From Hopelessness to Hope: A Reflection on Ash Wednesday

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888.   He was raised in the Unitarian sect in which his grandfather, a member of the wealthy and elite Eliot family of New England, had been a minister.   After receiving a classical education in elite private academies as a boy he went on to study literature at Harvard and philosophy at the Sorbonne before winning a scholarship to Merton College in Oxford at the outbreak of the First World War.  Oxford failed to win a place in his heart, however, and he quickly relocated to London, where he was taken under the wing of fellow American ex-patriot Ezra Pound.

 

Ezra Loomis Pound had met Eliot when the latter was still a student at Oxford.  Conrad Aikin, whom Eliot had known at Harvard, had arranged for them to meet so that Eliot could show Pound, who had just married Dorothy Shakespear, his “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.   Pound was impressed, and the following year, on his recommendation, Harriet Monroe published the poem in Poetry.   It was Eliot’s first poem to be published outside of academe.    Pound and Eliot struck up an instant friendship and the former, whose reputation as a poet had already been established, would continue to help further Eliot’s literary career, most notably as editor of “The Waste Land”, published in Eliot’s own The Criterion in 1922.

 

There were a number of similarities between the two poets that undoubtedly strengthened and sealed their friendship in these early years.   Both had been born and raised in the United States and had fled across the Atlantic to the Old World.   Both had been steeped in the literature and philosophy of ancient and medieval civilization and had come, as a consequence, to reject the attitude of progressive optimism towards the future of Western civilization that was prevalent and ubiquitous in their formative years.   Their trans-oceanic flight can be seen as a symbolic representation of this rejection.  They preferred to live in what they saw as the decay and ruin of the older civilization in its last days – the “waste land” of Eliot’s poem – than in the epicentre of the optimistic liberalism that was ushering in a new barbarism.   Three years after the publication of “The Waste Land”, Eliot returned to this vision of Western Civilization as a ruined wasteland in “The Hollow Men”.   The first stanza of this poem depicts the inhabitants of the wasteland as stuffed strawmen, like the effigies burned on Guy Fawkes Day, who are beyond the envy even of those inhabiting the shadowy realms of death, through which Eliot takes his readers in Dantesque fashion in the four remaining stanzas, until they arrive on the beach of the “tumid river”  (presumably Styx), where the denizens of this dismal place dance around a “prickly pear” singing a dark parody of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” that concludes with “This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper”, undoubtedly the best known words of the poet except for those set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

 

It was shortly after the publication of “The Hollow Men” that Eliot took the step that would take him and Pound down different paths from their common beginnings.   The following year, on a trip to Rome, he fell to his knees in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta, much to the discomfort of his kin who were travelling with him.   This was out of aesthetic admiration but it signaled a spiritual awakening.    In 1927, to the horror of Virginia Woolf who declared him “dead to us all from this day forward”, he converted to orthodox Christianity, and was baptized into the Church of England (Unitarianism, as its name indicates, rejects the Trinity, and so this was an exception to the general rule of the Anglican Church accepting the validity of the baptism of other denominations) and confirmed the following day.   Later that year he became a citizen of the United Kingdom.   Having first rejected the false optimism of liberal progress which had made a wasteland out of Western civilization, he had now turned his back on the hopelessness and despair of his earlier poems by embracing the faith that liberalism had rejected.   Pound, the restless pagan, was for whatever reasons, unable lay anchor on such rock himself, and consequently found himself adrift in dangerous waters.

 

A couple of months after his baptism, T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” was published as part of the Ariel Poems, the first of his poems to be written from his new perspective of faith.   Three years later he would publish a much longer poem expressing the experience of his conversion.    He gave that poem the title “Ash Wednesday” from the day on which the penitential period of Lent begins.

 

The first of the poem’s six sections begins with a return to the sense of hopelessness from “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” in the words:

 

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn.

 

The final section begins by repeating these lines with the word “although” substituted for “because” and concludes with the prayer “And let my cry come unto thee” taken from the first line of the 102^nd Psalm.

 

From the opening expression of despair to the concluding expression of faith we have the poet’s journey from the former to the latter expressed in his own familiar manner of metaphor and allusion.    I have no intention of providing an extended commentary here, but the following is worthy of noting.

