The love of apatheia

What if passion is an impediment to love? When studying the early church, students seem to find no idea as foreign to their own context as the counsel to put aside the passions. Sentiment, after all, is the only universal we have left. Having banished truth and beauty to the realm of the relative, the only appeal to a common humanity left to us is a single finger gesturing to the heart. Can we moderns say with the desert monastics that passion is demonic?

In the City of God, Augustine searches out the misery of the demons. The word daemon refers to "knowing", but theirs is not a dispassionate knowledge or a cold reason. What makes the demons miserable is that they are essentially all knowledge and all passion. Yet, one thing they lack. Citing 1 Corinthians 8:1, Augustine reasons with Paul to say that "knowledge is of no benefit without love. Without love... [knowledge] swells people up with a pride that is nothing but empty windiness." Bereft of love, the demons become the rage that is perfect knowledge united with frustrated passion. Demons are beings of knowledge unconditioned by love.

For Augustine, passions are sanctified by the godly mind, to be "instruments of justice... The question is not whether the godly mind is angered, but why; not whether it is saddened, but why." The passions are rightly utilised to the extent that they empower compassion. 

So we might ask: can apatheia enable love? Does the denial of passion open the door to compassion? Frances Young reflects on this question with reference to caring for her son, Arthur, who was born with a severe learning disability. For Young, Apatheia is not mere emotional suppression. “Apatheia, which Evagrius believes is never actually attained in this life, should be understood as ‘emotional integration’, or that detachment which is essential to true love” (God's Presence, 292). Not only does apatheia enable love, it reveals the true character of love to us:

“Sometimes what passes for love is really self-centred anxiety, as I have realized when time and again distressed by Arthur’s distress, finding it hard to cope when he is unsettled, unwell, or in pain, cannot express what is wrong, and the more we try to sort the problem the more frantic and furious he gets, hating to be handled, not understanding that we’re trying to deal with his discomfort. Frustration mounts, creating its own distress and anger, which hardly helps his—in fact, compounds it. Too easily inner demons of self-pity, a sense of failure, inadequacy and helplessness take over. So I recognize that I really need apatheia in order to love properly. Love requires a degree of detachment, an ability to let the other person be, to be ‘other’, to be what they are rather than what you want them to be.” (292-293).

The practice of apatheia might just be a way of laying down our lives for the sake of another.

Know-it-all heretics

Eunomius has everything figured out. Which pretty much summarises everything that is wrong with his theology. Divinity is, Eunomius claims, unbegottenness (which is why he thinks that the Son cannot be divine). Basil is aghast: “How much arrogance and pride would it take for someone to think that he has discovered the very substance of God?” (Against Eunomius, 1.12). Eunomius is like every other heretic: an aggravating know-it-all.

Arius is certain that the Son is not co-eternal with the Father. Apollinaris, agreeing that Arius must be wrong, knows that Christ can be fully divine so long as he is not fully human. Nestorius, going with the dismissal of Apollinaris, figures out how the divine and the human natures interact in Jesus (even in Mary’s womb!). Eutyches, standing with the church in rejecting Nestorius, solves the metaphysical problem of two natures (or one or three—the numbers all blend together). The early christological heretics all claim to understand the relation of the divine to the human in Christ. Each heretic solves the problem with confidence, but the church confidently keeps the problems and so keeps the faith.

The orthodox tradition maintains the tension between the knowable and the unknowable in its affirmations. We cannot know what divinity is in itself, just as we hardly understand the nature of humanity, but it seems necessary to say—if salvation is real—that Christ is fully divine and fully human and that these two “natures” are not merely pressed up against each other or mixed together, but are somehow united in the person of Jesus Christ. But orthodox theology rarely attempts to specify that “somehow”.

The heretics prefer to iron out the creases in their doctrines of God and Christ, leaving a smooth surface where everything is laid bare. But the orthodox tradition leaves the bedsheets in a crumpled pile, with hidden and mysterious crevices. Ironing the divine linen is an impossible task, for God is like a fitted sheet—accomodating yet unwieldy. Talk about God will always have hidden depths and untidy corners. “Heretics were too clever by half, thinking they could know God precisely so as to define the divine Being in all exactitude” (Frances Young, God’s Presence, 253).

Rowan Williams points out that the word “heresy” comes from the Greek hairesis, which connotes making a choice that creates division—“a heresy in St Paul is… choosing to belong to this little group rather than the whole fellowship” (“What is Heresy Today?”). The heretic is the one who looks at the doctrine of God and says “I understand this” or “I can prove that this is so” in such a way as to exclude all other understandings. The creeds, by contrast, were written to establish unity within the church through prayer, contemplation, and interpretation. To riff on Robert Jenson, there is nothing as capacious as a creed.

Tweet review of Edwin Hatch, The organization of the early Christian churches

It is a rare thing to come across such a hair style, or such a book. Edwin Hatch's 1880 Bampton Lectures gave a groundbreaking economic and institutional history of early Christianity. The lectures were published in 1881 as The Organization of the Early Christian Churches. The book was considered so important that it was promptly translated into German by no less a person than Adolf von Harnack. The book was recommended to me by one of my PhD students, and I'm very glad I read it. I was lucky enough to get a copy with uncut pages so I had the added pleasure of cutting the pages with my breakfast knife (following the revered example of Dr Johnson). I reviewed the book with a series of tweets, compiled here for posterity:

Lecture 1. Early Christian institutions have survived. This gives them a false air of familiarity and makes historical work bloody hard.

Lecture 2. The church was one of many civil clubs. Its special mark was almsgiving. This required financial administrators ("bishops") as well as distributors ("deacons").

Lecture 3. Early Christian governance was a continuation of the Sanhedrin: a court of collegial elders ("presbyters"), mostly for purposes of moral discipline.

Lecture 4. The apostles were succeeded by these councils of presbyters, but divisions soon led to the elevation of bishops as symbols of unity.

Lecture 5. Early Christian ordination was appointment to office, the same as in civil institutions. It did not confer spiritual powers. (Tertullian and the Montanists were defenders of tradition in the face of rapid institutional change.)

Lecture 6. So how did the clergy become a spiritually distinct class? Through state exemptions, they first became a civilly distinct class. The spiritualisation of this distinctiveness came later.

Lecture 7. Imperial power helped to weld the churches together until "church" came to mean a confederation ruled by councils.

Lecture 8. The medieval divide between parish clergy and cathedral clergy came from the way differing forms of civil organisation were adapted to urban and regional settings.

Conclusion: Every aspect of church order can be explained by external influences. Institutional forms are not fixed but elastic. They can and should be modified today. Attempts to rehabilitate the forms of earlier ages (he is thinking of the Oxford Movement) are misguided.

Tweet review of Christoph Markschies, Christian Theology and Its Institutions in the Early Roman Empire

The book is Christoph Markschies, Christian Theology and Its Institutions in the Early Roman Empire: Prolegomena to a History of Early Christian Theology, newly translated by fellow blogger Wayne Coppins (Baylor University Press 2015). I reviewed it on Twitter as I was reading it over the last couple of days. I've pasted all the tweets below – first a summary of the book and then some general thoughts.

Summary of each section

1.1 Christian history is not a one-way street of development or decline.

1.2 New ideas have to take root in new social forms. A history of theology is a history of institutions and their guiding norms.

2.1a Early Christians generally participated in the pagan education system with very little fuss.

2.1b Christian teachers adopted diverse educational institutions. This helps to explain the diversity of early Christian theology.

2.1c While some Christian teachers (e.g. Justin) were free-wheeling philosophers, Origen's school was more like a formal university.

2.2 The Montanists sought to recover the power of primitive Christianity by adopting the institution of the pagan oracle cult.

2.3a A third new institution: the Christian worship service. This absorbed elements of both pagan and Jewish cults.

