Transfiguring Eros into Agape, starting with John Donne

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So I’m doing a self-study, fake English degree so that by the time I’m 50 in 7 years, I’ll have read and studied the English literature I have missed out on. The idea came to me because one of the auditors in my King Arthur course was drawing great connections between, say, Pearl and Wordsworth. I can do the medieval history and theology and context bit, but not the long tradition of English literature bit.

Anyway, one of the big themes of my work on King Arthur lately has been how “Courtly Love” motifs can be redeemed and transfigured in light of the Gospel and Christ’s self-sacrifice. An example is Lancelot in The Knight of the Cart by Chretien de Troyes choosing to ride in the cart despite the fact that it will bring him shame and ignominy (riding in a cart only something done by criminals on the way to the gallows) because it is the surest way to rescue his love. So also, in a higher mode, did Christ not scorn the cross and its shame because it was the surest way to rescue his love.

Anyway, obviously one needs to find other things in English literature, but this sort of thing is everywhere, and I can’t help myself. So allow me to get the Eros – Agape thing out of my system here, using not medieval romance but John Donne’s poem “The Good-Morrow” instead. Follow the link in the last sentence and read it.

This poem is addressed to his beloved and sees their love as, if not the “real” beginning of life, the “real” beginning of adulthood, and the consummation and fulfilment of all goods before her. Life before this was but childhood or sleep. My tendency to see all love fulfilled in divine love kicked in in lines 6-7:

If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee.

Are these two lines not as easily turned upward to the divine as sideways to a lady? All beauty, all pleasure, all good in this world is just a taste of heaven, isn’t it? A foretaste of God. A dream of Him and his love divine, all loves excelling. This is what lies behind the rapture of the great mystics of the Church, that they found out that whatever beauty was elsewhere was, in fact, a preparation for them to encounter God in mystic rapture, seized like St Teresa in Ecstasy.

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And that word “desir’d” — here is what the divine transfigures. We all enjoy compartmentalizing our Greek words for love and doing a little C. S. Lewis The Four Loves, but the truth is that in real life — which includes their usage in Greek — these loves bleed into each other. And so, Eros, which can be translated desire is not entirely distant or closed off from agape, that powerful love that, as caritas, is typified in St. Bernard by the choice of the will to do and to seek and to will the good of the other, regardless of eros or affection.

And that agape, as we were all taught in Sunday school, is the kind of love that God is as stated in 1 John.

What John Donne provides us with here in “The Good-Morrow” is a transfiguration of desire from the pursuit of lesser things and objects to the pursuit of the beloved. All the other beauties are, in fact, dreams. Ephemeral. Passing fancies. Indeed, just before the lines I quoted, he says, “all pleasures fancies bee.”

And so his desire, his eros, finds its fulfilment in her.

The next verse looks more closely at the transfigured desire now turned to love. Lines 10-11:

For love, all love of other sights controules,
And makes one little roome, an every where.

Love such as he has for his beloved transfigures all other loves. Everything comes back around to here and to her. And this love makes their chamber into a universe. The two together are all the world. In a sense, this is that experience of “falling in love”, where the beloved becomes the whole universe for the lover.

And in God, is this not actually the case? Transfixed by love of Him, is it not the real fulfilment of this moment, that each room does become an everywhere because is everywhere yet equally present in each place? And so your little room, filled with your beloved, is itself a place where everything that matters in the universe may be found.

And so the lovers behold one another, “My face in thine eye.” They are together a world. But both are essential, are they not? The second-last line draws us into this mystery of love:

If our two loves be one…

Love, in the famous description made by St. Augustine in On the Trinity, is itself composed of lover, beloved, and love itself. Two people in love have two loves, but those two loves are, in truth, a single love. All of our loves are, therefore, a window into the divine, a gateway to God.

Donne continues:

… or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.

And thus the poem ends. Here is power that shows us how it is that when we rightly order our loves, we are transfigured into the image of Christ our God. “thou and I / Love so alike” — the lovers become like one another through force and power of their love. This is a reality. We become like whom and what we love. And so when our desire for beauty, our eros, finds its true fulfilment in the agape that is God, that love begins to transfigure us and make us like Him.

That is simply how love works.

That is simply how desiring God works. All the beauty that we desire is but a dream of Him. And when we are united to Him, we find a single little room becomes the whole world, and we find that we are united to Him and become like Him through the power of love.

What John Donne gives us is an image of the power of true, earthly love. And in so doing, he has also given us a dream of heavenly love.

Spiritual Formation and Discipline 2: Askesis & the Means of Growth

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In my most recent post, I discussed the telos, or end, to which spiritual formation tends: purity of heart, which means a Jesus-shaped life, living into the reality that already exists through our participation in the divine life in virtue of our faith in Christ and baptism into His church.

The means by which we grow more like Jesus and have our hearts purified are usually termed “disciplines”. In Celebration of Discipline, the 1978 book that sort of kicked off the current and ongoing interest in spiritual formation/the disciplines amongst low-church/evangelical Protestants, Richard J Foster lists 12, dividing his book into three groups of four:

Group 1, “The Inward Disciplines”:

  1. Meditation
  2. Prayer
  3. Fasting
  4. Study

Group 2, “The Outward Disciplines”:

  1. Simplicity
  2. Solitude
  3. Submission
  4. Service

Group 3, “The Corporate Disciplines”:

  1. Confession
  2. Worship
  3. Guidance
  4. Celebration

This book is helpful, and I recommend it. One Lent, I read 2 chapters a week as my Lenten discipline. I have no disagreement with focussing on these 12 practices to help us grow into the measure of the fullness of the stature of Christ.

