Ecclesiasticus I: Introducing Eastern Orthodoxy
Ecclesiasticus II: Orthodox Icons, Saints, Feasts and Prayer
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[This article was first given at a conference in
Lyon of the Association of Christians Against Torture, and appeared in
Supplément de la vie Spirituelle, Sept. 1987]
This
essay is not an analysis of violence but a hymn to that evangelical virtue
which is especially attractive to those who have had too long a familiarity
with death. Such an experience is fruitful only if it is understood in
the light of the Gospel. Otherwise, repeated daily atrocities can bring
people to the edge of nothingness, to a despair inspired by the total
collapse of society. Faced with the sense of non-being that such experiences
induce, only a vision of light can disclose signs of a christic time.
1
In
the middle of a storm the only question is how to be saved from it. In
such a situation it is normal for people to be tempted by the immediacy
of a drab ultra-pragmatism. When it seems to extend indefinitely to total
despair, my only question is how to save myself from death. But when death
becomes the only fact of everyday life, because it is no longer an exceptional
event, it becomes banal. It is just another object, like a stone, and
only acquires meaning if it is huge or occurs in large numbers.
In
the abyss of the annihilation, both of things and of people—starting with
those wreaking the destruction—the true sin is insensibility. Confronted
with violence, we can join in the deathly dance, and conceive of an heroic
rescue because we have the hands of a strangler and can no longer find
an expert who will establish the distinction—if it ever existed in God's
eyes—between the combatant and the murderer. Meanwhile we defend values
we never practiced, which are ambiguous or disturbing because we defend
them on a level other than their own, and have become perverted by hatred
or mutilated by being cut off from a cohesive context of values. We will
never sufficiently realize that murder springs from the heart, that no
evil is external, and that violence is simply the forthright expression
of pride and of the vanity of tribes which cannot recognize God's face
in the Other. There can be no genuine discourse about sin because sin
is irrational. When the soul is perverted by sin, it is no longer structured
by the Logos, the source of its peace and order. Repetition of sin gives
birth to passion, which is moral folly in the pure state, the death of
the Logos, and then simply death.
When
the apostle says that death is the penalty for sin, he is not talking
about a punishment meted out to the sinner from outside by a divine verdict:
God is not an executioner. It is simply that death is inherent in every
evil that our mind presents to us; every sin contains the germ of death.
It is, first, the destroyer of inner being, and potentially of every being.
Doesn't the adulteration of relationships between people derive from an
initial message that has woven false links between them, suffocating the
truth? Physical violence is only an eloquent expression of self-hatred,
due to fear of the truth that we no longer transmit because we don't want
to live it. To victimize oneself out of hatred of God and then to falsely
reestablish oneself in life by inflicting death on others represents the
implacable logic of those who have deliberately cut their ties with the
source of life. In God's very name they have confirmed themselves in Promethean
folly, offering the challenge of a kind of freedom, denying the Word of
God who alone rules over us and in whom our freedom is based.
The
hieratic society that empties the name of God of all content practices
a horrible paganism. "God" becomes just a word used to express
the will to power and the religious symbol becomes a sign of terror. In
this way God can ultimately be transformed first to a concept, and then
into an idol, instrument of a history that one no longer receives from
him but forges for oneself and then attributes to him. Holiness gives
place to heroism: only the warrior is holy.
In
this situation each faction makes its own interpretation of divine thought
since God alone conducts war. Our faith in God is based on this foundation,
for it is he who scatters death among our enemies and in the control over
these deaths God becomes authentic. Is not man called his vicar, as the
Koran affirms? Naturally, each group assigns this role of vicar to itself.
And if we believe we are divinely invested with this function here on
earth, it follows that we have power over life and death. All war is metaphysical;
one can only go to war religiously. In the state of peace we can easily
believe ourselves secularized. Regardless of what words are used, wartime
encourages us to be mystical. If we didn't believe that the transfer from
the will of God to the human will, was being carried out legitimately,
we would begin to question ourselves as interpreters of human destiny.
This doubt would lead to reconciliation and hence to the rationality that
consists in situating the Logos as superior and anterior to our personal
option, a rationality that includes the Other.
