Christmas and Chalcedon

In times such as ours it can be easy to lose our Christian faith amidst the polarization of civil society. It is not at all obvious how the tenets of the catholic and apostolic faith bear upon the place of the Christian in contemporary society. Rather than commending a particular political theology for our present cultural moment in early 21st-century North America, I would like to draw attention to the important role played by pride and humility in the political theology at work in part of one of the most influential works of Christian late antiquity, namely, Augustine of Hippo’s City of God.

In the first half of City of God (Books 1-10) Augustine undertakes to expose the false theology underlying the politics of the Roman empire. The second half (11-22) promotes the kind of society that arises from a true embrace of the apostolic faith. There is a powerful convergence of these critical and constructive tasks within the tenth book, which functions as a joint between the two halves. In making his apologetic case that Christ’s Church and its sacrifices of worship offer the universal way of salvation, Augustine at once exposes the unsavory politics implicit in Platonic philosophy and promotes his vision of the politics enjoined by the true faith and worship of the catholic Church². In short, Augustine lifts up the cruciform Christian community over against the political upshot of Platonism, which still attracted many of his contemporaries. Ingredient to Augustine’s argument is the contrast between the pride (superbia) of the Platonists and Christian humility (humilitas).³

Augustine presents the Church as the locus of true worship that forms and commends the humility necessary for aspiring to genuine human community, a community that prepares pilgrims (peregrini) in this life for the formation of the true res publica in eternal union with God.⁴ In contrast, alongside his strong affirmation of the shared commitments of Platonism and Christianity, he subtly traces the pervasive presence of pride and its effects on even the most superior form of Roman philosophy. It promotes at best a collection of individuals pursuing their own honor, station, and glory in competition with one another as well as the gods to whom they commend worship.

In book ten of his City of God, Augustine provides a compelling political-theological, apologetic argument for Christ’s provision of the universal way of salvation Porphyry believes must exist as a gift of divine providence despite never finding it in the philosophies and religions with which he was familiar. Augustine’s apology for Christianity as the true religion that offers proper worship is itself an exercise in political theology inasmuch as it “is the explicit attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization of bodies in space and time.”⁵ Augustine suggests that the Church forms its members to become exemplary participants in civil society. The sacrificial mediation of Christ (which lies at the heart of what Porphyry would consider divine providence and what Augustine would often spell out in terms of the “economy of salvation”) commends an alternative form of human community to the “community that is no community” in the Roman Empire insofar as it is a manifestation of the “earthly city” (ciuitas terrena).⁶ In the course of his argument, Augustine exposes the false worship, theology, and politics of the prevailing Platonism of his day and promotes the true worship, theology, and political vision intrinsic to Christianity.⁷

Augustine grants that as a Platonist, Porphyry is in a position to discover Christ and his grace, but rejects both. Porphyry understands that the initiatory rites of the gods do not purify the mind of ignorance or the faults to which it leads. This can “only be done through the ‘fatherly mind’ (πατρικός νοῦς), that is, the Mind or Intellect” whom Augustine identifies with the Wisdom or Word of God, the second Person of the Trinity.⁸ Unfortunately, Porphyry does not recognize “Christ, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24), but “[shies] away from his saving humility, inflated with the swollen pride of useless learning.”⁹ He despises Christ “on account of the body which he received from a woman, and because of the shame of the cross.”¹⁰ Porphyry could not assent to the Wisdom of God‘s undergoing physical embodiment and tangible suffering being anything more than “folly and weakness.”¹¹ What he fails to recognize is that the crucified Christ he considers to be shameful and foolish is the “grace, which heals the weakness of those who do not proudly boast of their delusive happiness, but instead make a humble admission of their genuine misery.”¹² On the subject of grace, Augustine implores his reader in the wake of the now deceased Porphyry to see the Word’s incarnation as “the supreme instance of grace” that should elicit deep gratitude and bestows on Christ’s members “the spirit of [the Son of God’s] love by the mediation of a man.”¹³ While “humility was the necessary condition for submission to this truth,” Augustine suggests, the philosophers are simply too proud to be persuaded that “God has assumed a human soul and body.”¹⁴ Augustine expresses astonishment at their incredulity, however, for although Platonists uphold a consubstantial relationship between corporeal and incorporeal realities in the body-soul composition of human persons (and the world, for that matter), they reject such a relationship between two incorporeal realities: the Word and the soul assumed in the incarnation.

