As the Bhagavad-Gita seemingly moves towards its zenith in a great battle, Arjuna’s companion and friend suspends the near cosmic momentum with a revelation. He is the Lord God Krishna. The astonished Arjuna worshipfully announces his intention to leave behind his worldly concerns and reside in contemplation of the divine. Krishna objects, and then gives a teaching on life and holiness. There are many ways to oneness, holiness, wholeness. They share a singular essence: the surrender of ego-centricity that the self become free to the divine within, allowing, thus, its power to freely flow. This involves learning not simply a mindlessness of self, but a mindfulness of the world about oneself. Anger, ignorance, and self-sanctification are the three great impediments to this state of being, this state of mind and heart, this wholistic presence with-in the world. One need not go off into solitude, for even in the devotions of the simple-most of mind and heart God is to be found. One must accept one’s position and vocation in this world, and for Arjuna, a prince, it is to lead and to care for his people wisely and well.
Christianity has, in the sundry times and places it has found itself, asked how wisely and well to focus, find, and maintain a mindlessness of self and a caring mindfulness of the world God has not only made but redeemed in his Word and continuously calls to its wholeness in his Holy Spirit. This tract is a brief consideration of the major currents evidenced in that pious pursuit.
Christianity begins within the arms of Judaism, its synagogal system of readings, teachings, prayers, its ideas of purification, its Temple and its sacrificial rites. All three of these continue to colour its searchings for a methodology to make both man and world truly, sincerely, authentically Christ-ian, the image of the Christ, the redeeming Word of the Father.
There was, consequent of the general thrust within Judaism, no initial impulse to flee the reality of the world and sit in austerities contemplating the navel of the universe. One looked to the sacred writings that had informed Jesus, reconsidered them in the light of his preaching, his pastoral approach, his death, and the foundational faith that, despite death, he was still present to the world in his followers by and in the inexhaustible Holy Spirit of the God he called Father. Among the believers in Jesus as the Messiah (Christ) there was manifest a strong sense of community. This was rooted not only in the Hebrew heritage, in the idea of a “chosen people”, but also in the idea of world made whole, a universe returned to its wholeness by God’s fore-giving presence and gracious embrace. The sensitivity for, the belief in, the resurrection was itself the sign of this presence and embrace, and in turn, the vocation to be both present to and embracive of this world. There could be no hiding away from the world the believers were called to “baptize”, to saturate, to permeate, with the reality of God’s care (his Word) and love (his Spirit). Every Christian was Christian by this belief, by this state of mind, and every Christian was Christian by this state of heart, the embracing of this vocation to “make it so” to and for all men, to—in action–respond to God’s gracious action by incarnating, by living, the “Amen”.
A discipline of self bolstered in mind through the hearing and consideration of the Hebrew scriptures, in heart through the charitable care for the community, not only of the believers, but of all, and in spirit through a weekly gathering to ritually share bread and wine as testament to the familial nature of the believing community and its living connectedness with Jesus, the Christ of God—these are the stanchions upon which Christianity begins to seek out its presence before God for the world. The first and last give the recognizable format of the Eucharist or Holy Communion service—a rite of readings, teachings, prayers, and a liturgy of sharing a ritual meal. The second stanchion, the care of the world, was always the raison d’etre of the first and third, and thus, the communion service early has attached to it as the dismissal “Go!”, go out into the world, and in your actions, in your life, show God has come to man, God is with us, in us, for us.[i] The synagogal system of hearing, learning, praying, and the communal sharing of a meal of bread and wine identified as “the mystery”, the great symbol, of God’s incarnate presence, the “Sunday Holy Communion” rite, is Christendom’s primal and universal methodology of focus and ritual reinforcement to create a seeding community of men and women mindless of self and open to God’s creativity and care of and for the world.
The Eucharist
The principal rite of Christendom has always been the eucharist.[ii] The sharing of bread and wine as a memorial of Christ’s death and his continued presence in the church, the body of believers, his “Body”, was, the earliest evidence indicates, a blessing attached to the end of a communal meal. A sense of respect and decorum were, according to the Apostle Paul, on occasion wanting, and he more than once writes to call attention to this issue. It is not, therefore, surprising that the separation of the eucharist from a communal meal and the conjoining of it to a time of readings, teachings, and prayers based on the synagogal service occurred early in Christianity’s history. By the second century a definitive ritualization is in place. The ritual varies from place to place, but certain elements seem somewhat constant. There is a sacrificial connotation to the blessing of the bread and wine. In keeping with the idea of sacrifice, the presiding ministers begin to identify as priests. There is stress upon receiving the “consecrated” [the made one with the holy] elements “worthily”. There is a definitive accent placed upon the “mystery” of God’s presence in the consecrated elements, and the Roman world’s fascination with the “mystery” religions of Osiris and Isis, Persephone and Demeter colour the emerging Christian ritualizations of the eucharist. The hearing, considering and learning of sacred texts, and the prayers for the community and the world which proceed the meal-rite are considered integral to it, a preparation of the mind and heart for that which will be acted out in the offering, consecrating, and sharing of one bread, one cup—for the salvation, the well-being, of the world. The Hebrew scriptures that informed Jesus and that are held as having been given Judaism as a testament from God to prepare it for Jesus as the Christ are received without question.[iii] These are augmented by explanations and exhortations from the leaders within the community, and eventually selected of these texts will form the canon of a “new” testament, an explication of a new covenant with the world. The celebration of the “holy communion” of the church is herein established as a singularity of word and action, scripture and ritual meal, the “forming of the holy”, the “sacrament”.
The Eucharist is the definitive spirituality of Christianity, a methodology accessible to everyman for the creation of a community of partakers in Christhood. In this, the reading and consideration of the sacred texts is in itself understood to be a sacred ritual, an action acknowledged as before God and as revelatory of God’s care for the church and world. It is in proclaiming the Word of God made manifest in Jesus, in praying in the name of that Word, that the very and living Word itself is made present to the church, in-forms the church, the “Body”. While there was customarily some teaching, explanation, exhortation based on the texts, this was not received as a classroom event. It is an integral part of the sacred event, and it evokes response. In the early church there were “charismatic” responses. The children of God had been given the Spirit of God, and so many felt freed and inspired to leap to declaration. Congregants spontaneously “prophesized” in word and action, “spoke in tongues”. Such liberties were soon curtailed by having the reflections and reflexes of the congregation contained by and orchestrated by the singing of a purposefully chosen passage from the scriptures. Such was to provide for a communal meditation according to a precisely set formula leading toward prayers for church and world. The concern was the building of a community of like minds and hearts. The ritualization of the meal was likewise meant to reinforce a sense of community. The meal was a symbol of God’s abiding presence here and now, of “in-corporation” into that presence, and its raison d’etre: the salvation of the world. As incorporated, embodied, into the Christ, the community, the living, sacred corporation, is partaker in the mission of the Christ.
The establishment of the church on the stage of empire excited embellishments to the ritual actions. The rituals of the Roman state become the proscenium of church ritual. The holy table sits upon a raised platform at the end of the sacred space. It is honoured with a canopy. On this same dais sit also the presiding ministers of the community and the rites. They begin to wear distinctive robes, and process in as would magistrates of the empire. The adaptation of pomp and pageantry are meant to reinforce the sacredness, the un-ordinariness, of the gathering, but also to stir a proselytizing interest in the general populace. The closing of the doors after the readings, teachings, and prayers, the privatizing of the sacred ritual meal to believers alone, only underscored that here was a sacred time, a sacred moment available only to the fully initiated into the mystery, and that spoke strongly to the general religious sensitivities of the day.
The move of the imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople also impacted the development of the Western rituals. The new capital was prone to a richer sensitivity for pageantry, the arcane and mysterious, for precise regimentation and hierarchy. These were imported into the West and infused themselves into the rather practical sense of order and decorum inherent in the Roman mentality. Embellishments, symbols, prayers multiplied. Much was added, little was deleted. The ancillary rites, chief among them the prayers at beginning and end of day, the sundry rites around baptism, grow in complexity and volume.[iv] They are on a road to becoming as esoteric as the mysteries of Isis and Demeter the early church was wont to mock as so much gibberish. Over-ritualization turned mystery into muddle. Muddle opened to door to magic. Such might still fascinate, but could it open the heart and inform the mind in Christ-hood?
Men in tights and women in tutus leaping about on tippy-toes to tell the tale of a sleeping princes and her rescue may well be taken as a lovely thing to watch, but a performance of the Bolshoi is not the stuff of spirituality, not a pathway to formulating a community of openness before and to God for his great work of salvation. Consider briefly some of the complexity that accrued to the simple blessing and sharing of bread and wine, the reading of a sacred text, the interceding for the welfare of all, and the turning of a heart in thankfulness.
