality. Only the sheer creativity of the God can. God, abiding the abyss, abiding in the abyss, responds: “Let it be”. God accepts man as he is and evokes him forward into wholeness, holds him in a constant love, ever re-creates him in his kenotic embrace, empowers him to accept his truth, his sociality, his righteous orientation outward toward an-other, toward the cosmos, toward his ultimate other, the God graciously resident at his core.
The acceptance of God’s love by man does not obliterate who and what man is. God’s love resides as the gracious power revealing man for who and what he is. Man remains a “sinner”, a being ever wont to deny the power of his centripetal force, his theocentricity. Man is prone to slipping out of the orbit of reality, of his sociality, and falling into a solitary hell of his own making. The divine and gracious presence at man’s core accepts man’s egocentricity, and evokes man’s truth, his thrust outward toward integrity and integration. This is the meaning of the scripture “God comes to man”. Man is always free to ignore this, to deny this, or to acknowledge this, to believe this, to trust this is so, and to “by faith” live from the power of this embracive core love.
Such faith suffers no delusions of the mystical. It is not legalistic. It is neither born in the fear of punishment nor propelled by the promise of a reward. It is realistic. It is a humbleness, a thankfulness for an inestimable gift. It is creative because it is a transparency before the Creator. It abounds with spontaneity. This radial openness to being accepted and embraced as one is banishes the dis-ease of doubt and fear, and opens man to being happy, makes man at-ease with himself, his world, his God. It is the at-one-ment in action. Luther’s psychology, hidden away in his doctrine of atonement, claims nothing more than the Christian scriptures’ assessment of man. It inverts every legalistic form of morality. Man beset by rules and laws, by demands for social responsibility and self-improvement can never find happiness. Happiness cannot be not earned. It cannot be planned. It is the first fruit of being loved.
The believer is redeemed, brought back to the truth of self, solely by acknowledging God’s love present within, and so stands with humble joy in God as God’s pre-sent, his Christ, to the here and now. The believer is the believer only as he accepts himself as a channel of the divine life. There can be no projection of love back into God, only an emanation of God’s love through the open and unencumbered soul into the world. By faith ego-driven man becomes transformed into the image of God, the child of God. By faith man becomes a transparency before God, and so Luther can say such a man becomes, by grace for the sake of the world, the finite image of an eternal Father, his true and very presence, “his Christ”. This transparency before God is man’s true freedom and his core happiness, and its manifest is the blessing of the other, the world.
Luther had struggled, as had the Apostle Paul, with the necessity of good works, obedience to law, meriting God’s love and acceptance, and like Paul came to understand that all such efforts were futile. Good works cannot be commanded, aroused by threats of punishment, the promise of reward. Such ideas are delusions flourishing in fallacious ideas of self-sufficiency and independence. Man, man locked into his egocentric self, can do no good works. Good flows from his theocentricity, his acceptance of his for-other and primal orientation. Good flows through his calm and tranquility, from his freedom and happiness in the God who so loves him and this world. Love is creativity, and its issue is good. Luther echoes Genesis wherein with the creation of each day it is God who asseverates “it is good”.
Many see the Reformation as another arena wherein are played out the tensions between love and desire, an inherent dignity and a fallen nature, between the Aristotelean-Thomist position and the Neo-Platonic-Augustinian position. The question is not has man the capacity to love, but can man’s love be sufficient response to the love of God, the Pure Transcending of Good and Beauty? Luther is prescient that such question is ill put. We are lost in words if we think the ideal of responding to love in goodness and appreciation, in transformative behaviour, is other than humbly, simply, embracing love in living trust, thankfulness, and joy. Love is not an exchange. Love is not the balancing of an equation. It is a state of being. Christianity claims God is Love itself because the beloved is held as the definiens of the lover—I am that which I love–and thus, God is incarnate in man. It claims I am that I love, and thus, God is creator of all that is. Love makes man. Love makes man whole. To “transvalue” Berkeley and summarize Luther regarding man: I am because I am loved, and I am loving because I am become open to being loved, transparent to the love at the core of my reality. Love is the gift at the root of man and all creation.
