Witnesses to the word of pardon: the Atlas martyrs

From the ecumenical martyrology of Bose:

 

The seven Trappist monks of Atlas

(d. 1996)

martyrs

On May 21, 1996 the Armed Islamic Group, an Algerian extremist organization, released a statement announcing the execution of the seven Trappist monks who had been kidnapped two months earlier from the monastery of Notre-Dame de l'Atlas. Their death was the conclusion of an itinerary of witness to the Gospel so radical that it had revealed the presence of the Emmanuel, God with us, in the midst of growing hatred and hostility. The story of the monks of Atlas had begun in 1938, when several of them had settled in the region of Tibhirine to give witness to the universal fellowship sought by Christians, in silence, prayer and discreet friendship with their Muslim neighbors.
In the 1960s the community found itself on the verge of closure, but the direct intervention of several French monasteries, together with the guidance of a new prior, Brother Christian de Chergé, led to a dramatic spiritual renewal. Brother Christian left the monks who would follow him with writings steeped in the Gospel, in which readers glimpse the makrothymia, or universal compassion, of a man whose resemblance to his Master was such that he had come to see others, and even the enemy, through God's eyes.
At his side, brothers Bruno, Célestin, Christophe, Luc, Michel and Paul shared every joy and grief, every distress and hope until the day of their death. Together they gave their life without reserve to God and to their Algerian brothers and sisters.
Despite the threats they received, they decided together to remain in Algeria, where they had long been engaging in dialogue and spiritual exchange with the Muslims of their region.
These monks' violent death, which reminded Western Christians of the possibility of martyrdom that exists in every truly Christian life, has communicated to every person capable of listening the conviction that only those who have a reason for which they are willing to die also have a reason to live.

And from a fellow Trappist, a meditation on the relationship between martyrdom of the monks of Tibhirine and the hope of forgiveness:

The martyr who offers his life while forgiving, accuses no one. A group of extremists does not represent a people: nothing would be more absurd than to accuse the Algerian people or the Muslim world for what happened. Neither must we accuse the physical authors of the drama. We must be confident that a word of pardon will dissipate all evil and ignorance, letting light shine within ourselves and finding spaces of liberty for the transformation of our existence. All human beings are worthy of being loved.

(The picture above is of the Tibhirine memorial in the Cistercian monastery of Aiguebelle in northern Provence because Brother Christian, prior of Tibhirine and martyr, began his monastic life there.)

"Become what you receive": thoughts from Holy Innocents Episcopal, Atlanta

As Ordinary Time begins, an excellent video from Holy Innocents Episcopal, Atlanta on the paschal nature of the Holy Eucharist.

Passover and Pentecost: Andrewes on eucharist and the gift of the Spirit

In his Whitsunday sermon of 1610, Lancelot Andrewes reflected on how we partake of both Christ and the Spirit in the Eucharist.  In the mystery of the Eucharist "we find 'Christ our Passover offered for us,' and the Spirit our Pentecost ... offered to us":

Besides, it was one special end why the Sacrament itself was ordained, our comfort; the Church so telleth us, we so hear it read every time to us: 'He hath ordained these mysteries of His love and favour, to our great and endless comfort.' 'The Father will give you the Comforter.' Why He gives Him, we see; how He gives Him, we see not. The means for which He gives Him, is Christ--His entreaty by His word in prayer; by His flesh and blood in sacrifice, for His blood speaks, not His voice only. These means for which; and the very same, the means by which He gives the Comforter: by Christ the Word, and by Christ's body and blood, both. In tongues it came, but the tongue is not the instrument of speech only but of taste, we all know. And even that note hath not escaped the ancient Divines; to shew there is not only comfort by hearing the word, but we may also 'taste of His goodness, how gracious He is,' and be 'made drink of the Spirit.' That not only by the letter we read, and the word we hear, but by the flesh we eat, and the blood we drink at His table, we be made partakers of His Spirit, and of the comfort of it. By no more kindly way passes His Spirit, than by His flesh and blood, which are vehicula Spiritus, 'the proper carriages to convey it.' Christ fitted our body to Him, that He might fit His Spirit to us. For so is the Spirit best fitted, made remeable, and best exhibited to us who consist of both.

This is sure: where His flesh and blood are, they are not 'spiritless,' they are not or without life, His Spirit is with them. Therefore was it ordained in those very elements, which have both of them a comfortable operation in the heart of man. One of them, bread, serving to strengthen it, or make it strong; and comfort comes of comfortare, which is 'to make strong'' And the other wine, to make it cheerful or 'glad;' and is therefore willed to be ministered to them who mourn, and are oppressed with grief. And all this to show that the same effect is wrought in the inward man by the holy mysteries, that is in the outward by the elements; that there the heart is 'established by grace,' and our soul endued with strength, and our conscience made light and cheerful, that it faint not, but evermore rejoice in His holy comfort.