2.3b School-theology was urban; prophetic-theology was rustic; liturgical-theology was universally accessible.

2.3c Early eucharistic prayers show a high degree of adaptation to local contexts. Liturgy was a vehicle of theology.

2.4 When Christianity transformed institutions, the old forms remained recognisable; that was part of the attraction.

3.1a The development of fixed norms isn't a power-play or a theological regression. It's necessary for the formation of new institutions.

3.1b Normative lists of a NT canon weren't only used in ecclesial institutions but also in the free-wheeling schools.

3.1c Marcion's institutional setting was Alexandrian philology. He wasn't trying to create a new canon but to edit an existing one.

3.1d Powerful bishops and free-wheeling teachers both used a NT canon in exactly the same way.

3.1e The Gnostics, free-wheelers par excellence, presupposed the same normative canon but interpreted it differently.

3.1f The point of this is that the canon was not an authoritarian construct used to suppress dissident voices.

3.1g But the canon wasn't monolithic either. Different communities had slightly different canons with a common centre.

3.2 This (amazing) section on the canon has been a case study in the way norms functioned in the new Christian institutions.

4.1 Walter Bauer's thesis of early Christian plurality and of orthodoxy as power remains dominant, even though it can be seen now as a piece of liberal protestant apologetics.

4.2 If Bauer's basic thesis of early Christian plurality is correct, is there nevertheless a deeper unity of Christian identity amid the plurality?

4.3 In opposition to Bauer, the inculturation view argues for a deeper unity by positing an original (culturally pure) gospel embedded in diverse cultures.

4.3b If Bauer's model is an apologetic for liberal protestantism, the inculturation model is an apologetic for Catholicism. Both models impose too much on the sources.

4.4 Plurality and identity go together. Early Christians forged a coherent and bounded identity out of plurality.

4.5 Early Christianity was a pluralism centred on an identity-forming centre articulated in theological institutions.

Bibliography: 100 pages. Small font. German encyclopedic erudition. Anglo-American scholarship well represented too.


General thoughts

Best part is the very rich and very important section on the NT canon. The book is worth getting for this alone.

Other highlights: the account of Origen's school, and the surprising demonstration of local improvisation in early eucharistic prayers.

I see this as a revitalised history-of-ideas approach. It doesn't see ideas as the products of social struggle.

Nor are ideas timeless truths. Nor do they unfold teleologically. Ideas belong to the engine of social life.

The book argues that early Christian plurality is best explained by the diversity of its institutions.

It includes research from ritual studies and material culture (e.g. a nice little section on ancient libraries) but also shows the validity of the "great authors" for early Christian history.

After all, individual talents like Origen weren't just products of institutions but were creative agents of institutional formation.

Compared to the rest of the book, the theoretical basis of the plurality/identity thesis (sections 4.4 – 4.5) seemed a bit thin.

The three institutions studied here are selective and illustrative. But it got me thinking about the theological function of other institutions like baptism, burial, martyrdom, etc.

I wish there'd also been a section on early Christian preaching (especially since Markschies has done top work on preaching elsewhere, e.g. in his book on Origen). But I'm not complaining. 

Also really useful is the way the book maps out the field of early Christian studies. Great section on Walter Bauer and his reception.

All in all, I don't think I've learned so much about early Christianity since reading Peter Brown or Elizabeth Clark.

The Son is not great: Athanasius on orthodox christology

It is now a well-known fact that Arianism was not overcome by Athanasius, but by modern historical scholars overcoming Athanasius. But we can hardly blame Athanasius for the Arians, since he himself was not a modern historical scholar and so was not in a position to adhere to the guild rules.

Since we are so careful to uncover the true legacy of Arius, we should be equally diligent in our attempts to present the theological vision of Athanasius. It would be simply wrong to say that he disagreed with Arius' "low christology" and presented his own "high christology" in response. The stature of the Son was not the heart of the question. As Athanasius points out, scripture does not depict the Son as more illustrious than other creatures. Divinity is not measured in greatness.

The angels worship the Son, Athanasius observes, but not because he is greater than them. “The angels served [the Son] as one who is other than them.” If all that was required to be eligible as an object of worship was greatness, then we would all be free to worship other creatures instead of God. But Cornelius is told not to worship Peter, and John is told not to worship the angel. The Son is worshipped “not as one who is greater in glory, but as being other… than all creatures.”

As you read through the works of Athanasius, you do not uncover a scheme to elevate the status of the Son, but the astonishment of one who has discovered the humility of God. In De Incarnatione, he addresses those who wonder why the Son should come as a human instead of one of the “other more noble parts of creation… as the sun or moon or stars or fire or air?” Because, he suggests, the Lord did not come to “be put on display but to heal… One being put on display only needs to appear and dazzle the beholders; but one who heals and teaches does not simply sojourn, but is of service to those in need.”

Which leads me to wonder whether the categories of "high" and "low" christology are still useful at all as indicators of orthodoxy. If we think of "high christology" as emphasising the divinity of Christ, we find that Apollinaris undoubtedly had a "high" christology, but he's still a heretic. If we are tempted to think that there can be some negotiated compromise between the two, we need only remember poor old Eutyches, and his fateful mediating ousia. The language can be retained only if they cease to be poles on a continuum. A faithful christology is simultaneously "high" and "low"--a theology of the high made low for our sake.

The Son is not merely greater than us, but is entirely different to us. The good news of the gospel is that he becomes one of us. Salvation rests in the blessed union of difference and solidarity in the person of Christ.

The stripping of the cross: the cosmic cross of early Christianity and the naked cross of modern theology

One of the strangest tactics of the early Christian apologists was the habit of attaching symbolic and allegorical meanings to the cross.

The early third-century dialogue by Minucius Felix gives voice to the Roman revulsion towards anyone who would venerate “a criminal put to death for his crimes, and the wood of the death-dealing cross” (Octavius 9). The Christian speaker replies that Christ’s followers do not worship the cross; it is only pagans who worship bits of wood. Yet he adds that the cross is not only a symbol of death. The Roman military signa and victory trophies are also designed in the form of the cross. And one sees “the sign of the cross” inscribed on nature and culture: the mast of a ship, the spread oars, a worshipper with outstretched arms. “In this way the order of nature [ratio naturalis] leans on the sign of the cross” (Octavius 29).

Minucius Felix borrowed these examples from Justin Martyr, who around the middle of the second century had offered a fulsome account of the cosmic significance of the cross. The form (schēma) of the cross, Justin says, is written into the order of nature and of Roman culture alike:

For consider everything in the cosmos. Without this form they could not be governed or interrelated. The sea is not traversed unless this token of victory – a sail – remains safe in the ship. The land is not ploughed without it. Diggers and craftsmen do not do their work except from tools which have this form. And the human form differs from that of the irrational animals only in the way it stands erect with hands stretched out – and also in the way the nose extends from the forehead, providing breath for the living creature, and showing no other form than that of the cross…. And the power of this form is shown by your own symbols on what are called standards and trophies…. Without realising it, you use these [crosses] as the signs of your rule and power. (First Apology 55)

Not long afterwards, Tertullian used the same arguments to point out the irony of Roman contempt for the cross. “All those rows of images on the standards are ornaments hung on crosses. Those hangings on your standards and banners are robes upon crosses. I commend you for your thoughtfulness! You didn’t want to consecrate crosses naked and unadorned” (Apology 16).

By the fourth century, the instinctive revulsion for the cross had begun to recede in Greco-Roman culture, and Christian apologists took more freedom than ever in adorning the cross with symbolic meanings. When Athanasius wants to prove that death by crucifixion was “fitting” for God’s plan, he produces an impressive array of cross-symbols. The outstretched arms show that Christ has united Jews and Gentiles in himself. It shows that Christ has opened the way to heaven. It shows his triumph over the demonic powers of the air: “only the one who ends his life on the cross dies in the air” (On the Incarnation 26).