What
we need from the outset, therefore, is the non-existence of others. They
may seem to exist, since we are fighting them, but that is only a minor
detail since the mystique of war is more important that the war.
The
others have no historical reference point; if they had, they would be
part of a discourse of unity. In a certain kind of war it is not a question
of conquering, since we are victorious from the start because of how we
think about God. Victory is a sort of platonic idea, whatever its empirical
expression. If the latter is not commensurate with the eternal model,
it is the empirical reality that has to change. By identifying ourselves
with the whole, we issue an anathema. So much the worse for the facts
if we do not numerically constitute the whole. There's always a sacred
alliance that God can support. Otherwise, God wouldn't have a permanent
vicar. The historical event that we repeat is simply a sign of the metahistorical
truth with which we are providentially entrusted. It is this mission which
founds the present and guaranties the future. Defeats only encourage the
myth that we have cultivated, which already proclaims the end of others.
When the soul is invaded by the thirst for blood, faith gives way to ideology.
The religious vocabulary is maintained but the words change their content.
They become symbols of empirical reality or of the meaning we think we
find in the concrete situation.
The
mythological reading of the past becomes the framework of interpretation:
that is why others are eliminated from the physical or moral world. If
they do not have the right to live today, their existence in the past
must have been an error. Although we cannot train them to renounce their
identity, and it is too costly to eliminate them from the land of living,
we can suppress them from the adobe of the dead by making a travesty of
history. They must not be allowed to become part of the historical memory
of their people. Their expulsion from time is more important than the
present anathema against them. If it is more convenient to tolerate them
in space, the first rule is that they accept the status of aliens in history.
But
a victim who does not revolt is not destroyed completely. The combat is
carried out to the end only if the minority does not renounce its reading
of history. The necessity of ideology forces the minority to renounce
its identity, or at least to adopt a mask that will perhaps veil its personality
for a long time. Ideology recognizes a special time during which foundations
were laid. Such a period does not simply refer to a period of history
but to a rhythm, a sort of Bergsonian durée, which will liberate
you, if you are its accomplice—whether out of fear or self-interest—from
your specific identity in order to hurl you into what has been chosen
for your salvation because it constitutes the truth.
2
What
I have described is a subtle, frightening violence, but which, strictly
speaking, can dispense with the use of force. Ultimately, the physical
weapon is present only as symbol of the anathema.
For
there is no question but that it is the gods who make war. Earth only
reflects the impiety of heaven. Death, the last enemy, is so foreign to
our nature that it has to be submitted to divine reason. Repressed by
men can women as an eternal thorn in their history, it can be grounded
only in God who has the right to choose his lieutenants according to his
good pleasure. That is why a doctrine of death does not really have its
place in a religion of fatum, in which gods and goddesses endure
human passions; a doctrine of the death of others is conceivable only
in monotheism, in which God does not know this love-passion that leads
him to death. If God does not choose death as his lot, and his resurrection,
as well as that of others, which emerges from it, he would inevitably
vow those who are not his own to destruction. The God who does not recognize
the dialogue interior to himself will give even less recognition to the
dialogue with pagans or infidels. To the Hebraic sensibility, the question
of Job receive a final answer in the rewards that he obtains after his
test. For those who recognize the incommensurable, however, it is only
in later monotheism, in which one finds revealed the Lamb which has been
sacrificed before all ages, that a response is given to Job.
I
will pass quickly over the history of Christian peoples in their justification
of violence. "Holy wars" were led against "infidels"
by various Christian sovereigns, especially in Spain. If the Crusades
did not borrow all the elements of Jihad from Islam, it is nonetheless
true that the rights of God, of western pilgrims, or of the Byzantine
Empire, were defended by mystics. Addressing the English, St. Bernard
of Clairvaux declares that "The earth trembles because the Lord
of heaven is losing the very land where he appeared among men… And now,
because of our sins, the enemy of the Cross has commenced to raise his
sacrilegious head and to lay waste the Promised Land." For St.
