`“Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of the sufferings of Christ” (1 Peter 2.13)
Tonight we meet not only in the week of The Fifth Sunday in Lent, in other words, in Passiontide, but in the conjunction of the commemorations of Benedict, the founding father of Benedictine monasticism which shaped so much of what would become Europe and the intellectual culture of the Latin or Western Church, and Thomas Cranmer, who built upon that legacy as the architect of The Book(s) of Common Prayer that envisioned a Christian nation as a community of prayer. Both can be regarded as “doctors” – teachers – of the Church. But Cranmer was the Archbishop of Canterbury and, as well, a martyr.
It seems fitting and in keeping with our Lenten series on The Comfortable Words and The Literature of Consolation that we give emphasis to the aspect of martyrdom, to the idea of comfort found even in suffering, captured in the text from 1 Peter and reflected in the Gospel reading from Matthew 16 about “deny[ing ourselves] and tak[ing] up [the] cross, and foll[owing Jesus]”.
“Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.” These words belong to the Invitation to Confession in the Eucharistic liturgy of the Prayer Book, words which perhaps we hear as familiar and dear but don’t really think about and yet they connect two things, comfort with Confession, and comfort with the Sacrament of the Altar. In both those senses they suggest something of the significance of the Comfortable Words in the Prayer Book Communion liturgy. In a way, the Comfortable Words pick up from that succinct and rich phrase in precisely those two ways: at once in relation to the comfort of confession and to the comfort of the sacrament to which the confession of sins leads us.
They echo, too, perhaps, the words of St. Paul at the outset of his Second Letter to the Corinthians, words of blessing in the midst of struggles and sufferings. “Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” That is consolation writ large! Two nouns and three verbal forms, yet all about comfort extended and received, but, most importantly, grounded in God. The Greek word for comfort is translated in the Latin as consolatio. It is, perhaps, not by accident then that Meister Eckhart, an astute and original thinker on every aspect of the Christian Faith philosophically and here pastorally considered, should entitle his two early fourteenth century treatises on Consolation with Paul’s opening word, “Benedictus.” The first treatise, “The Book of Divine Consolation” begins with these words from Paul, words which not only begin but underlie the argument of both treatises which together present in a concentrated way almost the whole of the tradition of consolation before him.
They are entitled The Book of “Benedictus” comprising The Book of Divine Consolation, and Of the Nobleman, which is really a sermon which complements the first treatise, providing a kind of itinerary of the soul back to God in whom we find all and every consolation. They were written, it seems, like so much of the literature of consolation to those in need, in this case, Queen Agnes of Hungary perhaps in the first decade of the fourteenth century. They reveal the central features of Eckhart’s mystical theology.
There are, he says, “three kinds of tribulation” for us ”in this sorrowful life”: harm to our “material possessions”; harm that happens to “kinsfolk and friends”; harm that happens to ourselves in various ways, both physically, in terms of the pains and sufferings of the body, and psychologically, in terms of the disgraces and sorrows of the heart. His aim is to write some counsels of consolation “with which a man can console himself in all his sufferings, afflictions and sorrow.” The first treatise is divided into three parts. The first under the guise of various true sayings provides the principles of consolation for all sorrows. The second provides “some thirty topics and precepts”, essentially a collection of arguments about finding consolation in the face of suffering. And thirdly, he provides examples of “what wise men have done and have said when they were suffering.” It will not be possible to be exhaustive about such an exhaustive work and one which involves almost one hundred “ifs”. The use of the conditional indicates how it is an educative process of thinking, a thinking about the nature of the goodness of God and our participation in that goodness, “if” we will think along with Eckhart.
The first part begins with noting the nature of the mutual relationship between a wise person and wisdom, a truthful person and truth, a just person and justice, a good person and goodness. In a way it is about our dwelling in the uncreated goodness of God who is the good in everything. “That which is good and goodness are nothing else than one single goodness in everything.” Every good is not just from the goodness of God but is in the divine goodness. Eckhart here draws explicitly upon Johannine passages about the mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son, particularly from the Prologue about how we “become the sons of God” by being “born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” Consolation is grounded in our participation in the indwelling life of God through being born of God. This goes beyond “the will of man” which refers to “the highest powers of the soul” separated, he says, “from time and place and all that.” But as created powers in the soul, Eckhart argues for something much greater: “they must lose their own image, and be transformed above themselves into the image of God alone, and be born in God and from God.”
