Rehearsal: Prayer-Reading the Gospel of John

By John Stamps

We miss the point of St John’s accounts of the resurrection of Jesus if we do not taste his resurrected life. Jesus Christ does not just want to be with us. He wants to “in-home” himself within us.¹ The very love with which the Father loves the Son, Jesus wants to share with us.

And I made known your name to them, and I will make it known, so that the love which you loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:26)²

We fall victim to one of the classic theological blunders if we only read John’s Gospel out of historical curiosity. To be sure, we can begin there. We all need to start somewhere. But sooner or later, Jesus Christ will ask us to make an existential commitment. He will call us by name and ask us to follow him as our shepherd. 

Alan Ecclestone suggests the following practices to “pray-read” the Gospel of John, much like we would pray the Psalter:

One purpose has shaped this book. It is a plea for learning to read the Gospel according to St John with the kind of attention that can best be described as praying it. In doing that, I believe, we come nearest to the mind and intention of its author. In that way we latch on to what he himself did. He wrote that others might join him. I hope to suggest some ways of setting about it. Here I simply remind myself that it calls for selfless attention, unwearying patience, passionate commitment, honesty of purpose, hunger for truth. Reading in this way is not foreign to Jewish and Christian traditions of prayer. In just such deliberate fashion Torah was studied and Psalms were recited from time immemorial. They will go on being used in that way for generations to come. My plea is for doing that kind of prayer-reading of the Fourth Gospel. It would be like turning it into a Christian Psalter. Such use of it is greatly needed and long overdue.³

I want to call this kind of prayer-reading rehearsal. If the Fourfold Gospel is something like an opera, we are not merely members of the audience.⁴ We are being drawn into the performance. And no one learns an opera by glancing once at the score. We rehearse it. We repeat its words until we begin to hear its recurring themes. We learn when one voice answers another. Eventually, the music gets inside us. Prayer-reading John is rehearsal for inhabiting the Gospel.

I like Ecclestone’s prayer suggestions. Shame on me, but it never occurred to me to pray through the Gospel of John. But other than “hunger for truth,” I’m not sure I’d derive them from John’s Gospel itself. In the light of the coming of the Spirit-Paraclete who is with us and in us, what would prayer-reading the Gospel of John itself look like?⁵

If the Spirit-Paraclete abides with us and will be in us (14:17), teaches us (14:26), reminds us of Jesus’ words (14:26), testifies to Jesus (15:26), guides us into all truth (16:13), and glorifies Jesus (16:14), then prayer-reading John should involve deliberately allowing the Spirit to do precisely those things.

How, then, do we rehearse John until his Gospel becomes somewhere we live? A choir learns a score by singing it again and again. We learn John in much the same way. As we prayer-read and rehearse the Gospel, John’s language becomes second nature to us. His questions become our questions. What is important to Jesus becomes important to us. We start to see ourselves and our world through the eyes of Jesus.

