Matteo Ricci - A Different Kind of Missionary

I have recently finished reading "Matteo Ricci- Le Sage Venu de L'Occident" by Vincent Cronin (a title that would sound even better in English- 'Wiseman from the West'!), which is, I suppose, appropriate given that I will be visiting China a fortnight from now. Its subject is the first Western Christian missionary to China. Not quite the first Christian missionary, but he might as well have been- the Nestorians briefly set up shop there at one point but had died out centuries before.

The book has given me a lot of food for thought.

The (very nearly successful) experiment that Ricci set out upon in his missionary work was governed by this question: Can a people be Christianised without being Westernised? Can the leaven of the Gospel be planted in an alien culture and grow without bringing with it the excrescences of the culture planting it? If one thinks about it, such a thing has almost never happened in Christian history. Certainly, as time goes on, cultures and peoples that convert to Christianity take on their own particular character. But it never begins that way. English Christianity was, from the start, unquestionably Roman. The Slavs, though able to worship in their own language thanks to the work of Cyril and Methodius, took on a very recognisably Greek Christianity.

Is there another way?

Matteo Ricci and his superior Alexander Valignano thought there was. And they were given a unique opportunity. Before them they found a culture whose essence was not fundamentally opposed to anything in Christianity. Sure, there were some questionable practices around. No Christian could countenance the widespread practice of concubinage or foot-binding. But at the heart of Chinese culture were duty, filial piety and the whole magnificent ethic of Confucius. In some ways, Chinese culture presented an even greater opportunity than that facing the first Christians who evangelised and converted the Greeks for, whereas the latter had to contend with a typically pagan pantheon whose morals were repugnant and the characteristic suspicion of the body in Greek philosophy, all of these were absent in China. It was an almost unprecedented thing. A sophisticated civilisation with a high ethic. No Dark Age barbarians who would kill you as soon as look at you here. No nomadic tribes as in South America. Nor even a high civilisation built on blood, as in Mexico. No, here was an ancient and highly civilised culture with its own Plato.

The danger of course was that unscrupulous missionaries would come in and treat the Chinese and their culture like other groups they would evangelise, either as an uncivilised group that would need to receive the equal gifts of civilisation and Christianity from the hands of the missionaries, or as a pagan civilisation that must be fought and destroyed so that a Christian civilisation might take root. This, alas, is the route most missionaries eventually took, but it was not taken by Matteo Ricci nor by his immediate Jesuit successors.

Here is a pertinent excerpt, from towards the end of Ricci's life when he has to consider the future of the mission (translated from the French as best I can):

Ricci could see from his own experience eight reasons for hope. Firstly, the miraculous progress accomplished in spite of immense difficulties seemed to prove that God looked on the development of the [Chinese] mission with a favourable eye. Secondly, since the Chinese regarded reason as the highest of all things, Christianity, a religion supported by reason, would satisfy them as much intellectually as mystically. Thirdly, books, which circulated freely in China, would permit the diffusion of an important apostolic literature. Fourthly, the Chinese, an intelligent people, were prepared to admit the superiority of Westerners in metaphysics and theology, as well as in the domains of mathematics and astronomy. Fifthly, Ricci had become convinced, thanks in large part to his study of their ancient beliefs, that the Chinese, a people pious by nature, had created for themselves a philosophy which conformed in almost every point to natural law. Sixthly, the peace which reigned in this country would permit Christianity, once established, to be maintained in a more or less permanent fashion. Seventhly, by adapting themselves to the Chinese mindset and etiquette, missionaries would certainly be known as wise and holy men. Eighthly, the doctrine of Confucius would be for them a most precious ally in their struggle against idolatrous sects [i.e. Buddhism and, to a much lesser extent, Taoism].

One of the really interesting things about all of this is the quite fundamental question, which we never find it necessary to think about: What really is of the substance of Christianity, and what are its accidents? Another book I've been reading on and off for a while is "The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys" by Andrew Louth, which has brought home to me in new and surprising ways to what extent our doctrines and our whole spiritual approach, in both East and West, depend upon Plato and those who came after him (I had hitherto no idea, for example, how vital were the foundations laid in Philo's ideas about the logos to later Christology). In Confucius, Matteo Ricci had a fascinating possibility open to him. Could he do with Confucius what the early Christian theologians had done with Plato? Could Christianity be built as solidly and fruitfully on the Chinese ethical tradition as it had been on the Greek philosophical tradition?

During his lifetime, the approach that Ricci took worked, even if it had slow beginnings. By the end of his life, he had been granted permission to live permanently in Beijing and was being inundated by Confucian mandarins, the cultural elite, and other government officials impressed and intrigued by his scholarship, ideas, skills (he was an adept clockmaker and cartographer) and religion. He had published several books, including a catechism which drew heavily on Confucius to demonstrate Christian truths.

Of course, since his death things have not turned out so well. There has been a lot of water under the bridge. The Rites Controversy, when the Church foolishly and ignorantly forbade the Chinese Christians from revering Confucius or venerating their ancestors during Qingming (thankfully rescinded, though far too late, in 1939); the whole wretchedness of colonialism, the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion; the Taiping Tianguo*; and then the unmitigated disaster that was the twentieth century, whose low point was the induced national brain-death that was the Cultural Revolution, when China's leaders sought to destroy utterly the great ethical tradition that had been the foundation of the Chinese people's culture for 2500 years.

Where to from here, for Christianity in China, or indeed for China itself?

I don't know. But I recall something that Finn Torjesen (whose organisation 'Evergreen' is carrying on a work not entirely dissimilar to Ricci's) said to me when I and some other Evangelicals visited him in China in 2003; that China is heir, as the Chinese love to boast, to a 4000 year old continuous culture and, though the last hundred years have been years of terrible upheaval, that is just a blip in their history and we don't as yet know where things will eventually settle or how the pieces will fall.

I don't know to what extent the approach or ideas of Matteo Ricci are still relevant or appropriate in modern China. Maybe there is no way to recapture the opportunities he saw, now irrevocably lost. Or maybe his ideas are the key to the future of the gospel in China. In any case, I have no doubt that he has not ceased to pray for China and the Chinese, his adopted country and people, especially over the past hundred grievous years, and will continue to do so.

*Warren Carroll, my favourite historian, is very sympathetic to the Taiping Tianguo.I find that remarkable. To me, the Taiping Tianguo epitomises the wrong-headedness of a quintessentially Western and usually Protestant approach to missions that shares, I believe, a similar error with the approach to relief practiced by too many celebrity charity workers and organisations (I'm looking at you, Bono). In the same way such organisations delight in throwing money at Africa, exacerbating the problem of poverty but enjoying the catharsis philanthropy brings, there have been and are plenty of Western missionaries and missionary organisations who delight in throwing Bibles at foreign countries and those who hail from them. I remember well as a child being invited to give money or do fundraising work to help buy Bibles for China, PNG or other such places. Imagine my shock when I eventually went to China and saw that Bibles were plentiful and easy to come by. Come to that, I find the idea that you can give a book to someone who shares almost no common cultural knowledge with you and expect him to come up with full-fledged orthodox Western Nicene Augustinian Protestant Evangelical Christianity on his own simply by reading it a laughably absurd notion. But the Taiping Tianguo shows a darker side to this approach. You may endanger someone's soul by a) not bothering to explain anything about Christianity to him first, b) not bothering to explain or try to approach agreement on the basic philosophical premises necessary to accept Christianity eg. the law of non-contradiction (not accepted by Buddhism), c) not bothering to find out even the first thing about his culture and beliefs. Endangering someone's soul in this way is bad enough. Or it could, on the other hand, lead to the deaths of millions of people (most sources say about 20 million) as when Hong Xiuquan was given a Bible out of the blue, read it and went on to carry out the biggest and bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century. There are better ways to bear witness to the gospel than this.

The Diverse Significances of the Humble Poppy

A clash of cultural symbols, by turns amusing and interesting, took place last week the day before Remembrance Day. The symbol was the poppy. For English speakers (and the French as well, I imagine), the poppy conjures up images of Flanders, the Somme and crosses row on row. For the Chinese, on the other hand, it conjures up the collective memory of the two Opium Wars and humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. Read about the aforementioned clash here.

In fact, I had a much smaller-scale version of the same clash the following day. A number of my students (the overwhelming majority of whom are Chinese) inquired after the flower I was wearing (I had been to a service earlier in the day). I explained to them its significance and, having done that, told them the name of it. Immediately, electronic dictionaries appeared and a flurry of typing ensued, whereupon a collective, almost simultaneous, gasp went round the classroom. Shock registered on a number of faces, followed by questions and remarks such as, "But...but...isn't it illegal?" "You must not have this flower. It is bad" and the like.

That such things can have such divergent associations in different cultures fascinates me, diplomatic incident or no. What intrigues me particularly in this case is the fact that, contrary to his advisers, David Cameron still wore the thing. Of course, cultural associations don't de facto trump each other, but it has become an almost reflexive habit of us Westerners over the past forty-or-so years to give automatic deference to other cultures before our own. Cameron's breaking of the mould is slightly refreshing and I can't help wondering if it's a precedent for something.

Glimpses of the Age of the Soapbox

"The past is a foreign country," said L.P. Hartley, "they do things differently there."

In recent weeks I have had the at times frustrating but also rewarding privilege of proof-reading and editing my grandfather's memoirs. The experience has been enlightening, to say the least. In it, my grandfather details his childhood growing up during the war (at 13 he was overseeing a factory because there were no experienced men left to fill the job), his years as an itinerant preacher in Queensland and his subsequent years as pastor of various Baptist churches.

