Some thoughts on McGuckin, The Path of Christianity

I’ve recently perused John Anthony McGuckin, The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years (IVP Academic 2017). I’ve not read the whole thing — frankly, I don’t have time, since it’s 1145 pages long and much of it is not pertinent to my current research, whether patristic or medieval, nor to my upcoming teaching in the Autumn (Latin epic and Latin verse epistolography in Autumn, and Theocritus and Greek Mythology in January).

My first thought is: What on earth students could use this as a textbook for a one-semester course on first millennium Christianity? Its 1145 pages are large with a typeface that, while not minuscule, is not large itself. Maybe students at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia are of a higher calibre than what I’ve experienced. Maybe McGuckin doesn’t actually intend you to use the whole book as a textbook; but he does intend it to be useable as a textbook.

That said, a certain amount of text is taken up by readings. So maybe it would work if you didn’t assign a separate book of readings.

In terms of coverage, it is geographically broad, but most interested in patristic and Byzantine things. Nonetheless, it does reach as far East as China and as far South as Ethiopia. There is a whole section devoted to churches outside the Latin-Greek spectrum that takes up most of the attention in church history books. The volume is divided into two sections, one that is a diachronic study of the story of the church and doctrine, whilst the other is an investigation of particular themes. McGuckin’s advice is to read part one in order but to intersperse the chapters from part two along the way, in whatever order you please.

I read a good chunk of Chapter 13 (pp. 763-789), and this chapter I recommend heartily: ‘The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Early Church’. He takes to task the modern approach to biblical studies, arguing that the ecclesial way of reading Scripture was prevalent amongst all Christians prior to the nineteenth century. I always like this kind of thing, because is the Bible is God’s revelation to humanity, then there are legitimate ways of reading it other than ‘how I read any other ancient text’, and it will also legitimately speak to us in different ways.

It seems patently obvious to me.

That’s why I do Latin and Patristics, not Biblical Studies.

The first chapter is also very good. He gives good coverage of the early movements within the Christian movement, and I would feel comfortable giving it to my students to read. His central thrust here is that the second century is one of the most important for everything that follows, and I agree.

I did not agree with every chapter I dipped into, I must admit. I think there’s more to Leo the Great’s Tome than McGuckin acknowledges, but I think most people miss what’s going on because the issue is not whether Leo is in step with the times or any of that, but, rather, cross-linguistic theology done by a Latin and the actual semantics of natura vs. physis. But most people don’t think about Latin Christology this way, seeing, as here, it as simply a re-statement of Hilarius of Poitiers and Augustine full stop. But that shouldn’t stop you from reading what McGuckin has to say here.

Likewise, I wasn’t sold on his interpretation of the Pelagian debate as manufactured by Augustinians and not actually a thing. My own position in this debate tends more towards the East, but given how much energy was expended in the initial Pelagius-Caelestius end, and then against Julian of Aeclanum, and later amongst so-called ‘Semi-Pelagians’ and ‘Augustinians’, I think something was happening here. Why is it confined to the Latin West? I’m not going to be reductive about every East-West difference, but I do suspect that gratia is not charis.

My final similar lament is simply a matter of a different reading of evidence for the Acacian Schism. McGuckin takes the standard line that it was over the Henotikon, but it is evident to me, at least, that from Gelasius’ standpoint, visible in his letters at length, it was Acacius entering into communion with Peter Mongus that was at least as important, if not more so.

Some of the translations of primary texts in the readers accompanying each chapter were a bit stilted.

In all, if you have some time, read the bits that interest you. If you have more time, read all 1145 pages. If have a lot more time, add the appendices on top.

The disparate nature of tradition

Council of Chalcedon

I am at present reading Justinian’s Letter to the Monks of Alexandria Against the Monophysites. As I read, many questions arise: Did Justinian himself write this? When did he have time? Did he ever sleep? If he didn’t, who did? How was this text received? How would Leo the Great have felt about this text? What about Cyril of Alexandria?

Leo the Great (d. 461) would probably have been fine with this work. I am not sure Cyril (d. 444) would have been, however. This is an interesting reality of our theological tradition. Many people, even within the church, have an idea that theological orthodoxy is monolithic. It is not. Leo the Great did what he could with what of Cyril he had in Latin — not all of Cyril, and Latin is not Greek. So Leo’s Christology is not the same as Cyril’s.

For example, I do not think Leo’s Tome and Cyril’s On the Unity of Christ are actually perfectly compatible.

