Stephen Lovatt is a traditionalist English gay Catholic. Unlike myself, who was born and raised in the Roman communion, Stephen converted, I think from Methodism. He maintains a quite extensive website Pharsea's Home Page, which is certainly worth a look, especially if you are gay or lesbian and wrestling with a Roman Catholic outlook. A physicist, he's also a Platonist in philosophy and has published an exposition of "Plato's wisdom for the modern world", New Skins for Old Wine. Stephen's traditionalism is not strictly conservative as he argues for changes to Roman Catholic teaching on sexuality, especially homosexuality, and he also supports the ordination of women. I am not a traditionalist. Unlike Stephen I do remember the pre-Vatican 2 Church and I also remember the heady days post-Vatican 2 when it seemed that the Church was opening up and transforming itself in more inclusive ways, even revolutionary ways. Yes, there was such a time, long ago now. I also part company with Stephen on his views about Islam, which one would have to say are Islamophobic. I would probably stand more in the tradition of Louis Massignon when it comes to appreciating Islam as a religion (or more correctly, a continuum of religions) drawing from the same Middle Eastern spiritual traditions as Christianity and Judaism. The three along with Zoroastrianism, Bahai, and Mandaeism are integrally connected and are a close, though fractious, religious family. Geopolitically I recognise the awful fact of European and US imperialism in generating the Middle Eastern conflicts and the cycle of blowback that George Bush wanted to call the War on Terror.
Stephen maintains a MySpace blog which is on my blogroll. There you can find all manner of discussions, including ongoing dialogues presumably arising from private correspondence from his readers. Although at the same time, I wouldn't discount that he uses the Platonic dialogue form so perhaps his interlocutors are fictional characters by which he can elucidate an argument about theology, philosophy, sexuality. A post a couple of days ago, Pelagianism or Orthodoxy, caught my eye and I've been mulling over it ever since. It's only a short post so I'm going to reproduce most of it below
Now I think that's a pretty good summary of what Christianity is all about and I want to reflect some more upon point 6 (and a little on point 3) in particular the notion of God's friendship. Somewhere along the way Christianity lost track of the friendship of God, replacing it instead, especially in the West, with the vindictive, judgmental God who's wrath must be appeased by the murder of his son and even then that appeasement is understood as partial. Following Augustine and particularly with the Reformation the comes the notion of the total depravity of humanity, derived from Augustine's notion of Original Sin. Luther was so haunted by it that he soared high on the ecstasy of justification by faith alone. Calvin on the other hand went down the darkest Augustinian path and taught predestination whereby the mass of depraved humanity are created for eternal damnation. Only a small number are saved by the will of God and from before time began. Predestination was also Augustine's idea (wisely rejected by the Western church after his death) and some have called the Reformation an attempted Augustinian renewal of the Church. My own thinking is that in the Reformation, mainly wrong answers were given to all the right questions that urgently needed to be asked, addressed.
But I want to return to the notion of God's friendship. Many years ago, I was surprised when reading Kallistos Timothy Ware's book on the Orthodox Church to read that one of the great post-Nicene Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, had declared that Christians may pray even for the redemption of Satan. It was many years later that I discovered that early Christianity was not necessarily the hellfire and damnation religion with which we are so familiar today. Famously, Origen, the real founder of Christian biblical studies, was posthumously condemned for a range of heresies some centuries after after his death, one of which seems to have been a form of universalism. By universalism I don't mean the notion that all religions are the same and all point to the one thing but rather the notion of a ultimate reconciliation, that no one is lost, that all will finally be saved. The term used is apokatastasis and it seems Origen and Gregory of Nyssa were not the only ones to accept it. It was pretty common among Christians although not all would necessarily include Satan and the demonic realm in that final reconciliation. Whether or not Satan was included, apokatastasis was understood either to be an automatic given, that no bounds could be put on God's love, or in other accounts, that the prayers of the saints would obtain salvation for all at the last judgment. As I wrote on one of the very early posts on this blog, the latter idea can be found in the 2nd century Epistle of the Apostles, a 2nd century Orthodox rebuttal of gnosticism, as well as in the Christian Sybillenes. It can also be found in the Apocalypse of Peter, a particularly gruesome text on the afterlife and its punishments/rewards that was widely popular amongst early Christians and regarded by many, including Clement of Alexandria, as scriptural. Clement himself is one of the many early Christian thinkers/teachers/saints who held to some notion of apokatastasis as integral to what Christianity was all about. Indeed, even though poor old Origen got condemned much later, in part, for believing it, it would seem he represented the early Christian norm.