10 years later, Dallas Willard wrote another helpful book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, which is about the philosophy of spiritual formation. He includes a chapter about specific disciplines, listing (on page 158 of my edition) the following:

Disciplines of Abstinence:

  • solitude
  • silence
  • fasting
  • frugality
  • chastity
  • secrecy
  • sacrifice

Disciplines of Engagement:

  • study
  • worship
  • celebration
  • service
  • prayer
  • fellowship
  • confession
  • submission

In preparing for my upcoming course on spiritual formation, I was thinking about how to address specific disciplines, and thus which disciplines to address. As helpful as these two lists are — no doubt there are other helpful lists — there are two means of spiritual growth that have come upon me over the years since I first encountered Foster and Willard in 2005-2006: watchfulness and suffering.

Of these two means, watchfulness is definitely a candidate for these lists. I’ll discuss it later. Suffering, on the other hand, is not something you do by its very definition. The disciplines discussed in the above lists are all practices, part of the praktike that makes us holier and more like Christ, part of things we do, if we take up the terms of the tradition of Evagrius Ponticus in the late fourth century. Suffering is something that is done to you. Suffering is about the bad things that you go through. In terms of spiritual formation, we do not practise suffering. We do not necessarily choose all suffering; much suffering is involuntary.

Nevertheless, in the great tradition of Evagrius and The Philokalia, as well as in the West with the Benedictine and Cistercian tradition, not to mention, say, Carmelites and others, keeping watch over your heart and mind and patient endurance of suffering are important elements in our formation into Christlikeness. They are means of sanctification.

Now, I could go on with a discussion of what these two means of grace entail, having already discussed in last post the hope of glory. But I wish to circle back to the question of the means of spiritual formation and growth in light of suffering and watchfulness and, thus how we approach our own spiritual lives. This will require revisiting the question of what is a discipline.

What is a discipline?

I have already said that a “discipline” in this context is something that we do. It comes from the Latin word disciplina. According to Lewis & Short’s Latin Dictionary the original base of the term is “instruction … teaching”, and extends outwards to “learning, knowledge, science” and even “custom, habit”. In the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, we see other similarities and shades of meaning — a branch of study, doctrine, moral regulation, chastisement, correction.

In the Vulgate, disciplina translates paideia in Ecclesiastes, Ephesians, and elsewhere. There’s probably a lot of work to be done in tracing the history of the semantics of the word disciplina (and a scan of the Rule of Benedict shows it to be part of the story), but we’ll continue without that.

Discipline itself, as a word, refers to things that help teach us in some sense. When spiritual formation literature talks about “the disciplines” or “a discipline”, they mean conscious practices and behaviours that we adopt for learning the way of being one of Jesus’ disciples and growing in our love and knowledge of Him.

However, there are important elements of our spiritual formation that are not disciplines. Suffering is the most obvious, although even here the extent to which suffering forms us into the image of the cruciform Christ depends partly on inner disciplines of submission to the will of God, of forgiving enemies, of persistence, etc. But in a sense, that is a mindset concern, and a mindset that is open to the working of the Holy Spirit at all times is the kind of mindset that will be more open to spiritual growth when practising a bona fide discipline as well.

The sacraments themselves are also not really disciplines, per se. The discipline is regularity for Holy Communion, and actually getting baptised. Certainly, they fall in the broader category of praktike, and certainly the more we open our hearts to the Holy Spirit at large, the more we will grow through the Eucharist, but I do not think that the Eucharist itself counts as a discipline, at least not as we usually think of them.

Or consider the steps to humility from The Rule of Benedict chapter 7 (trans. Carolinne White):

  1. “to keep the fear of God in mind at all times”
  2. “not to love your own will and not to take pleasure in satisfying your own desires”
  3. “to submit to your superior with complete obedience out of love for God”
  4. “to cling to patience with equanimity…”
  5. “to confess humbly to the abbot all the wicked thoughts that spring to mind and anything you have secretly done wrong”
  6. “to be content with the lowest position and the most menial treatment, and to consider himself incompetent and worthless with regard to everything he is told to do”
  7. “not only to claim that he is beneath everyone else and worse than them, but also to be convinced of this deep in his heart”
  8. “to do only what is commended by the common rule of the monastery and the example of his superiors”
  9. “to keep his tongue in check and to refrain from speaking”
  10. “to avoid being easily provoked to laughter”
  11. “to speak gently and without laughter, but with humility and seriousness, saying only a few, reasonable words”
  12. “always to display humility, both in his attitude and his behaviour, to those who see him”

Clearly some of these are covered by the branches of one or more spiritual discipline, but not all. Much of this is about habits of thought and mindset. They are important aspects of the praktike of the spiritual life, but they are not easily classifiable for a book that wants to write a chapter for each major discipline. There is a whole constellation of such behaviours and attitudes that would certainly warrant a chapter or book each: “watchfulness” or “keep the fear of God in mind at all times” or “cling to patience” or “do not consider yourself above others”.

Training in Righteousness

All of these practices along with other means of grace combine in our life of spiritual formation to become our “training in righteousness”, as per 2 Timothy 3:16-17, which is primarily about Scripture and its use in the Christian life. Yet here, perhaps, is another locus for what we are talking about in spiritual formation and the means thereof:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant [anthropos] of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (NIV unable to know how to properly translate anthropos without also being sexist, it seems)

  • teaching didaskalia
  • rebuking elegmos
  • correcting epanorthosis
  • training in righteousness paideia in dikaiosune
  • equipped for every good work pros pan ergon agathon exertismenos

I hope it’s not lost on us that “training” in 2 Timothy 3:16 is paideia, translated elsewhere by Jerome as disciplina (but here as erudiendum).

Elsewhere in St. Paul’s letters, he discusses this training and uses some metaphors from athletics to refer to how we should be training in righteousness. In extrabiblical literature, a common word for training athletic training is askesis, from which we get the English ascetic and asceticism.

If we consider spiritual formation and the means thereof (both “disciplines” and the other realities mentioned above) as “training in righteousness” that is focussed on Jesus as our end goal, then we can rightly order our lives and our minds and our hearts in an all-encompassing mode of life (or, as per one definition, askesis) that will open us to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit in our hearts and minds.