1. Hunger and thirst for truth.
   John repeatedly begins with our deepest desires: “What are you seeking?” (1:38); “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (7:37). Prayer-reading begins not with mastery of the text but with wanting what Jesus promises.⁶
2. Invoke the Holy Spirit.
   Come, Holy Spirit, come! This isn’t merely a perfunctory prayer before the “real” reading begins. We read in the presence of the Spirit-Paraclete who “abides with you and will be in you” (14:17). We are not reading John by ourselves. William James defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Sorry, Professor James, solitude isn’t what we’re doing. Prayer-reading occurs within the κοινωνία created by Father, Son, Spirit-Paraclete, disciples, and witnesses. We don’t rehearse this opera alone.
3. Listen for what the Spirit-Paraclete brings to remembrance.
   Jesus promises that the Spirit-Paraclete “will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you” (14:26). That suggests reading slowly enough for one Johannine word to summon another: water, bread, light, life, glory, hour, abiding, seeing, believing, Father, Spirit. Don’t immediately suppress those echoes to get back to the passage at hand.
   John’s Gospel sometimes sounds like a Bach fugue. Jesus introduces a theme, and then we hear it again in another voice, another setting, another key. Water, for example, flows throughout the Gospel. Living water appears beside a Samaritan well (John 4) and returns as Jesus’ great invitation at the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7). The theme remains recognizable even as John develops it in new ways. Rehearsal trains our ears to hear one Johannine theme sounding within another.
4. Abide with Jesus.
   This is indispensable. “Abide in me, and I in you” (15:4). Don’t merely extract the meaning and move on. Remain with a word, image, saying, or scene. Read it again. Sit with it. Let it become uncomfortable if necessary. Johannine prayer isn’t simply lectio but μένειν. Remaining, dwelling, abiding. As Jesus in-homes himself in us, we make our home in him. We rehearse the Gospel until the Gospel becomes somewhere we live.
5. Ask to be shown Jesus.
   The Spirit-Paraclete “will bear witness about me” (15:26) and “will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and proclaim it to you” (16:14). That gives you a remarkably concrete criterion for Johannine prayer: Where is the Spirit directing my attention to Jesus? What am I being shown about him that I had not seen before?
6. Expect misunderstanding and conversion of perception.
   Nicodemus misunderstands the new birth. The Samaritan woman misunderstands the living water. The crowds misunderstand the living bread. Mary Magdalene sees Jesus and thinks he is the gardener. Again and again, people hear correctly and understand wrongly. So a Johannine prayer-reading should include: What am I failing to see? What assumption am I bringing to Jesus that prevents me from recognizing what he is saying? The Spirit-Paraclete’s guidance “into all truth” (16:13) implies that our present understanding is incomplete.
7. Do the truth.
   This may be even better than “hunger and thirst for truth” as a distinct practice. John doesn’t conceive truth merely as something we possess intellectually: “The one who does the truth comes to the light” (3:21). And in 7:17, willingness to do God’s will precedes knowing whether Jesus’ teaching is from God. So after prayer-reading: What truth have I been given to do?
8. Let the word become love.
   “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (14:15); “Abide in my love” (15:9); “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (15:12). The test of Johannine contemplation isn’t the intensity of one’s religious experience. It is whether abiding in Jesus becomes love enacted toward another person.
9. Become a witness.
   “The Spirit of truth … will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness” (15:26–27). Prayer-reading doesn’t terminate in private illumination. The movement is Spirit → disciple → world. Ask: What have I seen? What have I heard? What am I now called to bear witness to?
10. Read until you hear Jesus call your name.
    Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus through accumulating evidence. Recognition comes when Jesus says, “Mary!” (20:16). John ultimately moves from eyewitness testimony to the reader: “These things have been written so that you may come to believe and trust” (20:31). At some point, prayer-reading has to cease being exclusively about Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Thomas, or Mary. Where does the Gospel address me? The point of rehearsal is participation. Eventually we discover that we are no longer merely reading John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel is reading us. We hear Jesus call our own name and ask us to sing our part.

We need to read John’s Gospel the way that John teaches us to read him: thirsting, listening, remembering, abiding, doing the truth, and trusting the Spirit-Paraclete to show us Jesus. We need to turn John’s Gospel into a Christian psalter.

I have one last piece of practical advice. Actually, I stole it from David F. Ford. Rehearsal requires repetition. He suggests reading the entire Gospel of John every 90 days, similar to traditional cycles of lectio divina through the Book of Psalms, to let its themes sink into our daily life and transform familiarity into an ongoing encounter with Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and now sitting at the right hand of God his Father.⁷

St John did not write his Gospel to be mastered but to be inhabited. John intends that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit come to make their home with us and be in us. We repeatedly read ourselves into meeting Jesus, trusting Jesus, and maturing in our relationship with Jesus and with each other.

Footnotes

1. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz write that in John, those who belong to God have “un-homed themselves” and “made themselves an unfitting dwelling place for God.” Their formulation prompted me to coin the obvious neologism “in-home” for the reverse movement: Christ making his home in us. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022), 78. ↩︎
2. All translations from St John’s Gospel are my own, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re curious about my translation choices, I always defer to Bauer-Danker-Ardnt-Gingrich (BDAG). When I don’t, it turns out to be a mistake. ↩︎
3. Alan Ecclestone, The Scaffolding of Spirit: Reflections on the Gospel of St John (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1987), 2. ↩︎
4. For my development of the Fourfold Gospel as an opera, see John Stamps, “Prelude — Hearing the Fourfold Gospel: Why the Bible Sounds Like An Opera,” Eclectic Orthodoxy, July 4, 2026. ↩︎
5. Marianne Meye Thompson usefully refers to the Paraclete as the “Spirit-Paraclete,” a formulation that keeps the Paraclete’s identity as the Holy Spirit clearly before us. Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 319. ↩︎
6. David F. Ford, “The Gospel of John and Contemporary Society: Three Major Theological Contributions,” Religions 14, no. 11 (2023): 1357, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111357. ↩︎
7. For David F. Ford’s practice of sustained, prayerful rereading of the Fourth Gospel, including his proposal to read the entire Gospel every ninety days, see David F. Ford, Meeting God in John: Inspiration and Encouragement from the Fourth Gospel (London: SPCK, 2019), esp. Appendix B, “John Every Ninety Days”; and Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Ford’s plan for pray-reading the Gospel of John covers roughly 5-10 verses per day. ↩︎

Peace Behind Locked Doors: The Risen Christ and the Breath of New Creation (John 20:19–23)

By John Stamps

And on the eighth day, the Son of God made all things new. The darkness has passed away, and the light of the resurrection shines upon the world. The old creation still bears the scars of death, yet a new creation has dawned. The Sabbath rest has given way to a new beginning. The Father is working, and the Son continues his work.

