“My Lord, and my God”
The Feast of Thomas closely aligns, at least in the northern hemisphere, with the winter solstice; the shortest day and the darkest night of the year. Its spiritual significance builds on that coincidence with nature to bring us to Christ, the Light and Life of the world, who comes to bring us out of the darkness of doubt and fear. Yet the story of so-called ‘doubting’ Thomas in the Gospel properly belongs to Easter and to the affirmation of the Resurrection, but his day of commemoration belongs to Christmas and thus to the affirmation of the Incarnation, to the bodily reality of Christ without which his suffering, death, and resurrection are illusory and meaningless. What Thomas says to the Risen Christ, who appears to him behind closed doors, “My Lord, and My God”, the Church says at Christmas about the Babe of Bethlehem, “My Lord, and My God”, the Word who is God and Lord made flesh, God with us. It is what we may say devotionally at Communion, too, at the elevation of the host. His words affirm the radical meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity in the intimacy of the body of Christ sacramentally.
The Feast of St. Thomas underscores the profound interconnection and interplay between Christmas and Easter, between Advent and Lent, in the dynamic and dialectic of their relation. John Donne wisely notes about Christ that his “Christmas Day and Good Friday are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day”. Each mystery is inconceivable without the other; they belong to the whole reality of Christ as Lord and God with us.
Thomas is the patron saint of scepticism which is a necessary part of our coming to faith and understanding. We may be apt to have a negative or sceptical view of scepticism and think that it undermines the assurances of belief. But belief that is mere assertion is empty and weak. What Thomas reminds us is the need for our serious engagement with the things of God being made known to us and thus to the questions about our knowing. It belongs, in other words, to the paradigm of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.
Neil Postman, an American philosopher and educator (d. 2003), argues for the development of a scientific or what he also calls a sceptical outlook as part of modern education and as one of the gifts of the Enlightenment, a period which some Christians often scorn and vilify as undermining or disparaging the Faith. Scepticism belongs instead to the deep quest for wisdom, to the idea of questioning. Quest and questioning go together; it is about the desire to know, something which Aristotle claims belongs to human nature. Without the questioning, we might say, there can be no real knowing. The questioning assumes the faith that things can be known which is not the same thing as saying that we know everything. Instead, it is the presupposition for our knowing.
Postman further argues that one of the great gaps in education is about learning how to ask questions without which education becomes little more than a blind acceptance of various forms of dogmatic opinion in the unquestioning deference to authorities. The Feast of Thomas belongs to the biblical exploration about our knowing, in part through the redemption of our desire to know by way of the refining of questions. The story of Thomas is paired with the story of Mary Magdalene in John’s Gospel; they both have to do with our coming to understand the Resurrection, itself the fullest affirmation of the Incarnation. And as C.S. Lewis puts it, in an often overlooked work, The Discarded Image, where he paraphrases Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy, “the character of knowledge depends not on the nature of the object known but on that of the knowing faculty”, an idea which in turn draws on earlier thinkers such as Ammonius and Plotinus not to mention Plato and Aristotle.
The Scriptures ask us to consider what kind of questions are being asked. The first question in the Bible, after all, is the question of the serpent to ‘the Adam’, to our humanity. “Did God say?” It is a question, to be sure, but one which seeks to undermine what in fact we know about what God said concerning the Garden and, in particular, the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What follows is the story of the Fall illuminated for us in the four questions of God to our humanity, questions which call us to account and in which we fall into reason albeit from the side of the experience of suffering.
“Where are you?” God asks. It is not as if he doesn’t know. The question is meant to challenge us about our denial and disobedience with respect to what we have been given to know as belonging to the goodness of Creation and as arising from the essential goodness of God. In a way, it is about our place or our relation to God. “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” is the second question, further explicated by the third question, “Hast thou eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Both questions catapult us into the beginnings of the journey of the soul towards the God whom our thoughts and actions have betrayed. And finally, there is God’s question to Eve and to us, a question which reverberates down throughout the ages and which belongs to all the forms of confession. “What have you done?” The point is that these questions awaken us to truth and as such reveal an essential feature of our humanity as knowing beings even in and through contradiction and betrayal.