Confessing

In the first and second essay, I brought attention to Goethe’s Faust. The academic who exchanged his soul in an attempt to go beyond his own limitations. Jaroslav Pelikan depicts Faust as a seeker.¹ He is a scholar who strives and strays. There is a lack of dependence upon God in his scholarship and in his life. His study has detached him from the truth and in Part I, Faust himself makes no confession of faith in God. Early in his engagement with Margarete, she asks Faust repeatedly if he believes in God. He deflects until her persistence insists upon itself. So he replies:

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“Don’t misunderstand me, lovely girl. / Who dares name him, / Dares affirm him, / Dare says he believes? / Who feeling doubt, / Ventures to say right out, / I don’t believe? / The all-embracing, / All-sustaining, / Sustains and embraces / Himself and you and me. / Overhead the great sky arches, / Firm lies the earth beneath out feat, / And the friendly shining stars, don’t they / Mount aloft eternally? / Don’t my eyes, seeking your eyes, meet? / And all that is, doesn’t it weigh / On your mind and heart, / In eternal secrecy working, / Visibly, invisibly, about you?— / Fill heart with it to overflowing / In an ecstasy of blissful feeling / Which then call what you would; / Happiness! Heart! Love! Call it God!— / I know no name for it, nor look / For one. Feeling is all, / Names noise and smoke / Dimming the heavenly fire.”²

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Faust’s description of God is thoroughly Romantic and pantheistic, and therefore just as much a statement of disbelief as it is a language game expressing the Infinite.³ What we do not have here is a confession of belief in the God of Christian orthodoxy. All of his reading and thinking has not led him to confession of God’s great glory, but to obfuscating who God is. The young maiden Margarete perceives this clearly:

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“It sounds fine when it’s put your way, / But something’s wrong, there’s still a question; / The truth is, you are not a Christian.”⁴

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Yet, Goethe, the author of Faust, envisioned that in the end Faust would be vindicated. This is primarily seen through the climactic final speech in Part II. Climactic, because it returns readers to the blood oath that Faust made with Mephistopheles in Part I: 

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“A bet! I swear! / If ever I plead with the passing moment, / ‘Linger a while, you are so fair!’ / Then chain me up in close confinement, / Then serving me no more’s your care, / Then let the death bell toll my finish, / The unreluctantly I’ll perish, / The clock may stop, the hands fall off, / And time for me over with!”⁵

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Which is mirrored in Part II: 

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“Then, then, I might say to the passing moment, / ‘Linger awhile, you are so fair! / The footprints of my earthly passage cannot / Even after eons disappear.’ / Foreseeing such scenes of unmatched contentment, / I now enjoy the highest, supreme moment.”⁶

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Accordingly, after the Devil acquires the requisite line from Goethe’s mouth he dies. Eudo Mason, rightly asserts, how Goethe attempts to portray Faust in this final speech:

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“The point is that Faust’s dying vision, humanly and ethically considered, embodies a magnanimous, altruistic programme motivated by high ideals and sense of the brotherhood of man, and that as such it shows Faust in the most favourable light.”⁷

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In the end, Goethe intends to portray Faust as a genius, an “enlightened despot”,  in the ilk of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Peter the Great.⁸ The salvation of Faust then originates out of an entirely Enlightenment dressed story and worldview. But Faust is not the only one who experiences salvation in Goethe’s story. Margarete (who, albeit in a conflation of protestant and Catholic thought) provides a more identifiable Christian narrative than Faust’s life. ⁹

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It is not Faust, but Margarete who offers us a model of confession. Throughout Part I, she is put forth as simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously sinner and justified). In our first introduction to her as a reader she is leaving confession.¹⁰ Mephistopheles even comments, “She is the soul of innocence/And has no reason, none at all/To visit the confessional. Her kind is too much for me.”¹¹ Later we are told her nose is “forever in a prayerbook.”¹² Mephistopheles even chides Faust for allowing Margarete to put  “the Doctor through his catechism.”¹³ To which Faust responds:

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“Monster [that is Mephistopheles], lacking the least comprehension / How such a soul, so loving, pure, / Whose faith is all in all to her, / The sole means to obtain salvation, / Should be tormented by fear / The one she loves is damned forever!”¹⁴

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Most importantly, after her private and public sins (uniting with Faust out of marriage, her part in the death of her brother, mother, and child) she confesses and places her dependence upon God:

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“In your hands, our Father, oh save me!” / You angelic hosts, stand about me! /Draw up your ranks to protect me!”¹⁵

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And it is after this that the heavens announce: “She shall be saved.” ¹⁶

This brings us to the central aim of this third essay, that of confessing. Confession commences, permeates, and is the proper end of the activity of faith seeking understanding. It is therefore the fitting end to reading and thinking. In this essay, I primarily consider confessing, as that activity, which is pregnant to faith seeking understanding. Pregnant, because faith seeking understanding must give birth to confession and is born out of the confessing individual.

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On Confessing

The word confession or confessing has a plethora of meanings within protestant Christianity. It may describe the individual christians turning away from sin and toward God. As Wittgenstein once said, “A confession has to be a part of your new life.”¹⁷ In this sense, confession is a term that refers to repentance, an activity which the Christian is to be active in throughout their life.¹⁸ This is primarily the way I use confession above in reference to Faust.  

In another sense, confession may refer to those symbols and creeds that define what Christians believe both personally and collectively. In other words, a confession of faith, such as the Belgic Confession or the Westminster Confession of Faith. As John Webster put it:

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“A creed or confessional formula is a public and binding indication of the gospel which is set before us in the scriptural witness, through which the church affirms its allegiance to God, repudiates falsehood by which the church is threatened, and assembles around the judgment and consolation of the gospel.”¹⁹

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The word confession may also refer to the personal and corporate act of praise. In what follows, I use confessing chiefly in the third sense: the thankful, public voicing of faith in the God who has spoken. It is the necessary beginning and end of reading, and thinking. Beginning because faith seeking understanding begins in Augustine’s words with: “I believe so that I may understand.”²⁰ The end of faith seeking understanding Bavinck portrays well, that just as the individual—made in the image of God— “absorbs the thoughts of God embedded in creation” and makes them his own, he must then, “express them again in his own words.”²¹ The ‘I believe’ is at the beginning and end of intellectual inquiry. The appropriation of truth into the mind of the Christian, becomes as it were a part of them, and is then taken up in the activity of confessing. In other words, thinking too must come to a head. In our case, it must return to its starting position or following the idea of Romans 11:36 it must return to God. “To him be the glory. Amen.”

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Thinking

Following the prologue, the tale of Faust begins with Heinrich Faust in his office seated restlessly in his armchair at the end of a long day of study. He opines:

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“I’ve studied, alas, philosophy, / Law and medicine, recto and verso, / And how I regret it, theology also, / Oh God, how hard I’ve slaved away, / With what result? Poor foolish old man, / I’m no whit wiser than when I began! / I’ve got a Master of Arts degree, / On top of that a Ph.D., / For ten long years, around and about, / Upstairs, downstairs, in and out, / I’ve led my students by the nose. / With what result? That nobody knows, / Or ever shall know, the tiniest crumb! / Which is why I feel completely undone.”¹

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We are meant to feel and see an academic at the end of his wits. At the end of his toil, in the study, straining in the classroom, and writing of his pen he has little to show for it. He has lost all joy in his study and even curses thinking.² All of his reading has not nourished his soul, nor facilitated his knowledge and worship of God. As he later states, “I feel it now, how pointless my long grind / To make mine all the treasures of man’s mind.”³

Mephistopheles then enters the scene as a dog before revealing himself as the Devil. He later returns to Faust and cajoles him into signing away his soul on a scrap of paper in blood.⁴  He admits to the Devil that he is done with thinking: “Thinking’s done with for me, I’m through / Learning I’ve loathed since long ago.”⁵ And indeed, thinking is precisely what Mephistopheles wants to prevent Faust from doing. As he puts it to Faust:

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Sir, come on, quit all that thinking, / Into the world, the pair of us! / The man who lives in his head only’s / Like a donkey in the rough / Led round and round by the bad fairies / While green grass grows a stone’s throw off.⁶

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This is not altogether foreign to our own time.  Living not thinking is what is valued and living is what we see Faust do in the remainder of the book. In Part I, After Faust’s blood oath with the devil we never return again to Faust’s study.