To conclude: where shall we find it if not here, where under one we find 'Christ our Passover offered for us,' and the Spirit our Pentecost thus offered to us? Nothing remains but the Father Himself, and of Him we are sure too. Filium in pretium dedit, Spiritum in solatium, Se servat in præmium; His Son He gave to be our price, His Spirit to be our comfort, Himself he keeps to be our everlasting reward. Of which reward there, and comfort here, this day and ever may we be partakers, for Him Who was the price of both, Jesus Christ!

"Being united with beauty": McGrath on the imaginative apologetics of CS Lewis

Alister McGrath's recent C.S. Lewis: A Life is quickly establishing him as the significant contemporary interpreter of Lewis.  In an ABC: Religion and Ethics article, McGrath explores the relationship between the appeals to reason and imagination in Lewis' works:

Lewis's explicit appeal to reason thus involves an implicit appeal to the imagination. Perhaps this helps us understand why Lewis appeals to both modern and postmodern people. Lewis gives us a synoptikon which bridges the great divide between modernity and postmodernity, insisting that each outlook has its strengths because it is part of a greater whole. Their weaknesses arise when they pretend to offer the full picture, when they really offer only part of the whole. Once the "big picture" is seen, they are both seen in their proper light.

Lewis enriches our vision of apologetics, allowing us to affirm that Christianity makes sense, without limiting it to the "glib and shallow" rationalism that he himself once knew as an atheist. Reason and imagination are woven together, using a rich concept of truth which emphasizes how we come to see things properly, and grasp their inner coherence. Truth, beauty and goodness all have their part to play in Lewis's apologetics.

Such an "imaginative apologetics" allows us to affirm the reasonableness of faith, while at the same time displaying its power to captivate the imagination. The Christian churches need to ensure that their preaching, witness and worship express this same rich vision of reality, and lead others to wonder how they can go "further up and further in" to the landscape of faith.

This understanding of a reasonableness which serves the call to captivate the imagination is also highlighted in The Tablet's review of McGrath's C.S. Lewis:

[McGrath] points out that under its clothing of reasoned argument, Lewis’ theology is always founded on a profoundly aesthetic effort: to draw us a picture of the Christian universe and our place in it that moves, attracts and persuades us, so that we say: yes, this is what life is really like, and how much more real it is than we ever imagined.

McGrath's reinterpretation of Lewis as an apologist of the imagination rather than the rationalism so often associated with, for example, Mere Christianity, offers a glimpse of how the Church's evangelisation and catechetics need to be "a profoundly aesthetic effort". In The Weight of Glory, Lewis wonderfully and powerfully pointed to why this is so:

We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

"The Lord himself is signified": Augustine's Christological reading of the Good Samaritan

Today the CofI daily office lectionary NT reading for MP was the parable of the Good Samaritan.  It is appropriate, therefore, to revisit Augustine's Christological reading of the Good Samaritan, reminding us that the parable - rather than being a moralistic addendum - coheres with and flows from the Church's proclamation of the Cross and Resurrection:

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, an dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely; of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead. The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which He deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage. The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come.

Gatsby and Augustine: imagining the renewal of the icons

This week on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day, Giles Fraser considered F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Tillich:

At the same time as Fitzgerald was putting together his great critique of the Jazz Age, his distinguished contemporary, the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, was working towards a parallel critique of the Gatsby’s of this world. For Tillich, faith was understood as a focus on what he called matters of “ultimate concern”. The problem with many of us, he suggested, is we are focused instead on things that are of penultimate concern. In other worlds, we worship things that are unworthy of real devotion - as Daisy was unworthy of the obsessive concern heaped on her by Gatsby. Which is why Tillich believed that one of the principle tasks of theology was iconoclasm – that is, showing up the false idols of our age to be precisely that. Whether it be money, or fun, or even beautiful women, such things are not worthy of the devotion that some people invest in them. And this, of course, was also Fitzgerald’s point – though, in reality, he was much dazzled by them too.

Gatsby is a tragic figure because he over-invests attention in the wrong place. All night long he stood staring out over long island sound, looking towards a flashing green light next to where Daisy lived with her polo-playing husband. Yes, in a sense, he was a romantic hero. But a fool as well. “There must have been moments” wrote Fitzgerald, “when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” Which is why its right to take seriously the theological imperative of destroying false idols of the mind – and indeed, idols of the heart as well.