 

In the opening lines, which paraphrase the title line of Guido Cavalcanti’s “Per ch’io non spero” we can see Ezra Pound’s influence again.   Cavalcanti was a favourite of Pound’s.   Almost twenty years before “Ash Wednesday” was published, Pound had published a translation of the Florentine poet’s works.  In the period in which Eliot wrote and published “Ash Wednesday” Pound was working on the section of his Cantos that included his translation of Cavalcanti’s magnus opus “Donna me prega”, although this was not published until four years after “Ash Wednesday”.   “Per ch’io non spero” was written in the last year of Cavalcanti’s life, during his brief exile in Sarzana.   The line which Eliot borrowed had originally expressed Cavalcanti’s despair of ever seeing his native city again – Eliot changed the original’s “return” to “turn” to fit the context of his own poem – thus laying the foundation for the poem as a whole being charged with the task of going where he could not, back to his Lady, to speak to her as his messenger.

 

Eliot began the second section of his poem by addressing a Lady.   This very briefly creates the impression that he was continuing the allusion to Cavalcanti, but this impression quickly disappears as the Lady is spoken of by his bleached bones – he presents himself as having been eaten by leopards with God pronouncing over his bones the question from the Book of Ezekiel “shall these bones live” – in intercessory tones.   This would seem to suggest a reference to the Blessed Virgin – especially since the first section had ended with the petition “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death” from the Sancte Maria – except that it is stated of her that “She honours the Virgin in meditation” and thus must be somebody other than Mary.   There is no mystery, however, as to who this is, because it is clear that Eliot has switched allusions from Cavalcanti to his best friend – Dante Alighieri.  This is exactly the way Beatrice is depicted in Divina Commedia – as the faithful member of Mary’s retinue who sends Virgil to rescue Dante from the beasts at the beginning of the Inferno and guide him through hell and purgatory, before she takes over as his guide at the end of the Purgatorio and throughout the Paradiso.   Eliot’s previous long poems had been full of allusions to Dante.   Having passed through his own Inferno and Purgatorio in “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” he had finally arrived at his Paradiso in “Ash Wednesday”.

 

Perhaps there is also a message to his friend Ezra Pound implied here, a message to the effect that while the latter was still restlessly following his pagan star Cavalcanti, he had finally found peace in the faith of his Christian guide Dante.  

 

Today is Ash Wednesday on the liturgical calendar of Western Christianity and on this particular Ash Wednesday, more than ever before we need to follow T. S. Eliot on the path from “Because I do not hope” to “let my cry come unto thee”.   It has been almost a year since our rights, freedoms, and social lives were stolen from us by politicians, bureaucrats, and the medical profession who are clearly determined to keep these from us for as long as they possibly can, which, given the history of how long Communist oppression lasted in the Soviet Union, could be a very long time indeed.   We must not let this become grounds for hopelessness and despair for these involve the denial of faith that God is a gracious and merciful God Who hears our prayer.

 

It is customary on Ash Wednesday to begin a fast in which we give something up for the forty days (excluding Sundays) of Lent.  In recent years some of our ecclesiastical leaders have recommended that we consider “social media fasts” for this period.   As good of a suggestion as this would ordinarily be, it hardly seems advisable this year in which social media  is the only thing resembling contact, fake though it be, that the tyrannical and totalitarian politicians and doctors allow us to have with our friends and extended family.   Indeed, since so much has been forcibly taken from us over the last year, I would suggest that if we give anything up today, it be our voluntary acquiescence in the theft of our own and our neighbours’ rights, freedoms, and social lives.   If we were all to give up masks, social distancing, and all of these other stupid and idiotic rules and restrictions and regulations, that would be a start to bringing the light of hope back into this dark world.  

 

 

 

 

 

Gospel Repentance – a Lenten Meditation

Law and Gospel are Scriptural terms with multiple connotations. Both are the proper designations of portions of holy writ. Law, as the translation of Torah, is the collective name of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Gospel is the genre label of each of the four portraits of the life of Christ by SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with which the distinctly Christian Scriptures begin. Each term is also sometimes used as a shorthand for the Scriptures as a whole, making them in this one usage, synonyms. More often, however, they are used as shorter titles for the Old and New Testaments and the Covenants from which the two major divisions of the Bible get these other names. When used this way, and especially when distinguishing the dominant principle and distinct message of each of the two Covenants, Law and Gospel are generally set in contrast with each other.

