We are rational people, as far as reason takes us. And we want to take it to the very end. We want reason and logical principles to determine what we do or think or feel. When I say ‘we’, I mean us Western Europeans. That’s why I have no particular affection for the notion of ‘faith’, or not until recently. I came to the Church and Christ through reasoning and practical meditation. Luckily for me, I had already rationally concluded, that the aim of life is theosis, or becoming the son of God, and that the Kingdom of heaven is within you, without the application of faith.
But the Gospels certainly do say, that faith in Christ, and also therefore in God, is the essential attribute which makes a man a son of God. So, I am going to examine what faith is, as far as I understand it. And I must expect, that I already have it, but simply don’t know that I have faith. Faith must be essential to being a son of God, and to theosis. I think I can explain what it is, by reference to my other interests, namely in the meditative prayer. I will show, that faith in Christ grows through the meditative prayer.
What I understand by the word ‘faith’ is not merely an interest and belief in, a set of ideas. It is a state of the heart and the mind, rather than a set of ideas in the mind. To be brief, faith is made possible by the silent prayer. And therefore, to attain to faith, you must pray the disciplined methodical prayer which the ancient ascetics described. This is how it will be possible to reconcile the secret message inherent in Christ’s sayings, and how to understand it, when he tells us how to pray.
Prayer and faith are the same thing, except that prayer is an act, while faith is a state of mind and heart. The one leads to the other. When the mother of the lunatic approaches the disciples in Matthew, and they cannot cure the illness, Christ tells them that to perform this miraculous act of healing, requires prayer and fasting (Matt. 17: 15-21). And this is because, prayer, leads to faith, and faith can do anything, since for God nothing is impossible. And the faith is therefore, unity with God: a state of union of the self with God. And this is how we should also understand the saying, that when you ask God for anything, while in a state of faith, it will be heard and granted (21: 22). Where faith is complete, a man has become the son of God, and his will is God’s will; and therefore, what he asks for, will certainly be granted.
I say we are rational people. I have recently been reading William Empson (1906-1984) and his essays on the poets, in Using Biography (1984). Empson’s essays from the 1970s, on Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, the foremost English-speaking poets of the last century, were each written on the understanding, that he thought that literary critics other than himself, were too Christian, and had interpreted the works of Joyce and Yeats in particular, in an unwelcome Christian way. He takes it as his job, to correct the taste of his time, and to combat critics, who alleged they were on the side of God and the Church. Empson’s motivation is evidently that he saw errors in the interpretations of other critics; but his lazer focus on this particular problem, his obsession with it, if you like, is because he disliked God. He disliked God the Father as a person. Even if Empson had been shown that God created the world, and that he exists, and that he is what Christians say he is, Empson would still have disliked God. He takes exception to the sacrifice of Christ, and the demand on Christians, that they undergo suffering; it was a recurrent theme with him, this eminent English literary critic, that he disliked God; that’s the substance of his book, Milton’s God; and I get the impression that it was a lifelong interest, this attack on God. I suppose Empson, who I take to be the standard of English understanding, would ask: why didn’t God make the world so that suffering was not built in? And who would worship such a God? It’s a rational question. But to me, this classic rational position, this question direct from the heart of a sceptical English reasonable man, which argues that life is too cruel, is founded on the deeper belief: that life is to cruel in itself. Which prompts us to ask men like Empson: do you want to live at all, under these conditions? Is it God who approves of suffering that you dislike, or is it life as it is, in itself? For, if we set aside the thesis that God made this world, the suffering would remain, and you would find that objectionable still; you would find life objectionable.
Perhaps I have not explained this very well. What I mean is, given our lives as they seem to be, with pains, and constant unease, we are obliged to accept that situation, and make the most of it, and understand it. As Christians, we understand to some extent, why there is unease and pain. We accept the life, and therefore, we are already able to accept that God gives us pains, for whatever reason.
But if Empson, who I offer here as the standard non-Christian rational man, objects to God sending us pain, it is because he does not accept the pain and the trials of life at all. He does not accept the trials of life. And there it is an explanation for this, I suppose: Empson was a socialist, who does not accept the conditions of life under which we live. Socialism is a purely rational answer, to the situation we are in, we people who want things to be perfect by our own efforts. We rationalist believe that the practical man, the rational man, is something like an ideal. Empson, and the English spirit, taking the man alone with himself as our initial situation, our default position in existence, wants to improve on it. To be a socialist in economic matters, to be a technologist, to mitigate all the pains and unease of existence. But behind it all, he does not accept life, and does not accept the way God has given it.
