The Comedy of Joseph’s Trouble

 Here are my thoughts on a question raised in class, ‘what should we do with comedy’?

 Horace Walpole said, “The world is an old acquaintance that does not improve upon one’s hands. However, one must not give way to the disgust it creates. My maxim, and practice too, is to laugh, because I do not like to cry.” and “I desire to die, when I have nobody left to laugh with me … Rabelais brightens up to me, as I see more of the world; he treated it as it deserved, laughed at it all, and (as I judge from myself) ceased to hate it; for I find hatred an unjust preference.” On the other hand, Saint Benedict rejected laughter as nothing more than a source of iniquity and stated in the Rule that monks should never laugh. Which way should we go?

 The Trouble is interesting because it contains many of the dramatic conventions of tragedy despite the content not being tragic at all. It contains, for example, a sudden reversal of fortune (in Aristotle, peripeteia) preceding its discovery by the hero (anagnorisis) in a long, tragic soliloquy. However, the tragic peripeteia – Joseph being cuckolded – is untrue, and the conventional anagnorisis, which the audience knows is farcical, occurs at the start of the play, rather than during the middle or final third. The true anagnorisis, which is Joseph’s discovery that Christ is the son of God, does occur at the usual point: around the beginning of the final third; but only after we have listened to his long soliloquy and the unfolding of a drama surrounding his farcical realization. This inversion of the traditional tragic devices renders the Trouble into a kind of anti-tragedy, where the tragic denouement is at the beginning, and the characters work themselves towards the realization that everything was fine all along.

 This structure must be contextualized by the fact that the foibles of Joseph are foregrounded against the background of divine history unfolding: namely, the Conception of Christ as one episode in a wider drama that encompassed all of human history. This is because the Trouble would entirely lose its comedic value if the reader/listener didn’t already know that Christ is the son of God. If the reader thought that Joseph was actually cuckolded, then the opening soliloquy could only be read literally. It would entirely lose the comedic flavor of passages such as

The bargain I made there,
That rues me now full sore,
So am I straitly stead.

 In the context of divine history, this passage is comedic partly because Joseph is worrying about a nonexistent problem, and partly because he is so wrapped up in his own ‘bargain’ that he cannot see the most important event to ever occur even though it is unfolding directly in front of him: the salvation of humanity. Likewise, if we believed that he was actually cuckolded, then we would sympathize with his soliloquy. The anti-tragedy would thus become tragedy, until it wasn’t, at the point when Gabriel revealed the truth to Joseph. The universal drama would become totally confused, we would not have understood the comedic mode from the outset, and we therefore would have missed the comedic idea of later passages such as

To Bethlehem bus me it bear;
For little thing will women dere;
Help up now on my back.

 This passage is comedic because Joseph is absorbed in regaining his manhood while the central event of the universal drama is playing out in front of him. It is the power of this contrast, of the tension between an apparent cuckolding (Joseph) and the unfolding of divine history (Mary, in her aloofness), and the verisimilitude of the domestic dispute, that draws the reader/listener into the drama. 

 The comedic mode is therefore indispensable in situating the Conception within the framework of divine history. If we already know that Christ is the son of God and that the historical moment of the Conception occurs against the backdrop of a divine history unfolding, then the pseudo-cuckolding of Joseph, given the rubric of the Trouble, needs to be funny. Otherwise, we would sympathize with his soliloquy and would therefore allow the actual divinity of Christ to recede from our interpretation of the drama. Likewise, it is the very tension between the mundane and worldly (Joseph losing his manhood) and the universal and divine (the divinity of Christ, represented by Mary’s withdrawal from the central dialogue) that resonates so profoundly with an audience that itself is suspended between contemplation of the worldly (Joseph) and contemplation of the divine (Mary); this, after all, is the situation of any Christian audience that is not living under Benedict’s rule in which laughter and ‘disturbing thoughts’ (Anselm) are under perpetual interdict. The comedic mode draws laughter from that tension – as one plucks a stringed instrument – and thereby dissipates it. The reality of Christ’s divinity within the context of the wider drama thereby becomes fuller and more profound.

 We may ultimately interpret the comedic mode in the Trouble as an attempt to negotiate the sublimity of the Conception and the drama with a popular audience. In this context, we can appreciate that comedy serves as an ideal medium through which to enter into the knowledge of that sublimity on a more authentic, and therefore genuine, level. A distinctly English feature of this cycle is its earnestness: the York author makes no attempt to explicate the mysteries. He speaks to (or perhaps with) his audience, but does not lecture them. And the audience in turn does not disguise its limited understanding of the mysteries or its inherent propensity to flee from that which it does not understand: it understands how Joseph could have thought that he was cuckolded, but not how Christ could have been born without pain, for example, so the latter is portrayed naively, while the former is portrayed realistically. The comedy of the Trouble is a way of overcoming this limited knowledge by drawing its audience into the Conception through the thing that it understands – a domestic dispute – while not denying the things that it doesn’t. It therefore presents an honest depiction of the meaning of the Conception for York as much as it does the Conception itself; the Conception thereby becomes at once a divine and a distinctly Yorkish affair, to the extent that the author does not erase the fact that he and his audience are provincial.

 So, perhaps the comedic flavor is necessary for the Trouble because of its rubric: it begins with Joseph learning about the pregnancy, and so his worries needed to be farcical because they were situated within the context of the universal drama. But why choose this rubric? Why not just organize the plot in such a way that would not require comedy?

 For me, it seems that the answer is because the author is being honest about the content of the Gospels. In Matthew, “Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together” and “was found with child”. The implication is clearly that contemporaries would have believed that Joseph had been cuckolded. Joseph “thought on these things”, but apparently only understood the truth after “the angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep” and told him to “fear not”. Importantly, Matthew places no emphasis whatsoever on the idea of infidelity: the social implications are entirely implicit, except in the line where Joseph, “being a just man”, is not “willing to expose” Mary. The scenario in Matthew, therefore, only represents Joseph as a just man who wanted to protect his wife, not as the confused old man of the Trouble who is somehow a side-character in his own marriage. Now, the Trouble entirely invented the ill-informed confrontation between husband and wife. But, it was honest in imagining the social circumstances that would have surrounded the affair as Matthew described it. That is, the author imaged the scene (in which he and has audience believed implicitly) playing out in the way that he knew, thus producing an admittedly Yorkish drama. But situating the actual events of the Gospels within the social framework understood by the author does not represent an intentional dissimulation of the canonical text. It represents an attempt to recreate the actual events of the Gospels in the context of the author’s own era, since divine history is always unfolding, even in York. The truth of the drama was thus realized through its provincial verisimilitude: Matthew’s story was funny because it was true.

 Finally, all of this should have an acceptable limit. The exploitation of comedic tension by the Trouble is only possible because, as the editor says, ‘the laughter does not reach Mary’. It is the contrast between Mary’s purity and Joseph’s shortsighted worldliness that produces the tension, and so the former is just as critical to preserve as the latter is to invent.

