Address to Society of the Holy Cross, 2 August 2024

admin | 2 August 2024

“‘Th’ abridgement of Christ’s Story’: Passion & Incarnation”
Address to the St. John Vianney Chapter of the SSC,
Province of Our Lady of Sorrows
Fr. David Curry, SSC

“And I, if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me” (John 12. 32)

We met for low mass commemorating St. John Vianney in the great romantic Gothic ‘barn’ of a building that is Christ Church, a building that embodies the spiritual emphasis of the Oxford Movement architecturally and liturgically. In a way, the whole building seeks what Jesus says in John’s Gospel about his being lifted up and our being drawn to him. His words capture the centrality of the Cross in the understanding of human redemption. They look back to the pattern of events of the Exodus and ahead to the shaping of the life of the Christian Church. The shadows of the Cross look backwards and forwards. Here Jesus looks back to a scene in The Book of Numbers where the people of Israel complained against God and Moses in the wilderness and were afflicted by God with venomous serpents. Moses intercedes and is directed by God to make a bronze serpent and to raise it up. Whoever looks upon it is saved. The logic is clear: in the bronze serpent raised up the sin of Israel is made explicit to them. They see their sin made visible and in seeing are saved. Sin and grace.

This informs the logic of the Passion. “They shall look on him whom they pierced,” John says about the Crucifixion quoting Zechariah. In our looking is our restoration; human redemption. The Passion and the Incarnation are inseparable terms: the one is unthinkable apart from the other. Such, too, is the meaning of the SSC as a society of catholic priests. “We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation, our life and our resurrection, through him we are saved and made free.” And yet this has somehow to be seen that “through the saving power of the Cross, + impressed inwardly upon our lives and revealed – expressed – outwardly in our work, may others come to know your love and your truth; through Christ our Lord.” Sacrifice and service are intertwined and belong to the mission.

The Society was established in 1855 just ten years after the “parting of friends” in Newman’s departure for Rome, largely owing to a view of doctrinal development influenced by the ideology of progress. Classical Anglican divinity was firmly opposed not to the development of doctrine but to any further development of essential doctrine; nothing to be added and nothing to be taken away from the essentials of the Faith. The ‘Newman crisis’ is part of the history and legacy of the SSC within the so-called Oxford Movement, of which the SSC is simply one aspect, and belongs more generally to the bricolage or fragmentations of thought of Victorian England in the various competing groups and intense divisions of feeling that are a significant feature of the 19th century. SSC is one of several forms of catholic revival such as the founding of Cuddesdon College (1853), Keble College (1870), and Pusey House (1884), and various other societies such as The Cambridge Camden Society (1839), subsequently The Cambridge Ecclesiological Society (1845), which had an enormous influence on Church architecture both in England and North America, the revival of monastic life, for example, SSJE or the Cowley Fathers (1866), and the promotion of retreats and pilgrimages such as to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Yet how to think through the bricolage of the period and its continuation into the 20th and 21st centuries towards a deeper understanding of spiritual unity and theological vision remains our challenge especially in the face of the growing hostility and animus towards all things Christian, exemplified, for instance, in the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics with a drag queen parody of the Eucharist. Such are some of the modern tendencies that we confront that parallel, in some way or another, as Fr. Hightower suggests, the struggles of the SSC in its early years.

For SSC, as for Keble and Pusey, it was not about looking to Rome but recalling and appreciating the essential catholicism of our classical Anglican heritage in its deep reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers. This led to such scholarly endeavours as The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, which although misnamed – the term is 19th century – contributed to a growing awareness of a spiritual inheritance much overlooked and ignored but there to be reclaimed, and as well to The Library of the Fathers with respect to the significance and necessity of patristic theology. The former had a profound influence on T.S. Eliot among others, for instance, who saw in Hooker and Andrewes the qualities of thought that made “the English Church more worthy of intellectual assent.” More importantly, perhaps, Eliot saw in Andrewes and Donne “the harmony of intellect and sensibility,” from which dissociation “we have never recovered.” It is an apt observation that belongs to the fragmentation and bricolage of 19th century culture and its continuing legacy in our times.

Fr. Robert Crouse, in his Images of Pilgrimage, suggests that “we should stay close to the language of images” with respect to theological reasoning. They are, he says, “the primary form of revelation, and although the precisions of theology are important and necessary, the images have a depth and richness, or wholeness, which the exactness and explicitness of scientific language can never quite exhaust.” This complements Eliot’s observation about “the dissociation of intellect and sensibility” which leads to the loss of the “depth, richness and wholeness” of the Scriptural images through default to more abstract terms and language.