But I'm wondering whether apokatastasis by the prayers of the saints or as a natural result of the boundless love of God are necessarily two separate ideas or are really two sides of the one coin. And for that I need to return to atonement, deification/theosis, and kenosis/self-emptying. Probably from its very beginnings, Christianity has understood the execution of Jesus as key to a cosmic drama of Atonement. Now there have been various theologies of what Atonement means and what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross. I wont bother going through them all now. But so important is Atonement in Christianity that one could be forgiven for thinking that Christians invented it all themselves. But of course they didn't. Atonement was key to the old Temple Judaism of the time (and remains so for Rabbinic Judaism too) such that what really happened was that Christians interpreted the execution of Jesus in light of the rituals and theology of the Day of Atonement as practised in the Temple (in 30CE at Jerusalem and one also at Leontopolis in Egypt). In these rituals the High Priest slaughters first a bull and then a goat and then takes the blood into the Holy of Holies. The blood is then sprinkled and smeared on various parts of the Temple. The Day of Atonement is part of the New Year festival at the autumnal equinox which celebrates the creation of the universe and the renewal of creation. Blood is life and the animal blood represents the blood/life of the High Priest who represents Yahweh, the LORD, who creates and renews creation by an outpouring of the divine life. In esoteric Judaism, this outpouring is understood as the Tree of Life of Kabbalah by which creation occurs through the outpouring of the divine light through the 10 Sefiroth or emanations that comprise the Tree and mapping the process of creation, of consciousness. In Christianity, Jesus on the cross pours out his blood/life as befits the Heavenly High Priest through whom all creation came to be. Jesus on the cross instantiates the divine processes of creation, atonement, renewal. More than anything else atonement is about healing creation, making it whole, restoring it to balance, which is why a key aspect of Jesus public career is healing the sick. Jesus also forgives sin; forgiveness and healing more often go hand in hand in the gospel accounts. Healing, renewal, liberation, and forgiveness are all part of the ancient Jewish theology of Atonement as expressed not only through the annual rituals of Yom Kippur but the associated sabbath and Jubilee years which were proclaimed on the Day of Atonement.
Atonement rituals were not unique to ancient Judaism but were part and parcel of ancient Middle Eastern religion. My own personal view is that such Atonement rituals were an attempt to approximate the maternal dimension of life, of the Godhead. This maternal dimension resurfaces, manifesting explicitly in the medieval West with the rich imagery of Jesus as Mother (and Mary as his Priest). I'm also inclined to think that the origins of this atonement model of understanding the crucifixion lie with Jesus himself who must at some stage have realised that his path had only one logical destination, given the realities of Roman rule in Palestine.
Nevertheless, while the Temple rituals of atonement were no doubt profound and awe-inspiring, death on the cross is not. It is brutal, disgusting, horrifying and shameful. Crucifixion was meant to debase and degrade as well as kill. So the sight of a person hanging bloodied and brutalised on a cross is not self-evidently an instantiation of the divine creative and healing process, far from it. I think it is this fact that lies behind the Christian stress on kenosis, self-emptying, that is understood from very early on as a hallmark of the divine, of the divine as manifested in Jesus. The god of Christianity is a god who submits to degradation and abandonment and death - eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani - this is a god who knows despair and brokenness. In other words this is a god who approaches humans on the same level, sharing human pain and desolation, who will submit to brutal death rather than summon legions of angels to lord it over humans.
God is friendship, says Aelred of Riveaulx; God is love, says John, and the language of friendship runs through John's gospel. That God becomes human so that humans can become divine is a key affirmation of early Christianity. After the crucifixion comes the resurrection. Divinisation, deification, theosis remains central to Eastern Christianity even though it has largely been forgotten in the Western churches. What does becoming divine mean? Again and again, the easterners say that it means becoming a friend of God, entering into friendship with God. God becomes human to invite humanity into friendship. By becoming friends with God one becomes more and more like God.