Gregory of Nyssa disregarded Athansius’ arguments and preferred the earlier cosmic reflections of Justin Martyr. The cross, Gregory says, is a symbol of the way the Logos unites the disparate elements of creation. Gregory suggests that St Paul was imagining a cosmic cross when he said that every knee would bow “in heaven” and “on earth” and “under the earth” (Phil 2.10), and when he prayed that the Ephesians would come to understand the “depth” and “height” and “breadth” and “length” (Eph 3.18). “In shape [the cross] is divided into four parts in which a way that the four arms converge in the middle. He who was extended on it at the time God’s plan was fulfilled in his death is the one who binds all things to himself and makes them one” (Catechetical Oration 32).

Though Gregory seems only half-persuaded by his own arguments – he notes that he is only repeating what he has heard from other Christians – he makes a clear statement of the reason for attaching such symbolic meanings to the cross. It is because of christology: “In the death we should see the human element; but from the manner of the death we should seek to penetrate its divine significance” (Catechetical Oration 32).

It is true that the cross was a brute fact in history. It was wood planted in the earth. But a merely wooden cross would be a half-truth. It would show the fact of Jesus’ death without conveying its meaning. Gregory’s references to St Paul are admittedly fanciful, but he is nevertheless quite right to assume that there was never a stage of early Christianity in which the cross was not already a theological symbol.

Neither St Paul nor the writers of the Gospels regard the cross as a brute fact. The cross could not at any rate have been a brute fact for anybody in the first century. Crucifixion was never just an unpleasant way to die. It was a symbol of Roman power. That symbol was every bit as public and as well-understood as the military standards borne by legions of soldiers. The first Christians had to think symbolically about the cross, since their Messiah had already been forcefully absorbed into the symbolic system of imperial power. One way or another the death of Jesus meant something, and what it meant was symbolised by a cross.

The tactics of the early Christian apologists are strange to us now. Nobody today would explain the significance of the cross by comparing it to a ship’s mast or the unity of the four cosmic elements or the shape of a person’s nose. But even at their most fanciful, these apologetic experiments contain an important half-truth: the cross is more than a brute fact in history; it is part of a system of meaning involving God and creation and everything.

If one strand of the history of early Christianity is the story of the transformation of the cross from a Roman symbol into a Christian symbol, then a strand of the history of modern theology is the story of a concerted effort to strip the cross of its accumulated layers of meaning. What modern theologians want is a naked cross, the brute fact of wood planted in earth and soaked with human blood. If it is to be a symbol at all, let it be a symbol not of life and religion and culture but of power and oppression.

The Romans invented the cross and the Christians stole it from them. Modern theologians have returned it to its original owners.

This stripping of the cross was a valid and necessary exercise in a world whose systems of power had been so thoroughly Christianised that the cross had come to resemble, more than ever, a standard raised before a marching army. The transformation of the cross into a Christian symbol had been a half-truth. But the stripping of the cross in modern theology is a half-truth too. If we see the cross only as a symbol of power and oppression, we should ask whether we have gone so far as to turn ourselves into Romans instead of Christians.

It is good that modern theology has taught us again to see the cross as “foolishness” (1 Cor 1.18). But we also need eyes to perceive “God’s might and God’s wisdom” (1 Cor 1.24) in the brute and foolish fact of the cross. To see the human element, as Gregory of Nyssa said, while also “penetrating its divine significance.”

Audio lecture: early trinitarian theology

Here's an audio snippet from this week's class on the Trinity. It's a 20-minute summary of the past few weeks of the course, which have focused on trinitarian theology in the second and third centuries. This summary is pretty sketchy, but I try to identify four general themes in early trinitarian theology:

1. Historical theme (Irenaeus)
2. Psychological theme (Tertullian)
3. Educational theme (Clement)
4. Participatory theme (Origen)

At the end of the clip I try to explain how the two most important themes (1 and 4) can go together, as I think they do in Athanasius.



Incidentally, I also wonder if these four themes might be helpful for explaining Augustine's theology of the Trinity. The significance of Augustine isn't that he represents a monolithic western approach, nor that he is simply a speculative innovator. Instead I think Augustine takes the least significant pre-Nicene theme, the psychological, and synthesises all the other themes around it. Thus Augustine still has a strong salvation-historical emphasis (De Trin. books 2-4) as well as a large preoccupation with the educational and participatory themes (De Trin. books 13-15); but these major pre-Nicene themes are subsumed within the vast architecture of what had until then been only a minor experimental theme, the psychological.

All of life is Easter: three quotes on Christian feast days

"All our life is a festival. Since we are persuaded that God is present everywhere on all sides, we praise God as we till the ground, we sing hymns as we sail the sea, we feel God's inspiration in all that we do.... Whenever we pay attention to God, every place and every time becomes truly holy."
—Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 7.7.39.

"So the whole of our lifetime is a festival. For when Paul said, 'Let us keep the feast' [1 Cor 5:7-8], he wasn't referring to the Passover or Pentecost. He was pointing out that all time is a festival for Christians.... For what good thing has not already come to pass? The Son of God was made human for you. He freed you from death and called you to a kingdom. Now that you have gained such good things – and are still gaining them – how can you do anything less than 'keep the feast' all your life? So let no one be downcast about poverty or illness or the cunning of enemies. It is a festival, all of it – our whole lifetime!"
—John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians 15.6.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.
—George Herbert, "Easter", from The Temple.

Heretical typos: von Balthasar's Origen

Where copyists are concerned, Origen was the unluckiest of all the church fathers. Rufinus complained that heterodox copyists had cunningly inserted heresies into Origen's writings. They "poured the poisonous filth of their own doctrines" into the texts of Origen in order to give their ideas a false aura of authority and antiquity (Rufinus, On the Falsification of the Books of Origen, 2). When Rufinus translated Origen into Latin at the end of the fourth century, he scrupulously omitted or erased anything that looked like a heretical interpolation. As he says in the preface to his translation of First Principles: "Wherever I have found in Origen's books anything that contradicts the devout statements he makes elsewhere about the Trinity, I have either omitted it as a corrupt and interpolated passage, or reproduced it in a form that matches the doctrine that he often affirms elsewhere." And then Rufinus adds that he has also made some interpolations of his own, inserting "explanatory comments" wherever Origen's "obscurity" calls for expression "in a fuller form" (Rufinus, Preface to First Principles).

Poor Origen! Interpolators on every side! Well, Christian reader, I'm sorry to be the one to break the news to you, but the bad luck of this great teacher has continued right down to our own time. One of Origen's greatest modern defenders, Hans Urs von Balthasar, inserts a very peculiar heresy into Origen's soteriology:

"... and by his death destroyed life."
Quotation from Origen in Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire, p. 184.

To be more precise, it is Balthasar's English translator Robert J. Daly who has inserted this latest heresy into Origen. I am not certain, but I believe it may have something to do with Daly's unwholesome fascination with sacrifice.

If only Rufinus were here, he would have tidied things up quite nicely and removed every trace of heresy – something like this (translated freely from Rufinus' Latin):

For although the only-begotten Son of God, whom the holy church acknowledges homoousios with the Father before all worlds, became truly human and suffered for the salvation of the human race, and by his death destroyed death (for let all those who claim that Christ's death was a destruction of life be accursed), and by his resurrection restored life, just as marvellous, apart from the incarnation of the eternal self-subsistent Word, were the things brought about by the Holy Spirit, who is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son, world without end.

Trusting in drunkenness: a note on Clement of Alexandria

At the start of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that moral action does not arise from deliberation. In order to think clearly about virtue, one must first already have a virtuous disposition formed by good habits. Aristotle drily remarks that the endless ethical debate of some philosophers is really just a sophisticated way of doing nothing. You become virtuous – and thus able to understand virtue – by acting virtuously. Nobody ever reasoned their way into right living.