Alongside Mephistopheles he galavants through earth (Part I) and the classical world (Part II). In Part I, the living of Faust ends quite badly. Faust, with the ‘help’ of Mephistopheles, falls in love with a young maiden, Margarete and subsequently is involved in the death of all those close to her.⁷ Her mother— by way of a sleeping potion⁸, her brother— by way of a duel⁹, their illegitimate child— at the hands of Margarete.¹⁰ The death of the child results in Margarete’s imprisonment and execution. Faust and Mephistopheles attempt to free Margarete from the dungeon, but she ultimately refuses to leave. And the book ends with the competing voices of the heavens and Mephistopheles over her soul.

Out of this terror, Part II unexpectedly opens not on earth or hell, but amid the classical world.  After his myriad of misdeeds in Part I, Faust’s misdeeds in Part II continue on a grander scale. With the aid of Mephistopheles’ magic he helps the Emperor to crush an opponent with David’s Mighty Men.¹¹ As a result he is given a piece of land along the coast. From here, he sets out on the very Dutch enterprise (Goethe was German, but admired the Dutch), of reclaiming more land from the sea through large scale engineering.¹² Once more, in this task of land-reclamation he calls upon Mephistopheles’ magic and there is no shortage of lives lost.¹³ By the slip of his tongue Faust has Philemon, Baucis, and their visitor burned alive because he desires their estate.¹⁴ There is a reason that restless and indomitable striving has often been associated with the adjective ‘Faustian.’

Shockingly at the end of Part II, after all his striving, and after his death, Faust too is saved. This rightly ought to surprise the reader. Did Faust not, with his own blood, make a pact with the devil? Does this not certainly condemn him to the abyss? I thought the Prelude asserted that Faust would traverse through this world and heaven “down to hell”?¹⁵ Readers may look in several places for a clue as to what has happened.¹⁶

Theologically, we might be reminded of the words of Karl Barth, “Dogmatics does not presuppose that it is our final destiny to believe as Christians, but rather that our destiny not to do so is not final, and therefore that we shall not be disobedient to the heavenly voice (Acts 26:19).”¹⁷ In other words, the final author of Faust’s life was not Faust himself, but God in Jesus Christ. This strained Christian reading may also be easier settled by admitting that Faust’s worldview is not Christian at all, but that of the Enlightenment. As George Santayana in his work Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe makes clear, that Goethe’s “philosophy of life was indicated [in the final scene]; namely, that he who strives strays, yet in that straying finds his salvation.”¹⁸ Above all, Faust is one who strives and therefore he finds salvation within Goethe’s work. Faust’s god even calls him his “good servant.”¹⁹ As he states at the start of Part II: “Firing me with a purpose I’ll never forswear:/To strive after highest existence always, forever.”²⁰

Faust’ striving is to be juxtaposed against the activity of thinking. I hope I am not misunderstood here. I do not intend to be understood as suggesting that the theologian/Christian should not be social, have friends, celebrate the accomplishments of others, enjoy their family, work hard, etc. Calvin certainly thought that the Christian should be active in the world before the face of God, exalting God. In all of Faust’s activity in the world he abandons this theological element. His greatest end is the self and the overcoming of his own limitations at the expense of others.