Yet Leo’s Tome was acclaimed and accepted at the Council of Chalcedon (that he helped engineer) in 451 on the grounds that it said what Cyril says. Which, if we consider the Cyril of the letter of reconciliation with John of Antioch Laetentur Caeli, I suppose it is. Both of these fifth-century bishops are accepted as authoritative by the imperial church and are regarded as Fathers of the Church by modern Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodoxy, and non-heretical Protestant churches.

But their entire corpora are not entirely compatible, despite what Justinian tries in his reading of Cyril as a supporter of two-nature Christology.

Moving forward a couple of centuries, what about Maximus the Confessor (d. 662)? Again, I am not sure that the Cyril of On the Unity of Christ and some of Maximus’s arguments about the operation of Christ’s two wills in the Garden of Gethsemane are perfectly compatible.

Moving beyond christology, Augustine (d. 430), who is actually considered a saint by the eastern churches, teaches a dual procession of the Holy Spirit, that even Maximus agreed to in a way, although its offspring, the filioque in the creed, is a major point of division between the eastern and western churches. Yet here they stand, part of orthodox (note the lower-case O) tradition.

Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) taught the Apocatastasis, the idea that all will be saved (patristic universalism). He is considered a Father in both East and West, although many reject this teaching. The ecumenically popular Isaac the Syrian (seventh century) also taught this.

Western accounts of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity tend to start with the doctrine of God and His unity; in the East, they tend to start with the persons and the threeness. This is a generalisation, but it does tend towards a different feel and different emphases in our presentations of dogma. Yet these presentations, whether by Augustine or Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390), are all orthodox though they differ.

Or consider the fact that our tradition includes alleged ‘Semi-Pelagians’ as saints (Faustus of Riez) alongside Augustinians like Prosper of Aquitaine.

Theological orthodoxy is not monolithic. Many other very specific cases could be found, but these will do. It is worth keeping these realities in mind as we ponder the great richness of the tradition that has brought us to where we stand today.

Favourite passages of Leo’s Tome

A few weeks ago, I misplaced my photocopy of Eduard Schwartz’s critical edition of Leo’s Tome. I assumed that I had tossed it out by accident since I had been clearing out a lot of old papers and things from my flat. Then, a week later, I found it — in my wardrobe, next to my Yellow Submarine T-shirt. My world makes little sense, it would seem. When I proclaimed this victorious discovery on Facebook, a friend asked what my favourite passages of the Tome were.

I’m not sure, actually. Nonetheless, based on my scribbled marginalia and interlinear notes, here are some passages that have caught my eye over the years.

One that stood out the very first time I read the Tome is a quick turn of phrase:

singulariter mirabilis et mirabiliter singularis

In context (in English) this is:

But that birth, singularly wondrous and wondrously singular, is not to be understood in such a way that through the newness of the creation the property of its type was removed.

This is a nice, little chiasmus, rhetorically balanced and pleasant to the ear. A few pages later, Leo writes:

infantia paruuli ostenditur humilitate cunarum, magnitudo altissimi declaratur uocibus angelorum.

the infancy of the boy is revealed by the lowliness of the cradle, the greatness of the most high is declared by the voices of angels

My marginale says, ‘Very good isocolon.’ Isocolon is a rhetorical device where parallel phrases (or cola) have equal length. Here we have two cola of five words in the order subject + genitive singular + passive verb + ablative of agent + genitive plural. They do not have equal numbers of syllables, though. Nonetheless, this is a nice example of isocolon and Leo’s use of balanced and parallelled passages throughout the Tome.

In fact, this is what makes the Tome such a pleasant read — Leo’s use of rhetorical balance in this way. The theology Leo is presenting in the Tome is two-nature Christology, so balance in argument and retoric makes a lot of sense. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, ‘The medium is the message,’ comes to mind.

Looking at my notes, I see many other instances of isocolon.

Leo is making the point about the duality of what is going on in the Incarnate Christ throughout the Tome, and one of the passages I like is:

esurire sitire lassescere atque dormire euidenter humanum est, sed quinque panibus quinque milia hominum satiare et largiri Samaritanae aquam uiuam, cuius haustus bibenti praestet ne ultra iam sitiat, supra dorsum maris plantis non desidentibus ambulare et elationes fluctuum increpata tempestate consternere sine ambiguitate diuinum est.

To hunger, to thirst, to tire, and to sleep are evidently human, but to satisfy five thousand people with five loaves and to bestow living water to the Samaritan woman, the drinking of which would maintain the one drinking so as not to thirst anymore, to walk upon the back of the sea with unsinking steps and to subdue the rising of the waves with the increased storm without doubt is divine.

