Nielsen’s Nook

For your contemplation:

‘If I in-thee’d myself as thou dost in-me thyself.’ This is one of Dante’s most concise and most intense sayings, and one of the most significant. … Something of [true union and communion] is known, on occasion, in the life of lovers; not, perhaps, in many; not, certainly often. There is some kind of experience which can only be expressed by saying: ‘Love you? I am you.’ This is a natural thing; but then there is the moral duty. It is the moral duty of lovers, as they certainly at moments know, to plunge with love into each other’s life — bringing power: power to resist temptation, to reject, to affirm, to purify, to pray. ‘I will pray for you’ is a good saying; a better — ‘I will pray in you.’ This indeed is like the nature of the prayers for which the souls on the mountain terraces are asking. Those on earth fulfill the necessary task. And now it is more than ritual prayers; it is the life and inter-life of souls. ¹

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¹ Williams, Charles. The Figure of Beatrice (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2005), 204.

I thank God that he has given us literature, which stokes the imagination and even returns refreshing fervor and dimension to theology. The Inclings met again last night and continued our study of Dante together, by reading chapter XI “The Paradiso” from The Figure of Beatrice by Charles Williams, who is stylistically quite different from Dorothy Sayers and every bit as profound.

The Paradiso is concerned to exhibit beatitude; that is — proper relationship between men and men and men and God. So full of derivation and nourishment are these that they may well be named the in-othering of men and the in-Godding of men. It is not an exterior but an interior relationship which is in question. It is also, in a sense, the absolute relationship, or at least it is one than which nothing more can be imagined or expressed.¹

In the world as it is, outside the universe of Dante’s Commedia, there is resonance with the mystery of the Incarnation itself. Like Dante, every human being is on a pilgrimage in one of two directions either plunging to the Inferno of our own desire or processing humbly to the perfect union, uninhibited communion with God through his Incarnate Son, Jesus. In the case of the former direction, the relationships of “men and men” are cut loose from the moorings of the relationship between “men and God” and the plunge deepens as that rift digresses. In the case of the latter, the relationship between “men and men” is exposed in its weakness and recalibrated on the basis of the New, the Incarnate relationship between “men and God.”

Even in this there is unquantifiable mystery wrapped up in an enigma. It is in this Beatitude of communion of men and God that we find the great joy of love. “[W]e love; we love the divine will, we love as that chooses to love, we are in-willed to will, in-loved to love.”²

Perhaps the most difficult part of the mystery of the Incarnation and the Christian’s mystical union to the incarnate and resurrected Christ is that it transcends us. When the Almighty God comes near we should expect the ineffable and immeasurable and I think that underscores much of our problem today in the contemporary church. We want what we can measure and then exhaust when God has given us himself with out end. It is precisely because the union we have with God in Jesus is eternal and immeasurable that “we should more expressly long to understand the union of our nature with God’s, that is, the Incarnation.” ³ For Jesus alone is our Beatitude, the place in which our relationship to God is put to rights and becomes far more than we can eternally imagine.

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¹ Williams, Charles. The Figure of Beatrice (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2005), 190.

²_____, 196.

³_____, 195.

On earth men dream, therefore, while they’re awake,
Some in good faith, and some deceitfully;
Of guilt and shame the greater share these take.

Ye on the earth, in your philosophy,
Are not for long content to tread one path,
Enamoured of vain show and subtlety.

Yet even this in Heaven stirs less wrath
Than when God’s holy Word is misconstrued,
Or when supremacy it no more hath.

Ye little think how great the cost in blood
To sow it through the world, how pleasing he
Who humbly bides by Scripture as he should.

All men, to show their ingenuity,
Contrive their own inventions — these they preach;
The Gospel is passed over silently.

…

So that the silly sheep, all unaware,
Come home from pasture fed on emptiness;
No harm they see, no less of guilt they bear.

Christ His Apostles did not thus address:
Go forth, preach idle stories to all men,
But taught them His true doctrine to profess.

Forth with His shield the Apostles sally then,
None other than His word their lips escapes,
This only is the lance they wield amain.

But nowadays men preach with jokes and japes,
And if they raise a laugh, their crowd cowls all swell
With pride - they ask no more, the jackanapes.

…

That’s how St Anthony doth feed his pig,
And many others too, more pig-like still,
Paying with currency not worth a fig.

…

The Primal Light the whole irradiates,
And is received therein as many ways
As there are splendours wherewithal it mates.

Since, then, affection waits upon the gaze
And its intensity, diversely bright
Therein the sweets of love now glow, now blaze.

Consider well the breadth, behold the height
Of His eternal Goodness, seeing that o’er
So many mirrors It doth shed Its light,

Yet One abideth as It was before.

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Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy III: Paridiso, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (London: Penguin Books, 2004), Canto XXIX, lines 82-145, pages 311-13.