The resonance of Fraser's reflections derives not just from the release of the film with Leonardo De Caprio.  There is some sense in which the 'long-1990s' - that NICE era of non-inflationary constant expansion - was shaped by cultural and social pre-occupations not unlike the 1920s.  The neo-liberal crisis of recent years has posed questions of these pre-occupations, but there is little evidence that these questions are being answered in a manner indicative of significant social and cultural change.  With Tillich, we might say that the idols - though tarnished - continue to overshadow the public square.

If there is a weakness in Fraser's invocation of Tillich, it is perhaps in the use of the category of 'idol'.  Yes, the idols exist.  But why?  This is where we might also usefully consider Gatsby from the perspective of Augustine.  In his Common Objects of Love, Oliver O'Donovan points us to Augustine's definition of a "people":

A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love.

Tillich's idols are created when people "share the things they love".  As O'Donovan goes on to state:

The loves of some communities attach to concrete material goods as their final term, while the loves of others treat those material goods as mediations of spiritual realities.  Materialism, for Augustine, is the paradigm of the lying love, attached to real goods and yet untrue, since it misconceives the significance of those goods within reality as a whole.

This Augustinian analysis, of course, finds its most beautiful expression in the Confessions:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.  And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made.  You were with me, and I was not with you.  The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all.

It is not that the "lovely created things" are unlovely or unworthy, which perhaps Fraser comes close to suggesting when he notes "such things are not worthy of the devotion that some people invest in them".  Rather, it is only when we receive them as gift of the Creator, as matter which "if they did not have their existence in you, they [would have] no existence at all", that we truly reverence them.  Only when we perceive and experience them as participating in and being icons of that "beauty so old and so new", do we rightly receive them. 

The Great Gatsby invites us to gaze on an era when we in "an unlovely state ... plunged into those lovely created things", a time when icons of beauty and meaning became idols of misplaced and misdirected love.  It is, therefore, also an invitation to imagine the renewal of the icons, of economic activity, pleasure and human beauty restored as bearers of the beauty and meaning of the Triune God.

Fitzgerald was, in the end, wrong.  It was not that Daisy fell short of "the colossal vitality of [Gatsby's] illusion".  It was the illusion which fell short, telling of a Daisy so much less then she was, as one created in and bearing the image of, and redeemed by, the Triune communion of Love.

"Narrative, argument, confession and imaginative witness": Milbank on apologetics

On the ABC: Religion and Ethics site, John Milbank has an excellent piece on apologetics.  His key contention is that apologetics is no mere subsidary aspect of theology.  Rather, the Church's theology is inherently apologetics.

Against the "hopelessly compromised exercise" that apologetics had become in the 20th century - "the defence of the faith on grounds other than faith" - Milbank outlines a definition of apologetics which seeks to imaginatively present an alternative to the theology of the city of this world:

Apology as narrative, argument, confession and imaginative witness by the human person in the name of divine personality against the impersonality of the city - that is the very heart of Christian theology. This is why it began with Paul, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus as "apologetics" - not just against pagan accusations and misconceptions, but also in continued expansion of Paul's defence of the God-Man, the infinite personality made flesh, before a human jurisdiction. This defence continues, after Paul, to be a witness to the real eternal life of Christ's spirit, soul and body as untouchable by either time or finite verdict. But it is a defence that must therefore begin to elaborate an entire metaphysical vision that seeks to imagine a reality in which all is divine gift, in which all creatures belong to an eternal kingdom that will overcome every kingdoms of this world.

This metaphysical vision which the Church shares in its apologetics is not derived from some 'neutral' understanding of Reason.  Perception of "natural order and human dignity" flows from the Trinitarian and Christological confession:

Christian apologetics must therefore always remain Christological ... while the truths of the Creation, the Incarnation, the Trinity and Grace, are replete of themselves, they complete and safeguard rather than destroy our sense of natural order and human dignity. This means that they themselves presume such a defence, and therefore that belief in these supernatural truths cannot survive the threatened collapse of the ordinary and perennial human belief in soul, mind and will, and its intuition of a "purpose" that exists in all things.

Milbank's essay echoes some of the themes evident in the excellent Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition.  Against the rationalist apologetics that dominated both the evangelical and catholic traditions in the last century, Milbank points to an apologetics that imaginatively engages the secular society from the heart of the Church's proclamation of Trinity and Incarnation.  What this means for the local church and its evangelisation and catechetics is an interesting question.  It might suggest a greater significance for beauty, music, and art, as well as the centrality of the experience and witness of compassionate, gracious, ordered and yet free community.  Against "cold detached reason", the Church's apologetics is a matter of - after Newman - heart speaking to heart.