Man is free simply because love comes with no conditions attached. It is not a means to an end. Indeed, any “love” that comes with conditions or ulterior motives is not love at all, merely a selfishness disguised. Love forces nothing upon the beloved. Love requires nothing of the beloved. Love expects nothing from the beloved. Comprehending oneself loved, however, portends the transformative. Only as one acknowledges oneself as beloved at the very foundations of self can one see oneself as self, as a being conflicted, constricted, tied into knots of self-interest, and only as one acknowledges oneself as beloved before the very foundations of self can one both know and feel freedom, peace, happiness. Only as one understands oneself simultaneously sinner and saint, can one live “really”—with, not only the Creator, but the Redeemer and the Sanctifier as the core and truth of one’s originating reality.
Times and Temperaments
Gertrude Stein may have attempted to embody the law of identity in writing “a rose is a rose is a rose”, but no rose is identical to another, and every rose of human encounter will be received and cathected by its recipient differently. Who we are, in considerable part, has root in where we are, not only in time, but place. We are a conflux of nature and nurture, surfaces and depths. Francis of Assisi would not have been Francis had he lived either in the 16th century or in Thuringia, and Martin Luther would not have been Martin had he trod the plains and mounts of central Italy in the 12th century. The retreats into solitude and the openness to others that so characterize Francis can seem to be autochthonous to the cave riddled hills and the open plains that surrounded him. Likewise, the forests of superstitions, fears, and mistrusts that propel Luther to seek out the Alkahest of all discontent could, it seems, never to have occurred outside the terrain of his Germany a half millennium past.
Francis embraced the drama of life. He was a romantic; contemplation of the Eternal and direct action in the world share for him and in him of one time and space. Despite the regulations he provided for his varied organizations of men and women, he was not concerned to add to the theological tomes of Christendom. Christ is a reality lived in the encounter with one’s other. Francis was not about theory but practice. Martin Luther, despite all his activity and the actions they initiated, was a scholar, a theologian, a teacher. He produced the text of reformation. He was not without warmth, cordiality, and charisma, but he was not Francis. His intense focus on trust, on the eternal well-being of a man as residing from the human side “by faith alone”, and on the divine side “by grace alone” alone banished the dark superstitions, the fears of God and world, that encompassed him and his world. By his fears and scruples broken, shattered, opened, he found himself, understood himself. In the detrital he discovered the core of his broken self—in all his failures there resides an unbroken icon: Jesus Christ crucified and risen, a God who can suffer but cannot fail, cannot fail the man be becomes. There is a directness between God and man, and that personal and personalizing connectivity transmits through believing man the face of God in the world, to the world, for the world. There is no mystical transcending of all distinctions in a contemplative bliss, no tour de force of theoretical understanding reaching clarity, no sublime illumination cutting through layers of darkness. Luther was a realist, a pragmatist. An overly romanticized spirituality had wrecked Christendom. Love is the work of God. It is accepted, believed. Love made the world, and Love continuously makes the world. Love makes the church, the family, the sundry societies of men. Love is God. Such is not put forward as a philosophical examination of the nature of love. It is neither a speculation nor a rationalization. Such is simply an exegesis of Christendom’s scripture. It is a statement of faith, an evaluation about how most vitally to receive, to believe, the fundamental power of reality.
