Loss of Transcendence - Lesson 14

I’ve just been asked a question about embodiment: can we explore it further than what we’ve already suggested was the attempt of the Desert Fathers? And the answer is yes, that the son of Basil, with his understanding of the embodiment of social community as being an expression of embodiment in Asia Minor, found that his son, who was a brilliant Classical scholar, perhaps the most brilliant of the early Church other than Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, he talks a lot about embodiment. And my colleague Hans Boersma has written a book about embodiment in Gregory of Nyssa. But the multiform ways in which embodiment was recognised by Gregory lacks in present contemporary scholarship another element. Embodiment also involves the whole family. What is the family you come from? What is the influence of that family upon your own sense of faith? And so one of the things that is so beautiful about Gregory is that he recognised that his older sister, Macrina, was embodying faith at a richer level than he was. And so he finds that his fellowship with his sister is vital for his embodiment of his own faith.

And so therefore we now have a whole new concept of embodiment and that embodiment for the Christian can be Christian friendship, that instead of having two pairs of eyes, you have four pairs of eyes and that you have a wider telescope by which you’re looking at the reality of the mysteries of God. And that when you then discover that friendship is so important for the early Church—and we haven’t talked about this at all; we could write another whole course on Christian friendship, which we might do later—it’s to indicate how vital it is in being embodied in the body of Christ that the building block for that embodiment of the body of Christ is the friendship that we share with each other. Well, Gregory was aware then that friendship was crucial and that the friendship of his sister was most crucial. But he also realised, like his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, who was a poet and was musical, that another form of embodiment for the Christian is living in a world of music, living in the melody of harmony, living in the reality of the poetic and that the poetic can be a wonderful expression of embodiment.

In the Bible study that I have been with a group of businessmen since 1973, we meet every Wednesday morning, and one of our members was imprisoned in Shanghai as a teenager because his father was an agent for one of the big trading companies with China. And so for some four or five years, this teenager was in a prison camp where he was not able to communicate anything. I somehow was given guidance by the Holy Spirit to ask him one day John, you’ve never written a poem. Isn’t it time you did? He was a scientist by training, a physicist, so remote from anything to do with poetry, but he started. And so it’s our routine now for three years that we start with John’s poem. What John’s poetry has done is to liberate his soul, to enable him to articulate in the fellowship of love that we are entering into his inner life in this way. And so this is exactly what was the blessing that Gregory of Nyssa had from his friend, that his friend was the poet of that community and that the whole family was in a kind of sense a miniature monastery, but each of them sharing their own gift in their different ways, one with the other.

[00:05:20]

So embodiment is very much larger than just simply saying that I have my body and I have my soul and I seek to relate with you. That’s very narcissistic when it comes to it. One of our arguments that we are tracing is that every culture has given us new cultural filters by which to understand the soul, or to misunderstand the soul. And so when we come to the Renaissance, especially [the High Renaissance, we discover that this is a period that we associate, of course, with people like Dante 00:06:05] and the High Renaissance of Florence and we’re looking at the riches that the Venetians had brought with trade from the Levant. So it’s a culture of wealth. It’s a culture of commerce. It’s a culture of the business world.

And so the playwright Ruzzante in his Most Ridiculous Dialogue, one of his plays, has a dead man reporting that there are two paradises in the world beyond: one is for those who live an active, virtuous life and therefore deserve to continue to be served with good wine and to dine well and do whatever they want to do because they deserve it. And then there’s the second paradise for the saints, who, in their abstinence, in other words, the older medieval monastic community world that goes back to the Desert Fathers, they don’t eat and they don’t drink. In other words, Heaven is now split into two dimensions and you go into which dimension you started with. And what wins in the Renaissance is that you can see this in all their pictorial representation. So you have in the foreground of many of these pictures a paradise of delightful fruits and exotic plants. And then there’s the skyline view of a celestial city with gold in its pavements and precious stones that form its perimeter. You’re entering into a paradisal state where it’s paradise that’s all important and the purpose of your soul keeping is to arrive in paradise.

[00:08:15]

And then, of course, there is that divide with Hell. So it’s a divided realm because it now is three-dimensional. And the question is you have to climb out from the dangers of hellfire up a ladder of virtues, the seven virtues, in order to escape from the purgatory of the pit. And then there’s another ladder that goes from the paradisal world of the millennial world, the kind of world that we had in dispensationalism, a kind of romantic extension of the good Earth that we’re now living on: you go up another ladder to the higher ladder of the New Jerusalem.

Well, this kind of dichotomy, of course, is what Dante is fighting against. He had a metanoia that changed him from being a worldly merchant and a worldly politician to being a pilgrim. And in his escape from the inferno, he is now giving us a completely different view of Satan and of the life of the Christian because of his own metanoia, his radical change of experience of life. He’s now homeless. He’s now exiled. He’s now a pilgrim. So all that old imagery has been cleansed from him, totally radically changed by the events of his metanoia before God. So where does he see Satan? The inferno is not a fiery furnace; the inferno is an ice-locked lake. And Satan is imprisoned in his ultimate narcissism. That’s a very different view. Hell is the self that’s isolated in the self for the sake of the self. It’s the condemnation of our narcissistic culture—that’s Hell. Well, you see, that’s a different imagery altogether. And the soul is therefore aware that the soul is the self for the other, not for oneself. And so we enter in our counterculture today as Christians by realising that the path of the individual that becomes self-contained is the satanic temptation and its ultimate reality is hellish. Hell is modern America. That’s a new way of looking at it, isn’t it? And Satan is that great beast that is frozen in itself. So what we’re realising is that, of course, every period that goes through different circumstances interprets the transcendence according to its context, according to its circumstances.

[00:12:18]

Some of you may be fascinated by Hieronymous Bosch in his painting of The Last Judgement of 1505. It’s terrible the way he depicts it all. Because you see a ship arriving to the seashore and that ship is navigating through all the enticements of the culture to seek the city of God. But why is all his engraving and painting so horrendously hellish? It’s because he lived in a culture of intense fear. And what was the origin of the intense fear that echoed from 1347 right through the next two centuries? It was the Black Death that wiped out a third of the population of Europe that was the fear that dragged on and so everything was interpreted in terms of that terrible event. And today, we’re becoming almost like Hieronymous because our whole world is today gripped by fear. We interpret everything around us by fear.

[00:14:07]

And I’m writing actually a book with a neuroscientist Ted George and the whole theme of our study is that we’re living in a culture tyrannised by fear. In fact, he may get a Nobel Prize because as the top neuroscientist responsible for understanding addiction he sees that the basic source of addiction is the diversionary pleasure to take our minds away from fear in a momentary pleasure. And that’s where we get addicted. We get addicted to a drug. We get addicted to drink or sex. And all these forms of such profound negative addictions are all motivated in the lower thalamus where is located the basic emotion of the human being, which is fear.

So this theme is something, therefore, that we cannot trace—we haven’t the time to do so—through all its different narratives, but it’s very difficult for any of us to escape from our own culture anymore than we can escape from our own times and not recognise that this whole dynamic of transcendence is always profoundly affected by the culture that we live in.

So perhaps we can have another break now before we come to the conclusion.