Bernard the crusade represents a sign of salvation, the pardon of sins,
and eternal glory. This master of Christian spirituality is, on every
count, in agreement with Islam, which practices conquest in the name of
God and sees itself in the role of conqueror. But Islam is not tied to
a place but to the Word and justifies holy war out of a desire to propagate
God's word in conquered territory. In countries united to the house of
Islam the Moslem religion is imposed on polytheists if they agree to live
by it, but hardly ever on Jews and Christians.
In
addition, Moslem holy war requires the combatant to prepare himself spiritually
by struggling against passions. St. Bernard, without knowing it, is a
disciple of Islam in that the crusader, like the Moslem, is to achieve
salvation through combat on behalf of God. Here the position of the Church
of the East is clear. St. John Chrysostom pronounces anathema against
anyone who teaches that we are allowed to kill heretics. Moreover, the
Church of Cappadocia with St. Basil, as well as the Church of Byzantium,
have categorically refused to canonize soldiers killed in battle as martyrs.
It
is not my intention to discuss the idea of just war in St. Augustine and
St. Thomas Aquinas. I don't believe that Christian reflection on this
theme has ever been as perverted as in Byzantium, where each morning every
Orthodox Church in the world sings: "God save our people and bless
our heritage. Give our pious emperor victory over the barbarians."
It is true that the Byzantines only accepted the idea of defensive war,
and that for them the oecumene included all the Christian nations
of the empire. In their eyes the failure to halt the barbarian invasion
would have meant the oppression of the Church and the rule of the uncivilized.
I can also understand their fierce desire to save Constantinople, dear
to God and to his Mother, before its fall in the 15th century.
How many holy monks, illustrious prelate, and venerable witnesses of the
most beautiful liturgy in the world were able to sing in the Acathiste
that the Theotokos was the rampart of the Empire? How could the Church,
which in a completely Biblical coherence, produced the only equilibrium
I know of, between a theology of the cross and a theology of glory, how
could it for so many centuries, in the purest places of meditation, confuse
the cause of Christ with that of the Empire, and later of all the Orthodox
kingdoms? How could it affirm in its liturgy that the Cross is the power
of the emperor? This was the atmosphere familiar to the Prophet of Islam,
which the Koran will consecrate and surpass. At the time of the Cistercian
reform people knew little about Byzantium and understood it badly, but
the Western intelligentsia was fascinated by Islam which they read in
its sources.
3
Nevertheless,
this question cannot be properly clarified as long as violence is not
exorcised and its biblical foundations overthrown. If Orthodox Christians
really admit that the God of the Old Testament led Israel from victory
to victory and submitted all nations to it, they have no reason to question
the theology of defensive war of the Byzantines or the Crusades. Keep
in mind that it was with the purest intentions that the tribunal of the
Inquisition erected its stakes. It was with the ideal of the perfect man
that the Nazi warrior carried on his belt the inscription from Isaiah:
"Gott mit uns." What does the Bible say on this subject?
"When Israel saw the mighty deed that Yahweh had performed against
the Egyptians, the people revered Yahweh." (Ex 14:31)
"I shall go through Egypt and strike down the
first-born in Egypt, man and beast alike"(Ex 12:12). Yahweh
fights for them and brings them into the land of the Canaanites. During
the occupation of the land, the Eternal One "will expel the
Canaanites, the Hittites"(Josh 3:10) and the other peoples.
He delivers Jericho and its king and pronounces this curse to its captain:
"Accursed
before Yahweh be the man who raises up
and rebuilds this city [Jericho!]
On his first-born will he lay its foundations,
on his youngest son set up its gates!"(6:26)
At
the conquest of Ai Joshua will say: " When you have captured
the town, set fire to it, in obedience to Yahweh's command."(8:8).
In this conquest led by God himself we have, ahead of time, the policy
of scorched earth and genocide. And the Psalms praise these great deeds.
Of the enemies of the people, David says:
"As
fire devours a forest,
as a flame sets mountains ablaze,
so drive them away with your tempest,
by your whirlwind fill them with terror." (Ps 83:15-16)
The
God Sabaoth, in service of Israel and its hegemony over the land of Canaan,
only reflects the thirst for conquest of a confederation of Semitic tribes,
a spirit that is totally foreign to the unfailingly loving nature of the
One who is the God of nations and rules history in all its developments.