The ministers, the servants, of the community become a class unto themselves. They are set aside from the others, expected to be beacons of sobriety and propriety. They are given holy orders. Their dress goes from the ordinary to the imperial “formal”, and by being set as the accustomed within a rather brief time, become, not merely antiquated, but the ritualistic, a series of costumes and masks every part of which is given some symbolic value and function. These servants of the community now take their place upon the raised dais from which are proclaimed the sacred texts, the Word of God, and where sits the holy table, now considered a sacrificial altar, which is itself robed in canopy and veils. The prayers of intercession disappear form the first part of rite, their petitions now interspersed within the second part, the prayer for consecrating the bread and wine. The prayer of the community is thereby lost in the prayer said by the bishop or his assigned priest. Only a trace echo of that common prayer remains in the “Kyrie” [Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy…]. The rite may have been translated from the common Greek of the first century into the Latin that comes into force by the third, but there is no such move toward a comprehensible tongue when the vernaculars of Europe begin to emerge in the dawn of the second millennium. The ideology about why and how the bread and wine are set apart for sacred use, “consecrated”, changes. Once a ritual act of incorporating a community into the pre-sent of God, the consecration becomes the mystery of God becoming present in the bread and wine themselves. It is a moment of awe, of terror. God suddenly “appears” before sinful man. Man must stand at a distance. Man must seek out a priest, heartily and well confess all his sins, sincerely repent them, and swear never again to offend. Man must fast and do penance before even thinking to approach the holy table. With this dire deterrent made the custom, receiving the bread and wine is no longer the norm; it is reserved more and more only to the presiding minister. There is no “holy communion” except for the priest, and the situation deteriorates so badly that the bureaucracy must set out legislation demanding the common folk “receive communion” at least once each year. There is a growing emphasis that in naming the bread the “body, and the wine the “blood”, the priest is actually confecting the physical presence of Jesus. The moment the bread becomes (under the appearance of bread) the flesh of Jesus, it is held up for all to adore—from a safe distance. Bells are rung to call attention least anyone be lost as to whatsoever the priest be doing or muttering. The same follows for the cup. But the fascinated mind is drawn in yet more. The bread becomes body before wine blood, and so this is truly a “sacrifice”, a victim with body separated of its blood. The cup is set to the side of the bread, for Jesus’s blood drained from his side. At the end of the great consecratory prayer, now a concatenation of prayers, a piece of the bread is dropped into the cup, and with body and blood reunited, the “risen” Jesus is raised up for all to see.[v] In keeping with this sacrificial mind-set, the once simple pointing to the bread and wine as they were blessed becomes a signing with a cross, and soon there is inserted into the prayer thirty-three signings with a cross, one for every year of Jesus’ life. Kneeling and genuflections become understandable responses. As is curiosity. The consecrated bread is placed in devises to mimic God’s dwelling “in a tent”, a tabernacle, among his people. On multiplying occasions, the bread, now a “host”, a sacrificial victim, is placed into a transparent vessel to be carried about or set on the altar of sacrifice that all, now unworthy to ingest, may gaze in wonder. As anyone prescient of the workings of “media stardom” will understand, when the tangible, the “sensible” becomes objectified as the “sensational”, man still wants to ingest it, to hold it, to in some form wrap himself about it; the mind craves to take it in every bit of the sensationalized, but because it is without nutrient, the psyche is left insatiable and a loop of desire and fascination is created. Devotions flourish, as do superstitions. People are on edge for the miraculous, and understandably so, for here, in front of them, is the Lord of the universe, Jesus crucified and risen into his glory. The parody here is that like unto the crowd at Golgotha, the masses are given to think perhaps he will prove himself present, perhaps a spot of sacred blood will be appear upon the “body”. Reportedly, on occasion it did![vi] Where now, in this whirling mass of devotion and magical expectation, is the “body of Christ”, his living presence as the holy community of believers? God, once said pre-sent in Jesus as the Christ, once understood as the presence of the “Body” that is church, is now beyond approach. Avenues of ascent must be found. Private devotional practices that had abided centuries now flood into the spiritual void. Priests, holy people, angels, saints—these are humbly approachable, these can help poor sinful man, these can intercede before God and his Christ. Jesus becomes sole Christ. There is no partaking in his mission. He alone accomplishes God’s will. He alone buys back humankind from the devil and its sin. Man is now indebted to God and to Jesus. They sit in judgement upon penny-less man. What austerities, what penance, what act of devotion can man perform to “redeem” himself–prayers, fasting, withdrawing from worldly pleasures, pilgrimages to beg before the relics of holy saints? And yet, all this is insufficient, and thus, the kindly pope, the Vicar for Christ on earth, comes with the succour of “indulgence”, a spiritual and superabundant bonus added to every conceivable “good” and pious work.[vii]
Admittedly, while all this amounts to a gross deformation of the original format, a tangible disoperation, it ought not to be taken as having arisen out of ill intent or as incapable of good effect. It was the aggregate product of human reactions to times and events, and as are all things human, a wanting for good filtered through ego and ever-incomplete understanding, and thus a wanting wanting. Admittedly also, there was a constant flow of attempts to correct this aberrant situation. It was, however, not until Luther nailed his observations and objections to a door that the situation moved with any momentum. With his German Bible and Deutsche Messe Luther sought to simplify, demystify, make approachable and comprehensible the “communion” which is both a rite and the church it creates. Cranmer in his Book of Common Prayer did likewise for the English church. Neither of these men, both priests, substantially changed the structure of the church. They sought how best to make the rites of the church, the spirituality of the church, accessible, relevant, realistic. Scripture is the sole authority for the church, but ritual is appreciated for its symbolic and subliminal power. Calvin was a lawyer. He was not inclined toward symbols and rituals. His idea of correct structure resided in and with the local congregation. Layers of bishops, archbishops and pope are bureaucratic corruptions. His idea of correct form and function resided in having the congregation rightly informed of God’s revealed word as set out in the scriptures. There is no “window dressing” proper to these ideas. Sacrament is subset of scripture, of Word; it merely signals it, “signs” it. He entertained no sensitivity for a functional distinction twixt ritualization and superstition. God has given his word, and man needs no drama, no magic to understand it, to humbly receive it, to take it to heart. Read. Obey. If there be anything else to be done, God will provide—if he so wills. Calvin’s approach informed the greater part of the early reformation. Rome’s reaction was to standardize the sundry variations in ritual, write in stone its dogmatic positions, present itself the church triumphant, and let loose a display of every glory of heaven artist and architect could muster.
Each of these movements excited reactions. The founding impetus of an “established” church in England was to attempt “Catholic” appearance and “Protestant” mind-set. That simply set two camps at constant odds with each other. If a bishop displayed too great a fondness for ritual, the opposing forces shouted “papist”, and in a state-established church, that term was synonymous with “traitor”. Despite the fact the Puritan party could not sustain rule of land for very long, a rather Calvin-inspired church prevailed until the mid-1800’s. Then, in part parcel to a fascination with an imagined golden age, and in part with a need to reengage and reignite the imagination of common folk, several influential clerics began the long trek to recover the ritual heritage of the Gothic period. The continental reformed churches also found themselves in need of some “re-awakening”. The sundry beckonings of both the Reformed and Roman churches would evaginate as the movements of quietism, deism, pietism, revivalism. Before, however, any of these movements there was monasticism.
Monasticism
When the church became accepted within the Roman state, there were some fearful of where that political accommodation would lead. They retreated from the world. They tried to effectively “die” to the world, and so become the living exemplars of a bloodless martyrdom. They lived as hermits and focused their efforts on finding a unity with God through austerities and prayer. Despite leaving society behind, they were not, for the most part, anti-social beings. Many were goodly souls and offered counsel, comfort, and guidance to those who sought out the sagacity of their worldly uninvestedness. There were, confessedly, some who were simply oddities—individuals whose idea of developing focus and freedom entailed sitting endlessly atop a pole or some other eldritch practice. They all, however, were suspicious of the world and all things material, of a mind that man needed to find a distance from such things, control all desire for such things, and concentrate all powers and talents upon the consideration of things spiritual, holy, immaterial. The pathway was “endlessly blaming oneself for one’s sins” (Anthony the Hermit), penance, fasting, all manner of austerities including the infliction of physical pain, and “ceaseless prayer”.
There are two notable aspects of history that converge into this radical departure from man as being-in-the-world. First, the Judaism out of which Christianity emerges had for several centuries groups who identified themselves as “separated” from the common masses in their attempts to obey the demands of divine law—the Hasidim of the Greek period, the Pharisees and the Essenes of the Roman period. Second, gnostic ideas had been meandering through various religious movements and philosophical schools for centuries. These anti-material world ideologies, and the notions of a requisite legal propriety before a divine adjudicator very early infiltrate the vision of an all embracive paternal love set out by Jesus.
Jesus proclaimed—in act and word–a community of man, a universe inspired,[viii] not by law, but by love. It is, unfortunately, somewhat difficult to sustain a human community without some structure. Freedom from law, even if it be the freedom of “God’s children”, is not something earthlings easily manoeuvre. We, the children of men, have our cherished ways. Among my ancestors were some who had been taught it was a sin to eat meat on Friday, and in their ripened years no meddling pope was going to tell them otherwise. The earliest believers, all Jews, were not easily persuaded their “freedom” involved giving up Mosaic regulations, especially culturally entrenched items such as dietary directives and circumcision.[ix] Leadership was needed.