There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies blow. [1]

If you’re like me when you read just those two lines of poetry you probably spent as much energy if not more trying to fight off ridiculous images of flowers growing out of the pores of a woman’s face as you did trying to imagine what Thomas Campion was actually describing in his poem, There Is A Garden in Her Face.

Dorothy Sayers, a colleague of C. S. Lewis, quotes Campion in making the point that the modern day person generally has great difficulty with poetry, figures and symbols. We don’t like them because they ask more of us than we have the faculties to appreciate. We tend to like the things that can be measured and then exhausted; yet, poets and prophets have given us figures and symbols that move us beyond ourselves - to something beyond the maximum.

This seems to be true in the way we approach church and worship, in the way we order our lives, in the way we think about happiness and fulfillment, and particularly in the way we think of and relate to Jesus, our Lord. Writing to those who misunderstood the figures in Dante’s Paradiso, his work on Heaven, Sayers writes:

… one of the results of having substituted a philosophy of becoming for a philosophy of being is that the very notion of an achieved happiness has become not merely inconceivable but actually repugnant to us. Timelessness, or eternity, like Heaven itself, passes man’s understanding.2]

What Sayers writes about Paridiso applies to our approach to Romans 12:1-2 with its figures and symbols. In lusting after the measurable and exhaustible we have begun to think of the Christian faith in such terms. We have reduced Christianity down to mere propositions and steps and functions. The consequence is that the way we think about God, Christ, his Cross and even ourselves has become frozen still, comatose, even demonstrating a spiritual rigormortis of sorts.

The Pattern of Eternal Irruption into Paul’s Life

Many of us come to the Apostle Paul’s writings and we resonate with the structure of his argumentation. But let us not forget that Paul wrote as an Apostle not because he studied hard enough or tried harder than anybody else, but because God in His mysterious providence was pleased to irrupt into the Apostle Paul’s life and change everything here and now with a view towards eternity.

We are given that paradigm at the beginning of his Epistle to the Romans where Paul reminds us that he is a servant of Jesus set apart for the gospel of God

… concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh ⁴ and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, (Rom 1:3-4, NRSV)

God had come to earth in the flesh of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. In his perfect human life, Jesus lifted his new humanity to a place so great that sinners clutching to our failed depravity cannot imagine or measure or exhaust it. He has lifted us back to a place of integration and fellowship with God in himself.

Jesus Christ, Paul reminds us, was declared with power to be the Son of God on account of his resurrection from the dead, which demonstrated his life before the grave as perfect.

But resurrections don’t happen all the time do they? Scripture teaches us that all but a few resurrections will happen at the end of time, when Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, will judge the living and the dead.

Paul is telling us that something of the future has broken into the past and changed everything.

[1] Campion, Thomas. Campion’s Works. Percival Vivian, Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. 178. Quoted in Dorothy L. Sayers “Introduction” to Dante’s Paradiso, (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 28.
[2] Sayers, 28.

[Humanity] had a major liberty which consists in a total love conformity of the will to God.  This was man’s glory, as it was his shame, for he was the broken rung in the ladder of created being…. His work had to be redeemed by being incorporated into the Humanity of the Incarnate Godhead.  The Incarnation is a new glory given to mankind; but that glory belongs to the act of God and not to the nature of man.

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Dorothy L. Sayers in the Introduction to Dante’s Divine Comedy III: Paradise, (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 26.

In my pilgrimage presently the Lord has my heart grieving over the fracturedness of the Church of Christ and the splinteredness of the fracturedness.  When Dante enters the intellectual Heaven of the Sun, where the great doctors of the Church have discourse, he then concludes that their perspectives of the truth, their partial truths have resolved into the One Truth. ¹ In light of this I wonder, just how much of the division and canibalism in Christ’s Church is not due to some Jack and Jill sort of arrogance that we can see all sides of even small things.  If all things are created to tell us something of the Creator then might we not do well to include more mystery in our thinking and contemplation.  Allowing for the ineffable is at least a component of spiritual health.

For low among the dunces is his place
    Who hastens to accept or to reject
    With no distinction made ‘twixt case and case;

Thence come rash judgments, mostly incorrect
    And prejudiced, and stubborn all the more
    That self-conceit shackles the intellect.

Worse than in vain does any quit the shore
    To fish for truth, the fisher’s art unknowing -
    He’ll not return the man he was before;

…

No one should ever be too self-assured
    In judgement, like a farmer reckoning
    His gains before the corn-crop is matured,

For I have seen the briar a prickly thing
    And tough the winter throug, and on its tip
    Bearing the very rose at close of spring;

And once I saw, her whole long ocean-trip
    Safe done, a vessel wrecked upon the bar,
    And down she went, that swift and stately ship.

Let Jack and Jill not think they see so far
    That, seeing this man pious, that a thief,
    They see them such as in God’s sight they are,

For one may rise, the other come to grief.²

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¹ Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy III: Paradise. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 21.

² _____., Canto XIII, 115-123, 130-142.