I find this hard to take. When Defoe wrote the first English novel, he described the Englishman on a desert island. And that man does not set about reconciling himself with God in that desert. Rather, he builds a small technological culture and sets about improving his situation. And it is in this sense, that I say, we are all rational. And I do contrast this with the situation of a man with faith, whose principle job is to be happy with his circumstances, and to make the relation to God his priority.
One of the reasons I do not consent to socialist politics, is that I not only see our situation as good enough already, and I accept the pain and the unease; it is that I think all socialist projects fail. This is because, man alone with himself, is contradictory, he is amphibious. He belongs by nature to heaven and to earth. So, when he treats of himself alone, as an earthly thing, with rational desires, his purposes always fail or have inadvertent consequences. Men never really know what they want, or their wishes always defeat their other purposes and needs. So, central planning, and rational organisation of a purely human society, will always be a failure and even a nightmare. This is so, at a personal and a national scale, and this is why I found myself praying and meditating, despite having no sense that I ‘had faith’.
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I could easily be convinced, that for the English of today and the past, dissatisfaction with the arrangement of things, the gift of life to us, has left us meddling and making a mess of things which are, we fail to admit, beyond our control. And Empson’s contemptuous dismissal of what he calls the ‘sacrificial’ bloodthirsty God, seems to me to be a dismissal of life itself.
I would add a note: this line of reasoning, that Chritians have to accept life, is the reason why the early church set aside and condemned Gnosticism; although the world is troubled, and suffering and stupidity and poverty are always with us, this is no reason to set the world aside, and to deny it in total.
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For reasons like this, theosis, and even faith itself, has never been a major part of the English culture. We are too practical for meditating and accepting. I can prove this, by having found no indication of how important prayer, the silent prayer is, in our literature and philosophy. There is no strong or even weak tradition in English, of the ascetic discipline, and how to achieve it. We have become socialists, by and large. And faith is to most people, either belief in some set of ideas and statements, or else nothing. What I mean by faith is something quite different.
We shut down the monasteries, and we gave up praying. I would like to try to fix this. I have come a long and roundabout route, to get to Christ and faith; I end up being an advocate for prayer. But the stages of my journey went through Nietzsche, and the anarchist and erotic works and ideas of Georges Bataille, who knew that man needs to be transformed, but refused to allow the he should be transformed into a Christian; and through Martin Heidegger, whose works are absurdly voluminous and obscure. But what I learned from Bataille is, that this objective of sovereignty of the individual, might have to be achieved through the irrational final act, which we reach after long careful thinking. The final highest achievement of man, is to approach God, beyond all things, beyond life, and that the leap there means giving up the world, literally in his case, to consume and destroy what is most valuable in the world. But the Christian at prayer is not destructive in the same harmful way as the pure materialist or socialist, as Bataille was. Yet the courage and the demand for the absolute truth is the same, in all these atheist thinkers of the extreme limit.
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When I write on prayer and theosis, I tell my deepest wishes. I tell the secret. It leaves me empty; it makes me more dissolute and careless, more confined to the merely mundane and secular. By telling the knowledge and experience you’ve gained, you give it away, and it’s the same feeling after a magician has told the secret of his magic trick. From me, the power and the mystery have gone. Christ, by contrast, often worked in secret; his way of speaking was frequently or purposely evasive; and perhaps what he had to say was impossible to express. His message was simple: God cares for you, and I am God. This needs no explanation, but actions rather. The saints were the same; few saints wrote books, or taught the intimate details of prayer in a theoretical way. The early saints had a saying, that there were two things an ascetic fears above all: women, for obvious reasons, and bishops, because the bishop will make a man enter the world, and start teaching and leading; whereas teaching and leading are harmful to the inner cultivation of self and love of God. I say so much, to indicate that it costs me, to explain things; and giving away knowledge does affect my composure; it sets me back. It is not even logically coherent for somebody who believes as I do, to also try to teach; if the single individual is sovereign and has within him the entire world, and if silent faith is his most important state, then where is the sense in speaking to other people about these things? It is a paradox, that a man teaches others in public, to be more individual and to become their true unique self. And it does feel as if it drains me, to speak about these things.