What has struck me most (and there have been several things that have struck me) is the difference between the culture of the 50s, when my grandfather was an itinerant driving from town to town in a "gospel wagon", and the culture now. Simply put, there is no way the kind of evangelism my grandfather practiced would work now. Not just the content of the message but the methodology.

A slight tangent. There is a fellow whom I regularly see who preaches from a soapbox (actually a small platform) outside the Queen Victoria Building opposite Sydney Town Hall a few evenings a week. He is, I think, Baptist, or certainly from that tradition of preaching, and almost never does anybody stop to listen to him. Mostly, people are embarrassed that he is there. Some, no doubt, are offended by things he says (he invariably sets up shop during the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and preaches hellfire in shrill tones to the passersby), others are simply put off by the fact that he is there at all, waxing eloquent to bustling crowds of the indifferent. I admit I usually have the latter reaction, even when I happen to agree with what he's preaching about, and I feel like taking him aside and telling him, "Mate, you're not helping the cause here. You're just making people more alienated from Jesus than they were before."

Yet, returning to my grandfather's memoir, in the 50's my grandfather was doing a very similar thing. He would park his wagon in the main street of a country town or a Brisbane suburb, stand up in the back and begin preaching. And a crowd would gather. People would come and listen. Some would heckle, of course, but others wouldn't. Occasionally, there might even be converts. He tells of one time when he was assisting a Baptist church in Park Ridge, south of Brisbane, over the course of a few months. As part of the work, they initiated a Sunday school and would drive through the town to pick up children and take them to the church. As the weeks went on, the number of children who wanted to come rose steadily until they had to sell their vehicle for a larger one to accommodate them. This would not happen now, I think.

I don't think these reminiscences are symptoms of a rose-coloured view of the past or, indeed, are isolated examples. For example, I think of what Frank Sheed used to do, first in Sydney and later in London- very much the same style of thing.

What does this mean? Were people more spiritual in the 1950's? Are they less spiritual now? Or is there some other reason? One could, I suppose, argue that people who had lived through the war would naturally be more open to God and anyone claiming to speak for Him. On the other hand, can anyone deny that today's generation is more hungry for meaning than any within living memory? Alternatively, it could be merely evidence of different things appealing to different generational cultures. Perhaps both theories are true to one degree or another.

There are of course practical considerations to take from that observation. If soapbox preaching was accessible to one generation but not to another, there surely must be some mode of evangelism which would appeal to the latter as soapbox preaching did to the former.

In any case, it is enlightening to get a glimpse of this foreign land where getting up on your soapbox did not automatically make you a pariah and an oddity.

The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism- Part 2

The Negative Principles of Protestantism

Bouyer states that Protestantism "seemed to bring in an incalculable wealth of constructive power, even to consitute a rediscovery of what was capital and permanent in Christianity." The principles noted already are regarded by Protestants as alone "necessary and sufficient" for the Reformation. But, as we have seen, there was nothing in these principles, understood positively, that was essentially at odds with the Catholic Church. The question then arises, "How did a movement that seemed and still seems to bear within itself the power to rejuvenate and restore traditional Christianity, the Church of all time, come in fact to set up a Christianity disrupted from tradition and to injure and attack of set purpose the Church it had wished to renew?" Protestants, of course, would turn the question around and ask why the Church rejected Protestantism. But, as has been shown, to the extent that Protestantism upheld and strove for sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura and soli Deo gloria, understood positively, the Church did not reject them but upheld these principles also. Thus there must be other principles which explain why what should have been a reformation became a revolt. Bouyer sets out to demonstrate two things in treating of these negative principles: 1) that they do not follow necessarily from the positive principles already mentioned, but are arbitrary to them; 2) that they have in fact undermined and stifled the practical application of the positive principles in the history and practice of Protestantism.

1) Sola Gratia -> Extrinsic Justification

In Luther's writings, two ideas ultimately become inseparable: i) grace alone saves us; ii) it changes nothing in us by doing so. Bouyer points out that the connection is not at all prominent in Luther's pastoral works, when he is teaching the Faith per se or speaking out of his own experience, but is front and centre in his polemics. Thus the notion that to expect or require change in a person is to deny the sufficiency of grace subsequently becomes a key Protestant idea. This is the source of a great deal of the faith vs. works polemic which is perennially popular from Protestant pulpits, in which the possibility of grace-sustained works tends to be elided over.

The New Testament, on the other hand, affirms at once the impossibility of any positive contribution of man to his salvation and at the same time the necessary fruitfulness of grace acting within man for his salvation. The tension may be seen in Romans 7 and 8, and most particularly in Phillipians 2:12-13, which may rightly be regarded as the key to an orthodox soteriology on this point. Luther, of course, hated James for not upholding extrinsic justification, but, in fact, Paul is not much better, consistently speaking of the new man and the old, the spirit and the flesh, a new creation and so on. The idea of a justification whose effects are invisible is foreign to Scripture. Indeed, Calvin saw the problem and advanced the distinction between justification and sanctification that remains standard for many Protestants. However, though this solves the problem, it is also a distinction unknown to Scripture.

Sola fide comes in at this point as well since, understood within the terms of extrinsic justification, faith becomes opposed to works rather than their complement and prerequisite. The Church was perfectly happy to deny the value of Jewish works of the Law, or works done prior to faith or without faith, but the Reformers went further, denying value even to works done by grace. Luther ultimately attacked the formula of fide caritate formata (faith formed by love, c.f. Galatians 5:6), regarding it as the ruin of all he set out to preach.

Bouyer cites the modern Lutheran author Anders Nygren, who agrees with Luther on this point, regarding his rejection of fide caritate formata as the highest point of Lutheran theology and subsequently writing a book ("Eros et Agape") in which an opposition between faith and love is made the hallmark of the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. To do this, much of the Gospel of John and the two great commandments in the Synoptics are sidelined, and Bouyer regards this as a demonstration that Protestantism, by its adherence to extrinsic justification, has created within itself a crisis it cannot resolve.

How does extrinsic justification relate to or derive from medieval nominalism? Because nominalism denies the reality of substance or essence and reduces abstract universals to concrete particulars, it creates problems with the idea of change within and relations between beings. If a change takes place within me, so as not to multiply entities unnecessarily, the change must be regarded as having its source in me. Thus, to preserve God as the source of grace, grace can only work externally. Anything active that comes from within me must derive from me. Bouyer states, "If being is reduced to action, and action to what takes place in us, our experience is closed to anything transcendent, or else, on the assumption that the transcendent could intervene, it could only do so by reducing itself to becoming part of ourselves." Thus, on this view, extrinsic justification becomes necessary in order to safeguard the integrity of sola gratia.

2. Soli Deo gloria -> T-LIP & God Beyond Good and Evil

This is not unrelated to the last point. Within Protestantism, God's sovereignty almost immediately becomes bound up with the idea of the impossibility and rejection of any human activity, grace-informed or otherwise, with any religious value or 'merit'. Essentially, Protestantism came to accept that "it is impossible to affirm and uphold the sovereignty of God without a corresponding annihilation of the creature." Bouyer goes on:

[In Protestantism,] to suppose that man, as the result of God's grace, has the power to do acts good in themselves, even granted his total dependence on God, would be to destroy the gratuitousness of grace and so to deny the sovereign freedom of God's action...to say that man, as the recipient of saving grace, could be himself pleasing to God is to be guilty of blasphemy.

Such ideas are clear in Luther, clearer in Calvin and pivotal in Barth. Indeed, Barth regards saints in the Church as being, rather than a testament to God's grace and holiness, an affront to them. Conceiving God's sovereignty as inversely proportional to any freedom or value, whether inherent or received, in His creatures derives, like extrinsic justification, from the reluctance of nominalism to multiply entities or to allow that substances/essences can be equal possessors of a particular universal, since nominalist philosophy does not accept either the existence of substance/essence or of universals.

What does Scripture say on the matter? On the one hand, as noted earlier, it disqualifies any attempt by man to ascribe to himself what belongs to the Creator. In Isaiah, the Almighty states "I will give My glory to no other," (Isaiah 42:8) and Isaiah says elsewhere, "All our justifications are like a soiled garment" (Isaiah 64:6). Job declares, "He finds fault even among the angels," (Job 33:23) and Our Lord Himself admonishes the rich young ruler, "No one is good but God" (Mark 10:18). But elsewhere Our Lord also commands His listeners, "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt 5:48). St Paul writes, "His grace in me has not been void," (1 Cor 15:10) and St John encourages the recipients of his first letter, "We are called sons of God and that is what we are" (1 John 3:1). There is a tension here and any adequate theology must account for it. Bouyer summarises:

The Bible sets God's holiness...in 'inaccessible light'...not...to deny Him the act of creating or recreating anything of value outside Himself...[but] to emphasise how much the first creation, still more the second, attest by their intrinsic reality and goodness the incomparable reality and goodness of Him Whom they manifest...The God of Calvinism and Barthism...keeps all His greatness only if His creatures return to nothingness. The God of the Bible...shows His greatness in snatching them from nothingness.

