Tolle Lege

Yesterday, many Christians participated in the traditional feast of the Epiphany, a feast celebrating the arrival of the three magi (wise men and/or kings, depending on the tradition) before the child Jesus.  Told in the Gospel of Luke, this nativity story of the three kneeling figures offering gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh unveils a rich teaching about the relationship between faith and reason quite overlooked in the popularized figurine nativity scene.  These three magi would have been some of the foremost scholars of the Gentile world, accomplished astronomers and natural philosophers respected for their erudition and intellectual achievements.  Furthermore, through their study of natural phenomenon, such as the Star of Bethlehem, these men found their way to God; they used their rational ability to uncover the invisible signs God has written in his visible creation. After enduring the incredulous scoffs and ridicule of their peers when they announced their plan to journey towards this star and find the “King” over which it hung like a celestial crown, these three magi set upon the journey of faith, led by reason and strengthened by fortitude on their quest to discover that which their intellectual knowledge pointed to, what it signified.  Despite the attempts of the New Atheists to force upon Christians an unwarranted fundamentalism and opposition to science and reason, it must be remembered that orthodox Christian teaching, especially the teaching of many of the early Church fathers, emphasized the importance of integrated inquiry, a search that utilized both the mode of reason and of faith.  In addition to the Scriptures, God was understood to have written another Book, the Book of Creation, a book which Man is able to read through his rational capacities, finding the imprint of the invisible upon the visible.

Furthermore, Thomas Aquinas advocated the view that grace – again, contrary to the assumptions made by many modern atheists – perfects or builds upon nature, rather than overruling, replacing, or destroying nature.  Christianity is not a religion that posits a “God of the Gaps,” nor does faith consist of irrational belief about that which has not yet been subjected to rational inquiry.  Instead, Aquinas and orthodox Christianity teaches that faith perfects reason and theology; as Pope John Paul II titles a section in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, “Credo ut intellegam” (I believe that I might understand).  Faith perfects reason’s ability to know truths about the world, and reason enables humanity to better elucidate the truths of faith.  Indeed, this is precisely what the story of the three magi relates: for when the three magi arrive at the court of Herod, they inquire as to where the King shall be born.  They humbly rely upon the wisdom of the Jewish religious leaders and the truths contained within their texts, truths of faith, to find that which they are looking for; their rational knowledge got them to Jerusalem, but it was only the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures, that the “shepherd of Israel” shall be born in Bethlehem, which enabled them to finish the journey.

What then can be said about the other followers of the Star, those humble shepherds of Luke’s Gospel?  Unlike the heretical Gnostic religions of the Early Church period which emphasized the need for a special knowledge or “gnosis” in order to achieve human fulfillment, unlike the Cathar and Cathar-related heresies of Middle Ages, unlike Neoplatonic philosophy, Orthodox Christianity does not confine the salvific promise of God to those who had achieved an esoteric mastery of mystical or scientific or philosophical knowledge.  Just as three scholarly magi found their way to Christ from the academies of the East, so also the humble shepherds of Judea found their way to the Son of God by means of earnest and simple adherence to the promptings of God through his angels.

Whether Gentile or Jew, scholar or shepherd, those who have the eyes to see can notice God’s presence.  What then can be said about both the Magi and the Shepherds as regards this vision?  I don’t presume to know what it means to have “the eyes to see,” and I offer only the observation that both these groups, Magi and Shepherds, possessed the humility to prostrate themselves before a child.  And what is at the heart of humility if not wonder?  Thus John Paul II writes in Fides et Ratio,

“Driven by the desire to discover the ultimate truth of existence, human beings seek to acquire those universal elements of knowledge which enable them to understand themselves better and to advance in their own self-realization. These fundamental elements of knowledge spring from the wonder awakened in them by the contemplation of creation: human beings are astonished to discover themselves as part of the world, in a relationship with others like them, all sharing a common destiny. Here begins, then, the journey which will lead them to discover ever new frontiers of knowledge. Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.”

Christmas allows us to both commemorate the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ and anticipate his second coming. Ubiquitous nativity scenes depicting the Christ-child naturally make us joyful but are also somewhat troubling. With Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, we too are invited to ponder in our hearts (Luke 2:19) the identity of this child and the implications of his coming amongst us. It took five centuries, four ecumenical councils, and many heresies for the early Christian Church to articulate the basic Christological theology that is currently held by mainstream Christianity. The ecumenical councils in no way attempted to fully describe Christ, but instead addressed specific questions pertaining his identity.

