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Advent Meditation

“Thy Seven-fold gifts impart”

Isaiah is the most ‘evangelical’ of all the Prophets as Anthony Sparrow, a seventeenth century Anglican divine, wisely notes. It is not by accident that in the Advent Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, used in Advent in 1918, just after the horrible and soul-destroying ravages of World War I, three of the great lessons are from Isaiah. Isaiah 11. 1-3a, 4a, 6-9 is particularly instructive about Advent both as an important doctrine and season in its own right and as anticipating the mystery of Christmas.

The passage emphasizes the so-called seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and the theme of Paradise restored. They go together and help to illuminate the darkness of our minds and our world. The Service of Nine Lessons and Carols is a pageant of the strong Word of God coming to us as light and life. The Seven gifts of the Spirit speak to heart and mind in relation to properties or qualities identified with the Messiah “which is being interpreted the Christ”, as the Gospel for the Sunday Next Before Advent reminds us. Yet the Hebrew text, as we have it from a much later period than the Greek translation of it, called the Septuagint and from which the Latin Vulgate translation derives, names six gifts though the Septuagint names seven gifts of the Spirit. That has come to define a whole tradition of spirituality in the Church Catholic expressed for instance in the Veni Creator Spiritus used at ordinations: “thou the anointing Spirit art, / who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart” in John Cosin’s lovely translation (BCP, 653).

But what are these gifts, these qualities of soul that participate or share in the divine nature itself? “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord”. The Septuagint, probably influenced by the rhetorical features of Greek poetry, couples “piety” or devotion with knowledge and makes “the fear of the Lord” a kind of concluding principle. The fear of the Lord refers to a sense of the awe and wonder of God whom we honour and worship.

They are all intellectual and spiritual gifts understood as having come from God. They speak to heart and mind, to character. That is significant with respect to theological anthropology, namely, how we understand our humanity in the sight of God, particularly in terms of the idea of the integration of heart and mind as distinct from their separation and antagonism, what T.S. Eliot famously termed “the dissociation of intellect and sensibility” which defines our modern dystopia in many of its confusions. The seven gifts of the Spirit suggest the mutual co-inherence and inter-dependency of heart and mind, of intellect and sensibility. That they are associated with the Messiah is also significant; they derive from the Word and the Spirit of God and as uniting us with God. As such they offer a profound vision about the greater dignity and truth of our humanity as grounded in God.

In the Christian understanding of Advent, these gifts that speak to the spiritual qualities of the Messiah are ascribed to the coming of Christ. For ancient Israel, the idea of the Messiah admits of a range of possible interpretations but focuses principally on the idea of a king who will restore Israel to prominence and rule as was partially accomplished in King David’s reign. In the Christian understanding, that political theme is inverted. The kingdom that Christ brings is not of this world but signifies a larger sense of redemption, namely, the redemption of the world and our humanity to God. The passage emphasizes explicitly the qualities of righteous judgment that belong to the Messianic kingship in ways that anticipate both the “hungering and thirsting after righteousness” and “mercy for mercy” in the Beatitudes. As such they remind us of the divine basis for all forms of social and political justice. They are rooted and grounded in God’s righteousness, a righteousness which acts as a check on the incomplete forms of human justice. We forget this at our peril.

There is the wonderful paradox that the 17th and 18th century world of the European Enlightenment and its heirs which impelled the projects of social and political progress also recognized the follies and stupidities of human presumption. Wanting to make things better does not necessarily mean that we succeed in making things better; sometimes we make them worse, something which the great satirical writers like Jonathan Swift and Voltaire knew very well. A cautionary note that applies in equal measure to our world.

In Isaiah 11, the theme of the righteousness of the Messianic reign carries over into the picture of Paradise Restored; in short, a vision of what that righteousness might look like. It is imaged in terms of the harmony of the natural world and the harmony of man and nature but ultimately as dependent upon God’s harmony with his creation restored to truth and righteousness. The sequence of images is powerful and suggestive.

Harmony reigns in place of nature as “red in tooth and claw”, a phrase coined by Alfred Lord Tennyson and later used by Darwin. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb rather than eat the lamb! This passage provoked the modern prophet of atheism, Frederick Nietzsche, to heights of rhetorical and polemical excess largely animated by his reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species. He argues for the will to power of each and all. The wolf shall devour the lamb; not dwell with the lamb in peace and harmony. It is a different vision and one that, logically, can only lead to abuse and destruction, to darkness and despair, to a world without reason.

Isaiah is recalling us not to the world of the Fall from Paradise but to Paradise Restored. It is a poetic and philosophic vision that opens us out not to the wildness of nature and man but to our humanity and the world as humanized by the righteousness of God; in short, to impossibilities made possible by the grace of God. Wolf and lamb, leopard and kid (goat), calf and young lion, cow and bear, lion and ox, all live in harmony and peace; a vision of Paradise Restored which has its counterpart in the theme of Arcadia in Greek and Roman antiquity.

But what about our humanity? “And a little child shall lead them,” Isaiah tells us. “And the sucking child,” the child as yet unweaned, “shall play,” unharmed,” on the hole of the asp” as well as “on the cockatrice’ den”, images which the Christian imaginary associates with the child Christ. “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain,” Isaiah concludes, “for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea”. Such is the Advent of God’s Word coming to us as Light and Life. Such is peace and harmony.

Fr. David Curry
Advent 2022