Talking to a friend yesterday who explained SUMO to me – it stands for ‘Shut Up, Move On’ – in other words, don’t get stuck in a place of pain. (In Christian terms, I think it could be phrased as ‘come down off your cross’.)
One of the best things about the Sandman sequence was the presentation of hell as somewhere that people chose their forms of punishment. One of many deep truths that Gaiman managed to capture.
Given all the fuss about abuse by Roman Catholic clergy (justified fuss, certainly) I thought it would be of interest to describe in some detail an ancient church controversy, which has some relevance. At the beginning of the fourth century AD, under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, there was a severe crackdown upon the Christian church. Some members of the church, including some priests and bishops, handed over copies of the sacred Scriptures to the imperial authorities. These people were called traditores – from the Latin for handing over. From this expression derives our own words traitor and tradition.
A few years later, Constantine became the Roman Emperor and, famously, he allowed Christianity to be celebrated publicly. At this point, a quarrel broke out within the church. What should happen to those priests and bishops who were traditores? The majority view was that those people who had collaborated with the authorities should be forgiven, and allowed to continue their ministry. Some one hundred years later, this was the view that St Augustine fought for, and he developed the theology to explain why. In sum, the validity of our sacraments – of baptism and holy communion – do not depend upon the moral state of the priest who is in charge of them. The president at communion is not expected to be an example of moral perfection; he or she is assumed to be a sinner, along with every other baptised member of the church. If the sacraments are celebrated properly, in accordance with the right teaching of the church, then they achieve what Jesus intended them to achieve. In other words the holiness at issue is the holiness of Jesus, not the holiness of the priest.
However, there was a distinct minority view which ended up being called Donatism, named after Donatus, who was consecrated as an alternative Bishop of Carthage. This group did not forgive the traditores for what they had done, and so they established an alternative church which explicitly advocated the holiness of ministers, the need to have a pure church; in other words, if a sinner presided at communion, the communion was not valid – Jesus was not present, no spiritual medicine was distributed. There followed a very unedifying struggle for power, especially in North Africa, between these two groups. It took some two centuries for the Donatist church to die out completely, and St Augustine was heavily involved, not just in establishing the theology, but practically as the legitimate Bishop of Carthage in his own day.
Now the Donatists were condemned as heretics. The word ‘heresy’ simply means choice, that is, the Donatists had chosen a course separate to that accepted by the wider body of the church. Although Donatism is the technical name for the heresy, it is more commonly known as the ‘pure church’ heresy.
In our highly individualist age, the notion of heresy is problematic. What is wrong with a group of people coming to a decision about how they wanted to function together? Why shouldn’t they have their own denomination, and be left to get on with their own business? What this misses is the connection between getting our doctrine right and the state of our souls. 1 Timothy instructs pastors that we are to “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” In other words, in Christianity, there is a link between what we believe and our eventual salvation, and the most important quality for pastors is the ability to teach the truth. That is how a priest exercises their cure of souls; not through being popular and well liked, but by holding fast to the truth of the faith. Right doctrine enables right behaviour; conversely, wrong doctrine leads to spiritual destruction. Let me spell out what this means in the case of the pure church heresy.
At the core of the controversy was a refusal on the part of the Donatists to forgive those traditores who had collaborated with the Empire, and handed over the Scriptures. In other words, the Donatists had embraced a path of judgement, contrary to Jesus’ explicit teaching. This is the spiritual root from which Donatism emerged like a flower. The trouble with this path is that the divide between the sinners and the righteous does not run between different people, or between different groups; rather it runs within people.
This leads to a problem. For if a community is constituted by the notion that only the pure can share in communion, then there is tremendous psychological pressure to preserve oneself in a state of innocence, in order to continue to share the sacrament. This means that all the elements of our own nature that don’t fit neatly into that ideal of innocence become repressed and denied. What this leads to, St John describes eloquently in his first Epistle: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” In practice, the tension generated by this pursuit of innocence and denial of sin is resolved through scapegoating. One person, or one group of people, becomes identified as the source of all pain and bitterness – they are no longer traditores, but traitors, the great betrayers, the ones who have become a scandal and a stumbling block to the wider community. The scapegoats are then persecuted and destroyed, and the pure church community is able to find unity in that process, with reassurance for their own identity.