(1) Is He God?

This fundamental question was addressed by the Council of Nicaea, which concluded in 325. Arius, a priest from Alexandria, speculated that Jesus was created in time by the Father and as such there was a time when the Son was not in existence, thus denying the full divinity of Christ. The bishops gathered in Nicaea vehemently rejected this view and articulated that Jesus was “of the same substance” as the Father and that he was “eternally begotten” of the Father. Christ, the same Christ who lay as a babe in a manger, was thus divine and had the same attributes of the Father. Such a concept is difficult to grasp, and it is no surprise that the next great disputes concerned the relationship between the humanity and divinity of Christ.

Lorenzo Lotto's painting The Nativity

(2) Persons and Natures

We know that Mary gave birth to Jesus, but can she be rightly called the Mother of God? This question troubled Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople who worried that such a title suggested that Mary was the source of both Christ’s divine and human natures. This title (Theotokos in Greek) was hotly debated in the Christian world and was resolved only with the conclusion of the Council of Ephesus in 431. The Council decreed that Mary did not give birth to a nature but to a person, the person of Jesus Christ. The title “Mother of God” thus reveals more about Christ than it does about Mary.

The last great Christological council, held at Chalcedon in 451, clarified that Christ was one person with both human and divine natures. Strikingly, the Council taught that Christ was perfect in both his humanity and his divinity. It repudiated the view that his humanity was absorbed into his divinity, proposing rather that Christ’s natures existed “without confusion, without change, without division and without separation.” Christ was therefore not a hybrid demigod; he was both Man and God. This is important when meditating on the life of Christ; the Tome of Leo the Great in reflecting on temptations of Christ in the desert notes that “the same one whom the devil craftily tempts as a man, the angels dutifully wait on as God.” He is able to relate to us just as he is able to relate to the Father.

The councils of the early Church did not haphazardly craft philosophically abstruse doctrines; the goal of each council was to better understand and describe the identity of him who lay in a manger in Bethlehem.  Christ’s identity is intimately bound with his mission to redeem a fallen humanity. As the Tome of Leo states, “To pay off the debt of our state, invulnerable nature was united to a nature that could suffer; so that in a way that corresponded to the remedies we needed, one and the same mediator between God and humanity the man Christ Jesus, could both on the one hand die and on the other be incapable of death.”  The feast of Christmas is no distraction from the mission of Christ. This is Christ, the child whose life will be an oblation for sinful humanity. Remembering the child of Bethlehem, remembering him who is both human and divine is critical in plumbing the heights and depths of the love of God (Ephesians 3:18).

References:

1. Aidan Nichols O.P. Rome and the Eastern Churches: A Study In Schism. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010)
2. Schaefer, Francis. “Council of Chalcedon.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. 23 Dec. 2011 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03555a.htm>
3. Leclercq, Henri. “The First Council of Nicaea.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. 23 Dec. 2011 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11044a.htm>
4. Chapman, John. “Council of Ephesus.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. 23 Dec. 2011 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05491a.htm>.
5. Leo the Great. “Tome of Leo.” Translated by Charles Lett Feltoe. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 12. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fa

In the first chapter of The Abolition of Man,^[1] C. S. Lewis reflects upon the interpretation that two textbook writers, Gaius and Titius, make of the story of Coleridge and two tourists by a waterfall. In the story, Coleridge leads the men through a forest to a waterfall, and upon reaching it, the first man exclaims, “This waterfall is sublime!” and the second says, “This waterfall is pretty.” After hearing these two statements, Coleridge admires the man who calls the waterfall sublime and looks with disgust on the one who calls it pretty. Lewis agrees that “sublime” is a proper way to describe the waterfall and criticizes the writing of the authors Gaius and Titius, who, instead of taking this opportunity to say something about why “sublime” is a better description of the waterfall than “pretty,” proceed to deconstruct the statement about the watefall (“this is sublime”) into a statement about the man’s feelings.