The first principle effect of praying is, that a person becomes more composed and more centred; he develops a sense of a self, he becomes a single person. So, it is natural, that he should be reluctant to then think of others. The English are a typically co-operative people, who work together, and consider individualists to be eccentric. And becoming the Son of God, theosis, as a pursuit, while it is at the heart of what the Church teaches, is not altogether harmonious with the spirit of a large organisation. How the early church allowed individual ascetics to flourish alongside the church, is a story of political compromises; in the West, individual hermit saints were not encouraged at all, but the ascetic tradition became a communal matter, with the rule of St Benedict, and the other orders which followed. In the west, hermits and ascetics were forced to find a place in communal cenobitic monasteries. But in the east, the individualist who eschewed the Church, was a type which was allowed.
It is perhaps because the basic meaning of faith, and the sure route to becoming a Son of God, was prohibited by the Western Church, that the Reformation was so easy to achieve. Nietzsche said of Luther, that he rebelled against the Church, because he failed at being a monk. Being a monk was to be subject to an externally applied discipline, and this might be why it was so easy to shut those houses down: there were no radically individual examples of asceticism. If the monk in England had been allowed to be a single individual, he might have held onto the Church and his Christianity more fiercely; for the freedom of the individual to work out his faith in God alone, is heroic, and could have saved the Church in England. But the cenobitic Christians simply gave up before Thomas Cromwell’s thieves, because there is something weak and pointless about an organised ascetic life: it must be, rather, individualistic.
What I mean by the prayer, I have already discussed. But here are more indications. When a man sits and prays silently, and makes his way inward, he does so while sitting, and in the example of St Gregory Palamas (1296-), he should do so in a posture almost doubled over. This is important, because that is the body of a man who is broken, humbled; it is the man of broken body and broken spirit. And this is essential to the prayer, which is silent not only with the lips, but also silent in the mind, in the spirit, in the heart and the will. The essential thing, is that the mind does not experience a succession of ideas; that it does not ‘think’ or feel or perceive. But it is almost, if not entirely, impossible to stop thinking or to stop ideas from passing successively through the mind. Unless, that is, we are totally broken and at the limit of self. A broken man has no interest in survival; he does not want to die; he is indifferent to living or dying. And this is one of the ways in which a man’s will, his in built uncircumventable will to survive, which inspires his ideas for the most part, can fall silent.
And this is why tears are said to accompany the real prayer. Terrible as it sounds, and it is terrible, men cry when they are totally defeated. When they lose something of great importance to them. And, the prayer can only happen, when they lose their common or garden self, and are therefore as if totally defeated. Tears flow, I would suppose, because that state of desolation has been achieved on purpose, which usually comes in the world by accident and causes such pain, that we break out in tears. But, since it was willed, and the heart is focused on God, and God is with the man in that state, then they could be called tears of happiness. But I cannot claim to have cried like this myself. I mean only to explain them.
The prayer is only possible to begin with, on a purely philosophical basis, if we examine the mind itself. Our mind is outside time, which is why John Locke (1632-1704) in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, points out early on, that our mind works sometimes instantaneously, gathering its ideas together and making judgements, of complexity, in a split second. Our mind, if we give it any examination at all, is above and outside time, and above ideas, above thoughts; one state of mind now, is the same as any state of mind in some distant past or future. Our mind is also, obviously, outside space and the physical. This is to say, that the mind is outside of time, it is eternal; and outside space, it is illimitable or infinite. I say this, in order to show, that our mind might not be able to understand God, but it does have the basis to share his eternity or infinity, and that this is obvious to anyone.
Now, a final point to make, before making a survey of Matthew, chapters 15 to 21, is how these things relate to faith. I do not dispute, that prayer of the silent type has its value, as yoga, and has Buddhist associations; I know little of those things, personally, but I believe that the Christian ascetic prayer is a human activity which has beneficial properties, to anyone; prayer, whether you believe in God or not, is extremely good for the human being. However, I also think that its final end, is that the state of deeper prayer, is the state of faith. By this, I mean to refer us to the faith which, Christ says, when a man has it, he can order a mountain to throw itself into the sea, and it would do so. The faith which, when a man is praying and he has faith in God, his prayer will be answered (Matt. 21: 22). The aim of the silent prayer, such as it has one, and every practice has an objective, is to give rest and collection and silence to the mind. Following this, the heart is also silent. They say that the mind is in the heart, when the heart is calm. When the heart is calm, it is because the quiet mind has entered into the heart. That is said to be the aim. But I go further: when the mind is in the heart, and they are one, then that is the condition of highest faith. For, when the mind is in the heart, he is also open for the approach of God, and nothing of his own personality stands in the way of the approach of the person of God. And the relation of the self to God, is faith. So, in effect, the higher state of the silent prayer, is the meaning of the word ‘faith’. It is when God and man become one, and the man become the son of God. I will leave it there.