Notions of humility
Luther understands the forces at play within the psyche. Man is plagued by internal powers that thrust away from gracious and civil behaviour. They are ever problematic and challenging to moral man, to social man. They are deemed corrupting and deadly. They are at the base of man and they are in themselves the verily base. They are primal, but they are not original. The origin of man is in the hand of another, a “Self” preter-intuited as beyond the flow of time and experience, thus, an eternal other, a world-transcending other. For Luther, speaking ever in the iconography of scripture, man has his origin in God’s hand, man is broken, locked into his wanting only to own his own diurnal self, person-ally corrupted, socially disoriented. Only by turning (by re-penting) to his origin, to comprehending himself as the beloved of the ultimate Other, does a nobility and noblesse oblige accrue to him, cover his disorientation, shield him from his corruption. Humility is being realistic about who and what one is: a flawed being beloved of the very Foundation of Being. Happiness is the manifest of knowing oneself so loved.
The ancient Greeks did not formulate the human moral dilemma in this way. There were, indeed, disruptive powers about man. The allure of sensation and desire present challenges to overcome, but they are peripheral encrustations, not of the essence of man, not at the soul, the psyche of man. The essence of man is reason, an ordered and ordering mind, intelligence. World events coloured that ancient optimism and transformed it. Plotinus proposed the cosmos was under the control of a divine, all-transcending mind, but man became man in suffering a fall away from that mind. By this fall man is deeply stunned, semi-comatose, caught up, entrapped, in the miasma of worldly stuff. To escape, to return to the origin, an agent must come to awaken, revive, illuminate, and arouse man to unravel himself from the earthly entrapment. The awakening, reviving, illuminating, and arousing are all gifts, graces. The unraveling is the labour required, and every bit of the world, the flesh, must be burnt away in ascetical fires and contemplative focus that the divine spark fallen away from the original One be freed to fly back into itself. Contemplation and ascetical existence can yield only a partial freedom, a quasi-deliverance, so there comes a pessimism. The factuality of fate’s constant battering, the yearnings for goodness and freedom, frustration with the turnings of heart and events, can, and do, give rise to, not merely a trumpeted summons from the world, but to a contempt for the world, a scorn of all things that are. Man and world are a unity, and thus, contempt for the world of transient things and fate simply manifests a contempt for self.
Christianity is early caught up in this gnostic inclination. The grandeur and magnanimity that was anciently espied as belonging to man, here are held as belonging solely to God. Man was of his image, his likeness, but man fell away from that, and with him the whole of the cosmos. The popular notion of humility held man needed to submit his sinful, disoriented, distorted self to the will of God. It is legalistic, pessimistic. Man’s freedom, any pittance of self-sufficient magnanimousness, any capacity for equanimity, are ego-driven delusions.
The world here has ceased to be God’s glorious self-giving. The world God made for man is lost to man, and man takes up his own world, a world that ceaselessly spins out of his control, not by fate, but by his own sinfulness. The contemptible world and the contemptible self are one. All man’s reality has become the devil’s playground, a gestalt wherein every temptation plays out, for like Pandora’s box, once a temptation became something “opened” by man, temptation itself was freed. The magnanimous spirit of Greco-Roman thought, man’s “great spirit”, man’s ability to stretch his-self outward into its true sociality, is unspeakably corrupted, a prisoner held in “flesh”, in ego-concern. When man asserts himself as an individual standing out from and above the others, he makes of his-self a prisoner within his own flesh, his own concern, his own dominion. In this fallaciously unbalanced understanding, in this attempted abortion of his truth, his cosmic sociality, the relief of the psychic tension thereby caused, the road to health, to “salvation”, becomes understood within the parameters of the distortion, and thus, the flesh, the worldly stuff of existence, must be gotten rid of, killed, mortified, “put to death”. Here is exposed the paradox of this gnostic inspired notion of “sin”: the man who strives to be “like God” and comprehends not the sociality and self-sacrificial nature of God, not merely looses God, but destroys both the world God has made and his very self.