The Divine Gardener walks once more in the garden. He plants the first seeds of the new creation and breathes the Holy Spirit upon his disciples. Adam and Eve no longer hide among the trees. The tree of shame has become the tree of life. Mary hears her name upon the lips of the risen Lord. Exile is ended. The gates of Eden stand open. The crucified and risen Christ comes to his fearful disciples and speaks words of grace over his renewed creation: “Peace to you.”

John wants us to hear these resurrection stories against the backdrop of creation itself. From its opening words, “In the beginning was the Word,” John invites readers to understand Jesus through the imagery of creation. Light shines in the darkness. Water and Spirit bring new birth. A garden becomes the setting for divine encounter. When Jesus rises on the first day of the week and breathes the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, Easter is not merely the reversal of a death. It is the dawn of a new creation.

Over a century ago—1925, to be exact—G. K. Chesterton had already captured the same Johannine vision:

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.¹

Jesus does something extraordinary. He breathes. John uses a word that takes us all the way back to the creation of Adam. The one who has passed through death now breathes the Holy Spirit and sends his disciples into the world. Easter is not finished with the raising of Jesus from the dead. The risen Lord now begins to breathe his new creation into the world.

We should not be surprised that John borrows Genesis’s language to describe the resurrection. The only comparable analogy to life from death is creation from nothing. Easter is vita ex morte victa—life out of death conquered—as radical and unprecedented as creatio ex nihilo itself.

Peace Behind Locked Doors

So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors had been shut where the disciples were because of fear of the Judeans,² Jesus came and stood in the middle and says to them, “Peace to you.” And having said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. (John 20:19-20)³

By anybody’s reckoning, this first day of the week had been filled with shocking news. The disciples had passed through the darkness of Good Friday and the bewilderment of the empty tomb. Then Mary Magdalene appeared with the astonishing report that she had seen the risen Lord. These events were too much for any normal person to take in.

Why, then, does John emphasize “that day“?⁴ He is doing more than supplying a date on a calendar. Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus had prepared his disciples for the sorrow that lay ahead. The crucifixion of their teacher would shatter their world. Yet Jesus also made them a solemn promise, one they could not possibly understand until Easter:

In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. (John 14:20)

That promised day has dawned. But the disciples are utterly unprepared for it. They hunker down behind locked doors. They imagine they are safe from the Judeans. They are not safe from Jesus. Without warning, he stands in their midst. The experience is terrifying. His first words are simple, yet both necessary and comforting: “Peace to you.” We hear echoes of God’s fearful encounter with Gideon:⁵

And the Lord said to him, “Peace to you! Do not be afraid. You will not die.” (Judges 6:23)

The one standing before them is both familiar and utterly unexpected. Jesus appears where no one expected him. The crucified Jesus is alive, yet alive in a way that transcends ordinary categories of presence and absence.

“Peace” was a familiar Jewish blessing, but on the lips of the risen Lord, it becomes something more. Jesus had already promised this peace on the night before his death: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you” (14:27). He had also promised, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take courage; I have overcome the world” (16:33). The disciples had heard those words before. Now they hear them again from the lips of the one who has passed through death and emerged victorious.

Yet his greeting alone does not produce instant recognition. Jesus, therefore, shows them his hands and his side. He shows them his wounds because our incredulity runs so deep. The disciples now recognize him because he still bears the scars of his crucifixion. Resurrection did not erase the stigmata; it transfigured them. This is the same Jesus they saw crucified. It is no other. No ghost stands before them, though walls and locked doors are no barrier to him. The crucified Jesus stands alive in their midst. Resurrection is no escape from death but a new creation that includes and transforms death itself.

The wounds remain, yet they no longer signify defeat. Death no longer holds him. The risen Lord remains embodied, yet his life can no longer be measured by ordinary categories of space and mortality. The crucified Jesus is alive, but alive in a new way.⁶

Finally, the disciples recognize Jesus. Terror gives way to joy. Their rejoicing fulfills a promise Jesus had already made during the Farewell Discourse:

Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be grieved, but your grief will turn into joy. A woman, when she gives birth, experiences grief because her hour has come. But when she has delivered the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of her joy, because a human being has been born into the world. And so you now experience grief, but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. (John 16:20-22)

The disciples now discover what Jesus meant. Their grief has not merely ended. It has been transformed. The horror of Good Friday has given way to the joy of Easter. The hour of sorrow has become the hour of rejoicing. The risen Lord stands before them, and no one can take their joy away.