God, whose name, presence, truth and unicity are love, cannot lend Himself
to the massacres perpetrated by Joshua son of Nun.
There
is a related issue in the way St. Paul deals with the concubinage of Abraham.
The perfect chastity which he advocates in his Epistles is not invoked
as a judgement on the patriarch. Nevertheless, when the apostle employs
allegory to explain Abraham's two wives as figures of the two alliances,
he does not necessarily eliminate the historical meaning of the text.
The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews seems scarcely to criticize the
prostitution of Rahab, which becomes part of the history of salvation:
"It was through faith that the walls of Jericho fell down"
(Heb 11:30) and by faith the Hebrews "conquered kingdoms"
(Heb 11:32).
In
opposition to this bloody deity there is the image of the gentle God whose
voice is heard in the great prophets, especially Jeremiah and Hosea, and
in the Song of Songs. In the betrohal of Yahweh and his people, just as
in the Servant songs, we recognize the accents of the Gospel. Confronted
with the irreducible opposition between these two faces of the Lord, Marcion,
in the middle of the 2nd century, thought that the wars, judgments
and punishments described in Scripture could not be attributed to the
good God, Father of Jesus Christ, but to an inferior deity, the just God
of the Jews. It was obvious that the Church, in order to preserve the
unity of the Scripture, had to reject Marcionite dualism. Byzantine iconography
is so impregnated with the identity between Yahweh and Christ that it
always writes on the nimbus that surrounds Christ's head o
wn, the Septuagint translation of Yahweh in
the epiphany of the Burning Bush. The patristic exegesis of the Old Testament
is basically typological. Clement of Rome, who tells the story of Rahab
and the spies in detail, says that the scarlet coed that the prostitute
attaches to the window is a type of the blood shed by Christ. The raising
of Moses' arms above the battle between Israel and Amalek will be interpreted
by the Tradition as a type of the Cross, and exegesis reflected in Byzantine
hymns and vigil readings.
The
problem concerns the how of revelation, the real meaning of inspiration.
If it is right to affirm that, in a certain manner, the Old Testament
is an icon of the New, the latter is also type or prototype of the Old,
in the way that Saint Basil calls the bread and wine of the Eucharist
before the epiclesis antetypes of the Body and Blood of the Lord. Thus
I would rather apply the term type to the realities of the New Testament,
with the Gospel already inaugurating the eschaton. Nevertheless, the typological
exegesis of the Fathers adopted by the liturgy can veil the historical
meaning. That is why I would like to propose, in a complementary sense,
what could be called a kenotic reading of the Scriptures. I borrow the
term from the Epistle to the Philippians where it is a question of the
humiliations of Christ, from the form of God to the form of man, from
the form of man to the form of a slave, from the form of a slave to death
on the cross. In the kenosis the divinity of nature does not disappear
but it is not made manifest. In this mystery divine knowledge becomes
operational only through human growth. The synergy of the two natures
also runs through Scripture, which is the body of Christ. Because of divine
condescension the Word is sometimes profoundly hidden beneath words, underneath
the fleshly covering of Scripture. This is what the West calls the personality
or subjectivity of the sacred author. In fact, all divine writing shapes
itself in human terms and everything human bears in itself the divine
model. In the light of this explanation I refuse to attribute the wars
waged by Israel to the divine will. Otherwise we get trapped in the morality
of means, making death an instrument of life, and the destruction of various
tribes becomes a condition of faith, and part of God's plan for the exaltation
and prosperity of a particular people.
Yahweh
cannot be pardoned for his mighty deeds of war by peoples who were crushed
because of the weight of history and the unreadiness of Israel through
the ages. In any case, the notion of progressive revelation can be understood
only in terms of spiritual maturity, a purification even within divine
beauty. For there is no possible path from the warrior-God of Exodus and
Joshua to the God of Jesus Christ. That monstrous image cannot be made
acceptable. The progress of revelation seems to me to depend on Hegelian
dialectic and there is no trace of this awareness of evolution in Hebraic
thought. I do not believe that the Bible is truly a history of salvation:
God reveals himself in time, but history is not the matrix of divine thought.