Nominalism creates even more problems for God's sovereignty, however. The sovereignty of God, as a concept, requires that God be absolutely free, that none of His actions be constrained. To be understood in nominalist terms, however, this creates a gulf between the Creator and creature that goes beyond Christian orthodoxy. Given nominalism's rejection of transcendence as such and it's need to understand all things as singular, concrete and particular rather than as exemplars of abstract categories, in order for God to be God, He must be beyond all possible limitations, all possible particulars, incapable of being comprehended or understood by finite beings. This is somewhat similar to Eastern ideas of apophaticism or hesychasm, but taken to even greater extremes, because on this understanding God is, among other things, beyond good and evil, beyond true and false (Occam proposes this as the only acceptable definition of omnipotence or potentia absoluta). Thus the favourite Calvinist text of Romans 9:20-22 ("But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?") becomes not a rebuttal to those who would limit God's covenant but a rebuttal to anyone who would believe that God must be true to His own nature as He has revealed it, i.e. merciful, faithful and just. The infinite in nominalism must also be the indefinite. To refuse the possibility that God can leave men as sinners while regarding them otherwise or create some to salvation and others to damnation would be to limit His sovereignty. Conversely, a God Who makes us act and be freely is a God Who lessens and diminshes Himself precisely to that extent.

To demonstrate the deleterious effects of this philosophy on Christian theology, Bouyer takes the example of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth on the 'analogy of being', and it is an interesting enough example to warrant a short digression.

2.1 Barthism vs. Thomism on Revelation

Thomas in his understanding of God's revelation of Himself to mankind puts forward the idea of the 'analogy of being'. This idea is designed to see off two possible errors:

1) that the Word of God is of like nature with human words and is thus reducible to them (this is essentially the present liberal position), thus the Word of God can be understood and manipulated by me in the same way my own thoughts and words can be.
2) that the Word of God has no relation to human words whatsoever; thus the Word of God must remain "an unresolved enigma, a symbol impossible to decipher".

Thomas skirts between these two errors, proposing a third alternative. Since God made all things, says Thomas, and thus all things are a reflection of God's mind (the mind of man included), it is possible for man to open his mind, illumined by faith, to the mysteries of God's Word, not limiting them within his own ideas but transposing and enlarging these to reflect God's Word truly, if imperfectly. Thomas calls this the analogy of being (a good historical exemplar of the analogy of being at work is the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, for instance in the concept of the Son being eternally begotten; here we see precisely this stretching and enlarging of human ideas, words and concepts to express infinite realities).

Karl Barth, however, regards the analogy of being as an aberration and tantamount to idolatry; in fact, he believes it indistinguishable from Error 1 above. He has precedent in this, because nominalist theologians of the late Middle Ages thought the same, though approvingly, because they believed Error 1 was correct. This was far from Thomas' understanding, however. Bouyer bemoans the fact: "Catholic writers are certainly to be blamed for [this misconception] but only through their subservience to fallacies that Protestants did not dream of criticisng, Barth least of all."

3. Personal Religion -> Individualistic Religion

Despite Luther's conservatism vis-a-vis liturgy and the sacraments (he was the only Reformer to uphold the Real Presence as an objective reality against Zwingli's symbolic and Calvin's subjective approach), there exists in him and in Protestantism from its inception the tendency to downplay the value of the sacraments and/or make their worth purely subjective. Thus personal religion, in practice, has no object outside itself. Several natural consequences flow from this tendency.

The sacraments, the Church (and even, potentially, doctrine c.f. modern liberal Christians) become only aids to individual faith or psychological stimulants. By implication, then, a person of strong faith doesn't need them and, since the person with least faith naturally thinks himself the person of strongest faith, we have, in the case of churchgoing, the classic line, "I don't need to go to church. I can pray to God at home." The standard Protestant response of quoting Heb 10:25 and saying, 'You need to meet with those of like mind; you need the support of your Christian brothers and sisters," misses the point. Thus faith becomes less and less a faith in salvation in a universal covenantal sense or faith in Him Who saves and more and more faith in my own individual salvation.

4. Supreme Authority of Scripture -> No Authority But Scripture

The supremacy of Scripture was very quickly married to absolute denial of any authority in the Church, present or past, either in its interpretations of Scripture (patristics), doctrinal decisions of Councils or the right of bishops or Popes to recommend or condemn ideas, or discipline in any way the Christians in their spiritual care (in other words, fulfill any of their pastoral responsibilities). Sola Scriptura, then, came to mean, not only 'Scripture is the supreme authority' but 'Scripture is the only authority'. Scripture did not merely trump other authorities (an idea the Church had always accepted), it replaced them. There were to be no other authorities, even ones subservient to Scripture.

Once again, this new idea derives from nominalism. The necessity of an external Word in nominalism precludes any immanence of it in tradition, external interpretation (eg. by any church) or in mystical experience. It cannot come through the agency of man in any form, lest it cease thereby to be of God. Thus the perennial Protestant temptation is to regard it as delivered direct from God, dictated to its human authors. Though many Protestants hold that Scripture had active human authors and as such is at once the words of men and the Word of God, the extent to which that idea affects how Scripture is read and understood can be shaky at times, and the temptation to deny it altogether often exhibits itself (eg. in John Owen, among others).

Positive and Negative Principles Confounded

The great tragedy of the Reformation, according to Bouyer, is that, since nominalist concepts and categories were largely taken for granted by all, almost no one, either Catholic or Protestant, thought to distinguish between the positive principles at the heart of Protestantism and the negative principles that were arbitrarily but intimately joined to them. So mostly each side fell to condemning the whole package wholesale or defending it wholesale. I would argue, contra Bouyer, that the Council of Trent did go some way towards separating the two and condemning only the latter (though far too late for it to do very much practical good; the lines were by then too clearly drawn and each side too deeply entrenched) but certainly on a non-magisterial level, that contention holds true more often than not. Three examples:

Exhibit A: Luther and Erasmus on the Will

The titles of their respective treatises (De Servo Arbitrio & De Libero Arbitrio- "The Enslaved Will" & "The Free Will', respectively) demonstrate the problem. Essentially, Erasmus tried to salvage free will independently of grace, while Luther tried to defend grace by denying free will. It occurred to neither of them to say that prevenient grace frees our will to respond to saving grace, or that grace, instead of declaring us free while we remain slaves, makes us free indeed. For both Luther and Erasmus, the idea that God and man act together in justification is a zero-sum game, like two men hauling something. The more one man does, the less the other has to (or can) do. For the corrective to both, see St Bernard of Clairvaux's De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio ("Of Grace and Free Will"- again, the title sets the tone, this time in the right direction). For St Bernard, God does all and man does all and there is no contradiction between the two. St Bernard maintains the paradoxical balance of Phillipians 2:12-13 whereas both Luther and Erasmus betray it in different ways.

Exhibit B: Personalism vs. Authoritarianism

As one reads the writings of the Counter-Reformation, it quickly becomes apparent that the extreme subjectivism and individualism of the Reformers was countered, not by an effective personalist alternative, but by rigid authoritarianism. Catholic writers of the period have a tendency to exalt external authority and make blind submission a virtue. This was effective to at least some degree in keeping Catholics in the fold, but it also persuaded lots of Protestants and reform-minded individuals that their conviction of the importance of engaged, personal religion could only be preserved by rejecting any external authority, legitimate or not, and replacing it with free-thinking.

Exhibit C: Predestination

If infinite equals indeterminate, God is either not the cause of our salvation or He is the equal cause of salvation and damnation since good and evil are in the Deity not intrinsic but arbitrary (as chez the Muslims). Calvin, of course, took the latter option. The Catholic response? Almost across the board it was urged "Just don't think about it." For example, see the admonition in St Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, "We should not make predestination an habitual subject of conversation." It is not surprising, then, that many people, to retain the traditional Christian doctrine of predestination in some form, jumped on board with Calvinism.

Both reactions flow from nominalist assumptions. Because nominalism is a purely empirical system, excluding anything not within our experience, thereby disallowing transcendence, it must conceive the kingship (sovereignty) of God in human terms, i.e. the more power the people have, the less the king has, and vice versa. An absolute authority that, by its very absolutism, enables (rather than destroys) the freedom of its subjects is thus literally inconceivable. Therefore, in the very effort of trying to maintain God as Wholly Other, Calvinism reduces Him to human categories and engages in a bit of ugly but covert anthropomorphism. Meanwhile, the Counter-Reformation sees the problem but sees no way out of it since, without noticing, it has become guilty of the same anthropomorphism, and thus covers its ears and sings, "Lalala!"

Decay of the Protestant Principles

According to Bouyer, the retention by Protestantism of nominalist categories and the ideas flowing from them led not only to "the neglect of the complementary aspects of Christian truth" but also inhibited and undermined the positive principles on which Protestantism is built. A few examples will suffice to make the point.

From Sola Gratia Back to Pelagianism

Extrinsic justification, designed to safeguard sola gratia, ultimately prohibits grace from having any visible effect. Thus mysticism becomes suspect, since God is not allowed to show Himself in the interior life, only externally (Bouyer mentions the violent reactions in Lutheranism against the Lutheran Collegia pietatis of Arndt and Spener). In addition, the secular and sacred realms become domains which do not affect or touch each other. Both of these tendencies were ultimately reacted against and the pendulum swung back the other way, to a religion of moralism and of sentimental experience (the latter especially prominent in a lot of modern Evangelicalism, to the chagrin of some- Bouyer regards it as an inevitable development since grace had been understood as meaning man had nothing to do). Likewise, Puritanism soon turned Pelagian by trying to establish 'the heavenly Jerusalem' on earth, first in England under Cromwell, then in America. Since grace did not enable them to do this (it being a simple declaration of righteousness), they had to do it on their own, in their own power. Also Arminianism, reacting against Calvin's double predestination and the repugnance of TULIP, makes the will that accepts grace autonomous. Pure Pelagianism.

