Ascending to Perfection (Wesley & Ancient Syriac Asceticism)

A lot of mystical literature, from the Neo-Platonists to today, includes imagery of ascent. The fourth-century Syriac Liber Graduum is no exception. In 19 we read:

1. Give me now your full attention, O one who wishes to become a solitary and is anxious to travel quickly to the city of our Lord Jesus. I will show you how you may go directly to the city of our King, if you have the strength to journey as I will show you. Because the steps are difficult to climb, I will guide you [how] to climb. Since, however, there are also numerous paths that deviate from the straight road — on which many mountains loom about you, and day after day you are blocked until the day of your death comes — it will find you on [one of] the paths that turn off from one side or the [other], seeing that you do not know how to go directly on the road to that city. If during your life you do not investigate about that road, traveling diligently in order to reach that city, you will not be able to go to it when you have departed from this world, for the end of your road is Perfect and its beginning is when you begin to uproot from yourself all faults. (Trans. Kitchen & Parmentier, pp. 183-184)

Memra 19 goes on to discuss the ascent to the city of Jesus, discussing various commandments that one must follow in order to make the climb. There are two paths — the path of the Perfect that takes you straight up, and that of those less-so, that will not get you there ultimately, but will perfect you and mature you and make you strong enough to climb the narrow, treacherous path of the Perfect.

Alongside the ascetic labours (Memra 20: … there is no other ascent to this step … except by this ascent … much watching and fasting, lowliness, and powerful crying out with many tears, much supplication and with the sweat of afflictions [p. 217]), there is always prayer. It is very useful in the ascent of the Perfect and the fight against sin.

Fourth-century Syriac authors were not the only Christians in history to believe in Perfection. While his conception differs on some key points — the Liber Graduum‘s Perfect are celibate ascetics who have renounced all attachment to the world — John Wesley is very famous for his teaching on Christian Perfection.

This Lent, in fact, I read Wesley’s Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

We may disagree with what Wesley calls “Perfection”, but I believe that by the grace of God (as Wesley says), it is attainable. Christian Perfection is having your heart filled with naught but love — love of God and love of neighbour. These are the two commandments on which hang all the Law and the Prophets, after all. The Perfect in Wesley’s view may still commit sin involuntarily or through ignorance, but will not willfully sin.

Now, the question of sinlessness aside, can we fault Wesley’s answer to how we are to wait for this change?

Not in careless indifference, or indolent inactivity; but in vigorous, universal obedience, in a zealous keeping of all the commandments, in watchfulness and painfulness, in denying ourselves, and taking up our cross daily; as well as in earnest prayer and fasting, and a close attendance on all the ordinances of God. (Ch. 19)

Like the Liber Graduum, Wesley also calls us to prayer:

All that a Christian does, even in eating and sleeping, is prayer, when it is done in simplicity, according to the order of God, without either adding to or diminishing from it by his own choice.

Prayer continues in the desire of the heart, though the understanding be employed in outward things.

In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a continual prayer. (Ch. 25, Q. 38, §5)

Wesley was a reader of the Fathers, with a special love of Chrysostom’s homilies and Ephraim the Syrian’s poetry. It is clear to me from reading A Plain Account that the Greek Fathers have influenced Wesley’s thinking about humanity. He believes that God is actually powerful enough to take the peccator that I am and make me really and truly justus.

Indeed, Wesley’s call to piety, like that of the other famous Anglican Patrist of that age, William Law, is an application of the ascetic, mystical writings of the Fathers to a modern layperson’s situation. The wisdom of texts such as the Liber Graduum is adapted for a new audience — much like how Cassian adapted the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers for a Gallic audience.

Besides having a more optimistic anthropology than the Lutherans or the Reformed, Wesley and the ancient ascetics call us forth to a holiness that is beyond virtue. I know that sounds silly, but it is true. We tend to think that we are “good” by being nice to people, even rude people and jerks, and by giving to the poor. Maybe we are “good” because we evangelise. Maybe it’s because we go to protests and write letters to MP’s. Maybe it’s because we don’t look at porn.