Here Leo is emphasising that Christ maintains all the properties of humanity as well as of divinity. He gives four examples. For humanity, he gives us a nice example of brevitas, giving only one conjunction (atque), but for the divinity, he extends the examples into a periodic structure with subordinate clauses. The punchiness of the human examples is pleasant to my ear, and the way he makes the divine bigger and grander is pleasant theology.

I don’t think Leo makes the unity of Christ’s person as clear as he could in the Tome — this is because the error he has in mind is the over-unification of the natures, the reduction of the humanity of Christ to a nothingness liable to absorption in the divinity. He does say, however:

For although in the Lord Jesus Christ there is one person of God and man, nevertheless it is from one whence the insult is common in each, from the other whence the glory is common. For from ours it happens that the humanity is less than the Father, from the Father it happens that the divinity is equal to the Father. Therefore, because of this unity of person that is to be understood in each nature both the son of man is observed to have descended from heaven, when the son of God assumed flesh from the virgin from whom he was born, and again the son of God is said to have been crucified and died …

Severus of Antioch took issue in the 500s with Leo claiming Christ to have one person and maintained that Leo actually believed that Christ had two persons and was thus a heretic. Severus’s argument is that Leo spends too much time discussing how different actions and words of Christ pertain to divinity or humanity, not enough time stressing what is communis.

Most especially at issue is another passage that is rhetorically pungent but perhaps not Leo’s theological best:

agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est, uerbo scilicet operante quod uerbi est, et carne exequente quod carnis est.

For each form operates in communion with the other what is its own, with the Word, that is, performing that which is of the Word, and the flesh acting that which is of the flesh.

Leo goes on, saying, ‘One of these glistens with miracles, the other succumbs to injuries. And just as the Word does not recede from the equality of the Father’s glory, so the flesh does not set aside the nature of our species…’

For the Syrian Orthodox, the Coptic, Ethiopian, and Eritrean Orthodox, and the Armenian Apostolic believers, this is grave heresy. For we western Christians, it is non-controversial dogma. Either way, I do think it’s pretty good rhetoric.

Philology and theology — just the way I like it.

If you find yourself suddenly thirsty for more Leo, the Tome is in English here.

Christmas: The Leonine Sacramentary (and Leo the Great!)

Fourth-century nativity, Palazzo Massimo, Rome

Merry Christmas! (Don’t worry about my celebrations, I’m writing this post in advance!! Skip ahead to the prayers I’m talking about if you like.)

This Advent I explored the collects for the season from the Sarum Missal,¹ taking us on a journey of expectation, calling upon the Lord to come down into our lives and stir up our own souls to do good deeds as well as to succour us in the midst of our own sinfulness. My original plan had been to approach Advent from the angle of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, as I’d been posting about Late Antique and Early Medieval liturgy in November,² but I discovered that those liturgical books I have easiest access to give us nothing for Advent. But Christmas is a different story.

I turn our attention now to the Leonine Sacramentary. This liturgical book is not, technically speaking, a sacramentary. Sacramentaries are precursors to missals and have in them all the things you need for the feasts of the liturgical year and the saying of the Mass. The Leonine Sacramentary, ms Verona lxxxv, of the seventh century, is a collection of prayers to be said at Mass, arranged by the secular year, and does not include the actual liturgy of the Mass. The manuscript is damaged and begins in April.

It was initially imagined to be by Leo the Great because of how old it seems to be, and because Leo is said to have made some modifications to the Roman liturgy. The collection is texts is now thought to be later than Leo but likely draws upon much fifth- and sixth-century manterial. From what I understand, it is a ‘pure’ ‘Roman’ form of the liturgy, from a time before the West was engaged in a lot of cross-pollination between Frankish Gaul/Germany and Italy, or the Eastern Mediterranean and Italy.

Let’s look at the text.

Using the Ballerini edition of the 1750s (because it’s right beside me, repr. Migne, Patrologia Latina 55), we can see a nice variety of prayers for ‘VIII KALENDAS JANUARII’ — that is, 25 December. The first immediately catches my eye:

God, who wondrously established and more wondrously reformed the dignity of the human substance, grant, we beseech Thee, to us that we may be sharers in the divinity of Jesus Christ your Son, who was judged worthy to participate in our humanity. Through …

Frankly, this prayer is more than enough for a blog post!