 So what should we think about Benedict’s Rule? A fundamental claim of the Enlightenment is that it encourages people to live as they are, rather than as they should be. This claim is not to be taken seriously, partly because it means that the Enlightenment must ultimately reject any normative principle of spiritual improvement, which is unacceptable. Nonetheless, it is a powerful claim, and it is therefore important to recognize that it can only be made because of authors like Benedict. In the end, his Rule may be suitable for training monks, but perhaps not for living well: our situation is what it is – removed from God – and while we may disagree with the Enlightenment on many counts, we must admit that it is beyond our power to fundamentally alter our situation. Perhaps the greatest strength of the Trouble is that it greets its audience as they are, in their limited understanding, in their Yorkishness, and not ‘as they should be’; but only to the same extent as God greets Anselm in his own ‘inner chamber’.

-Henry Stratakis-Allen

Edit: I wanted to add this picture of the Mérode Altarpiece (ca. 1425), which I had in mind while reading the Trouble. Obviously, we can note the presence of two contemporary donors on the left panel, the unabashedly Dutch setting, and Joseph’s depiction as a storefront carpenter in the town square, absorbed in his work, and apparently oblivious to the unfolding of the (literally) central drama in the middle panel. Joseph looks down at his carpentry, away from the center, while the donors peer into the room and perform an act of devotion. The artist has honored Joseph with a bright blue turban (the pigment was expensive at the time), and yet there is something vaguely comedic in his unawareness. All of this is occurring outside of time, and yet within a familiar setting.

Mimesis and Sublimity in Christian Narrative

 

In the spring of 2023, I had the great misfortune of seeing a truly horrific play telling the story of Saint Joan of Arc, titled “Joan and the Fire”. Between the musical performances, the constant twirling of ribbons on stage, and the presence of a “unicorn” in light up fuzzy boots and drag makeup in a scene made to represent a mushroom-induced psychedelic trip, it felt as though Joan was being tortured in front of a crowd for the second time. This performance could not have provided sharper a contrast to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s stark yet moving La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and its brilliant performance by Renée Jeanne Falconetti. In this movie, practically every second feels endowed with the sublime, with each part of the production honoring Joan’s incredible story. While “Joan and the Fire” and La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc deviate slightly on the focus of their timelines and narratives, they ultimately tell the same story.

 

                                            Joan and the Fire
 

 

Joan’s story is one imbued with the sublime, and it is a story that has power both in a simple narrative recounting and in an extravagant and artistic telling of it. While I will address the proper presentation of these stories at the “low” level later, I will first discuss the sublimity of the high level first. For class, we read chapter 7, “Adam and Eve”, from Erich Auerbach’s masterpiece Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. In this chapter, Auerbach addresses the stylistic differences between sermo gravis/sublimis and sermo remissus/humilis, or the elevated and low styles of writing in antique rhetoric. He explains that while these two approaches were kept separate in antiquity, Christianity merges them, creating a powerful style befitting of medieval mystic writing. Importantly, this style also introduced a new sublimity “in which the everyday and the low were included, not excluded, so that, in style as in content, it directly connected the lowest with the highest” (154). This style brings the mysteries of the Bible into new light, inviting us to consider the riddles and questions that the sometimes-simple, sometimes-esoteric text offers us.  

 

 

In class, we discussed the beauty of the Junius manuscript, looking at the way in which Genesis and Exodus were written in an epic style in Old English. We saw the language, rich and poetic, brimming with its own florid descriptions of the biblical scenes so sparsely described in the actual Old Testament, as an example of the sublime sermo gravis that Auerbach explained. Yet, as Professor Fulton Brown aptly pointed out, this version was one sung in mead-halls by “barbarians”, not painstakingly analyzed by Saint Augustine or Saint Jerome.

 

This point would surely have fascinated the writers and intellectuals at the court of Louis XIV, as they took up sides in the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” (the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns). In brief, scholars of 17^th century France fervently took up arms to either defend the claim that the ancient authors were superior to those the modern era, or vice versa. The Anciens believed that the writings of antiquity were endowed with a certain “wild” sublimity, being of a truer and purer sprit by virtue of their ancientness, uncorrupted by modern mores. Perhaps this same thinking applies to the Junius manuscript, which tells the great Biblical narrative in a way that excites the mind towards the world of “Spear-Danes in days gone by.”

 

To further apply the work of the Anciens to our class discussion, I turn to the writing of their leader, poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. In his preface to a translation of Longinus’ On the Sublime, Boileau discusses the difference between a sublime style (one with advanced rhetorical style) versus a text with true sublimity. He uses the beginning of Genesis to explain his definition of the true sublime: the extraordinary, the surprising, and the marvelous. For Boileau, the inherent power of “God said: Let there be light; and there was light” is so astonishing and beautiful that it does not need heightened language to convey its majesty. Of course, Boileau is not against the appropriate use of a sublime style in other contexts, but his point that there is an inherent sublimity in the acts of God is an important one.

 

                                                            Nicolas Boileau Despréaux (1636-1711)

 

So—now to connect these different ideas. I believe that like Joan’s story, and like Boileau says, there is an inherent sublimity in these religious narratives. When presenting or retelling stories of such import, we come face to face with the difficulty of properly honoring them. One way to do that is to share them through the sublime language of the Junius manuscript, or the sublime acting of Falconetti in Dreyer’s film. Yet to relegate these stories solely to this realm is to ignore the other part of what Auerbach tells us makes Christian writing so powerful: the presence of the sermo remissus. There is perhaps nowhere that this humble, low language to depict these sublime events is more on display than in the York Mystery Plays, which we examined in depth in class. These plays are farcical, enacted by one’s own neighbors within the limits of a wheeled cart. It is hard to see the sublime of God’s actions in these productions, yet they do not feel disrespectful to the stories they tell in the way that “Joan and the Fire” so clearly felt. I believe that the sublime beauty of these mystery plays lies in the honesty and beauty of human nature to tell our own story, and to share and take part in the story of our own creation. This figurative depiction, though foreign to us, holds truth in its commitment to the story it shares. While somewhat silly-appearing at first glance, the York Mystery plays reveal our dedication and love for tradition and belief, and our desire to see ourselves in the majestic narrative of the universe. This is something beautiful and sublime in itself—something far more powerful than a play like “Joan and the Fire”, where there is no recognition of or love for the piety and power of the original story. 

 

                                               Performance of the York Mystery Plays

 

 Sarah Muhlbaum

 

Auerbach, Erich. 1957. Mimesis.

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Auerbach, Erich. 1957. Mimesis.