The contrasts are myriad but there is one in particular that I wish to reflect upon and that is the difference between repentance under the Gospel and repentance as it was under the Law. Or rather, I wish to focus on one of several differences between Gospel repentance and Law, others of which I have discussed elsewhere.

Before looking at this difference we should briefly observe what is the same about repentance under both Law and Gospel. Repentance is the way appointed for those who have offended God to return to Him and find forgiveness and restoration. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is the attitude which those who have offended God are expected to take in returning and seeking His forgiveness. This was the case under the Law and it has not changed under Gospel. Under both Covenants it is primarily preached to and expected of those who are already members of the Covenant, although there are Old Testament examples of others repenting and the Sacrament of initiation into the Christian Covenant is a ritual which is symbolic of repentance and the washing away of sin.

Under both the Law and the Gospel people are expected to repent of their bad deeds. Under the Law it is only of evil that people are called upon to repent. When the prophets call upon the Israelites to repent and return to their God it is over idolatry, child sacrifice, injustice, and assorted other such wickedness. When Jonah, very much against his will, proclaimed God’s judgement upon the wickedness of Ninevah, it was of that wickedness that they repented. There is even a word play that is not infrequent in the Old Testament in which “repent” and “evil” are used with a double sense – one the one hand they designate the contrition and the sin of the sinner, and on the other the clemency and the averted retribution of God. The end of the third chapter of Jonah is an example of this, at least if you read it in the original Hebrew or a translation that preserves the Hebrew play on words like the Greek Septuagint or the English Authorized Version and avoid the Non Inspired Version which, favourite of evangelicals though it be, does not. When applied to divine retribution ערַ/κᾰκῐ́ᾱ/evil is clearly limited in its sense to destructive effect and does not have the connotation of moral culpability but the figure of speech preserves the common theme that it is “evil” of some sort that is the object of repentance.


Which brings us to the difference. The Gospel calls upon us to repent, not only of our bad deeds, but of our good deeds as well.

Perhaps your initial reaction to that assertion is to ask how on earth it is possible to repent of one’s good deeds. It is an understandable reaction, especially if you have been taught to think of repentance primarily in terms of a kind of self-improvement – turning away from past wrongdoing and starting to do that which is right. Scripturally, however, the essence of repentance is contrition and humility, and behavioural change is merely its fruit. To repent of one’s good deeds is to confess them to be sins, to renounce all claim to divine praise and reward for them, and to seek God’s mercy and grace for them, as well as for one’s overt bad deeds.

St. Paul showed us how it is done in the third chapter of his epistle to the Church at Philippi. After summarizing all of the reasons why he might “have confidence in the flesh” in verses four and five, he wrote “But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ” in verse six and then proceeded in the next verses to use the following much stronger language:

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.

To count one’s personal righteousness “as dung” surely merits the description repentance of good works.

Another passage in which we are enjoined to take a similar attitude is Luke 17:7-10. In this passage the Lord Jesus Christ uses a parable about an earthly lord and his domestic servant to illustrate to His disciples that they are to regard their service to God as their obligation or duty, i.e., that which they owe God, and not as something done for gratitude or reward. “So likewise ye,” the Lord says, “when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.”

Next, consider the parable that is found at the end of the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 25, beginning at the thirty-first verse. In this famous parable about the Last Judgement, the Lord Jesus says that at His Second Coming He will send His angels to divide the sheep from the goats, placing the sheep on His right hand and the goats on the left, then He will judge the works of each. The same list of works, which has taken on the traditional name of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, is gone over twice, and the sheep are bidden to “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” because they performed these works to Christ Himself whereas the goats are told to “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” because they did not perform these works to Christ Himself. When each group is surprised to be told that they had ministered or failed to minister to Christ they are told that their ministry or failure to “the least of these my brethren” is counted as being done or not done to Christ Himself.