Listing the Means of Formation

Having said all of that, I do think classification and listing can be helpful because it helps us consciously pursue the telos of spiritual formation. The broad categories of the means are:

  • Disciplines (as per the lists by Foster and Willard above)
  • Sacraments
  • Suffering
  • Mindset(s)

These elements working together are what constitute our training in righteousness so that we may attain to the measure of the fullness of the stature of Christ. Having cleared the ground, we can think more clearly and more comprehensively on the spiritual life.

Spiritual Formation and Discipline 1: Telos

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I’m going to be teaching a course about spiritual formation over the summer, and then I teach the Desert Fathers again in 2027. So watch this space for more meditations on asceticism and such! My own approach to spiritual formation is to inhabit my own Anglican experience and tradition. For me, this means not just the Church of England from the sixteenth century onwards, and not just the English school of spirituality from St Aldhelm through Bede and Aelfric to Aelred and then the fourteenth-century mystics (Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton, The Cloud of Unknowing).

My Anglican spiritual formation sources also include the patristic roots and foundations common to the whole Chalcedonian Church as well as noteworthy continental influences from the Middle Ages. English spirituality ought not to shy away from Sts Cyprian, Augustine, Maximus, Basil, Benedict, Boethius simply because they are from elsewhere! Insular Christianity has never been so insular. Likewise, the great works of Anselm from when he was in France, or of Aquinas, or St Bernard of Clairvaux are part of the matrix of sources for us.

Anyway, that’s the usual eclecticism from which I have drawn for ages. I bring it up because two thoughts have come to me on this topic tonight. First, the question of the telos of spiritual formation. What do Scripture and tradition tell us about the end we are being shaped into? What form should we be seeking for our spirits? Second, the question of the means of seeking that telos. These means are typically called disciplines, but I’m grappling with that terminology just now.

Let’s just talk telos and patristics tonight; I’ll look at the means next time.

Purity of Heart

Among the first patristic texts I read was John Cassian’s Conferences from the 420s (IIRC), and this is a work that has been involved in forming me for almost 20 years. In Conference 1, we are given a helpful distinction to consider everything we do in life. Whatever you are doing, you have an end, or telos, towards which you are aiming. For a farmer, the end to which he aims is a good harvest. To achieve that end, there is usual a more proximate goal, or scopos, that is being sought. Tilling a field; seeding; weeding; watering. Make sure you do those well. The goal is the seeds planted in the ground at the right depth and the right time.

In the monastic life, the telos is seeing God, and the scopos one works towards to achieve that end is purity of heart. Cassian is here drawing from Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The vision of God, the beatific vision, is the end towards which we strive. While we cannot actually seek that directly, we can aim for purity of heart. And then that’s what the rest of the Conferences are about.

Purity of heart comes around in Conference 10.7 with a wonderfully beautiful description about the unity with God, the participation in the divine life, that pure prayer looks like:

And this will come to pass when God shall be all our love, and every desire and wish and effort, every thought of ours, and all our life and words and breath, and that unity which already exists between the Father and the Son, and the Son and the Father, has been shed abroad in our hearts and minds, so that as He loves us with a pure and unfeigned and indissoluble love, so we also may be joined to Him by a lasting and inseparable affection, since we are so united to Him that whatever we breathe or think, or speak is God, since, as I say, we attain to that end of which we spoke before, which the same Lord in His prayer hopes may be fulfilled in us: that they all may be one as we are one, I in them and You in Me, that they also may be made perfect in one; and again: Father, those whom You have given Me, I will that where I am, they may also be with Me. (John 17:22-24)

Jesus is the Pure of Heart

Having said all that, I think it may be more important to frontload the telos of spiritual formation as Christlikeness — which itself would mean purity of heart, of course. My friend James R. Wood published an essay on The Gospel Coalition Canada in January on spiritual formation, and he cites this is the final cause of spiritual formation. His piece is good, and I recommend it. He cites some important Scripture verses for us to consider in this regard.

First, Romans 8:29:

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. (ESV)

For our purposes, the important bit is “conformed to the image of his Son”, and we can leave foreknowledge and predestination out of this conversation for now. This is the end towards which we are headed as people baptised in the threefold Name of the Triune God. We are going to become like Jesus. For me, the Scripture verse that has been calling out in this regard is a phrase from Ephesians 4:13:

to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ

In the Bible, what this means is that we are becoming more like our Saviour, and it is happening by the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives. Of course, to say that is not to say that we don’t do anything. Our actions are the very tools that God uses to shape our characters, to conform us to the image of Jesus.

As James also notes in the TGC article, the apostles exhort us to imitate Jesus, as per these verses:

whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. (1 John 2:6 ESV)

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. (1 Peter 2:21 ESV)

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. (Ephesians 5:1 ESV)

Becoming God

To pick up the title of my most recent post here, a third end to which we train in spiritual formation is union with God, and this union itself is at times called theosis or theopoiesis or deification. It does not mean that we ourselves slip away, even if Cassian above may feel that way to some. It means that we are united to Christ, to the Holy Trinity.

In a line running from Irenaeus through Athanasius to Maximus and beyond to mediaeval mysticism: God became man so that man might become God. The absolute theological foundation for spiritual formation is not prelapsarian Adam. It is not our state after the Fall. It is not our glorification in the New Heaven and the New Earth.

The absolute theological foundation for spiritual formation is the incarnation of the Son of God. It is the hypostatic union, lived out as the single hypostasis of Jesus of Nazareth, God the Word incarnate, possessing two complete natures. Through his incarnate life, death, resurrection, ascension, and reigning on high, human nature has been taken up into divinity.

We are, to use the Middle English phraseology, “oned” to God through Jesus Christ. A few Bible verses:

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:5 ESV)

But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. (1 Corinthians 6:17 ESV)

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 ESV)

What we seek in pursuit of spiritual formation is a deeper union, a more perfect union. We seek to know God Himself, to pierce the cloud of unknowing and be united more fully to Him and live a Godlike life here on earth.