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Humilitas and Sublimitas: Genesis B

    In chapter seven of Auerbach’s Mimesis, Adam and Eve, the author recounts how the Biblical literature of the Middle Ages was always informed by the notion that, whatever event was being represented, the whole story was informed as a piece of “one great drama whose beginning is God’s creation of the world, whose climax is Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, and whose expected conclusion will be Christ’s second coming and the Last Judgment.”. As such, it was a duty of this literature to be comprehensive in a way little known before: the humilitas of the human was to be incorporated into the sublimitas of the absolute, and without a loss to either aspect. Auerbach shows with finesse how this was accomplished in medieval liturgical dramas like the Old French Mystère d’Adam and the Italian dialogic Passion poem of Jacopone da Todi. I want to take this opportunity to reflect on how the poet of the Old English Genesis B was able to accomplish a similar representation in his non-dialogic form, and particularly in his representation of the Fall. It seems to me that this poet was able to hold together the humilitas of the human and the sublimitas of the absolute by weaving together the perspectival representations of the psychologies and personalities of Adam and Eve with the ultimate truth of their characters in the history of salvation. He at once offers their sentiments and motivations as apparent to them and their sentiments and motivations as conditional parts of the whole. 

    The poet begins at the outset of his description of the Fall by offering a description of the grounds for the successful temptation of Eve. These grounds are described unconditionally: “The woman’s mind / Was more malleable to him, her heart / More hospitable to his concealed cunning” [emphasis added]. He begins, in other words, with direct reference to the character of creation, and not with reference to how things “seemed” to any personality: this grounds the story in the absolute. As soon as this is established, however, the poet goes into the mind of Eve, and here the unsolidity of human psychology reigns: “She was led to believe that the deceitful devil / Was a divine messenger sent from God. / His tongue seemed truthful, his words wise, / His sign spectacular.” Here things “seem.” Yet, immediately, the two are combined: “She sidled up / To her lord and master, saying to Adam.” The poet returns to the absolute narrative without qualification, but makes of the unsolidity of Eve an absolute fact with a suspicious word (assuming the translation is accurate) like “sidled.” This opening is a presentiment of the poet’s procedure in general: he goes, not “freely,” but with assured connection from the absolute, to the perspectival, and back again. (A word on “freely.” This seems to be one of Auerbach’s favorite adjectives for the emergence of his preferred style of “realism,” at least in its more primitive forms. However, the value he places on “freedom” -- of diction especially -- seems to be ultimately subordinate to the rightness or substantive connection between word, deed, and personality present in the realistic style at its peak, for Auerbach, in Dante. But, at least as early as Genesis B, we see such connections already being formed.) 

    This transformation sets the pattern for the rest of the poet’s narrative. It is echoed already in Eve’s immediately subsequent speech to Adam. In the first phase of her speech, she begins haltingly “Adam, my lord, this fruit is so sweet-- / It’s a taste of bliss and a pleasure to eat. / It will warm your heart and open your eyes / To the world’s brightness. God’s beautiful angel / Is everything he claims.” She begins as if personally overwhelmed by a sudden and carnal pleasure and has recourse to mere “claims.” In the second phase of her speech, she is on the way to speaking more unconditionally, but, as is shown through her use of merely comparative or pragmatic arguments -- “He’s better a friend than an adamant foe” -- her pathetic humilitas is still embarrassed by the sublimitas of the “King of heaven” and “almighty God.” It is only in the last phase of her speech that Eve has the confidence to approach the absolute. As is shown by the abounding and stressing of personal pronouns, however, what Eve glimpses of the absolute by virtue of tasting the forbidden fruit is conceived to be essentially hers, and thus a spurious combination of the perspectival and the absolute. We have: “My mind is a miracle-- / Since I ate the apple, my eyes are enlightened. / Here take this fruit I hold in my hands. / I offer it openly. Share my vision. / Taste this greatness. I believe it’s brought / From the hand of God by his own command / Through this mighty messenger” (note how many of the personal pronouns open lines or follow the central stress). Eve’s vision has spuriously and willfully particularized God -- it is not the “particularization” -- the word pales in light of the event -- freely offered in the form of Christ, and in so doing grants her a position that can seem at least rhetorically to be staked beside God’s omnipotence. However this may be, it is clear that the poet's combination of Eve’s conditional psychology, her claim on the absolute, and the absolute as it actually is that makes for the drama of her speech. 

    As we reach Adam’s final acquiescence this drama comes full circle. Adam’s acquiescence is represented with the following words: “His beautiful bride urged Adam on / To share the fruit, till his spirit softened, / And trusting her undaunted loyalty and love, / He took the fruit. He ate the apple / And lost himself.” These lines suggest that Adam acquiesced not for any of the reasonings asserted by Eve in her speech, but for a certain psychological understanding sensed to underlie all of Eve’s asseverations: that, whatever Eve said in fact, love must be behind her speaking. Adam does not acquiesce with a reasoned speech in this presentation, but with a softening of the spirit. The poet has prepared this representation by the observation he puts in his own name: “Eve incessantly urged Adam all day long / With words thick and fast to taste the fruit. / This lure was aimed at expanding love / Or sharing blame” [emphasis added]. In other words, Adam, in his humilitas grasped only one half of the true grounds of Eve’s urging: he had to take it that “this lure was aimed at expanding love,” while in fact it was equally aimed at “sharing blame.” We are therefore presented with a web of perspectival motives, a spurious claim on the absolute on the part of Eve, an expectation of love on the part of Adam, unified by a true psychology: that “expanding love” and “sharing blame” had become tragically inseparable in the absolute event of Eve’s temptation in the history of salvation. The poet’s editorial comment in his own name on this event confirms that his web of representations all along was meant to bring out the interconnectedness of these partial perspectives and the actual truth: “So now the children of Eve know sin / When they fall as all of mankind must, / Though they may find through their suffering / And amending their ways their Maker’s mercy / And be restored to their Lord again.” 

    One can see throughout the artistic or “mythological” elaborations of scripture of the Middle Ages such as this one in which so much in the way of psychological representation is added how much they were meant to bring out the coherence of the whole of human experience in light of the history of salvation. From the embedded circularity of word and image of the codices to the human representation of the sublime in liturgical drama, this comprehensiveness seems to be a guiding ambition.

-LB

Auerbach, E. (2003). Mimesis: The representation of reality in Western literature. Princeton University Press.

The Complete Old English Poems, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. https://doi-org.proxy.uchicago.edu/10.9783/9780812293210

“Seeing” Angels

So much of the Bible and medieval mythology seems to be wrapped up in the phenomenon of “seeing.” Everyone is concerned with seeing God of course, whether corporeal or in his actions, and there has been a lot of discussion in class about images that represent people/scenes from the Bible. Part of the nature of “seeing” has to do with faith, with seeing God even if he is shrouded in mystery, but another part has to do with the actual images and way things would be conceptualized. It’s a way to sort of put yourself in the shoes of a medieval Christian and see through their eyes. Between the writings from the clergy and laity and the scripture itself, one might think this would come easy and a clear picture would arise, but the images themselves are so mystical that these acts of seeing can also be difficult. The surviving artwork from the period provides a bit of help in deciphering what the conceptualization looked like, but in other ways they also are just as complicating as they are illuminating.