There is, then, all the difference between questions which seek to undermine knowing and questions which are about the deepening of our knowing and which reveal its importance for our self-understanding and life with one another.
These questions of God are repeated in the story of Cain and Abel in terms of the more concrete image of murder. The question “Where is Abel your brother?” echoes God’s first question to ‘the Adam’, “where are you?” even as Cain’s sophistic response echoes the question of the serpent in terms of a denial of what is known and a form of self-contradiction. “I do not know: am I my brother’s keeper?” to which God replies with the same question to Eve, “what have you done?” The questions contribute to the ethical lesson powerfully and poignantly stated by God. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” We are catapulted into the quest for understanding about our relation to God through our relations with one another.
Que sais-je? What do I know? Montaigne famously asked in the 16th century. Calvin in his Institutes begins by noting that the two most important things are the knowledge of God and the knowledge of the self. Descartes in the 17th century will embark upon one of the most remarkable thought experiments in the history of philosophy. His ‘hyperbolical doubt’ is a method by which he seeks certainty about himself and what he knows or can know. It is impossible, it seems to me, to disassociate what the father of modern philosophy is doing from the earlier traditions about epistemology and the human quest for understanding, going back to the Greeks and then to Augustine and to Anselm but as well seeing in that activity forms of the biblical teachings which belong to the Feast of St. Thomas.
For Thomas truly wants to know. He is not willing to accept things simply on the authority of others. In a way, he seeks the authority of Truth itself and it is Truth itself which speaks to him (and to us, as the remarkable philosopher, Michel Henry, d. 2002, argues in “I am the Truth” and in “The Words of Christ”). The significance of the Gospel read this evening is highlighted by way of contrast with Mary Magdalene.
She comes to the tomb seeking the body of Christ whom she believes is dead and finds it empty. She comes in grief and sorrow, a grief and sorrow which blinds her to the presence of the Risen Christ even as she turns to him. Jesus immediately questions her, drawing out of her what she seeks. “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” Not recognising him, she says, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” She seeks the body of Christ but as a corpse, a dead body, and as such she seeks to perform the rituals belonging to burial. It is a profound form of ethical care towards the dead, what will come to be known as one of the works of corporal mercy. The care of the dead belongs to the Tao of our humanity as an intriguing feature of human culture in its variety of forms.
She seeks the body to honour the body but with one word she encounters the living and risen Christ, something beyond her expectation. Jesus simply calls her by name, “Mary”. With that there is an αναγνορισις, a moment of recognition, and the beginnings of the dawning of a new understanding. She acknowledges him in Hebrew (or Aramaic) as “Rabboni” which John tells us means, “Teacher”. Note the emphasis on the idea of learning, of knowing. But then he immediately tells her noli me tangere, “touch me not; for I have not yet ascended to my Father” before sending her on the mission to the disciples, apostle apostolorum, to proclaim to them the Resurrection. It is an interesting and intriguing encounter. It has very much to do with her faculty of knowing. She is to know Christ in a new way; not less than the sensual body whether dead or alive but as more than simply that. Not less than sense but more than the sensual. The encounter signals the redemption of the understanding by its being raised to a new level, to the meaning of God with us. She learns about the radical meaning of Christ. “I ascend”, he says to her “unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God”. That says something profound about our humanity.
As C.S. Lewis notes in a remarkable and, perhaps, neglected work, The Discarded Image, “in ourselves sensation, imagination, and ratio all in their several ways ‘know’ man. Sensation knows him as a corporeal shape; imagination, as a shape without matter; ratio, as a concept, a species. None of these faculties by itself” he says,” gives us the least hint of the mode of knowledge enjoyed by its superior” form of knowing. “But above ratio or reason there is a higher faculty, intelligentia or understanding.”
