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.
It is mind-numbing to think about the loss of lives in the First World War and the Second World War but even more to think about the catastrophic destruction of the millions upon millions of human lives in the totalitarian regimes of Hitler in Germany, of Stalin in Russia, of Mao in China, of Pol Pot in Cambodia, and to recall as well the destructive bombings by the allies not just of Dresden reduced to rubble but other cities as well or the bombing of Tokyo, let alone the dropping of Atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, Remembrance Day requires us to contemplate ourselves in the parade of destructive power that so defines the modern wasteland. Somehow there has to be a way in which we confront the possibilities of such evil in ourselves.
At the same time, Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day, a recalling by name of those who gave their lives in the defining devastations of the twentieth century. What are we recalling? In a phrase, sacrificial love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Christ’s words adorn a thousand cenotaphs across the globe, words which speak so powerfully to human worth and dignity precisely in the face of the collective madness of the world’s wars. For it is about those who were prepared to put themselves on the line for others, those who gave their lives for what they thought was worth living for and thus dying for. It is that spirit that we do well to recall and remember.
They ought to be remembered by name. I am sorry to be critical but a great failing of the Remembrance Day observances in Windsor is the omission of the reading of the names engraved upon the plinths. The great numbers of young people and families at that ceremony is quite moving; it is probably one of the larger Remembrance Day gatherings in the province. But to read the names on the cenotaph would be to realize the enormity of the sacrifices of those from every little community in Hants County where such a high proportion of the male population went to war never to return and so left their communities bereft and empty of its future. The effects of such losses continue to be felt decades upon decades later. The devastations of the destructive forces of the twentieth century are still with us. We do well to try to remember.
We remember the hell of our humanity, what Paul in Ephesians speaks about when he says that we contend “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” He is right for such things are ever present and yet, as he says, we contend by taking upon us “the whole armour of God” and proceeds with a series of military images, “above all, taking the shield of faith… the helmet of salvation … and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” The point is that there is the constant struggle to will the Good, not not to will, but to wrestle for the Good. At the very least, it is to seek “the good of intellect,” the proper good of our humanity wonderfully encapsulated in the Beatitudes which spell out the qualities of sacrificial love belonging to the perfection and truth of our humanity. As the Gospel shows us that is simply and entirely about the resonance of God’s word in our souls. The nobleman who sought the healing of his son by Jesus did not rely on “signs and wonders” but trusted in the word of goodness, “Go thy way, thy son liveth.” As John tells us, “the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken.” That is to will the word that Jesus spoke. It is about a commitment, the commitment of faith to what is true and good and holy.
This is the challenge of the Christian Church. Not to be the ciphers of the religion of human rights which only leads to division and destruction but to lay hold of the word of Christ whose words of sacrificial love counter the negative and empty nhilisms of the modern wasteland.
And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXI, 2019
November 10th, 2019