This parable has suffered from much misinterpretation over the years due to a superficial reading. The misinterpretation is theological rather than ethical. Obviously, on the ethical level, the parable conveys the simple moral lesson that we ought to perform these works to everyone who needs them, great or small, as best as we are able and is in this regard, similar in meaning to the parable of the Good Samaritan. Theologically, however, legalists of all stripes have regarded this passage as evidence that Christ taught otherwise than St. Paul on the matter of works and justification, despite the abundant testimony to the contrary that can be found in St. John’s Gospel. In this passage, the legalists claim, works are all that is talked about and there is no mention of faith at all. Note what this simplistic and superficial interpretation overlooks.

The sheep are divided from the goats, not by the judgment of their works, but before the judgment of their works. At no point is it suggested that performing the Works of Mercy is what makes the sheep sheep or that failing to so perform is what makes the goats goats. Indeed, to interpret the parable this way goes against the obvious implications of the responses of each group to the judgement. The sheep are surprised to hear their works praised, the goats are surprised to hear of their failure. In the case of the goats what this suggests is that they were self-satisfied and confident that they HAD performed sufficient good works of this type so as to merit eternal reward. Ergo the shock to find their smallest failures being brought into focus and the harsh condemnation that they actually receive.

As for the sheep it suggests that they had done precisely what I have been arguing the Gospel calls us to do – to repent of our good works as well as our bad. They counted the good works that they were surprised to hear praised as loss, they had disavowed any and all claim to praise and reward for their works, and considered themselves, as Christ had commanded, to be “unprofitable servants.” They had renounced all claims to a righteousness of their own works and had placed their faith entirely in the Saviour Whom God had provided to a fallen and sinful world, trusting to His all-sufficient merit alone. For that is where faith is to be found in this parable. It is what makes the difference between the sheep and the goats. Believers and unbelievers alike will be judged on their works, because works are the only basis upon which anyone can be judged. The nature of the judgement is radically different for the two different groups. Those who have placed their faith in the Saviour that God has freely and graciously provided, and who are pardoned for their sins and credited with the righteousness of Christ, find their smallest service praised and rewarded (Matthew 10:42). Their service, if subjected to scrutiny, would not measure up, so God’s acceptance of it and bestowing of praise and reward upon it, is also an act of mercy and grace, on top of His having freely given them salvation in Christ. Those, however, who reject the salvation that God has freely given but seek to establish their own righteousness by works, find their self-righteousness subjected to that scrutiny to which no human works can stand up.

If the need under the Gospel to repent of good works as well as bad has not already been made clear, let us now consider the basic meaning of ἁμαρτία which is the primary word used for “sin” in the New Testament. The branch of theology that considers the doctrine of sin takes its name, hamartiology, from this word and it is also the word used in the classical literary criticism of Aristotle for the “tragic flaw” of the hero in a Greek tragedy. The basic concept suggested by ἁμαρτία is that of missing the mark.

Imagine that you are back in Nottinghamshire in the reign of Richard the Lionheart competing in an archery contest. You have been doing very well and have outshot all your competitors. All of a sudden a last minute challenger shows up. He is wearing a heavy hooded cloak hiding his features because he is the legendary Robin Hood, an outlaw being hunted by the very Sheriff who is hosting the match. Your last shot was just slightly off the bull’s eye. The hooded challenger claims that he can beat you. Allowed to try, Robin hits the bull’s eye smack dab in the centre. The Sheriff rules that you be given another chance and you try again. Your next arrow comes even closer to the bull’s eye than your previous one – but Robin’s is still closer. Then, to rub it in, Robin shoots a second arrow and splits the first having hit the mark perfectly twice in a row. He then proceeds to blow a raspberry, wiggle his thumbs at you, and do an obnoxious victory dance all around you but you aren’t paying any attention too of this. All you can think about is how your shots, of which you had been so proud, don’t look so good anymore compared to his. You were closer than all of the other competitors except Robin – but you had still missed the mark. That’s ἁμαρτία. That is what the New Testament’s primary word for sin means.