Clement of Alexandria’s second-century Exhortation to the Greeks has a similar view of the priority of acting over deliberating. Clement’s Hellenistic friends don’t first need to comprehend all the complexities of the Christian faith. What they need first of all is a change of disposition. They need to be charmed by the magic of Christ, enchanted by Christ’s music. The first step is to accept Christ and to begin to follow his way. Understanding what it’s all about comes later.

In a typically affable illustration (he is the most affable of all the early fathers), Clement explains the point by comparing conversion to getting drunk at a party:

Let me give you an illustration. You might have some doubt about whether it’s right for a person to get drunk. But it’s your practice to get drunk before considering the question. Or in the case of self-indulgence, you don’t first make a careful examination: you hurry to indulge. Only when divine things are in question do you first inquire. When it’s a question of following this wise God and his Christ, you think this calls for deliberation and reflection, even though you have no idea what would be pleasing to God. Put faith in us, just as you do in drunkenness, that you may become sober! Put faith in us, just as you do in self-indulgence, that you may live! (Exhortation to the Greeks 10.77)

This is not to suggest that the Christian faith is irrational. For the one who has had a change of disposition, Christ also begins to shine as a rational light. Clement assures his readers that he has "an abundance of persuasive arguments about the Logos" – but these are for those people who have already had their desire awakened and have already begun to "contemplate this clear faith in the virtues", i.e., in the way of life that it initiates.

In praise of short sentences

One of the themes of my life this year has been the short sentence. Early in the year an experienced editor brought to my attention the virtues of the short sentence. I took his words to heart. I have been trying to use a greater variety of sentence types in my writing, and I have particularly been labouring to achieve good short sentences. It is harder than it sounds.

I have also begun to notice that many college students could improve their writing dramatically merely by setting their sights on shorter sentences. Many students have somehow got the assumption that scholarly writing requires a certain tone of voice. I don’t know where this assumption comes from. I am inclined to blame it on the rhetorical posturing of well-meaning but fundamentally inept high school English teachers – the kind of teacher who promotes “critique” and “decoding” of “texts” instead of explanation and clarity of ideas. I do not blame these teachers. I hope they will still be allowed into heaven. I know they are only doing what they’re told. At any rate, whatever the source of this malaise, the symptoms are evident in the tendency of students to obfuscate simple ideas through a complexification of syntax, a multiplication of imprecise verbs instead of the selection of the one strong verb, and a deliberate substitution of polysyllabic words whose meanings are often vague and slippery for smaller ones whose meanings are plain and solid. It is all very anti-working-class. The student’s shame of his uneducated parents and their drab suburban home is transferred to a (deeper and more scandalous) shame of plain speech. Nothing good will come of this.

So I have been encouraging students to aim for shorter sentences that say exactly what you want to say, not for longer sentences that sound the way you would like to sound. And – physician, heal thyself – I’ve been trying to do it too.

I have also been noticing short sentences when I read. Sometimes I have underlined a sentence simply because it is so short and good. One of the theological geniuses of the short sentence is Tertullian. Some of Tertullian’s most impressive (and humorous) rhetorical effects are achieved with short sentences. In his treatise on the Trinity Against Praxeas, he cites a list of biblical texts used by his opponents, and then responds drily with a two-word sentence: “Legimus omnia” – “We’ve read all that.” What a sentence! Sharp as a sniper’s shot. The whole of Tertullian’s little treatise on the Roman toga (De Pallio) is abuzz with similar short-sentence effects, humorous and biting and precise.

A modern genius of the short theological sentence is the congregationalist writer P. T. Forsyth. He uses potent bursts of staccato sentences. Like the following: “To lead the democracy the Church must be free of the democracy. The Church is not a democracy. It is certainly not the democracy on its religious side. That is but Hooker up to date. It is latter-day Erastianism. What is the difference? Democracy will acknowledge no authority but what it creates whereas the Church has no authority but what creates it. It is an infinite difference…. The Church is not the indiscriminate champion of the democracy but its benefactor, its faithful friend and prophet. It is not its tribune but its conscience. The Church is not there in the first instance to represent democracy, but to represent God to the democracy. It is not there to speak for it, but to speak to it” (The Church and the Sacraments, p. 118).

What a difference it would make to contemporary theological writing if we had more of this! At the end of his treatise on the toga, Tertullian avows his preference for the philosopher’s cloak over the Roman toga with the short exclamation: “Gaude pallium et exsulta!” – “Rejoice, O cloak, and exult!” I will paraphrase the great North African, in praise of short sentences: Rejoice, O short sentence, and triumph!

Christology: twelve grammatical rules

I've just finished another semester teaching christology. This is one of my favourite classes. (My other favourite is the Trinity.) Really it's one of the joys of my life to be able to explore such things in a classroom setting. In the tutorials we worked our way through two of the richest works on christology ever written: the third volume of Irenaeus's Against Heresies, followed by Athanasius's On the Incarnation. The twelve weekly lectures were as follows:

Part I. Lord Jesus Christ: New Testament Christology 

1. The Son of Man: Christ in the Synoptic Gospels
2. The great interchange: Christ in Paul’s letters
3. The Word made flesh: Christ in the Gospel of John 

Part II. The Iron in the Fire: The Doctrine of the Incarnation 

4. Adam recapitulated (Irenaeus)
5. Wisdom, Word, and Image (Origen)
6. What is not assumed is not healed (Gregory of Nazianzus)
7. The iron in the fire: two natures, one person (Cyril of Alexandria)
8. Singing in one voice: the whole Christ, head and body (Augustine)

Part III. Redeemer of the World: The Doctrine of the Atonement

9. Deification: renewing the image (Irenaeus and Athanasius)
10. Satisfaction: paying our debts (Anselm and Julian of Norwich)
11. Reconciliation: bringing us home (Karl Barth)
12. Messiah: Prophet, Priest, and King (Calvin and Barth)

In the last class I tried to draw together some of the key points in a list of simple "grammatical rules" for talking about Jesus Christ. I'm sure I've missed some important points, but here are the twelve rules I came up with. Each is a negation followed by an affirmation:

1. Not to speak of Christ in any way that sidelines his human experience. Jesus Christ is truly human.

2. Not to speak of Jesus in any way that sidelines the divine depth beneath his human experience. Jesus Christ is truly God.

3. Not to divide Christ’s divinity and humanity, or to give the impression that he sometimes functions as God and sometimes as a human. Jesus Christ is divine and human in one person.

4. Not to give the impression that Christ’s divinity is fully contained within his humanity, or that his divinity is limited by his human experience. The human nature of Jesus is assumed by the person of the eternal Word.

5. Not to divide redemption from creation, or to give the impression that Christ invades a world that is alien to him. Human beings were created after the pattern of the same eternal Image that has become incarnate in Jesus.

6. Not to divide Christ’s person and work, or to give the impression that Christ is merely the instrument by which God achieves salvation. Salvation is a person: Jesus Christ.

7. Not to divide Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, or to give the impression that he achieves salvation at just one moment of his career. The total life-journey of Jesus Christ – from his birth, to his ministry of teaching and healing, to his death and resurrection – is the saving event.

8. Not to speak of Christ’s death as a mere preliminary stage on the way to resurrection. Jesus Christ is the Priest whose death abolishes the power of sin and death. He is the humble God.

9. Not to speak of Christ’s resurrection as a mere reversal of his death. Jesus Christ is the King whose resurrection exalts and glorifies human nature. He is the deified human.

10. Not to speak of Christ in any way that implies that he is absent, or to give the impression that the church’s task is to make Christ present. Jesus Christ is the Prophet who reveals himself. He is present always and everywhere as the divine-human light of the world.

11. Not to divide Christ from Israel’s history, or to give the impression that the New Testament abolishes the Old. As Prophet, Priest and King, Jesus Christ is the surpassing fulfilment of Israel’s messianic hopes.