The Breath of New Creation

So Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you! Just as the Father has sent me, I also send you.” And after he said this, he breathed and says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Of whomever you forgive the sins, they are forgiven to them; whomever you hold are held fast.” (John 20:21-23)

Jesus repeats the blessing of peace. Yet peace immediately gives way to mission. As the Father sent him into the world, so he sends his disciples into the world. The Church’s mission does not begin with its own plans, programs, or ambitions. It begins in the sending of the Son.

Jesus issues the Church a blank check and tells us to fill in the amount. “We can act in unprecedented. daring ways.”⁷ Will we be brazen or reluctant? Fearful or faithful? Yet one condition is attached to the check: “Just as the Father has sent me, I also send you.” The mission of the Church must therefore take the same form as the mission of Jesus. Yes, there will be glory. But we dare not confuse glory with spiritual thrills, religious success, or excitement. In John’s Gospel, glory has nail marks.

Then Jesus breathes (ἐνεφύσησεν/enephysēsen) the Holy Spirit. John’s allusions are unmistakable. Any attentive reader hears the echoes of Genesis and Ezekiel:

And God formed the human from the dust of the earth, and he breathed (enephysēsen/ἐνεφύσησεν) into his face the breath of life, and the human became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7 LXX)

And he said to me, “Prophesy, son of man! Prophesy to the Spirit and say to the Spirit, ‘Thus says the Lord: Come from the four winds and breathe (ἐμφύσησον/emphysēson) into these corpses, and let them live!’” (Ezekiel 37:9 LXX)⁸

The risen Lord now performs the Creator’s work. This is not merely the return of a crucified man to life. This is God’s new creation. The same God who once breathed life into Adam now breathes the Holy Spirit through the risen Christ.⁹

In Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, God does what only God can do. The one who once created out of nothing now creates out of death conquered. God does not replace the life that died but raises and transforms it. Resurrection does not reverse death; it conquers death and transforms the life that has passed through it. Creatio ex morte victa. Creation out of death conquered. From the ruins of the old, God brings forth a new creation: a life beyond death, a world beyond decay.

The gift of the Spirit immediately takes concrete form in a ministry of reconciliation:

If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven to them; if you hold anyone, they are held fast.¹⁰

This difficult saying is often read as John’s version of Matthew’s language of binding and loosing. Yet John phrases the commission differently. The object “sins” appears explicitly in the first clause but disappears in the second. Whether this omission is deliberate ambiguity or grammatical ellipsis remains debated. Sandra Schneiders argues that John shifts the focus from retaining sins to holding on to persons.

Whether or not one accepts her interpretation in full, the Johannine context is striking. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus does not abandon people. He seeks them, summons them, confronts them, and restores them. Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, and even Peter after his denial, all bear witness to this pattern.

The commission of the Spirit-breathed disciples is not merely to pronounce verdicts but to continue Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation. Loosen the sins, but hold on to the people. Refuse to abandon them. The mission handed on by the risen Christ is his own mission.

This essay begins a four-part series on the first climax of John’s Gospel. And yes, there is a second climax in John 21. We have followed the evangelist’s movement from the risen Jesus standing among his frightened disciples to his breathing the Holy Spirit upon them and sending them into the world (20:19–23). Next, Thomas will encounter the wounded God (20:24–29). Finally, John will make a remarkable turn from the eyewitnesses to us, his readers: “But these things have been written so that you may come to believe and trust” (20:30–31).

But before we move on to Thomas, we need to linger over Jesus’ startling command: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” John has been preparing us for this moment throughout his Gospel. The Spirit who was once “not yet” is now breathed upon the disciples by the crucified and risen Jesus. How did we get from living water to Paraclete, from promise to glorification, from “not yet” to “receive”?