Leadership rarely abides without being challenged. Who has the right to lead? Who is leading rightly? Without regard to the result of such battles, invariably the need to have others follow too easily slips away from the charism of leadership and into the bleak need for obedience, and thus to rules, laws, legalities. In these love, spontaneity, novelty, freedom, creativity become increasingly compacted, and the soul, the psyche, itself is compressed, repressed, and discounted. This psychic strangulation manifests into the world. Life, the world, the cosmos, become not free but imprisoning, not vitalizing, but detrimental, not creative, but bound, binding, austere. The gnosis, the secret, the sacred, the wholistic, knowledge as how to escape this law-bound, world-detrital is itself to be austere. The notion of austerity as the path to holiness, to wholeness and its peace, is, as the Apostle Paul understood, born of frustration under law. A vitalizing sense of respectful awareness of oneself as a communal being, as a partaker of a “holy communion”, which union is itself but the “leaven” of the earth, looses its sense of focus and sociality, and unhappily, unhealthily, distorts into introspection and solitude. In Christianity, this inversion of psychic and gospel truth pragmatically means God is no longer Love. God is no longer the Creator, the caring parent. God is no longer the Redeemer, the freedom-giver. God is no longer the Holy Spirit, the giver of wholeness. The world is simply allowed by God; it is the Devil’s device, the portal of hell and damnation in disguise. God is the law-giver. God is He who requires you pay him for your indolence before his law. God does not save you, you must save yourself and he gives you an example: Jesus bleeding and slowly asphyxiating upon a cross. God will not make you holy, you must strive to be holy as He, Spirit, is holy, and so you must shred and shed every aspect of your self that is not spirit. You must flee the world and all its ways. At the very least, you must shun it, look away from it. Within a matter of decades after Jesus, Christianity looks to rules and laws to curb not just egocentricity, but man’s very physicality.
The hermits emerge onto the world stage as the exemplars for this new “spiritual” insight.[x] In rigorous self-analysis and the austere renunciation of the world they sought inner calm and serenity. Time and circumstance will slowly move them into communities, and these will incorporate under rules governing shared responsibilities and ideals. They are called monasteries, communal dwellings for solitude. While monastic life emerges as early as the third century, Benedict of Nursia and his “rule” are usually received as the cornerstone of Western monasticism. His rule sets out to establish a very Christian community, albeit one very contained and hierarchically structured. It is a formula of obedience to the will of God through selfless obedience to the needs and goals of the community, regulating as best possible an undistracted environment of work, study, and prayer [body, mind, and soul].
Monasticism grew rapidly between Benedict’s sixth century and the dawn of the reformation. During the so-called dark-ages monastic communities were not only shelter for them seeking solace of soul, but a bulwark to ground surrounding communities left somewhat adrift in the dissolution of imperial control and oversight. Thanks to charitable contributions and managerial savvy, their increasing acquisition of wealth and land allowed them to foster, support, promote local agricultural, commercial efforts, and trade. They gave care and space to many who for various reasons might well be treated less than equitably. Admittedly, that does not mean they were treated equitably within monastic walls, but they were given a dignity the world would have undeniably denied them.[xi] The great monastic houses were also preserves for knowledge. They collected texts, copied them out, promoted scholarship, and provided education to worthy candidates. They, in brief, kept the fragments of empire functional while the divers cells of the great European nation-states gestated.
In the early thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi and Dominic Caleruega established organizations that opened the monastic model. The unity of prayer, work and study that was the bulwark of the Benedictine rule were maintained, but an emphasis was shifted. The work becomes, not confined to the monastic enclosure, but sent out into the world to heal in body and spirit, to teach, to preach. The work is no longer in support of the establishment, but in support of humankind. It is missionary. It is a definitive move from a primary focus on self-perfection toward exemplifying gospel hope and enlightenment in and for the world. The Franciscans and the Dominicans may have been as well intentioned as their enclosed confreres, but they were entities of their times. They were as prone to reinforcing the structures and practices of the contemporary church as any other group within the church. Here is an age wherein the rites had descended into an incomprehensible assemblage of signs and symbols, wherein the language of the church was no longer the language of its people, wherein the masses were less catechized than ever, wherein simple devotions were proffered the masses as succour for the dearth of means for spiritual maturation, wherein superstitions flourished in lack of understanding, and the designated teachers of teachers, the academics, were careening over the edge of all reality with arguments that defied the proper bounds of both logic and faith. The times may have given us the splendours of the gothic, a magnificence of treasure in glass and stone, soaring structures and intricate objects of devotion and ritual, but it all stood upon an unsure foundation. Despite all the fascination of the age with deciding which had priority, faith or knowledge, neither were well treated. For all its ecclesiastical grandeur, the church had opulently lost its way, clarity of teaching, and groundedness of faith. Coupling this, the great monastic houses and religious orders had grown in power and influence to become something akin to transnational corporations. Such expansive power tends to breed insularity of mind, corruption of founding purpose, and excite both wariness and hostility in others vying for power, specifically emerging nation-states and their ambitious potentates. The monastic entity was ripe for both reform and for plucking.
Whatsoever the potentates may have wrecked upon the monastic institutions within their reach, it is Luther’s excoriation of them that for large parts of Christendom cause their deflation, their destruction. They had been established as ideal Christian communities—microcosms wherein property was to be minimal and held in common, all work was for the common good and general welfare, where life was lived as a beacon of selflessness shining within the communities of man, and where every effort was consecrated in making real Paul’s admonishment that the Christian “pray ceaselessly”. Luther, a monastic, did not see the reality of the day at-one with that ideal. Ceaseless prayer was no longer a definitive mindfulness of thanks for this world, this life and all its blessings, it was no longer an authentic selfless love of self and this world, it was no longer a living worship and adoration of the creator, redeemer and sanctifier of this world. It had become an introversion, a self-absorbing self-concern. It did not permeate work and study and worship. An inspired effort to exemplify the “community of man” had diminished into being an escape from man, an escape from the world of man. A soulfulness defined by thankfulness and authentic caring had deformed into a multiplication of times to recite a multiplication of prayers.
While Luther and his fellow reformers defenestrated the monastic experiment, to the south of all this upheaval, two souls standout among them seeking to re-form monastic practice. John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila recognized both a balanced view of the world and of prayer had been compromised. Body and soul, world and spirit, may be a unit, but the root of all that is seen and unseen, love, cannot be free without a sense of focus, without orderliness, without a proper “control over” the panoply of human passions. While a discipline is the requisite of any accomplishment, there are no set forms or formulae for prayer, for being prayerful. Being prayerful is not about feeling, thinking, or doing, but about being itself, about being open to being, about being loving, first and foremost of one another, then of all created things, and last, of oneself. The prayerful love of self is humility, a living knowledge that love is not a human tour de force, but a power beyond the ever self-concerned quotidian man, a grace, a power that flows through the soul from the Creator of the world into the world.
Theresa and John are of a mind that humility, selflessness before God, is honed in detachment. The more one is tied to things, the less freedom one enjoys for openness to God. One learns detachment through privation, the ultimate privations being the notions of self-esteem and self-sufficiency. It is only when one is left with nothing but a darkness of self, that one is freed to fall back unto God. Here, in this moment, God communicates himself. It is an illumination of the psyche beyond all intellection. It cannot be taught. It cannot be learned. It exceeds all desires, all prayer. One must learn to silently—in mind, body, soul, and heart—wait for God. God, for whom all is possible, comes when man knows his darkness, knows his emptiness, his mere vessel-ness. Having abandoned all hope and want to fill, to ful-fill, oneself with pleasures, distractions, even detachments, the soul simply awaits God to fill it with his-self. Here the soul “loves God and loves that which God loves”. It is a “spiritual union”, a “spiritual marriage”. Such spiritual athleticism is not a universal vocation. It is special and gracious call to perfect a passivity of self before God, an abandonment of all except his glory. Such vocation acts as a beacon, a bulwark for Christendom, and preserves the ideal of the sovereignty of God over the world of man, the gracious brilliance of God over the distracting glitter of human desire and accomplishment. Such Olympian vocation does not, however, exempt all others, for it is universally true that no body, no soul, is well served without exercise, proper diet, and discipline, that no being is poised toward its wholeness that does not silently bow itself before its sociality, its immediate and cosmic environment.
While Teresa and John seek to redirect monastic focus, others act to take the prayerful anchor of the monastic heritage and ply it toward a worldly presence and mission. Ignatius Loyola organizes a para-military company of saints and scholars to reset the boundaries of the faith and make “being church” something viable, relatable and relevant for all manner of men. There follows an explosion of religious “societies”, “congregations”, “orders” to care for the sick, the poor, the outcast, to preach to the heathen, to teach the young, to form learned and dedicated clerics, etc. In time, certain among the reformed churches would again become open to monasteries and religious houses. The last century witnessed the establishment of an ecumenical religious house, the community of Taize. It presents a renewed aspiration to make in the world for the world a beacon of Christly love, a community of understanding and reconciliation where, in the words of its founder, Brother Roger, “kindness of heart and simplicity of life” are the centre of everything. The monastic ideal of an ideal Christian community to act as exemplar continues.