One more point to make on the secretiveness of Christ. I think it has to be said, even though it is obvious, so obvious, that we miss it. We practice the prayer alone, and what happens to us there, is not shared; it’s not like a landscape, or a drama which you can show to anyone and share with a crowd; we see it alone. And in fact, everything which happens to us, really, including viewing the landscape or watching the drama, is also for us alone, in the final analysis. That makes it secret and private to each man alone. The secret is essential; what is secret could potentially be shared; but this kind of secret can’t even be shared, even if we wanted to do so: it is unique and utterly private. Since these things only happen to one person. Secrecy is not an option: it is the nature of the whole thing. It cannot be expressed or shared with another. Christ had this character, of being unable to share his life or power with others: “O faithless and perverse generation, how long must I be with you? How long must I suffer you?” The whole world has that character.
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When I have been reading Matthew recently, I have devoted my talks to seven chapters of his gospel at a time, and this talk today concerns chapters fifteen to twenty one of Matthew’s gospel; these chapters include those, where Peter is said by Christ to be the foundation stone of the Church; they include the transfiguration; the entry into Jerusalem; and the first couple of days in the city. I intend to make some comments on how individuals, sovereign individuals of the kind I have described, will be able to live together. That is, to look at Christ’s instructions on the Church.
Chapter 15 begins somewhere in the north of the country, and scribes and pharisees have made a journey to come to find him there, to ask him about the behaviour of his followers, who do not follow the rituals around washing hands prior to eating. Christ answers them by saying that when the Jewish officials carry out these rituals, they do so as an offering to God, for which they expect praise; these traditions irritate their Father, he tells them. I would interpret this to mean, that the inner composure and humility necessary for a relationship with the Father, is not brought about by the pride you feel, when you follow an instruction successfully. He quotes Isaiah: “This people honours me; but their hearts are far from me. They worship me without cause, teaching doctrines fit only for men”. The dirt is in their hearts, and it is that dirt which they need to clean up. Jesus explains that they should be careful about what they say, since what comes out of the mouth can pollute the heart, and that the heart is the site of all kinds of evils.
I would think, that Christ would not have set out to look for the priests to abuse them like this; they came looking for him, not he for them; and it could be said, that they are the men he most admires, the people who are most ready to be shown the truth; they might be converted and form the basis of a church. But as it turns out, they have come to see him, and they are planning to get rid of him.
He enters the area of Tyre and Sidon, and is approached by a woman whose daughter is vexed by a demon. He replies that he does not intend to heal non-Jews such as she is, and that the food meant for the children of Israel, should not be given to the dogs. She replies to him that the dogs can get the crumbs which fall from the table of the children, and he heals the daughter, because of her persistent belief and faith in him. They return to Galilee, and a crowd gathers, wanting healing. Christ calls the disciples together on one of the mountains, and arranges for the crowd to be fed. This is the second time in this gospel that he feeds thousands in the desert; this time there are four thousand. When Sadducees and Pharisees have words with him again, in chapter 16, he warns his followers not to trust their food, or their teaching.
I would make an observation about the way these things are told. The narrative cannot be taken as a day by day, exhaustive account of his journeys; it would not be possible to create a timeline, with exact dates, and places, based on the information in this gospel. But that was typical of the method of writing biography, at the time when this was set down. Historians of the time, in the tradition to which Matthew belongs, do not write history like that. He rarely mentions the date or locates an event in time; nor mention the distance of time between two events. Plutarch and Suetonius, roughly contemporary with Matthew, do not write like that, either. They tell us about what an eminent man did, but do not describe his life course in exhaustive detail; their aims was to describe a man’s character or what effect he had with some specific act, not to map out his entire life from start to finish. And Matthew writes with the same intention.