Intermezzo — The “Not Yet” Spirit: Living Water, Paraclete, Glorification

Footnotes

1. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 213. ↩︎
2. I translated οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι as “Judeans” rather than “Jews.” The Greek term can refer to inhabitants of Judea, the Jerusalem authorities, or particular opponents of Jesus rather than to the Jewish people as a whole. Jesus and his disciples are, of course, themselves Jews; readers should therefore not hear John’s language as a blanket condemnation of the Jewish people. You don’t believe me? Ask N.T. Wright! “Another linguistic point: like some other recent historians, when speaking of the ethnic people from which Jesus came, I have referred to them as “Judaeans” rather than “Jews.” People from Athens were Athenians; from Rome, Romans. As the gospel went out into the world, Jesus and his earliest followers were thought of as being from Judaea. Our modern word “Jew” has many connotations, some of them unhelpful to historical study.” N. T. Wright, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (New York: HarperOne, 2025), xv. ↩︎
3. All translations from the Greek New Testament, the Greek Old Testament (LXX), and the Hebrew Bible are my own, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re curious about my translation choices, I always defer to Bauer-Danker-Ardnt-Gingrich (BDAG), Lust’s Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, and HALOT. When I don’t, it turns out to be a mistake. ↩︎
4. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI, vol. 2 (Anchor Bible 29A; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 1019. ↩︎
5. Brown, 1021. ↩︎
6. David F. Ford, Meeting God in John: Wisdom for the World according to the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 100. ↩︎
7. David F. Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Baker Academic, 2021), 269. ↩︎
8. The Greek word πνεῦμα can be translated as spirit, Spirit, breath, or wind, depending on the context. The underlying Hebrew word (רוּחַ / rûaḥ) has the same semantic range. English forces us to choose among meanings that both Hebrew and Greek can hold together. Here the LXX moves from πνεῦμα (“Spirit/breath”) to the four πνεύματα (“winds”) and then commands the πνεῦμα to ἐμφύσησον (emphysēson), “breathe,” into the dead. ↩︎
9. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz nicely capture the continuity between creation and new creation: “Jesus gives the disciples the life-giving Spirit of both the original and the new creation, affirming the first and giving them a foretaste of the second.” The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022), 129. ↩︎
10. Sandra M. Schneiders translates John 20:23: “Of whomever you forgive the sins, they are forgiven to them; whomever you hold are held fast.” The Greek reads: ἄν τινων ἀφῆτε τὰς ἁμαρτίας, ἀφέωνται αὐτοῖς· ἄν τινων κρατῆτε, κεκράτηνται. Notice that while the first clause explicitly supplies the object τὰς ἁμαρτίας (“the sins”), the second supplies no corresponding object for κρατῆτε (“hold,” “hold fast”). On the significance of this omission and its implications for understanding the Johannine ministry of reconciliation, see Sandra M. Schneiders, Jesus Risen in Our Midst: Essays on the Resurrection of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013), 91–92. ↩︎

“She is received with rejoicing and unspeakable delight in the house of God the Father, herself the house which God built for his Son, who dwelt in her without being circumscribed and was flesh from her by the Holy Spirit”

How amazing, my brothers and sisters in the love of Christ! Today she who gave birth to the life of all people has moved on to be a sharer in that life. The life which was begotten before the ages from the Father, which is God and the Word of God, which she bore in the flesh and nursed from her own breasts, the life that built all things from nothing and generated life in them—this life she has inherited, and has come as its mother to share in it above all the holy ranks of heaven and earth. The life that is the fountainhead of the universe she received from God and made a spring for this world, the light of mortal beings; for it is written, “The life was the light of men and women” (Jn 1:3f.). She has gone to dwell with this light, the true and substantial light, “the shining-forth of the glory of God the Father” (Heb 1:3), which lightens the world, which has become flesh through her by the Holy Spirit, “enlightening every man and woman who comes into the world” (Jn 1:9). And when Christ our God, co-eternal with his Father and the Spirit, chose by decree to take her to himself, to share in his glory—his most-blessed mother, who is, after him, the greatest of all beings—all the angels and archangels rushed through the air to gather in a joyful visit to this world, sent from heaven by God to be the celebrants of her holy falling-asleep…

The radiant cloud that bore the Lord of glory has been lifted up—lifted up to him: she who flashed forth his perfect divinity in her body like lightning, who rained down holy gifts from him on everything under heaven. There the orbit of that spiritual moon above our world, which the prophet spoke of (Hab 3:11), comes to completion: the moon which gave birth to the sun who is one of those three suns that share a single substance—the Trinity, as revealed by the tradition of the Fathers. “And the moon stood still in the tracks” of her virginity (Hab 3:11); she is truly the Mother of God, revealing his radiance that all of this creation might come to know its God. She is received with rejoicing and unspeakable delight in the house of God the Father, herself the house which God built for his Son, who dwelt in her without being circumscribed and was flesh from her by the Holy Spirit; who remained in her nine months and became an infant; yet who was God, inseparable from his Father and the Spirit. She who was made the dwelling-place of the consubstantial Trinity has come to a better dwelling—she who is forever his home, having heard from the archangel Gabriel, “The Holy Spirit will come down upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the one born of you will be called holy, the Son of God” (Lk 1:35). So she is glorified above the holy ranks of heaven; she is transplanted from here, as “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3:18)—the mortal bush that bore the fire of divinity—to the land of the living” (Ps 116:9), where she shall join in radiating the light of the face of Christ our God, who was truly and wholly contained in her womb; preserved unburnt by him, as the one who, above all women, is blessed with the name of Virgin Mother.

