2008 Michael Ramsey Lecture

Today the Principal, Canon Robin Ward, will give the 2008 Michael Ramsey Lecture at Little St Mary's in Cambridge. The lecture is entitled 'Flying Bishops' and Impaired Communion: a view from Patristic Antioch. The lecture begins at 5.15 p.m.

All Souls - Solemn Requiem Mass - Photos

This evening the House celebrated All Souls with a Solemn Requiem Mass in St John the Evangelist, Iffley Road. The Ordinary and Propers of the Mass were sung to Latin plainchant by the House Choir, Fr Edward Dowler celebrated and Canon Robin Ward gave the homily.

The nave of St John's church, showing the rood screen

The nave altar

The High Altar vested in black and with unbleached candles
in the tradition of the feast

The Mass vestments in the Sacristy

Last Sunday after Trinity - Dr John Jarick

You may have heard it said that the meaning of life is 42. That strange, mathematically-precise but philosophically-dubious claim was made in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in its various incarnations as a radio programme, a book, a television series, and most recently a Hollywood movie, all arising from the comic genius of writer Douglas Adams. His work contained many gems, and not least among them was the fundamental piece of advice to all creatures travelling on life’s journey: “Don’t panic!” Ever since I saw those words, emblazoned in large red letters on the back of a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’ve thought they embodied very sensible advice indeed, and I’ve endeavoured to follow that advice at various stages of my own journey, such as when I sat my Bachelor of Theology examinations back in Australia and I encountered some unforeseen questions about certain matters I hadn’t revised; or when I tried my hand for the first time at driving on the narrow, twisting roads of Britain; or when the Senior Tutor of St Stephen’s House asked me to double my teaching load for this term. At all such times a policy of “Don’t panic!” is a prudent one to follow, and I’m grateful to Douglas Adams for having drawn it to my attention in the way that he did with his Hitchhiker’s Guide.

But when it comes to the matter of the number 42, which The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy claims as the amusing answer to the great question about life, the universe, and everything, I must beg to differ. The meaning of life is not to be found in the number 42, but in the number 206. Yes, 206. Let me explain.

The Bible begins with a special and unique collection of five books that have traditionally been called the Torah, or the Pentateuch, or the Books of the Law. They are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Together they constitute the fundamental teaching of the Hebrew religion, the inexhaustible source from which the rest of scripture and beyond that the whole of Jewish and Christian tradition has sprung. They tell of the relationship between the human world and the divine sphere, of God’s intense yearning to be with us and among us, to woo us and liberate us, to set before us possibilities and prospects that we could never dream of if left entirely to our own devices. And as part of that encouragement for us to be more than simply self-centred individuals pursuing our own little petty and unsatisfying agendas, these books of the Pentateuch present for our consideration a number of commandments or precepts, advice on how we might conduct ourselves in this tricky business we call life.

Now how many commandments do you suppose there are? Most people would probably say that there are Ten Commandments, and that is what Christian tradition has generally said, drawing upon a twofold setting-out of ten particular precepts in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. As it happens, not everyone agrees on precisely which ten precepts are to be included — Catholic and Lutheran catechisms have two commandments prohibiting coveting but no commandment prohibiting the manufacture and worshipping of idols, while certain other churches include an injunction against such idol practices and make do with just one anti-coveting clause — but there is a general agreement that 10 is a good figure for commandments. It certainly seems an intuitive figure for ten-fingered creatures like ourselves, but in fact the total number of commandments in the biblical Books of the Law is 613.

613 commandments are an awful lot to have to come to terms with, wouldn’t you think? And actually, if truth be told, some of them are probably not particularly edifying, or at least not so relevant any longer in the modern world, such as the 46th commandment, “You shall bring from your settlements in the land two loaves of bread as an elevation-offering” [Leviticus 23:17], or the 291st commandment, “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard” [19:27]. I’m using, by the way, the traditional rabbinic numbering of the commandments. And I want to say that many of the 613 commandments to be found in the first five books of the Bible are in fact abidingly relevant and essential, such as the 211th commandment (better known to many of us as either the 4th or the 5th commandment in the more familiar reckoning of the Top Ten), “You shall honour your father and your mother” [19:3], or the 177th commandment (which doesn’t make it into the Top Ten but is still rather important), “You shall not render an unjust judgment” [19:15].

