Year: 2023

“Ye shall know them by their fruits”

“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He was the Duke of Milan but preferred his books in the study of natural philosophy to the mundane duties of running his dukedom which he had delegated to his brother, Antonio.. Betrayed by his brother, who in cahoots with Alonzo, the King of Naples, usurped his dukedom, Prospero and Miranda are set adrift on the seas on a derelict raft. Never mind that Milan is not an Italian port city! They wash up on an island – “the Bermoothes” – Bermuda, as it turns out. Not such a bad place to come ashore, I suppose. The play is the only play of Shakespeare that is set outside the Euro-Mediterranean world. Miranda at the time in the play was three. Now at fifteen she learns who she is, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. Prospero’s answer to her question “how came we ashore?” is “by providence divine.”

The play explores the ambiguities of Prospero’s intent. His knowledge of nature in Renaissance eyes is a kind of magic – so-called ‘white magic’. It belongs to early modernity in different ways to see knowledge as conferring a power over nature. We should be only too well aware of the deadly consequences of such knowledge in our own times. Prospero conjures up a storm, a tempest, to bring his betrayers to the island and under his power. But to what end? Revenge? Or something more? Reconciliation?

There is a nice sense here of the interplay between natural and moral philosophy. On the ship are not only his betrayers but also the son of one of his betrayers, Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, King of Naples. As well there is the noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, who gave Prospero his books as he was being set adrift. On the island, there is Caliban, the symbolic image of the indigenous cultures in their encounter with European culture. Shakespeare not only explores the complexity of that encounter but provides a Euro-critique of itself that derives from the indigenous cultures themselves.

The play unfolds the love theme between Ferdinand and Miranda that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness and reconciliation are extended even towards those who show no remorse, no change, such as Prospero’s brother, Antonio, and Alonzo’s brother, Sebastian, unrepentant scoundrels and miscreants both. Yet grace is greater than those who resist it; they are sustained by what they refuse to embrace but, at the same time, what they cannot enjoy. There’s the rub.

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“I have compassion on the multitude”

Today’s Collect is a loaded prayer that pulls together the central ideas of the Epistle and Gospel readings. Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, it gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as standing upon the truth of God revealed. The images of grafting, growing, nurturing and preserving are organic and agricultural – most fitting for our lives in the valley – but they follow upon an understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things”. That understanding shapes the meaning of these images. It makes them profoundly sacramental.

The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle unpacks, we might say, the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. And we pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel alludes to the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things”, is through the compassion of Christ who feeds us in the wilderness and sets us upon our way, “he in us and we in him,” as the Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy put it. Grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” as Paul teaches, we are meant to live from that Word of God revealed.

That we are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name” reminds us that Baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuation in the Eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life”. Thus the interplay between the Epistle and the Gospel is like the connection between Baptism and Communion.

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