Saint Modestus of Jerusalem

Creation is God Playing

by Tom Belt

If I were to try to express my understanding of God’s creative act, I’d use this picture.

What play gives us that ordinary talk of “choice” doesn’t is an activity that can be simultaneously spontaneous and expressive of what one is. The child doesn’t stand before the bubbles calculating, analyzing, or deliberating. Must I blow this bubble rather than that one? Must I play this game? Or none at all?

Play is interesting because it isn’t normally undertaken to address deficiencies or achieve some externally imposed end, or even an internal constraint or disposition to some inevitable exercise. The child isn’t blowing bubbles because she needs bubbles. She’s expressing an abundance of life. Creation conceived as divine play would therefore be neither arbitrary manufacture nor necessitated production. It is the gratuitous expression of plenitude.

Many of us have used the phrase ‘gratuitous expression’ but then we collapse immediately into the familiar ‘necessity/contingency’ modes. Let’ s try not to do that here. The distinction between “I must do this” and “I might just as well not do this” become inadequate. Imagine asking the delighted child: “Was blowing bubbles necessary or contingent?” The question misses the phenomenon. Its spontaneity is precisely what makes it hers.

Now, Hart dislikes spontaneity when it comes to this question. He doesn’t want creation to be arbitrary, which is, I take it, what he thinks any choice between equally good alternatives would have to be. After all, if A and B are equally good (equally ‘fitting’ or ‘proper’) and nothing in the Good inclines toward A rather than B, then choosing A is sheer voluntarism. The will simply chooses (without logically antecedent explanation, and no principle of sufficient reason). Hence the resistance to counterfactual accounts of God’s creating (or of anything God does). Creation is good. But non-creation would have been equally good? God simply choses to create? For some, that “simply chooses” threatens to become arbitrary.

But perhaps we’re assuming too quickly that the only alternatives are: necessitated act or arbitrary act.

But play seems to scramble the alternatives. It is not a choice between competing goods. Nor is it instrumental action ordered toward obtaining some good the agent lacks. It is goodness expressing itself gratuitously. The child blows bubbles neither because bubbles are needed nor because she has conducted a comparative valuation in which “blow bubbles” defeats “don’t blow bubbles.”

Play suggests a third category: spontaneous self-expression.

That might give us a category for saying that God’s determination to create is neither a deliberative selection from a menu of possible worlds nor a kind of involuntary metaphysical emanation. Creation is the free spontaneity of divine plenitude.

I’m suggesting that the question Was God’s determination to create necessary or contingent? may itself impose a modal distinction that simply doesn’t apply to divine agency, and that play may be a means of extricating the divine act of creating from both ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’. In other words, perhaps it’s not that God’s determination to create is either necessary or contingent, nor is it the transcendent combination of the two beyond the veil of human comprehension (Hart), but rather it is neither. The toolbox terms ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’ are getting in the way. God’s determination isn’t one or the other, nor is it both. It is instead neither.

Play is suggestive because when someone plays freely and spontaneously, our asking whether the play was ‘necessary’ or ‘contingent’ seems strangely external to the act. It can entirely miss the nature of play. ‘Necessary’ makes it sound entailed by antecedent nature or what have you, while ‘contingent’ makes it sound as though the agent stood before play / don’t play as equally available alternatives and selected one. But play qua play isn’t well described by either. It arises freely from the player without being necessitated by the player’s nature or elected against an equally good counterfactual alternative. And don’t make the mistake of thinking my account of play is “incomplete” because it “leaves out” the questions of necessity and contingency. Why should that be? Why can’t an adequate explanation be had without either term?

I’d put the thought something like this:

God’s creation is not necessary, because nothing, not even a metaphysical mechanism internal to God’s nature, necessitates it. But neither is it contingent in the sense that God confronts “Create” and “Don’t create” as alternative possibilities to deliberate or resolve upon. Creation is divine play: the spontaneous, gratuitous act of infinite goodness whose freedom consists neither in necessity nor in counterfactual choice, nor in any transcendent recipe comprising their combination. It is a metaphysical surprise and joy, unpredictable given everything God is, and yet perfectly expressive of who he is.