Not Mental Wellness

My final point in tonight’s post is that the telos for which we strive in spiritual formation is not mental wellness. There’s a tendency out there towards what I call “mysticism as therapy.” Good mental may be a by-product of a life lived seeking purity of heart, the imitation of Christ, participation in the divine life. Maybe. Maybe not.

It is certainly not the point. Ever.

The point is God Himself. Nothing less will do.

As to the means for spiritual formation — that’s for next time.

Becoming God: Maximus, Eucharist, Asceticism

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The loggia of Santa Maria Maggiore (my photo)

I used to be a server at church in days of yore (now I’m a mere parish priest). One Sunday I was sitting there behind the brass communion rail watching everybody come up, old and young, men and women, a little kid with a stuffed animal. And there was my Dad distributing the bread, a lay reader with the chalice. None of the distinctions in that crowd mattered at that moment. You knelt, you ate, you drank.

There, at the communion rail of St. Thomas’ Anglican Church, people met God.

They consumed God. They were united to God.

I was struck by the beauty of it.

And as I meditated on this great levelling achieved by God’s grace through the sacrament, I realised that the Holy Communion is the most mystical act we’ll ever do. It must have been summer or Christmas, and I must have been an undergrad reading about medieval mysticism to think that! As I understood it, mysticism was the reaching out of the finite human spirit to achieve union with the infinite Spirit of God.

This is precisely what happens in the Holy Communion.

St Maximus writes in On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy:

Through the holy partaking of the immaculate and life-giving mysteries, grace brings about the fellowship and identity with God according to participation that is possible through our likeness to God, and through this identity man is deemed worthy to become god from man. (935, Trans. Armstrong, p. 88)

First, I just love the way the Greek Fathers talk of the sacraments: “the immaculate and life-giving mysteries.” Beautiful. Anyway, the grace of God is at work in the Holy Communion, and St Maximus is saying everything I was thinking at age 22 and more. He pushes us through participation in the divine life to our likeness to God, and then higher up to our own deification.

St Maximus gives a bit of explanation:

For, we believe that we have partaken of the gifts of the Holy Spirit through grace by faith here in this present life, and we believe that, after keeping the commandments to the best of our ability, we shall partake in these things in their very reality — in the age to come according to that which is ultimately true, according to the unfailing hope of our faith and the certain and infallible fulfillment of what has been promised. (Ibid.)

What we see here is that this is a real partaking of grace at Holy Communion which we experience here and now. And these are a foretaste of heaven. But we are called to keep the commandments to the best of our ability. I’ll circle back to that. First, let’s finish this passage off:

As we pass from the grace that is by faith to the grace according to sight, he will remake us into himself — clearly, I am speaking of “our God and Savior Jesus Christ” — by stripping away the properties of corruption in us, and he will graciously give to us the archetypal mysteries that are represented here through sensible symbols. (Ibid.)

Note that it is all grace. Sure, we keep the commandments, but even in this, it is grace that gives us the fellowship with God through partaking of the Eucharist. And we see that our final transformation into gods is done by God Himself, by Jesus Christ. He is the one who remakes us. He is the one who strips away corruption. He is the one who gives us the realities that we today only experience through symbols.

To tie us back into the last post about the union of heaven and earth in Christ’s theandric union, the Holy Communion only does this because of the perfect completeness of Christ’s human and divine natures as well as their complete and perfect and full union. The flesh is real flesh. The flesh is real food. The man is real God. His grace permeates the flesh, his divinity comes to us as we eat. We grind God with our teeth because He became a man. Both realities must be in order for Holy Communion to communicate God’s grace to us. This is the teaching of St. Cyril in his Commentary on John, and it is the only thing that makes Question 35 of St Maximus Responses to Thalassius make sense to me.

Holy Baptism brings us into union with Christ the God-Man and His death and resurrection. The Holy Communion renews that union experientially and gives us a foretaste of the full participation in the divine life that awaits us. We are being conformed into the image of Christ, who is fully God, through Holy Communion. Holy Communions makes us gods.

It deifies us.

There is in the pursuit of deification, in our desire to participate in divine life, a balance and movement of grace and faith, of resting in God’s power and work out your salvation in fear and trembling. Everything we gain through the theandric union of Christ’s hypostasis comes entirely through God’s grace, not our effort. The Holy Communion is regular fuel for this ongoing, lifelong transformation of deification.

More from the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy:

Therefore, let us not be absent from the holy Church of God because she contains such great mysteries of our salvation according to the holy regulation of the divine symbols performed there. Through these mysteries, the Church fashions each on into the image of Christ — each one of us who conducts himself to the very best of his ability — and she reveals the gift of adoption that is given through holy baptism in the Holy Spirit and that perfects each one into the image of Christ. (Ibid., pp. 93-94)

St. Maximus goes on to call us to the moral life, the ascetic life. Asceticism, properly understood, is not about denying the body. It’s not about working for heaven or earning God’s favour. It is about opening ourselves up and readying our hearts to be more ready and more able to receive the grace God offers us. Asceticism is about widening our own capacity to receive grace. Paradoxically, asceticism only works because of God’s grace and heavenly benediction.

St. Maximus is a great ascetic and contemplative writer as well — he gets the most air time in The Philokalia, in fact. There is much that could be said here as well.

But I always like to circle us back to the union of heaven and earth. Our ascetic labours can be the means God uses to one us to himself. But we are only oned to God because He did it first. Contemplation and asceticism may open us up to receive God more fully, but this is only because He became man as Jesus the Christ. God the Word became a complete human being and caught humanity into the divine life.

If we accept the life Jesus now offers, we are brought into the divine life, and made more open to the power and movement of the Holy Spirit. And so we strive in our asceticism and sit quietly in contemplation. But we do so knowing that it is all grace. It all comes from above. Heaven is united to earth because of Jesus Christ.

Receive Holy Communion. Become little gods.

And pray.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The Union of Heaven and Earth in the God-Man

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I came away from my last post thinking about St. Maximus and the hypostatic union and flowing from there into Holy Communion once again (with a little help from St. Cyril of Alexandria). As you may recall, my last post drew together St. Maximus the Confessor and the cosmic element of the Holy Eucharist as portrayed in Malcolm Guite’s tour-de-force ballad epic Galahad and the Grail.