12. Not to speak of Christ as if he were relevant only to some people in some cultures and circumstances. Jesus Christ is present to all people, in all times and places, as their divine-human Prophet, Priest and King. The church trusts and proclaims, but never possesses, this Messiah.

Patristic peculiarities: John Chrysostom and the poison eucharist

This is the start of a new occasional series on some of the more peculiar arguments I've come across in early Christian literature. These are the quirky bits that somehow never made it into the textbooks. 

John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century preacher, described Christ's descent into hell as a kind of poison eucharist. When Christ died, his body descended into the ground. Death ingested his body like food. But this was no ordinary food. It was a fatal poison. It brought on violent stomach cramps, worse (Chrysostom assures us) than the agony of a woman in labour. Death could not digest Christ's body. Death writhed in pain, then vomited: "Like those who take food and vomit it up because they can't retain it, so death vomited. He received the body which he could not digest, and so he had to throw it up again" (all this is from homily 24 on 1 Cor).

But after developing this vomiting image in graphic detail, Chrysostom changes his mind. No, he observes, Christ didn't come back out of the mouth of death. He didn't come out the same way he went in. Death didn't merely vomit; it suffered a massive abdominal rupture. After death had ingested Christ's body – I warn you, this is pretty grisly – it suffered violent convulsions, and then its stomach burst open. Everything came out. Chrysostom is thinking here of the story in Bel and the Dragon, where Daniel killed the dragon by feeding it a concoction of pitch and fat and hair; upon eating this vicious recipe, the dragon's stomach burst open and it died. "For Christ didn't come forth again from the mouth of death, but issued forth from the belly of the dragon, bursting it and ripping it open from within."

Thus the body of Christ proves to be a fatal poison. It destroys death from within. When the stomach of death is violently emptied, it's not only Christ's body that is released. Everything else that death had ever ingested is released as well. The contents of death's stomach are completely emptied. Hell is left empty, and not a single one who died is left in the grave.

And Chrysostom's point? "This is the body that he has given to us to hold and to eat!" These grisly reflections come, after all, in a sermon on the eucharist. Chrysostom is reminding his congregation never to come carelessly or irreverently to the table. "Purify your soul, prepare your mind for the reception of these mysteries!" The same body that poisoned death and emptied the grave is now ingested by the believer. It is the same body, the same potent food. "So," Chrysostom cautions, "let us stir ourselves and be filled with horror." When you come to the table, don't forget what you're about to eat!

"Because of this body I am no longer earth and ashes, no longer a prisoner, but free…. This body, nailed and scourged, was more than death could stand against. The sun turned aside its beams when it saw this body sacrificed. The veil was rent for this body, and the rocks burst open and the whole earth was shaken. This is the very same body!" At the Lord's table we hold this body in our hands. We "kiss" it and "bite it with our teeth." (Chrysostom observes that lovers often nibble each other when they're passionately kissing: in the same way we lovingly nibble the consecrated bread.) Death ingested this body, not knowing that it was eating its own death. The same body is life to us when we eat it. By poisoning and slaying all death's power, this food has become "our hope, our salvation, our light, our life."

Tertullian on interpreting parables

The parables of Jesus were all the rage in the second century. Gnostic teachers like Valentinus hung lavish esoteric cosmologies from the parables. Not even the smallest detail was safe from allegorising interpreters. This exegetical excess led second-century writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian to formulate rules for interpreting the parables. Irenaeus' rule is pretty simple (Against Heresies 2.27): stick to the clear kanon of truth, and don't read anything into the parable that would contradict the plain sense of the apostolic faith. For example: don't interpret a parable to mean that there's more than one god, since this would be out of harmony with the faith.

Tertullian is more interesting (On Purity 8-9). He makes the same observation as Irenaeus: interpretations of the parables should be rejected if they "destroy the whole economy of salvation". And he insists that parables should be interpreted in light of the Christian faith: "We do not take take the parables as sources of doctrine, but rather we take doctrine as a norm for interpreting the parables." But he is not concerned only to rule out heterodox interpretations; he also dwells on the characteristics of good interpretation of the parables. He assumes that the good interpreter will take in the whole parable at a single glance, while the heterodox interpreter scrutinises every little detail and loses the wood for the trees. In an age that loved allegory and typology, Tertullian is bracingly straightforward: "Why a 'hundred' sheep? and why, indeed, 'ten' drachmas? and what does that 'broom' stand for? Well, when he wanted to show how pleased God is at the salvation of one sinner, he had to mention some numerical quantity from which one could be described as 'lost'. And in view of the ordinary procedure of a woman who looks for a drachma in the house, he had to supply the assistance of a broom and lamp."

Tertullian thus happily admits that some elements of the parable might remain unexplained. The heterodox interpreters, he says, are driven by a lust for coherence and comprehensiveness. They want every detail to fit. They "work out these parables with perfect consistency." Theirs is a kind of conspiracy-theory theology: a perfect account that explains everything and leaves nothing out. By contrast, good interpreters of the parables should allow for a measure of imperfection and inconsistency. "We make no effort to twist everything so that it fits our own explanation, striving to avoid every discrepancy." An exegetical argument, Tertullian says, "should not be extended beyond the limits of the subject matter with which it is concerned." It is better to have a general sketch of what the parable means than to be lost in a maze of hyper-interpretation. "If needs must be, we prefer to have an incomplete rather than an incorrect understanding of the scripture."

And why does all this matter? Because "bad exegesis is no less serious than bad conduct."

How does Jesus save? An alternative typology (against Gustaf Aulén)

Gustaf Aulén's Christus Victor, first published in 1931, has influenced the way generations of students think about Christ's death. According to Aulén's typology, there are three main types of atonement theory: (1) the "classical" ransom theory, according to which God used Jesus as bait to rescue humanity from subjugation to the devil; (2) the "objective" satisfaction theory, according to which Jesus' death satisfies the demands of God's honour or justice; and (3) the "subjective" moral influence theory, according to which Jesus' obedient death has an exemplary moral power that can be imitated by others. 

I do not believe Aulén's typology is a reliable guide to the Christian tradition. Some comments on each of his three types: (1) His first category – intended to represent patristic thought – is a real muddle. The importance it gives to the role of the devil is very misleading. The image of Jesus as bait on a hook has no frequency or importance in patristic literature, and does not represent any typical understanding of Jesus' death. Aulén has mistaken an eccentricity for a type. (2) His second category, satisfaction, is the only one that strikes me as broadly reliable. (3) His third category, moral influence, is historically so marginal that it is quite misleading to include it at all. This category might have been interesting as a characterisation of patristic thought if it had been set against the backdrop of early Christian ideas about the spiritual power of imitation. But linking this category to Abelard makes it a mere triviality, of no real importance in the tradition. Again Aulén has made a type out of an eccentricity.

I've been teaching christology this semester (using mainly patristic sources), which has got me musing about alternative typologies of Christian views of salvation. So here's a suggested typology of six themes in patristic literature:

1. Christ the Second Adam. A major theme most powerfully developed by Irenaeus in his account of recapitulation. Christ restarts the human race from the beginning and sets it on a course towards life. Christ replaces Adam as the new life-giving head of the human family. (Main scriptural source: Romans 5.)

2. Christ the Sacrifice. This is an important background theme that becomes explicit mainly in liturgical texts. Melito of Sardis' On Pascha provides the most vivid elaboration of sacrificial imagery, artfully interwoven with a plethora of other Old Testament themes and images. (Main scriptural source: the Pentateuch and the Gospel of John.)

