ALMOST THE SQUARE ROOT OF INFINITY

For many thoughtful people hovering on the edges of faith, the Trinity is a stumbling-block. For both Jews and Muslims, it comes perilously close to polytheism. For the philosophic psychologist Jung it was a sign of incompleteness, in the Catholic Church suitably completed by the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even for many of the faithful, it is a puzzlement elevated to a mystery. So it is worth thinking about. 

St Athanasius, that uncompromising Church Father whose Creed is printed in the Book of Common Prayer as the Quicunque Vult, wrote a magnificent letter in which he explains the Trinity. Here are two excerpts:

“We acknowledge the Trinity, holy and perfect, to consist of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In this Trinity there is no intrusion of any alien element or of anything from outside, nor is the Trinity a blend of creative and created being. It is a wholly creative and energising reality, self-consistent and undivided in its active power, for the Father makes all things through the Word [the Son] and in the Holy Spirit, and in this way the unity of the holy Trinity is preserved. Accordingly, in the Church, one God is preached, one God who is above all things and through all things and in all things. God is above all things as Father, for he is principle and source; he is through all things through the Word; and he is in all things in the Holy Spirit.”

“Even the gifts that the Spirit dispenses to individuals are given by the Father through the Word. For all that belongs to the Father belongs also to the Son, and so the graces given by the Son in the Spirit are true gifts of the Father. Similarly, when the Spirit dwells in us, the Word who bestows the Spirit is in us too, and the Father is present in the Word. This is the meaning of the text: My Father and I will come to him and make our home with him. For where the light is, there also is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there too are its power and its resplendent grace.” (Letter to Serapion)

I find this admirably clear and wholly convincing. What is still difficult, once one has absorbed it, is the complementary understanding of the Unity. Once one has grasped the identity and the relation of the three Persons of the Trinity, one wrestles with the fact that “they are” One God. In Athanasius’ explanation of the Unity, God as above all things as their principle and source and Creator is understandable. God as in all things as the indwelling Holy Spirit also makes sense. Where it becomes harder is when A. sees God being through all things as the Word, or the Son. What, here, does “through” mean? I think that it becomes easier if we change the verb. God does all things as the Source and Creator of them; He does them through (dia, per, via) the Word; and He does them in the Spirit. This leads us back to the Gospel of St John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” And, as Athanasius reminds us elsewhere, Jesus also says, “Who has seen me has seen the Father.”

In the full sense all this is of course well beyond our complete understanding. We see very much as in a glass, darkly. Our window is grubby, and our binoculars ill-focused. But we can get something of a sense of this vast core of our faith. Pater (non) e(s)t Filius (non) e(s)t Spiritus Sanctus. Its dazzling strangeness reminds me of what Tertullian (or someone close to him) wrote of the death and resurrection of the Son of God: et mortuus est dei filius: [prorsus] credibile est, quia ineptum est. et sepultus resurrexit: certum est, quia impossibile. “The Son of God died: this is utterly believable because it is improper. And having been buried, He rose again: this must be true (is certain), because it is impossible.” 

 

OF WOODS AND TREES

Sarv-e Abarqu, a cypress tree in Iran, over 4,000 years old

When the blind man healed by Jesus first began to see, he said, ‘I see men, as trees walking.’ This Entish moment appeals to us. I’m sure it’s a true report by the Evangelist, because of its unexpectedness. And it reminds me how important trees and forests are as images in and of our lives.

         T.S. Eliot, following Dante, saw life as a journey through a vast forest: in middle age we are in its centre. The path through the trees is not always clear. J.R.R. Tolkien made great use of forests, beginning with Mirkwood in The Hobbit. But it happens that, reversing a common saying, we can’t see the trees for the wood: that the forest we travel in prevents us from paying attention to a particular tree.

         So it is with the Biblical Tree of Life (the Etz haChaim). All of us are familiar with its neighbour, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, often abusively lopped to ‘the Tree of knowledge’. But the Tree of Life gets little attention.

         In the Old Testament, after Genesis, it appears in Proverbs and in Esdras, always with an indefinite article, ‘a tree of life’. As an image, it seems to represent an abundance of spiritual life that grows out of some spiritual goodness in a person or a nation, as a tree grows from a seed. And that growth is given: it is a gift of God.

         In that sense, the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden is perhaps also the principle of life itself, especially of human life both individual and collective, that stands in the centre of the Garden as a (perhaps the) gift of God. But not of life simply physical: of life spiritual, of life as children of God, of life as it was intended to be, created human life in complete harmony with its Giver.

         If we do not, as some theologians have done, conflate the two Trees – and I find it much more convincing not to -- , it is significant that the serpent does not appear in the Tree of Life. Nor should he; nor could he.

         The Tree of Life stands in the Centre of the Garden: it is central, spiritually it is the very core of what God created: the incarnate image of life in harmony with God.

And now, nearly at the beginning of Lent, we need to turn to a thought about that Tree that first surfaced in the Eastern Church and came from it to us in the West. Not surprisingly it was Pope Benedict XVI, that tireless seeker after reunification with the Eastern Church, who expressed that thought in many of his homilies. It is that since the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the Tree of Life has a new form: the Cross. Or as we might say to bring home the full weight of that thought: the gallows.