To speak of broader currents in Protestant culture. If for God to be sovereign man must be nothing, and since experience demonstrates that man is not nothing ("made in the image of God", as the Scriptures attest), to regard man as he is requires diminishing God. This naturally leads to things like the old Protestant maxim, "The Lord helps those who help themselves", a sentiment that would have horrified both Luther and Calvin. Likewise, one not infrequently finds in modern Protestantism a tendency to treat God as an equal (the "Jesus is my boyfriend" kind of spirituality present in many modern Praise and Worship songs exemplifies this) or as a commodity (for example, as a means to make your life better, Prayer of Jabez-style). All of these things run entirely counter to those genuinely Christian principles at Protestantism's heart.

From Personal Religion and the Sovereignty of God to Authoritarianism and Human Tyranny

By making a genuine valuing of personal religion, over against arbitrary regimentation, legalism and authoritarianism, into a force overly individualistic and subjective, Protestantism inadvertently raises up an even more authoritarian edifice than before. Moreover, it is an edifice that rests not on the sovereign and almighty will of God but on the arbitrary will of men.

Given the break with the Catholic Church, three options were open to Protestantism:

1) reject all spiritual authority save the individual (Anabaptists, Quakers, etc.)
2) give spiritual authority to the civil authorities (Lutheranism)
3)create a new church artificially through the contrivance of an individual genius (Calvinism)

All three options subject Christians to arbitrary and undeniably human authority. This is so in large part because of the relegation of concrete authority from God to an inaccessible heaven (or, arguably, the inaccessible past). Thus Luther, following a medieval tendency (which Henry VIII also ultimately followed) created a national church, subservient to the State. How this undermines effective living of the Christian life and, most particularly, effective corporate witness of Christ to non-Christians may be adequately seen in the current upheavals in the Anglican Communion. Calvin tried to avoid this implicit denial of divine sovereignty by creating a church from a Scriptural blueprint. But the Body of Christ cannot be remade by men- it must be created directly by God. Thus the Calvinist churches became, rather than divine institutions, human institutions established according to a divine plan.

The existence of these different approaches naturally gave rise to the concept of denominations (we too easily forget how novel the very idea of denominations is, and how foreign to the minds of most Christians throughout history). Subjectivism rules out an objective norm for faith, but when someone with such ideas founds a church, it is founded on his own subjectivism and thus is narrower and more oppressive to others. Such foundations, as they multiply, tend to become ever narrower and, in an attempt to halt the process, become ever more pedantic about rules of faith and doctrinal requirements, making matters of speculation into makers or breakers of fellowship (for example, the original Fundamentalists, who made fundamentals of some things which had never been so regarded by Christianity in the past and did not feature in any of the historic Creeds; moreover I know of and have been a member of churches that have split or have lost members over issues such as gifts of the Spirit, various eschatological scenarios, creationism, when the age of reason commences in children and inerrancy- issues on which Catholics, perhaps surprisingly, are perfectly free to hold a variety of opinions). Bouyer says:

Whenever [Protestant churches] refuse to dissolve themselves in practice into simple associations for worship, without any doctrinal, moral orliturgical law other than the whim of each, they tend immediately to become rigid frameworks in which a particular type of religious mentality or feeling unconsciously results in the opression of others. Moreover, in practice, even where the ministers do not wish or claim to be other than delegates of their own communities, churches of this type always end by delivering over their members to the subjective views of each minister.

The principle is seen a fortiori in worship. At the centre is the sermon, which the minister has written and delivers according to the message he wants to give his congregation. He chooses the readings based on what he wants to preach on, the hymns to fit the same topic (though, with the advent and increasing use of 'worship leaders' and 'worship bands' this is less the case than when I was growing up) and the prayers he usually makes up as he goes. The whole liturgy is moulded by the minister's personal devotion. "One cannot imagine," says Bouyer, "any system more completely effective in replacing the authority of God by that of the individual minister."

In addition, the Protestant use of sacraments, according to Bouyer, undermines sola gratia. In the sacraments, on the Protestant understanding, is found not what faith finds there but what it puts there. My baptism is merely an outward showing of an inner reality. The Lord's Supper is simply a memory aid. Thus both become not unlike the Jewish Law, merely exterior acts, bringing nothing that is not in the believer, becoming less necessary the more spiritually mature you are. "What, in fact," asks Bouyer, "is more contrary to the principle of a religion in which the gift of God is all than the reality of a religion in which there is nothing beyond what is brought by the personal devotion of each?"

Moreover, far from returning to the simpler worship of the early Christians, Protestants have inadvertently exacerbated late medieval worship tendencies and corruptions. For example, in the late medieval period in the West, the focus of Eucharistic worship had come to be predominantly on the words of institution. The older focus, however (still strongly maintained in Eastern Orthodoxy), was on the whole epiclesis, which ultimately derived from Judaism. The Reformers (most especially the Zwinglians) tended to drop the epiclesis entirely and regard as valid any Eucharist at which the words of institution were uttered, and this is still generally true of Protestants today. In doing this, rather than harking back to the apostolic practice of the Lord's Supper freed from medieval accretions, Protestants have taken a dodgy medieval idea and run with it, sacrificing essential and apostolic elements of Christian worship.

From Sola Scriptura to the Jesus Seminar

Protestantism, in making itself a Religion of the Book, opened itself to two contradictory tendencies. The first is to virtually divinise the Bible (certainly that's what it looks like to more than one Catholic to whom I have spoken), to eliminate as much as possible the human elements in it by, for example, postulating the inspiration of the vowel signs in the Masoretic text or remaining stubbornly committed to the exact scientific accuracy of Genesis 1 or the census numbers in Numbers. The Bible must be seen, says Bouyer, "as a spiritual meteor discharged suddenly onto our planet...innocent of any geological traces." In modern times, we have such things as the KJV-only crowd or the idea I once read (I forget where, unfortunately) that God providentially caused the original autographs to be lost lest people misguidedly worship them (a notion which, to a Catholic, confirms all his mistaken supicions about Protestant bibliolatry and, in any case, seems patently ridiculous since there are plenty of more immediate relics of Christ and the Apostles out there and nobody worships those).

In the nineteenth century, textual criticism made the human element undeniable and so this extreme view was reacted against and the human element elevated above or even to the exclusion of the divine element. Not being comfortable with a Word both fully divine and fully human, due to nominalist modes of thinking, the reactionaries relegated it firmly to the latter category; unable to see anything in Scripture that was not human, it became merely human literature, at best evidence of the 'religious genius' of the Hebrews.

Protestant Revivals

Bouyer sees, in addition to these examples of the negative principles undermining the positive, other examples of Protestants instinctively taking hold of the positive principles and fighting back against the negations that cancel them out. He describes at some length how he sees in such a category men like the Lutheran Pietists, Count von Zinzendorf and the Moravians and, most interestingly (to me, anyway), John Wesley and the Methodist movement. I won't describe at length these examples (this post is getting far too long- I had forgotten how extensive my notes were) but Bouyer sums them up in this way.

[Protestants such as these] remain faithful to the religion of the sola gratia, but do not consider themselves bound irrevocably to extrinsic justification. They do not cease to uphold the ideal of soli Deo gloria, but they have discovered anew the meaning of the words of St Ireneaus, 'Gloria Dei, vivens homo.' More than anyone they desire personal religion, but they escape the chimera of a person built on autonomy and subjectivism. More ardently than all the rest they believe in the Bible, in the Word of God in the Bible, as the source of light and life; but the very truth of their practical obedience to the divine Word is what preserves them from bolstering it up with philosophical assumptions that would prevent its being heard whenever it said anything different from what the system warranted.

In short, Bouyer urges Protestants to carefully examine and seek to understand the significance of these revival movements for Protestantism and the ideas it is founded on.

And what of the Catholic Church? Bouyer's final chapter is titled "The Catholic Church Necessary for Full Flowering of the Principles of the Reformation". Protestantism, he believes, will only be fully faithful to the principles on which it is founded in union with the Catholic Church. Separate, it will continue to undermine its own principles by the negations already mentioned. Likewise, Catholicism needs the living expression of that Christian core at Protestantism's heart. Protestantism should have reformed the Church and it still can, but it can only do so from within the Church; separated, it will continue to sabotage itself to a greater or lesser extent. "Catholicism," concludes Bouyer, "insofar as it is opposed to the principles of Protestantism, opposes only a systematisation of them that rests on fallacies and leads to their destruction. In reality, the real tenets of Catholicism, if seen as they are and not through a distorting lens, bring the Reformation principles the support refused to them by the structure actually made for them." Ultimately, rapprochement and reunion between the Protestant movement and the Catholic Church would bring about "the full splendour [of] the Reformation"- it would be "a Reformation at last achieved".

The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism- Part 1

I recently finished going back through Louis Bouyer's "The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism", this time taking down some notes, and thought I would put some of what came out of that exercise here.

"The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism" is one of those fascinating books that comes at a subject one knows well but with insights and angles one had not considered. It is, moreover, a book with something to offend everybody. Bouyer's basic thesis is this: Protestantism was a movement of reform and renewal in the sixteenth century that recovered, emphasised and embodied several authentic and positive principles inherent in Christianity which had been in recent centuries marginalised or neglected. At the same time, it connected and confounded these positive principles with certain negative principles deriving from the nominalist philosophy of the late Middle Ages. These negative principles undermine, both theologically and historically, the full flowering of the positive principles; however the continued affirmation and embodiment of the positive principles within the movement means that there is a permanent and vital Christian core to the movement whose presence is not as pronounced in other Christian traditions. Bouyer states:

The main error of Protestantism lies in this; that it has come to associate inseparably, but quite artificially, the positive statements of the Reformation with certain negations, so that these have come to seem equally characteristic of its nature.

