God's friendship

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

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).

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.

COLIN GRIFFITHS - REQUIESCAT IN PACE

I planned this to be an occasional blog i.e. a posting frequency of once a week roughly. But here I am putting up two posts on the same day. But yesterday I got word of the death of Colin Griffiths in Newcastle. I’d been emailed the night before that Colin was in hospital and not expected to live very long.

Where to begin with Colin? Maybe right at the very beginning. I don’t think Colin or I ever worked out when or where we first met. We had too many overlapping circles of friends, which was a fact of Brisbane gay life and a fact consequently of the Brisbane HIV/AIDS ‘community’ in those days. But one thing Colin and I worked out pretty quickly was that we were astro twins, born the same day, same year, same city – Sydney 5/7/1952. I had a pretty good idea of when I was born – my birth, it turns out, was a bit of a medical emergency and so my father remembered the nurses saying the time I was born when he went in to the hospital to visit Mum. However Colin only knew that he was born around lunchtime. His father remembered getting the word when he came home for lunch. I ran up a chart for him on www.astro.com for the time 12.10pm. I’m not into rectifications and the time was sort of a compromise based on Colin’s recollections of what his father had told him but the chart seemed to make some sense. But I guess the interesting thing about astro twins is we represented to each other different possibilities of what our lives might have been given that birth, our own birth, is something over which we humans have no control whatsoever. But while we might represent different possibilities to each other we also had some uncanny instances of parallel tracking. I remember still to this day when we were first alerted to this fact. I can’t quite remember the year, 1989 or 1990. I was then working for the AIDS Council and Colin worked for the Injectors AIDS organisation, QuIVAA. We both went to a meeting in Qld Health, it might have been a World AIDS Day planning meeting or maybe a meeting re the non-English language speakers national AIDS campaign that the federal gov’t launched in 1989. But anyway Colin and I turned up at the meeting wearing exactly the same shirt. We were also wearing blue jeans and sneakers. Jeans and sneakers were fairly standard dress in the community sector and while jeans come in a variety of colours blue is pretty standard. But the same shirt! Everyone commented on it as did we ourselves who had a bit of a giggle about it. Neither of us knew we had that shirt – think I might have bought mine not long before. I don’t know when Colin bought his.

In 1996, Colin moved into the house I was living in, in Brisbane’s West End. The house belonged to Stephen Brown who had also worked in the AIDS Council in those days and was studying social work at Uni of Qld. Both Steven and I had started our doctorates. Colin, Steven and I lived together in that house until late 2003 when Colin moved to Newcastle. By that stage Steven had dropped out of his doctorate and was back working at the AIDS Council. The following year major funding changes meant the end of QuAC as we knew it to be rejigged in ’05 as a community based health promotion organisation, Qld Association of Healthy Communities (also pronounced quack). Steven took the change as an opportunity for ‘early retirement’ (he was younger than me) to be partly financed by selling the house. In retirement, he would live between Pattaya, Thailand and Brisbane. It was in Thailand, two years ago that Steven died suddenly of a stroke, pretty much on this day or the day after. So it is quite uncanny that Colin, whose health had been deteriorating markedly over the last year, should die at this time. It’s also very strange to realise that the two people with whom I lived for 7-8 years are now both dead.

So I’m thinking about Colin and thinking about Steven and thinking about death. Curiously next month will mark 24 years since my first experience of a friend dying from AIDS. It will also be three years since the death of an old ex of mine in Wagga, also from HIV disease (it seems Marc could not respond to the treatments cocktail being given to him – but given that his sister had died in the year before, reopening all manner of family wounds I suspect he might have died of grief). Like most gay men my age, I got used to the ways of death and funerals a long time ago. What was strange for me was the lull that occurred from the late 90s onwards with the kicking in of the new treatment regimes. But the last four years have been marked by a rising tide of deaths and funerals, the only difference being that most are now not HIV related.