Let’s start by thinking a bit more about the hypostatic union in this post, and then Holy Communion in the next. This term is actually rendering what Sts Maximus and Cyril (assume Alexandria unless otherwise stated) term “union according to hypostasis.” Contrary to what an endorsement on a recent heretical book about the Trinity says, this is a Christological term, not a Trinitarian one. What it means is that there is a single hypostasis of Jesus Christ, but that single hypostasis is a perfect union of God and man.

St Maximus uses the language of St Dionysius the Areopagite and calls the union “theandric”. There’s a lot going on in St. Maximus’ discussions of the union of God and man in Jesus. Here’s one passage from Ambiguum 5 (which itself is an analysis of a passage from St Dionysius):

…in the mystery of the divine Incarnation, divinity and humanity were united in the hypostasis of the Word: neither of the natural energies was displaced in the union, neither functioned independently after the union, and neither was divided from that to which it had been conjoined and with which it coexisted. (Ambiguum 5.25, trans. Constas in Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library)

Hypostasis has mostly in later theology been translated by the Latin persona, or English, person. A hypostasis is a single, united, acting subject that I’m tempted to say is in relation to other subjects (I chose to say “is” instead of “exists”; please clap).* Jesus the Christ, the God Word incarnate, is only one of these. He is or has only one person.

St Maximus, like St Cyril, says that the hypostasis that is the ultimate agent of Christ’s actions and subject of his verbs is the God Word. However, what he’s pressing at throughout Ambiguum 5 is that the God Word possesses the fullness of what it means to be divine as well as the fullness of what it means to be human. These two fullnesses are what we like to call “natures”.

We see this fullness after the colon, where St Maximus says, “neither of the natural energies was displaced in the union”. What “energies” or energeiai refer to are actions, operations, etc. St Maximus is saying that the fullness of the activities natural to humanity and likewise of divinity were still present after the union of God and man in the Blessed Virgin Mary’s womb. Neither was the divinity diminished, nor was the humanity swallowed up.

But while they are both there in their fullness, they are perfectly united “neither functioned independently after the union.” Everything has but a single acting subject.

St. Maximus’s argument flows on:

For in the indissoluble union, the Word made flesh possessed the whole active power of His own divinity together with the whole passive power of His own humanity. Being God He worked wonders in a human way, for they were accomplished through naturally passible flesh. Being man He experienced the sufferings of human nature, but in a divine way, for they unfolded at the command of the His sovereign will. Or rather, both were done in a theandric way, since He is God and man at the same time. (5.26)

This is the perfect union of heaven and earth. The most perfect union that could ever be — Jesus Christ, God the Word incarnate, where divine and human are indissolubly united. Point to Christ on the Cross — that is the very flesh of God Himself, sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying:

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The Crucifixion, Studenica, Serbia. 1310s.

As heaven and earth are united through the indissoluble, theandric union according to hypostasis of Jesus Christ, we are saved. St Maximus has more to say:

By means of the wonders He restored us to ourselves, revealing the state in which we were created. By means of the sufferings, He makes us His own, for we have become that which He revealed. By means of both He enables us to trust in the truth of the natures from which, in which, and which He is, for He alone is true and trustworthy, and wishes to be confessed as such by us. (5.26)

Exegeting St Maximus’s exegesis of the Fathers is the task of a lifetime, so I’ll stop with all the quotations. The purpose of all this beauty and glory in St Maximus’s theology was stated 300 years earlier by St. Athanasius: God became man so that man might become God.

Heaven and earth are united precisely through the union of God and Man in the man Jesus Christ, which means that we are united to God through the deified human person, deified human flesh, of Jesus Christ, God the Word incarnate. We are baptised into His death and resurrection bound to Him, filled with His Spirit.

This is a reality we enjoy in virtue of our baptism into Christ. But it is also a reality we can enter further into experientially. And the starting point for a discussion of that ongoing, growing experience of our deification through God’s humanity is the Blessed Sacrament of His Most Holy Body and Blood: Holy Communion.

*If you care, the business of “in relation to other subjects” is a little bit of Zizioulas, Being As Communion, and may be a wrong remembering of him, and he may be wrong, anyway. But I think it works here.

The Union of Heaven and Earth at the Holy Grail

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The other day I finished Malcom Guite’s truly wonderful epic in ballad form, Galahad and the Grail. Perhaps you’ve seen people raving about it online. The book is worth your time, let me tell you! I have long enjoyed Fr. Malcolm’s work, and I am a lifelong King Arthur fan — plus, The Quest of the Holy Grail is one of my favourite books.

Last time, I posted about Maximus the Confessor and the Holy Grail. Let me do so yet again, but on a new theme, drawing from Fr. Malcolm’s poem.

One of the themes of the Grail legend that Fr. Malcolm grasps and lays bare more fully than the medieval tales is that of the relationship between humans and creation. The created order was damaged and wounded with the Dolorous Stroke that brought low King Pelles. His realm, where Corbenek, the Grail Castle, is located turned into a waste land.

Into the Waste Land.

Taking tips and cues from TS Eliot and elsewhere, Fr. Malcolm bound land and grace and human travail together. As always, the achievement of the Grail involves the healing of the Land as much as it does the healing of the Fisher King. And the Grail represents the grace of Christ communicated to humanity, as much through the Eucharist as in his blood spilled on Calvary (into the Grail) — equally so into our hearts and minds, if we are (to use David W. Fagerberg’s word) capacitated to receive said grace.