Wesley and the Fathers would applaud these things. And then they would tell us to go further.

They would tell us to live lives saturated with prayer, to do everything out of love, to fast, to study the Scriptures assiduously, and to seek out opportunities to do good whenever we can. By doing so, we will put to death “the flesh” and rise nearer to the likeness of God, healing the wounded image within.

I think we can do it. And I think most of us western Christians don’t even try out of sheer laziness.

Shame on me for being lazy rather than righteous.

“Kill the flesh, in order to acquire a body.” -Sergei Bulgakov

Tap into the Tradition: The Remedy for “Matthewism”

As may be known, I have a habit of listening to Ancient Faith Radio and reading Eastern Orthodox books (the most recent being Being As Communion).  The Eastern Orthodox are a voice worth listening to, and one of the main reasons they are worth listening to is because they, in turn, listen to the Fathers.  They are, thus, deeply traditional, preserving that which has been handed down to them.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, one of the many Orthodox converts on Ancient Faith Radio, says:

I realized that my selections [in my spiritual life] were inevitably conditioned by my own tastes, prejudices, and blind spots. I was patching together a Frankenstein God in my own image, and it would never be taller than five foot one. (Quoted here.)

This is the Christianised version of the religion cited by Miroslav Volf in Exclusion and Embrace of “Sheilaism” — whatever you feel like believing, however you feel like worshipping, however you feel like living is what comprises your worldview, religion, and lifestyle.

What Mathewes-Green discovered in Orthodoxy was the corrective of tradition.  We all have our idiosyncrasies that we bring to how we think and live, and as Christians we have them when we approach Scripture and worship.  Tradition is the accumulation of what has been handed down from the Apostles and generally approved of in each generation.  It challenges our presuppositions and idiosyncrasies, sometimes very uncomfortably, but when entered into prayerfully, the Spirit will use it to conform us more and more into the image of Christ rather than the accumulation of stuff and culture and self that we bring with us to begin with.

I decided that, while Orthodoxy is interesting and all, I already have a tradition of my own, and it sprang up in England around 596 with the arrival of St. Augustine of Canterbury.  To ensure that I actually am part of this tradition, I recently re-read the 39 Articles of Religion, and I find myself in agreement with them.  So, besides reading the 39 Articles, what am I to do to engage with the Anglican tradition in all its richness?

1.  I have decided to plug into the Book of Common Prayer more frequently, using Morning & Evening Prayer and Compline, but also on occasion the Anglican Society of Saint Francis’ Celebrating Common Prayer for the divine office.  The daily office is an important part of traditional English spirituality.  It is a way to pray to and draw near to God while at the same time joining with believers within the tradition throughout the world and throughout time.

2.  I want to read the classics of the Anglican moral/ethical tradition.  This will first mean finishing off William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, but moving on to Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and John Wesley’s Plain Account of Christian Perfection.  This aspect of the tradition includes both virtuous living and the call to social justice, both of which are part of the endless movement towards holiness and perfection (on this endless movement, see St. Gregory of Nyssa).

3.  The Anglican tradition also includes the English Reformers, so the Book of Homilies and Richard Hooker at large are to be part of my long-range plan, as is Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

4.  The Anglican tradition has a large component of hymnody worth exploring, and since I have 3 copies of Canada’s 1938 Hymn Book, I am well-prepared for this angle.  Alongside hymnody are the poets — Donne, Herbert, et al.

5. The pre-Reformation English tradition, from St. Augustine of Canterbury to the Venerable Bede to St. Anselm to Lady Julian of Norwich and more is part of the tradition as well.  I think a study of the mediaeval roots of “Reformation” thought would be a worthy activity.  Despite the arguments over the date of Easter and monasticism, mediaeval English Christianity tried to adapt local Celtic customs as part of their own, thus making “Celtic” Christianity also fair game.

