Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity
And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him
Do we? The word of Jesus is the word of life. Apart from that word we are simply dead.
“I had not thought that death had undone so many,” T. S. Eliot says in The Wasteland, channeling Dante the Pilgrim’s observation about the throngs of souls in the Vestibule of Hell in Dante the Poet’s Inferno. They are souls who are neither worthy of Heaven nor Hell, a Dantean invention of great insight. They are those “who against God rebelled not, nor to Him were faithful, but to self alone were true.” Hell is, in Dante’s vision, the place for the miserable race of “those who have lost the good of intellect.” Not to will at all is part of the loss of intellect. It means an aimless life following this and that fad of the moment, what Dorothy L. Sayers calls “the weather-cock mind, the vague tolerance which will neither approve nor condemn, the cautious cowardice for which no decision is ever final.” Even more, as she suggests, they chase aimlessly after the whirling banners “stung and goaded by the thought that, in doing anything definite whatsoever, they are missing doing something else.” It is a contemptible and pitiful picture of an aspect of our humanity in its disorder and disarray, and yet one which in its inability to commit, to will at all, is part of our world and day.
Power, wisdom and love are attributes of the Trinity that speak to the image of God in us. “If there is God, if there is freewill,” Charles Williams notes, “then man is able to choose the opposite of God. Power, Wisdom, Love, gave man freewill; therefore Power, Wisdom, Love, created the gate of hell and the possibility of hell.” And so there is in Dante’s powerful vision a gathering together of those who have chosen the opposite of God and who are ferried by Charon across the river of death to the City of Dis, to Hell. The image is autumnal. “And as, by one and one, leaves drift away/ In autumn, till the bough from which they fall/ Sees the earth strewn with all its brave array,/So from the bank there, one by one, drop all/ Adam’s ill seed.” Yet, the souls in the Vestibule are not even worthy of being gathered into Hell.
Such grey and dark thoughts are hardly pleasing, and yet the whole purpose of Dante’s Divine Comedy is to lead us from misery to felicity. That requires sombre and serious reflection upon the forms of misery that belong to the images of sin in the self and in the human community. And that is part of the challenge of Remembrance Day. Eliot was commenting by way of Dante about ‘the wasteland of modernity’ occasioned by the devastations of the First World War and beyond that make the twentieth century the most destructive period in human history. It is a tale of madness belonging to the global export of technocratic power without parallel. We are only beginning to understand the importance of Remembrance Day. It is not about cheering for King and Empire, for Queen and Commonwealth, but rather about contemplating the complexity and complicity of human evil in the times of “collective madness.” The phrase is from Robertson Davies.
