“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my path”
We have used this text as the basis of our Advent meditations which reach a kind of crescendo on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. The word of God is prophetically signalled in the witness of John who points us to the greater wonder of the Word with us, the Word as light in the various darknesses of our understanding. “He was not that light”, we will hear on Christmas Eve “but was sent to bear witness of that light”. Word as light has been our advent concern and interest.
Sarah Bakewell, in her wonderful and brilliant treatment of the essaies of Michel de Montaigne (wittily entitled, ‘How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’), notes at the outset that “the Twenty-First century is full of people who are full of themselves”. A wonderful aperçu, beginning or opening, it strikes me as having a particular resonance and poignancy for our times. In one way, it is nothing new, and, against Bakewell, the interest in the self as a reflection of the other is not new as something invented by the forms of introspection seen in Montaigne. Yet her remark captures an aspect of our contemporary discontent. Beyond Wordsworth’s “the world is too much with us, late and soon”, we have a world full of those who are full of themselves.
Her opening statement provides an opening to our current concerns and difficulties where we are very much concerned about ourselves in ways that paradoxically undermine ourselves. A world that is full of people who are full of themselves is a world full of empty selves or non-selves, at once narcissistic and nihilistic. Today’s Gospel provides an interesting counter to one of the myriad of forms of self-contradiction in our self-obsessed age. It does so through the witness of John, who in response to being asked who he is, consistently re-orients the question to the one who is greater than he without whom he himself is nothing. This is truly remarkable and without it we can make little sense of the Incarnation.
John is saying that he is nothing in himself. He is saying that he exists for another. Self and other are not pitted against one another in an endless rivalry and animosity. In a way, we are being reminded of the deeper logic of the law in terms of the inseparable qualities of the love of God and the love of neighbour. Even more, we might say with St. Felicity that “another shall be in me who shall suffer for me because I am to suffer for him”, to which the witness of John points us. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. ‘Another lives in me’ is the counter to our being full of ourselves.
Whether it is mere serendipity or a kind of divine providence, reading Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne coincided with my reading of one of the more philosophical works of the influential Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis. “The Abolition of Man”, delivered as the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Durham in 1943, provides a profound reflection on ethics as something universal and objective, what Lewis refers to as the Tao, using a term from ancient Chinese philosophy. The three lectures counter the subjectivist climate of opinion that negates any true knowledge and leads to the abolition of man by man. The lectures bring out the ethical principles common to the religious and philosophical cultures and traditions of the world in and through their differences of expression. It is an argument for what is universal about our humanity in contrast to the forms of cultural relativism or social constructivism that continue to beset us.
He points out the inherent contradiction in all forms of subjectivism: to say that all statements are nothing more than personal expressions of value is to make a universal or absolute claim. Lewis wants to argue from more than simply a Christian perspective that concepts such as the Beautiful, the Good, and the True “take us beyond our isolated perspectives into a shared discourse of objective values” (Michael Ward in “After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man”, 2021). The first lecture, “Men Without Chests” shows the fatal divide between the intellectual and the sensual, echoing T.S. Eliot’s famous “dissociation of sensibility”. What is needed is the integration of our thinking and our feeling, an integration of mind and body in the heart or core of our being. Men with chests, as Homer put it, is about that integration. The second lecture, “The Way”, examines the qualities of that sense of integration in terms of the Tao, a universal principle of objective moral value, discovered in and through the differences belonging to what he calls “the traditional moralities of East and West”. The differences of expression have to do with the dynamic and organic developments from inside the Tao because that is the only basis for the possibility of any kind of moral judgement. As Michael Ward explains, “as soon as one steps outside the Tao” – outside the framework of essential ethical principles – “one has stepped into the void”, into a world full of people who are full of themselves but empty of principle.
The last lecture, “The Abolition of Man”, is about that void in terms of humans dominating other humans largely through the lenses of the technologies which reduce others to things, as mere artefacts to be manipulated. The mastery of nature leads to the mastery of men but at the expense of our humanity because we negate our humanity and the world itself. Such is the abolition of man by man. In many ways, the lecture is eerily prophetic about our current distresses. How to reclaim “the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery”? The question then is our question now.
Yet it is one which is addressed in the Collect and readings for this Sunday. We look for the power of God, not the power of man, to “come among us” which alone provides succour or help over and against “our sins and wickedness” which hinder us “in running the race that is set before us”; in short, the path of life which we can only follow through the “bountiful grace and mercy” of God. As Paul says, “The Lord is at hand”, thus “in nothing be anxious”, a lovely phrase which calls us to action, to the activity of prayer with thanksgiving, to rejoicing, and to the awareness of the peace of God “which passeth all understanding” precisely because it is not and cannot be a human construct. We await the coming of one whom, as John the Baptist proclaims, “cometh after me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose”, the one whom he names as “the Lamb of God”.
This awakens us to the abiding truth of the Tao, of God as the principle of our life and understanding and to the idea of that truth coming to us and abiding with us. We are awakened to the joy that is not of our own making but which requires our constant attention and reverence. Thus the words of the Psalmist belong to the pageant of ethical understanding, the Tao, the way of our living and being with one another in truth, in beauty, and in goodness. For these are the things given to live in us which counter the idea of being full of ourselves. “Thy word is a lantern unto my feet”, not my word, not your words, but God’s word, “and a light unto my path”, the ethical way of life without which we lose our humanity. We are not the light but await the light which comes in the quiet wonder of Christmas.
“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my path”
Fr. David Curry
Advent IV, 2021