Perhaps the mistake is assuming that “not necessary” entails “contingent.” In ordinary modal logic, of course, that’s precisely how the terms are defined. So my proposal is that the modal apparatus itself (necessary/contingent or could-have/could-have-not) is illegitimately applied to divine determinations. Play is interesting not as an answer within that modal framework, but as an image for why the framework is inadequate.

The little girl isn’t standing metaphysically behind her play, deciding whether to become a player. She plays. And yet “therefore she must play” is every bit as wrong as reducing the event to an arbitrary selection between play and not-play.

Raises your glasses with me. Here’s to the mystery!

Divine Freedom: Could God Have Not Created the Cosmos?

In 1948, Dom Illtyd Trethowan, a monk of Downside Abbey, published this dialogue between himself (Criticus) and a Thomist (Scholasticus) on the question of divine freedom and divine creation. Trethowan was Augustinian in his theology and decidedly unsympathetic to Thomism. Given Robert Fortuin’s recent articles on theodicy in which he argues that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo entails the proposition that God could have done otherwise–that is to say, in his freedom he might have decided not to create the world. I thought this dialogue would be of interest. I have copied the dialogue as it is presented in Trethowan’s book Absolute Value. It differs on minor points from the journal article, to which I provide a link at the bottom of the page.

* * *

Criticus: I have come across a passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain which I should like to read to you:

With every advance in our thought the unity of the creative act and the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though this or that element in it could have been removed will become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the “best of all possible” universes but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only ‘worlds which God could have made but didn’t’. The idea of that which God ‘could have’ done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than himself produces his acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that his own goodness is the root from which they all grow and his own omnipotence the air in which they may all flower.

Tell me, Scholasticus, do you regard this as a defensible position in Catholic Theology?

Scholasticus: I do not. Surely you know that Abelard was condemned for saying that God can do only what in fact he does and that the Vatican Council condemned Guenther for teaching the necessity of creation.

Criticus: I thought you would say that. You will agree that it is often not so much what is said in a condemned proposition as why it is said that is the reason for the condemnation. But before we discuss that, I wish you would explain to me the metaphysical principles on which you base your own position. For I suppose you don’t just take the answer ‘on Faith’. Let me say at once that I don’t find the ‘necessity of creation’ in Lewis, if by this we mean that the created universe contains within it the reason for its own existence. That is plainly a contradiction, for God is that reason.

Scholasticus: I have here Fr Boedder’s manual of Natural Theology which contains a comment on a passage of Victor Cousin’s. Cousin, as you will see, took a line which is substantially the same as Lewis’s. Here is the passage:

The creative act is a necessary act because it results from the nature of a cause which needs must act, and it is free, for it proceeds from the proper, independent, primitive spontaneity of a cause which acts by itself, which determines itself, so that its determination, though necessary, is nevertheless its own, and is not under any influence from without. Fr Boedder’s comment is as follows:

Against these assertions we maintain that God has created only because He freely willed the existence of creatures, being equally free not to will had He pleased’. Cousin’s words, Fr Boedder considers, imply that ‘creation was a necessity required to supply some deficiency in God.

Criticus: I don’t see that. Cousin’s doctrine as given by Fr Boedder seems to me not only intelligible but inevitable. He is saying, surely, that without the act of creation God would not be God, because (as all agree) he is his acts. It is meaningless, then, to envisage the possibility that there could have been no such act.

And it does not even begin to follow that the term of God’s Act, ‘creation’ in the sense of the created universe, adds anything to God. It is a commonplace in this connexion that you cannot add chalk to cheese. Lewis is not suggesting that God and his creatures add up, when he rejects the use of the conditional mood in statements which have God as their subject. Indeed, I find it hard to see how the transcendence, the immutability, of God, is to be safeguarded on any other showing.

Scholasticus: There is of course a difficulty, and I can show you a passage in which Fr Boedder deals with it. He distinguishes the necessity of Pure Act from that free will to create which is yet the same Pure Act looked at from a certain point of view. He says, you see: ‘the internal act of [God’s] will, which is really identical with the essence, can without change involve or not involve that relation to an object which we call choosing and willing’.

Criticus: I don’t find that thinkable. I can think of choosing only as a response in face of a state of affairs upon which the chooser is in a sense dependent. If God is described as choosing, this can mean for me only that he finds himself faced with ‘possibles’ soliciting his will and therefore in a certain respect acting upon him and so making him dependent on them. Besides, I thought it was good Thomism not to allow that there are relations in God to creatures, but only in creatures to God.

Scholasticus: I admit that this language of relations has its drawbacks. But you seem to suppose that, just because we cannot conceive of an act which combines freedom of choice with freedom from external solicitation, we cannot allow that God’s act of creation is of this kind. You are dragging God down to your own level.