Quietism and Pietism
The “Reformation” did not end because certain parties sat down and signed a treaty at Westphalia. That document merely halted military hostilities, for the most part. The ebullience of the reformation, both in its Protestant and Roman flavours, had a need to clearly, well, and adamantly define doctrines and church structure. While Rome vigilantly dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” with its dogmatic pronouncements at Council of Trent, its also opened its doors to every enactment of the splendiferous, encouraged every pious devotion, and, confessedly, heartened a certain amount of moral and spiritual rigorism with reinvigorated promotion of the cult of the martyred saints. The private liberties of piety and devotion, the promotion of the stoic cult of martyrs, such can stir open the chasm twixt the littleness of man and the grandeur of God. Chasms always beg to be filled. The Protestant churches had no singular doctrinal position. There were elements most agreed upon: the supremacy of scripture, the dominical sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, the teachings of the early church councils, the satanical nature of the papacy. Beyond such, there was not common ground, and thus the protestation was not only against Rome, but one another. They became denominations of the one universal church. Liturgically, eschewing the pomp of papacy and relying on scripture only, they became—in large part–rather drab spaces and places for the reading and teaching scripture and the accepted understanding of scripture. Pedagogy is not known to capture the imagination, and religion does properly exist to do just that, to stir with an image of the Holy a life open to the Holy. People hungry for a connectedness to the holy began to seek out avenues of approach the recitation of scripture and the enunciation of dogma cannot provide. Thus, neither the Reformation nor the counter-Reformation were settled matters. In the seventeenth century, issues of heart and mind would continue to evolve, chiefly in two major “movements”. The first was rational. It took seed mostly in Roman circles. It was, in part, a reaction to the emotional content in Roman piety and religiosity. It was concerned with grace, with man’s sinfulness, and with God’s action in the human soul. The second was emotive. Its first shoots are within the Protestant churches, particularly the Lutheran. It sought to balance the intellectual feats of dogmatics with the rest of man, with the redeemed man’s sensitivities and feelings, with man as man-in-the-world for the sake of the world. It set out to address the ennui in faith and morals that was accruing to the dry preaching of church. However, both these “movements” and those that throughout the following centuries derive from them, have overlapping aspects.
Luther and Calvin, each in their own way, had very precisely set the boundaries around man’s abilities and the free flow of good through the human soul that had, by grace, been opened to the Fount of all grace. These positions seemed straightforward and secure. Rome, likewise, endeavoured to enunciate its position, specifically that God’s grace was necessary, but man retained a will free to accept it and cooperate with it. This “sufficient” grace was offered to all men. Cornelius Jensen, researching the works of Augustine, became convinced the great saint was not of such mind. In his arguments against Pelagius, Augustine looked upon man as an utter ruin. Resultant of his sinfulness, man can neither freely nor rightly feel, think, will, or act. God must “illuminate” his faculties that they be capable of properly functioning. Only this grace, this favour of God can overcome human ego-determinedness and bondage, and release man to the propriety of his being. Furthermore, this “irresistible” divine power is not intended for all men, simply the “predestined” for glory.
The Jansenists embraced this as their founding thesis. Like the Calvinists, who were on this issue also indebted to Augustine, they demanded subscription to a rigorous moral code. Man is called to perfect contrition for his sins, and the sacraments and devotions of the church are necessary to such end. Salvation, however, resides solely in God’s grace. Augustine in so arguing was making a thrust against Pelagius who had declared man self-sufficient as the creation of God and the redeemed of God. The Jansenist position did not consider the fulness of Augustine’s writings. It did not appreciate that Augustine was not a systematic theologian so much as a pastor, and that his works range from the polemical to the exhortative. Augustine’s positioning shifts according to the need of the argument or the person before him. He does write that man is an “utter ruin”, and argues that only grace saves man, but he also claims: “the God who without us made us, will not without us save us”. Augustine does not understand the biaxial grace and works, God’s love and man’s response in faithfulness as items antithetical one to another. They are ways of viewing man from differing perspectives, and he does not shy away from taking differing perspectives according to the need before him. As Augustine’s writings exerted enormous influence in theology and spirituality for more than a millennium, it is unfortunate that this aspect of his work is not respected when theologs go looking for the anchor of tradition. The Jansenist’s fatal error rested not in revisiting a fifth-century saint’s argumentations. Their ruin rested equally in partitioning Augustine’s thought, and being tone-deaf to time and terminology. In an age reeling over the reformers’ notions of “by faith alone”, “by grace alone”, what “Catholic” would proffer their most emblematic phraseology? [xii] Rome condemned the movement. But it stood a volley exposing the fact that the Roman church had within it a spiritual equivocation, a very “protestant” wariness that was abetted in its cult of the martyrs, and its teachings regarding penance and the sacrament of confession.
Taking up this discounting of human efficaciousness is quietism. Quietism has many ancestors: the ancient stoics, the Hesychasm of the early Greek church, the mediaeval Cathars, Albigenses, and Bogomils, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross. Its methodology is “the prayer of silence”, contemplation. The mind cannot conjure up images, indulge in imagination. Neither can it enter discursive thinking, drawing one idea out of another, creating an internal rational conversation. Contemplation is not meditation. It is the closing off of all sensible, imaginative and rational faculties, that emptied of all, “in silence” of self, of self-consciousness, the soul waits upon God to come to it. Its goal is perfection, unity with God. This is sometimes understood as sinlessness, or more realistically, as the divine presence burning away all sin and its stain in the brilliant light of love. Its founding theses is: man is impotent, and only God can effectively act. Which, admittedly, opens the question, is there then a “prevenient” grace that “goes-before”, that prepares and allows man to empty his self of all in contemplation. If there is not such, then man is not totally impotent, or contemplation is wholly the work of God, a predestined construct totally outside the powers of man. The movement’s seventeenth century incarnation has three chief formulators: Miguel de Molinos, Jeanne Marie Guyon, and Francois Fenelon.
It is Molinos who sets out the most extreme form. Man is called to annihilate all desire, and thereby free his soul that it may become one with God. The soul must also close itself off from self consideration and self examination and rely solely upon God to act. Prayer cannot avail itself of any images or thoughts. Prayer is silence before God, a total passivity before God. To this point, Molinos stands, for the most part, within orthodox tradition regarding contemplation. He then veers into the questionable, then the unorthodox, and finally, the heretical. The pious concern for saints, even for the earthly Jesus, are about “sensible items” and thus, to be avoided. The sacraments of the church are to be received in simple passivity. Penances and works of mercy are useless distractions. The same holds for temptations. They are to be ignored. If one falls to them, that too is to be ignored; it is a matter of nature and the devil’s control of it. Obedience to any authority is merely a matter of outward conformity. When all desires are extinguished, all thoughts banished, when the soul reduces itself to nothing before God, then, in this mystical death, God comes with peace and perfection.
Guyon was less gnostic and less disparaging of cult in her approach, but her focus is the supremacy of contemplation. One needs to be free of attachment to any image in prayer. Such only obscure the presence of God, and the ability to “feel” God. Leaving behind all distractions of the world, in pure contemplation God will come, and the soul will know its fulness, a fulness of God within. It is a mysticism of passivity before God, and of the effusive feeling of God.
Fenelon tried to steer a course between the moral vacuity of Molinos and the effusiveness of Guyon which he both admired and found ripe with spiritual danger. He examined the writings of the great spiritual writers and mystics. He proposed five stages of love from the simple love of God for the good things he has made in this world, to the love of God as the supreme good, to an elementary love of God for himself, to a state of love wherein God is loved in hope of an eternal life with him, to the final stage wherein God is loved without any concern for oneself, even one’s own salvation. It constitutes, not so much a passivity, as an indifference to anything beyond the will of God. Here, in contemplative surrender, the soul experiences God’s presence. But this is not a sustained state.[xiii] It is a graced state that resides along side of meditation and general prayerfulness. It is not an abandonment of the world or of self; it is a receiving of world and self simply according to God’s will. It is about acquiring a spirt of indifference to self-satisfaction that the soul be satiated in God alone.