So to return to apokatastasis, the image of the saints praying for the salvation of all at the Last Judgment and having their prayer granted demonstrates the activity of deification, theosis. The saints are those who have died in the friendship of God. Now deified they live the divine life by praying for the salvation of all, a prayer that is, of course, answered because the love of God has no bounds. These are not two different forms of apokatastasis but integrally linked and derived from Christian language of atonement, kenosis and theosis.
Returning to Stephen's post, I particularly like his observation that God's friendship can be asked for "explicitly or implicitly". I take that to mean that asking for God's friendship does not necessarily mean embracing a specific form of Christianity or even any specific form of religion. One of the recurring dilemmas in most forms of Christianity as a result of theologies of eternal damnation is that of the righteous unbeliever. In my school days, it was one of the stock items we would put to our teachers to try to catch them out, to discomfort them. As kids we realised something was amiss with the notion that one had to be a Christian, or even a Catholic, to be "saved". What about the righteous godfearing Hindu for example? Or the righteous atheist? These were the days of Vatican 2 and after, the days when the Roman communion began the move from an exclusivist eternal hell theology to the de facto universalism of today. One of the first things to go was the tenet that there is no salvation outside the Church, which did originally mean just the Roman communion. Bad luck you Protestants, Orthodox and everybody else.
Eastern Christianity never completely abandoned apokatastasis/universalism but the West did to its great detriment. But perhaps Purgatory is the older Christian hell revived, or maybe not even revived but renamed instead. Nowadays, not just the Roman communion but much of Western Christianity has likewise returned to a de facto, at least, universalist position. Only the fundamentalists want to hold on to it and they claim to base their position on the scriptures, taken at their literal meaning. Which raises the question, if someone like Clement of Alexandria, counted as a saint and a key early Christian theologian, not only read the same scriptures as contemporary Christians but counted even more hair-raising texts like the Apocalypse of Peter as scripture, and could still hold to a universalist position, how much does the interpretation of the text depend on the framework one brings to interpret the text? Obviously, quite a lot. And perhaps contemporary Christians need to spend some time in the schools of Clement, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa (and Dame Julian of Norwich, too, for a bit of medieval universalism).
You can find a really interesting article by Andreas Andreopoulos on apokatastasis here. And a very good article by Brendan Palphrey on theosis in Orthodox Christianity can be found here.
Stephen maintains a MySpace blog which is on my blogroll. There you can find all manner of discussions, including ongoing dialogues presumably arising from private correspondence from his readers. Although at the same time, I wouldn't discount that he uses the Platonic dialogue form so perhaps his interlocutors are fictional characters by which he can elucidate an argument about theology, philosophy, sexuality. A post a couple of days ago, Pelagianism or Orthodoxy, caught my eye and I've been mulling over it ever since. It's only a short post so I'm going to reproduce most of it below
2. One can try to be just without calling on God's help.
3. God always helps those who try to be just; but is more able to do so if they ask to be helped; because it is partly the recognition of one's weakness and need of God's help and encouragement which makes it possible for God to help one.
4. Without God's help and encouragement it is impossible for any human being to become fully just.
5. With God's help and encouragement it is possible for any human being to become fully just.
6. No matter what one achieves by oneself one cannot ever earn God's respect or friendship. Friendship is a freely offered gift, but has to be asked for - explicitly or implicitly. Respect is due only to one who is worthy of it and we can only become worthy of God's respect as a result of His help and encouragement and friendship.
7. "God's help and encouragement" is generally called "grace" in theological circles.