3. Christ the Teacher. A characteristic theme of the Alexandrian tradition. Christ is the divine pedagogue who, by a slow and patient process, leads human souls up into the presence of divine wisdom. In some accounts this process extends into the afterlife. Clement of Alexandria developed this theme explicitly. The same theme supplies the basic architecture of Origen's thought. Many accounts of deification are really just elaborations of the end result of this educational process: life is a school, and deification is the graduation prize. (Main scriptural source: the four Gospels.)

4. Christ the Brother. The adoption theme is prevalent in early Christian writing. Christ becomes our brother. Through him we become members of God's family. What he is by nature, we become by grace. It is often in this context that language of deification is used: Christ is God by nature, and as his brothers and sisters we become gods by grace. Adoption language is especially pervasive in Origen. By the fourth and fifth centuries the emphasis tends to fall more on deification, but the deification theme should still be understood as a subset of either the adoption theme or the education theme (#3 above). (Main scriptural source: Romans 8.)

5. Christ the Life-giver. One finds this theme everywhere in early Christian liturgical and theological texts. It is developed with an impressive systematic rigour in the work of Athanasius. The divine Logos had to become incarnate in order to become capable of dying; by entering into death, he absorbs death into the divine life, thus draining away death's power; and by rising again, he transforms corruptible human nature into a glorious incorruptible nature. Here Christ's death and resurrection are equally emphasised as the two poles of the saving event. (Main scriptural source: 1 Corinthians 15.)

6. Christ the Healer. My impression is that this theme recurs more than any other soteriological theme in patristic writing, even though it is seldom developed in much detail. Very frequently Christ is described as a physician who cures our illness. Often he is also described as medicine. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of the incarnation as a healing of human nature. Augustine is particularly fond of the healing theme, and it is a constant refrain in his sermons. He speaks of Adam as infecting the human race with the disease of pride, and of Christ's humility as the medicine that cures us. (Main scriptural source: the four Gospels.)

Comments: (a) Even from these summaries, one can see that these themes are normally found not as separate ideas but as closely interwoven motifs. (b) Note the pronounced tendency to speak of salvation in corporate terms. Christ achieves salvation not for individuals but for human nature, for humanity as a whole. Only in the third theme (teaching) is there a more individual emphasis, but even here patristic authors believe that the whole of humanity is enrolled in Christ's school. Saints and martyrs are in the PhD program; the wicked are in kindergarten. (c) Only in the second category (sacrifice) is there any exclusive fixation on Christ's death as a saving event. Much more characteristic of early Christian writing is a broad vision of Christ's life, death, descent into hell, and resurrection as the one great drama of salvation. Even the sacrificial imagery that dominated early Christian interpretations of the passover (e.g. Melito's On Pascha) was qualified when Origen (in his own On Pascha) argued that the passover is not a type of Christ's sacrificial death, but a type of the whole movement whereby Christ's death, descent, and resurrection leads the human race in exodus from death to life. (d) While scholars like N. T. Wright routinely criticise orthodox christology as a flattening out of the Gospel witness, with no serious attention given to Jesus' earthly ministry, one can see above that two of these major soteriological themes (#3 and #6) were primarily adapted from the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry. Very prominent in all four Gospels is the portrayal of Jesus as Teacher and Healer. Through a spiritual interpretation of the Gospels, these features of Jesus' life and ministry became fundamental patterns for describing Christ's saving work.

Reflected glory: Imitation, biography and moral formation in early Christianity

I wrote this piece for ABC Religion & Ethics, and am re-posting it here.

While some Christian writers drew freely on ancient Roman ideas of virtue and self-care, the characteristic way early Christians reflected on the moral life was through biographical stories. It was Christianity's immense investment in the idea of incarnation – the belief that God had entered the world in human flesh – that made stories of embodied life so important for the Christian moral imagination. If God's life is definitively made available in the human flesh of Jesus, then ethical principles, universal values and the like will be relatively uninteresting compared to the actual texture of moral life as one finds it in the experience of real human beings.

Nothing is more illustrative of the whole Christian attitude towards life than this preponderance of biography in the early centuries of the faith. In the first Christian biographies, stories like the Passion of Perpetua (c. 203 CE) presented the heroic death of martyrs as moral exemplars. By the time of Pontius' Passion and Life of Cyprian (259 CE), the martyr's whole conduct and way of life had also become material for study and imitation. As well as holding up Cyprian's courageous death as an example to be followed, Pontius praises the entire person of Cyprian as a sort of moral text to be read and assimilated. Cyprian's personal habits, his manner of dress, even his facial expressions are material for contemplation: "So much sanctity and grace shone from his face that he confounded the minds of those who looked upon him. His countenance was grave and joyful, neither a gloomy severity nor excessive affability" (Passion and Life, 6). The reader of the biography is meant to see Cyprian; and moral transformation occurs as this seeing ripens into imitation.

In the fourth century, once Christians could no longer be martyred, biographers turned their attention to a new kind of exemplary life: the “holy man” who achieves self-martyrdom through heroic feats of asceticism. The first and greatest biography of this variety was Athanasius' Life of Antony, written in Egypt around 356 CE. By now the moral dimensions of biography have been expanded to include even the most seemingly insignificant details about the saint's daily life – diet, dress, moods, sleeping habits, manner of speech, and so forth – culminating in a meticulous account of his death. Though Antony's death is admittedly not the death of a martyr, it is nonetheless performed by Antony as something "worthy of imitation" (Life of Antony, 89).

And in the Life of Antony we again find our biographer paying particular attention to his subject's face. The saint's face is a centre of moral and spiritual gravity. It is especially important that the face be contemplated, studied, assimilated into one's own moral and imaginative world. Here is how Athanasius describes the face of Antony: 

"His face, too, had a great and indescribable charm in it. And he had this added gift from the Saviour: if he was present in a gathering of monks and someone who had no previous acquaintance with him wished to see him, as soon as he arrived he would pass over the others and run to Antony as if drawn by his eyes. It was not his stature or figure that made him stand out from the rest, but his settled character and the purity of his soul…. The joy in his soul expressed itself in the cheerfulness of his face, and from the body's behaviour one saw and knew the state of his soul, as scripture says: 'When the heart is glad, the face is radiant'" (Life of Antony, 67). 

 The tradition of Christian iconography – the visual representation of the faces of saints as objects of veneration – has its foundations here, in what might be called a tacit theology of the face. At any rate, in the moral environment of early Christianity, the sanctified face had a peculiar moral power and a peculiar capacity to produce moral responses in others. Athanasius reports that troubled pilgrims would go away healed and helped after merely having laid eyes on Antony.

The impetus towards imitation among early Christians is nowhere more touchingly attested than in a speech delivered by Gregory of Nazianzus at the funeral of his friend Basil of Caesarea in 379 CE. Basil's saintliness was legendary in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and beyond. He had given away his family fortune to help the poor. He distributed food during times of famine. He worked to reform prostitutes and criminals. He founded monastic communities. He created what his contemporaries regarded as one of the wonders of the world: the Basiliad, a "new city" outside the city, a vast and complex community of care and support for the poor, the sick, the dying, the aged, the orphaned, and the outcast. As Gregory says in his funeral speech, "Others had their cooks and rich tables and enchanting refinements of cuisine, and elegant carriages, and soft flowing garments. Basil had his sick" (Oration 43, 63). In Greek culture down to this day, it is not Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus who brings the children their presents, but Saint Basil.

But such was the people's love for this good man that Gregory, in his funeral speech, takes a few moments to castigate what he regards as an unseemly degree of Basil-imitation among the populace of Caesarea: 

 "So great were the virtue and the surpassing reputation of this man that many of his minor traits and even his physical defects have been affected by others as means of gaining esteem. I mention, by way of example, his pallor, his beard, his manner of walking, his pensive and, in general, introspective hesitation in speaking, which, in the badly conceived imitation of many, degenerated into melancholy. Then there were his style of dress, the shape of his bed, and his manner of eating, none of which were to him deserving of attention…. So you might see many Basils as far as external appearance goes…. The incidental things in Basil's life were far more precious and notable than the serious efforts of others" (Oration, 77).