Following on from the practice of reading, the task of ‘thinking’ is what preoccupies us in this essay. Thinking is the slow work that follows reading: the activity by which what we have read is remembered, ordered, tested, and allowed to address us before God. The renewal of the mind of which Scripture speaks is inseparable from the reordering of our loves; thinking is a part of sanctification. To think theologically is to be recalled again and again to God’s self-disclosure, in the company of the saints.²¹ Barth in conversation with Anselm defines thinking as reading more deeply. He appeals to the Latin root of understanding (intelligere). In Latin, to read is legere while to think, or contemplate is most literally ‘to read inwardly’ (intus legere).²² Thinking is reflective, meditative reading—especially reflection on what is confessed by Christians. If attentive reading opens the world to us, thinking is the work of honest reflection before God, about God, and all things in relation to God. In this manner of speaking, we do not flee from thinking like Faust in league with Mephistopheles, but in faith take up seeking understanding.²³ Thinking then is not primarily for ourselves, but for God and for others.

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On Thinking

Broadly, “thinking” is an inescapable element of being conscious. One can be lost in their thoughts, day-dream or passively engage with anything that is set before them or in their hands. We are those creatures, who along with angels, think; a gift and capacity given to us by the Lord.  Thinking is both a personal activity, as Wittgenstein asserted, “No can think a thought for me in the way no one can don my hat for me.”²⁴ But also, thinking can be carried out in community. Everyone is aware of the concept of “group-thought.” In the same way, Marilynne Robinson in her book The Death of Adam acknowledges that as modern people we often participate in a “collective fiction” which although thin and fraudulent, in fact often dated and thoughtless, acts as the “gatekeeper” of our dearest interests.²⁵ Just as we can be thoughtless as an individual we can be thoughtless as a group.²⁶

Preceding Wittgenstein’s discussion on reading in the Philosophical Investigations is a section on thinking and understanding.²⁷  One scholar astutely observes that despite this, Wittgenstein “is simply not in the business of providing an answer to the question ‘What is thinking?’.”²⁸  What is more important to Wittgenstein is what counts as thinking.²⁹ As I have described it so far, thinking is a broad activity that accompanies consciousness. But I want to move us toward a more narrow definition, that permits us to think about the activity of thinking as it relates to theological reasoning, stepping further into faith seeking understanding.

Once more, I’d like to point to Webster’s article “Reading Theology.”  Thinking, no less than reading, is never solitary. “We do not begin de novo.” Thinking is a craft learned among others. It is a participation in an existing field of spiritual and intellectual practices. “In short,” Webster posits, “thinking is embedded in tradition.”³⁰ To think theologically, then, is not merely to process ideas, but to share in a community’s ongoing work of discerning the truth of God and his works. Thinking not only begins with others, but ought to continue amid others (and here I do not have in mind primarily the company of books). As Charles Taylor asserts, our impression of what is truly important often depends on our conversations with others.³¹

We might also recall the intimate etymological connection between thinking and thanking made by Martin Heidegger.³²

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“When we listen to the word thanc in its basic meaning, we hear at once the essence of the two words : thinking and memory, thinking and thanks, which readily suggest themselves in the verb "to think."³³

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Gratitude is, therefore, proper or intrinsic to thinking. The inverse is also true, churlishness is improper to thinking. Heidegger burrowing down into his own thought, asserts:

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“The supreme thanks, then, would be thinking? And the profoundest thanklessness, thoughtlessness? Real thanks, then, never consists in that we ourselves come bearing gifts, and merely repay gift with gift. Pure thanks is rather that we simply think—think what is really and solely given, what is there to be thought.”³⁴

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Building from Heidegger, we may also return to Anselm. Envisioning thinking, as the task of faith seeking understanding shapes the posture of thinking. Humility must govern thinking. As Barth states, reflecting on Anselm’s Prosologion, “Humbly, as much as I can” (Humilitier quantum potest), the theologian will “seek the reason how it is” (quaerere rationem quomodo sit).³⁵ In other words, believing and confessing God ‘as he is’ opens up the task of thinking—faith seeking understanding—as one governed by attempting “to understand the truth as the truth.”³⁶ Similarly, in line with this, for Bavinck, thinking is not mere analysis but a movement toward the inner depth of things; a penetration into their essence in order to perceive them as they truly are before God.³⁷  The practice of thinking then ought to bring us to reflection upon and closer to the truth in gratitude.

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