Loving angels instead

Rosemary A. Arthur says that in the intertestamental period – that’s the gap between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, the way that the Jews saw God underwent a transformation, which correlated closely to the transformation of the political order they lived in. The kings in the Old Testament are a very human bunch. They screw up; they get angry; they fancy women; they go to the loo; they listened to women fighting over a baby; they asked for ornery shepherd boys to play them music. And their kingdoms were also pretty small: they were never that far away from the ordinary people. And the God of the Old Testament was similarly engaged. He showed up in bushes; he got people out of bed in the middle of the night; he threatened to go off in a huff because his people were disobedient; he talked about Israel as the beautiful woman he loved. He was right there, in the middle of history, talking to ordinary people, accessible.

But when the Israelites went into exile, they were caught up into far vaster empires with much more complicated bureaucracies, and layer after layer of civil servants. Alexander the Great was an almost mythical Emperor; his empire spanning continents, containing unimaginable numbers of people. And as the meaning of kingship and authority changed, so did the Jewish conception of God. Increasingly, God’s transcendence was emphasised, his utter apartness from ordinary human beings. And because he was so inaccessible and far away, there was a new need for something to bridge the gap between God an man. This is where the angels came in. Picking up some ideas from Babylon, Jewish thinkers slowly developed the idea of a hierarchy of angels mediating between God and man, much as the ranks of civil servants mediated between Alexander and ordinary people. All sorts of hierarchical schemes of angels were proposed, often corresponding pretty closely to the structure of contemporary royal courts. This idea of mediating angels got picked up by Neoplatonism, Gnosticism (an early Christian heresy), and early Christianity. It surfaces in Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Dionysius the Areopagite, to name but a few.

I think it’s interesting that a change in the structure of society was reflected in a change in ideas about God. I wonder how much that’s still the case. Hans Kung, a Catholic theologian (though not one very popular with the present Pope), argued that, as the infallibility and authority of the Pope became more important over time, there was a corresponding rise in the importance of Mary within Catholic devotion and doctrine. Maybe Mary fulfils a similar function to the angels: she is accessible and human where God, like the Pope, is other, distant, and cut off from ordinary people by layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy.

Is there a relationship between the way that we seem to want politicians to sell themselves to us as personalities and the way that we talk about a ‘personal relationship with Jesus’? Is there a relationship between the way that we’re subjects of the Queen, but don’t let her have any real power, and wheel her out at Christmas and special occasions to say a few kind things that the fact that 70% of British people call themselves Christians and yet hardly ever attend church, except maybe at Christmas and special occasions? Any more?

A vision of Jesus

I've been reading some letters by Pseudo-Dionysius today. He's mostly famous for being an apophatic theologian, talking about the limitations of our language for naming God, and so a lot of modern discussion of him are all about abstract philosophical things. But reading his letters, a different side comes out. I'm going to tell you a story he tells, but first, a bit of context.

He's called 'Pseudo' Dionysius because he writes as those he's writing in the very early Church, the Greek convert mentioned in Acts 17:34, though actually he was probably writing in 5th century Syria. In Letter 8, he is apparently writing to Demophilus, a monk, and he tells Demophilus a story that was apparently told to him by a guy called Carpos who he met on Crete. Who knows, frankly, whether this story is true but just given a new historical context, or made up, but it's a good 'un so I think worth retelling regardless. The story goes like this.

Carpos was a very good man, who really knew God. Once, a man he knew tempted someone away from the church and into godlessness in the very days of his baptism which were supposed to be supremely joyful. Carpos intended to pray for them, asking God to draw them back with his goodness. His plan was to pray for this until he died or until they returned to the love of God. But instead, he found that he was angry and bitter. In this rotten mood, he went to bed, and slept fitfully until he woke up in the middle of the night, at the time he would normally wake up to praise God.