The negative, 'heretical' aspect of the Reformation neither follows from its positive principles nor is a necessary consequence of their development or vindication but appears simply as a survival, within Protestantism, of what was most defective and corrupt in Catholic thought at the close of the Middle Ages.

The first part of that thesis is likely to offend a large number of Catholics who regard the Reformation as an unmitigated disaster, think things would have been better if it had never happened, and look warily at anybody who would suggest that Protestantism might not be all bad or that Catholicism as it is lived and practiced in their particular neck of the historical and cultural woods is in any way deficient (they ought to know better but, for good or ill, most Catholics are human).

The second part is likely to offend almost all Protestants, who regard the Reformation as an unmitigated triumph, literally cannot imagine Christianity without it, and who regard warily anyone who would suggest that Catholicism might not be all bad or that Protestantism (or my brand of it, anyway) is in any way deficient (I guess most Protestants are also human).

Bouyer doesn't exactly say "A plague on both your houses!" but he does open up the possibility of a more honest mutual critique and assessment.

What I'm going to offer here is a kind of precis of my notes from the book (hopefully more readable than my actual notes), with some of my own ideas springboarding off these here and there. For my part, I am fascinated by some of the ideas here (though I don't necessarily agree with everything wholesale). Indeed, much of this is, for me, news rather than simply information; i.e. something told to you that demands a response. The responsibility of having lived in both camps and thus having the opportunity and duty of bringing in those elements of authentic Christianity from Protestantism which are inherent but less prominent in Catholicism is one that I continue to think about and, by God's grace, try to fulfill.

Positive Principles of Protestantism

1. Sola gratia

'Grace alone' is THE fundamental principle at the heart of Protestantism. The Reformers believed that, and Bouyer agrees with them. It is also the source of, and is intimately related to, sola fide, which is why in almost every case when you hear an apologetic defending sola fide, it actually ends up defending sola gratia. I'll come to sola fide later though.

Sola gratia undermines any attempt by man to contribute to his own salvation. It rejects any possibility of pulling oneself up by one's moral bootstraps, in the popular phrase, or any salvific action independent of God. In this sense, it rejects synergism, understood as God and man contributing parts to salvation independently. It lies at the core of Protestant conviction and is the beating heart of authentic Protestant spirituality. Bouyer quotes at some length both from the Reformers, from modern Lutheran theologians and from Protestant hymns to demonstrate its centrality, both for Protestant theology and at the popular level in worship.

Is sola gratia really an authentically Christian principle, and where did it find itself in Luther's day? The answer to the first question is clearly yes. It rings throughout the pages of the New Testament. Nor, come to that, is it particularly absent from the Old Testament. It had been affirmed and described clearly and at length by St Augustine, great foe of Pelagius and touchstone of Western theology (not to mention founder of the Order to which Luther belonged), in the fifth century. It had been upheld at the Council of Orange and would later be upheld without reservation at the Council of Trent. It had, however, as sometimes happens (even in Protestantism) fallen by the wayside in the actual practice of the Faith and in popular piety. In this sense, Luther's recapturing of it was a genuine recovery.

Bouyer sees two possible problems deriving from the centrality of sola gratia in the Protestant movement, which he deals with in turn. The first is the thorny problem of grace and free will. How can God "create in [us] to will and to acomplish" without absolving us from "working out [our] salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12-13)? In fact, Bouyer demonstrates, the problem is not as thorny as one thinks, as long as one is not a priori committed to a philosophy that sees the two as necessarily mutually exclusive. Garrigou-Lagrange writes, "In the work of salvation, all is from God, including our own co-operation, in the sense that we cannot distinguish a part as exclusively ours that does not come from the author of all good." God, in other words, as Lord and Creator of all, is also Lord and Creator of our freedom. How then do we explain sin and evil? Well, if we understand sin as something positive, an actual thing that we now have as fallen human beings, then this is indeed a problem. However, if we understand it as a lack, a privation, a negation, as Thomas Aquinas did, the problem ceases to exist. As Augustine points out, "Free will is a sufficient cause for evil, but for good it can do nothing unless aided by the Almighty Good."

The second potential problem Bouyer addresses is the possibility that, since Protestantism focusses so centrally on sola gratia (in contrast to Christianity up to that point where the Trinity or Christology had been central), this will warp the rest of its theology in the same way putting a bicycle wheel hub immediately next to the tyre, with some spokes shorter and some longer, will undermine its nature as a wheel and probably make it impossible to run. There have been even Protestant theologians who have proposed this as a real possibility- Schweitzer, for example, with his emphasis on union with Christ in conscious opposition to Luther's emphasis on justification by grace through faith. But in fact, Bouyer demonstrates that this problem is also ephemeral, quoting at length from Luther's commentary on Galatians where Luther uses sola gratia as a safeguard ensuring the integrity of his Christology (in this case the doctrine of Christ's full divinity). Thus, the centrality of sola gratia in the Reformers and in the Protestant movement, though unprecedented in Christian theology up to that point, is in fact an authentically Christian development.

2. Soli Deo Gloria

Luther had made God the sole cause of all, and man's salvation the principal effect. But the peril of sola fide (which is really just the human side of sola gratia) is the possibility of leaving out faith's Object- "justification by faith, independently of beliefs" in Eugene Menegoz's phrase, as exemplified in twentieth century liberal Protestantism. With soli Deo gloria or, put differently, the doctrine of the full sovereignty of God, Calvin sought, among other things, to head off that pass.

At the heart of Calvinism is a high idea of God, and the Calvinist will not settle for less. Everything redounds to God's glory. And God can in no way depend on a creature; He is by His nature totally sufficient in Himself. Calvin, in fact, is a man drunk on God, a quality that shines through in the greatest parts of his writing and is reflected in the most faithful of his successors. Well do I remember the way my conception of God was challenged and enlargened the first time I read A.W. Tozer's "The Knowledge of the Holy". One even finds strong echoes of this aspect of Calvin in a populist like Louie Giglio.

Bouyer puts forward the idea that Calvin's was a fundamentally mystical insight, one that he later attempted to systematise. A surprising assertion, but one that makes more sense the more one thinks about it. Why is it so shocking? Principally, says Bouyer, because most Protestants are "incredibly ill-informed about Catholic mysticism while Catholics know only the externals of Calvinism." To demonstrate his point, he examines some of these externals.

Calvinist churches are blank. This is striking and, often, offensive to Christians from more liturgical and sacramental traditions. They seem barren and empty and, thus, unworthy of God. There is nothing to lift the mind or heart to contemplate the Almighty and His works. But what is the significance of this barrenness? In fact, it has clear counterparts within earlier Christian history. The austerity of Calvinist churches derives from the same impulse that sent the first monks out into the desert- the desire to cut away all intermediaries and aids so that, in barrenness and silence, the soul might encounter God Himself.

In the void and in nakedness, if the soul does not reach out to God, it runs no risk of illusion and deception. It will not think that it advances or has found Him when it is only amusing itself, merely losing itself among trifles that have nothing in common with Him. Conversely, for the soul that truly seeks Him, at however great a distance, this virile austerity may have the most invigorating effect.

This is largely why Calvin's chief objection to Catholicism, likewise inherited by his successors (quite clearly in Tozer, Karl Barth and, a bit closer to home, in Ray Galea), is that of idolatry, of putting the creature in the place of the Creator and of arrogating to it that which belongs to the Creator alone. The impulse described above may be seen as, in part, a reaction to the decadence of the Renaissance Church, in the same way the early hermits and monks were reacting to the diluting of Christian devotion and practice after the legalisation of Christianity under the Roman emperors or, to take another example, the way the early Franciscans were reacting to the worldly thirteenth century Church. It is, however, a quintessentially Christian reaction, as evidenced by its consistent expression throughout Christian history. Nor, Bouyer points out, was it confined to Calvin. It is no coincidence that St John of the Cross, pre-eminent mystical theologian, arose and wrote at the same time as Calvin. Both men had the same preoccupation with God's transcendence, both saw idolatry as the chief evil to be guarded against (especially in its most religious forms) and both even use many of the same Scriptural texts to support their ideas.

Calvin also, by the by, was first to propose the concept of separation of Church and State. This seems ironic given what Geneva was like in practice, but Calvin understood that, if the soli Deo gloria is taken seriously, civil society must also acknowledge God, even if it is separated from the Church as an institution. All things ought to further the sanctification of justified men so that "in all things God may be glorified." Bouyer, interestingly, compares this aspect of Calvin's thought with St Ignatius of Loyola who was also very concerned for God's glory (ad majorem Dei gloriam) and used authoritarian means which flowed from that conviction. The Puritan state of New England and the Jesuit state of Paraguay were not so dissimilar.

3. Personal Religion

One principle that Bouyer elucidates that does not fit neatly into the solas (unless one places it under sola fide, which is not an exact fit but may well do) is the concept and practice of personal religion. This is the idea that, as Dean Inge says, "One cannot be religious by proxy." Faith, to be real, must involve the active participation, the conscious engagement, of him who holds it. Nominalism, in the sense of people who are religious through habit and nothing else, is anathema to Protestantism. Faith stimulates and engages the individual personality; if it does not, it is not faith.

The first expressions of this conviction may be seen in Luther's De libertate Christiana and De captivitate Babylonica. The former seeks to free the Christian from a legalistic/ ascetical system which he believes has become "a hindrance rather than a support" for the spiritual life. In the latter, Luther seeks to separate the soul from " the complexities of an ecclesiastical organ that would stifle it, once the means of grace were either misdirected or made ends in themselves." Luther wants to recall the Christian to a radical and direct dependence on Christ. It may be argued that in fact Luther sets the Christian up as a king in a desert, deprived of the supports necessary for living the Christian life, but this is not his main aim or desire.