When the Grail is achieved, each Grail Knight experiences it differently, and I really like it. With no more spoilers than that, here is some of what is seen:

The moment he removed the veil
I saw the Chalice shine.
Though silver, it seemed clear as glass,
and through it I saw all things pass.
All the earth gives — her living grass,
her grain, her vines, her woods, her seas,
— all earthly things that fade and pass
seemed lifted in that living glass
to meet the things divine.
-Book 3, Stave VIII, lines 527-535

The poem goes on to see the Grail as “an isthmus … between the earth and Heaven.” (lines 536-537)

The Grail, in its literal sense in these ancient poems, is an object from the Last Supper that bears the literal blood of Christ in it, brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea. Thereby it becomes a conduit for the grace of God. But it’s not just the grace of God as some general concept, but the very specific grace of God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, communicating God’s grace and heavenly benediction even now.

It is also, in this same vision in the poem, Eucharistic, connecting earth and Heaven and revealing Christ in the elements of the Holy Communion.

When I read that stanza quoted above, I immediately thought, “Of course! Christ is the heart of creation!” And while that’s the title of a book by Rowan Williams, I haven’t read Williams yet! I have read and meditated on St. Maximus, though.

In St. Maximus, we see a full flowering in the terms of Nicaea (the fulness of the Trinity) and Chalcedon (the fulness of Christ having two natures) the promise of the teaching of St. Justin Martyr, that there is a logos spermatikos abroad in the world, even in the hearts and minds of pagan Stoics. Christ is that Logos.

As Logos, if I remember my Maximus aright, Christ is not simply the utterance or thought of God. A word in the earthbound sense in brief and frail. Rarely are they fletched and feathered like arrows as in Homer. A word is no more spoken than it fades away. Yet we know from Scripture that God’s words will not pass away.

Christ is the Word through Whom all things were made. He is not simply the utterance of Genesis 1 but also the plan and blueprint. A Word such as this, as is one of the nuances in Greek Logos and Latin Verbum, is the blueprint and plan of a thing. It is the final cause. It is the end towards which something is headed, the origin from which it springs. The Word is both protology and eschatology.

Everything has its own little logos. These logoi determine their essential nature and character, whether “living grass … grain … vines … woods … seas — all earthly things that fade and pass”, including human persons. All of these little logoi working together are bringing about the fulfilment of the great Logos, the Plan of the Universe. We, as humans, can join that movement towards Christ the Eternal Logos and thus live forever with Him and the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Or we can turn away.

And when we turn to Christ, who is both Planner and Plan, who is the Word behind the words (to quote another of Fr. Malcolm’s poems), we are also joining with all creation, as in Psalm 19. All creation rightly gives God praise.

And so our coming to Christ and union with Him can transfigure our vision of the world around us and help us see Him everywhere. He binds together all of creation, and thus all of creation becomes for us a gateway to God.

And this grace will help us find the Grail.

Maximus the Confessor and the Holy Grail

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The other day, I stated across social media that all I really want to read right now is Arthurian literature and St. Maximus the Confessor. At first blush, the uninitiated may find that a headscratcher. What of the famous tale of the Cistercian who found the brothers dozing a little during the sermon, so shifted tack and said, “Once in King Arthur’s court…” Everyone suddenly listened! The idea is that we are spiritually lazy (even monks!), and we are more interested in imaginary adventures than the slow faithfulness of holiness.

Moreover (the imagined critic may say), what of all the unsavoury bits in Arthurian literature? Uther’s adulterous passion for Ygraine. Tristan and Isolde. Lancelot and Guinevere. The many tournaments. What’s the deal with the Green Knight? How could this body of literature have anything to do with one of the great “mystical” (if you will allow it) theologians–certainly a spiritual theologian!

Well, tonight I finished off the anonymous Quest of the Holy Grail, written between 1215-1230. This is a French romance that is part of the much larger Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail Cycle. It has been argued that, while there are clearly multiple authors for different parts of the cycle, the original core three romances had a single architect who oversaw the other authors’ work. But the individual who did the Quest, however, was by far the more spiritual of the three.

In her translation for Penguin Classics, P. M. Matarasso calls this not a romance, in fact, but a spiritual fable. Of course, in terms of genre, this is most obviously a romance. Yet it is also clearly a spiritual fable. It is not a perfect allegory, and the characters know it. But the characters also see the spiritual symbolism that underlies much of what they do. To give a straightforward example, when Sir Galahad drives away seven felonious knights, while there is a real history there, the act symbolises the Seven Deadly Sins.

The most potent spiritual symbol through the whole book is, of course, the Grail itself. Now, if this were not a spiritual fable, clearly knights like Sir Gawain or Sir Owein the Bastard could just, say, take a helicopter to Castle Corbenic and get their hands on the Grail (as suggested by my eldest when he was four years old). In fact, none of the knights can even just ride there on horseback unless they are meant to go. It is known that Corbenic is where the Grail typically resides.

Yet not even Galahad, the Good Knight who will achieve the Quest, can simply ride to his Grandad’s. He, too, must quest. The Grail itself is, in its very broadest sense, the grace of God in all its medieval variegated hues. It’s not just grace in terms of God pardoning our offenses and helping us out. It’s grace in terms of God making us better, transforming us into holiness. And that, of course, requires work. If I counted time right, in fact, the Grail Quest takes about seven years to achieve.

Anyway, the Holy Grail is not simply a mystical McGuffin, nor does it behave like an ordinary archaeological object that you can get your hands on by following the clues and walking across a chasm to find an ancient knight in a room full of fancy cups. Its mystical properties mean that it comes and goes at will — kind of how the wind blows where it will — and its primary residence is not simply easily accessible the way Camelot is.

There is a lot about how the spiritual life works here, about the journey of repentance and confession and penance and wandering in the woods of the world, resisting temptation, undoing the curses of the evil, fighting monsters, and on and on. A lot.

As Matarasso says: a spiritual fable.

What’s the Maximus factor, then?

The immediate teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor that came to me was from his On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, ch. 6, where he discusses Sacred Scripture. St. Maximus, consciously following the teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite but in a line of teachers going back to Origen and including St. Gregory of Nyssa, says that the Scriptures are like a human:

The Old Testament possesses a body, and the New possesses a soul and spirit and mind. And, again, the historical letter of all holy Scripture (I am speaking of the Old and the New Testaments) is the body. And the mind of the Scripture and the aim towards which it refers is the soul. (trans. Armstrong, p. 69)

The spiritual sense of Scripture here flagged is where contemplation resides and which is eternal, drawing us to God.