Christ came to Caesarea Philippi, which was in the far north, and we are told this, because a significant event took place: Jesus’ discussion with Peter about the Church. When Jesus asks some of the disciples, who the people say he is, they tell him that the people think he is a prophet, or a prophet reincarnated. And when he asks them who they, the disciples, think he is, Peter responds, that he thinks he is the Christ, the Messiah. This knowledge can only have come from God, and is an example of faith, Jesus then tells him. Faith, when it is knowledge, is a kind of understanding which God gives to a man, when his heart is loyal and steady. He then tells his close followers that he must soon go to Jerusalem, to die there, and be reborn. Peter says that, if this were to be the case, it would be better if they did not go to Jerusalem, but Christ grows angry about this, because it is a temptation, and says: “Get thee behind me, Satan! A person of the world would say that to me. But I am not of this world” (16: 23).
Chapter seventeen gives us the event of the transfiguration, which takes place on Mount Hermon, not far from Caesarea Philippi, on the border with Lebanon. Nearby is a cave entrance which in the ancient world was held to be sacred to the god Pan, and was known as the ‘gate to the underworld’, which is why, when Christ now begins to talk of the future church, which Peter will found, he says that the ‘gates of hell’ will be nothing compared to it. I do not intend to discuss the transfiguration itself, which is so important to the Orthodox Christian; it is sufficient to my purpose to say, that the vision of Christ with Moses and Elijah, and robed in the white energy of God, is significant to the ascetic silent prayer, since it is considered to be a moment when men saw the actual energy of God the Father, as uncreated light. Seeing the uncreated light, which Palamas explained as the energy or activity of God, is a justification for the man at prayer, to hope to be able to experience and mix himself with God. Once again, Christ tells the three intimates, James, John and Peter, not to tell anyone else about what they have seen there on Mount Hermon, or about his being the Christ. There are also parts of this chapter which indicate that the Church will have power to compel people on earth, and the compulsion or liberation which the Church gives to men, will be valid in heaven (19: 18); in this way, the Church is promised to be a way in which earthly authorities will be able to interact with the kingdom of heaven.
Later on, the disciples try to cure a lunatic, but fail, and Christ grows frustrated, but says that only fasting and prayer will give them enough faith to cure such illness. Indeed, faith comes from fasting and prayer. It puts the mind in the heart, which means controlling the heart, doing away with its unease and evil.
As we saw, Chapter 17 has Christ speaking of the Church; in 18, he lays down some basic rules for how the people of the Church will behave toward one another, and work things out. If we have assumed, as I do, that the Christian is at the higher levels of his faith, a purely solitary person, and centre of existence, then the matter of how he will interact with other people, must be addressed. They will be able to bear with each other, Jesus says, because they will forgive one another; and, they will take care of the weak, and the children, as an obligation which must never be betrayed. Jesus goes to some length, to ensure the disciples are clear: the weak and the young already belong to the kingdom, and anyone who offends or harms them is involved in unforgiveable crime. Particularly, if a man is able to harm children, then it would be better for him to do away with himself, because the children and the vulnerable already have the kingdom of heaven. They are the centre of their world already, although, as time passes, they become more complex, and move further from their true highest nature. “See that you never harm one of these weak ones: for I say to you, that the angels in heaven who guard them, are in heaven always seeing the face of my Father, who is in heaven” (18: 10). The parable of the money lender is told them, which is an instruction about how forgiveness is reciprocal, and that God will not forgive anyone who cannot himself forgive. I should point out, that forgiveness, like purity, and the other things taught by Christ in general, comes from the heart; it is not a calculating virtue.
And this is proven by another parable which comes a bit further on, in Chapter 20, about how men who worked for just one hour, were paid by a certain master, with the same amount, as men who had worked all day. This story indicates that men must have a pure heart, and accept the gifts of God, without reference to how it seems to go for other people, without calculating their advantage gained from the kindness of their master. Their relationship to each other should be indifferent and forgiving, even if they perceive inequality. The master asks the angry workers: “Can’t I do what I want? Is your eye evil, just because I am doing good? Has my generosity to you all, made you angry?” (20: 15) He tells this parable in the context of answering the question: how can anyone go to the kingdom of heaven, if it is so hard to be pure? And the answer is, that everyone can do what he is capable of, in this life, and will be rewarded if he does as much as he can. But the worst thing is for men to judge each other, because this corrupts them, and sets them against each other, and turns a man into a mere human being; when his Christian duty is to have faith and join with God.
In chapter 19, the group returns to Galilee, and cross the Jordan into Israel. There they are met by a huge crowd, and being back in Judea, there are also pharisees. These religious rulers of the people approach him, and question him on points of doctrine; in this instance, divorce, a complex matter, which they hoped would make him look foolish or impious.