I prayed for Colin this morning and will pray for him over the coming days. For some time now as part of my spiritual practice I pray for those who’ve died. It’s a very Catholic thing to do – also very Buddhist, especially for those in the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition. I remember a film I saw many years ago in my AIDS Council days. I can’t remember the name – maybe it was Longtime Companion? – but it was about the pandemic and it’s impact on a community of gay men in New York in the 80s. There’s a beach, probably at Fire Island, that recurs throughout the film. Early on it’s a place of much gay abandon – the favourite summer haunt of these New York queens. The final scene, which stays with me still, is set on the beach. A couple of surviving characters are on the beach talking about the last few years remembering all those who have died. All of sudden great crowds of people surge onto the beach. They are all the dead, and the living, back together in an amazing moment of gay eschatology, recapitulation, reconciliation. It reminded me of the final chapter in D M Thomas’s White Hotel, itself a remarkable evocation of life, life within death, life beyond death. Following the bayonet rape/death of the main character at Babi Yar in the previous chapter, this chapter opens with the arrivals of all these trainloads of people, including Lisa, the main character, at the end of their journey of 'resettlement in the east', in a dreamscape Palestine beyond, which is rapidly filling with all manner of folk as the massacres of World War 2 progress. And while the initial arrivals are Jewish this Palestine is a place open to all and hence not marked out by borders and fences, not owned/claimed by anyone.

The German Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch, asked how can we live when the Revolution comes knowing how many countless generations did not make it to the new age of justice and freedom. How can one live in the new age knowing that it rests on the bones of the countless dead? An AIDS musical from the 80s ends with Vaccine Day celebrating the eventual end of the reign of HIV. But what of those who never made it? A Russian theologian/philosopher, from the 19th century I think or maybe early 20th century (his essay is in an anthology on Russian spirituality, which I might have packed away but even if not, I’m housesitting and so don’t have access to my books), wrote that the only task of Christians is to raise the dead. He doesn’t actually say what he means by that, at least not in any sort of logical, rational way. His essay is mystical, poetic. Intuitively, poetically, I know what he means but to put it in dry mundane speech is not possible. At best I can only say – to raise the dead means to remember them, to value them, to live and hope for a time of recapitulation, reconciliation, restoration. Vaccine Day, the Revolution can only be fully realised if the dead themselves somehow share in that moment.

One text that turns up frequently on ancient lists of New Testament texts is the Apocalypse of Peter. If people think the Book of Revelation is scary (I don’t, actually) then they should read the Apocalypse of Peter. It’s really nasty stuff. But in my readings of and around this text I stumbled across a reference to a scholar (whose name escapes me now) who argued that despite its horrors, the Apocalypse of Peter originally included the notion that at the last judgment those who are consigned to damnation are saved by the prayers of the saints (i.e. Christians) that indeed those saints will be praying for all those others, that it is a natural thing for saints to do. The idea is definitely found in the 2nd century Epistle of the Apostles and also in the Christian Sybillene books. And I wonder if such thinking lies behind eastern and western catholic traditions of praying to the saints, especially the Virgin Mary, and asking them to pray for us. And does such thinking lie behind the extraordinary medieval accounts of how Mary saves so many reprobates (read ordinary people trying to get through life in all its day to day fucked-up-ness) who have kept up praying to her despite all else? (Some of these stories are quite delightful and would make the fire and brimstone set wince) In other words, far back in the Christian tradition there seems to be the notion of a universal reconciliation and restoration. I should add that in 2 Enoch, at the last judgment all the animals are there to give testimony on human behaviour, to call humans to account. In other words it’s not just humans who are included in the new era of the eschaton. For those who don’t know it, 2 Enoch is part of a whole library of ancient Jewish literature that was only preserved by Christians (in 2 Enoch’s case, Slavonic Christians).

And so Catholics pray for the dead. We pray in part because we recognise we are part of a community that transcends time and space including the walls of death. (That is why Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic churches are adorned with images icons paintings statues of the saints – to acknowledge and affirm that community) We pray for the living and we pray for the dead and (the hope) the dead pray for us too. It is part of what it means to work together, to help each other, to support each other. It is part of justice making, of community making, of what in Judaism is known as tikkun olam, the spiritual repair of the world, a repair that comes through, to coin a term of Peter Kropotkin, mutual aid. Mutual aid is the mark of the Revolution, of Vaccine Day. It’s how the Revolution is waged. It’s how to raise the dead.

And so I pray for Colin and I hope he’s saying a prayer for me. And I look forward to catching up with him sometime, somehow, perhaps on a beach, or a beachside terrace. We can share a few camparis and soda and some joints (my stash runneth over). And he’ll laugh and say ‘it was a bit fucked up sometimes but we did it fine’. (And I hope, even though he didn’t like parties, that Steven will come along for a drink too).

Solidarity forever!