In ch. 24, St. Maximus says, “Through the sacred reading of the Holy Gospel, grace brings about the end of the earthly mindset, as the end of the sensible realm.”

Elsewhere (reference not handy, sorry), St. Maximus discusses the Transfiguration of Our Lord, and he says that this itself has a spiritual meaning that points to the spiritual meaning of Scripture! Christ’s normal, non-glowing garments are the historical-literal sense, and the glowing, white Christ is the spiritual sense hidden underneath.

That’s the simplest way to bring St. Maximus into Arthurian literature. This approach works best with the consciously Christian/catholic/religious ones, such as The Quest of the Holy Grail or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the asking if there is a lurking spiritual lesson/meaning/symbol/image waiting to be found in the other literature can make even Chretien de Troyes into a spiritual exercise.

But there is undoubtedly more Maximus-Arthur crossover to be had! The spiritual meaning of the Holy Grail and the progress of grace and the Real Presence of Christ and all of that. The full-bodied, two-nature Christology of Maximus is probably handy, as well. Or perhaps we could consider the Centuries on Charity, their mysticism, and the repentance of Lancelot, or the rapture of Galahad. How do the Grail companions fare as models of Maximus’ spiritual vision?

But that’s all for now. I do recommend reading theologically, whatever poet seizes your fancy next.

“The Life of Man on Earth is Warfare”: An Image of the Armour of the Lord

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This appeared on Twitter:

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The Tweet gave me no info, so I did a small amount of digging. This is the miles christianus — Christian solider, from the Summa Vitiorum by William Peraldus in the mid-13th century. The manuscript is British Library, Harley MS 3244 (after 1236), image on fol. 28r.

Above this picture of your valiant medieval knight, the heading says, “The Life of Man on This Earth Is Warfare” (I’m translating militia as warfare tonight.)

When I looked at the image, I realised this wasn’t your ordinary illuminated knight fairly quickly in seeing that his shield is a shield of the Trinity. Here’s one in English:

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Then I looked at the heading. Indeed, this knight is an allegory! The thrill!

Unsurprisingly, his sword is the Word of God. But the armour is not, as it turns out, all Ephesians 6. Above his helmet, below the crown, we read “Hope of future joy”.

  • Behind his armoured neck, “Charity”.
  • His spear: perseverance.
  • His saddle: Christian religion.
  • Above the steed’s rear: good will.
  • On the blanket beneath the saddle: Humility.
  • Spurs: Discipline.
  • The reins: Discretion.
  • The hoofs: Delight, consensus, good work, custom.
  • The banner: The desire of the kingdom of heaven.
  • Stirrup: Readiness for a good work.

The angel bearing the crown has one banner that says, “They will not be crowned except those legitimately fight/contend. The angel bears a banner with seven streams in the other hand, recalling the Beatitudes of Matthew 5:

  • Theirs is the kingdom of the heavens;
  • they will possess the kingdom;
  • they will be consoled;
  • they will be satisfied;
  • they will receive mercy;
  • they will see God;
  • for they will be called sons of God.

The sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit lurk on the left, cut off presumably because they are headed for the gutter? I don’t know, and I can’t see the whole thing.

Nonetheless, the image is striking, and it is a reminder of what this life is. It is not just we priests who are to take up arms against the foe. This whole life here on earth is warfare. Christians are called by their Lord to fight against the Enemy. This fight is composed of practising the virtues, believing the truth, seeking the Kingdom of God, and so forth.

When we toss out the term “spiritual warfare” in relation to the battle for our souls, we tend to think immediately of demon possession or of intercessory prayer, that kind of thing. But the life of virtue is as much a battle as the life of prayer. Get on your knees and fight, yes! But also realise that every time you read the Bible or receive communion or pay attention to a sermon or show love to a neighbour you are fighting as well.

Take up arms against the foe and fight for an imperishable crown.

“The Armour of the Lord”: Priests as Knights

MJH Anglicanism, Christianity, Liturgy, Mediaeval Christianity , , , ,
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As you know, I’ll be teaching “King Arthur and the Baptism of the European Imagination” for Davenant Hall next term. I’m very, very, very excited for this course! Preparing for this course has allowed me to legitimately make time for medieval romances (when I’m not being diligent at my true vocation — more on that in a moment!).

One of the phrases that popped up in my recent reading of Malory, and one I remember from The Quest of the Holy Grail, is “the armour of the Lord” to refer to a priest’s vestments. The context is Knights of the Round Table coming upon one of the many hermits who live in legendary Britain’s forests. When they meet him, he is in the chapel, ready to sing Mass, wearing “the armour of the Lord.”

It is clear from the context that when I say “vestments”, it’s not simply a cassock or even cassock and surplice that are meant. This is the fifteenth century. If I remember my priestly training correctly, the armour of the Lord, then, is cassock, alb, amice, stole, surplice. Like a knight with his linen shirt, tunic, gambeson, haubergeon, plate armour. An arming cap under the helmet, of course.

Layers that transform you from an ordinary man in a linen shirt into a warrior.

And in a ritual society such as that of the 15th century, a man’s dress is part of what defines him.

Priests are warriors.

We have a high vocation. An impossible vocation — as my brother reminded us in his sermon at my ordination not long ago. Anyway, fighting the devil is part of the vocation of the priest.

The Prayer Book (I had a BCP ordination) calls us “watchmen of the Lord.” We are on guard to protect the Lord’s flock. “For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his spouse and body.” (BCP 1962, p. 649) And the call is to care for the spiritual health of this flock. To protect it from wolves. To guide it so it does not go astray.

There’s a lot to be said about the priestly vocation — preaching the Word, administering the sacraments, helping the people pursue holiness through one’s guidance, and doing it all faithfully and in line with God’s word, not bringing in erroneous doctrine. Doing it all while leading a holy life.