The scripture that describes the angels gives a fair amount of details, but the angels themselves are so abstract that its difficult to actually put the words into pictures. Taking Ezekiel 1 for example:

“The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze…Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle.”

In one way, this description comes as no surprise. Angels are kind of like humans with wings, right? Once you consider the four faces and the gleaming bronze hooved feet, the image gets a bit more difficult to contend with. The other famous multi-faced, cleft-hooved is of course Satan, so what’s the deal with the angels looking so similar? It is in this kind of passage that we are reminded of the words of Baltmann on the mythology of Christianity. Would most modern Christians believe that angels came down to heaven with four faces and bronzed hooves? Likely no. Would most medieval Christians believe that? Likely yes.  

Another place I looked with this question in mind is in The Many. The explanation that his writing is more of a “fusion” of Christianity and Platonism/Neoplatonism and likely the angel hierarchy situation was imported into Christianity. Following a trend that seems to be arising in thinking about this material, the angelic hierarchy seems to at once help and hinder the understanding of whats actually going on. Part of the issue comes from the nature of a story: “When he retold the story, Josephus did not mention the Lord, which might seem a curious omission, unless it was natural for him, an educated Jew from the high priestly family, to think that an angle, or three angels, was another way of describing the Lord” (66). The blending of languages and the cross-cultural foundations lead to this kind of confusion. If it really is the three angels that told Abraham to destroy Sodom and spoke of the birth of Isaac and not the Lord, where do we go from there? Some Christians make the claim that this description was a “pre-incarnation appearance of Jesus” or that “this scene is said to represent the Trinity, Jewish tradition says three archangels, and the original text is not clear” (66). There is more information with The Many that traces different angelic forms, ranging from angels ruling different months/days, gnostic interpretations that differ greatly from the old testament, angels being made of fire and light, etc. Even within more of the scripture, Isaiah 6, the descriptions continue in this kind of fashion: “With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” At the ound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.” Trying to interpret all these descriptions and differing images and issues within translation create a feeling not far off from this cacophonous image of the angels from Hildegard von Bingen. If I had to try to represent all this in a painting, it would likely look as confusing as this, too.

 

              It is in these kinds of proceedings that I am reminded of our first-week discussions of Bultmann and his words on the mythology of Christianity. In his words, “Can Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true?” (3). This is directly applicable in the discussion of angels, how much of these images and descriptions can be accepted as pure truth? If we accept that angels are sort-of humans that just do the bidding of God and disregard all the talk about multi-faced, multi-winged, cloven bronze feet, what else is able to be thrown aside as well? At what point does the Bible and its stories become unfounded? I believe the task is a bit more complicated than Bultmann would have it, “we can only completely accept the mythical world picture or completely reject it” seems to be a bit defeatist. If anything, these widely differing and extremely complex angelic discussions point towards a great cultural interest in both the past and present. There is so many unanswered claims and questions (I didn’t even discuss Celestial Hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius!) and there is so much out there to still be gained.

- CRC

Temporal Perfection and Angelic Free Will

    As I thought about Lucifer's fall, specifically its depiction in "The Fall of the Angels" from the York Mystery Plays, I was captivated by the part of the play in which God instructs the remaining angels to "give light to the earth, for it faded when the fiends fell" (lines 147-8). The incorrect exercise of free will here leads to a loss of light, both for the heavens and the earth and for Lucifer, who mourns that "my brightness is blackest and blo now" and "my misery is endless kindling" (lines 101-2, I changed the second quote based on the glosses in our text to make it more readable). Not only does Lucifer lose his light, but his misery becomes kindling. The idea that Lucifer's misery becomes fuel for a fire is significant in that fire is an element linked to the angels in Ezekiel and Isaiah. In Ezekiel, fire is connected to the physical appearance of the angels. When the angels appear to Ezekiel he says that "their appearance was like that of burning coals of fire and like the appearance of lamps. This was the vision running to and fro in the midst of the living creatures, a bright fire, and lightning going forth from the fire" (Ezek. 1.13). Lucifer's misery, then, provides kindling for an element which emanates from the angels and is intimately associated with their appearance. In Isaiah, fire plays more of a purificatory role in relation to the angels, as a seraphim uses a burning coal to cleanse Isaiah's "unclean lips" before Isaiah communicates with the Divine (Isa. 6.5). Here the fire is connected to the angels' roles as mediators between the human and the divine - the use of it enables communication between the two parties, and the angels are the intermediary third party who know how to facilitate the communication. It is ironic, then, that even when Lucifer falls he is still in some way fulfilling his role as an intermediary - though he is no longer close to God, his suffering is kindling for the fire associated in Isaiah with communication between human and divine. 

Fall of Rebellious Angels, Georgios Choumnos, 15th cent.

    Another aspect of "The Fall of the Angels" that I found interesting was the implication that the fall of Lucifer occurs temporally in the moment during Genesis between the creation of the angels and the separation of light from darkness. As we discussed in class, there is no moment in Genesis when it is clearly stated that the angels were created, but "The Fall of the Angels" in likening angels to light, suggests that angels were created when light was created. This association between angels and light is established when Lucifer and his fellow fiends fall, resulting in a "murkness" over the earth (Fall of the Angels line 150). If light is a physical feature associated with the angels, we can assume, consistent with the writings of Hugh of St. Victor, that the angels were created along with light. In "The Fall of the Angels" God subsequently names the murkiness resulting from the fall of the angels "night" in an allusion to the moment in Genesis when God "called the light Day, and the darkness night" (Gen. 1.5). This suggests that the episode concerning Lucifer occured before the naming of light, suggesting a longer stretch of time and the occurence of a major event between the creation of light (and angels) and the separation of light and darkness (itself catalyzed by Lucifer's fall). 

    The problem I ran into with the conception of events presented in "The Fall of the Angels" is that the play appears to stretch time in the creation story to be longer than it seems when reading Genesis. When I read Genesis the events of creation have always seemed to take place one after another to me, without pauses or events in between. It is interesting to consider that the time between the different creations could be longer than this, but time in Genesis also does not have to bend to our normal conceptions of it (except to follow the structure of days laid out). While I might get an idea of the amount of time it took for Lucifer to fall in "The Fall of the Angels" based on my human idea of how long these monologues and conversations would have taken to play out, these events could have taken place in a single instant, as suggested by Hugh of St. Victor in On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. Hugh does not address the fall of Lucifer, specifically, but does examine how and when the angels were created. Hugh says that "in the first beginning were made simultaneously all corporeal things in matter and all incorporeal in angelic nature" (Hugh 76). I am troubled by this idea because, having read Genesis, I struggle to visualize creation as a simultaneous creation of corporeal and incorporeal things, since Genesis lays out a very clear order and structure of creation. Hugh, however, says that "all things, both visible and invisible, were created simultaneously" (Hugh 77). The suggestion in "The Fall of the Angels" that angels and light were linked, and therefore created simultaneously, seems to resolve some of my confusion around Hugh's statements, as I am able to visualize light as a material creation and the angels as immaterial creations made with light. Yet there is still the issue of Lucifer's fall–did it occur in an instant, just like creation of the angels, or did it follow a more regular time course? How soon after the creation of light was darkness divided from it? 