"So you might see many Basils": Gregory's report sounds uncannily like our own celebrity culture, where the hairstyle or brand of sunglasses or tone of voice of our film-star saints sets in motion wave after wave of stylised imitation. Western culture today remains, for good or ill, a culture of imitation. It remains a culture of saints. All that's missing is the virtue of the saints whose lives we imitate. It is, after all, not the clothing someone wears that makes them worthy of imitation, but the virtue – that nobility of spirit, that spark of godlike excellence – which has become enfleshed in them.

At the end of his farewell to Basil, Gregory raises the question whether in sketching the outlines of Basil's life he has provided "a common model of virtue for all time, a salutary example for all the churches and all souls, upon which we may look as on a living law and thus regulate our lives" (Oration, 80). But he concludes that such direct and deliberate imitation is less important than the simple act of seeing Basil, of becoming witnesses to the quality of redeemed life that was visible in him. The task is not primarily to mimic external behaviours, but to look intently into the face of the saint, to contemplate the spiritual life that has become available there: "eyes fixed on him," Gregory says, "as though he were seeing you, and you him, that you may be perfected by the Spirit".

The strangest theology essay of all time?

In my doctrine of the Trinity class this semester, I received a paper titled "Augustinian Dreaming." It started out conventionally enough – explanations of Augustine's analogies of the Trinity, quotes from Rowan Williams, observations about "the spiritual transformation of this fallen earthly creature, which at best represents a foggy image of God," and so on. 

Then I got to the the last page. When I read it, I called the student aside and said: "As your teacher, I have to tell you that this is completely unacceptable, and you must never do this again in an academic essay. As a human being, I loved it – can I post it on my blog?" The student, who shall remain anonymous, granted permission: so it is with pleasure that I reproduce for you here the final section of his paper on the analogies of the Trinity in books 9-10 of Augustine's Trinity. (Disclaimer to any students who may be reading: this is not the way to get high marks...)

At any rate, I'm sure this will clear up any questions you might have had about Augustine's trinitarian theology:

Meanwhile Back In Creatureville

Anyway, on with the show, said the mute dwarf with the stunted knee caps to the blind ice cream attendant who’d already vacated what he didn’t know to the occupied tenants who didn’t live there anymore due to the fact that Rowan Williams was standing backwards in his vestry complaining that his bells no longer rang since vacating the local nun who’d never been occupied before except through Papal eyes that had fogged his glasses on a hot steamy winter’s night after forgetting that he’d been vaccinated against amnesia, meanwhile faraway from within the backwoods of Umbria in the Donovan Hills there was Francis and his friend Mellow Yellow trying to wear their love like heaven while counting all the tulips which didn’t grow there until the day came when they decided to venture beyond their dream and visit God who lived in Rome and wore a funny hat, he was none too pleased when all the beggars arrived at the marble palace interrupting his hand feeding of the penguins in his harem which ended up in a heated discussion about Martini Lucifer and the Druids of Seclusion until the mute dwarf stumbled in claiming you had a lot of shots at Martini and now you want to cosmic the beggars who are secretly just Augustinian infants who also confessed but you just have the Augustinian blues because you had nothing to confess to which the penguins sighed and departed with the beggars after which Pope Perfect sank back into another shot of bourbon, but upon their arrival in the Donovan Hills some of the penguins discarded their dilemma and began playing tambourines with smoked out eyes and chanting Hare Krishna while others bared their chastity screaming juice me, so Augustine with a passion for writing words of passion got a job as a juice-maker which he used as inspiration for his next book while the local Druids began planting rocks in preparation for the solstice when suddenly Sunshine Superman appeared on the horizon (which is why the Stonehenge was never finished) and just when the story was about to end all the Wilbury children arrived after spending many years travelling from Greenwich Village following a Purple Haze via Voodoo Chile and collecting multiples along the way, including a Mexican Sultan who solicited a Black Magic Woman claiming you have to change your evil ways while all her sultry voice could moan was, touch me with your Samba Pa Ti

--

Origen and the problem of writing

Origen was the church's first professional writer; but in his day Christianity was not yet a literary religion. Jerome lists 800 books by Origen, but a more accurate list by Eusebius details 2,000 books (most of them now lost). Origen's patron Ambrose of Alexandria commissioned most of these books and put a huge staff of scribes and copyists at Origen's disposal.

When Origen was asked to respond to Celsus, a pagan writer who had attacked Christianity in a book called True Doctrine, Origen observed that a written response was not really appropriate for the Christian faith. "Now Jesus is always being falsely accused," Origen says in the preface to Contra Celsum. "He is still silent in face of this and does not answer with his voice; but he makes his defence in the lives of his genuine disciples, for their lives cry out the real facts and defeat all false charges." The only real apologetics is the life of Christ's followers, not written arguments. Indeed Origen suggests that producing a written defence of the faith might actually diminish the vitality of the Christian community: "I would therefore go so far as to say that the defence which you ask me to compose will weaken the force of the defence that is in the mere facts, and detract from the power of Jesus."

He goes on to write the book anyway, a big doorstopper of a book, 500 pages in the English translation. But his bad conscience – his need to apologise for the act of writing – is revealing.

When he got to the fifth book of his massive Commentary on the Gospel of John – he had completed four books so far, and had only got through a few verses – Origen paused to reflect on the words of Ecclesiastes: "My son, beware of making many books" (Ecclesiastes 12.12). He admits that he seems to have transgressed this command, and he explores this problem at length before resuming the commentary.

In the first place, Origen notes that "none of the saints has produced numerous compositions and set out his understanding in many books." Even Moses left only five books, and Paul was content to dash off a few lines when the occasion demanded. As for John, Origen poignantly observes that he "has left one Gospel while confessing that he could compose so many that the world could not contain them."

Origen is distressed by the sheer quantity of all that he has written compared to the prophets, apostles, and saints. "I get dizzy as though I were suffering vertigo, lest perhaps by obeying you [Ambrose] I have disobeyed God and have not imitated the saints." And he quotes another seemingly damning Wisdom saying: "In a multitude of words you will not escape sin" (Proverbs 10.19).

Yet Origen ventures a defence of his prodigious literary output. He notes that the perfect Word of God is not "a multitude of words" but one single Word. A person who contradicts this Word is being loquacious; he says too much, and sins in what he says. But a person who speaks truthfully always speaks the one simple Word, "even if he says everything so as to leave out nothing." You could talk forever and still be saying just one Word; and you could speak a pithy falsehood and be condemned for multiplying words. Truth is simple, falsehoods are multiple. As an example of the simplicity of truth, Origen notes that there are not four Gospels in scripture; rather "there is truly one gospel through the four."

The conclusion is that it's quality that counts, not quantity. If Origen can set forth the truth in his many writings then he will be speaking only one word. But if he speaks contrary to the truth in even one place, he will have written "many books."

The whole procedure is a striking example of Origen's spiritual exegesis, an attempt to press beneath the literal sense of the prohibition against "making many books" and to yield up its theological meaning. Only after securing this exegetical conclusion does Origen also mention the obvious practical exigency: the heretics are busy writing "many books" (literally, and in a spiritual sense!), and somebody has to answer them "on behalf of the teaching of the church." Otherwise the inquisitive and the vulnerable will be led astray.

Origen says that he has offered this defence "for myself" as well as "for those who are able to speak and write." He is assuaging his own troubled conscience, but he is also spelling out an exegetical rationale for a literary Christian culture, a culture in which writers can "make many books" while cleaving to the one simple Word.

