HE SANG THE SPIRIT, 17 CENTURIES AGO

Today is the feast of St Basil the Great and of his friend St Gregory of Nazianze. Basil, a capable 4th-century archbishop, is also a Doctor of the Church, and has been called "the Minstrel of the Holy Spirit". So I thought I would put up here a snippet from his De Spiritu Sancto, to give us an idea of his voice. Here he is defending the glory of the Holy Spirit against those who underestimate Him.

49.  And His operations, what are they?  For majesty ineffable, and for numbers innumerable.  How shall we form a conception of what extends beyond the ages?  What were His operations before that creation whereof we can conceive?  How great the grace which He conferred on creation?  What the power exercised by Him over the ages to come?  He existed; He pre-existed; He co-existed with the Father and the Son before the ages.  It follows that, even if you can conceive of anything beyond the ages, you will find the Spirit yet further above and beyond.  And if you think of the creation, the powers of the heavens were established by the Spirit, the establishment being understood to refer to disability to fall away from good.  For it is from the Spirit that the powers derive their close relationship to God, their inability to change to evil, and their continuance in blessedness.  Is it Christ’s advent?  The Spirit is forerunner.  Is there the incarnate presence?  The Spirit is inseparable.  Working of miracles, and gifts of healing are through the Holy Spirit.  Demons were driven out by the Spirit of God.  The devil was brought to naught by the presence of the Spirit.  Remission of sins was by the gift of the Spirit, for “ye were washed, ye were sanctified,…in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the holy Spirit of our God.” There is close relationship with God through the Spirit, for “God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father.” The resurrection from the dead is effected by the operation of the Spirit, for “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and Thou renewest the face of the earth.” If here creation may be taken to mean the bringing of the departed to life again, how mighty is not the operation of the Spirit, Who is to us the dispenser of the life that follows on the resurrection, and attunes our souls to the spiritual life beyond?  Or if here by creation is meant the change to a better condition of those who in this life have fallen into sin, (for it is so understood according to the usage of Scripture, as in the words of Paul “if any man be in Christ he is a new creature”), the renewal which takes place in this life, and the transmutation from our earthly and sensuous life to the heavenly conversation which takes place in us through the Spirit, then our souls are exalted to the highest pitch of admiration.  With these thoughts before us are we to be afraid of going beyond due bounds in the extravagance of the honour we pay?  Shall we not rather fear lest, even though we seem to give Him the highest names which the thoughts of man can conceive or man’s tongue utter, we let our thoughts about Him fall too low?

MIRACLES

Fr Alexis Helg

 "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the judgment than for you.…” (Luke 10:13-14)

This, today’s reading in the Catholic (and now Anglican also) Lectionary, received an excellent comment in the admirable Prions en Eglise booklet from Fr Alexis Helg, a Swiss religious in the Order of St John. He writes about reacting to miracles, which clearly the cities St Luke mentions got wrong. Do we, he wondered, get it right? Can we discern miracles when we see them?

This got me thinking. First: as we know, the Age of Miracles is over. What that means I doubt if anyone is quite sure. I suppose, in a way, they were (or were seen as, or were – as in Chorazin -- not seen as) a sort of Close Encounters of the First Kind: something overwhelming and against all we know of the laws of Nature. Six large amphorae of water suddenly turn into Chambolle-Musigny; a blind man suddenly becomes sighted; a paralytic takes up his camp-bed and dances down the road singing; a man several days dead comes lurchingly to life. And hundreds of ordinary bystanders see it happening, and the news goes viral. That was then; this is now. I don’t want to go into the 19^th-century style rationalist “explanations” of the miracles; if I can believe Christ rose from the dead I can believe the others. But that was then, this is now. Why did that Age end?

Perhaps a better question is: why did it happen in the first place? If, as we now believe, God does not suddenly appear on all the world’s video screens, overwhelming the planet, because He is love and that is not the way love works; if love can work only in freedom of response; then why bother with all those miracles back then?

One possible explanation is that they were a result of the Hypostatic Union, i.e. of the unique combination of divinity and humanity in Yeshua Bar-Yousuf, the carpenter from Nazareth alias Son of God. Imagine his very human burst of feeling upon seeing an exhausted paralytic begging in the dust and 110º heat, or upon  hearing that one of his best friends, still young, was dead. We can share that; what we can’t share is that in God, Will is Act: so when he feels it, something happens: the poor bugger gets up and walks, Lazarus stumbles forth, blinking.  

(One of the alarming but often likeable things about Jesus’ humanity is his fits of sheer temper: the passage from Luke above surely is one, as, I suspect, is the terrifying passage about bringing not peace but a sword, and the Great Whupping of the merchants in the Temple.)

This explanation of the miracles would explain why they ceased (though not why one or two generations of Apostles still managed them). Now, says Fr Helg astutely, we need to look more closely around us to see miracles, and when we do see them, we need to learn to connect them with God as we live in a world that does not do so naturally. But – I would ask Fr Helg – how should we so connect them? If we do not believe that God micromanages creation – and we need to not believe this in order to stay sane: does God allow Daech? does God allow the suffering of terminal Parkinsons patients? is sickness punishment for sin? --, then how should we connect the miracles we may observe with Him?

I don’t have an answer for this, or not a reasonable one at least. The one thing that occurs to me is that our unconscious sometimes understands things for which our (and I mean our collective) reason is not ready. When we see a miracle, something in us may connect it with God, and if that happens, we instinctively give thanks. That instinct may some day be justified by a new understanding that our minds can confirm; meanwhile, it may be a deep truth implanted in our human spirit by a Spirit rather more Divine.