Could anything me more Leonine? The balancing of ‘wondrously’ (mirabiliter) with ‘more wondrously’ (mirabilius) is a strikingly Leonine parallel, as when this great pope speaks in his Tome (Ep. 28) of Christ’s birth that was singularly wondrous and wondrously singular. At a deeper level, the issue of ‘human substance’ is itself a deeply ‘Leonine’ theological concern (I refer the reader to J Mark Armitage, A Twofold Solidarity: Leo the Great’s Theology of Redemption) — Jesus Christ is consubstantial with us through his birth through St Mary the Virgin and with God the Father through being God, the Word, Incarnate.

This double consubstantiality is essential for salvation, and it is what is at stake in Leonine Christology when Leo begins arguing about ‘two natures’. If you read the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, this is what the Council Fathers were very concerned about as well — that Christ took on full human flesh from His Mother and was thereby fully human. It is a concern that, in these terms, reaches back to the First Council of Ephesus in 431, but goes even farther to the fourth-century argument against Apollinaris of Laodicea who maintained that Jesus did not have a human soul. As St Gregory of Nazianzus famously put it (Ep. 101):

What has not been assumed has not been healed.

Through Jesus Christ’s participation in our humanity (to return to the text of the prayer), God has ‘more wondrously reformed the dignity of the human substance’. As I say, the thoughtworld is deeply, inescapably Leonine here. I am revelling in it as I type.

And what is the actual petition in this collect? ‘That we may be sharers in the divinity of Jesus Christ your Son’.

This, my friends, is Theosis. We, as the adopted children of God, enjoy by grace what Christ enjoys by nature. He was a participant in humanity. We can participate in divinity. He became man that man might become God (St Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.3).

Quick closing musings. We should not be surprised that a Veronese liturgical codex of the 600s has such strong Leonine influences, especially on its Christmas prayers. Christmas is when Leo is most quoted. Furthermore, I think that Verona is in that part of Italy that entered in to schism with Rome over the ‘Three Chapters’ following the Council of Constantinople in 553 (the Istrian Schism) — the final reconciliation did not occur until during the pontificate of Pope Sergius in 700. The ‘Tricapitoline’ Christians in northern Italy were hardline, conservative followers of Leo and Chalcedon who felt that the council of 553 had abrogated Chalcedon, and therefore Leo the Great. Leo, as a result, was very close and very dear to their hearts. That his theology would penetrate a Veronese codex, then, is no issue.

As you reflect on these rich theological truths, rooted in Scripture and tradition, I hope that the joy of Christ’s Nativity will fill hearts with joy!

Merry Christmas! Christus natus est!

---

<sup>1. These posts are: Advent 1, Sarum: Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord; Advent 2, Sarum: More Stirring up!; Advent 3, Sarum: Give Ear to Our Prayers; Advent 4, Sarum: Raise up Thy Power and Come ↩
2. Ancient and Early Medieval Prayer 1: An Invitation; 2: Why; 3: Sources. ↩</sup>

Leo the Great, San Clemente, and Cardinals (pt 2)

Lower Basilica of San Clemente (4th c); the ceiling would have been higher

In case you were wondering what Leo the Great has to do with yesterday’s post…

The Ballerini edition of Leo’s letters from 1753 (published in Patrologia Latina, vol. 54) includes this reference towards the end of Ep. 28, the ‘Tome’:

fratres nostros Judium [sic PL 54 online] episcopum et Renatum presbyterum tituli sancti Clementis, sed et filium meum Hilarum diaconem vice nostra direximus.

That is to say, ‘we have appointed our brothers Bishop Julian and Renatus, Presbyter of the titulus of St Clement, but also my son, Deacon Hilarus in our place.’ Whether these people were Leo’s official agentes in rebus in Constantinople does not concern us here; Julian is presumably Julian of Cos, who often represents Leo’s interests in the East; Hilarus is the deacon who will represent Leo at Second Ephesus and later become Pope Hilarus, Leo’s successor. Renatus, another of Leo’s usual agents in Constantinople, is listed here as being a presbyter of the titulus, or title, of Saint Clement.

I admit to not being certain of this reading’s veracity, given that it’s not in all the manuscripts and is the sort of thing one would slip in later, either as a gloss or otherwise, if one knew or thought that Renatus was presbyter of St Clement’s.

Be that as it may, this reference to St Clement’s, although I’ve no doubt I’d read it many, many times before, never struck me until this Tuesday, having visited San Clemente. And I realised, ‘Hey, he was priest of San Clemente!’

Renatus, whose name I’ve seen in various of Leo’s letters, was priest in that old, fourth-century basilica that I visited on Sunday. That’s very cool. History comes alive in Rome.

So that was my first excitement. The second is where Cardinals come in.

