Nielsen’s Nook

A colleague of mine passed a link onto me (thanks Stephanie!) for a blog that deals with all things Inklings. As she said, one of the things so likeable about this blog is its simplicity and conciseness, there is plenty to ponder yet not to much to drive one away. Enjoy The Inklings.

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.

__________

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.

__________

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