Gaius and Titius draw attention to the nature of the first man’s statement. They say that though he “appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall … Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.” When he says “This is sublime,” he intends to say “This waterfall makes me feel sublime.” ^[2]  Gaius and Titius believe that we cannot make value judgments about an object, but can only describe our feelings toward it. As they indicate, when we “appear to be saying something very important about something…actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.”^[3]

Lewis disagrees with the authors’ assessment of the statement, “This is sublime.” First, Lewis points out that from a very practical standpoint, the first man could not have intended to say that the waterfall makes him feel sublime. If he had been speaking about his feelings, he would have said that the waterfall makes him feel humbled and awed. More importantly however, Lewis disagrees with fundamental aspects of Gaius and Titius’s philosophy. Lewis rejects the authors’ belief that all attempts to judge value merely reflect the subjective feelings of the observer, and he says instead that people can make claims about what something truly is.

Lewis understands that fundamental to Gaius and Titius’s philosophy is the idea of determining what is right. We cannot make value judgments but can only describe our feelings. Some emotional responses, such as virtue and valor, are more proper than others, such as vice and cowardliness. What makes them better responses? It cannot be that they are fundamentally better, for to say so would be to make a value judgment about them. Rather, since there is no higher authority to appeal to, society must subjectively determine which responses are proper.

Clive Staples Lewis

Lewis holds that the concept of determining what is right is flawed, and instead we must discern what is right. Gaius and Titius’s philosophy believes that being and doing are not connected, for we can see what something does (the feelings it creates within us) but cannot know what it is (and thus there are no grounds for making value judgments about whether “pretty,”  “sublime,” or any other term is the best description except by subjectively determining it). In the world, however, being and doing are always connected. For instance, in order to write this essay, I must first be. For you to think about this essay and draw conclusions about the truthfulness of it, both you and it must first be. Being always precedes doing. Thus when something like a waterfall creates a feeling in us, that feeling is not isolated from the waterfall’s being but proceeds from it. Therefore, we can and ought to use reason to discern its true nature. From there, we can make value judgments about whether a given description is better or worse.

Returning again to the story of the waterfall, why does Lewis agree with Coleridge and approve of the first man’s response and disapprove of second man’s? Both men make offer a description of the waterfall, and certainly neither “sublime” nor “pretty” falsely describes its nature. As Lewis writes, however, “[t]he reason why Coleridge agrees with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others.”^[4] Calling the waterfall “pretty” may be true, but calling it “sublime” better captures the essence of the waterfall and is therefore the proper response; it better discerns what the waterfall truly is.

Whereas Gaius and Titius believe that we can only describe reality in terms of our feelings, Lewis argues that we can make value judgments about descriptions of reality because there truly is an objective reality to be described. When we study the world to find out what is true, we must do so with a proper understanding of being versus doing, and determining versus discerning. We must be before we can know. A tree must be before anything can be known about it. Truth must be before we can know it. Therefore, when we search for understanding, whether it be it in physics, philosophy, or any other subject area, we must remember that our job is to discern what is already true, not to determine what should be true, and we must then speak in ways that most appropriately describe reality.

^[1] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

^[2] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 2.

^[3] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 2-3.

^[4] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 15.

“And they crucified him” (Mark 15:24).

Today the cross is widely recognized as the symbol of Christianity, but two thousand years ago it was an emblem of scandal, mortification, and death. In Sunday school when I heard that Jesus died on the cross for me, in my young ignorance I had thought that crucifixion was a simple, effortless death. I was tremendously mistaken.

Crucifixion is arguably the most egregious form of execution ever designed by man. The criminal on the cross would ultimately die of suffocation. His horizontally outstretched arms with nail-drilled wrists pulled the chest cavity up and out, making respiration extremely strenuous. When oxygen-deprived, the criminal would then have to push his body up by flexing his elbows, shifting his weight from his arms to his feet so that the chest cavity would contract more normally. This position, however, required the nail-penetrated heels to support the weight, and the criminal’s back, already torn open by previous flogging, would scrape against the cross. His wrists would rotate, exacerbating the pain from the damaged nerves, muscle cramps, and paresthesia.  (Paresthesia is a burning or prickling sensation usually felt in the limbs, caused by sustained pressure on a nerve. Chronic paresthesia is often due to traumatic nerve damage, as in Jesus’ case on the cross.)^[1]  Every breath would require exhausting effort, and eventually the criminal would die of asphyxia.^[2]  The physical brutality of the cross is so utterly mind-blowing that no vicarious experience can replace the unspeakable agony of crucifixion.