Christ’s answer, like other judgements on the subject of marriage, is sometimes taken to be an absolutely historical and confirmed opinion of his, by people who do not believe the gospels can be trusted, and who do not believe in God. They do so, on the supposition, that the Church would have attributed many things to Jesus, particularly those which are of benefit the Church, such as his exchange with Peter about the power of the Church’s authority; but where we find words attributed to him which do not benefit the Church, then they are highly likely to be his actual sayings. And so, it has been said, that the words of Jesus which he almost certainly uttered, because they are the most severe and unwelcome to men, concern divorce, on the principle, Christ’s statements about divorce are not beneficial to the church: they make him seem too intolerant. So, the secular scholars can claim, that the only reason Matthew would have had to put these words into his gospel, is that Christ actually said them. I don’t follow this procedure myself, when trying to work out which sayings Christ gave utterance to, and which he did not. I mention this only as a nod to the strange way in which Biblical scholars have sometimes gone about their work.
The pharisees ask him whether a man can put his wife away, or divorce her. And Christ says that, no, a man may not divorce his wife, unless she has been adulterous. In what I consider to be a fact of nature, and something which humanistic enlightenment has done nothing to change, Christ says that mankind is made both man and woman, and they were designed to be a couple, joined in marriage. There is, that is to say, no complete natural adult man who is not also married. Human sexual difference means, that the complete human being is a pair. Feminism, which presupposes that sexual difference is something to overcome and set aside, is therefore a terrific dangerous lie, as far as Christ is concerned. The question put to him, was asking, whether a man can arbitrarily dispose of his wife, since I suppose, that in those times, men were able to treat their women with such high handed indifference; and the question is, should the Jews be able to dispose of their women as they please, throwing them out and leaving them destitute; which Christ denies they should be allowed to do. When they reply to him, that Moses allowed divorce, he tells them that this was because the hearts of men were hard in those times, and that Moses made allowances for cruel men. But good men must never put their wife away. Jesus then allows, that they should chose well before they commit to it. But he cannot give a universal rule on marriage, sexual difference, or divorce, since there are mysteries which only God understands, since some men do not marry, but are as it were, married to God; they are ‘eunuchs for God’.
The rich young man approaches Jesus and asks him how he can be perfect, if he already follows the law and prophets. Christ replies that the young man should give away all of his money and follow him. The young man is not prepared to do this, and Christ smiles and says that a rich man will find it, as difficult to enter the kingdom of heaven, as a camel would find it to go through the eye of a needle. The disciples murmur among themselves about how hard it would be for anyone to do so. So, Christ is forced to tell them that God will look after those who fall short, since although men find it impossible to give up all things, for God, all things are possible; so God will find a way of making men give things up. Perhaps their inner being can be liberated, even if they still have obligations in the world; we could say, that the activity of faith is possible even if a man has a family, and a house, or can’t go into the wilderness and follow Christ, as would be best. Peter reminds Jesus, that they, his followers have given up all, and Christ assures them that they will be rewarded.
In the twentieth chapter, he continues to tell them about their reward, and how God allocates life in the kingdom. I have already mentioned one of the parables about this, when discussing the labourers who are all rewarded equally, at the master’s discretion. And then he tells the wider circle of disciples that they must all go to the city, and he describes for a second time the whole plan, this time to the twelve. The mother of the sons of Zebedee approaches, and asks if her sons can sit at his right and left hand in the kingdom. This, as well as the two blind men who later approach him, calls us to remember the two men who are crucified next to him later on. The other disciples, still anxious to get some kind of worldly success and influence over one another, grumble about priority given to the sons of Zebedi; but Christ tells them that whoever will be in charge of his Church, will be the servant, and not an authority with mastery over the others. I think that it is improper for most men to behave with total humility in the world; there is a need for the state, for money, and for the other things which need order and self-assertion. But where the Church is concerned, men will forgive each other for what they are forced to do; and, where the priests are concerned, the leaders of the Church must be, in their hearts at least, the servant of the people, and not their proud masters. It is the state of the heart and mind which determines everything, as we have said.
Finally, for my purposes in this talk, the twenty-first chapter describes Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, and the first days of his time there. Jesus sends disciples to find an ass and a colt, fulfilling the word of Zechariah (Zech. 9:9); he is acclaimed the saviour by the people. Arriving at the Temple, in the centre of the city, he overturns the tables, and tells the authorities that the Temple is a place of prayer, and not of official business or work. He heals various blind and lame men, and the children proclaim him the Son of David, which makes the scribes and priests indignant, particularly when the children proclaim him. But he says: “Did you never read it: from the mouths of children and infants you have perfected praise?”