The Choirs of Angels, Hildegard of Bingen

    Adding to this confusion is the fact that time and the angels are inextricably linked by Hugh. Time is a major theme when Hugh expands on the creation of the angels, stating that although spiritual and angelic natures were formed, they had yet to be perfected because their perfect form would be received afterward "through love and conversion to its creator" (Hugh 77). The idea that angels are not formed perfect but are perfected later seems to me a link between the fall of Lucifer in the York Mystery plays and Hugh's ideas. Hugh speaks of three levels of perfection: perfection in time, perfection in nature, and universal perfection (Hugh 82). Angels, he says, are created in the first perfection to aspire towards the second perfection, which is attainable for them. They can never reach the third perfection because only God exists in this perfection. "The Fall of the Angels" suggests that whether or not angels reach the second perfection is linked to how they exercise their free will. Lucifer uses his free will incorrectly, falls, and is detached from the temporal perfection he once resided in. One the other hand, an angel who utilizes their free will correctly will move from the first perfection to the second, transcending time to reside in perfection according to nature. Nature is above time, supporting the supposition that bodies are not responsible for sin, since sins are committed first in the temporal perfection. Although human beings possess moral bodies that are beholden to the decay brought along by time, the angels show us that true perfection exists outside of temporal perfection, and Lucifer's fall shows us that temporal perfection cannot make us impervious to sin or punishment for it.

    Since the angels are so linked to time, and at their creation exist in temporal perfection, it makes sense that the nature of time is uncertain. What is certain is that in "The Fall of the Angels", Lucifer's fall is an event which causes a notable progression in the Genesis story, as if his tumble from the land of temporal perfection actually caused a shift in time, just as it caused a loss of light. This suggests that existence within temporal perfection causes a pause in time, but falling out of it causes a shift. What I am curious to know is whether elevation of an angel from temporal perfection to natural perfection, as Hugh discusses, also causes some kind of shift. Or, on the other hand, would it cause a shift in nature, considering an angel is being added to the ranks of natural perfection? These shifts, likewise, are influenced by the direction free will is exercised in, suggesting that humans may also have a hand in shifting the realms of time and nature (although I was uncertain after reading Hugh as to whether or not humans exist in any kind of perfection at all, or if we fell out of perfection with the fall of Adam). 

-Aethelthryth

Hugh of St. Victor. On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, edited by Roy J. Deferrari, Medieval Academy of America, 1951.

"The Fall of the Angels." York Mystery Plays, edited by Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, Oxford UP.

The Holy Bible. Douay-Rheims version, Saint Benedict Press, 2009. 

Faces of Fire

How do I not go to hell? As an imperfect Catholic, it is a question that I concern myself with often. It seems that imitating the Angel of Great Counsel, also known as Jesus Christ, is where I should start. This raises a similar question though on how do we become angels, or at least more like them? If I had a solid answer, I would feel much more secure in my spot in the image below, but even Lucifer was at one point in the Choir of Angels and fell.

Coronation of the Virgin by Beato Angelico. Notice the musical instrument the angels are holding. Image Link

In some ways we already are like them. Both human beings and the angels possess free will. This means we both have the ability of following our voluntary desires, as well as giving us the power to choose and the freedom to judge. Since neither of us are perfect, there is only one perfection, we can fail in our judgement and use our power to choose unwisely (St. Victor, 85). Look no further than the fall of man. Adam and Eve were walking in the garden with God (that is being pretty close to Him) and still chose to eat of the fruit in order to become like him. Adam and Eve were tempted though by the adversary known as Lucifer. Lucifer was guilty of the same sin, he also tried to become like God. “I shall be like unto him that is highest on height (The Fall of the Angels, 5).” Then Lucifer fell, I guess in his great and amazing wisdom he never read Dante’s Inferno and learned that the sin of pride sends the sinner to the lowest layer of hell. The story of the fall of the angels leads to two important christian concepts. One, it shows that gnosticism is heretical (go Saint Irenaeus) because if spirit is good and material is evil. Secondly, we learn that it does require us to perform a physical action to sin, we can sin just by our thought, this is exactly what Jesus Christ taught during the Sermon on the Mount. The sins of Adam and Lucifer are also similar to the sins of the magicians. The pursuit of knowledge, the ability to forgive sins, and to know divine power are what caused the angels and man to fall (The Sworne Booke of Honorius).

So if we want to be like one of the good angels, we should not think that we are gods, but what else? I personally like the way monks attempt this, which is singing with one voice. The monks would drop whatever they were doing when the bell was rung and head to their appointed place to sing the Psalms with their fellow monks. The entire psalter would be sung once every week, and Saint Benedict in his opinion only the lukewarm monks do. The forefathers of Saint Benedict would complete the psalter in one day. But what is the point of doing this? Well for one, the monks battle demons, and by singing the Psalms one is training their will to successfully combat the demons. My confirmation saint, Saint Michael the Archangel, is also famous for fighting demons. Catholics sing of this story at Michaelmas every year in the Factum est Silentium. This idea of many people singing with one voice is an interesting idea. In my previous essay on Bede and the tabernacle called, The Tabernacle on my Bookshelf, I mentioned how you are not supposed to read the Bible by yourself. Well it seems as if it is not ideal to sing, worship, by yourself either. Christians are supposed to be worshiping together, the religion emphasizes community and the importance to evangelize peacefully through communication and changing one's mind.

Psalter of the Divine Office according to the Rule of St. Benedict. Image Link

We know singing is something the angels do whenever they show up in holy scripture. For example, when the angel, dressed as a high priest, visited Abraham he taught him the song that kept everything in order. Abraham was told to sing the song as he approached the throne (Barker, 83). This song that keeps everything in order is called harmozousa in Greek, which means harmony. In the tradition, harmony was the role that Wisdom played in the creation of the world (Barker, 84). Therefore it seems as if angels and wisdom play the same, at least similar, role in the creation story. Since the enthronement of the lamb, we too can play a sort of role in the ordering out of chaos through the process of praising God. Through Him, the heavenly creation and the earthly creation are once again united (Barker, 93). Notice this unity between heaven and earth is not acquired through the domination of the other's will but comes about freely. The forceful domination of another is never just, even if the one binding the others will have the best of intentions.