All of the commandments I’ve just quoted are to be found in the book of Leviticus. That particular book isn’t among many people’s favourite reading, and perhaps you groaned a little when you noticed that this morning’s first reading was from Leviticus. But within that reading was the 206th commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”, to be found in Leviticus 19:18. The compilers of the lectionary want us to notice that particular commandment, since they’ve taken out of the reading some other rather good commandments that come in between verses 2 and 15 — such as an injunction against manufacturing and worshipping idols (just what is it about that commandment that makes us want to cut it out all the time?) — and they also stop the reading from going on to distract us with other matters — such as the prohibition in the very next verse against wearing a garment made of two materials (who among us can honestly say that we’ve never worn a garment made of two materials?).

Commandment Number 206 is at first glance almost hidden within this overload of 613 commandments. But stop. Coming in at Leviticus 19:18, it’s situated close to the very centre of the book of Leviticus, the book which itself lies at the centre of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). In other words, at the heart of every Torah scroll is this 206th commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. The whole law focuses in on this one precept; commandment after commandment coming before or after it can be summarized in this one. Everything else flows out from this point, and all the complicated injunctions are attempts at fleshing out this principle. Such at least was the teaching of the great Rabbi Akiva, who taught that the fundamental principle of the entire Law of God was to be found in this one brief saying. And it was the teaching too of the apostle Paul, who wrote in his letter to the Romans that “the commandments, ‘you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet’, and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘love your neighbour as yourself’” [Romans 13:9]. Or again in the letter to the Galatians, it’s said that “the whole law is summed up in [that] single commandment” [Galatians 5:14]. Everything, then, boils down to Commandment Number 206.

Perhaps you’re wondering, since I mentioned earlier that a popular number associated with the meaning of life is the number 42, what the 42nd commandment might be. Well, it happens to be this: “You shall offer, at the beginning of each month, a burnt-offering to the Lord, consisting of two young bulls, one ram, and seven male lambs a year old without blemish, with three-tenths of an ephah of choice flour mixed with oil as a grain-offering for each bull, and two-tenths of choice flour mixed with oil as a grain offering for the ram, and one-tenth of choice flour mixed with oil as a grain-offering for every lamb” [Numbers 28.11-13]. It’s simply not in the same category as “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”, is it? If you don’t love your neighbour, if you don’t care about the people beside you or the ones with whom you share this life and this world, then any fastidiousness you may have about offering burnt offerings at the beginning of every month — or whatever other pious patterns you follow to the letter — will be meaningless. And so I say again that it’s not the number 42, but the number 206, that expresses the meaning of life. We’re all fellow-pilgrims with others on this journey of life, and meaning is to be found in living for others rather than simply for ourselves. That’s the profound truth at the heart of the Old Testament laws.

But my little equation wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention the number 3, for the third commandment in the traditional listing of all 613 commandments (not to be confused with the third commandment in the traditional lists of Ten Command­ments) is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” [Deuteronomy 6:5]. That’s an essential part of the equation, for without it we might be very good humanitarians in our concern for our fellow human beings, but we would still not have grasped the full meaning of it all, that we are in fact creatures under God, and that we’re incomplete without a relationship with our creator and redeemer and sustainer. So it is that we heard in the Gospel reading today [Matthew 22:34-46] that Jesus coupled that saying from Leviticus about loving your neighbour with the saying from Deuteronomy about loving the Lord your God. Love towards one’s neighbour is an expression of love for God as surely and inextricably as love for God demands love for the neighbour. “We love because he first loved us”, says the first letter of John. “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who don’t love a brother or sister whom they’ve seen, cannot love God whom they haven’t seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also” [1 John 4:19-21].

How many commandments are there? 613? 10? Essentially, there are two, and essentially those two are one: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”; and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” [Matthew 22:40]. Amen.

Assumption of Our Lady - Canon Robin Ward

This sermon was preached by the Principal at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham for the feast of the Assumption this year:

I have bad news for the shrine of our Lady of Walsingham. It would seem that our pilgrimage to this holy place is soon to be superseded, and that England’s Nazareth will once more sink into torpor and obscurity. Why so? Will a new tyrant arise to overthrow the cult? Will the demise of the Church of England make it redundant? Will the departure of Fathers North and Barnes in fact require a lengthy convalescence from the effects of the ministry of the bouncy castle? No. The real threat to our shrine, according to the learned and erudite Professor Haldane of St Andrew’s University is space travel. Once we get rockets which are big enough and speedy enough we will have no need to mess about coming on pilgrimage to Marian shrines, stopping for fish and chips in Fakenham and so forth, because we will be able to go and see Mary herself in person. After all, if she has been assumed body and soul into heaven, moved that is from one place to another in an extraordinary way, but still in a way which preserves the essential continuity of her existence, then really the only difficulty (though that a rather daunting one from a strictly practical point of view) is knowing where to look for her.

