“You have received a spirit of sonship”
It was the year 524. The place was a northern Italian town called Pavia. There, in prison, languished a scholar named Boethius, falsely accused of treason against the Arian king, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Boethius would be brutally killed. But not before writing, while in prison, one of the great intellectual and spiritual classics of the West, The Consolation of Philosophy. It, along with Boethius’s theological works, would have an enormous influence upon the development of European culture and understanding.
The word “person” for instance, so much in vogue in our own culture in the discourse of natural rights and identity politics, has its roots in the definition of person that Boethius provided in his treatise about the humanity and the divinity of Christ, Contra Eutychen. Distinguishing between nature and person is essential for understanding the unity of God and man in Christ and for thinking about the unity and difference of God as Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; in other words, Boethius developed a concept that serves to illuminate an understanding of the names of God revealed in Scripture as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From such language and terminology for God, there is the natural application of the term to our humanity, especially since for Boethius, following Augustine, man is imago Trinitatis. Being made in the image of God means being made in the image of the Trinity. Such are some of the fruits of his labours by which he is known.
We have, perhaps, as a church and culture forgotten all this. There is something entirely providential in being reminded about the legacy and deeper meaning of such terms as person, defined by Boethius as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” For it reminds us that the language we use about ourselves has its roots in language about God; the two are inseparable. And isn’t that central to the Christian witness in the contemporary world? Namely, to proclaim that our humanity is radically incomplete without God, in this case, that even our language of political and social discourse is grounded in theology? “You have received a spirit of sonship,” Paul proclaims, and from that, and only from that, we might say, flows the true meaning of our actions. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” We are at once our actions and yet more than our actions.
Okay, you might say, allowing in your patient way for such pretensions of scholarship to have their moment in a Sunday morning sermon, but what does any of this have to do with the powerful Scripture readings that we have just heard, you might ask? Well, it has very much to do with Providence, it seems to me.
“O God, whose never-failing Providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth,” the Collect prays even as the Epistle reading from Romans argues for the nature of our spiritual identity in Christ, as the “children” and “heirs of God, and fellow-heirs with Christ.” The Gospel warns us about the discrepancies between the outward and the inward, wolves in sheep’s clothing, for instance, while exhorting us to be and do what we say and believe. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” Actions often reveal intentions. Good fruit and bad fruit from good and bad trees respectively.
This is where the question of Providence comes into play. Good and evil. They seem so black and white. So absolute. And they are, but with this qualification, that one may change from one to the other, from good to evil and vice versa. How? Either by grace or by sin. By grace means through our wills in concert with God’s will; by sin, simply on our own. Such is the dynamic of the morality of rational persons as distinct from mere nature. Evil cannot bring forth anything good but “it can happen that he who was evil is not now evil, but it cannot happen that he who is evil does good.” But by the grace of God, good can come out of evil and this is an aspect of Providence, as Augustine notes: “And though at times what the evil person does is useful, this is not due to him, but to the providence of God that makes use of him.” God rules but in and through our actions.
God, and God alone, it must be said, makes good out of evil. It is a profound concept that has entirely to do with the transcendent nature of God and acts as a check upon our presumptions and follies. The Providence of God teaches us that Creation is not a static event, a once-off, as it were, but a continuing activity. God sustains and upholds the being of all things. They have their truth and meaning in him, in his will and purpose. It is the metaphysical corrective to all the forms of a merely mechanistic reason, a legacy of the Deism of the Enlightenment that remains with us.
Far from a denial or denigration of free will, the concept of God’s Providence is presupposed in the freedom all our acts and actions. The world is more than a chaotic mess of random events out of which, somehow, an intelligible order emerges. How can something intelligible arise out of what is, in principle, non-intelligbile? It can’t unless there is something intelligible, the active reason of God, at work in all things.
The reason and the will of God move in and through the events of our lives. We are often blind to the movements of God’s Providence but it is precisely what has been written out for us to read in the story of Christ. In him, the mind of Providence is writ large, we might say; the Logos – the Word or Reason – of God has entered full bodily into the mess and morass of human sin and evil. In him we see the utter nothingness of evil. In every way, it is privative, that is to say, it depends entirely upon what truly is. Think of a lie. It has no power apart from the truth which it betrays.
As The Wisdom of Solomon puts it, the one text referenced in Boethius’ treatise, “Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily and sweetly doth she order all things”, “fortiter et suaviter”, strongly and sweetly. We may not always see this – such are the limitations of our finite minds, let alone our sinful wills, but it shapes the very meaning of the prayer to God “to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things that be profitable for us” and, as always, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason,” Lady Philosophy reminds the wounded and broken pilgrim and prisoner, Boethius. Everlasting reason – divine reason. The rule of God’s reason is always more and greater; the wonder of Providence is how we are privileged to participate in the reason of God at work so strongly and sweetly in our lives. The lesson from Romans reminds us of our essential identity as the sons of God and the Gospel recalls us to the freedom that belongs to our actions. We are meant to bring forth the good fruit, the fruit that arises from our awareness of the Providence of God and the constancy of our saying ‘yes’ to God so that his mind and will may move in us, that we may be in him and he in us, as our liturgy prays. Such is the Providence of God at work already in our lives and all because “you have received a spirit of sonship.”
“You have received a spirit of sonship”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VIII
Christ Church & St. Michael’s
July 21st, 2013