6.  Patristics is fair game, being the root of much mediaeval Christian thought as well as much Reformation thought.  The Fathers are the Fathers of all Christendom, not just the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox bits.

7.  The theologians other than the Reformers, up to the present day.  The emphasis on Tradition means that, while I should probably grapple with the likes of Spong, Ingham, and more, my emphasis should fall on the Wesleys, the Anglo-Catholics/Oxford Movement, C.S. Lewis, N.T. Wright, J.I. Packer, John Stott, and their ilk.

The above should probably last me until I’m dead.  Re those within Anglicanism who are divergent voices of dissent who attack and judge the tradition, I believe that the way to approach them is to look at them through the lens of the tradition, taking those bits that fall beyond the bounds of Scripture, the Creeds, and the 39 Articles, and providing cogent, reasonable, biblical, and traditional critique.

What about your tradition?  What are the roots and classic writings of Baptists, Mennonites, the Christian Reformed Church, Roman Catholicism, Pentecostalism?  With these in one hand, the Bible in the other, large doses of prayer, and the enlivening of the Holy Spirit, we should be more clearly drawn towards the image of the likeness of Christ than when our own idiosyncrasies take control as we read our Bibles all alone in our rooms.  Oh, also, take along a worshipping ecclesial community for the journey.  God will use them to shape you mightily as well.

Saint of the Week: John Wesley (Pt 2)

Yesterday, we left off with John Wesley’s true and powerful conversion of his entire self to Christ and the cause of Christ in 1738.  This led to his evangelistic mission that lasted from 1739 until his death in 1791.

This was the year that Wesley the student became Wesley the teacher — although he would never cease to learn as his life continued.*  He became a preacher.  As I recall, one of his first (if not the first) major evangelistic events was outdoor-air preaching in Bristol.  In that city were many people of the working-class who had not heard the Gospel in plain language, people whose lives were lived out in abject poverty both of body and of spirit, alcoholics, wife-beaters, people who, if they did darken the door of the local parish church, had learned to tune out the parish priest.

So Wesley did something different.  He brought the Gospel to them.  He stood out of doors in their midst and preached to them Christ crucified.**  He called them to live lives of holiness, infused by the grace of Almighty God.  And John Wesley, the failed missionary of Georgia, aflame with the limitless power of the Holy Ghost, became John Wesley the evangelist of England.  He travelled on horseback almost ceaselessly, preaching 15 times a week, bringing the light of Jesus into the darkness of Britain.

And the Holy Spirit did His work in these people.  People came to hear Wesley, and they were convicted by his words.  These new converts were organised into a system that would enable them to be catechised in what the faith taught and instructed in how to live, being held accountable one to another.  On one occasion, when Wesley visited one of the smaller gatherings, a former alcoholic appeared drunk at this believers-only gathering.  Wesley expelled him for drunkenness.  The Spirit worked on this man’s soul, and by Wesley’s next visit he was living sober, counted among the faithful.

Wesley had a high standard of holiness; yet we see in his sermon “On Working Out Our Own Salvation” that he was aware that we are not saved by holy living, only by Christ.  Yet in that sermon he exhorts his listeners to holy living, for Christ who calls us to work out our own salvation also “worketh in us” to bring it about.  By grace we are called to obedience; by grace we are enabled to live the obedient life.  By faith we respond.  This call to holy living was one of the central points of Wesley’s theology, as seen in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

More important for Wesley’s theology than Arminius was Perfection.  Indeed, whether we are predestined to salvation or can choose it freely, we are called by Christ to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.  God is love — He loves you, ungrateful, decadent you.  Respond in faith.  Live by faith.  Thus, live faithfully.  Live out holiness.  This is, of course, nothing new.  Wesley is not out to start something new, though!  He is calling the Church, in the 18th century, in the 21st, back to her origins, to her one true Love, the Father Almighty; his is the faith of the Primitive Church, of the Fathers, from the Didache to the Cappadocians to Ephraim the Syrian.  His faith is one informed by the Prayer Book and William Law, by the mystics Pascal, Brother Lawrence, Fenelon, Mme. Guyon, Mme. Bourignon, John of Avila, Lopez, Molinos.***