This is the way of the world, and we don’t have to go very far to find examples of it. The most obvious is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, but it has happened in this country very recently, eg when considering the fate of one of the boys who killed Jamie Bulger. Generally speaking, the tabloid newspapers are driven by this process, of finding scapegoats on whom to place all the burdens of our existence. Remember: this is the realm of Satan. Satan means the accuser, the one who points the finger, the one who apportions blame, the prosecuting counsel in a trial. It is because Satan is the presiding spirit of this process that Jesus calls him the Prince of this world.
In other words, just to make things absolutely clear, the end point spiritually for anyone who embarks upon this path is to be cut off from the living God. It is to be in Hell, now and for eternity. Hell is not a metaphor, it is a state of life filled with finger-pointing and bitterness, where anger is nursed until it becomes the defining feature of the personality. This is why St Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians that we are to “get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” The only possible way out from Satan’s realm is forgiveness – as Jesus taught, and as he lived. As St Paul writes, we are to “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” To live by forgiveness – to give and to receive forgiveness – this is what it means to be a Christian, to pass on forgiveness just as we have received forgiveness. This is lost by the pure church. That is why it is a heresy.
In Part Two – what do we do when the priest isn’t pure?
Justin Martyr (presumably not _the_ JM) asked me to expand on my comments about ordination.
One point at issue is whether ordination confers any sort of spiritual superiority compared to other Christians, to which the fairly uncontentious answer is No. However, there are things which the church does which do confer that spiritual superiority (superiority is a bad word for this, but I can’t fathom a better one just now).
I am thinking of baptism. Baptism grafts a person onto the Body of Christ and equips them for ministry. The community of the church is a community set apart, consecrated, a royal priesthood. The church functions for the world in the way that the Levitical priesthood functioned for the people of Israel. They are called to be holy.
Ordination to the priesthood neither requires nor enables any greater degree of holiness on the part of the minister, compared to what is expected of any baptised believer. What it does do is mark out a person for the exercise of a particular role; it also prays for the guidance and blessing of the Holy Spirit to be with them as they exercise that role (this could be rendered in ‘ontological’ language but doesn’t have to be). So someone who is ordained is not called to be more holy than someone who is baptised.
The separation is not vertical (more or less holiness) but horizontal (a different part of the body).
First posted December 29 2005; reposted as it is relevant to the Dawkinsnet situation.
A post about the structural parallels between Christianity and moq.org, Peak Oil and other groups with a tendency to ‘cult-like’ behaviour.
I have been struck by the echoes of Christianity that crop up in unexpected places, and to try and explain what I mean, I need to explain something about Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy and language.
The easiest way to get a quick grasp of Wittgenstein’s view of language is to talk about the difference between what he calls surface grammar and depth grammar. Surface grammar is the explicit content and form of a sentence: the division into nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. It is what we normally think of as grammar. Depth grammar is the function that a sentence plays within the life of the person speaking the sentence. In other words, an investigation of the depth grammar of a word will indicate the use that the words have.
Think of the expression ‘I need some water’. This seems quite straightforward, but depending upon the context and the emphasis placed upon different words, it could have all sorts of different senses. For example, it could be a straightforward description of thirst, or an expression of the need for an ingredient in making bread, or preparing water colours. So far, so straightforward. But think of something more interesting. Perhaps it is an insult: I am a mechanic, and I am working on fixing a car radiator. My assistant knows that I need some fluid, but passes me some left over orange squash: ‘I need some water’ – where the expression also means: why are you being so stupid? In other words, the surface grammar of a comment may be the same, but the depth grammar is radically different dependent on the situation at hand. For Wittgenstein, true understanding came not from the search for definitions but from grammatical investigation – ie, looking at real situations and seeing what is being discussed.
So the ‘depth grammar’ is concerned with the function that words, concepts and behaviours play in our human conversation and life. What has been striking me strongly in recent months, first from my experiences at moq.org and now from researching the Peak Oil situation, is how far there are patterns of behaviour in non-Christian environments which in fact replicate the depth grammar of Christianity. In other words, how easy it is for a particular topic to become a gospel-substitute, and how this reflects the profoundly embedded nature of Christian thought within our civilisation. As Wittgenstein once put it – a whole mythology is embedded in our language.