We find something of this “in the world but not of the world” mindset in George Fox, founder of the Quakers. Calvin’s thought was ripe with the biblical notion of the “priesthood of all believers”. Puritanism brought a sensitivity for that to England. This priestly, this mediatorial power, is a first step in Fox’s thought. Fox rejects everything about church dogma, ritual, and structure. Christ is not found in a book or through a rite. Christ is the light within every being. Christ is immediate to the soul. Christ is within the soul. His light exposes both man’s sin and God’s mercy and love. It brings the believer out of sin and darkness, and makes him perfect, sinless. It condemns them that believe it not. The believer, having been made perfect in Christ, is called to be Christ in the world here and now. As such, the Christian turns toward the world with kindness, with a sincere love of humanity. As such also, the Christian cannot be a partaker in the world’s greed or the violence that it produces. The Christian “turns the other cheek” and therein knows suffering for God’s sake. The “children of God” enjoy the liberty of God, but they are not lawless. They are transfigured, living according to the heart and mind of God as did Jesus Christ who dwells within. The transfigured bear a charism. They are prophets among men, a living witness within the world. The early gatherings were given to various outbursts of the “Spirit”, speaking in tongues, prophetic utterances, etc. but ripened into more contemplative events, into “waiting” for the word of God to speak.
While quietism was intent upon perfection through the denial of self, pietism sought out something very “sensible”. It was a response to two differing situations: the dryness of the church’s proclamation of faith, and the awakening fascination with the predictability of cosmic functions.
In the seventeenth century, as scientific confidence took hold, many began to think of the cosmos as a well engineered machine. It was not only decipherable according to certain natural laws, it was, through the understanding of those laws, predictable. It may have been made by a great and primal intelligence, but such a magnificent mind would not be interested in the minutia of its every minute part, most specifically, man. God was understood as a distant inventor. He had made the cosmos-machine to function according to a certain internal dynamic, and he had left it to run its natural course. He was intellectually above meddling with it. He was not the providential God of Christendom. He did not bend his ear to the prayers of man. Such was the thrust of Deism. It affirmed a divine being, but not a being interested in the particulars of man’s quotidian world. It led first to a morality of reason, then of common sense, and lastly to moral utilitarianism. It led also to empty pews. It harboured a distain for organized religion. Scripture found itself being critiqued by many who were angry for, as they saw it, having been duped by idolatrous notions of God, and misled by lies dressed up as miracles and a God-man. Scripture was ripe with falsities created to keep the common man under the control of the elite. Jesus was simply a good man whose life was distorted to verify this great deceit connived by his disciples. There was no empathy for “sacred narrative”, for myth, as the language of the psyche, and the church was then—as it in most places still is—at grave fault for simply reiterating the narratives of scripture and not breaking open the sacred stories and plainly delivering their meaning.
Deism may have emptied pews, but it did not bring Christianity to its end. Many continued to attend to the church. The spirituality with which they were met was not substantially more than a rote recitals of insipidities. Church was both bland and boring. The spirit of man, however, is creative. It wants to seek out the new, move into novelty. It needs, thus, to be free, to be able to breathe and find the open air within which to do so. Pounding out the same story, the same demand for duty and obedience do not breathe life or give room to life. The church needed to speak to the whole of human nature. The reformation’s focus had been to define its position. That translated as the accentuation of words over action, knowing over doing, scripture and dogma over the vitality of being-Christian. If, as all Christendom believed, Jesus-Christ be present within, there is a connectedness to him and his vocation that is tangible, real, animate, and animating. It is wholistic and, thus, addresses the whole of man’s nature. Such is the basic vision of Pietism.
The piety Pietism upholds is an emotive experience of God or his Christ. Its focus is a depth of religious feeling expressing itself in devotions, both private and communal, and in social action for the well-being of others. While such orientation has always been part of Christianity, it had been somewhat suppressed in the reformation. Devotion and emotion too easily conjured visions of superstitions and things “Roman”, items seen as having defiled the scriptural message, and defalcated the church of its truth.
Philipp Jakob Spener, in his Pia Desideria, provides the groundwork of the movement. Salvation may be by faith alone, and man may be both sinner and saint, but the Christian life is rooted in an intimate relationship with Christ, the redeemer. The vibrancy of this relationship with the divine and holy informs all aspects of one’s being. It is “experiential”. It is “living faith”. It is a “religion of the heart”. It is rooted in a real and sensible conversion experience, a “reawakening”, a “new birth” so intensely visceral that it propels man from sin and into a new state of being, a life of “perfection”–as a partaker–with Jesus in the very life of God. Faith is not an intellectual assent to the items of the creed. Faith is about a vitalizing relationship. It is a life-journey shared with Christ and them that partake in his Christ-hood. Faith is the adventure of a gospel (evangelical) people making real in the world, as did Jesus with thankfulness and joy, God’s care and concern. August Francke was most instrumental in spreading this spirituality. However, while both men envisioned this as a continuance of the reformation reinvigorating the church’s vocation to witness and service, and while pietism seems an orthodox revival of the mediaeval mysticism that weaves its way through Martin Luther, Johann Arndt, and Jakob Boehme, its practical accentuation of the “priesthood of all believers” excited opposition from the establishment.
Pietism was prescient in stressing the church needed to move from being dogmatic to being pastoral, from being a church of words to being a church of spirit. Nikolaus Zinzendorf took Spener’s focus upon the Lutheran church in Germany and shifted it toward its natural scope—the universal church. Denominationalism and inter-denominational bickering are a blight upon the church. His is the initiating thrust toward inter-communion and ecumenism. There ought to be as a defining marker within Christianity a charitable sensitivity for the abiding familial bond among all believers. There ought to be throughout Christendom a living acknowledgement that in all dialogue and interaction primacy belongs to the heart. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher will translate the pietism of his childhood and give it philosophical basis. His work continues to exert influence upon modern theology. While the emotive aspects within pietism can be demoted into subjectivism, it is by nature prayerful and pastoral, by thrust missionary. John Wesley and his “Methodism” (a methodology of prayer, study, and sacrament, fortified in fasting [bodily discipline] and a communal openness to the Holy Spirit of God) owe much to the pietist vision. The pietist freshet is reflected also in sundry movements from the seventeenth century forward: the expansion of devotions in the Roman church, the varied revival and charismatic movements that begin in the United States, the liturgical movements within Anglicanism, and the plethora of missionary societies and organizations that arise across Western Christendom.
The evolution of modern psychology
Plato would cringe to read Darwin. He asserted the cosmos moves from higher forms to lower, not from lower to higher. The highest form, the Ideal, is the true and invigorating reality. The mundane world in all its parts is merely an inferior copy, a lesser incarnation of the Ideal. In defence of his perspective, he is concerned with the rational mind, with a theory of knowledge, and as he stands at the threshold of such investigation, he has not access to centuries of consideration and investigation as to how sensation and the mind interface. He holds things “lower”, particular things, cannot be built up into something that is higher, universally true, and therefore, superior. We do not see a tree here, another there, and from those sensible experiences begin to formulate in our rational, our sense-superior, minds that which constitutes the essence of being a tree, the points necessary to define a thing as a tree. We come into this world with a mind full of patterns, and in applying them to lowly sensations, differentiate this from that. Indeed, the whole of our ever-changing world is but a copy of unchanging and eternal patterns that exist outside this world. These patterns, these “forms” or “ideas” are the supreme and only true reality, and they are humanly accessible in man’s highest form, his highest animating principle, his highest “soul”—reason.
Plato’s world understands man as having three layers of animation—a plant-like or sensitive soul, an animal-like or concupiscent soul, and a definingly human soul, reason. The rational soul is superior to the others and is the only aspect of man that is eternal. Aristotle would not disagree with this, although he understands knowledge is built up from processing sensation of individual and particular things to the universal idea of the constitutive of all things of a certain group. From the sensations of numerous, particular trees man comes to the knowledge of the qualities requisite to call a thing a tree, to the universal and true idea of tree.
The ancient Greek notion of three distinct animating principles (souls, psyches) within man, and the Plato-inspired prejudice of discounting the ability of lower to evolve into higher crash into the Christian understanding of soul and of man’s quest for wholeness. There is only one soul in man. One might debate that if God made man from the earth, the earthling was animated by the same forces that animated plant and animal, but that man might be truly, not only “by his hand”, but of “his image”, he breathed into his nostrils his very breath or spirit, giving him another source of animation, namely a godly soul. Neither the Hebrew thinkers nor the early formulators of Christian doctrine ever sought to explore such arcane avenues. God had made man and man had but one source of animation, one psyche, one soul. It is not until Augustine that the issue is concretized. While Augustine may not have been the first Christian scholar to plummet his soul, he was certainly among the most academically arduous about it. Man has one soul and it is a conflux of forces—sensible, concupiscible, and rational. Genesis specifies that when man was in Paradise these operated unitively. Man could walk with God, talk to the animals, and live with-in Eden in total harmony. Man misused his divine spirit, his freedom. He learned to separate things—good from evil, nature from shame, man from woman. There was no turning back. His own self was divided. All of man’s abilities to sense, to desire, to reason were dislodged from their primal integration. Man’s sensible, desirous and rational faculties entered into a war one with the other. The result of this internal belligerence renders man a ruin. He has lost his integrity; he is lost. He is expelled from the peace, harmony, and integrity of the world God made and into the ever increasingly divided world the misuse of his share of divine freedom generates. Only the omniscient and omnipotent God can redeem the situation, sort things out, and bring peace. Man, alienated internally and externally, is in the dark. God needs come from outside of him, “illuminate” him, bring him his own “gracious” presence, bring him the light to rightly feel, want, think, will, and act. Without this corrective power from “beyond”, man is a hopeless ruin. Man is the sinner, the one cut off from the truth of his own self, no longer at-one with God or his creation. Latter theologians would become caught up in the whirl of world-discounting that came with the fall of empire, stoicism, and Gnosticism. They would broaden the rift twixt the light of God shinning above and beyond man and man’s internal darkness. They would claim man’s only hope of release from his psychic plight is to abandon everything except the quest for God and his light, to shed a “fallen” humanity in hope of a divine absorption. Plato had followed his mentor, Socrates, in conflating moral being and knowing. To know what is right is to have the power to do what is right, and that power is irresistible. From Plato Augustine inherited this notion that psyche is a rational entity, properly aloof from whatsoever saps of sensation or desire, and that rightly knowing translates into rightly doing. By such disposition, salvation becomes not a matter of incarnation, but decortication. Thomas Aquinas tried to ameliorate the deafening roar for a transcendental transformation into another world by separating moral being from the theory of how we know things, but Augustine’s formulations still command considerations in spirituality, and still inform fundamentalist interpretation in theology.