There was at the height of mediaeval thought an attempt to correct this Neo-Platonic attitude. As Genesis had it, man is dust, but man is also God’s work, and so, by grace, shares in his greatness. Man secures his freedom and happiness by humbly acknowledging it is not his, but “gifted” him. It is not made by man. It is not manufactured. It is not asserted. It is something that is situated at the very root of man, something there before ego or “I” ever emerges, something that propels and ever evokes every aspect of the evolving self. Aquinas proposes the acknowledgement of this giftedness is humility, and that it properly exists only before the source of all gifts, the font of freedom, the purest creative force, God. From the pragmatic and moral position, man could not be considered responsible were his only freedom by God’s intervention. Man’s freedom is integral to man. Man may have a dispositional declivity, a disorienting ego-centric mesmerism, but the print of pure creativity is not therein extinguished, merely dis-advantaged, un-cult-ured, grace-less. Aquinas, true disciple of Aristotle, claims man has freedom, has reason, has responsibility, and thus, the right and duty to trust in himself, to realize–to comprehend, to actualize–his limits, and to trust in God, in the Power of the pure creative from which he comes, to come to his assistance, to enlighten, to arm, to guide. Such openness to graciousness is at once a confidence, a faith, in God and in self. It is both humility and hope.
Many reformers find this heretical. It is Aristotelean babble not Bible. They cannot make a differentiation twixt humility before God for his unbounded and fore-giving love, and the joyful acceptance of the talents and abilities resident in and by God’s continuous creation and sustaining of the world. They have no perceptivity for history, for evolution, no receptivity for the continuousness of “salvation history”. Man is nothing. Man is less than a ruin. The image of God is extinguished. All power, all righteousness, and all health are solely with God. Man can only cower in humble submission before God. Humility becomes obsequious self-abnegation. An all encompassing “humility” is hung about man’s neck like a mill-stone, and no caveat is given other than “stay humbled” under God. Man is Sisyphus, and it is difficult to comprehend why ever God became present for man in his beloved and creative Word.
Indeed, it is here that ideas of predestination ripen, and much of them under the pen of Calvin. Unlike Luther, Calvin did not come to his “conversion” out of fear. He came from a profound sense of his sinfulness, his negation of divine law and order. Calvin was not disposed toward being either a contemplative or a romantic. He was a lawyer, a man of rules, law, and logical consequence. The theology of reformation he produces centres upon a God of law and order. It is not to creativity that man is called, but obedience, and God alone will be judge as to whether obedience is sufficient to merit salvation, for God, in his omnipotence, can squash all human effort and extinguish it in eternal oblivion. It is a vision not far from the early gnosticism that engulfed Christianity. It is a severe pessimism about God and man.
The human spirit can be crushed for only so long before it dies or fights back, and thus, the we find in the centuries after that the vision of man and the ideals of ethics begin to morph into the systems of rationalism, empiricism, and the Enlightenment. As at the Renaissance’s dawn, man is again glorified in his reason’s, his mind’s, abilities, and “cringing humility”, as Kant named it, is counted as an abhorrent vice. All authority gives way either to “common” sense or pragmatic ends. The vision of God as the font of creativity, as the hand of ceaseless providential care, gives way to a God made nothing more than a principle to guarantee the verifiability of a logic, and the value of moral rectitude. For some, morality remains a realm of rules, obedience to which merits heavenly bliss. For many others, morality becomes a realm of ideals that the keeping to which will foster happiness in individual and society. The “in-spired” man, the man “into whom God has breathed his very Spirit”, becomes the man not of self-giving love and creativity, but the man of pragmatic ends.
Ignatius Loyola
As Luther presents us the teacher Christ, the theology of being-Christ, Francis the pastoral face of Christ, Ignatius presents the approach of the statesman, the soldierly stratagem and regimentation, the internal mechanism of governance to support a diplomacy of worldly presence, the comity of Christ. These three men provide example of the three scriptural forms of being-Christ: priest,[ix] prophet,[x] king.