Northern Renassiance painter Matthias Grunewald's depiction of the agony of the Cross

Yet when Jesus died on the cross, he was not only breathing, but cried aloud, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).^[3]  Jesus knew he could still call God in the possessive “my God” even as he was being abandoned by his Father. While most victims on the cross die unconsciously due to oxygen deprivation, Jesus was aware of bearing the wrath of God, revealing that he is fully conscious of his death and its purpose. He had said, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Jesus knew, on the cross that was only reserved for the basest criminals, that he was dying for our sins.^[4]

The physical pain, however, was only a fraction of all the suffering Jesus had to bear, for more painful than the bodily torment was the mental brunt of the cross. In addition to the desertion he felt from God, Jesus was scorned by his people, as they shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” (Mark 15:13-14). Jesus was also betrayed by his disciples: Peter denies, “I don’t know this man you’re talking about” (Mark 14:71). Despite his shame and anguish, Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree,” taking the sins of all mankind on his shoulders alone (1 Peter 2:24). However, it is the scandal of his crucifixion that makes the meaning of the cross more beautiful, for God made Jesus, who had no sin, “to be sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). In fact, Jesus became a “curse for us” by hanging on the cross that symbolized divine rejection (Galatians 3:13).  How beautiful then, that Jesus, fully God and fully man, died in our place the lowliest death and rose up afterward in glory.^[5]

I will never take sight for granted. Without glasses or contacts, the world is a blur of color and movement, replete with objects coaxing me to stumble. Because of my poor vision, I have always been drawn to Biblical accounts of blindness. I yearn to be healed of my physical defect like those in Matthew 21:14: “The blind and the lame came to [Jesus] at the temple, and he healed them.” I relish the image of Jesus bringing clarity to a dark and disorderly world. Yet one of the most potent incidents of blindness involves not the restoration of sight but its elimination. As Saul, a vehement, vocal opponent of Christianity, traversed the road to Damascus, he was suddenly stricken blind by the same Jesus who made a ministry of healing. Ironic? Of course. Effective? Incredibly. “For three days [Saul] was blind, and did not eat or drink anything” (Acts 9:9). Saul (henceforth Paul) emerged from this blindness not only physically restored but spiritually enlightened; thirteen New Testament letters are full of his persuasive writing.

Paul’s insight has inspired generations of Christians struggling for clarity in a hazy world. His letter to the Ephesians supposedly prompted John Newton to pen the famous lines:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Like Paul, Newton’s incredible transformation lent passionate intensity to his words. Abused as a child, Newton rejected religion and made a living as nothing less than the captain of a slave ship. The awesome fury of a storm, however, brought Newton to Christianity, and he renounced every aspect of his formerly wretched existence, eventually becoming ordained as a minister. It was in the light of this new understanding that he wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Even as his physical vision faded with age, Newton fervently preached a message of insight.

"The Conversion of Saint Paul" by Caravaggio

“Spiritual insight” is a disturbingly vague concept. How can I be spiritual if I don’t already have insight into the spiritual world? And how can I seek insight when I’m not sure what it means? I shy from the idea of “spiritual insight” simply because I don’t know how to address it. But define “spiritual insight” as the opposite of “spiritual blindness,” and suddenly I get it. I know all too well the vast difference between walking without my glasses (Is that a car? Is it moving towards me? Will I trip over the curb if I try to get out of the way?) and with them (That is a car and I am going to die if I don’t jump onto the sidewalk RIGHT NOW). If the world seems a chaotic place to my malfunctioning eyes, I can only imagine what effect it must have on my malfunctioning, selfish spirit.

In his book Waking the Dead, John Eldridge writes, “A simple prayer rises from my heart: Jesus… help me to see… give me eyes to really see.” These are the eyes that Paul discovered when blinded on the road to Damascus. These are the eyes John Newton relied on as his earthly vision failed. These are the eyes Jesus promised when he said, “[The Spirit of the Lord] has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free…” (Luke 4:18). On our own, we stumble about, searching for the elusive meaning of life and finding only random moments of pain and happiness. Our vision is not only distorted but incomplete. We are so blind that we cannot even recognize our lack of sight. Thankfully, God is more powerful than any corrective lens.