If sin is “missing the mark” then our good deeds are to be counted as sins as much as our bad deeds. For however good our deeds may appear to us, or however well we may think we do in comparison with others, they fall far short of the mark for which we ought to be aiming – the perfect righteousness of God as stated in His Commandments and manifested in Jesus Christ. Many who seem to have no problem with confessing that they have sinned by their bad deeds and who would acknowledge that their good deeds fall short of the perfection of God balk at confessing such shortcomings to be sin. The pride that is at the root of the sinfulness of fallen human nature wishes to cling on to something for which it can claim credit, even if it be merely the intention or sincerity of our deeds. The Gospel, however, calls upon us to renounce all claim to merit of our own that we might place our confidence entirely in the all-sufficient merits of Christ.
We are in Lent, the period the Church has assigned since ancient times for penitent reflection in preparation for Passion Week’s commemoration of the events of our salvation, culminating in the celebration of the Resurrection on Easter. This Lent, let us not be satisfied with repenting of our bad deeds, but repent of all of our deeds, even those we are accustomed to think of as g

The Nature and Origin of Evil

Since ancient times, it has been the practice of the Christian church to observe a forty-day fasting period in preparation for Easter, the annual Feast of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Christian Passover in commemoration of the redemption of the world that inaugurated the New Covenant, of which the Passover of the Old Covenant was an anticipatory type. In the English-speaking world we call this period Lent. (1) In the Western church, this period begins on Ash Wednesday (2) which, as the name indicates, is a day set aside for the sober business of remembering our morality, and repenting our sin, (3) setting the tone for our reflections during this period. It is a very appropriate tone, since our sin and morality, are both the reason for Christ’s entering the world on His redemptive mission, taking our humanity, our mortality, and, as He died on the cross, our sin, upon Himself, and the enemies over which He triumphed when He rose victorious from the grave.

It is also ancient custom for the church’s lexicons to assign readings from the Pentateuch, and especially the books of Genesis and Exodus, to this period. The readings assigned to the daily offices (4) in the Book of Common Prayer begin Genesis at the start of Shrovetide (5), the two and a half weeks just prior to Lent. The book of Exodus is very fitting for this period, of course, because it tells the story of the redemption of national Israel from slavery in Egypt, the first Passover foreshadowing the Christian one. The book of Genesis prepares for this by explaining what the Israelites were doing in Egypt in the first place, but it also goes back to the beginning of the story, to the entrance of sin and death into the world with the Fall of man, and to Creation itself. St. Basil the Great’s Hexaemeron, a series of lessons on the six days of Creation, were originally a set of homilies preached during the Lenten season.

The juxtaposition of meditations upon Creation with reflections on sin and mortality, brings to mind the conundrum that theologians and philosophers have been struggling to answer for centuries. That is the question of evil. Why is there evil in a world created by a good and all-powerful God?

Framed that way, the traditional and orthodox answer to the question is that God gave man and the angels free will in the sense of the ability to make moral choices, i.e., choices for which they are responsible and can be held accountable, and that implicit in such free will is the possibility of evil. We shall return to this answer, but first let us look at a different angle of the question. What is evil?

This is actually a trick question, which requires some elaboration to explain. Everything that exists, is either a substance – in the philosophical sense of the term, which includes non-material substances such as spirit and energy – or an attribute– a quality, like colour, for example, that exists, not in itself, except in a transcendental realm like Plato’s realm of the Forms, but in substances. The existence of attributes, is secondary to that of substances, on which it is dependent, and a further distinction must be made between real attributes, whether properties or accidents, (6) in which the qualities are positively present in their substances, like sweetness in sugar, and “unreal” accidents that are only negatively present, i.e., absences, wants, and defects. The latter, while present and observable, do not “exist” in the same sense that substances and real attributes do. Everything that does exist, in this sense, must either be eternal, the source of its own existence, or created, dependent upon something prior to itself for its existence. As the existence of attributes is a secondary form of existence to that of substances, so the existence of all created substances and attributes, is secondary to that of the eternal. Only God, as the First Cause, is eternal, truly possessing existence in Himself that is not dependent upon another. (7) Everything else that exists derives its existence from Him as part of His Creation, either as substance or attribute. Since God Himself is Good, evil therefore, must either a) be part of His Creation as a substance, b) be part of His Creation as a real attribute, or c) not exist. Evil is certainly not a substance created by God. Nor is it a real attribute of anything that He made. Throughout the account of Creation, God looks upon the things that He has made – Light, Earth and Sea, plant life, the sun, moon, and stars, the birds of the air and fishes of the sea, and land animals – and sees that they are good (Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Finally, after creating man in His own image, He “saw everything that he had made: and behold, it was every good.” (Gen. 1:31) Therefore evil does not exist. The orthodox answer to the question what is evil is that it is not.