It is the locus of revelations, and later, the incarnation of the Word.
Hence it is the area of faith's intelligibility, but it can in no way
be its formative principle. If history is all human, it receives the divine
without any confusion. That is why Scripture is not the unfolding of the
divine in time but the identity of divine epiphanies across time; the
only difference between the epiphanies is that they are not clothed with
the same splendor, because of the divine pedagogy, or the economy that
God uses, out of love, veiling himself to different degrees.
But
if everything was consummated on the cross, the ultimate truth about God
is a truth of love. If Christ is the revealer and locus of divine discourse,
He presents himself, in His life and death, as the only exegete of Scripture
and its sole reference point. On this basis God was not the author of
the sufferings of Canaan and of conquered peoples. When Joshua commanded
armies, He who will later bear the same name was already, in his precedence
to Abraham, on the side of the victim, just as he was on Isaac's side
when God of Abraham commanded him to offer his son as sacrifice. Yahweh
was not revealed by his raised arms and his powerful hand but in every
weakness of those whom the armies of God Sabaoth were overwhelming. That
God was a simplistic reading that Israel made of its own power. Israel
was the people of God but not the body of Yahweh. This reality of God's
body was not able to be revealed prior to the intra-Trinitarian kenosis
and the nothingness of love brought about by Jesus. It was necessary for
the Lord, by his suffering, to attain the perfection of his humanity so
that the very perfection of God would be known.
It
is only by beginning with this feebleness of God that we can understand
Jesus' teaching and the unanimous tradition before Augustine about not
resisting evil.
The
great tempter, face to face with the apparent powerlessness of Jesus on
the cross, demands that he come down from it. The supreme temptation is
to believe that we can change the world without God, or that one can,
one ought, to impose human instruments on God. At the moment when the
Lord of the universe seems to have abandoned the world and to have therefore
proclaimed his own death, humanity lays hold of this emptiness in order
to make justice reign. The revolution and the counter-revolution, which
are of Promethean scope, have as their point of departure the absence
of God as Savior. Berdyaev was right to maintain that every revolution
is degraded because it starts out with the illusion that one can establish
justice by getting rid of people, and putting itself in their place, establish
other principles of government.
A
new combination of forces, representing other social backgrounds, will
have to intervene, bringing a new social dynamic, so that a creative breath
can animate the poor, who have previously been left out of consideration.
Violence is presented as the only adequate response to the invisible violence
exercised on "the victims of oppression." There are, of course,
dehumanizing situations, structures that represent "established"
violence. A large percentage of humanity is reduced to such despair that
violence seems to be their only recourse. Those who cannot exercise their
right to participate in power or exercise a public function because of
their color, religion, or ideological neutrality, those who are deprived
of their right to vote, and cannot get an education, adequate food and
medical care, are undergoing an injustice which is the worst violences.
Civil war or war on behalf of others, which produces further complications
and reproduces itself indefinitely in a vicious cycle that ends only with
general famine, shows the absurdity of violence. At that level of intensity
and extension to protest against violence is meaningless. The institutionalization
of war makes it impossible to bring up St. Thomas' question about revolt
against the tyrant. There is obviously what Dom Helder Camara calls a
"spiral of violence," whose dialectic is injustice/revolt/repression.
One is beyond the simple right or duty to change the government when all
governments are reduced to powerlessness in an uncontrollable situation
that has reached the ultimate in irrationality. Under these conditions
violence is no longer even a means. When hatred, fear, suspicion, corruption,
fanaticism and oppression have reached their climax, the question of the
option between one and another political solution becomes superfluous.
Every political attitude is a calculation and hence something less than
complete testimony, for at this level of the disintegration of society,
as defined by parallel existences, every policy is political.