When described in scripture they not only sing, but usually shine like fire. Enoch saw two men whose faces shone like the sun, with eyes like fire (Barker, 88). The prophet Ezechiel sees the angels which appeared as glowing brass, burning coals of fire, and the appearance of lamps (Ezechiel 1:7-13). Compare this with the story in Exodus, “And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation with the Lord (Exodus 34:29).” In this passage, the term horned refers to shining, or sending forth rays of light. This leads to an important concept that the angels are not shining like fire due to their own greatness and wisdom, but because of their close proximity to God. They shine because just like Moses they know, see, and talk to Him, and maybe most importantly love Him. So how do we become like angels? We need to know, see, love, and talk to God.

-- L. O'Connor Jelenik

Hugh of St. Victor, & Deferrari. (n.d.). Book I. In On the Sacraments (pp. 74–93). essay, Hathi trust. 

Honorius. (2009). The Sworne Booke of Honorius. Liber Juratus Honorii, or the Sworn Book of Honorius. http://www.esotericarchives.com/juratus/juratus.htm 

The Barkers. (1999). The Fall of the Angels. In York Mystery Plays (pp. 1–7). essay, Oxford University Press. 

Barker, M. (2011). The Many. In Temple Mysticism: An Introduction (pp. 63–96). essay, SPCK. 

The Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims version. (2009). . Saint Benedict Press, in association with Tan Books. 

Eye of Angels

 

Reading this icon, you seems to make eye-contact with it. Your eye hits the page and is  immediately drawn into the dark center, the pupil, the obscurity at the middle. Once you manage to extricate yourself from the blackness and take in the surrounding field of vision, you feel taken aback, almost—having expected only to observe it, you find yourself the object of its observation. The image looks back at you, returns your gaze. But who is it that looks out from the page?

Setting aside the question of the eye for a moment, we must ask what is pictured here. This icon is understood as an image of creation. One way to read the dark void at the center is as earth, pictured from the words of Genesis 1:2, “And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.” The black circle stands in contrast to many other icons we’ve looked at in class that portray God as a white circle, as if an impenetrably radiant light. If we understand the black circle as Earth, its darkness places it in contrast to God as an impenetrably dark obscurity. The blue angelic hosts are suggestive of an expanse of waters, undulating in shade and texture. As John 1 tells us, the radiant figure hovering in the foreground is Logos, inclining His gaze downward toward the darkness. “In the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God, and Logos was God.” Although John goes on to tell us that “Logos was made flesh,” (in other words He didn’t start out as flesh), here the image prefigures His incarnate body, which is partially radiant and partially in shadow, resting an elbow upon the earth void even while blessing it with his right hand. 

The presence of angels and their circular formation suggests to me that the icon also pictures the beginning of time itself, which is visualized more often than not in circles (think of the orbits of the planets, the face of your watch, the curve of a sun-dial). This serves for an account of the angelic host present — Hugh of St. Victor tells us that “with the beginning of time, that is, when time itself began, there also began simultaneously the matter of all visible things, and at exactly the same moment the essence of the invisible things in the angelic nature” (Hugh). Angels are creatures, but not embodied ones. Though Genesis doesn’t give an account of their creation, many have speculated as to how and when Logos brought them into being. Margret Barker reminds us of the creation account in Job, where God asks Job “‘Where were you…when the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for Joy?’ (Job 38.7),” and she adds, “Angels making music accompanied the creation” (Barker). Combining these understandings, we can read the image as showing the celestial hosts, brought into being by the initiation of Logos and standing in measured rank, singing in worship as time begins to spin. 

I want to return now to the question of the eye, in part to assert that these angels are more than arbitrary embellishments in this image of creation—that their presence allows for two understandings of the eye. The iconographer could easily have filled in the iris of the eye with the waves of the sea or something like that; instead he chose angels. The angels are a part of the eye, their wings ribbed as the sinews of an iris, which we know as the sphincter muscle that contracts and dilates to moderate the amount of light allowed into the pupil. Dionysius the Areopagite writes that Angels are mirrors of the divine illumination, sort of like filters or veils between us and God (Dionysius, Caput IV, S2). They signal the presence of God, and as such are a way for humans to see and communicate with God. As an iris mediates between the light and the pupil, so can we understand the angelic host in this image as mediating between the inexorable light of God and our mortal vision. Seraphim are creatures of eyes. The heavenly host pictured here are not “full of eyes,” as many Bible passages and icons have them, but instead they themselves comprise an eye. They are creatures who watch, but are also creatures who allow us to see. 

Creatures who watch:

With the first in mind, the gaze of the icon can be newly understood as the gaze of God looking back at us from the page, the dark circle merely a veiled version of the white ones elsewhere. In this understanding, the sinewy rings of angels encircle God himself (as in Hildegard von Bingen’s  vision), focusing the image around He who is impossible to see, telling the viewer, look, look here at what you cannot see! We are veiling His light, but He is looking back at you! And of course in the foreground, Christ Logos stands revealed in his human body, God the Son unveiled to the viewer at the right side (hand) of God the Father obscured from view. 

Creatures who allow us to see:

Understood as the eye of the created earth, the gaze that meets yours when you look at this icon is that of your fellow-creatures, watching you while you pray with intensity, inquiring who you are and who it is that you worship. The eye of the earth looks past the figure of Christ in the foreground, unable to see, as you can, that his hand is raised in blessing towards it, unable to see his radiant right side. Instead it looks at you, the icon reader—are you, too, radiant with this unintelligible light? it asks, what is it that you see?

-Alice

Sources:

Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims Version (Charlotte, N.C.: St. Benedict Press, 2009) [ISBN 978-1935302056]

Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments, trans. Deferrari, book I, part V (“On the creation of the angels”), pp. 74-93 [BX2200.H891 Hathi Trust]

Margaret Barker, Temple Mysticism: An Introduction (London: SPCK, 2011), pp. 63-96 (“The Many”) [BM655.B375 2011]

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy <http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_13_heavenly_hierarchy.htm>

https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/hildegard-von-bingen/scivias-i.6-the-choirs-of-angels/

The Wholeness of the Holy Trinity

     After our discussion on Tuesday, I found myself thinking a lot about our conversation’s tendency to expose (or at least, propel discussion towards) questions relating to the origins and explanations of the holy trinity. The phrase “father, son, and holy spirit” is said again and again during sermons and within religious texts, but when we started talking about the representations in medieval art and more concrete explanations of the differences between each figure I found myself a bit mystified. I had never really considered much about the trinity beyond its simple existence and accepted it, particularly with the idea of the holy spirit.