It should be clear from the above, that the assertion that evil does not exist is not a denial of its presence in the world, the evidence of which presence abounds wherever we look, but that evil, being neither a substance nor a real attribute, has no being, essence, or, the title of this essay notwithstanding, nature. Evil’s presence in this world is like the presence of the shadow that is cast when some object blocks the light. Light is something, it exists, it has an essence, whereas the darkness of the shadow does not, it is simply the absence of the light. St. Basil, therefore, introduces the subject of evil in the second homily of his Hexameron, in commenting on the words “and darkness was upon the face of the deep” in the second verse of Genesis. Just as the darkness in this verse, is neither a created nor an uncreated essence, but is the “shadow produced by the interposition of a body, or finally a place for some reason deprived of light” so evil is “neither uncreate nor created by God” but is “is not a living animated essence; it is the condition of the soul opposed to virtue, developed in the careless on account of their falling away from good.” (8)

St. Basil was addressing heresies here, primarily the dualistic heresy of Manichaeism in which darkness and evil are real essences, almost equal to those of light and goodness. St. Augustine, who had been a disciple of this heresy prior to his conversion to orthodox Christianity, declared that “What is called Evil in the Universe is but the Absence of Good”, illustrating the point with bodily diseases and wounds which “mean nothing but the absence of health” and which are not substances but defects “in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils— that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents.” (9) Similarly St. John of Damascus declared that “evil is not any essence nor a property of essence, but an accident, that is, a voluntary deviation from what is natural into what is unnatural, which is sin.” (10) The writer whose works were attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite devotes much of the fourth chapter of his book on the Divine Names to addressing the question of evil, concludes that “The Evil, then, is not an actual thing, nor is the Evil in things existing. For the Evil, qua evil, is nowhere, and the fact that evil comes into being is not inconsequence of power, but by reason of weakness…[the demons] aspire to the Good, in so fa as they aspire to be and to live and to think. And in so far as they do not aspire to the Good, they aspire to the non-existent; and this is not aspiration, but a missing of the true aspiration.” (11) St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote:

No growth of evil had its beginning in the Divine will. Vice would have been blameless were it inscribed with the name of God as its maker and father. But the evil is, in some way or other, engendered from within, springing up in the will at that moment when there is a retrocession of the soul from the beautiful. For as sight is an activity of nature, and blindness a deprivation of that natural operation, such is the kind of opposition between virtue and vice. It is, in fact, not possible to form any other notion of the origin of vice than as the absence of virtue. For as when the light has been removed the darkness supervenes, but as long as it is present there is no darkness, so, as long as the good is present in the nature, vice is a thing that has no inherent existence; while the departure of the better state becomes the origin of its opposite. (12)

If evil is not something that exists, in either a created or an uncreated essence, but denotes an absence of goodness in created beings, how, since God created all things good, do we explain the presence of this absence?

We return to the orthodox answer of free will – the ability, of men and angels, as rational, responsible, moral beings to make choices for which they are accountable. If free will explains the presence of that void in the souls of men and demons that we call evil, then this raises some further questions. If God created moral, rational, beings with the attribute of free will, then free will itself must be good. How then, can free will, being good, result in evil?

In considering this question it is important to observe that evil is the result of free will, not its product or creation. This is related to what we have already considered about evil not being a substance or a real attribute but a defect or absence. When men and angels exercised their free will in disobedience to God, the evil that ensued was not the entrance into existence of a new essence called evil, but the diminishment of their own being, through the loss of the quality of goodness. Which is why this event is referred to as the Fall. Mankind fell away from what he was to become something less.

The question, therefore becomes, one of how it can it be the nature of free will, an attribute that is itself good, to make choices that result in such a diminishment of being, such a loss of goodness possible. To add another dimension to the question, remember that according to the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin, the choice to sin resulted in the diminishment, not only of our created goodness, but the freedom of the will itself, which then became bound in slavery to sin. The answer is that what was included in the nature of free will, was not the inevitability of this result, but its possibility.