The Christian message of salvation would in many ways be much easier to explain if we did away with the resurrection of the body. Survival after death, future happiness and sufficient continuity with this life to assure recognition of loved ones: these are the staple expectations of the English which all the parish clergy recognize from countless funeral visits and insipid crematorium tributes. The Bishop of Durham is quite right to point out how un-Christian these expectations are, even if by doing so he chooses to identify himself with the error of Pope John XXII, denying that the blessed enjoy the beatific vision before the Last Judgement. But he is right to suspect the spiritualizing as old as Plato and as persistent as Gnosticism, whereby the body is explained away: no need for any of those embarrassing questions about the whereabouts of heaven or indeed the fierceness of the fires of hell, if we let go of the tangible and project salvation into a purely spiritual and therefore conveniently inconceivable realm.

This is not the faith of the Catholic Church. The great monastic theologian Anscar Vonier wrote: The resurrection of our bodies is the acid test of our orthodoxy; no man is truly Christian in his intellect unless he firmly believes that in the world to come mankind will be, not a multitude of ghosts, however glorious, but a race of distinct personalities, composed of body and soul as here on earth. My soul is not me: without my body I may possess by God’s good grace the sight of His face which is the reward of the blessed and the Beatific Vision promised the saints, and possess it in that degree of intensity which reflects the measure of grace to which I have attained in this life; but I will not possess it to the fullest extent until I enjoy it having received back my body in the resurrection. Dante expresses this yearning of the blessed thus: The lustre which already swathes us round/Shall be outlustred by the flesh, which long/ Day after day now moulders underground.

The scriptures could not be more explicit about the bodily character of the glory which is promised to the blessed in the resurrection life: on the mountain of the Transfiguration, Jesus is glorified with Moses and Elijah, both of whom have been assumed bodily into heaven at the end of their earthly lives; at the very moment that the sacrifice of the Cross is consummated by the death of the Lord, the first-fruits of the redemption are made known by the rising of the saints in Jerusalem, a resurrection not made known to witnesses until after his own. And despite Professor Haldane and his rockets, the notion of heaven as a place (which naturally follows when you need to find space for a body) is not strange to theology: S. Thomas inherits from the monastic fathers of the Church the term Empyrean to mean heaven conceived in this way. He argues that because God intended the material universe to possess a two-fold glory, both spiritual and bodily, he begins the creation with the perfect spiritual beatitude of the angels, and the perfect bodily glory of the Empyrean, luminous, unchanging and beyond our observation because it is subject to neither motion nor sight. It is to this place that the Lord ascends to prepare the mansions of the blessed in the Father’s house, and in this place that the Mother of God perpetuates the particular ministry entrusted her in consequence of the singular privilege of her Assumption body and soul into glory.

For Our Lady’s Assumption is not simply an anticipation of the resurrection of the dead which God has decreed for all at the final Judgement. Her Assumption is a consequence of her particular dignity as the Mother of God. Human death comprises of three aspects: one that is natural, the dissolution of material substance in that inevitable decomposition of contraries which is the lot of created things; one that is unnatural, the separation of the soul which possesses immortality from the body which does not; and one which is punitive, the consequence of the Fall.

Our Lady although conceived without Original Sin and so exempt by God’s grace from the penal aspect of human death, was not exempt from the natural end of human life, nor the sundering of soul from body which is the dissolution of the human person. She is not in this way superior to her divine Son, who for our sake willingly submitted Himself to a redeeming death on the Cross. But her death is truly as the Christians of the East call it a Dormition: a passing over into Eternal Life which is untouched by the traumatic separation of body and soul which the children of Adam are sentenced to bear, and which exemplifies the dignity of her divine and virginal Motherhood by which she truly co-operated in the work of our Redemption.

When the scriptures talk to us about the resurrection life they draw attention in a rather curious way to clothing: Elijah, as he goes up to heaven in his fiery chariot, lets fall his cloak as a commission to Elisha; the Lord’s garments are transfigured with Him and shine white as light upon the mount of Tabor; the woman of Revelation appears in heaven clothed with the sun. The Pauline teaching for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ seems to take on a tangible form. This clothing is the outward sign of that inward infusion of spiritual insight which enables the created mind to see God and which the theologians call the Light of Glory. For Mary our Mother, the people of God have found profound comfort in the image of her protecting veil, which is at once the token of her bodily glory, the Queen clothed in gold of Ophir, and the pledge of her continuing intercession for all her devout children, whom her divine Son wills should come to salvation through the mediation of her Immaculate Heart. May our blessed Lady assumed into heaven pray for us in this place dedicated to her name and patronage, and for all who come seeking her intercession in trouble and in joy, that we may come at last to the heavenly kingdom of her Son, and enjoy for ever with her the vision of God in the resurrection life.