One of the texts that I found to be helpful in reconsidering and tracing back this idea was from Three-in-one. Prof. Brown speaks of the twelfth-century movement towards “Christ in his humanity with its corresponding focus, liturgically, on the body and blood of the Mass, and, meditatively, on the compassionate imitation of the sufferings of Mary and Her Son” (470). Of course, the focus here is on the “son” part of the Trinity. But, I almost feel as though if you asked any church-goer who or what they worship in church and they would say God, not necessarily the Son, not necessarily Jesus. It has been a while since I have gone to church so pardon if this is untrue, but it is at least what my answer would be. There seems to be a multi-century discussion around the distinctions between the figures in the trinity, this is even something we discussed in class but left without reaching a conclusion. In part, my guess is that this confusion and acceptance of the unknown is a big part of faith. “Arcane, if at times overheated, quarrels with the Greeks over the procession of the Holy Spirit; abstruse, if not necessarily heretical, efforts to distinguish grammatically the concrete individuality of God from the abstract quality of his divinity” etc etc. It is by nature that these questions arise with such a topic as the trinity. In class, we discussed an issue that arose in trying to get to the bottom of these questions – in dividing the trinity and searching for spiritual, grounded attributes in each of its three parts, how does it not lose its supremacy? The seems that the trinity can only work and be the strongest when it is still considered one unified grouping. If there is one creator, things still stand. If there are actually more than one creator, what does faith stand on?

I found that the pictures and illuminations we looked at in class only furthered this issue and made it more confusing. In one image, Jesus reigns in the darkness, on a throne, with rivers coming out of it. In another, there are creatures beyond the earthly realm – snakes, the sun, the moon, the stars. In yet another, a depiction of creation seemed to at one point contain two figures, but at another point one of the figures was removed and painted over with pink. None of this necessarily negates the existence of the trinity or completely conflates one thing with another, but the representations are increasingly puzzling. The Lord being depicted on a throne seems to denote supremacy, the creatures seem to reflect a structure of cosmic creation, and the removed figures point towards some kind of pre-existing duality in creation, rather than a singular creator. What do medieval Christians make of this? And how? I looked towards St. Anselm for an answer. “When I reflected that this consisted in a connected chain of many arguments, I began to ask myself if it would be possible to find one single argument, needing no other proof than itself, to prove that God really exists, that he is the highest good, needing nothing, that it is he whom all things need for their being and well-being, and to prove whatever else we believe about the nature of God” (238). A big question, if you ask me. As St. Anselm begins to discuss this problem, much of his focus turns towards seeing God. “Lord, you are my Lord and my God, / and I have never seen you” and “and still I do not know you. / I was created to see you, . and I have not yet accomplished that for which I was made” (239-240). Even literal saints from the twelfth century struggle with believing in the trinity and not having the ability to see God, but it seems as though the question has shifted to if seeing God alone is possible, or is God unable to be seen as separate from the trinity. If he is, does that mean there are three Gods, as Roscelin of Compiegne posited? (Brown, 474). Or does the trinity cease to exist when God is seen and separated from his son and the holy spirit?

So, where do we go from there? How can the trinity be thought of without losing all sense of what is established in the church? My discussion rests in the words of Sayers in The Mind of the Maker. To her, the trinity is much less concrete than past doctrines might suggest. Sayers and Anselm do seem to agree that God (and the trinity) is mysterious by nature or on purpose, and part of faith is continuing to ask questions while holding belief to still be true. She cites how a Trinitarian structure actually works quite well and almost solves the questions that some say it poses. The example she uses is from St. Augustine of Hippo – “There is a trinity of sight, for example: the form seen, the act of vision, and the mental attention with correlates the two. These three, though separable in theory, are inseparable present whenever you use your sight” (46). This poses a wonderful anecdote to the confusion and turmoil spoken of by previous scholars and religious figures, though it is not in any way a final answer. I have found that considering the question of the trinity and the methods of investigation provided in its discussion has resulted in a really fruitful way to wrapping my head around the unanswerable questions of theology.

- CRC

Anselm’s Proof

    In our last class, we briefly discussed what the ‘point’ of the ontological proof really is (‘Saint Anselm wasn’t writing to convince Richard Dawkins’); I would like to expand a bit on that here, although I am not sure whether this way of talking about the proof will make sense for anyone else.
    Anselm wrote at the beginning and end of the first chapter of the Proslogion that “the believer does not seek to understand, that he may believe, but he believes that he may understand”. That is, knowledge of God cannot be rational or empirical; the act of belief is epistemologically prior to any other species of knowledge.
    However, the term ‘act of belief’ is misleading because Anselm did not conceptualize ‘belief’ as an ‘act’ in the sense of ‘making a conscious decision’: “man cannot seek God, unless God himself teaches him; nor find him, unless he reveals himself”. Clearly the act of approaching God in ‘the inner chamber of your mind’ is not a rational exercise, for Anselm. It is rather the decision to participate in an internal religious phenomenon that is already unfolding. It is to accept the grace that God offers.
    Likewise, Anselm wrote that “I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate your sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that”. That is, the exercises of the Proslogion were contained within the mind (the ‘inner chamber’) of the devotee. They did not flit outside of the mind into the external world, let alone into the realm of God. Rather, God would approach the devotee on the terms of the latter’s intellectual capacities. There were no acts of coercion involved in the contemplation of God on either party’s behalf: certainly the believer did not intrude upon God in his quarters; neither did God intrude on the believer in his. Thus, “it is not intended that the reader should feel impelled to read the whole, but only as much as will stir up the affections to prayer”.
    The ground of any understanding of God, for Anselm, was therefore the ‘act of belief’, which involved the participation of the believer and the sponsorship, so to speak, of God. Anselm’s notion of the ‘understanding of God’ does not seem to have connoted a positive meaning, at least in the opening chapters of the Proslogion. Our understanding is limited to what God reveals to us, namely the core idea of the ontological proof, which is that the essence of God itself consists in existing.
    This is quite relevant for the ontological proof insofar as virtually every opponent of the proof, from Thomas Aquinas to actual atheists, have taken the position that the concept of a being ‘than which nothing greater can be conceived’ is incoherent. Naturally, this critique is generally uninterested in the fact that the Proslogion did not introduce the concept as its own invention; it was a concept that God revealed to the devotee in his ‘inner chamber’. It was a concept that ‘came to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment’ (Heidegger, QCT).
    It seems to me that this is the proof that Descartes wanted to write: “mais quand bien même je dormirais, tout ce qui se présente à mon esprit avec évidence, est absolument véritable”. History, though, attests that his philosophy hastened the spread of a novel epistemological system, which is embodied in the position of Locke that all truth can be demonstrated through experience or reason. This position completely reoriented the plane of western thought. By the 1740s, Voltaire could believe that he had reaffirmed the orthodoxies of Lockean empiricism by affirming Newton’s conviction that cœli enarrant gloriam Dei simply because he took that position on account of reason rather than belief: when Voltaire read ‘heavens’ in Newton, he thought that he meant ‘matter’ (Voltaire, Éléments).
    In any case, Anselm believed that God was already in the ‘inner chamber’, and that we would be able to ‘see’ him if only he revealed himself to us as we approached him. Conversely, Locke believed that the human mind could penetrate the realm of God and observe his substance directly, and that anything unobservable – either literally or figuratively (observable by reason) – was, in the end, unworthy of belief: that is, reason became the condition for belief, rather than belief being the condition for understanding, as Anselm said. The ontological proof was not, in its original context, meant to create knowledge, it was meant to reveal it.
    This brings us back to the ‘point’ of the ontological proof: in its original formulation, it was an act of devotional meditation. It represented the progress of truth from concealment into unconcealment on the terms allowed by the human mind, which for Anselm was so important because ‘man was created to see God’. It was also, perhaps more importantly, an act of purification, in that the Proslogion was meant to provide a sanctuary for the reader from bad thoughts, much as the psalms that Anselm often paraphrased were meant to provide a sanctuary from bad language through repetition; so his thinking was quite monastic.
    Now, if we want to do history right in striving to understand the spirit of Anselm’s society and the mindset that created the ontological proof, then this is the direction in which to move. Clearly, the notion of the philosophical proof as a fundamentally ‘rational’ tool has completely driven the proof’s original (devotional) context from our historical memory, and we now measure the strength of the proof by its ability to succeed on this level, namely with respect to its contested terminological coherence. It may perhaps be edifying to remember that Pascal’s demonstration that it is ‘rational’ to believe in God for probabilistic reasons was only meant to demonstrate that atheism, like belief, comes from the heart, not the mind; it was not meant to convince the atheist to believe in God on account of a probability. Likewise, Anselm’s proof was not meant to convince anyone of anything. It was only meant to help the believer “flee, for a little while, your occupations; hide yourself, for a time, from your disturbing thoughts. Cast aside, now, your burdensome cares, and put away your toilsome business. Yield room for some little time to God; and rest for a little time in him.” And, we should add, to see the ‘face’ of God.