San Clemente, you see, is one of the titular churches of Rome; according to my little book about San Clemente, there were 25 such ancient churches. It says of these priests:

One of the duties of the priests of these “Titles” was to serve the cemeterial churches, or, later, the major basilicas. Because they were thus incardinated in (or seconded to) a church distinct from that to which they had been ordained, these priests from the Titular Churches were known as “cardinal” priests.

Another possibility, mentioned by a 20-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica, is that bishops from sees which had fallen to invasion in the 6th century were put into new sees as cardinales — from cardo, pivot or hinge — referring to their method of arrival.

The first etymology is still a bit garbled to me, since cardo means hinge, and cardinalis can mean principal. It srikes me that cardinales presbyteri are such because they are chief and principal presbyters of the church; this option appeals to me more than the other two. In the Early Middle Ages, they referred to the presbyters of the 25 titular churches and the bishops of the seven episcopates nearest Rome.

Regardless of muddle etymologies, the popes have had agentes in rebus and apocrisarii and other allies throughout the centuries, some in Rome, some abroad, all of them to help do their bidding. In the Early Middle Ages, a group of these started to be called cardinals; today, the cardinals are the head honchos of the Curia who elect the Pope, represent him in various countries, and try to keep things from changing.

And back in the 440s, Leo the Great sent a presbyter named Renatus to Constantinople to represent him. We have textual evidence that he was priest of the Titular Church of San Clemente — thus, what would later become a cardinal. And you can visit the remains of San Clemente that existed in Leo and Renatus’ day.

In Rome, history comes to life.

A note on Leo the Great’s style

I’m just finishing off On Christian Teaching (De Doctrina Christiana) by St Augustine of Hippo. In Book 4 of this fantastic volume,* Augustine discusses the Latin translation of the Bible, and makes this point about it’s style:

It must certainly be admitted that the stylistic embellishment that derives from rhythmical clausulae is missing in the Latin scriptures. Whether this is the fault of the translators or whether (as I suspect is more likely) they deliberately avoided such specious things, I do not venture to say: I admit I do not know. (Book 4.115, trans. R P H Green)

Clausulae are a stylistic feature of Latin prose where you end the different breaks in sense or grammar with different rhythms. There are metrical ones, popular in Cicero (d. 43 BC), that use long and short syllables the same way ‘classical’ Greek and Latin poetry do — although different metres (never use ‘strawberry jam-pot’, that’s obviously from epic); and there are the rhythmical ones, popular in Ammianus Marcellinus (d. AD 390), that use the stressed and unstressed syllables of Latin’s natural rhythm to produce the auditory effect.

Whether Augustine means what we call ‘rhythmical clausulae’ or ‘metrical clausulae’ here, I am not certain.

About a year ago, I sat down with Leo’s Tome and marked all of his rhythmical clausulae at the end of sentences or major clauses (ie. where there was a semi-colon). He also makes use of metrical clausulae, but I have not thoroughly investigated them. I found that Pope Leo I uses the standard ones consistently throughout the Tome, but I do not have my notes to hand, so I cannot tell you the exact findings.

Shortly thereafter, I also investigated his biblical quotations in the Tome. Here I found that he often diverges from the Vulgate. This is unsurprising — Jerome’s revision that we call the Vulgate was still relatively new at this stage, and Leo is probably quoting from memory most of the time, anyway. One of the things I found was that, when Leo’s biblical text is not the same as that of the Vulgate, at least one scribe has ‘corrected’ it to match.

What I also found is that on a number of occasions, Leo has transposed the word order or dropped in a different word with the same meaning, and as a result, produced a rhythmic clausula. Whether this was intentional or not, who can say? What it demonstrates is that Leo knew his clausulae, and he used them consistently enough that this affected his writing of the Latin Bible, which Augustine, above, has observed lacks clausulae.

This observation is part of how I view Leo and the fifth-century at large. The world is still very classical — until 476 there was a western Roman Emperor, there was a Senate, people were still writing in the traditional genres, etc, etc. And so, despite the gradual cultural shift that would end up ‘mediaeval’, fifth-century Latin authors still demonstrate themselves to be ‘classical’, even when quoting the Scriptures or doing something ‘mediaeval’ like argue Christology or make rulings about canon law.

Which should hopefully make us rethink ‘mediaeval’, anyway.

*Recommended for people interested in semiotics, preaching, rhetoric, the Bible, God, logic, and so forth. He, apparently, invented semiotics in Book 1 of this text. So there.