The Protestant conviction that faith must be active and engaged explains the natural Protestant ambivalence towards any number of Christian practices that might appear to violate it, such as infant baptism, confession and set prayers, among others. It also explains the Protestant love of conversion stories and the penchant (taken to new heights in revivalist movements like Methodism) for proposing these as a standard for all Christians.

Some have argued that this element in Protestantism is at heart the religious aspect of sixteenth century humanism: the turn towards the individual, which has caused much harm in the centuries since and continues to do so in our own time. But is this in fact the case? Bouyer argues that it is not; that this aspect of Protestantism is the true heir of a thread woven throughout the Old Testament, coming to fruition in the New. Particularly in the prophets, God condemns the desire of the individual to hide behind the group, to cover his infidelity to the essence of the covenant with pedantically followed rituals (rituals given by God- a fact that, if anything, makes the trespass worse). That message rings throughout all the prophetic writings and reaches its apogee in Christ ("Say not, "We have Abraham for our father" for I tell you God can make sons for Abraham from these very stones.") Here, therefore, Protestantism has recovered an authentic Gospel principle.

And here again, curiously enough, concord may be found between unexpected bedfellows. The distrust of outward show that does not reflect inner spiritual reality is characteristic, more than in any other Christian group, of the Desert Fathers, whose realism and honesty in such matters can border on the discomfiting. For example, in one account, Abba Makarios refuses money from a visitor. "Why should I accept your money," he says, "I have everything I need." "In that case," says his visitor, "give it to the poor." "Absolutely not," says the Abba, "for if I did that, I should be proud for having done a good deed and my soul would be in a worse state than if I accepted the money for myself."

Likewise, it is notable that St Ignatius of Loyola wrote his Spiritual Exercises with the express purpose of "rous[ing] the individual to the most personal 'realisation' of his beliefs as a Christian." Again we find curious points of convergence between Protestants and their nemeses the Jesuits.

4. Sola Scriptura

Two great dangers within Protestantism throughout its history have been the opposite errors of illuminism and fundamentalism. The first of these does not accept any objective criterion of revelation and so can and does admit individual inspiration that is inherently unverifiable (this was true of the early Anabaptists and is presently true of some Pentecostals). The second restricts all communication between God and man to the Bible, thus making Christianity into a Religion of the Book (thus, in practice, not unlike Islam). Neither of these extremes, however, derive from Luther (indeed, fundamentalism of this sort was largely unknown in Christianity before the nineteenth century).

Authentic Protestantism, argues Bouyer, is found in Calvin's idea of the interior witness of the Holy Spirit in the believer agreeing with the Spirit-inspired words of Scripture; in the twentieth century sola Scriptura, in its positive sense, has found its fullest expression in the rich theology of the Word of God by Karl Barth. For the Reformers, Christianity was a religion of the Word, not a religion of the Book exclusively. Luther writes in De Concilio et Ecclesiae, "The Word of God cannot exist apart from the people of God. Who would preach it or hear it, if not the people of God? And how would the people of God arrive at faith, if the Word of God were not preached to them?" Here, God's Word and His Covenant People exist in a relationship of mutual, though unequal, dependence, underscored by God's grace mediated by the Holy Spirit who, in a sense, dwells in and supports both. The best of Protestantism derives from this positive view of Scripture in the life of the Christian people. Bouyer writes:

In spite of all its possible defects, Protestantism has lived by, and handed down, an authentic life, constantly renewed, precisely in the degree in which it has handed down the Bible and, with this, a living practice of recourse to it, of drawing nourishment from it as from a source of life, of finding in it personal contact with Christ, while interior experience is constantly referred to it as to the highest ideal. [Protestantism is a] collective...life discovered and maintained by familiarity with the Bible."

The extent to which Protestant life and practice draws on and is immersed in Scripture is, adds Bouyer, almost impossible for Catholics (or any other outsider) to appreciate. This does not help mutual understanding when it comes to apologetics and polemics.

Is such a high view of Scripture inherently foreign to Catholic faith, however, or is this an accident of history? Bouyer argues for the latter position. If one reads the Fathers, after all, their books and sermons are immersed in Scripture, and it is clear that they assume a substantial knowledge of Scripture from their congregations. Nor did this decline as much as might be thought during the Middle Ages- the sermons of St Bernard of Clairvaux (and, to a lesser degree, Aelfric) are very much along the same lines. St Augustine wrote, "To those books of Scripture alone now known as canonical I have learned to pay the honour and respect of believing firmly that none of their authors made any mistake in what they wrote."- a view that sounds surprisingly close to inerrancy (though the way Augustine approached the interpretation of Scripture was not inerrantist in the modern sense). Likewise, Thomas Aquinas wrote that the Scriptural books alone, in and by themselves, enjoy absolute authority, and that "sacred doctrine makes use of [other] authorities as extrinsic and probable arguments; but properly uses the authority of the canonical Scriptures as an incontrovertible proof, and the authority of the doctors of the Church as one that may properly be used, yet merely as probable. For our faith rests upon the revelation made to the apostles and prophets who wrote the canonical books."

Is such a view still current in the Catholic Church? Well, yes, at an official level. One need only read Dei Verbum from Vatican II or read Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth to see that this is so. Certainly no Catholic theologian would raise any doctrinal authority to a level equal with Scripture. But nor can it be denied that, at a popular level, Biblical literacy and piety certainly do not obtain in modern Catholicism anywhere near the extent that they do within Protestantism. Though many Bibles were printed before the Reformation, both in Latin and the various vernacular languages of Europe, it was Protestant Bibles (in Germany and England) that became shapers of culture and language. And though the liturgy has always been and continues to be drenched in Scripture, more than one person to whom I have spoken who has left the Church has deplored the paucity of aids available to help the average Joe in the pew contextualise and internalise what he hears each Sunday.

This, as may be seen, is an anomaly in Christian history and it is, perhaps, part of the tragedy of the Reformation that the movement that could have renewed Biblical piety in the Church should have gone its own way for other reasons. The present state of affairs in Catholicism may then plausibly be blamed on ongoing suspicion by association, in the same way Catholics were ambivalent towards itinerant preaching during the late twelfth/early thirteenth centuries because of its association with the Cathars (until, of course, St Dominic came along and demonstrated that there was no reason orthodox Christians couldn't also preach as itinerants). This has decreased in the last century or so, but there is still a substantial gap to be closed.

Still, as before, it is curious to note where the closest convergence between Protestantism and its older Christian counterparts comes; for sola Scriptura, in practice and in spirit, has most in common with the monastic ideal, especially with lectio divina. Indeed, many Protestants already practice a form of lectio divina without knowing it. Moreover, having spent time in a monastery less than a week ago myself, I can testify that the constant presence of Scripture throughout the monastic day (be it in the continual chanting of Psalms or in private Bible reading) echoes and appeals to something deep in the Protestant psyche. Both monks and Protestants find in Scripture the principal support for their relationship with God.

Given the historical regard for and reverence towards Scripture in the Church, and the culture of Biblical piety so characteristic of Protestantism since its beginning, Bouyer concludes, "The supreme authority of Scripture, taken in its positive sense, as gradually drawn out and systematised by Protestants themselves, far from setting the Church and Protestantism in opposition, should be the best possible warrant for their return to understanding and unity." I agree, and I'm not the only one.

These are the four positive principles Bouyer puts forward as the essential core of Protestantism as a movement, principles undeniably Christian with deep roots in gospel soil, shared (at least in principle) with all Christians of all centuries but clearly in the sixteenth century in need of new emphasis and application. In my next post, I will continue my precis of Bouyer's book with my own reflections here and there, this time regarding the negative elements that Protestantism inherited from medieval nominalism.

Possibly Counter-intuitive Eastern-Western Comparison

I mentioned earlier that a lot of my reading of late has been Greek or Greek-related. While I'm presently chugging my way through the Odyssey, I just finished this book and have jotted down some notes and thought trains which I thought I might share.

Andrew Louth (a Russian Orthodox priest who, interestingly enough, works at Durham University, Durham being the city where N.T. Wright is bishop) attempts in "Greek East and Latin West" to treat of Eastern and Western Christendom for the period in tandem. As he does so, he draws out some interesting and occasionally (at least to a Western Christian)counter-intuitive contrasts between the two. For example, looking at the monastic reforms of the eighth and early ninth centuries in both East and West, he points out that the reforms of Theodore of Stoudios were quite independent of imperial authority and, in a society and church wracked by iconoclasm, his reforms and his stubborn and principled refusal to toe the imperial line on doctrinal and ethical matters (while Constantine VI did his best to ape Henry VIII) set a precedent that allowed Eastern monasticism to attain a place in the society independent of emperor and political expediency, enabling it to counter-balance the primacy of those elements and fulfill a kind of prophetic office in the Byzantine Church, like Samuel to Saul or John the Baptist to Herod.

In the West, on the other hand, monastic reform was largely instigated and overseen by the emperor (in this case Charlemagne and then Louis the Pious) and the imperial court. It was a largely top-down affair, among other things standardising the Rule of St Benedict.

The interpretation Andrew Louth puts on this is very interesting. He says that the nature of reform in the West set later precedents for centralised reform of monasticism by bishops and/or the Pope- that, in effect, monasticism was to be ordered and controlled and always fall under some sort of central authority, to be (I think the East would see it thus) less pneumatic (in the Greek sense of the word). In the East, on the other hand, it was and is more chaotic, as we in the West might say or, as they might say, more Spirit-led and free.