-Henry Stratakis-Allen

Maker, Monks, and Math: Getting People to See the Beauty Within

I’m a math major and a math tutor. In my three years of doing the latter, primarily focused on introductory calculus, I have struggled with how to explain the concepts and processes in an understandable way to my students. And it is a struggle because math has become so internal that it becomes hard to even see what would be difficult about it, especially with the straightforward processes of introductory calculus.

But beyond that, I want to show my students the beauty of mathematics. I loved math from a very young age, but it was not until I took classes here that I really understood the inner beauty, hidden from the world by proofs, technical definitions, and layers of abstraction. How do you show someone what makes Galois theory incredible or topology so interesting without immersing them in these technicalities?

As Christians, we are confronted with the same problem. Bringing someone to faith is an attempt to make them see the inner beauty of the story and how much better our lives are when living in faith. But, as we have already discussed in class, that’s difficult to do, especially when you’re so immersed in it. How do you externalize yourself from it to see it from a non-Christian perspective? How do you bring people in?

Christianity has the additional problem of faith. Nobody really rejects the reality of math; no matter how much someone may dislike it, he does not deny its truth. But that’s not the case with Christianity. Plenty of people will reject God even if the best arguments and evidence are brought to them. Faith is a decision we cannot make for someone else; to quote The Matrix (my favorite film), “I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it.”

So, with the problem established, we can ask the obvious question: how do we get people in the story? The answer? The same way we do with math.

What do most math classes consist of? Lectures and problem sets. In lectures, the teacher explains the information and usually goes through a few examples. In lower level math classes, those examples are generally computations, whereas in higher levels they are proving important results. Problem sets are where the knowledge is tested by going through computations individually or practicing with the definitions and theorems. In my experience, this is where the real learning happens, especially with proof-based math; I don’t really understand anything until I’ve worked with it directly. Thus, the practice improves my knowledge, allowing me to advance to new topics which I can then practice. It becomes cyclic. 

Likewise, Christian faith comes in two parts: knowledge and practice. The knowledge comes from reading the scriptures and listening to sermons, as one would expect, but also from making those arguments ourselves; the true test of understanding is whether you can explain it to someone else. The practice also comes in familiar forms, prayer and church attendance. Faith is not just about “knowing” Jesus is Lord but acting on that faith, to the best of your abilities. You cannot truly understand without the practice.

This is what the monks see. When looking at St. Benedict’s Rules for Monasteries, specifically Chapters 8 to 20, it details a thorough schedule for saying the entirety of the Psalms each week. The practice is vital to the monks and centers everything they do. The effect the practice has on one’s spirit is absolutely crucial; gathering together in praise of God, each and every day, and multiples times therein, allows for spiritual edification of potent strength.

And I can speak to this in my own practice. During my participation in Professor Fulton Brown’s prayer group, we have had many fluctuations in attendance. Sometimes, it has simply been the two of us; other times, we are joined by a larger group. And there is power in both. The larger group is great because we are able to gather in fellowship and raise our voices in praise to God. But the smaller group has its own quality, as I know that we gather every week, rain or shine (and I do mean that!), to come together and praise our Lord. No matter the circumstances, I count on gathering together, and I know my faith has grown stronger as a result of it.

Through their disciplined practice, then, the monks are able to see what they do. Bede’s On the Tabernacle or Gregory’s Moralia in Job are clearly the result of knowledge from practice. For example, consider this quote from Bede: “The width of the ark was one cubit on account of the dispensation of the Lord’s own charity, with which he took care to unite his elect in God” (Bede, 12). The symbolism Bede sees in the measurements of the ark is something that most would never notice, and something I admittedly struggled to understand the precise grounding of. It is only through the result of their practice that one could hope to understand the texts the way they do. And that is unique, among scholarly considerations, since it is not merely an object of study and knowledge, but also one of worship for those considering it. I do not worship math nor use it to worship in the way that I do with the Scriptures.

Speaking again from personal experience, I have experienced something similar, though on a much smaller scale. When we first started I would trip over the words and was still learning their cadence. But now that we have practiced together for five quarters (and counting!), Psalm 94 has become known to me in a way it was not before. Lines like “make a joyful noise to him with psalms” (Psalm 94:2) have taken on a new meaning as we do that weekly, or “To day if you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Psalm 94:8) feels like reaching out to those around us as we pray in the Quad. I had not really thought about it before my reflection in class, but I realize that I understand them differently now versus when we started.

Thus, just as in math, faith comes through knowledge and practice, and they act cyclically: practice gives way to greater knowledge, and the deeper understanding brings a deeper faith and better knowledge.

Thus, let us return to the original question: how do we bring people into the faith, to see its inner beauty? There is not a perfect answer, since faith is a personal choice that we cannot control. But, for both ourselves and for others, we must both share and participate in knowledge, the intellectual grounds of faith, but also practice our faith to the best of our abilities. In trying to demonstrate the inner beauty of the story and of faith, both are necessary and cannot be substituted.

I will conclude with a question, then, that I do not have a proper answer to: considering the benefits the monks reap from their practice, why don’t we all become monks?

—Chad Berkich