A
genuine politics is conceivable only when it grows out of an interior
debate. Since such discourse includes the other, one already places oneself
beyond the question of means. I have to liberate myself from the narrow
notion of the group and my identity in the group in order to welcome another
face, in the light of which I can perceive my own, and enter the world
of the person. In the perspective of a purpose that foreshadows a communion
of love, society is not just an empirical reality concerned with law and
economic development. From the point of view of effectiveness, it is a
matter of trying humbly to put order into a society according to appropriate
and provisory formulas. Perhaps we can't aim at anything else, especially
in the Third World where everything is so fragile. Politics can't be redeemed
in its inner being. If humanity has a purpose, a society of men and women
is not a number but a communion of people, which ultimately conceivable
only if they are all deified together by the Eucharist. Both citizenship
and the state are consummated only in the eschatological community that
will put an end to tribal status, nations, and separate languages. I am
only presenting a testimony; I make no claims as to the political merits
of such an evangelical commitment. It would be political suicide if politics
is considered an autonomous domain. In a spiritual vision, however, the
frontiers between human communities tend to disappear, and it would be
absurd to have one behavior completely governed by realpolitik
and another dictated by a search for the Kingdom. If the Kingdom of God
is seen in filigree in the empire of Caesar, that is because there is
no such thing as civil society in the pure state. The latter is ordained
to the society of communion that englobes it or gives life to it. As Origen
said, "The Church is the cosmos of the cosmos"—it is itself
the spiritual universe which contains the historical universe.
The
unanimous tradition of the primitive Church against war clearly shows
that it was doctrinal position. One might have that loyalty to the Empire
and Paul's adhesion to the pax romana would have meant acceptance
of the military order. But apart from the centurion Cornelius and the
jailer baptized by Paul at Philippi, we don't find any mention of a Christian
soldier before 170. The non-participation of Christians in the defense
of Jerusalem in the year 70 and their flight to Pella shows that they
were hardly interested of Jerusalem. The pagan Celsus, about 178, exhorts
Christians to aid the Emperor with all their strength in order to support
justice, to fight for him and serve as soldiers because if the Emperor
were left alone and abandoned, the res publica would fall into
the hands of the lawless and the barbarians1. We know from
the writings of Tertullian that there were a large number of soldiers
in the Roman armies, and nevertheless, in his Catholic period, Tertullian
writes that the Lord, by disarming Peter, has challenged every soldier.
No uniform is legitimate among Christians, he asserts, if it is linked
to an illegitimate duty2. Those who desire baptism in the Lord
must abstain from military service and every public function.
Origen,
drawing on Tertullian's interpretation of Jesus' arrest, when he forbids
Peter to kill the soldier, says that Christians cannot defend themselves
against their enemies, that they cannot destroy anyone, that they are
no longer to take up the sword against a nation, no longer to learn war.
He responds to Celsus's argument by saying that if the barbarians are
evangelized they will submit to the law and become gentle, and only Christians
will rule, since, in that case, the Word would have taken possession of
all souls.
Among
the apologists we find the same attitude. Athenagoras, after speaking
of massacres, the devastation of cities, the burning of homes along with
their inhabitants, and the destruction of entire populations, affirms
that no suffering in this life can make reparations for such sins. As
for Christians, he says that they cannot allow anyone to be put to death,
even for a just cause. For Clement of Alexandria those who practice war
no longer fear God.
My
point in citing these texts is to show that the earliest Christians not
only had a horror of war and refused to justify it, but believed they
could overcome it by faith, prayer, and the power of God. Whether or not
this attitude is utopian, it ought to be preserved since it establishes
a testimony that introduces the fire of the of the Spirit in a death situation
that can grow to such proportions that every option becomes meaningless,
and the only thinkable "solution" consists in killing the largest
possible number of one's opponents. Although this means a political triumph,
it will soon bring about the resumption of hostilities. When no one has
the means to carry out such a policy, ideology is not only overcome but
shown to be false, foreign to its initial, natural purpose, which is the
maintenance of existence. When the will to death becomes a pleasure and
the princes of the city are armed children, one can't even bring the theory
of non-violence because it will be judged on the basis of effectiveness
and preached as apolitical theory. But the sweetness of the Gospel imposes
itself apart from any concern for effectiveness, out of a search for salvation,
as a sign of the Kingdom that is to come. When a country crumbles completely
and people feel like animals, tracked night and day, and are constantly
astonished they remain alive, the Lord becomes their only resting-place.