Augustine needed to explain why man is ego-centric, insular, covetous, mean, driven by wants and desires, and why man can rise above such. He needed to explain why even when man attempts something “good”, something seemingly loving and other-oriented, there is still a taint of self-interest. He needed to explain why there seems to be a voice within calling man to be more. He needed to explain why, if man listens to such voice, he is capable of more. He predates William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung by a millennium and a half. He did not think of soul, of psyche, as something that can be analyzed as faceted, as something spoken of as having streams conscious and subconscious, as having a blind childish thrust, a capacity for socialization, a compromising power capable of bridging the two, as having multiple dimensions beyond that which makes its way through the quotidian world, as having a primal thrust toward being an integrated being integrating into the environment of others, of world, of cosmos. Ego, id, superego, shadow, animus, anima, and the host of differentiations modern psychology marks as aspects of the one power of being we call man’s psyche, man’s soul, are for Augustine aspects of sinful man having lost the capacity to integrate his faculties that he might function as an integrating being. All agree the primal thrust for such integrity comes from outside the stream of mundane-dealing consciousness. Augustine calls it God, the grace of God, the illumination by God, the indwelling of God. Call it as you will, the investigators of man’s animating principle, past and present—taken outside their cultural indicatives—speak the same basic analysis. Man is internally conflicted, from depths unknowable propelled from innocence, naivete, insularity, toward wisdom, from the childish acclamations “ME!” and “mine”, toward being able to authentically move from “I”, to “We”, and ultimately to “Thou”.
For Augustine and all of theology and spirituality in this wake, both the Roman and Reformed, man the sinner is some mix of ego and id, and God the primal thrust for integration evoking from beyond the immediate realms of consciousness. This is not to demote the all transcending Power of the cosmos to a human power. In religions, the human psyche has always been portrayed as an imaging, a picturing, a glimmering of the all-transcending Power, the Ideal Truth. Here it needs be kept vigilantly before the rational and critical mind that the talk of powers in philosophy, in psychology (both modern and ancient), in theology, in religion and its ritualizations in words and sacraments is always about picture-making. That which is God and that which is the very soul of man are beyond man’s rationalizations because they are the very items we name as the milieu within which we define what is cosmos and what is man. Thus, they are not so much de-fined, enclosed by clear and distinct idea, as vaguely intuited. They might be more appropriately spoken of as colours rather than forms. Psychology has its sacred terms, as does every religion. They both constantly, when entering into the depths of the matter, talk in myths, narratives. They both employ a therapy of ritualistic action, catharsis, communal dialogue and confession. They are both, at root, matters in the mercy and grace of man the artist, the story teller, the picture maker–be that with paint, movement, or sound. They are both types of art therapy for the soul ever vulnerable to lose itself in some false concretizing, materializing, and too small vision of self and world.
To speak of man as sinner or of man as caught up in a battle between the forces of id and super-ego, of childish self-assertion and the demands of his inherent sociality, is not to absolve man of culpability. Man, social to the core, is by nature response-able man. To respond, one must first be open to listening, to focus upon what is being said—internally, externally. To focus requires faith, a basic orientation of trust, of openness to the other, of openness to novelty. If, in Christianity’s iconography, “Hell” is the state of forever being closed off from the true vibrancy of life, faith is the state of constantly being open to the spirit that gives life, a spirit, by grace, resident within all God’s works, within the soul’s inner vocation to integrity and wholeness, within the world’s exteriorizing evocation to integration and harmony. When the disciples of Augustine speak of good as flowing solely from the grace of God within the soul, they say no more than selflessness is not to be found in the quotidian powers of psyche, that true love and realistic care and concern flow from deeper chambers within the soul, the very primal thrusts of man as social-man, of man as being-in-the-world, of man as focused in faith, attuned to the truth within his very essence.
Once the flow of selfless goodness and love is understood as an iconography, it is necessary to step back from it and appreciate it as a depiction of creative power within the psyche. Plato, obsessed with the unreliability of the ever-changing world, opined everything changeable was but a poor copy, a depiction, of the ever unchanging and sublime, the ideal, and with that a dichotomy is made twixt the ideal and the real. There is engrained into Western thought an inclination that creative movement can only proceed from high to low, from the good to something lesser, as the continued hostility to Darwin and evolutionary theory evidence. Social upheavals and uncertainties seized upon this intellectual inclination and moralized upon it. If man were ever to escape the conflicts of the real and unhappy world within which he discovers himself, he would need some power or means of abnegating its reality as the path to the ideal. The path is to deny the existence of the poor copy, and at every turn to run from its embrace. Deny the body, the pleasures of the body. Deny the world and its sociality. Insulate self in the one aspect that is idealizing: the rational mind. It knows ideas and ideals and so must be man’s most intimate nexus with the Ideal. The ideal man is not, unfortunately, an abstraction of mind. Man is a being with a mind, and mind is one among many of man’s internal mechanisms. It properly functions for deciphering the items of the world and navigating through them. Man is more than mind, as he is more than sensations, desires, wants, needs, vocations, and evocations. The ideal and real, this world and another, eros and agape, etc. cannot be taken as permanent one-way streets or eternally divided states. They are abstracted notions taken out of one reality for nothing more than the purpose of analysis. They are logical isolations for the sole purpose of being able to dissect and examine their parts, their functions. They cannot be left torn apart and passed off as something vitally whole. They are intertwined aspects of being that inform one another, lines of a double-helical dynamic. God and cosmos, mind and body, desire and love, ideal and real—these are dialogical partners speaking to each other, affecting each other, effecting each other, the eternal coparceners of each other. So also is true of their “scientific” progeny, the ego and id, the consciousness and subconsciousness, etc.
The morality of the materialized psyche
A sensitivity for the intimacy of matter and mind, body and soul, material and immaterial has never been absent from philosophical and theological thought. A certain despondency, however, presents itself as Renaissance optimism descends into arguments about priority. Where resides the groundwork of being, of knowing? Is it in the real or the ideal, the concrete and sensible or in the abstract and mental? By the sixteenth century, the idea that soul is but a subtle form or manifestation of matter is rather well accepted. Philosophers look to base man’s moral-social actions and aspirations upon purely logical ground, on quasi-mathematical grounds. Man’s only “moral principle” is the pleasure/pain principle (Thomas Hobbes, David Hume). Some would state that more subtly: pleasure is not the end of rightful action but its reward (Joseph Butler), or pleasure resides within a self-evident idea of good (Samuel Clark, Thomas Reid), or pleasure is simply natural to the altruistic act (Francis Hutcheson). Others asserted that sympathy, the ability to place oneself in another’s position, is the true basis of moral action, and this “social emotion” presents as a sense of pleasure and fulfillment, even if the sympathy is tied to some negative emotion such as sorrow (Jean-Jacques Rousseau). For others, sympathy acts as a type of conscience wherein man can look upon his intentions from the point of view of others (Adam Smith). These sixteenth and seventeenth century philosophical notions regarding the source of psychic fulfilment and satiation are founded in reason divorced from the idea of a transcending power. They will gradually sever themselves from society as well, and assert the autonomy of the individual, an idea that erupts in full power in Nietzsche’ s ideology wherein the great man, rising even above Machiavellian man, becomes the “superman”, maker of his own rules. Man, without a transcendent to inspire and summon him forth, becomes simply practical man. Practicality devolves into utilitarian man, man the user of things. Despite Dewey-eyed cries from all that man’s ultimate pleasure and fulfillment reside in the “greater good”, the exaltation of the utility of the world–in all its forms–increasingly propels man into being insular and even anti-social, a sorrow evidenced in consumerism and product disposability, in the impersonality of corporations seeking only their own profitability, and increasingly in governments as they seek to emulate the “bottom-line”, impersonal utilitarianism of the business model, thereby reducing man himself to an item in a ledger book, a thing defined as potentially disposable according to his placement as asset or expense. The insularity suffered in the loss of a transcending power to inspire and summon, to which man stands as responsible, is an isolation of man, of man’s psyche. It is an isolation from man’s truth, his sociality. Man, therefore, disassociated from the other, comes to fear the other. He feels, from his socially-contracted, self-constrained, unnerved and fracturing depths, that he must protect himself from the other, guard, shield, even arm himself. Man-in-it-for-himself, whether that be an individual man, a society, a corporation, a government, is exactly that which Hume had prognosticated: the fear-ful savage at war with all about him—nature, knowledge, man. Man, of his psychic constitution, requires a transcending power to trust in. Some may opine that the all transcending Power is merely a projection of the dynamic of the psyche’s thrust for integration. Yet, even accepting that, unless man can put a “mask” upon it, address it, respond to it—as sacred narratives and gesticulations, and rituals of sundry type have anciently allowed him so to do–man still is a person, and needs speak to himself personally, needs to speak before himself personally. Priests, confessors, gurus, trusted friends, confidants, psychologists and psychiatrists have enacted that role for many, but there would be no role were there not a script, a Word to emulate. There would be no role were there not a persona dramatis to embrace, and for man at his most vulnerable and intimate, what “character”, what characteristic, is more empowering and embracive than Love? If man matters it is because he is “graced” within with a light, a voice, a power that emanates throughout all men, and summons to responsibility, authenticity, and maturation in both. And as it is often the case that that which is obvious is not necessarily that which is patent to the understanding, let it be affirmed here that godliness or godlessness in a soul is not a matter of “going” to church, temple, or mosque; it is about the soul’s “humility”, its selflessness before the transcending one—whatsoever name man may give to the “mask” of wholeness.