And the faith of this Great Tradition inevitably leads us to live our theology and to proclaim our theology.  The Virgin Birth matters, the Ascension is real.  These miracles are events of history, and their impact permeates us now, contrary to certain Anglican bishops then (and now) who denied these doctrines.  Christ is God; God is Christ.  He is ascended on high and He lives in us and through us.  By His power, we live holy lives.  Thus, Wesley’s theology always grappled with the practical realities around him, including faithless bishops and faithless flocks.  These were called back to Jesus, back to the Gospel, back to lives of holiness.

Ah, that we could live holy lives ourselves!  The path of holiness is calling us to seek it.  Our Guide is reliable.  And the End of the path is the most worthy End of all — for He welcomes us with open us, us squandering, prodigal, wastrel children of His.

*See John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns and Sermons, “Introduction,” by Frank Whaling.  HarperCollins, 2004, p. xxiv.

**This technique had been seen in England before, as with George Fox the founding Quaker.

***See Whaling’s “Introduction”, p. xxi.

Saint of the Week: John Wesley (Pt. 1)

Today is the feast day of John and Charles Wesley  in the Anglican calendar.  John Wesley (1703-1791) is the more famous of the two famous Wesley children.  He is quite famous these days for being an “Arminian”, and thus figures in the endless theological debates you will find out in the internet.  Nevertheless, just as Calvin was more than predestination, so Wesley was more than freewill.  So if you are a Calvinist, read on.

John Wesley studied at the University of Oxford and was ordained to holy orders within the Church of England in the year 1728.  He spent a brief time helping out his father, also an Anglican priest, before returning to Oxford.  At Oxford, he discovered that his brother Charles had begun a “Holy Club.”  It is my understanding that this club consisted of young men who met together to read the Greek New Testament and to life lives of holiness.  Their standard of holy living was set so high and their lifestyle so reflected a holy method of living that they were called “Methodists.”*

John Wesley’s “method” of life ran thus:

1. Begin and end every day with God; and sleep not immoderately.
2. Be diligent in your calling.
3. Employ all spare hours in religion as able.
4. All hollidays [should be devoted to religion].
5. Avoid drunkards and busybodies.
6. Avoid curiosity, and all useless employments and knowledge.
7. Examine yourself every night.
8. Never on any account pass a day without setting aside at least an hour for devotion.
9. Avoid all manner of passion.

At Oxford, the Wesleys also encountered the Church Fathers, classical literature, Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, and the recent bestseller A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law (see my post here).

In the Fathers, Kempis, Taylor, and Law, the Wesleys will have found a high call, a call to live holy lives centred upon Christ and his love for us, lives of faith that produces good works.  In his sermon on fasting, we see that John Wesley strove to steer a course between the extremes of those who believe that good works are nothing and those who believe they are everything.  He believed that they were the result of faith but that faith is what saves us.

After graduation, he went to Georgia where he met with little success.  In 1738, after his return to Britain, he started hanging out with the Moravians, and at a Moravian Love Feast on May 24, his “heart was strangely warmed.”

Wesley now knew that none of his holy living, no amount of partaking of communion, none of his prayers, none of his theology, no success as a missionary would or could save him.  All that could save John Wesley was Jesus Christ and his gift of grace freely given.**  He was truly converted to Christ.

And so, from 1739 to the end of his long life in 1791, John Wesley was committed to evangelism, to bringing this Good News of Jesus Christ to the people of England, and to waking up the Church of England.

More on John Wesley to come . . .

*I have also heard people say that Wesley was called a “Methodist” because of his method of organising the movement he started.  Somehow that is less convincing.