This problematic is seen in the Lux Mundi School in the late 19th century, a liberal Anglo-Catholic project, in its book, “Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation,” ed. by Charles Gore, first published in 1889. It went through ten editions. Their focus on ‘science and religion’ belongs to a tendency and feature of 19th century thinking influenced by a number of factors: Darwinian evolutionary theory, the shift from the rural to the urban world via the enormous expansion of industrialization, the legacy of mechanistic reason as one aspect of the Enlightenment and the romantic reaction that ensued, the rise of the experiential in terms of psychoanalytic thinking first, with Nietzsche, and then with Freud and Jung, and the turn to the sociological at the expense of the metaphysical. Peter Harrison’s The Territories of Science and Religion illustrates the shifts in language and thought that this entails.

It is the problem of reification, turning words and concepts into things that are more abstract and thus emptying words and metaphors of their power and meaning. The change in the terms ‘scientia’ and ‘religio’ from being habits of mind and soul to becoming entities or things; in short, ‘Science and Religion,’ contributes to a modern tendency that views ‘science’ as ‘the dominant cognitive paradigm’ through which everything else is measured and/or reacted against, either acquiescing to the determinisms of technocratic culture, ‘the religion of science,’ scientism, or in flight from it and the world into the various imaginaries and abstractions of the soul, what Michel Henry termed “Galilean sociologism” which supplants philosophy and learning. Both are anti-life and anti-thought.

“The religion of the Incarnation” is a 19th century term virtually unknown in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Its meteoric rise in use, according to Google Books Ngram Viewer, matches the heyday of the Lux Mundi school and perhaps contributes to some of the misconceptions about the concept of the Incarnation in our times; particularly, in an overemphasis on the theology of kenosis and a downplaying of the Cross, something which Abp. Michael Ramsay observed in 1960. This downplaying of the Cross is partly a failure of the imagination and partly a form of linear thinking which reduces theological concepts to a collection of disparate bits and bytes at the expense of their unity and integrity.

This stands in remarkable contrast to the spiritual legacy of classical Anglicanism wonderfully captured in “Th’ abridgement of Christ’s story”. It is a line from a poem by John Donne and yet refers to a way of understanding found in Hooker and Andrewes about thinking the nature of human redemption in a more unitive way especially in terms of the Chalcedonian definition. We have, I think, largely forgotten this.

At the heart of the matter is the term ‘Incarnation’ which for us, it seems, is largely seen as God’s embrace and celebration of the endless indeterminacies of existential experience; in short, God’s endorsement of human particularity indiscriminately. This belongs to our confusion about the term ‘Incarnation’ and, paradoxically, to a loss of self.

John Donne’s poem, Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608, reflects upon the coincidence of Good Friday falling upon March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation. His soul, “sees him man, so like God made in this,/ That of them both a circle emblem is,/ Whose first and last concur; this doubtful day/ Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away.” In the fifteenth line, the focus shifts to Mary:

At once a son is promised her, and gone,
Gabriel gives Christ to her, he her to John;
Not fully a mother, she’s in orbity [meaning sorrow],
At once receiver and the legacy;
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th’ abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one
(As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)
Of the angels’ Ave, ‘and Consummatum est.

The abridgement is the contraction or concentration of the meaning of human redemption in the circling around and into each other of Christ’s Conception and Christ’s Passion, each inseparable from the other, signalling at once the birth and death of God himself.

The “circle emblem” recalls the mystical idea of God as “a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” but here applied to Christ as man whose beginning in the flesh and whose end on the cross meet together on one day. This sensibility runs through many of Donne’s sermons. “The whole life of Christ was a continuall Passion,” he says in his 1625 Christmas Sermon. “Others die Martyrs, but Christ was born a Martyr. He found a Golgotha (where he was crucified) even in Bethlem, where he was born … His birth and his death were but one continuall act, and his Christmas-day and his Good Friday, are but the evening and morning of one and the same day” (VII, p. 279).

This complements Andrewes’ Good Friday sermon of 1605. “It is well known that Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continual cross. At the very cratch [meaning the crêche], His cross first began. There Herod sought to do that which Pilate did, even to end His life before it began” (II, p. 65). A continual Passion, a continual act, a continual cross.