Consider the claim of Christianity: the world is corrupted by Sin; Jesus Christ was born to free us from that Sin; if you accept that Jesus rose from the dead and confess him to be the Messiah (ie confess Jesus as the ‘standard’) then you will be released from Sin and born again. To embrace Jesus as the Messiah is to resolve all the spiritual questions which may plague us and provide a pattern of living which leads to abundant life. There is an explicit claim of salvation – “Jesus saves!” – and the embrace of that salvation, leading to fullness of life, is what shapes the ‘grammar’ of Christianity.
Now consider, first, some of the shenanigans at moq.org. The MoQ – Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality – is an account of the world, which claims to solve many of the most troubling contemporary issues. It is certainly a very useful philosophy, and one with which I have a lot of sympathy. Yet it is – inevitably – not without its flaws. What interests me is the way in which, once those flaws are pointed out, there is an exaggerated reaction, which suggests that there is something more at stake for the interlocutors than merely a dispute about philosophy. For the reaction often takes the form of ‘you haven’t understood it yet’. The MoQ is viewed like the Bible, ‘inspired’, therefore it cannot be wrong, therefore if you disagree with it there must be something wrong with you, you must still be in the grip of heretical understandings etc. Once you have understood it, then you’re free of the clutches of alternative views and it all makes sense.
As such, it’s a form of gnosticism. There is esoteric knowledge, associated with particular (pure) experiences – called Dynamic Quality in the MoQ – and once you have gained that knowledge, absorbed that insight, then you are on the inside. You share in the mysteries.
Now compare with some of the discussions that go on around Peak Oil, particularly the ‘doomers’. Instead of it being a work of metaphysics that needs to be understood, it is a combination of geology, physics and politics. Yet here there is the same tendency to describe disagreement as ‘not getting it’ and for there to be vigorous repudiation of alternative perspectives. Again, it is this emotional charge which interests me the most. With Peak Oil there is at least the possibility that lives might rest on the outcome of the debate, yet once views have been ‘scratched’ a little, it rapidly becomes apparent that the views expressed rest upon more-or-less unacknowledged presuppositions, going deeply into a particular persons view of the world. An entire weltanschaaung is in play – this is not an academic question, it is not just an existential question – these are the questions of the meaning of our life.
They are – in Christian language – ‘salvation issues’. For this is what is at stake in the discussions for the participants, this is what gives them such importance – that the resolution of a particular issue, whether it be the MoQ, Peak Oil, the virtue of Republican or Democrat perspectives, whatever – resolution of such issues takes on the penumbra of a faith. If you ‘get it’, then you are ‘saved’. Although the explicit language is starkly different, the fundamental patterns of human behaviour – the ‘depth grammar’ involved in these human conversations – seems to me to be effectively identical in each instance. This is what I mean by the ‘grammar of salvation’. An issue takes on the form of Christianity, whilst – obviously – employing a different vocabulary.
Which leads to the question of legitimacy. Christianity is explicitly talking about God, the meaning of life, the nature of our human existence. Yet the MoQ and Peak Oil make no such explicit claims – and those who are most charged to defend their perspectives are often also those who are most assertive about their rejection of Christian perspectives. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Yet it is also the way in which their language functions.
At the heart of the Christian faith – indeed, something which is held in common with other faiths such as Buddhism – is the sense that we cannot capture what is most essential in our words, our language games. The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. Which has the consequence, once it has been understood, of making all explicit claims to finality stand under a cloud of doubt – this could be wrong. In Christian terms, this is the process of casting out our idols, those things around which we structure our lives which are not God, and thereby diminish our humanity in so far as we gain our worth from them (ie worship them). Which leads, ultimately, to a radical uncertainty, for there is nothing tangible and explicit upon which we can rest our judgements. Here there is only room for faith – for a lived out and worked out understanding and approach to life which cannot be captured in words.
Thing is, our culture suffers from a crisis of certainty, from Descartes onwards (see Cosmopolis by Steven Toulmin for one account of why), and this crisis of certainty has its origin in the rejection of Christianity amongst the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Yet the consistent reapplication of the grammar of salvation to various issues teaches me that the longing for salvation has not gone away – it has simply channelled itself into more socially (intellectually?!) acceptable channels. Metaphysics does function as a religion – it is a kind of magic, as Wittgenstein puts it.