Ignatius was a dandy. A lover of fine appearances and chivalrous action, he was given to affectation and extravagance. Reportedly, his quest to gain worldly glory through a military career involved him in court intrigues. He was severely wounded in battle, one leg broken, the other shattered. His convalescence was long. To pass the time, he asked for books, specifically stories of romance and chivalry. Alas, the institution did not stock such texts, and he was presented books on the lives of the saints. It did not take long for him to discover the similarity between the heroics of the church’s saints and the state’s great military strategists. His conversion was brewing, and when he received a moment of great spiritual consolation, his life was transformed. He gave away his finery, surrendered before the icon of Mary his sword, and retreated to a cave in Manresa in central Catalonia to pray and mortify himself. He supported himself by begging. It was not an untroubled transformation. He was plagued with scruples, even thoughts of suicide. Yet he prevailed, and out of his self-examinations and his meditations upon the gospels he began to formulate that disciplined approach to self-examination and meditation we know as the Spiritual Exercises.[xi]
At a rather late age, he embarked upon acquiring a university education. His experiences as an older student fostered ideas about educational methodology, and these he fused to his ideas regarding prayer and penance. While he was well received by many, his ideas were not darling to the establishment, and he more than once had to negotiate the quizzing of the Inquisition and suffer its imprisonment. He attracted several like minded souls, and they, having taken vows to live in poverty and chastity, eventually offered their services to the Pope as a type of spiritual army. Indeed, Ignatius styled it “the Company of Jesus”, although it has come down to us from the Latin “Societas Jesu” as the Society of Jesus. As in any good military, the regimentation involved honing both body and spirit. The world was not to be ignored, it was to be encountered, understood, embraced, and when necessary, endured—all in simplicity and poverty of self. The spirit, the mind, was to be kept open to all possibilities, the better to discern, and adapt to the situation at hand. That openness and discipline, that stress on education and order have always made Ignatius’ society notable, powerful, and adaptable. It was its missionaries to China that dressed themselves in the robes not of Western clerics but those of the indigenous scholars, that sought to include into Christian worship the orient’s deep respect for ancestors, that sought to adapt the rituals of the church for the cultures of the Indian subcontinent, to always and everywhere, make the experience of Christ-hood and church something relevant and relating to the culture. From its beginnings, such openness of mind and spirit excited enemies within both church and state, and, as the efforts of the present Jesuit pope exhibit, do still.
Ignatius instilled in his army the idea that God is free for all things, God is to be found in all things, God is to be found in being free to all things. There is a creative singularity to reality, a “divine milieu”, as de Chardin named it. Such freedom from the human side is found in acquiring a deep detachment from all things, by focus upon maintaining a transparency before the power of the all-transcending God, and therein allowing his meaningfulness to transform man and world, to manifest his joy in all his works. In this soldierly spirit, learning, prayer, service, and self-discipline become inseparable.
It is often thought the prayer “Anima Christi [Soul of Christ]” is from Ignatius’ hand. It is not. Its opening lines, “Soul of Christ sanctify me, Body of Christ save me”, however, succinctly capture the spirit of Ignatius. The first petition, to be made whole by grace, to be made open to the spirit of the Christ, is completed by the second, to be made whole by faith, by becoming at-one with and in the “Body of Christ”, his church, and the world redeemed in God’s self-giving as the Christ. Fidelity to the seat of Peter and to the reality of the world redeemed in grace reside as one at the Jesuit approach to “presence”.
The gospel truth each of these three men sought to live is the “moment” of the God-incarnate, the world-encounter that speaks of loving creativity giving itself away in giving the reality of the world a way fore-ward.[xii]
[i] Cf: W. B. Yeats: “The Second Coming” (1921).