The Scandal of the Incarnation’s Particularity (and the perils of academic theology)

Council of Chalcedon

The other day, I came across Towards a Feminist Christology by Julie Hopkins on the new books table in the Divinity library here. In an of itself, I don’t suppose feminist theology is any worse than any other particular vision of theology. The problems arise when people, rather critiquing theology or doing theology from a feminist perspective, seek to create a theology that is inherently feminist and that solves feminist problems.

Theology is thinking about God, and therefore transcends all barriers. The job of the theologian is to find the Truth and communicate it. But academic theology can often go astray seeking instead to apply philosophy to Christian issues or sociology to the Almighty or calling Christian philosophy theology or confusing anthropology with theology. Academia may, in fact, be the least hospitable environment for true theology to thrive because of the drive to create new things and publish them on a regular basis.

And so Hopkins challenges, in a mere six pages (I think), the Chalcedonian Definition (my translation here) of Christ’s dual nature, reducing it to, ‘fully god, fully man.’ Her first critique is that this is a decidedly sexist vision of the Incarnate Christ. I suppose it would be, if that were what the Fathers at Chalcedon actually said.

In fact, what the Chalcedonian Definition says in the criticised phrase is, theon aléthós kai anthrópon aléthós — truly God and truly a human being. We can always ask ourselves if ancient authors, when they wrote anthrópos or homo meant ‘human being regardless of gender’ or if they were often thinking of ‘male men’, but the word anthrópos refers to a human being of either gender. And throughout the Chalcedonian Definition itself, all the terms used to refer to Christ’s human nature are derived from anthrópos, not anér, the word for ‘man.’

Leo’s Tomus ad Flavianum is similar, using homo, basically the Latin equivalent of anthrópos.

Thus, the Chalcedonian Definition is not sexist.

I should probably stop there, but Hopkins did not (alas). Citing some other feminist theologians as well as Patristics scholar Frances Young, she maintains that the Fathers compromised the Gospel with Platonic dualism, thus leading to the tortured Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. Whether the Fathers did compromise, to what extent, and why are all debatable issues.

What I can say is this, even without the question of dualism arising or the concern about impassibility, the question of how on earth a man could be God would have been a thorny question, and it would have arisen through the centuries of meditative exposition of the Scriptures anyway — so something like the Chalcedonian Definition would have been formed (although some people are leaning towards the position that, without Leo’s orchestration of Chalcedon, the formulation would have been more conservative Cyrillian [Mono-/Miaphysite] than Leo’s Augustinian vision).

Nonetheless, even dispensing with ideas that proclaim the weakness of the Church’s credal statements from Nicaea to Chalcedon — tainted by pagan philosophy as the appear to be — Hopkins brings up a decidedly modern (postmodern? contemporary? I dunno) concern. How can we discuss the Incarnation of the divine in the feminine?

My response: In short, we cannot.

Annunciation to the BVM

The Incarnation of the Divine Person as Jesus Christ is an unrepeatable historical event with cosmic significance. The actual Incarnation is the taking-on of human flesh by the Almighty. All human flesh is gendered. All human flesh is particular. In order for Christ to save all of us, he had to be one of us. The general significance of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and reigning in glory, comes from the particularity.

Jesus is not embodied humanity in some general way, although some Unitarian website I saw about a year ago thought that’s what Chalcedon teaches. He is a particular human — a man. And he lived and wrought wonders and taught great things, things recorded for us in the Gospels. He died a criminal’s death and rose the Victorious Saviour. He ascended into Heaven.

By living a ‘normal’ human life, Jesus recapitulated the Garden. He reversed the curse through obedience to the Father.

If somehow one were to argue that Incarnation is necessary from General or Natural Revelation (or whatever you call it), one could say that the Divine Being could become Incarnate in a woman. However, those things that make true, Christian theology Christian are the revelation and the tradition that inform us that when the Divine Person became flesh, it was as the Man, Jesus of Nazareth.

Yet God became man that man might become God, right? (Theosis, as some call it.)

Well, then. Think on this, if you wish to see the Divine in the human plane of the feminine.

After 40 days living His resurrected life amongst the Apostles, the God-Man Jesus returned to Heaven. As a result, his particularity can become general. Whereas before he was only with certain followers at certain places and certain times, now Jesus, God Himself, can be with any followers at any places and any times. With all of us at once. He has promised to be with us in a special way through communion, but I think we can find Him elsewhere.

And when we find Christ, God, Trinity, we can find union with the Divine in a way that is so intimate that the Scriptures — our first point of reference in doing true theology — can only describe it as being like a marriage. We have all become Christ’s bride.