**To people who want to argue against Arminianism with some Augustinian arguments about grace being inescapable and therefore freewill illusory — not here.  Not now.  Embrace Wesley as a brother, see how much like you he is.

A Most Serious Call

Thus far, in our journeys for 2010, the Classic Christian small group has sought out God in the story of Martin Luther in film; we have seen His revelation to us in the Bible with John Cassian as guide; we have seen God’s particular revelation to St. Paul and been exhorted to read and apply the Scriptures by John Chrysostom; we have encountered God in the liturgy of Sarum, the incense, the music, the Eucharist; and we have seen that the fullness of His revelation to humanity has come in these last days in the Person of His Incarnate Son, Jesus, fully God and fully Man, as explained by Pope St. Leo the Great.

Standing with this knowledge of the living God whom we have encountered, the small group stepped forth into Lent this past Tuesday.  And stepped forth into our considerations of the disciplined life, for our Lord Jesus Christ tells us to take up our cross daily, then come and follow him, and to deny ourselves.  He says that if we love him, we shall obey his commands.

St. James says that faith without works is dead, that we are saved by faith and works, that the true religion God accepts is looking after widows and orphans.  Thus, while we have already in this group affirmed the teaching of Martin Luther that we are justified by faith alone, still we cannot avoid the call to live a disciplined life.

Bonhoeffer assures the readers of The Cost of Discipleship that to exhort people to live the disciplined, obedient life will not be to lay a still heavier burden on people, for “Jesus asks nothing of us without giving us the strength to perform it.”  Here he echoes John Wesley’s sermon “On Working Out Our Own Salvation.”

And thus William Law (1686-1761) stands up and makes his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, the first chapter of which we read on Tuesday.  Law was a high church Anglican clergyman who spent most of his career tutoring Edward Gibbon, Sr,* and living in a semi-monastic community giving help to the poor, educating women, and building housing for destitute widows.  A trained philosopher and theologian, he engaged frequently in the intellectual debates of his day, defending traditional views of Scripture and God as well as calling people to live holy lives.

And what a call it is!  Behold paragraph 2 of chapter 1:

He, therefore, is the devout man, who lives no longer to his own will, or the way and spirit of the world, but to the sole will of God, who considers God in everything, who serves God in everything, who makes all the parts of his common life parts of piety, by doing everything in the Name of God, and under such rules as are conformable to His glory.

William Law leaves no room for waffling, no room for compromise with the world.  He proclaims that the majority of seemingly pious people, although devoted to attendance at public prayer, have the same cares, concerns, loves, fears, hatreds, friendships, pastimes, ways of spending money, ways of wasting time, as the general heathen public of England.

He protests this, saying,

It is as great an absurdity to suppose holy prayers and Divine petitions, without a holiness of life suitable to them, as to suppose a holy and Divine life without prayers.

Indeed, he argues, “If we are to follow Christ, it must be in our common way of spending every day.”  My comment on this last night?  BAM!  William Law pulls no punches.  How unpopular this would be for a society that wanted its religion and its frivolity too!  How harsh this would sound to the ears of the aristocrat who was at Church every feast day yet still paraded around town in the finest beaver-felt top hat and shining brass buttons, puffed up with pride for all to see, giving money only occasionally and only to the Worthy Poor?

Yet is not the call of Christ something this radical?  I have been reading not only Law but also Bonhoeffer of late, let alone all the monks in my past.  The call of Christ is this radical.  He strikes at the root of our loves, fears, lives.  Everything about our lives is to be subordinated to his easy yoke and light burden — from our rising in the morning to our resting at night, from our spending money to our spending time, from how we read to what we read to when we read.

Jesus calls us to follow him.  Are you truly able to drop your nets, leave your plough in your field, walk away from the tax collecting booth, sell all your possessions and follow?  Count the cost.  It is high, yet the rewards are higher.

*Father of Jr, the historian.