[ii] Does Plato’s eros end in objectification if it terminates in the realm of the Eternal Ideas, non-entities that are beyond the subject-object divide of the world, and which themselves serve as the template, the basis, the form-at, of this world and all its parts? Cannot it be said that Plato’s eros, carried to its extreme, gives us not an eternality, but a type of eternal return, a moment of capturing the very platform of reality that ever recedes from its exemplification as world, yet ever in-forms that world, a foundation that “exists” to give “form” to man and world with the highest Form being Truth. Plato gives a meta-physic that grounds his mentor’s mantra, enunciates a foundational principle of life that situates Socrates’ “Know thyself” within a cosmic context. To know thyself becomes to know thyself as the incarnate conduit of the eternal, all-encompassing ideas of truth, beauty, goodness. As long as the eternal Ideas are eternal and the formality that excites by some means the diurnal world, they constitute a creative energy outwards. To claim, as it is both common and technically proper so to do, that for Plato the soul ideally ends in a transcendental frozen perfection, is more about ending the reading of Plato at the Freudian pole of the Thanatos than completing his complex equation of form and eros and world.
[iii] The behaviourist schools treat the surface without consideration of the depths and source. Within the parameters they set, their approach may be deemed “functional”. However, they are akin the them that would practice a Newtonian vision to the disdain of the quantum realities.
[iv] Cf: The Serpent and the Symbol, January 2016.
[v] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 1, November, 2013; Occidental Ideas, Part 8, endnotes iii, and vi, February, 2014.
[vi] “Christ” denotes one sent with full re-presentative powers.
[vii] Luther is not unaware the Apostle Paul speaks of believers as “holy and beloved”, as “saints”. Luther’s point is ever that holiness is not something man works toward, gains, or merits. It is the gift of the Holy One acknowledged as intimately yet distinctively present within. Man’s salvation, his well-being, is always something which from the divine perspective is “by grace alone”, and from the human perspective by trusting it is so, “by faith alone”.
[viii] This ego-assertion of man, this “I”, is countered by God in the revelation of his name to Moses as “I AM”, and unlike Adam, who dissimulates reality by hiding and pointing in blame at another, the God of Christianity claims not only the ancient Hebrew name “I AM” but “I AM my Word”, and that “Word made flesh”.
[ix] Francis, Luther, and Ignatius were all in “holy orders”, and each held their office in awe. In Francis’ time the diaconate was seen simply as a step toward the common-most office of holy orders, the priesthood. Francis remained a deacon, eschewing the priesthood as too great an honour. Luther was filled with trepidation at the altar. Ignatius delayed for more than a year celebrating the ritual most commonly associated with priesthood, the eucharist, again out of deference to so profound an act of the church.
There is, it seems, in this secular, post-Christian, multi-cultural age, much confusion or simply ignorance regarding the distinction twixt “holy orders” and “religious orders”. To dispel such chaos, the following precis is offered.
regarding Holy Orders:
“Holy orders” refers to ministries conferred upon individuals to serve the church in a specified capacity. Those ministries are traditionally bishop, priest (presbyter/elder), deacon, and sub-deacon.
“Religious orders” are freely entered organizations designed for some religious or pious purpose—the living of a contemplative life, the teaching of the faith, the care of children, etc. Members of religious organizations or “orders” may also be in “holy orders”.
Technically, by baptism, every member of the church is a minister of the gospel and of the celebration of the gospel in the rites of the church. Scriptures evidence that from its beginning the church began to structure certain positions regarding administration and worship. These came to be hierarchically related one to another and placed under a local supervisor or “bishop”, a rather corrupted pronunciation of the Greek for manager or over-seer, ἐπίσκοπος, episcopus.
The bishop, in episcopal systems of church governance, acts as the chief minister, high priest (pontiff), supreme pastor of a given area, usually termed dioceses or see. In many applications of this system, all rights of ministry in the community belong to the bishop, and he or she then delegates various functions to various individuals.
The most primitive evidence has bishops entrusting many of the administrative and charitable tasks of the office to those whose service to the community documented their worth. These officially recognized “servants” to others assisted the bishop in the community and at the rite of eucharist. They were called deacons (from the Greek for servants).