This leads to the question of how, if it is the nature of free will to include the potential for evil choices, for falling away from goodness and its own freedom, free will itself can be considered good.

Here, the orthodox answer is, that while it is the nature of free will to include the possibility of choosing evil, free will is necessary for moral goodness in created, rational, beings. Free will, again, is the quality of being able to make rational, moral, choices for which one can be held accountable. This is a quality which must exist in created beings who bear the image of their Creator, which is the first thing predicated of man in the Scriptural account of his Creation. (13) It is only this quality, which includes the potential for sin, that allows for the possibility of goodness that is chosen.

The influence of his orthodox Catholic upbringing is clearly visible in the novels of John Anthony Wilson Burgess, who wrote under his two middle names. He is most remembered, due to Stanley Kubrick’s film version, for his novel A Clockwork Orange, and the very point of orthodox theology that we have been considering is at the heart of this novel. The main character of Alex, leader of a gang of “droogs”, is caught, arrested, and sent to prison after a string of “ultra-violent” crimes, including the home-invasion of a writer who is beaten half to death and forced to watch the rape of his wife, and the murder of a wealthy, elderly, woman. He is offered the chance of early release from prison, when he learns of the government’s experimental new “Ludovico technique” for curing people of violent, criminal, tendencies. He volunteers to undergo the technique, which consists of his being conditioned, by being forced to watch images of violence while being injected with drugs that cause pain and sickness, to become extremely ill whenever a violent urge arises within him. The prison chaplain objects to the technique and, speaking as the voice of the author, explains that the removal of free will, and the possibility of evil, does not thereby create goodness. The state officials ignore him and proclaim their new technique to be a success, but the chaplain’s commentary is born out as the released Alex finds that he has not been cured of his violent tendencies, so much as robbed of the ability, not just to act on them, but also to defend himself against the violence of others. There is a lesson in this, that our government, which, responding to the demands of the ignorant following the recent string of school shootings south of the border, has just introduced more gun control legislation, legislation which only ever diminishes the ability of the law-abiding to defend themselves and never keeps guns out of the hands of criminals, might learn, if it had ears to hear and eyes to see, but as long as it is led by the Trudeau Liberals, it will remain as blind as a bat and as deaf as a post.

For man to be a good being, not just in the sense in which rocks and trees, fish and birds, are good, but in the sense God intended, of a rational, moral, being who freely chooses the good, required that he be created with the potential of choosing wrongly, of turning away from God and the light, from Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, to the void that is darkness and evil. Man having so chosen, the events that we are about to commemorate in Holy Week, from Jesus’ presentation of Himself as the Christ in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, through His death on the Cross on Good Friday, His burial and the Harrowing of Hell on Holy Saturday, culminating in His triumph over death on Easter Sunday, are the story of how God set about to rescue man from his own choice and free him from the bondage of sin, that he might finally be the being God intended him to be.





(1) As with “Easter”, “Lent” is a term that indicates the season of the year in which these occur. In the languages first spoken by the church, and modern languages derived from those languages, the celebration of the Resurrection is called Pascha (the Christian Passover) and the preceding fasting period is called by words designating its length, “from the fortieth.”
(2) The Western church does not count the six Sundays as part of the forty days of Lent because Sundays, on which the church meets in remembrance of the Resurrection, are weekly Easters or Paschas. The Eastern church, however, counts the Sundays in the forty days and so begins them on a Monday.
(3) The “Ash” of “Ash Wednesday” alludes to the ancient practice of donning sackcloth and heaping ashes on oneself to mourn over one’s sins, and to the dust and ashes, to which everything temporal is ultimately reduced.
(4) From Latin “officium”, meaning “duty” or “service”, this refers to the Hours of Prayer. There are traditionally seven of these. The Book of Common Prayer assigns readings and liturgy to the two most important, Matins or Morning Prayer, and Vespers or Evening Prayer which, when chanted or sung, is commonly known as Evensong. Elements of two other of the offices, Lauds and Compline, are incorporated into this liturgy.
(5) The period that begins on Septuagesima and ends on Shrove Tuesday, the day prior to Ash Wednesday.
(6) A property is an attribute that arises out of an essence or substance so that it cannot be changed without the substance itself becoming something different, an accident is an attribute that can be altered without altering essence.
(7) Note that God, when asked by Moses: “Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you: and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?” answered “I AM THAT I AM...Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” Ex. 3:13-14.
(8) St. Basil of Caeserea, Hexaemeron, Homily II.4.
(9) St. Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion, XI. Enchiridion is Greek for “handbook”, and this handbook is on the subject of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. Chapter XI falls in the “faith” section, which is rebutting various heresies. The chapter prior asserted that “The Supremely Good Creator Made All Things Good”.
(10) St. John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV.20.
(11) The Divine Names, IV. 34. Dionysius the Areopagite was the convert St. Paul made at Mars Hill (the Areopagus – hence the Areopagite) in Acts 17. The works attributed to him, are almost universally considered to be much later than the first century, and so the true author is unknown.
(12) St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, II.5.
(13) Genesis 1:26.