Why this constant interplay of birth and death, of Annunciation and Passion, of Christmas Day and Good Friday, “th’ abridgement of Christ’s story”? Because of what belongs to human redemption. “We may hereby perceive,” Richard Hooker says, “the cause why divine nature should assume human, that so God might be in Christ reconciling to himself the world.” The idea of reconciliation presupposes a gap, a separation between where we are and where we might think we would like to be, theologically between us and God. As he explains, “the world’s salvation was without the incarnation of the Son of God a thing impossible, not simply impossible, but impossible it being presupposed that the will of God was no otherwise to have it saved than by the death of his own Son. Whereby taking to himself our flesh, and by his incarnation making it his own flesh, he had now of his own although from us what to offer unto God for us.”

This reflects the Chalcedonian Definition which has to do with the distinction of Natures, human and divine, united and preserved in their integrity in the Person of Christ. Hooker unpacks the history of its development by way of those Fathers who argued for the full divinity of Christ, for the full divinity of the Holy Ghost, and for the complete humanity of Christ, particularly Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil and the two Gregories, against Arius and Apollinarius, for example, before charting out a middle course between “that distraction of Persons wherein Nestorius went awry” (Nestorianism) and the “confusion of Natures which deceived Eutyches” (Monophysitism). He recognises, however, that both Nestorius and Eutyches were partly right: “For Nestorius teaching rightly that God and man are distinct natures, did thereupon misinfer that in Christ those natures can by no conjunction make one person,” while on the other hand,“ so Eutyches, of sound belief as touching their true personal copulation, became unsound by denying the difference which still continueth between the one and the other Nature.” At issue is making sense theologically of the Scriptures and human redemption, what Hooker calls “the mystery of our coherence with Christ.”

This way of thinking informs our sacramental understanding. There is an explicit connection between Incarnation and Passion and our participation in this mystery. “His body crucified and his blood shed for the life of the world, are the true elements of that heavenly being, which maketh us such as himself is of whom we come.” He notes that “to all things he is life, and to men light, as the Son of God; to the Church both life and light eternal by being made the Son of Man for us, and by being in us a Saviour, whether we respect him as God, or as man. Adam is in us as an original cause of our nature, and of that corruption of nature which causeth death, Christ as the cause original of restoration to life; the person of Adam is not in us, but his nature, and the corruption of his nature derived unto all men by propagation; Christ having Adam’s nature as we have, but incorrupt, deriveth not nature but incorruption and that immediately from his own person into all that belong unto him. As therefore we are really partakers of the body of sin and death received from Adam, so except we be truly partakers of Christ, and as really possessed of his Spirit, all we speak of eternal life is but a dream.”

Hooker provides a wonderful ‘abridgement’ of the Chalcedonian Definition. Four words, he says, capture its essential teaching about Christ and thus our participation in Christ: “truly, perfectly, indivisibly, distinctly. The first applies to Christ being God, truly; the second to his being man, perfectly; the third to his being of both one, indivisibly, and the fourth to his still continuing in that one both, distinctly.” He notes that all heresies past and present come under these headings.

Whether ‘Incarnation’ is taken as a collective term that comprehends the whole of human redemption in Christ as true God and true Man, or, in a more limited sense, as referring simply to Christ’s Conception, or as embracing both Christ’s Conception and Birth, the Passion is always central to the concept. This gets overlooked in the ways in which atonement is broken down into three incomplete, partial, and competing perspectives – the classical theory of Christus Victor, the substitutionary theory of Anselm, and the exemplarist theory associated with Abelard, for instance. This fragmentation appears already in Lux Mundi but was later popularized by Anders Nygren and Gustav Aulen and which influenced mid-twentieth century Anglican thinking, for instance, A. G. Hébert.

Yet these three aspects of atonement all go together as Augustine clearly taught and as Crouse clearly explained. Our tendency is to break things down into parts, what Iain McGilchrist calls too much left-brain thinking and which he says is destroying us all.

The word ‘Incarnation’ and its cognate forms rarely appear in the sermons of Andrewes and Donne or for that matter in the classical liturgies of The Book of Common Prayer. The Nicene Creed speaks of Christ “who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.” The Litany prays that “by the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity … Good Lord, deliver us.” Incarnation in both Creed and Litany seems to refer to Christ’s Conception in the womb of Mary at the Annunciation. The word appears in the Athanasian Creed but not in the Thirty-nine Articles. Yet the logic of Incarnation and Passion, “th’ abridgement of Christ’s story,” is clearly shown in our Canadian Eucharistic Prayer where Jesus Christ is given by the Father “to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption.”

SSC by its very nature and vocation is about the abridgement of Christ’s story in seeing the Cross as essential to the understanding of the restoration and redemption of our humanity.