Before anyone wagging his head at the above think to wag also his finger, every man, as Luther presciently put it, is a confluence of self destructiveness and a capacity for authentic good, simul peccator et justus, simultaneously sinner and saint. Since the Apostle Paul, Christian iconography has set Adam, the icon of historical man, as the contraindicative of Christ, the icon of potential man. Yet both Christ and Adam are graced beings. Adam is the potential that flowers in the Christ. Adam is the promise of grace manifest as the Christ. To situate Adam in darkness and name him sinner may be artistically proper to Paul’s chiaroscuro sketch, but it is a purposefully taken licence denying Adam his wholeness and his truth to highlight that of the Christ. Adam is the one given both a curse and a promise that become comprehensible and whole only in the Christ who completes both curse and promise and so becomes hailed both true man and true God. Without balance, theology and spirituality teeter upon a dangerous edge. The notions of pleasure and pain, sympathy, inherent insight into right and wrong, while in a presumed secular garb, simply mirror the tension anciently expressed as sin and grace, ideal and real. They must be understood as perspectives within the singular dynamic of man’s psyche, his power of being as being-in-the-world. To do otherwise, to “draw a line in the sand” between them, as too many self-righteously take liberty to do, is to demand a point to absolute separation, be that between heaven and hell, liberal and conservative, wise and stupid, ordinary and elite. Neither man nor his world can function in an unending state of artificially induced antithesis.
Tension can hold things together for a time; it cannot resolve them. It provides no avenue of transcending. It is an enforced coarctation. It has no dynamic. It is not creative. It is a ground with the potential to spawn fear and loathing and to too easily construe them as virtues. Man cannot renounce his humanity and fly off to God. Man cannot denounce his animal nature and cloister himself in some feigned world of ideas. Man cannot enisle himself from society. Man cannot ignore the quotidian nature of determinism, or surrender the vitality of his moral, his evaluative freedom. Man cannot embrace his own concern, his own well-being, his own pleasures and ignore the sociality of his existence. Man cannot be whole by exscinding one or more aspects of the reality that is man. If there is to be peace twixt God and man, freedom and fate, sense and reason, individual and society, man and nature, then man must find the path to integrating them into a whole. He must comprehend their powers and make those powers to function for the benefit of each and for all. Man cannot confuse the dynamic of life that apposes one item against another as an opposition, an either/or tension wherein only one can be the victor, only one must be the victor. Such dynamic is its own pulse to transcendence, and that transcendence is realistically, authentically, accomplished in the work of respecting all the forces at work within man and world, and bringing them into harmony. Health, individual and corporate, resides in the integration of powers, not their negation, denial, denigration, or denunciation. This is not revelation. Our words and notions of whole and holy, sanity and sanctity approximate each other with reason.
The future of Eucharist
Eucharist is the pathway set out within the church as the constitutive of church. It is the ritual action of word and sacrament to form a community of partakers with Jesus in Christhood. It is the spirituality of salvation—individual and corporate. It is the formula for the maturation of man into God’s incarnation in world, for the world, God’s world. It is a ritual less and less attended. The Second Vatican Council excited many, both Roman and Reformed, to revisit the eucharist and to make it more relevant to the present age. It largely managed to execrate ritual, myth and mystery, and decoct whatsoever was left into the bland and uninspiring.[xiv] In the Roman churches, having long denied to the masses a basic familiarity with scripture, readings were stacked atop one another, and no one thought to reflect that too much information is as useless as none. Silence and quiet for reflection and meditation were expunged that everyone might be kept busy in reciting psalms and antiphons, the only purpose of which could be memorization, for such activity certainly rouses not spiritual formation. The once named “sacred mysteries” of bread and wine made a memorial for the sake of making a community, a “holy communion”, became the playground of pedestrian sound-bites and chatter, all “presided” over by a cleric become more ring-master than ritualist. All of it—insipid, bland, boring, wearisome, monotonous, tedious. What is the point of ritual when nothing is other than mundane? Where is the mystery when nothing is other than conspicuous commentary? Where is the prayerfulness wherein everything is an interminable buzz of clipped colloquialisms? Where is the evocation of soulfulness when everything is about keeping busy doing something spiritually exhaustive and intellectually enfeebling? And were all this not sufficient to make raving atheists of all Christendom, there is the dirge of ineptitude spewing from a multitude of pulpits, canting platitudes and repeating sacred narratives without ever a thought to breaking open their meaning and turning them into the Presence, the very voice of grace, the very light of God, to the present for the present as the Pre-sent of God. Confessedly, not every preacher is inept. Excellence is, however, as ever, rare. Confessedly, not every church is damned to blandness. Some evangelizers have enthusiastically embraced the “spectacle”. Gimmicks galore from pulsing sounds and colours, bands, and light-shows are produced with such steam as to galvanize the near dead. But, can a rock-show or the equivalent of an overly energized pop video evoke the grace of God from depths within, or does such merely startle with a moment of stupefying sensationalism? There is a difference between transmitting a sensitivity for the sacred and its existential joy through ritual practiced with dignity and decorum and using the sanctuary as a stage to excite “the Holy Ghost giggles” (a term my squirrelly mind could never have conjured).
This, note well, is not to claim every eucharistic celebration is a travesty, or that spectacle cannot be plied to good ends, as anyone familiar with the precise artistry of ritual to be found in many Anglican cathedrals will know. Processions, the glitter of vessels and robes, the awe of architecture, the magic of music, and the power of song–be it chant, anthem, or rallying hymnody—all these are but instruments whose artistic value and power reside not in them of themselves but in how they are used. Further to the point, there is a difference, a nuance perhaps, between art bent to spiritual end and “a good show”, something akin to Pius XII’s differentiation twixt the beauty of the nude and the nudity of the beauty. There is like case with preaching. Does it open scripture, with its variants of narrative, poetry, exhortation, and song, to the mind and heart of the congregation? Does it make patent the meaning? Is it true mystagogy? Does it inspire? Does it, most importantly, truly exude, extrude, and galvanize spirit? Better to give six well said sentences than a half-hour of sorry oratory creating no more than numbness of the mind and posterior. Whatsoever be done, it ought to be done according to the gathering, the place of gathering, and with a sincere sense of reverence, dignity and decorum. It is about creating–in the midst of the everyday and ordinary–a “sacred”, an extraordinary, time and place. It is about creating an environment for opening the depths of self to the depths of meaning-fulness itself. It is an intimate occasion wherein the faithful stand together before God. It is the occasion when the faithful stand with hearts bared, when the faithful stand naked before God and confess both sin and faith. It is an embracing occasion wherein the faithful together break bread, share of one cup, and acknowledge each to be to the other and for the other, to the world and for the world, none other than God’s Christ.
Why does such occasion not allure, evoke, adduce? Why has church allowed the holy community of eucharist to evaporate into “going to communion” or “receiving communion”? What, indeed, do such terms even really mean? How does one receive or go to a “holy incorporating” into Christhood? Do we need again revisit the entire exercise? No. I do not believe in throwing out the baby with the bath water. As with man, simul peccator et justus, sinner and saint, so too is it with the institutes of man. Nothing is unredeemable.