The Divine Persons are not feminine. They transcend gender as a Trinity. However, their transcendence of gender makes them equally available to all. Therefore, we need not worry over the Incarnation of God in the feminine. God came as a man, but can return to any of us at any time, whether male or female.

Christmas with Pope Leo

Merry Christmas, one and all! Here are some bits from St. Leo the Great himself, translated by yours truly. Originally published in PRINT, the magazine of Little Trinity Anglican Church, Toronto.

Sermon 26, Christmas 450

Latin ed. Chavasse, CCSL 138, pp. 125f.

Indeed, on all days and at all times, dearly beloved, the birth of our Lord and Saviour from his Mother the Virgin comes before the souls of the faithful while meditating upon divine things, and the mind, raised up to confessing its creator, whether it is turned to the groan of supplication, or in the exultation of praise, or in the giving of sacrifice[—while all this transpires—]nothing more frequently and nothing more faithfully attaches to the spiritual insight than this: God, the Son of God, begotten from the co-eternal Father, was indeed also born from a human birth. But no day brings this nativity to be worshipped in heaven and on earth to us more than today, and with a new light also shining in the elements, it brings total clarity of the miraculous mystery in to our senses. For not only in memory but also in a certain way into view the conversation of the Angel Gabriel with amazed Mary returns, as does the conception from the Holy Spirit as wondrously promised as believed, the Author of the world is brought forth in a virginal womb, and he who established all natures, is made the son of her whom he created. Today the Word of God appeared garbed in flesh, and that which had never been visible to human eyes began even to be tangible to hands. Today the shepherds learned from angelic voices that the Saviour was born in the substance of our flesh and spirit, and today the form of evangelisation was prearranged amongst the superintendents of the Lord’s flocks, so that we also may say with the host of the heavenly army: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of goodwill (Luke 2:14).

 Tome of Leo (Ep. 28, June 13, 449)

Latin ed. Schwartz, ACO 2.2.1 pp. 26f.

 Or perhaps he [Eutyches] thought that the Lord Jesus Christ is not of our nature, since the angel sent to Blessed Mary said, ‘The Holy Spirit will come over you, and the power of the Most High will shadow you and, on account of that the holy one who will be born, will be called the Son of God,’ (Luke 1:35) with the result that, since he had been conceived of the virgin by the divine working, the flesh of the one conceived was not from the nature of the one conceiving? But that begetting—singularly marvellous and marvellously singular—is not to be so understood that through the newness of the creation the characteristics of the humanity are removed.

The Holy Spirit gave fertility to the Virgin, but the truth of his body was taken from her body, and while the Wisdom of God was building itself a home, ‘the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,’ (John 1:14) that is to say, in that flesh which he took from a human being and which he quickened with the spirit of rational life.

Therefore, as the characteristics of each nature are preserved and come together into one person, humility is taken up by majesty, infirmity by strength, mortality by eternity, and an inviolable nature is united with a passible one for the restoration owed to our condition, so that, since it was fitting for our cure, ‘the one and the same mediator of God and human beings, the human being Christ Jesus’ (1 Timothy 2:5) both could die from the one aspect and could not die from the other. Thus, true God was born in the whole and perfect nature of a true human being, entire in his own characteristics, entire in ours.

 Sermon 70:3, April 2, 443

Latin ed. Chavasse, CCSL 138, pp. 428f.

 For it seemed illogical and irrational to accept with the mind that the inviolate Virgin begat the Creator of all natures in the substance of a true human being, that the Son of God, equal to the Father, who filled everything and contained all things, permitted himself to be seized by the hands of raging men, to be condemned by a trial of hostile men, and, after dishonours from shameful men, to be affixed to a cross. But in all these things at the same time are the lowliness of humanity and the loftiness of Divinity, nor does the plan of mercy hide away the majesty of the merciful one, since it came from the ineffable power that while true man is in inviolable God, and true God is in passible flesh, glory would be bestowed upon human through injury, incorruption through humiliation, life through death. For unless the Word were made flesh (cf. John 1:14), and so sturdy a unity existed between the two natures, that the brief time of death itself could not break the assumed [nature] from the assuming one, mortality would never have been strong enough to return to eternity. But unique aid was present to us in Christ, so that the condition of death would not remain in the passible nature, which the impassible nature had received, and through that which could not die, that which was dead could be raised up.