We are required to live with our uncertainty; and the only way to live with uncertainty is through faith. The only interesting question is ‘what sort of faith?’ not ‘do you have faith?’. The ability to be detached from one’s own perspective is a sign of spiritual maturity – living with uncertainty we walk by faith. Unfortunately, those who are most strongly attached to the various perspectives – those in whom is provoked the strongest ‘emotional charge’ when such perspectives are held up to sceptical scrutiny – are those who have not come to terms with the uncertainty, and they do not have faith.
Only the holy can see truly. That is what it means to believe in God, to attain perfect detachment, and that is what it means to walk with faith.
A train of thought prompted by the Dawkinsnet kerfuffle.
I would say: it matters in the same way any other human activity matters. In the end, it will all pass away into nothingness.
The merit is what happens whilst we are working on it.
The real motorcycle is yourself.
Which is why the crass stupidity of the administrators has caused such anguish. A part of the self has been torn away.
Here is where I would say: only religious language can deal with this phenomena. “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.”
Actually, this post is very relevant to the Dawkinsnet situation. I might bring it up front.
Pondering an image:
Take an egg, apply consistent heat, the ‘white’ actually becomes white, it changes from a liquid into a solid, from something with potential to something consumable. The egg remains an egg, but it is denatured.
The same can apply to a faith. Apply consistent pressure, before you know it, it has changed out of all recognition. It is still ‘faith’ – the words used might be identical – but the living content has become denatured.
A coincidence is something that happens to occasion remark, but which is, by definition, meaningless. That is, part of the metaphysical presupposition behind using the word ‘coincidence’ is that there is no meaning present. There is simply a factual occurrence which happens to provoke comment and interest in those perceiving it.
A Godincidence, by contrast, is something that happens to occasion remark but which is considered meaningful by the people involved. In other words, it is taken up into a larger story, that of their own life or the life of their community. One might also talk about providence.
This is not about proving one thing or another. This is about the assumptions embedded within the vocabulary.
Asserting that something is a coincidence – often accompanied with amplifiers like ‘mere’ or ‘just a’ – is the assertion of a specific metaphysical commitment, one which, in truth, rules out every possible sense of meaning (an unacknowledged consequence).
Part of the problem that Christianity faces is that this specific metaphysical commitment has not simply passed unnoticed, but that it has passed into the bloodstream of the church.
It needs to be extirpated. We might begin, as Christians, by disavowing the routine use of the word ‘coincidence’ and only using it when we are consciously asserting that there is no meaning to be found in an event.
I suspect that we would need to exercise a great deal of caution in such a case.
“Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economists that ‘economic forces’ automatically work for good and has assumed with the industrialists and militarists that technology determines history. It has assumed with almost everybody that ‘progress’ is good, that it is good to be modern and up with the times. It has admired Caesar and comforted him in his depredations and defaults. But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life. A part of the normal practice of his power is his willingness to destroy the world. He prays, he says, and churches everywhere compliantly pray with him. But he is praying to a God whose works he is prepared at any moment to destroy. What could be more wicked than that, or more mad?”
(Wendell Berry)
Jon has tagged me with another meme. This one is: “To list an artwork, drama, piece of music, novel, and poem that you think each express something of the essence of Christianity and for each one explain why. Then tag five other people.”
Artwork: Resurrection, Cookham by Stanley Spencer. This has always struck me as the perfect expression of Easter in Ordinary.
Drama: Magnolia (assuming that ‘drama’ isn’t restricted to the stage). A warts’n’all portrayal of modern life, which nevertheless contains the rumour of grace and forgiveness.
Music: haven’t I said enough about music recently? OK, off the top of my head: Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, which I’m listening to a lot at the moment. The light gets in through the cracks; in other words: pride leads to darkness.
Novel: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant; I’m thinking especially of the second series and the way in which Covenant’s ‘poison’ is redeemed, which seems authentically orthodox.
Poem: Teach me my God and King, George Herbert – if we do what we do for God, then all shall be well (a theme of mine at the moment)
BTW readers in the UK are strongly recommended to watch this programme on the IPlayer which is highly relevant (and it might not remain up for much longer).