During my early sojourn in academia, it was not unacceptable to occasionally omit the mandatory mass in chapel and for a few to gather as a small eucharistic community. Strangely, however, we still vested, still draped a table in multiple cloths, ensured the prescribed candles and crucifix and other accoutrement were present, and followed the appointed texts. On occasion, if in library or a study hall, we sat around the table—a radical act for Romans–although the Puritans are known to have done so, as reportedly did the apostles and early Christians. The discombobulation with this practice was trying to take “church”, the ritual and ritual embellishments, out of chapel and duplicate them in some other space. If a community wishes to use a non-ecclesiastical space to celebrate the eucharist together, then there, with or without table, with or without seating, it ought to do so. There is no need to follow a lectionary. There is no need to “vest”, and to do such in such venue is as realistically inappropriate as it is for people in ordinary attire to assist at the holy table when the presiding minister is “vested”.[xv] There is no need to have other than cup of wine and some bread. Listen together to some sacred text, reflect together, pray together, mindful of the universality of church—from Jesus to the present–give an appropriate blessing, and share of the cup and the bread, embracing each other as children of one family, each made the pre-sent of God to and for each other and the world about. Perhaps this is where the thrust of eucharistic invigouration needs go—into the home, the office, the park. Perhaps that edifice, that piece of architecture we call “church”, ought to be reserved as the place the greater community of church can gather to more fully, more richly celebrate, the place exemplary where mundane time and space can be allowed to become wonderous, and the majesty and awe of God be made manifest in the depth of ritual action, in the unlatching of soul to myth and symbol, and in the dissipation of world-caution and guardedness. In such place, in such “moment”, with every artistry plied, can mind and heart be open, heart and hand be stirred. Perhaps then also, that place can become a beacon for spiritual counselling and direction, for learning and serious reflection. Perhaps the church will then need fewer priests, more catechists, more spiritual directors, more artists of divers type. Perhaps the spirituality of eucharist needs become more enshrined in the hands of all them that by faith and baptism are made priests, prophets, and governors. Perhaps were everyone baptized into Christ recognized as free to say to his/her family and intimate community “here is my body given, my life poured out, be thankful”, “church” would be a more tangible presence in soul, in home, in world. Perhaps, as in some communities, the consecratory words, “here is my body given, my life poured out, be thankful”, ought to be said or sung by all. Perhaps each ought to approach and stand at the holy table to receive the bread and cup, and having so received, turn to the one who follows and present the bread and the cup. There are some, having no sense for intimacy or ritual, who will immediately object such action will take too much time. If that be the case, if it be the case that the most intimate and important act of Christian ritual needs a stop-watch, then omit a lection, shorten the sermon, but do not rush Love’s most heartening words and embrace. Perhaps making each the minister of the sacrament will ripen ritual into living spiritual root. If the church is truly and manifestly the Body of Christ in the world, the reality of the resurrection, the tangible presence of the Risen One, can we any longer entomb it in a building, a time, or a certain group? Perhaps were all such things allowed to be, the governance of the church would become less clerical and insular. If it is the church, the whole of the church, that is called to say: “this is my body, my life given”, then so let it be. Perhaps then they that walk in sorrow and not-knowing will have their eyes opened, turn, and run to a new holy city, a new holy community, and with joyous heart proclaim: “It is true. We have seen. Christ lives”.
[i] By the time the church in Rome added the formal dismissal of “Ite missa est [go, this is the dismissal]”, the urgency of the gospel commission to “go” into the world with a divine purpose is lost to the awareness of the general congregant. Eucharist [Ευχαριστία], “thanksgiving” for God’s mercy in making man “partaker in Christ” becomes Mass [Missa]. By the early mediaeval period, when the eucharist has become indecipherable as a “holy communion”, both ritually and actually, by some preservative trick of the psyche, there is added after the dismissal the reading of the opening lines of the Gospel according to John, the great prologue recounting the descent of God to man, as man, for man. It is an eloquent rite of commissioning, of sending out into the world. It is a sorrow that it was, at best, a private prayer of the priest, an act completely shorn of “community”.
[ii] The Eucharist is the one and singular pathway of Christianity. It is the road provided for all who would partake with Jesus as the Christ in God’s action for the welfare of the world. It is the authorized discipline for “putting on” the heart and mind of God as his representative presence upon the earth, his here and now incarnation. Morning prayers (Lauds, Matins), evening prayers (Vespers, Evensong), the sacraments, the sacramental are all merely subsets, sub-functions, augmentations, extensions, of this founding, the fundamental rite.
[iii] The first Christians accepted the Hebrew sacred texts without question. They were the very texts that foreshadowed Jesus as the Messiah of God. Marcion (died 160 AD) rejected them. He insisted they were to be read literally, and the God they indicated was incompatible with the God Jesus preached. The God of the Hebrews was, therefore, a false God, merely the creator of the material world. It is debatable whether Marcion’s position is rooted in a rejection of Judaism for its rejection of Jesus and denunciation of Christianity, a reaction against the heretical Ebionites who insisted the laws and rules of Judaism apply to all Christians, a rebuttal of Gnosticism, or some conflation of these.
[iv] Cf: on the Holy Eucharist, on Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, on Baptism, on the Rites of Baptism, on Divine Service and Sacred Choreography 1, on Liturgy as spiritual exercise and the ills of heterodoxy 1, January 2012.
[v] It was the custom in Rome, at the end of the eucharistic prayer, to place into a cup of consecrated wine a piece of the bread. This cup was then sent to a neighboring community to be included in its eucharistic service as witness to the fact that the entire church shared in one eucharist. By the mediaeval period, the bread and wine are still mixed, but there is no sending of it to a neighbouring church, and the symbolism of the action is lost. Here it is taken as the reuniting of body and blood after their separation in the act of sacrifice, and thus, the ritualistic “resurrection”.
[vi] The reported spots of blood are now usually considered cases of a fungus, “wheat rust”.
[vii] Cf: regarding indulgences: Spirituality, Part 5, endnote xv, May 2017.
[viii] Inspired as a religious term has too often by Christians been misused. In-spira-tion is a “breathing into”, a giving life (spirit, soul) to, and in religious parlance, in every instance of use the ultimate breath, the ultimate Spirit, is God’s.
[ix] If one considers the evidence preserved within Christian scriptures, women were more inclined to liberty then men, and men very quickly found themselves reminding women “the freedom of the children of God” in this world has limitations. God may have come to man, but God came as a male, not a female. God forgave us all our sins, but did not move to disenfranchise the systems of this world, chief among them, patriarchy. Why would the God Jesus called “Father” wish to dis-establish a system of which he was supreme head and exemplar! Freedom and love move slowly within the human heart, and so the indicatory mantra of every entrenched system becomes the ambiguous “Do as I say” not “Do as I do”.
[x] Cf: regarding the contemplative and solitary life: Spirituality, Finding the Full Voice of Our Nature, paragraph 10, June 2016.
[xi] Cf: regarding monasticism: Can a Christian be an atheist?, endnote ii, October 2013.
[xii] Cf: on Sin, March 2013.
[xiii] Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross note that contemplation, imageless, non-discursive prayer, is to be limited to a half hour. There have always been aspirants seeking to gorge themselves with ecstasy, to prolong the experience as much as possible. Such, however, is a blatant attempt at “self-satisfaction”, and no respectable confessor or guide would tolerate this errant idea. The fruit of contemplation is openness to self and to others, not titillating self-insulation and world-escape.
[xiv] Cf: on Divine Service and Sacred Choreography 2, January 2012.
Further to this point, they that faithfully attend upon the sacred rites will undoubtedly object. Their devotedness colours their perspective. They need ask themselves why the rites are not growing the church, why the rites are not creating apostles, missionaries, evangelizers, why the secularized world has a distaste for the rite and word of the church.
Especially at weekday liturgies, the loyal souls that do regularly attend sit like islands in a sea of pews. There is no sense of community. There is no community. It is an occasion of private devotion, and a moment of gadding about to high-five “peace” is neither a sacred ritual, nor a component of community building, nor of communication, nor of communion. It is simply a silliness robbing undoubtedly sincere devotion of its value. It is here the presiding minister needs to gather all into chancel or sanctuary, and after the readings and prayers gather them closer, around the holy table itself. There is a ministerial duty to create a sensitivity to the Sacred’s incarnation into this time and place, its making of the wandering sheep a flock, his flock, a holy communion of all, the communion of the saints. A rote performance of a text, no matter how fondly or devotedly done, is a service to no one—neither God nor his people.
[xv] If any servant of the liturgy is vested, be it in Geneva gown, cassock and surplice, or traditional eucharistic vestments, then all others assisting at the holy table ought to be in like manner vested. It is simply rude to not do so. One ought to reflect upon the parable of the wedding guest who did not respect the venue and came casually attired. He was tossed out. Further to the point, it takes less than a minute to dress in gown, alb, or cassock and surplice. Isaiah’s cry to “come as you are” does not apply to servants of the sacred rites.