He started to pray, but boy, was he in a rotten mood. Instead of praying for salvation for the two men, he told God that it was wrong that they should even continue to live, and asked God to strike them down with a thunderbolt. As he prayed, the place he was in shook, and was split in half down the middle. A shining light appeared, and the heavens seemed to unfold, revealing Jesus in the midst of an angelic host. As Carpos looked down, he saw a great chasm. The two sinful men were at the edge of the chasm, starting to slip further into it. They were being attacked by serpents which tried to drag them down into the pit.

Carpos was overjoyed by what he saw, completely forgetting the vision of Jesus above him. He was impatient, seeing that the two men still hadn't fallen into the chasm, and tried, unsuccessfully, to help the serpents drag them down. Finally, he looked up again, and saw that Jesus had left his heavenly throne to offer a helping hand to the two struggling men, helped by the angels. He said to Carpos,

'So your hand is raised up and I am now the one you must hit. Here I am, ready once again to suffer for the salvation of man and I would very gladly endure it if in this way I could keep men from sin. Look to yourself. Maybe you should be living with the serpents in the pit rather than with God and with the good angels who are the friends of man.'

Photo credit: Vatican website

Nemesius of Emesa on human nature

Nemesius of Emesa is a bit of a mysterious figure, so obscure in fact that the latest translation of the only book of his we have ('On Human Nature') has been translated recently by a medical historian rather than a theologian. He was writing in the late 4th century, around the same time as the more famous Gregory of Nyssa (honestly, he really is quite well known in the world of patristics). He's interesting because, unlike a lot of his contemporaries, he seems to have been pretty hot on the classical philosophers and thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Galen (a big medical man) rather than just having read about them second hand.

Nemesius claims to be the Bishop of Emesa, which we have no reason to disbelieve. Emesa was one of the more hellenised (that is, Greek culture-ified) parts of Syria, so he may well have had a proper classical education. Although he wrote in the fourth century, no one seems to have heard of him until the 7th century, when first Maximus the Confessor wholesale lifted bits of his writing and incorporated them into his work (he wasn't a big one for quoting his sources, which was more ok then than it is now), and then John of Damascus both quoted and acknowledged him. He later became popular in 'floria legia', which are big books of quotations from the Fathers which were used in Byzantine monasteries to educate monks, functioning a bit like the wikipedia of their day: want to know about the incarnation? Read this bit from Father X, he's good.

The reason that Nemesius got popular in these compilations is that he had a very neat solution to a very vexing problem. Given that humans are able to choose to repent, or to sin once they've been righteous for a bit, what's to say that the angels and demons can't similarly recant and swap places? No one really wanted to allow for this possibility, because it causes all sorts of celestial chaos: bad enough keeping tabs on flighty humans, let alone a whole cosmos of beings switching allegiances and changing their mind, and heaven forbid we have to start seeing even Satan as capable of repentance.

But how do you explain the difference between humans and the spiritual beings? The problem was made worse by Origen, who occupies an interesting place between respected Father of the Church and heretic. On the one hand, he came up with some important and influential theological ideas; on the other, he thought that the cosmos had started out with loads of beings, all of whom had fallen. The ones who fell a lot and were really naughty were made into demons; the ones who hardly screwed up at all became angels, and the middling sinners became human beings. Odd, no?

How to get away from Origen, then? Nemesius did it by arguing that the thing that's distinctive about human beings is that they have both souls and bodies. Animals and plants have bodies but no souls; angels and demons have souls but no bodies. This uniquely human combination gives humans two special privileges. On the one hand, only humans are pardoned when they repent; on the other, they're the only bodies to be granted eternal life. The pardoning privilege comes from the body, because unlike the angels and demons, human beings have animal needs and affections which can lead them astray. The bodily immortality privilege comes from the soul, which is immortal and thus grants immortality to the body.

This is a very satisfying theological solution, because it's often difficult for the Fathers to give the body much significance - they tend to see the soul as more important and generally better, and so often drift away from orthodox Christianity which demands the redemption and resurrection of the body. It also, I think, plays nicely into a lot of contemporary discussions about the future destiny of the physical creation, which has implications both for Christian environmental ethics, and also for our attitude to work. Whether it solves the problematic questions about the potential salvation of the devils which arise from the discussion of evil as deprivation, though, I'm less sure...