Now I think that's a pretty good summary of what Christianity is all about and I want to reflect some more upon point 6 (and a little on point 3) in particular the notion of God's friendship. Somewhere along the way Christianity lost track of the friendship of God, replacing it instead, especially in the West, with the vindictive, judgmental God who's wrath must be appeased by the murder of his son and even then that appeasement is understood as partial. Following Augustine and particularly with the Reformation the comes the notion of the total depravity of humanity, derived from Augustine's notion of Original Sin. Luther was so haunted by it that he soared high on the ecstasy of justification by faith alone. Calvin on the other hand went down the darkest Augustinian path and taught predestination whereby the mass of depraved humanity are created for eternal damnation. Only a small number are saved by the will of God and from before time began. Predestination was also Augustine's idea (wisely rejected by the Western church after his death) and some have called the Reformation an attempted Augustinian renewal of the Church. My own thinking is that in the Reformation, mainly wrong answers were given to all the right questions that urgently needed to be asked, addressed.
But I want to return to the notion of God's friendship. Many years ago, I was surprised when reading Kallistos Timothy Ware's book on the Orthodox Church to read that one of the great post-Nicene Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, had declared that Christians may pray even for the redemption of Satan. It was many years later that I discovered that early Christianity was not necessarily the hellfire and damnation religion with which we are so familiar today. Famously, Origen, the real founder of Christian biblical studies, was posthumously condemned for a range of heresies some centuries after after his death, one of which seems to have been a form of universalism. By universalism I don't mean the notion that all religions are the same and all point to the one thing but rather the notion of a ultimate reconciliation, that no one is lost, that all will finally be saved. The term used is apokatastasis and it seems Origen and Gregory of Nyssa were not the only ones to accept it. It was pretty common among Christians although not all would necessarily include Satan and the demonic realm in that final reconciliation. Whether or not Satan was included, apokatastasis was understood either to be an automatic given, that no bounds could be put on God's love, or in other accounts, that the prayers of the saints would obtain salvation for all at the last judgment. As I wrote on one of the very early posts on this blog, the latter idea can be found in the 2nd century Epistle of the Apostles, a 2nd century Orthodox rebuttal of gnosticism, as well as in the Christian Sybillenes. It can also be found in the Apocalypse of Peter, a particularly gruesome text on the afterlife and its punishments/rewards that was widely popular amongst early Christians and regarded by many, including Clement of Alexandria, as scriptural. Clement himself is one of the many early Christian thinkers/teachers/saints who held to some notion of apokatastasis as integral to what Christianity was all about. Indeed, even though poor old Origen got condemned much later, in part, for believing it, it would seem he represented the early Christian norm.
But I'm wondering whether apokatastasis by the prayers of the saints or as a natural result of the boundless love of God are necessarily two separate ideas or are really two sides of the one coin. And for that I need to return to atonement, deification/theosis, and kenosis/self-emptying. Probably from its very beginnings, Christianity has understood the execution of Jesus as key to a cosmic drama of Atonement. Now there have been various theologies of what Atonement means and what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross. I wont bother going through them all now. But so important is Atonement in Christianity that one could be forgiven for thinking that Christians invented it all themselves. But of course they didn't. Atonement was key to the old Temple Judaism of the time (and remains so for Rabbinic Judaism too) such that what really happened was that Christians interpreted the execution of Jesus in light of the rituals and theology of the Day of Atonement as practised in the Temple (in 30CE at Jerusalem and one also at Leontopolis in Egypt). In these rituals the High Priest slaughters first a bull and then a goat and then takes the blood into the Holy of Holies. The blood is then sprinkled and smeared on various parts of the Temple. The Day of Atonement is part of the New Year festival at the autumnal equinox which celebrates the creation of the universe and the renewal of creation. Blood is life and the animal blood represents the blood/life of the High Priest who represents Yahweh, the LORD, who creates and renews creation by an outpouring of the divine life. In esoteric Judaism, this outpouring is understood as the Tree of Life of Kabbalah by which creation occurs through the outpouring of the divine light through the 10 Sefiroth or emanations that comprise the Tree and mapping the process of creation, of consciousness. In Christianity, Jesus on the cross pours out his blood/life as befits the Heavenly High Priest through whom all creation came to be. Jesus on the cross instantiates the divine processes of creation, atonement, renewal. More than anything else atonement is about healing creation, making it whole, restoring it to balance, which is why a key aspect of Jesus public career is healing the sick. Jesus also forgives sin; forgiveness and healing more often go hand in hand in the gospel accounts. Healing, renewal, liberation, and forgiveness are all part of the ancient Jewish theology of Atonement as expressed not only through the annual rituals of Yom Kippur but the associated sabbath and Jubilee years which were proclaimed on the Day of Atonement.