This teaching provides us with “true consolation in all our sufferings,” a teaching “written in the holy gospel” but “recognized with certainty in the natural light of the rational soul.” Such again is the consolation of philosophy. It is about our being with God and in God for “in God there is no sorrow or suffering or affliction.” Consolation is our “hold[ing] fast to God and turn[ing] wholly to him.” All suffering comes from our “not turn[ing] in God and to God.”
“Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.” The comfort, the consolation, lies entirely in our turning completely to God and being with God and in God. It requires losing the image of ourselves and of all creatures since that separates us from God. “All our being, living, knowing and loving is from God, is in God, is God.” It is a remarkable statement and provides the principle upon which the whole treatise builds and depends.
The just man rejoices in his works of justice because those works are God’s justice at work through him. This, Eckhart suggests, is why the saints joyfully gave their lives. They gave their lives for the sake of justice, the justitia dei. Thus Eckhart doesn’t deny that harmful things happen to people. The whole exercise of consolation is entirely about how we think about them. And if, there is that word again, we are in God then nothing that happens outwardly can afflict us inwardly and even more, we should rejoice in the afflictions that we receive outwardly. Why? Because they bear testimony to our existence and thus to God. To will God’s will is more than the world. If we suffer then we exist. I suffer therefore I am and I am only in God. We cannot find consolation in created things, only in God. This in turn leads to how we learn to love God alone in created things and love created things only in God. This idea will have its poetic expression in Thomas Traherne, some three centuries and a half later. “you never enjoy the world aright unless you enjoy it in God”.
God and “God alone is the single source and channel of all good, of essential truth and of consolation.” The corollary which equally informs the second part of his treatise is that “everything that is not God possesses from its own nature bitterness, sadness and suffering.” In “run[ning] after created things, from which by their nature desolation comes,” we are “run[ning] away from God, from whom all consolation flows.”
The second part of “The Book of Consolation” is a rich compendium of topics both theoretical and practical about consolation found in and through suffering. At times intensely theological and speculative, it is also quaint, pastoral and commonplace. There is in short, a kind of direct and simple wisdom that stands alongside some remarkably profound insights into the Goodness and the Oneness of God, of suffering found in division and separation from the essential oneness of God, of consolation found in our suffering for and with and in God.
There is no suffering without consolation; no suffering that is only suffering, Eckhart argues, noting that “the saints and the pagan philosophers also say that God and nature do not permit unmixed evil or suffering to exist.” It is really all about a way of thinking that finds our suffering in God and as such is a kind of suffering without suffering because it belongs so completely to the goodness of God and our willing that will in our lives.
Suffering and affliction often turn on what our thoughts are focussed. The loss of forty marks (money) from one hundred or the fact that we still have sixty marks? At once practical advice, it turns upon an astute philosophical principle. “What exists and is good can console me; but what is nonexistent and is not good, what is not mine and what I have lost, that must of necessity bring desolation.” Do you think about the bad that has happened at the expense of the good things that also have happened? Think of the good rather than the bad. Same thing with sickness. There are always those who are suffering far more than you. Again, a commonplace, but always with Eckhart, the commonplaces and cliches of comfort are grounded in something principled and often supported by authorities like Sirach, Augustine, David, Seneca, Aquinas as well as passages from Ecclesiastes, from Isaiah, from Paul and from John. Sometimes the same passages are referenced more than once but not simply repetitively.
Consolation is found in the suffering and not just from suffering and not just past or future but present. Suffering can be for God but even more importantly, it is found in God. Quoting the Psalms that “the Lord is with a good man in his suffering,” Eckhart derives a sevenfold consolation: suffering a lot for a good and greater end; suffering with God and since God is with me in my suffering, what more can I want since all that I want is God; God is himself suffering with us which turns suffering into our joy and consolation; compassion of others lightens my suffering, how much more then does God’s compassion; suffering for the love of another, how much more is God’s suffering with me and for my sake out of his love for me; God’s suffering for me is prevenient such that my suffering already participates in his suffering for me in a far greater way, such that suffering for God and in God belong to God himself; and finally, since God is with us in our suffering for God and in God, suffering loses its sorrow. God is suffering but suffering is not sorrow or misfortune but blessedness. All because of the intensity of our identity in God.