Red Tory: A Radically Conservative Catholic Political Economy

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Academe, and what it’s for - Fr Andrew Davison

This book review by the Fr Andrew Davison, Tutor in Christian Doctrine, appeared in the Church Times :

The State of the University: Academic knowledges and the knowledge of God by Stanley Hauerwas

“Write about what you know,” is standard advice given to would-be authors. It seems also to apply to seasoned academic writers, for whom the university itself is a favourite subject.

This contribution to the genre from Stanley Hauerwas is a collection of occasional papers and lectures, as are many of his books. Its coherence is not structural, the kind possessed by a book written in one go, but that of a mind with a single intent. It is a report from a period of the author’s life in which one question was foremost: how should the Christian view the contemporary university?

Common to all these papers is a tension: we are to love and serve the earthly community while at the same time knowing that here we have no abiding city. For Hauerwas, university is where this sense of dislocation is most acute. It is the institution in which he is most profoundly at home, and yet he finds it inextricably bound up with the secular state, which he excori-ates at every turn for its violence.

The title of the book is, therefore, a pun (a weak one): Hauerwas in-vestigates the “state of the university”, and finds it to be a “state”, or, at least, an arm of the state. The book is as much a reflection on resistance to violence and on the contemporary political situation as it is on education, narrowly understood.

Hauerwas will not allow the university to set the agenda as to her strengths and weaknesses. Nor is he enthusiastic about the perspective of students: too often they go to university aiming to earn higher salaries afterwards rather than aiming to “educate their aims”. Instead, he poses questions that have theological roots: “What is the university for?” and “Whom does it serve?”

Reflecting on the American scene, he argues for goals that are both more transcendent and more mundane than those the university currently allows for herself. The university needs to find more profound causes to serve than freedom (freedom for what, he asks) or critical thinking (which is conveniently critical of everything but the status quo). Christians would wish her also to serve the poor, and put down roots in her locality.

The book does not always make for cheerful reading. The intriguing antidote for these woes may well be an emphasis on the university as a place of friendship, for all that this theme is not brought to the surface explicitly. A number of these papers were offered in homage to particular friends in higher education. We get the sense that it is in such friendships, and in the bonds of community that they forge, that we begin to resist violence.

This collection is sometimes frustrating — it is a little uneven highly opinionated, and it raises more questions than it answers.

Yet it ought to be read widely, and received as a gift to both the Church and the university. For anyone involved in the work of teaching, this book is a perfect invitation to think through questions of what we are doing and why. Hauerwas has an infectious sense that “it is hard to make God boring, or have little significance to the way we live and think.”

Gates of Heaven - Canon Robin Ward

Preached by the Principal at the feast of the dedication of St Paul’s Church, Brighton, on Sunday 19th October 2008:

One of the goods things which have emerged recently from the travails of Anglo-Catholicism in a riven Anglican Communion is a more profound reflection on what constitutes our patrimony: what makes Anglo-Catholicism actually distinctive, and justifies the anxiety which unites us to find a future for what we have received. After all, the great majority of Catholic Christians manage quite well without adding a national qualifier to the third mark of the Church adumbrated by the Creed. But those of us who live within our embattled, contrary tradition know that there is a tone, a way of doing things, a pastoral and liturgical ethos which is both absolutely distinctive and yet also prophetic in pointing beyond itself towards a greater unity – those of us who went recently with the Archbishop of Canterbury to Lourdes will understand what I mean. When we look at the lives of the saints we see that in their diversity of character and spirituality they point us towards the truth of Revelation in different ways: for S. Thomas Aquinas, the overarching principle which organizes his understanding of reality is truth, for S. Francis of Assisi it is goodness, for S. Augustine it is beauty. Our tradition, rather at odds actually with the puritan mentality of the first Tractarians, values beauty: the beauty of holiness in Christian living, the beauty of holiness in Christian worship, the beauty of holiness in the magnanimous expenditure of human wealth on the splendour of Christian cult.It is important to recognise that this is not just an aesthetic preference (although there is nothing wrong with that). Attentiveness to beauty in religion is not like an enthusiasm for Bellini or Bonsai, it is to recognise a fundamental characteristic of the nature of truth as indeed beautiful because divine: as Augustine cried, Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new. To prefer the trite, the banal, the makeshift to the artful, the well-crafted and the beautiful is to make a theological mistake about God. The present Pope is very anxious to rescue the ideal of liturgical beauty from the charge of aestheticism and is determined to put this right in a way which should rejoice all Anglican Catholics who have from the beginning been attentive to this core aspect of evangelisation. It was both moving and significant that on the feast day of Ss. Peter and Paul this year he invited the Ecumenical Patriarch to inaugurate with him the year of Paul in a liturgical celebration which reflected a new commitment to beauty in music and vesture which many of us thought was lost in the 1960s. But the great eastern fathers of the Church were not simply interested in aesthetics, not simply Christians of good taste. They understood beauty to be a morally valuable quality, human creativeness which exemplified our creation in the image of God himself, and our transformation into the divine likeness by the work of grace.