Atonement rituals were not unique to ancient Judaism but were part and parcel of ancient Middle Eastern religion. My own personal view is that such Atonement rituals were an attempt to approximate the maternal dimension of life, of the Godhead. This maternal dimension resurfaces, manifesting explicitly in the medieval West with the rich imagery of Jesus as Mother (and Mary as his Priest). I'm also inclined to think that the origins of this atonement model of understanding the crucifixion lie with Jesus himself who must at some stage have realised that his path had only one logical destination, given the realities of Roman rule in Palestine.
Nevertheless, while the Temple rituals of atonement were no doubt profound and awe-inspiring, death on the cross is not. It is brutal, disgusting, horrifying and shameful. Crucifixion was meant to debase and degrade as well as kill. So the sight of a person hanging bloodied and brutalised on a cross is not self-evidently an instantiation of the divine creative and healing process, far from it. I think it is this fact that lies behind the Christian stress on kenosis, self-emptying, that is understood from very early on as a hallmark of the divine, of the divine as manifested in Jesus. The god of Christianity is a god who submits to degradation and abandonment and death - eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani - this is a god who knows despair and brokenness. In other words this is a god who approaches humans on the same level, sharing human pain and desolation, who will submit to brutal death rather than summon legions of angels to lord it over humans.
God is friendship, says Aelred of Riveaulx; God is love, says John, and the language of friendship runs through John's gospel. That God becomes human so that humans can become divine is a key affirmation of early Christianity. After the crucifixion comes the resurrection. Divinisation, deification, theosis remains central to Eastern Christianity even though it has largely been forgotten in the Western churches. What does becoming divine mean? Again and again, the easterners say that it means becoming a friend of God, entering into friendship with God. God becomes human to invite humanity into friendship. By becoming friends with God one becomes more and more like God.
So to return to apokatastasis, the image of the saints praying for the salvation of all at the Last Judgment and having their prayer granted demonstrates the activity of deification, theosis. The saints are those who have died in the friendship of God. Now deified they live the divine life by praying for the salvation of all, a prayer that is, of course, answered because the love of God has no bounds. These are not two different forms of apokatastasis but integrally linked and derived from Christian language of atonement, kenosis and theosis.
Returning to Stephen's post, I particularly like his observation that God's friendship can be asked for "explicitly or implicitly". I take that to mean that asking for God's friendship does not necessarily mean embracing a specific form of Christianity or even any specific form of religion. One of the recurring dilemmas in most forms of Christianity as a result of theologies of eternal damnation is that of the righteous unbeliever. In my school days, it was one of the stock items we would put to our teachers to try to catch them out, to discomfort them. As kids we realised something was amiss with the notion that one had to be a Christian, or even a Catholic, to be "saved". What about the righteous godfearing Hindu for example? Or the righteous atheist? These were the days of Vatican 2 and after, the days when the Roman communion began the move from an exclusivist eternal hell theology to the de facto universalism of today. One of the first things to go was the tenet that there is no salvation outside the Church, which did originally mean just the Roman communion. Bad luck you Protestants, Orthodox and everybody else.
Eastern Christianity never completely abandoned apokatastasis/universalism but the West did to its great detriment. But perhaps Purgatory is the older Christian hell revived, or maybe not even revived but renamed instead. Nowadays, not just the Roman communion but much of Western Christianity has likewise returned to a de facto, at least, universalist position. Only the fundamentalists want to hold on to it and they claim to base their position on the scriptures, taken at their literal meaning. Which raises the question, if someone like Clement of Alexandria, counted as a saint and a key early Christian theologian, not only read the same scriptures as contemporary Christians but counted even more hair-raising texts like the Apocalypse of Peter as scripture, and could still hold to a universalist position, how much does the interpretation of the text depend on the framework one brings to interpret the text? Obviously, quite a lot. And perhaps contemporary Christians need to spend some time in the schools of Clement, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa (and Dame Julian of Norwich, too, for a bit of medieval universalism).