The second part of the twofold Book of “Benedictus” entitled “Of the Nobleman” deals with the movement of the soul in its return to God. Here Eckhart underlines one of his distinctive contributions to theology, the emphasis on unity over diversity and the grounding of all diversity in the unity of God. Our blessedness does not lie in our knowing that our blessedness is in God since that would imply a kind of separation and run the risk, perhaps the precursor of our modern dilemmas, of putting the onus on what we know rather than on the one in whom our knowing, our willing and our being depend. Consolation is not simply in our knowing that God is our consolation; it is in God himself.
In a way that provides an intriguing and extraordinary check or counter to what will later become our epistemological fixations. To be sure, our knowing matters but it cannot be the basis of reality but depends upon a principle of intellection and being that is beyond both; a point which Plato understood.
Meister Eckhart’s treatises on Consolation deserve much greater consideration. At this point, all one can do is to point to them and encourage the thoughtful reading of them; “if”, indeed, “if” we will, then we shall find true consolation and one which can speak to the disorders of our souls and our times.
Three centuries later, John Donne in one of his Holy Sonnets in the Divine Meditations will contribute to the literature of consolation and in ways that already suggest a different emphasis yet one which connects to the tradition of consolation literature through the devotional traditions that arise in late medieval catholicism. The focus turns more and more to the cross at once aesthetically and spiritually as the ground of our participation in the goodness of God. God is suffering is the meaning of the sufferings of the crucified.
“What if this present were the world’s last night,” Donne’s sonnet begins, asking us to think about how we might face judgement and death. “Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell/ the face of Christ crucified… “ Look into your heart, the heart here understood as the place of the soul, and not the mind, the poem suggests, and see there an image, “the face of Christ crucified.” It is clear from the poem that Donne probably has in mind the images of Christ crucified that emphasize the sufferings of Christ particularly as imaged in terms of the devastations of the Black Death that decimated two-thirds of Europe in the fourteenth century and left a recurring legacy of fears about plagues. The images of Christ crucified capture that sense of the human sufferings of Christ in terms of the hideous distortions of the human form as a result of the plague.
Look within, Donne is saying, at the image of Christ crucified, depicted on the walls of the Churches, but even more as imprinted on our memories. He asks us to inquire about what we find as remembered within ourselves. Look at “the face of Christ crucified and tell/whether that countenance can thee afright.” Does the remembrance of that image frighten you, he asks, going on to describe the features of suffering, of the light in his eyes quenched and the blood of the crown of thorns. It is all about what we see and understand and then from the visual, the poem turns to another aspect of the image, to the inescapable conjunction of things seen and heard, to the words of the crucified. In other words, there is the question about what we see and how we understand to what is heard and remembered by the witness of the Scriptures to the story of Christ crucified and its meaning.
“And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell/ which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite,” an explicit reference to the first word of Christ from the Cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” That ends the octet to which the sestet responds in answer to both what is seen and what is heard. “No, no”. No to both our being frightened by what we see in the sense of being condemned and no to our being judged verbally. Instead, the sestet points to the things that separate us from God, what Donne calls his “profane mistresses,” meaning all those external loves and interests that are outside of God and not understood within God and as such distract us from God and as such can only contribute to our fears and sorrows.
“Beauty, of pity, foulness only is a sign of rigour.” Beauty, Donne argues, signifies pity, the compassion of the good and the beautiful towards us in our ugliness in contrast to the foulness and decay of which death – rigor mortis – is the sign. The sonnet ends with words about the image of the crucified which has undergone a transformation, a transformation in thought that leads from suffering to consolation. “This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.” The tone and sensibility is different but the underlying message is the same. In the sufferings of Christ we see the sufferings of God and that gives us assurance, joy and blessedness; in short, consolation.
The consolation literature challenges us in our own times to think more deeply about human suffering as a way of participating in the absolute goodness of God for us. It is what the Comfortable Words teach even as they draw us into the comfort of the sacrament, to our being with Christ and his being with us. What more could we ever want?
“Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of the sufferings of Christ”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Programme IV
Wednesday, March 21st, 2018