By the late fourth century such a literary Christian culture could be taken for granted. Nothing could more vividly illustrate the changes Christianity had undergone than a remark from Athanasius, an Egyptian theologian writing around the middle of the fourth century. In a letter written during one of his many exiles (if only Athanasius had a dollar for every time he was exiled!) he apologises for the brevity of his previous 50-page letter. "I thought what I wrote was ever so brief, and I accused myself of great lethargy for not being able to write as much as is humanly possible against those who are impious toward the Holy Spirit" (Letters to Serapion, 2.1.1).

"I accused myself of great lethargy": Athanasius has a guilty conscience too. He feels bad for not having written enough.

By the fifth century Christianity has produced a writer like Augustine. One finds him in a provincial town in North Africa, an ageing bishop carefully overseeing the maintenance of the vast library of his own works. Augustine devotes the end of his life to itemising each book chronologically; he makes revisions and corrections; he collaborates with his librarian Possidius, taking every pain to ensure the preservation of his works for posterity. If some earlier Christians had happened to be writers, Augustine is an author. He writes not simply to refute heresy or to respond to this or that local problem; he writes because he is an author. He writes for his contemporaries, and for those not yet born. He thinks of himself essentially as a man of letters. His identity is bound up with the production of literature. In a letter of 412, Augustine had remarked: "I try to be one of those who write by making progress and make progress by writing" (Epistle 143.2). And in his De Trinitate Augustine describes writing as a path of discovery, a way of seeking the face of God.

In the same period, one finds an author like the Roman poet Prudentius, for whom writing is not a tactical necessity but a spiritual vocation in its own right. In the preface to his collection of poems, Prudentius writes:

When I write or speak of these things,
how I wish to break free from the chains of my body
to the place where my nimble tongue's last sound carries me!

[Haec dum scribo vel eloquor
vinclis o utinam corporis emicem
liber quo tulerit lingua sono mobilia ultimo!]

Augustine writes to make progress; he writes to seek God. Prudentius writes to transcend the world of the flesh; he writes to be saved. Writing has become something quite different here, something Origen could never have imagined. It has become part of the apparatus of spiritual life, a means of purgation and transformation. Writing has become a vocation and a spiritual discipline. Writers have become authors. With Prudentius and Augustine, the transformation of Christianity into a literary culture is complete.

Come into my heart, Lord Jesus: Origen and Augustine on the roomy heart

As a little boy there was a song I loved to sing. I learned it from my mother. She taught it to me and I sang it, and all my life it has replayed inside my mind.

Into my heart, into my heart,
Come into my heart, Lord Jesus;
Come in today, come in to stay,
Come into my heart, Lord Jesus.

It was (or so I thought in those days) a song about conversion, about getting saved, being born again. A Sinner's Prayer. At Sunday School they were always warning us to make sure we'd invited Jesus into our hearts. In another song I remember from those days, the human heart was compared to a castle where Jesus lives:

Joy is the flag flown high from the castle of my heart,
For the King is in residence there.

It seemed a pretty grand thing, to have Jesus living in your heart. And we always felt sorry for the poor non-Christians, those people who went about like walking ghost towns, their interior houses empty and abandoned. Our most fervent wish was that they too might one day invite Jesus into their hearts, that they too might one day be able to run the royal insignia up the flagpole.

I suppose it's good to learn that sort of thing when you're still a child, before you get too disillusioned about the capacities of your own (or anybody else's) heart. It never occurred to me to doubt that my heart was spacious enough to accommodate a person like Jesus, or that it was the kind of place a person like that would want to live. When I invited Jesus, rather generously, to come into the house of my heart, it never occurred to me that he might take one look inside and say, "Sorry, this isn't quite what I had in mind. Do you have anything with an extra bedroom? And a view?" Nor did it occur to me that he might want to buy the house (like so many people in my neighbourhood in Sydney) only in order to demolish or renovate – that he might show up on the first day with trucks, sledgehammers, men in hardhats; that he might be the kind of homeowner who tears out the kitchen sink and knocks down walls.

That's the way some of the great patristic writers spoke about Jesus. They described the heart as a house for Jesus – but a house in dire need of rebuilding and repair. To start with, it's far too small. If Jesus is going to live here, there will have to be extensions. And it's all looking pretty rundown. The roof leaks. Mold is growing on the walls. The front door is hanging off its hinges. There are strange smells in the hallway. Weeds are growing up through the floorboards. Jesus is moving into your heart not because these surroundings are fit for him, but because he enjoys the challenge of fixing up old places like this – a broken-down dump of a house.

In the opening pages of his Confessions, Augustine poses the riddle of how an infinite God could be contained in any place. If God is the one who contains all things – if God is the environment in which all creatures live – then how could God be located within any of those creatures? What part of creation could possibly contain God? The very thought of it is absurd, like trying to grasp the horizon in your hand, like trying to pour the ocean into a teacup. "To what place can I invite you, then, since I am in you? Or where could you come from, in order to come into me?" (Confessions, 1.2.2). Yet God loves the human heart and wants to dwell there. Augustine is deeply moved by this thought, that God would choose to take up lodgings in such a humble dwelling.

But there's a problem. God arrives, suitcase in hand, and knocks on the door of our heart. And he can hardly fit inside. The place is too small. And it's a mess, a ruin, a veritable pigsty. Yet God isn't deterred. God wants to live here: the place has a lot of promise; and besides, God likes the neighbourhood. So there's only one for it: God rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. 

As Augustine puts it: "The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild it" (Confessions, 1.5.6).

What Augustine is describing here is not what we would call a conversion experience. He's describing a process that will continue for the rest of his life. God renovates slowly, persistently, with boundless patience, and with loving attention to even the smallest details. My whole life will be nothing but the story of God's renovation. My whole life is one of God's repair projects. It's not the once-off experiences that matter – not any single episode of inviting Jesus into my heart. What matters is the process; what matters is that my heart gradually becomes bigger, wider, cleaner, more orderly. What matters is that it slowly becomes, over a whole lifetime, an inhabitable place for God.

Two centuries before Augustine, Origen had also spoken of the gradual process by which our hearts become dwelling places for God. But if Augustine's language evokes scenes of a dilapidated Roman villa, Origen's language has about it a certain characteristic oriental, Jewish, Old Testament flavour: his themes are learning and feasting.

For Origen, the heart is repaired and expanded by learning. As we learn more about God, gradually increasing our knowledge by daily increments, our hearts grow wider. At first the heart is too small, like (he says) the heart of a little child. But when it has grown big enough, Jesus is able to move in and take up residence there. And the goal of life, Origen thinks, is to become roomy for Jesus – to give Jesus room to move about easily and freely. As we grow, we are able to "offer such roomy hearts to the Word of God that he may even be said to walk about in them, that is, in the open spaces of a fuller understanding and a wider knowledge" (Commentary on the Song of Songs, 2.8).

To you and me, this vision – of God inhabiting the domain of our understanding – might seem rather dry, too cold and intellectual. But for Origen it is the highest mysticism. To be sure, the whole process involves thought, reflection, study of scripture: all this is the necessary work of renovating our shabby home. But once Jesus moves in, he is festive and full of cheer. He lays a feast, and the Father and the Spirit celebrate together at the table: "Blessed is that roomy soul [latitudo animae, in Rufinus' Latin translation], blessed the couches of her mind, where both the Father and the Son, surely together with the Holy Spirit, recline and sup and have their dwelling-place!"

Moreover, when Jesus takes up residence in the house of the heart, he brings with him every good thing. "With what precious stores, think you, with what abundance are such Guests regaled?" The purpose of life, in Origen's view, is to grow through learning – not because learning is an end in itself, but because through learning the heart grows wider, and such a spacious life can be a home where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit recline together and share a feast.

In Rublev's icon of the Trinity, it is usually said that we are invited to take up a seat, that the fourth place at the table is for us. But here is how Origen might see the icon: Jesus has laid a feast; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are reclining together at table; and the human heart is that table, the humble venue of eternal feasting, eternal joy.