What I find interesting is how contrary to the typical stereotype both pictures are. Contrary to the charge of caesaropapism often levelled at the East (which, I think it would be fair to say, has often been true generally of the episcopal hierarchy), the monks and monasteries could (and sometimes did) stand against the emperor, giving a substantial section of the Eastern Church independence from political vagaries and therefore the ability to comment on and apply the Church's teaching to the issues of the day. On the other hand, as far as the West is concerned, it is arguable that, even given the later battles to secure the Church's independence from the state, the habit of centralisation, at least as far as religious and ascetic life goes, was simply transferred from the imperial court to the Pope. It is interesting to see this tendency even now at work, with the recent papal-sponsored tour of inspection of monasteries in the U.S. (a very much needed and, indeed, long overdue initiative). The habit has become, for good or ill, ingrained.

At the same time, looking at the period in question, it is undeniable that, given the choice, one would much rather have been a Christian (and, for that matter, a Christian monk) in the West than in the East. The Eastern emperors were, at this point, hostile to orthodoxy and, largely, a liability for the Church. In the West, Charlemagne and his immediate successors were faithful, devout and orthodox Christians who were genuinely trying to foster the Church and the life of faith in their domain.

Of course, times change and what was once necessary and laudable under certain circumstances becomes unhelpful and detrimental under other circumstances. That is, I suppose, true of the approach to monasticism of both East and West. The approaches seem to have remained the same ever since, but the political and social situations which form their context are constantly changing, and either model suits certain contexts better than the other. Which, I wonder, is the better approach in our present situation?

St Antony in His Cave, or The Puzzle of Monasticism

Today, being Jan. 17, would ordinarily be the feast of St Antony. But this year today is Sunday, so it isn't. Still, why should that stop me venerating him and meditating on his life? Accordingly, I offer two related excerpts from the account I sent several family and friends of my own visit to St Antony's cave last October.

"Confronted by the life of Antony, my Protestant hackles go up. What kind of a response to Christ is it to flee into the desert and keep oneself away from all human contact? How does that fulfill the Great Commission? Expressions and images leap to mind- visions of fat friars, "so heavenly minded he's no earthly good" and such sayings. This instinct is strong, and has something in it. There are legitimate fears at work here- the fear that one will, through asceticism, believe one can work one's way to heaven; the fear that the obligation of evangelism will be neglected. Stereotypes of monastic and eremitical hypocrisy inevitably crowd in also.

To this there are two responses, which naturally overlap and interweave with each other.

The first is a story, one of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. There are many such stories and sayings, collected by monks in the very early days of monasticism here in Egypt, and I have made the collection of them my spiritual reading this trip, dipping into them and meditating upon them whenever I have a moment. One such story tells of three brothers, who all decided to dedicate their lives totally to Christ. The first brother decided to be a peacemaker, following Our Lord's words in Matthew 5:9 and also in mind of James 3:18. The second chose to minister to those who were ill. The third decided to go into the desert and live in quiet and solitude. After some time had passed, the first brother became frustrated, because he could not settle everyone's disputes. He went to find the second brother to see how he had fared, and discovered he was similarly frustrated, drained and emotionally exhausted from his ministering. So they both went out into the desert to find the third brother. Upon finding him, the two poured out their hearts to him with all their difficulties and asked him how he had fared. The third brother was silent for a while, and then poured some water in a bowl. "Look at the water," he said, and they did, but they couldn't see anything in it. He waited a couple of minutes and then said, "Look at the water now". They did, and could see their faces reflected in it because the water had settled and become still. The third brother said to them, "This is why you are failing in spirit. You are working in a crowd and because of the turbulence, you cannot see your own sins and faults. But if you are still, you will see your sins." Only if we see our sins, what keeps us from God, can we allow grace to work on us in those areas. As long as we cannot see those things, they will not be healed and they will sabotage whatever kind of good work we endeavour to do.

How many evangelists, taking seriously the command to preach to all men, preach to others but neglect to preach to themselves? "All men" must include myself. Far better to preach to oneself alone than to preach to others and have one's unconscious sins and faults undermine the message. Only by preaching first to myself will I prevent myself from preventing God saving those I meet.

But, it will be protested, such a way of life, if undertaken seriously and rigorously, would prevent any real evangelism from taking place. If the serious Christians go out into the desert or off into the woods alone to live by working and praying in solitude and quiet, what will happen to those who have never heard the Gospel? Where will the missionaries come from?

That brings us to the second response to such questions. It is a simple recognition of an undeniable historical fact, and it is this. Almost all the peoples of Western Europe (and many in the East as well) were converted by monks.

This is simply a fact. The conversion of the Franks was set on foot when St Remigius preached to and baptised King Clovis. He was a Benedictine monk. St Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with St Augustine of Hippo) began and made great progress towards the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in England. His entire missionary team was composed of monks. St Boniface preached in the north of Germany and his mission had great success. He was also a Benedictine monk, hailing from a monastery near Winchester. In the East, Sts Cyril and Methodius began the conversion of the Slavic people, and Cyril's name is still attached to the alphabet he created to translate the Scripture into the Slavic language- it is called Cyrillic, and those are the letters you see on all those Russian signs. They were also monks. Nor should it be forgotten that it was principally because of the efforts of Benedictine monks, such as Dunstan, Aethelwold, and my good friend Aelfric, that the Faith was renewed in England after the wars with the Danes.

How is this to be explained? How does one reconcile the nature of the monastic lifestyle with such successful missionary efforts? How can something that begins with a man following Christ by running out into the desert to live away from people end with masses of people accepting Christ and whole cultures being drenched in the Gospel (in most of these countries, the people and the culture are only now, more than a millenium later, beginning to lose their faith- I'd call that some successful evangelism!)?

I don't have any easy answers to those questions. Indeed, it is something I am still digesting and mulling over. Part of the answer lies, I think, with the story above. So eager to get out there and win the world for Christ, we have not taken the time to let grace get its claws into us. Thus we sabotage ourselves. There is another story about a man who declared that he was completely sanctified and, taking Matthew 5:48 as his text, said that in Christ he had been made perfect. One of the monks went to visit him and asked him if he had really said this. He replied that he had. So the monk asked him, "Suppose you came in here and found a woman on your mat. Could you speak to her as though she was not a woman?" The man said, "No, but I would resist any temptation and refrain from touching her." The monk said, "Then you are not perfect. You have imprisoned lust but it is still in you. But suppose you were walking along and saw some stones on one side of the road and a jar of gold on the other. Could you think they were the same value?" The man said, "No, but I would resist any temptation and leave the gold where it was." The monk said, "Then you are not perfect. You have imprisoned greed but it is still in you. But suppose one man loved you and spoke well of you and another man hated you and slandered you, and suppose they both came to visit you one day, would they both be equally welcome to you?" The man replied, "No, but I would force myself to treat them the same." The monk said, "Then you are not perfect. You have imprisoned vanity, but it still lives in you. Your passions have been conquered but they have not been redeemed."

Another part of the answer, illustrated to some extent by the above story, lies in this. One of the things that strikes one about the monks is their total realism. Not for them lofty and abstract theological concepts. Grace, redemption and the work of Christ are found in the nitty-gritty. Sin is not a concept, an idea. It is a lived reality to be recognised and fought against intelligently, and sometimes one wins and sometimes one loses. Solitude and quiet are the prerequisites of self-knowledge, so you can know how sin gets at you specifically, and thus where grace is needed. The monastic lifestyle forces one to be honest. And only when we are honest about ourselves can we stand before God and let Him have His way with us. As long as we hide from ourselves, even subconsciously, we will also, like Adam, hide from God.

Another story tells of how a man tried to make a donation to a hermit. The hermit refused, saying, "I have enough for my needs from the work that I do." The man insisted, saying, "Then you could give the money to the poor," but the hermit refused even more vehemently, saying, "Then I should sin doubly. I would have accepted what I do not need, and then be vain from doing a good deed." That kind of moral realism, sprung from self-knowledge, is highly to be prized. To recognise that externals are ephemeral, and that whatever leads my soul to God, no matter what it is, should be sought, and whatever leads my soul away from God, no matter what it is, should be shunned.

I do not think these are the whole answer to this paradox, but they are clues.

What then, in a related set of questions, are we to make of Protestantism's traditional ambivalence towards monasticism? Of course, part of that no doubt owes something to Martin Luther's own experience of it as a bed of legalism and a hindrance to his relationship with Christ. That experience, being part of the foundational narrative of Protestantism, has, I suspect, been formative. There is also the general stereotype of monks (particularly during the Reformation period) being hypocrites, engaging in sinful and lewd lifestyles while putting forth a veneer of piety and devotion, entering the monastery because they were lazy and didn't want to work (the Desert Fathers would, one imagines, have stern words for such men), etc. It is undoubtable that these stereotypes, though open to the charge that many exceptions existed, had some foundation in reality during that period. One has only to read a little of the troubles Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross had in reforming the Carmelites in the same period to realise that monasticism was not in particularly good shape in the sixteenth century. And again, as that era was Protestantism's formative period, its birth and childhood, the contours of the culture of the time have characterised it to some extent ever since.

But I suspect it goes deeper even than that. The sixteenth century has been and gone. From an historical perspective it ought to be clear, especially in Evangelicalism whose origins are later than Protestantism more broadly defined, that monasticism as a way of life has a particular dynamic to it and that the abuses and dodginess widespread in the sixteenth century and afterwards are not of its essence. So why, apart from a few Anglican efforts which are clearly lifted pretty directly from Catholicism (the Anglican Franciscans leap to mind), has Protestantism not given rise to any monastic movements of its own? Is there a particular reason why it should, alone of all forms of Christianity, excise from itself a lifestyle that has proved vigorous, dynamic and gospel-centred in every other branch of Christians?