With the expansion of dioceses, bishops were no longer able to preside at a Sunday eucharist at which the entire diocese could attend. It became necessary to subdivide the diocese into smaller units (parishes) and to delegate the power to preside over the eucharist in these subdivisions to certain trusted elders (presbyters) of the church. In some places, where a sense of continuity with the Hebrew priesthood was desired, and where the sacrificial nature of the eucharist came to be stressed, these elders took the title of priest. In time, various other powers were given to the priests as they took over the administration and spiritual guidance of the local congregations. Soon the local priest presided over every liturgical function except ordination and, in the Western churches, confirmation. This rise in priestly power overshadowed and eventually suppressed the work of the deacons, until the office of deacon became no more than a preparation for the office of priest.
The sub-deacon is to assist the deacon. The ministry was often seen as a preparatory role to the deaconate. The mediaeval Western tradition had the sub-deacon ordained to the office. The Roman church suppressed the ministry after the Second Vatican Council. In the Anglican world, the work of the sub-deacon is presently largely subsumed under the office of the Lay Reader. The lay reader is licensed to perform varied duties including assisting at the Lord’s Supper, publicly preaching and teaching, publishing the banns of marriage, receiving alms, and assisting the incumbent in the administration of the parish. In some places, certain members of the congregation are commissioned to carry out certain of the traditional liturgical functions of the sub-deacon.
These four ministries (bishop, priest, deacon, sub-deacon) have traditionally been termed the holy or major orders. In most places, one is ordained or consecrated into or for a holy order. Admission to these orders renders one a cleric (clerk, member of the clergy). In most systems, ordination is considered irrevocable. In churches that hold deacons and priests function as representatives of the full power of ministry residing in the bishop, their ordinations have usually been understood as the bestowing a capacity to perform certain functions. The right to perform is provided by a licence from the bishop to perform the designated functions within his jurisdiction–and his jurisdiction only. The licence to act can be withdrawn, the capacity to act cannot. If a priest or deacon wishes to act upon the capacity in the jurisdiction of one other than his bishop, he must seek out a licence or permit to so do from that bishop. Under certain circumstances, a member of the clergy can be “reduced to the lay state”, laicized, formally treated as no longer a cleric, but in those churches wherein ordination is believed to create an indelible spiritual change in the individual, such action is simply “formal”, “pragmatic”.
Conjoining episcopal territories or diocese have traditionally been confederated into provinces, provinces into national churches, etc. These are variably supervised, chaired, or presided over by bishops given the title Archbishop, Primate, Primus, Presiding Bishop, Patriarch, Pope. These titles denote offices within the bureaucracy of the church. Likewise, the title archdeacon refers to the holder of a bureaucratic office. It harkens back to the ancient days before the priesthood became the dominant ministry and deacons were the primary assistants to the bishop. Since early mediaeval times the archdeacon has usually been a priest appointed to act as a chief or regional assistant to the bishop.
During the Reformation, some found in the scriptures no evidence for the prevailing episcopal system. They understood the early church to be lead by a collegial body of elders (presbyters). The local church, under the guidance and supervision of its elders, was the essential form. Here again, a sensitivity for the greater community was embraced, and varied forms of a regional governing council and an elected supervisor, superintendent, or moderator were established.
Below the level of sub-deacon, there are varied ministries. Not all have been in use in all places or at all times; various churches have established them, suppressed them, altered and adjusted them according to need.
One ministry, in addition to that of sub-deacon, that has fallen into dis-use is that of deaconess. Any evidence deaconesses were “ordained” or assisted at the Holy Table is questionable. They seem to have been “commissioned” to carry out certain of the functions of the deacon in relation to women. The office fell into early disuse, and most attempts at revival were neither successful nor long lived. The present practice of many churches to ordain women into the diaconate renders the office obsolete.