In
such a situation faith is no longer only the evidence of what one does
not see. It is something that welcomes you when you have just escaped
from a sniper. It is even that which welcomes the sniper when he recognizes
that he is assailed night and day by his victims, whose faces he recognizes.
Listen to this statement of Maxim the Confessor:
If
possession of the indestructible Kingdom is given to the humble and gentle,
who would be so without love and desire for divine goods as not to make
a supreme movement toward humility and gentleness in order to become,
as far as it is possible for human beings, the imprint of the Kingdom
of God by bearing within them by grace the exact configuration in Spirit
to Christ, the great King? …. The soul, in which the majesty of the divine
image has been naturally infused, is transformed by free will to the likeness
of god… it becomes the all-splendid habitation of the Holy Spirit… Christ
always dies voluntarily and mysteriously, becoming incarnate in those
who are saved, creating the soul to which a virgin mother gives birth.
Because
of its close, everyday contact with those who weep, the Gospel represents,
above all, compassion of heart, a gentler glance, the baptism of tears.
The patience of the saints allows us to understand that a considerable
number of men and women no longer have any grounds for imagining a future,
either immediate or long-term, but God reveals himself to them in his
splendor in the midst of their humiliation. This Kingdom, which is within
us, becomes the portion of those who no longer judge. For those who have
lived through the experience of a nameless abyss, there is nothing but
sacrificial death and martyrdom. The new creation is within you. You know
this, quite apart from every reference to history, or any human realization.
This
position does not challenge the Christian's political commitment in other
situations, but it has even greater understanding for becoming disengaged,
with a view to the Kingdom. Such a disengagement is serious only in an
awareness of political reality; it means a complete purity in the face
of every manipulation of public opinion and adhesion to the national cause
with an independence of mind, and openness to the foreigner, and a knowledge
of all thee elements of transfiguration in the historical event. Those
who are apolitical are not free men and women, but have fallen into an
absence, a human regression. It is out of an interior strength that one
can renounce the use of force and every form of domination. That is the
liberating knowledge to which the meek of heart bear witness, in imitation
of the One of whom it is written: "He will not brawl or cry
out, his voice is not heard in the streets, he will not break the crushed
reed, or snuff the faltering wick." (Mt 12:19-20; see Isaiah
42:3-4)
Jesus'
"way", already described in the first Servant Song of Isaiah,
reflects the very behavior of Yahweh when he appears to Elias at Horeb.
There, unlike at Carmel, the encounter with God is not accompanied by
the massacre of prophets:
Then
he [the prophet] was told, 'Go out and
stand on the mountain before Yahweh.' For at that moment Yahweh was going
by. A mighty hurricane split the mountains and shattered the rocks before
Yahweh. But Yahweh was not in the hurricane. And after the hurricane,
an earthquake. But Yahweh was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake,
fire. But Yahweh was not in the fire. And after the fire, alight murmuring
sound. And when Elijah heard this, he covered his face with his cloak
and went out and stood at the entrance to the cave. (1 Kings 19:11-13)
This
gentle murmur was the locus of divine revelation, the ultimate revelation.
It
is not by chance that of all the virtues with which the sacred humanity
of the Lord was clothed, he retained only one to propose to his disciples:
"Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of
heart" (Mt 11:29). This virtue, among others, will be the
fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23).
A
Christian people, whose heart has been converted to the Holy Face and
which lives the kenosis of the face of God, may in fidelity to the absolute
never produce anything spectacular, but simply transmit the words that
have been said to it, the forms that contain its prayer. Carrying the
cross of Jesus in obedience to the commandment of love, it will bear witness,
in the darkness of history, to the eternal Passover.
Translated
by Joe Cunneen
1.
Origen, Against Celsus, VIII, 68.
2. De Idolatreia, 19.
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