Like my brother said, impossible.

This great treasure entrusted to the priest is the enemy’s great desire. All God’s wants is your heart. All the devil wants is the same. He wants to tear down and destroy what God has built, by whatever means he can. He wants to tear churches apart and scatter the faithful, to make the faithful lose faith. To laugh at those who mourn. To scorn those who love. To burn it all down.

Now, a healthy church will have an amazing team of older women praying and interceding for the congregation, for specific needs, for the priest, and so on.

This is good, because the priest is both the offense against the devil and one of the devil’s first targets. Tear him down with a scandal. Make him cause someone to lose faith. Use him to profane the name of God amongst unbelievers. Great. This is what the devil wants.

And so the priest goes to fight for these people against the forces of darkness. Interceding for this flock. Praying for their specific needs, at times known only to him. Praying for them more generally. Praying for wisdom to guide them to God almighty.

And on Sundays, he puts on the armour of the Lord. And he goes to battle against the forces of darkness with the soldiers of Christ under his command. And he consecrates the Body and Blood of the Lord that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and our souls washed through His most precious blood.

Friends, the Holy Communion is a mystical feasting with Christ that binds us to Jesus, to all who partake at that moment, to all who partake around the world, to all the saints in heaven. It is the great advancement of the church militant against the devil. It is the way the Lord strengthens his people and makes them holy.

So pray for your priest as he goes out and fights the devil.

Get on your knees and fight alongside him.

Who’s Afraid of Medieval Literature?

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On April 6, I will begin teaching a long-awaited, much-desired (by me, at least) course, “King Arthur and the Baptism of the European Imagination”. I’ll get into the inspiration for the course in a future post, but for now: SIGN UP HERE! Today’s thoughts are instead something that surfaced in my mind about five years ago — Who’s Afraid of Medieval Literature? Why not read it for yourself?

At the time this question first struck me, I turned up at my workplace with my copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (trans. Tolkien, naturally). My boss made some noise about not being up to that level of reading or something. I didn’t say anything; maybe I should have! But, really, Sir Gawain is pretty easy, especially for a guy whose favourite book is Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon. Gardens of the Moon is one of those hefty, 712-page fantasy novels with multiple main characters and plotlines that occasionally converge.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, on the other hand, has but a single plot. Tight and dense, with richly woven symbolism, sure. But only one — and it’s easy to follow. Tolkien’s translation takes 76 pages. And since it’s poetry, there is a lot of white space on the page. If you can manage Steven Erikson, you can manage the Gawain poet.

That’s not all — this was my first piece of medieval literature. The year of the inciting anecdote, I reread The Quest of the Holy Grail and got my hands on Corin Corley’s translation of Lancelot of the Lake (Lancelot du Lac). I first read Sir Gawain, however, when I was thirteen.

Thirteen!

I had read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Then I stalled on The Silmarillion. There wasn’t much other Tolkien available in the mid-90s besides other Silmarillion-type stuff. But then I saw his name emblazoned across a King Arthur story!!

Friends, I have long had a soft spot for King Arthur. In Grade 3, I crouched inside my bedroom door by the crack of light from hall reading some kids’ adaptation of King Arthur that I got from the school library. I picked up my own kids adaptation at London Drugs on a trip to Calgary another time. I would go on to read the young readers versions of Rosemary Sutcliff’s work (presumably adapted from Sword at Sunset?)

So naturally enough, when I went into Buddy’s Bookshop and saw it, I picked up this copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo with cover art by John Howe (my favourite Tolkien artist at the time). Here it is, 29 years later:

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I loved it. I was thirteen, and I loved medieval narrative verse. Everything about the story fascinated me. It was intriguing to me that you put a description of dividing up a deer into poetry. I loved the description of Sir Gawain’s arms and armour. The story propelled me.

Not all medieval literature is as readily accessible, and different people react differently to it. I really struggled to read all of Beowulf when I was 18, but I love to reread Beowulf now. I’ve read it probably 5 times at this point. I have enjoyed multiple readings of The Nibelungenlied as well, not to mention the Norse sagas and Norse mythic literature. And, of course, there’s Arthur, the Matter of Britain.

These stories of Arthur are captivating and ensnaring. The prophecies of Merlin. The Sword in the Stone. The rebel kings. War against the Saxons. Arthur’s (clearly very historical) conquest of the Roman Empire. More to the point — the Round Table. The Green Knight. The various tales and adventures of the knights throughout the Kingdom of Logres. The Quest of the Holy Grail. The darkest road, leading to Camlann.

It seizes you, whether it’s the 19th-century retelling I read when I was 14, or Malory, or Geoffrey of Monmouth. It seizes you, whether it’s the film Excalibur or the musical Camelot. It seizes you, whether it’s The Once and Future King or Stephen R. Lawhead. It seizes you, whether it’s Tennyson or Malcom Guite.

Arthur and the Round Table get into you mind, into your veins, into your self.

The Arthurian legends are the stuff that fantasy is made of, alongside other medieval imaginative glamoury. Once when I was reading the Renaissance poet Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (to quote CS Lewis, if you tire of Ariosto, you tire of life), my brother-in-law remarked that unless it had magic rings and swords with names, he wouldn’t read it. “You’ll never guess what…” I said.

I have blogged about the question of Robert E. Howard and Ariosto elsewhere. But we know for certain that Tolkien and Lewis, two of the founders of modern fantasy, were deeply influenced by being medieval lit professors. Tolkien both edited and translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He lectured on Beowulf, preparing his own translation to work from; this besides his scholarly essays on these works. Two of CS Lewis’s greatest non-fiction works are The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image, both of which are about medieval literature and the medieval image of the universe.

Other medieval literature feeds into other fantasy works, not to mention informing us as we approach the history of the period. With modern translations of so much medieval literature coming out all the time, it is increasingly accessible. Why not try it out? Why not get sucked into another world by being drawn back through time into the imaginations of another age?