            Ouch. The cross, the gallows, is the tree of death. It is properly shunned, it horrifies us. Or it should, if we could still see it as Jesus’ contemporaries saw it. Remember the Spartacus Revolt, the rebellion of the gladiators and slaves, when the crosses of the defeated rebels lined the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. Can one wonder that St Paul was consciousness of his preaching’s monstrosity to both Jews and Greeks? In his letter to the community at Corinth he wrote, ‘The preaching of the cross is, I know, nonsense to those who are involved in this dying world…..the Jews ask for a sign, the Greeks seek wisdom; but all we preach is Christ crucified—a stumbling block to the Jews and sheer nonsense to the Gentiles.’

            However, his point is that, in contrast to those very natural reactions, natural in view of the cultures that give rise to them, for ‘us’ who have been saved, made safe, rescued, that stumbling-block, that idiocy is ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’. For God’s foolishness is wiser than man’s wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than man’s power.

And so, the gallows-tree, the ignominious tree of death, becomes in this vast, cosmic, terrifying, glorious paradox, the Tree of Life itself.

            And the Tree of Life in the full, original, Edenic sense of the word: it is now the incarnate image of the life lived in harmony with life’s Giver. It is central. As the Carthusians’ motto puts it: stat crux dum volvitur orbis: the Cross stands while the world turns. Only now the Centre incoporates a paradox: because that has not gone away. It cannot and must not be ignored. The Tree of Life, the life of the tree, cannot be as if the Son of God, the Moshiach Himself, had not been nailed to it, had not expired upon it. Which means that we cannot meditate upon it without acknowledging that stumbling-block – because stumbling-block it is, make no mistake. To adapt a bumper-sticker: Sin Happened. Sin Happens. Sin gets, chronically, in the way of Love. So that ubiquitous nasty has to be gone through. It can only be gone through by going through it. Mercifully, we are not alone. He went through it; and if He did, so can we. Because on the other side of Lent, there is Easter; on the other side of the Cross, there is the Resurrection; on the other side of death, there is life. A whole Tree of it.

A TIME (NOT) OUR TIME?

This is a year of which many will be glad to see the end. I see the sentiment everywhere expressed, often profanely. And for this late post for the Second Week in Advent I was moved to consider the ways in which we relate to the “time of the world”. There are so many kinds of time we live in, as someone on French radio, discussing Gilles Deleuze on Proust, said recently; and what I call the time of the world is one that seems to occupy more people more of the time than ever.

The “time of the world” is not a measure of time, although years, decades and centuries might be related to it. Rather, it is “time” in the sense of Zeitgeist, a “spirit of the age” as the Germans call it: an expression dating from the nineteenth century, and which the sixteenth might have found bizarre. The sense of a Zeitgeist seems linked to what we now call communication, which in its modern sense is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and which participates (and is in part at the root of) the accelerating J-curve of “rapid social change” which the Victorians were the first generation to have to confront.

It has continued to accelerate and has now (for the time being) culminated in the smartphone. This, together with the social networks it gives us permanent access to, has had the effect of bringing the “time of the world” into individuals’ lives in ways, and to degrees, never before experienced. As such it far outstrips newspapers and television. Much, perhaps too much, has been said about this, and I’ve no wish to repeat it. But it does change the felt quality of this season of the year. Not its essence, which is darkness and hope, sorrow and the promise of light; but the felt quality, different as the Wind Chill Factor makes the felt temperature.

A year such as 2016 has brought to the world a series of misfortunes, some unavoidable (the hurricane in Haiti), some avoidable (the Syrian civil war and the American election result – which will soon be seen as disastrous by all but the few who sit on the pork barrels). And because of the “time of the world” it appears to have been a uniquely ghastly twelvemonth, spreading gloom all around. Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, the world has not become worse: it still carries on in its difficult journey from the Fall to the Second Coming, a journey full of sin and misery but equally full of kindness, generosity, love and hope. That these last are not felt by many as part of the “time of the world” shows the degree to which that concept belongs to the public world and the media that reflect and comment upon it. A French radio programme, “Carnets de Campagne”, each day interviews founders and members of local organisations that work on the bases of co-operation and solidarity: the number of these, and their quality, is astonishing. I shared on Facebook today the story of Torrington in North Devon and its experience with child refugees. In a little-repeated story, France in the last 10 months has seen anti-semitic and anti-Moslem acts diminish by ca. 60% from the year before. And virtually all of us personally know people who, at whatever level, make the world a little better.

At this time of the year, I propose placing “the time of the world” in perspective by more attention to two other dimensions: the “time of our lives” and the “time of eternity”. The Time of our Lives is what happens to us personally. It may be fraught with difficulty and danger, but it is our time, to savour and to deal with and to improve. And if, as also often happens, it is a time of happiness, joy or even prosperity, we should not let the Time of the World embitter that. The Time of our Lives is the time in which we can be kind, generous, positively effective and spread comfort and joy.

And the “time of eternity”? That is God’s paradox: dark and difficult, we tend to think until we remember that those supposed to understand it best are little children. It is the time which eternity underlies; the time which eternity penetrates; the time which eternity suffuses and lights with a glow that is permanent, if only intermittently perceived. It is the time of faith, of hope, and of love, at the smallest level (a child grasping its parent’s hand without looking) and at the greatest level, a dimension far beyond our understanding. That is God’s paradox, totally incorporated in the apparently simple phrase “Our Father which art in Heaven” – which always makes me catch my breath, when I think of Hubble’s view of a corner of the Universe: the Creator and Father of that, all that, is here in this room and hears my prayer? 

Stupendous. And quite enough for two candles.