In time, certain ministerial roles below that of sub-deacon came to be seen as hierarchically arranged and preparatory steps toward priesthood. These were: Acolyte, Lector, Catechist, Exorcist, and Porter. Entry into these “minor orders”, as they came to be called, was preceded by the rite of Tonsure (from the Latin for shave). It was a symbolic or actual shaving of the head or part of the head performed by the bishop and meant to ritually reinforce a leaving behind of worldly involvement, and a submission to the divine will as expressed in the hierarchical structure of the church. Traditionally, one was usually commissioned or instituted into a “minor order”, and thereby rendered a lay clerk.
regarding Religious Orders:
The term order here refers to an organization or society founded on a certain discipline of communal life usually called a Rule. Membership in a religious order is open to both laity and clergy alike. In some religious orders, allowance is made for associate members, laity and clergy who cannot leave their lives in the world but who yet wish to share in part in the life and discipline of the organization or society.
There are two basic types of religious orders: those who cloister themselves or close themselves off from contact with the world and devote themselves to prayer for the world, and those who maintain an active mission in the world. The male and female members of the first type are called monks and nuns respectively; the male and female members of the second type are called brothers and sisters respectively; in common parlance, however, these names are usually interchangeable. Various orders have various names for their dwellings: abbey, priory, convent, etc.; and various names to designate the superior officer of the dwelling: abbot, abbess, prior, prioress, etc.
From the early middle ages, many members of religious organizations embraced holy orders. Such clergy are called Regular or Religious Clergy (clergy living life under a certain religious rule [regulations] and under the control of the religious organization’s superior), as opposed to Secular or Diocesan Clergy (clergy living in the world [seculum] and under the direct control of the bishop of the given diocese).
[x] Francis is herein referred to as a prophet because he makes his life a sign of God’s presence. We tend to think of a prophet as a seer who speaks of things to come, but a prophet is more than a religious clairvoyant, more than an insightful voice prognosticating moral blindness, arrogance, decay. The great prophets exemplified in word and action a truth hidden, unobserved, ignored, and that truth invariably was about the divine care for man, and man’s need to turn himself away from self-interest and embrace a greater vista of self and world. When the prophets of a “false God” failed to strike a fire to consume the sacrifice they had prepared, Elijah successfully called down fire from heaven to testify to the propriety of his sacrifice and the truth of his God. Jerimiah spoke in signs of the impotence of the people before the impending disasters: he refused to marry and have a family, he buried a linen belt and allowed it to decay, he bought a jar and smashed it to pieces. To signal the swiftness of the coming turmoil, Ezekiel did not mourn his wife’s death, and pantomimed the siege of Jerusalem. Hosea married a harlot as a sign of Israel’s cuckolding of its God with idols. Isaiah went about naked to exemplify the shame about to descend upon the people. Jesus cursed the tree that bore no fruit and it withered, and when the disciples of John came to ask if he was the awaited messiah, he responded that the poor have good news preached to them only after he marked that by him the blind had been made to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, the dead raised, and the lepers healed. The prophet, in his words, in his works, is himself the sign.
[xi] The Exercises and their directions are well devised, direct strategies for the maturation of heart and soul meant to be undertaken over the course of a thirty-day retreat. They can be read through in a single sitting. No exercise regime, however, is written out for reading, but performing, and the performance of Ignatius’ exercises remains potently formative.
[xii] We need always proceed with caution in evaluating another, and especially so when we begin to speak of God. Our words present historically distinctive and culturally cultured mediums of expression, and admittedly, to our reckless inhumanity, we tend to be overly possessive of them. However, in most cases, our hearts, when they be open before self and God, incline in similar direction. Confessedly, the words that enshrine us can colour our vision for good or ill, and theology would have no place to grow were that not so. I harbour no doubt that beyond the structures and strictures of time and place, nature and nurture, the joys of heaven and the treasuring of God’s creation share of one heart in Francis, Luther, and Ignatius. Before anyone cry objection, before anyone set up camp and secure positions, before anyone entrench in inattentive devotedness to systems and intellections, let us reflect upon how we iconize the locus of love. Is it not a heart? It is here we ought begin and end.