This is something I have wondered about for some time, primarily as simply an historical curiosity. I don't think I have a definite answer but I have some suspicions which may be more or less on the mark. I submit them for what they are worth.

It seems to me that Protestantism, particularly Evangelicalism, has a very specific understanding and practice of prayer. Prayer is there to get things done. All forms of prayer are subordinate to, and converge towards, petitionary prayer. One can see this in the kind of language used. The standard kind of opening, "Lord, we just want to praise You and thank You..." or "Lord, we are so blessed to be able to come into Your presence..." naturally leads to sentences beginning with verbs like 'help', 'use', 'allow', etc. All very active. Lord, do stuff! I should add, in case there is any doubt, that this is a perfectly legitimate kind of prayer and I am not criticising it, much less condemning it. But what I find interesting is that for Protestantism generally, and Evangelicalism in particular, this is the whole of prayer. And this naturally leads to an inherent suspicion of all kinds of prayer that do not have as their stated objective the intention of getting something done.

I think this idea of prayer is the basis for much that is good in Protestant culture. The gung-ho, pro-active "Let's win some souls for Christ!", "Let's church the unchurched!", "Let's reach out to the lost!", "Let's let our good works shine before men so that they praise our Father in heaven!", "Let's make Sydney 10% Christian by 2015!" attitude is laudable and challenging to those of other Christian cultures who are unused to such in-your-face Christianity.

But for those raised in such an atmosphere, monasticism constitutes a blindspot. "You can't cut yourself off from everybody. That's not biblical." "Following Christ means bearing witness to the good news in your home, in your workplace, not leaving everything behind and doing nothing on your own." For all of these objections, my suspicion is that the fundamental problem is that monasticism doesn't seem active enough. I recall a seminar offered once in the Sydney Uni Evangelical Union. The advertisement ran thus: "GET THEE TO A NUNNERY! Or, for a serious discussion of Christian femininity, come to the Women's Forum on Thursday at 1pm." The implication was that doing manual work, praying, and singing Psalms every day in an enclosed community was no way to be a Christian woman.Why not? At the risk of completely misreading the intentions of whoever came up with the advertisement, I would hazard a guess that it was because such a lifestyle appeared ineffective. It didn't affect anything. With no evangelistic or other outlet for outreach of some sort, the nunnery looks rather like hiding your light under a bushel. The scandal of that approach is that, with the Great Commission firmly embedded in her mind and heart, a person who takes up such a lifestyle seems to be opting out. Shirking her God-given responsibilities as a Christian.

There may, of course, be more to it than I have suggested, but I think that this dedication to what is outwardly and explicitly active and effective, this results-driven spirituality, is at least a large part of Protestantism's historic distrust of the monastic way of life. There may be more to it than that, and I may not be completely on the mark with that hypothesis. But its something to think about anyway.

To ingrained objections like these, the only thing to say is what I pointed out before- those two responses from earlier. Firstly, grace cannot work on sins of which we are unconscious and, unless we have the experience of being quiet and alone, engaging in contemplative as well as active prayer (i.e. prayer that does not seek to get things done but simply to know God), we will not see our sins nor will they be cured and they will sabotage all our efforts. Secondly, the counter-intuitive but undeniable fact that monks have been more successful and more effective missionaries and evangelists than anyone else to date."

- - - - - - -

"To our right, leading up and behind one of the large formations of rock that characterised the mountain, we saw a set of steps. This, we assumed, must be the way to Antony's cave. So we left Ahmet with the car and began to climb. Having reached the top of these steps, we realised that an error of judgement had been made. We had assumed that the cave must be just beyond this rise. Having reached the top of it, however, and therefore being able to see farther than before, we perceived that in fact the steps led halfway up the great massif, and that we had a long way to go. Moreover, we had not brought any water with us.

With an ever-so-slight devil-may-care attitude, Tanta Suzie, Jeanne and I decided to continue up anyway. We wanted to see Antony's cave. Well, we would see Antony's cave! So the climb began.

There were actually huge numbers of people going up and down the mountain. Interestingly, every one of them was Egyptian and almost all of them were young. Coptic Christianity is clearly doing pretty well these days. To either side of the steps as we climbed were little plaques stuck into the ground, each featuring a verse of Scripture or one of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers in Arabic. Tanta Suzie was kind enough to translate a couple of these for Jeanne and myself. The climb was maybe half the distance that the Steps of Repentance had been on Sinai (I found out later it was 1200 steps) and not as gruelling as the climb up Sinai had been. But it was still fairly gruelling, especially given that we had not brought water...

Eventually, after a good 45 minutes, we reached the small area where Antony's cave was. There was a precipice at its edge, and a tall fence had been built to prevent any accidents. The rockface stretched up from where we were more or less vertically, though in one small crevice one could see a Coptic cross placed, and in another one could see pigeons nesting (the first animals we had seen in the area- it is after all in the middle of the desert). Around the cave were quite a number of people, mostly young. One group of young men from a church in Cairo were eager to get a group photo with the curiously-dressed Westerner, and, slightly reluctantly, I obliged them. It was, at any rate, a good opportunity to practice my Arabic, much to their delight and occasional amusement.

The cave itself was tiny. A small gap in the rockface, nothing more. In gaps and small crevices in the rock around the entrance, pieces of paper had been placed with prayers inscribed, as at the Burning Bush at St Catherine's. And around the entrance on the ground were shoes and sandals belonging to those who had entered. The concept of going barefoot in holy places a la Moses is still very much alive among the Copts.

Jeanne and I went in, but Tanta Suzie, who was not feeling the best after the climb, decided to wait outside. It was, as I said, nothing but a crack in the rockface. I mean that literally. There was no floor as such and not enough space to stand, just two walls of rock that curved narrowly on either side, meeting in a sharp point below one's feet (or foot, as it was often too narrow to put both feet down at once) and the same again a short space above one's head. One was forced to half-crawl, half-skip, half-walk (yes, I know that makes three halves but one-third sounds odd) in order to progress, and this became even more interesting as the daylight faded behind and one became enveloped in darkness as the cave bent away and into the mountain. Someway in, it opened out to a space that was a little larger and where there were candles to give some light. There were a couple of steps down and there an altar, with one of those Bedouin mats laid out in front of it. Above the altar was an icon of St Antony and above that a larger icon of Our Lord. I thought that was as it should be. There was a man who came in with us and stood at the top of the steps where the cave opened out a bit. He spoke to us and gave us some background on the place, but, being in Arabic, I was only able to grasp a small part of what he was saying.

I knelt there for a while, praying, asking for Antony's prayers, and meditating on the significance of the place. Looking around and up at the cave walls, with the candle-light flickering and casting shadows among the formations in the cave ceiling, it was extraordinary to think that Antony had lived here for years, on his own in the dark. Getting to know himself truly. Getting to know God truly. Letting grace chip away at him bit by bit. How familiar these rock walls must have become to him. And yet how lonely. How far away from everything. This niche in a cliff-face was miles out into the desert, far from anything. Dangerous to live here. So little to sustain even basic necessities. What kind of happiness or fulfillment could a man find here? No one to talk to. Surely a person would go mad, like those people one hears about isolated on islands for years. Yet Antony did not go mad. In fact, the opposite. He became sane, saner than most anybody else around, so that people would travel out into the desert to get spiritual counsel and advice from him. Holiness and sanity are related, as Frank Sheed reminds us, because they both involve living in accordance with reality, a reality that ultimately derives from and consists in God. Far from going mad, Antony's relationship with the Lord made him into the kind of man that could ease the sufferings of the whole Christian population under Diocletian, and build up and encourage the orthodox in their struggle with the Arians.

It was not right to flee the world and isolate himself in the desert, cry the critics. It was not right to flee the world and isolate himself in the desert, cry my own spiritual instincts. What good did it do? demand both.

Ask that of the Alexandrian Christians under Diocletian. Ask that of Athanasius and the orthodox during the Arian crisis. Ask that of the Anglo-Saxons, of the Franks, of the tribes of northern Germany, of the Slavs. Ask that of the Coptic young people who climbed the mountain yesterday and placed their prayers in the rocks. Ask that of the Patriarch of Alexandria at prayer in his chapel. "Go, sell all you have and give it to the poor and come, follow Me."

I also thought of something else, which I had been thinking about since Sinai. It had always seemed to me that Moses got a rather raw deal. All those years of working, all those years of wandering. But no pay-off. The Israelites get their reward, their homecoming. They finally enter the Promised Land. But Moses, after everything, doesn't get a thing. It seems so unfair. Where is his happy ending? Shouldn't God reward him after all his faithfulness, his tireless work, his sacrifices? But then I realised. What am I expecting or wanting for Moses? I'm wanting something for him that God will give him. A crown, a sense of fulfillment, some kind of closure, something. But Moses has learnt the most important lesson, and I'm one step behind even grasping what that is- Moses has learnt to desire God Himself, in preference to any of His gifts. God Himself is Moses' reward at the end of his life. That is his only closure. That is all the closure he needs. All Moses' experiences have led up to that and it is that that is the essence of the Torah - "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength." - and it is that that Moses finally learns to desire on the mountain when he says "Show me Your glory." The Israelites have received their home, their land, a place for themselves. But they have not learned to desire God simply in Himself, and thus they will continue to fall from Him for centuries to come. Moses has learnt this. He has come to desire God simply for Himself. So, for him, the Promised Land is superfluous. In the desert, Antony learned to desire the same thing."