by CCW | 16 December 2014 21:30
This is the second of a two-part Advent Programme. The first part, presented on 2 December, is posted here[1]. Both parts have been combined into a single pdf document which can be downloaded here[2].
II.
O Sapientia. O Wisdom. This is the first of the Advent Antiphons, a series of Scriptural statements and prayers that belong to the heightened expectancy of the Advent Season. Suaviter and fortiter, sweetly and strongly, Wisdom rules and moves through all things. Wisdom is an important feature of the Advent season and often as not it is found in and through the experience of human limitation, not to mention human folly and wickedness. Our Advent preparations focus on such follies and wickednesses depicted in Dame P.D. James’ extraordinary novel, The Children of Men[3], a dystopian novel which examines the spiritual barrenness of our world and day.
That world is viewed through the eyes of Theodore Faron. In him the gentle skepticism and questioning agnosticism of her detective hero, Adam Dalgleish, emerge as a kind of detached atheism. The poetry of Adam Dalgleish, too, finds its complement in the diary of Theo Faron.
The diary serves as a vehicle for describing himself and his world. “If there is nothing to record, I shall record the nothingness”. The diary is not written for the sake of posterity, for there is no prospect of succeeding generations. It represents instead, as perhaps diaries generally do, the hold of memory in the meaning of human personality. It is part of his identity which must, it seems, vanish with himself. “If and when I reach old age – as most of us can expect to, we have become experts at prolonging life – I shall open one of my tins of hoarded matches and light my small personal bonfire of vanities”.
Dr. Theodore Faron is an academic, an historian of the nineteenth century with “an interest in the Victorian Church, old liturgies, defunct forms of worship”. For him “that age…seems like a world seen through the telescope at once so close and yet infinitely remote, fascinating in its energy, its moral seriousness, its brilliance and squalor”. The past of the nineteenth century is woven into the fabric of the twentieth and lies, like a pall, upon the dead lives of the twenty-first century. And yet the memory holds life, ambiguously and tenaciously. The liturgical memory of Theo Faron becomes the conduit of redemptive grace, but only through the learning of love.
He is moved against the stronger instincts of his “obsessive self-sufficiency”, the cause and the consequence of the barrenness in his own life and, it would seem, of the novel’s world in general – to befriend a protest group. They are revolutionaries of mixed aims and motives. They call themselves The Cranmer Club and behind the facade of meeting “to read and study the old Book of Common Prayer”, they seek the reform of the government in this totalitarian state of the terminally ill. They are the voice of the powerless against the powerful, a cry against the parody of the power of God. However mixed their motives, their demands are the forms of Christian compassion. This makes them particularly threatening, for, after all, “he hath put down the mighty from their seat,/and hath exalted the humble and the meek”. Out of this group come sacrifice and betrayal, birth and death, hope and life, redemption and love.
The ecclesiastical scene mirrors the condition of the state which is wanted to be reformed. Theo observes that “during the mid-1990s the recognized churches, particularly the Church of England, moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism”. He goes on to note that the next step was and is the virtual abolition of “the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross” for “even to unbelievers like myself, the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol”.
Yet the “reform” will be something more than simply political re-organization. It will actually be something of another order. The reform will be rebirth and renewal, the theology of sin and redemption, precisely in the face of the barbarism of “corporate social responsibility” and the cruelty of “sentimental humanism”. The cross is comfort and life precisely in the face of death. It is literally the last word in the novel.
Theo’s cousin, Xan Lyppiatt, is the Warden of England. His benevolent tyranny conceals much that is sinister in the land of the aging. There are, for example, anxieties about the state-assisted suicide programme, called the Quietus. There are concerns about the rights and freedoms of the foreign guest-workers, called the Sojourners. And there are questions about the conditions of the Isle of Man penal colony for the social and political deviants of the Warden’s England.
There is hardly a moral and social issue of our day which is not at least touched upon in this novel; from reproductive technology to euthanasia, from immigration to health care. Like Herod, Xan fears only the threat of another king to his absolute power. Like Herod, he is utterly ruthless. The prospect of a new birth is one which he would bring under his control. But those who “rule a desert well” (Sophocles’ Antigone) are dead to the necessities of love.
Theo is drawn into sympathy with this unlikely group of reformers. As a group, their powerlessness contrasts with the Herodian power of Xan. They are themselves a mixture of Christian believers and unbelievers, lay and cleric, male and female, the power-hungry and the meek. As such he is drawn out of himself at least to the extent of being in the place where the possiblities of grace may be found. He is learning to love and knows himself to be learning. However much he doesn’t understand, there are yet some things which now he has come to know, “and perhaps they were all he needed to know. He wished only for her good. He would put her good before his own. He could no longer separate himself from her. He would die for her life”.
His teacher is the woman Julian. In the structure of the mystery play, she unites the figures of Mary and Mary Magdalene. In her, the tomb becomes the womb of new life. She teaches Theo the conditions of this new life. The lessons are mercy, forgiveness and forebearance; in short, the lessons of love, come what may.
There is nothing sentimental about this teaching. The acknowledgment of sin and evil belongs to the knowledge of love. Those who live by the sword must die by the sword. This truth is not simply eclipsed by the Christian gospel. There is, too, the hint of an ambiguity – a shadow – that in the destruction of one empire, another may rise in its place with the same temptation to obsessive self-sufficiency, with the same destructiveness, and with the same barrenness. Consequently, the same lessons may have to be learned yet again. But then, they always have to be learned.
The world of corporate social responsibility and sentimental humanism is one of the by-products of Christianity. It shows itself to be tyrannous, destructive and, ultimately, barren when its origins are forgotten or denied. Then it no longer stands under the theology of sin and redemption. Then it no longer stands under the cross.
Yet the possibilities of new beginnings arise out of the sense of an ending. The ending, however, is one in which the past is remembered, not repudiated, and remembered, moreover, in its fullness. The remembering is the redeeming of the past by bringing it into the service of the present.
The structure of the novel reflects this sense of endings and beginnings. There are two parts, Omega and Alpha respectively. The first describes the wasteland where the pleasures of the present in a dying world are, like T.S. Eliot’s “fragments” of the past, “no more than pathetic and crumbling defenses shored up against our ruins”. The past, too, is empty of vitality and meaning for the present. It is barren of purpose. “History which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species”. In the memory of Theo Faron, the past is reduced to a refined aestheticism.
Alpha signals the possibilities of new beginnings. The past is redeemed through repentance, recollection and the growing awareness of the necessities of love. Theo contemplates the gulf between him and Julian’s belief. He may not be able to connect with the God of her faith, yet he becomes open to the possibility that “perhaps, in the end the bridge would be love”.
Out of the barren wasteland comes a reason to love when there seems to be no reason. Memory is stirred into life. Tears well up into a fountain of everlasting life. There is redemption. “From some childhood memory he recalled the rite. The water had to flow, there were words which had to be said. It was with a thumb wet with his own tears and stained with her blood that he made on the child’s forehead the sign of the cross”. By water and the blood. Nativity and Resurrection. Will we learn the lessons of love?
Perhaps only by way of prayer, praying the Advent Antiphon, O Sapientia, praying for the wisdom of God to order, suaviter et fortiter, our souls and lives.
O Wisdom, which comes out of the mouth of the Most High, and reaches from one end to the other, mightily and sweetly ordereing all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence
Fr. David Curry
O Sapientia
December 16th, 2014
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