 Leonine Sacramentary (Attributed to but not by Leo)

Latin ed. Feltoe, p. 159

 O God, Who both marvellously established the dignity of human substance and more marvellously reformed it, make it, we beseech Thee through Jesus Christ Thy Son, that we become sharers in the Divinity of Him Who judged it worthy to become a participant in our humanity. Through Jesus Christ our Lord Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

Those Older and Wiser: The Living Tradition Around Us

I was working through translating Leo I’s Tome (Ep. 28) when I noticed that some of what he says about Eutyches ties into a thought I’ve been having of late about truth-seeking as in St. Vincent (discussed here).

Leo writes:

What, moreover, is more iniquitous than to taste impieties and not to give way to wiser and more learned men? But into this senselessness fall thsoe who, when they are prevented from understnading the truth by something obscure, run back not to the prophetic utterances, not to the apostolic writings, nor to the evangelical authorities, but to their very own selves, and, moreover, they become teachers of error because they had not been students of truth.

The bit of this passage I want to draw especial attention towards is the bit where Eutyches is recommended to ‘give way to wiser and more learned men,’ as well as to Scripture. No doubt, Leo thinks of himself as such, and probably of Flavian, the intended recipient of this letter.

Whom Leo imagines to be wiser is of no import for my consideration, though. What is of import is the idea of turning to other, living members of the Church for wisdom.

In St. Vincent, we read that he had ‘sought thoroughly with great zeal and the highest attentiveness from very many men outstanding in holiness and doctrine.’ St. Antony, according to The Life of Saint Antony by ‘St. Athanasius,’ similarly sought out others — when he first took up the ascetic life, he went around to all the local ascetics in turn and learned from them the right way to livie.

Who are the wise elders in your life? From whom have you learned both the teachings of the faith and the praxis of the faith-lived-out? We should sit at the feet of those who are older in the faith than we are and who are also still alive.

I, myself, have gained wisdom from my parents — my father is an Anglican priest who celebrates weekly Eucharist and has been involved in ‘charismatic’ renewal; my mother, also involved in renewal, has been involved in most aspects of church life from music ministry, to Sunday School, to Bible studies, to conferences, to typing things up. They are a wise pair to have recourse to.

There are others I turn to today, as well. Seek wisdom where it is to be found — and that’s not just in the dusty writings of dead monks and theologians!

Christ the King Sunday

Today is the Sunday Next Before Advent, and under the new calendar shared by Anglicans, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics, it is Christ the King Sunday, the final Sunday of the Christian year.

Jesus Christ is King. In his famous Tome, Pope Leo I reminds us:

He took on the aspect of servitude without the stainof sin; He added to the humanity but did not lessen the divinity. For that putting of of self whereby He the invisible made Himself visible and as Creator and Lord of all things wished to become one of the mortals was an inclination to mercy, not a failure of power. He who keeping the form of God created man, the same was made man in an aspect of servitude. (Ep. 28, trans. Edmund Hunt, p. 96)

In one of his many balanced statements stressing the duality of Christ throughout the Tome, Leo also says, ‘the Lord of the universe assumed the aspect of servitude with a shadow veiling the immensity of his majesty.’ (Hunt, p. 97)

In Sermon 9.2, Leo addresses this week’s Gospel reading, Matthew 25:31-46 — ‘The Sheep and the Goats’ — and says:

Let those who want Christ to spare them have compassion for the poor. Let those who desire a bond with the fellowship of the blessed be ‘readily disposed’ toward nourishing the wretched. No human being should be considered worthless by another. That nature which the Creator of the universe made his own should not be looked down upon in anyone. Is it permitted for any of the hired hands to refuse that payment which the Lord declares to have been given him? Your fellow servant receives assistance, and the Lord returns thanks. Food for someone in need is the cost of purchasing the kingdom of heaven, and the one who is geneorus with temporal things is made heir of the eternal. (trans. Freeland and Conway, p. 40)

That passage was preached in November 443 at a service where Leo went on to encourage the Christians of Rome to give generously to the poor. Here we see the ethical implications of our Christology.

Christ is King, He rules over all the universe. As God, he is the ultimate King and, like a King of days of old, an ultimate Judge. He is perfect and sufficient in himself. Yet this mighty King, as we saw in the Tome and John 1, took on flesh and pitched His tent among us.

How, then, can we look down upon the poor, the sick, the needy, the disabled, the elderly, those of lower classes, those of lesser education, those in professions of compromised morality? These are people whom the King of All became like; he took on the same nature of any and all humans.

Therefore, we should have compassion on the lowly, the poor, the outcast. We should love them with real love, bring them both tangible and spiritual grace and benefits. This is what Leo, and his monastic contemporaries, calls us to do.

And here I preach as much to myself as to the faceless readers on the Internet.

Amen. Lord, have mercy upon us.