That night, he goes to Bethania. He curses a fig tree as he passes, which turns out to be the opportunity for him to give a lesson to the disciples. They wonder how he can make a tree wither just with his word, and he tells them, that if they have faith and no hesitations at all, which means, the deep faith in the heart of a single mind, then “everything whatever it is that you ask in prayer while believing, you will receive” (Matt. 21: 22). How can the self which has become God’s own self in some way, not also see, what it wills to happen, happen?
Back at the Temple, the authorities ask Jesus under what power he acts. And he responds by asking them a question: under what authority did John the Baptist act? Since this exchange takes place in public, his opponents are afraid of the people, who believed that John was sent by God. So, they reply, that they do not know, and refuse to answer him. So he tells them, that they won’t answer him, and he will not answer their question, either. Following which, he tells them two parables; the first, about the two sons who are asked to work by their father: one says he will work, but doesn’t; the other says he won’t work, but resolves later on to do so. And then the apocalyptic story of the labourers in the vineyard who kill any servants sent to collect the harvest, including the master’s own son.
Then, he tells them that “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner” (Ps. 118: 22; KJ); the stone will crush and grind to dust anyone who trips over it. The priests and pharisees would have laid hands on him, “but for the crowd, who believed he was a prophet” (Matt. 21: 46).
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I have spoken about what I think faith is; how it coincides with anyone becoming himself; the idea of the self requires the idea of God. And that the intensification of the idea of self, coincides with humility rather than egoism; and it reinforces the Christianity of a person by making him more inward, and less interested in the world. Faith is a change of heart, made possible by prayer, which Christ told his followers, is what makes anyone able to enter the kingdom of heaven.
And I am quick to suggest, that faith is not having an idea of something and believing in that. Rather, it is a state of the heart in relation to God. We should already believe in God, that he exists. Physicists, when they study the heavens, come to the conclusion that God is scientifically necessary; I would not call that faith, but knowledge. Faith is something else: it relates to becoming a unique self, aware of your own centrality to all existence, the friend of God, the son of God.
I have also noticed the foundational steps toward making a church, and advice on how the members should behave. Their relationship is one of humility, and forgiveness of one another; and among the priests or leaders, the most self-abasing actions, that the first shall be last. I have been reading Lives of Jesus, by Mark Tully (1935-2026) which was published in 1996, and accompanied a BBC documentary series about Jesus. It could be called the BBC’s view of him, or at least, the view which the BBC held before its recent precipitous progressive decline. I did so, because Mr Tully died very recently, and I decided to go back to his book. Jesus is described in four ways over four episodes of the TV series: as a god, as a Jew, as a rebel; and as ‘the hidden Jesus’. Since Tully does not believe in God, none of his work is of use to Christians, except as it yields some interesting insights into scholarship, and some bits of historical background; or, as it reveals what dry as dust academics think. Nevertheless, the final chapter, which investigates the eastern Orthodox and monastic traditions, does not disappoint us so much. Tully interviewed Archbishop Kallistos Ware, and considered the Christians of the desert, and how they were accepted by the Church under Athanasius.
I mention this, because Tully makes it clear that Christ can be understood as a superb individualist, when considered by a non-believer. He clearly was so; and the depths and higher reaches of this individualism, and what it means, are only revealed to mysticism and prayer. Tully is aware of this in his way, since he also considers how, after the 325AD acceptance of Christians by the Roman state, the monastic ascetic impulse flowered, because men who had previously lived as internal exiles inside Rome, were now no longer exiles; they would need to get away from society much more urgently, having lost the isolation characteristic of life in Rome before that date. Their inner exile was no longer possible, and so they found the desert. That is to say, a certain isolation was essential for the Christian, at all times. He recognises that the monastic orders have an uneasy relationship with the Church. The Church is, broadly, for the people; it is the means by which they get together, and worship together. But there is a place for the higher forms of spirituality and nearness to God, direct, and without the sacramental life, which the eastern Church has from the beginning, tolerated and sometimes encouraged.
In my next presentation, I will look at the final chapters of St Matthew’s gospel, and consider two specific things: the role of the state for a Christian people; and, the role and purpose of evil, as it is permitted by God.
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