The great fifth century bishop Cyril of Alexandria, exemplified this teaching: Christians are called not simply to salvation but to deification, to become as the second epistle of S. Peter puts it, partakers of the divine nature. Through incorporation into Christ, our ontological participation in God, whereby he calls us out of non-existence into createdness, is advanced into a dynamic participation, whereby we advance from createdness to transcendence.

Cyril is particularly emphatic about the Eucharistic character of this participation. Writing to his opponent Nestorius he says: When we approach the sacramental gifts and are hallowed participants in the holy flesh and precious blood of Christ [we receive] not mere flesh (God forbid!) or flesh of a man hallowed by connection with the Word … but the personal, truly vitalizing flesh of God the Word himself. This is not simply a mechanical, formal process: by participating in the Eucharist the Christian receives the incorrupt life of the Word, and so gains the necessary stability of personhood to restore the divine image and likeness, which Cyril locates primarily in our will to choose the good. Deification in the Christian tradition always has an emphatically moral emphasis, because to participate in the divine is to choose the good: as Cyril writes, The divine is in everything that is beautiful, and is the very source, root, and origin of all virtue. Beatitude, human fulfilment, has as its end the vision of God as the culmination of the moral life. This is at the heart of the Pauline teaching about life in Christ: And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor 3.18).

Christian theologians, at least since the time of S. Thomas Aquinas, have been ready to recognise in Aristotle’s moral taxonomy of the four cardinal virtues a map of the moral life: as the philosopher says, the will to live together is friendship, and the end of the City is the good life. But these acquired virtues of Justice and Temperance, Prudence and Fortitude, cannot give that stability to the human person which is needful to restore the divine image, and so the aspiration to the vision of God. For this to be so, the Christian needs to be endowed with the theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. These are infused by God, not acquired by us, and give us the moral formation which we need to live as citizens of the City of God.

And here it is important to give a proper place to the virtue of Religion in the Christian moral scheme. Some treat it simply as part of Justice, what we owe to God as His due. But others, and in particular the judicious Carmelites of Salamanca, have seen Religion as a truly theological virtue along with the Pauline triad, because Christian worship is far more than the punctilious payment of a debt, but the fulfilment of the priestly character of the people of God which is the gift of Christ its Head: But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2.9). If Religion is truly a theological virtue, then the moral life takes on a cultic character, and cannot be lived in its integrity without this liturgical orientation. What we do in church: the manner in which we worship and the beauty with which we surround our sacred celebrations is not simply the fulfilment of a duty and the satisfaction of a particular taste, it is a participation in the divine, and a re-ordering of our moral life in accordance with the its true end, the vision of God.

Every English parish church should stand as a reminder of this. They are not simply convenient meeting rooms for use once a week: they are meant to be gates of heaven, which through their architecture, their decoration and the care with which we conduct divine worship within them testify to the centrality of the virtue of Religion in the Christian life. Each art has a place here, and each art is elevated by its encounter with the divine: sacred art, whether it be in music, in painting, in the splendour of fine vestments or the magnificence of skilled metalwork is not an extravagance, it is an embodiment of our virtuous ascent to God through the transforming action of his grace. One of the most encouraging signs of revival in the life of the western church at this time is the rediscovery of this sacred tradition by the young, who are recognising in liturgical forms which were denied them the authentic voice of Christian belief and doctrine, whether it be at choral evensong or the Latin Mass.

The end of all virtuous living, indeed the only ground for its possibility, is deification, participation in the divine life. But this is emphatically not a denial of the worth of human art, rather a gracious revelation of its true goal and fulfilment. So we come back on this liturgical and artistic commemoration to the words of S. Cyril of Alexandria, that city so eminent among the schools of antiquity:

The divine is in everything that is beautiful, and is the very source, root, and origin of all virtue.