It is important to recall this because the story of Thomas follows upon it in the very same chapter. To the one he says “touch me not”; to the other he says basically “touch and see”. At first glance, this seems completely contradictory but a moment’s reflection reveals something more and something greater. Both encounters have to do with the reality of the Incarnation and its deeper meaning. Thomas has doubted or questioned what the other disciples have told him about their meeting behind closed doors with the Risen Christ on the evening of the day of the Resurrection. The question is about how do we come to know the Resurrection? That, in turn, raises the question about the Incarnation. How do we know?
Thomas famously says “except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Seeing is believing, it is commonly said. Here it is both seeing and touching, two forms of sense perception. Yet Christ affirms this aspect of knowing for it is one part of reality and of knowing. “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” The empirical world is not an illusion but neither is it self-sufficient for understanding. We aren’t told whether Thomas reached out and touched but that is not the question. Like God to Job, so Christ to Thomas responds to his demand to know and this leads to a new understanding, an understanding which does not negate but perfects the forms of our knowing. Sense, imagination and ratio all participate in intelligentia or understanding. They are not negated but affirmed.
This is not simply about the different perspectives of Mary and Thomas, as if to say ‘there is your perspective’ and ‘there is my perspective’ which these days has become famously (and fatuously) ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’ which negates the idea of Truth. Different perspectives or different forms of knowing do not mean different truths. How do we know God? The quest to think this question recognises that we can know the invisible creator by way of the visible things of creation, on the one hand, a kind of cosmological argument which another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, will make, and, on the other hand, we can know God inwardly through a profound reflection on ourselves, in the various ontological arguments which seek to connect our thinking with the principle of thought and being itself. Revelation honours both while setting before us the principle itself. God teaches us through the sensible things of the world and experience and through the intellectual operations of our minds.
The scepticism of Descartes actually complements the scepticism of Thomas for both seek to know what can be known with certainty. Descartes through a rigorous process of doubt comes to know what cannot be doubted, himself as a thinking thing, but that knowledge is utterly empty and nothing without his coming to recognise that the knowledge of the self and, ultimately, a knowledge of the world depends upon an intellectual principle, God, which cannot be produced or invented by us. It is not a human construct. Thomas’s doubting, as the Collect puts it, and again, as an echo of Thomas Aquinas, provides us with the greater or “more confirmation of the faith”.
It brings us in other words to the meaning of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, to the reality of God with us, to the presence of God as Truth made known to us through the complementary forms of our engagement with Truth in and through the various forms of human knowing.
Doubting as serious questioning is the legacy of Thomas. It speaks to confusions of identity in our own world and day. We are more though not less than our biological beings as male and female. To reduce human identity to just the biological negates the fuller forms of human identity; it is a form of determinism which denies human dignity and free will, the fuller reality of our humanity. On the other hand, we are not simply what we might think we are in our imaginations at the expense of our biological being. The claims to identities such as non-binary, neither male nor female, only results in another kind of binary: binary versus non-binary. It results in a contradiction with the body. For however much you change around all the body parts, all the outward forms of the body, the DNA does not change, the biology still remains. The contradiction is what Mary Harrington calls bio libertarianism, a flight from the body, a denial of the body and the world. This, too, is an inadequate view of our humanity, a kind of gnosticism or docetism, the very thing which John in his Gospel and letters seeks to counter in affirming the bodily reality of Christ. Paradoxically such claims may be a true and felt reaction to the determinisms that belong to the binary logic of the technological world.
There are social constructs, to be sure, but they cannot be in flight from nature, the world, and our bodies, the affirmation of which belongs to the Christmas mystery of the Word made flesh. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life … we declare unto you” (1 John 1.1ff). It is really a commentary on the story of Thomas.
The Feast of Thomas affirms the goodness of creation because it affirms the Incarnation, itself the most profound testament to the goodness of creation. The distinction between God the Creator and the Creation is not negated; if anything it is more strongly emphasized. This is captured beautifully and powerfully in Thomas’s great words of faith, “My Lord and My God” by which Christ dwells in us and with us sacramentally and by faith, and “in whom”, as Paul puts it, “ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit”. Through the Incarnation and Thomas’s words of faith we find our dwelling-place with God.
“My Lord, and my God”
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of St. Thomas
Advent Programme II
December 21st, 2021.