“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing;
nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net”
Nada, nothing, nichts rien. A powerful word, it captures something of the dilemma of modernity – the sense of nothingness, of emptiness. Is “at thy word” the counter? Or does it reveal a deeper problem? Does “at thy word” mean that suddenly we will have everything? Yes and no. The danger lies in what we think “at thy word” means.
The danger is in our thinking. If “at thy word” means a logic by which we acquire things then reason has become something merely instrumental, a means to an end. But what kind of end? An end where everything is turned into things. We not only get things – a full net of things – but our thinking turns us into things. And this is a greater nothingness, our greater nothingness, the loss of our humanity. It is a betrayal of the deeper kind of thinking that this Gospel along with today’s Epistle presents to us. If we think “at thy word” means getting things then we have missed Peter’s command to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”.
In the Christian understanding, Christ is the Logos, the Word and Son of the Father. But as Word, he is not the means to our domination and manipulation of the world. That is exactly our contemporary problem. It is a problem about how we think about thinking. If we turn reason into a tool, then we become things at the expense of our humanity. We dismiss and ignore all the qualities of life signalled in the Epistle that are true blessings, blessings rooted in the compassion of Christ, the truth of God who is the author and meaning of all life. Life is more than things. It is our evil to turn reason into a machine-making thing.
The point of the Gospel is that Christ wants more for us than a net full of things. Ultimately, he has come that we “might have life and have it more abundantly.” That abundance of life does not mean an abundance of things. It has entirely to do with the quality of our life with one another that turns upon our life with God in Christ. It has entirely to do with the power of the Good alive and at work in us. It is altogether about a meaningful life, a life lived to and for God and with God.
Our labour is empty and nothing without that deeper sense of meaning and purpose. The meaning and purpose of our lives is not about things because that in turn turns us into things. This is something which the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century and the existentialist writers of the twentieth century understood. It belongs to their reaction against the kind of mechanical reason, the kind of technocratic reason of our current discontents. “The world is too much with us, late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,/Little we see in nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” In short, not much good it does us, and not much good does it do for our world.
Not surprisingly, Wordsworth looks back to another world, even a pagan world. Better, it seems, to “be suckled in a creed outworn”. For we are, as he puts it, radically “out of tune” with reality. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in another key, describes our relation to the world as a kind of loss, as well, a world in which “generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared and smeared with toil; /And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:/ the soil/ Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.” In Albert Camus’ powerful image, this kind of alienating reason turns us into robots; we make the machines that unmake us. These are all images of our alienation at once from nature and from ourselves but more importantly from the word and will of God.
This is, I suggest, what happens when we forget the deeper meaning of “at thy word”. It is the counter, to be sure, to our anxieties and concerns, the nothingness nothing of the world we have made for ourselves. The Gospel recalls us to the truth of our humanity as found in God.
In Dante’s Purgatorio, there is a wonderful image about human life. The pilgrims of the Purgatorio are really images of ourselves. The Purgatorio is the only part of the Divine Comedy that occurs in time; it is very much about the pilgrimage of the soul to God, a pilgrimage undertaken in community. It is about mountain climbing but the mountain is symbolic. What has to be overcome in us are the things that belong to our disordered loves, hence the idea of purgation that complements and informs the idea of illumination, our learning about the love of God that belongs to the truth of our humanity and without which we cannot be made “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars” of the Paradise of God. The journey is one in which the vices of the soul have to be purged and done away while the virtues of the soul have to acquired and put on.
But it is the law of the mountain that we can only climb in the labours of perfecting love during the day. The classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice are important qualities of human life but they are only provisional, only partial forms of something greater, namely, the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. In the mystical and moral vision of the Commedia, nighttime on the mountain is spent sitting under the light of the three stars of the theological virtues. All our labours in the acquisition of the virtues belong to love, they are all properly speaking forms of love; love perfecting our humanity.
The phrase “at thy word” refers not to a mechanical or technocratic kind of reasoning but to a kind of ethical thinking. To reclaim something of what that means will require paying serious attention to the forms of moral and intellectual discourse about the virtues. It will require preachers and teachers and students to pay attention to the poetic and philosophical treatments of ethical thinking in the ancient Greeks, the later developments via the forms of neoplatonism and its influences on Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought, and the subsequent medieval and early modern developments. Hard and necessary work, to be sure. But it seems to me that there are forms of such a way of thinking precisely in the Enlightenment world which gave rise to the destructive forms of our practical and technocratic reason.
Voltaire and Swift, for example, not only embody the supreme qualities of the Enlightenment world but also provide a critique. Through the forms of satire they are only too well aware that the reason that seeks to improve things can equally be what makes things worse. They understood the need for the kind of ethical thinking that we also need. Voltaire’ novel Candide, for example, is pointedly critical about the forms of reason’s exploitation of the natural resources of the new world but also about how it leads to abuses such as slavery. The negro slave in Surinam, who has lost a hand and a leg, remarks that “this is the price for which you eat sugar in Europe”, tying exploitation to the economic aspects of our reasoning. Modern slavery belongs to the reasoning that turns us into objects, into things; slavery not through conquest but by commerce. The sad spectacle moves the character Candide to renounce his naive optimism. It is, he says, “the mania of maintaining that all is well when we are miserable.” Voltaire is making a strong moral point and calling us to the justice that belongs to the labour of reasoning ethically.
This is the labour that makes life worthwhile. It is about meaning, not things. A reason that seeks things reduces us to things at the expense of the love which redeems and sanctifies our humanity. In the Gospel, Simon Peter, “fell down at Jesus’ knees” “for he was astonished and all that were with him, at the draught of the fishes which they had taken”, having acted “at thy word” and let down the net on the other side. Their astonishment has the quality of a kind of self-awareness about sinfulness which stands in stark contrast to the goodness of God. The wonder here is about goodness. Jesus furthers this point of astonishment by bidding Simon Peter “Fear not, from henceforth thou shalt catch men”. It is not about things; it is about us and about what it means to be human.
Such is the remarkable power of the Gospel in our despairing and desperate age. It offers the counter to the very way of thinking that destroys us and our world. It recalls us to the deeper reason of God and to the way in which we participate in that Word. The Trinity season is the journey of the soul in and with God putting on the virtues that belong to the deeper truth of our humanity in Christ. In him, we find meaning and purpose. It is found in the life of compassion and care, being “followers of that which is good,” even if we suffer for it. It is about the real reason, the Word, who teaches us what to be.
“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing;
nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity V, 2017
Christ Church & St. Michael’s, Windsor Forks