This and That No. 7

My last two essays have been on topics that are central to evangelical Protestantism. My next essay will continue in that vein, after which my essays in this theological series will address topics on which small-o orthodox Christians are in agreement and topics in which I tend to be more "High Church".

I went to see the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Winnipeg's production of H. M. S. Pinafore last Friday at Pantages Playhouse. It was an excellent performance, although it was a bit strange to hear Fred Cross in his role as Sir Joseph Porter sing "I am the monarch of the sea, the ruler of the king's navy". As today, when the operetta was originally written and performed a queen sat on the throne. This production was neither in its original setting nor contemporary, but was actually set in the 1930's. This could also be seen in the costuming and in the set itself, where the ship had very WWII-era looking artillery on prominent display.

This past Sunday (April 3) was my birthday. I am now half-way to the three-score and ten that Moses says is allotted to a man.

The Manitoba Opera will be performing Mozart's "The Magic Flute" in the upcoming week, with performances tomorrow, Tuesday, and next Friday. I look forward to seeing it.

Unless you have been completely avoiding international news for the past few months you are undoubtedly aware that civil wars are breaking out in northern Africa and that Western countries, including our own, have for some foolish reason or another decided to get involved in the latest one in Libya. Neither side, in this conflict, deserves Western support. Colonel Qaddafi is a power-mad, evil dictator, to be sure, but that does not mean that the uprising against him is worthy of our support either. We have allowed ourselves to be brainwashed into thinking that "democracy" is an ultimate good and that therefore we must support it, whenever and wherever in the world it rears its head. This makes an idol out of democracy. Democracy is not an "ultimate good". Indeed, it is hardly a good at all, and perhaps ought to be considered an evil. It is the most destructive and tyrannical of all forms of human government. The only reason it has worked out fairly well in the English-speaking world is that other, stronger forces, have historically kept it in check. Originally, those were the power of the Crown and of the titled, landed, nobility and aristocracy. Then, when liberal individualism weakened the power of the Crown and aristocracy, liberal individualism itself held democracy in check. Now democracy is triumphant and like most demon idols it is calling upon us to make human sacrifices to itself. This is what those bombs we are dropping on Libya are truly about.

Every year in Canada we sacrifice about 100, 000 children to the demon idols of "women's rights", "sexual equality" and "sexual freedom". Having grown tired of worshiping the idols of "race" and "nation" we are now desperately trying to sacrifice our own people to the post-modern Moloch of "racial equality". It is not enough, for the modern and post-modern pantheon of pagan devils, that we sacrifice our own children. "Democracy" and "human rights" demand the blood of both our own children and other peoples' children as well.

Lent, in the Christian year, is a traditional period of self-examination and penitence in anticipation of our remembrance of Christ's death and resurrection on Good Friday and Easter. As we consider, this Lent, the children, our own and others, that we have sacrificed to the above mentioned demons let us follow the prophet Joel's instructions, and rend our hearts not our garments, and turn in contrition to the Lord our God, for "he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness".

For those of you looking for a less-preachy analysis of our involvement in the Libyan conflict that is none of our business, I refer you to James Bissett, former Canadian High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago and former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia. His excellent remarks can be found here: http://policystudies.ca/library-mainmenu-76/96-international-affairs/411-humanitarian-intervention-again