Criticus: We are always doing that. All I can say is that it is the attempt to avoid it which causes my dissatisfaction with the usual Scholastic treatment of this question. Try as I may, I cannot reconcile the notion of alternative courses with what I know of God, and I observe further down on this page of Fr Boedder’s book the following sentence: ’The will of God in its relation to creatures is absolutely necessary in its entity (i.e. in its internal actual state) but not in its term (i.e. it does not necessarily bear to creatures that relation which we call volition).’ This is the regular Scholastic formula, isn’t it? Now to say that the will of God is not necessary in its term is perfectly acceptable if it only means that God’s creatures do not enjoy his necessity. Creatures stand in a unique relation of total dependence upon God. This relation in which they stand to him is such that he is other than they, utterly transcendent: yet at the same time they have a mysterious ‘likeness’ to him. This is what we find in our experience; and we cannot justify it except by showing that we do find it. My difficulty is that the Scholastics seem to introduce this lack of self-sufficiency, which is the mark of God’s creatures, into the creative act which is God himself.

Scholasticus: I don’t think you fully grasp the Scholastic position.

It may help if I contrast it with your own. Your own is, I think, that it is the nature of God to create. God’s nature is necessary. Therefore his act of creation, which is identical with his nature, is also necessary. But I say that it is not so simple as that. It is just as much God’s nature to create as not to create. By which I mean that his simple perfection is indifferent to creating or not creating; it includes both. It is his nature to create or not to create at his pleasure.

Criticus: God created because it was his will to do so; and his will is free. But the meaning which you give to ‘free’ seems to set up a contradiction in God. How can we avoid the conclusion that if God had chosen not to create there would have been something ‘unrealized’ in him? You may say that I am obliged to accept your meaning by the condemnations to which you referred. But it is not unreasonable, I think, to suggest that those condemnations bear simply and solely upon an error which inspires the condemned propositions, the error, namely, that creation is necessary in an ‘emanationist’ sense, that God is incomplete without creatures.

The condemnation which controls the Scholastic discussion I take to be that of the Guentherist proposition that God created with the necessity with which he loves himself, which certainly leads to a confusion between God and creatures. For it suggests that there is a relationship between God’s will and his creatures of the same kind as that between God’s will and himself. If we work in these terms, since we must say that there is a relation of identity between God’s will and himself, we must say that there is this same relation between himself and his creatures. Naturally Rosmini was also condemned for saying that there is a ‘moral necessity’ for God to create ‘because he loves himself in creatures’. And Abelard was condemned for saying that God ‘can do things only as he does them in fact’ because in the light of his other statements this seems to be setting bounds to God’s omnipotence. But all I am saying is that God would not be God without his act of creation.

Scholasticus: But are you not involved in these errors? For you find it inconceivable that God should exist without creatures.

Criticus: It is his nature to be generous, to give, to produce what is not himself, not because he requires us.

Scholasticus: If he does not require us, why can he not do without us?

Criticus: In an obvious sense he does without us: that is, God is simply God and we ‘make no difference’ to him.

Scholasticus: Very well, then, if God had not created us it would have made no difference to him. Why should you hesitate to admit the hypothesis?

Criticus: To say that the act of creation makes no difference to him in that sense would be to say that there is something unnecessary in him, as I have said before. You seem to think that by asserting this power of God’s to abstain from creating, you are maintaining one of his prerogatives. I am prepared to ‘take refuge in a mystery’ if I am bidden to do so by the Church. But I cannot pretend to attach any meaning to what you are talking about. The act of creation ‘makes no difference’ to God, so far as I can see, only in the sense that it is identical with his nature.

Scholasticus: But consider what consequences follow from your position. Are you not in effect denying all meaning to ‘possibility’? If there are no alternatives for the First Cause, are there any alternatives for anyone?

Criticus: ’To say that this is just the world is not to say that possibility is meaningless. It means that God has only one plan of creation. But it is a plan which involves human freedom—because it involves human blessedness; so we can refuse to accept God’s actuations. But this ‘can’ is not itself a possibility for actuation by God. It is something sui generis to which we can refer only in negative terms.

Scholasticus: Do you really mean to say that this world could not be improved upon?

Criticus: St Thomas, as you know, says that God governs his chosen world with supreme wisdom and benevolence. But you refer, no doubt, to his doctrine that God could have chosen another and a better one. Does that doctrine satisfy you?

Scholasticus: It seems to me imposed upon us. Anything created could always be better than it is. There is no assignable limit to the power which God could confer upon a creature. And this applies to the created universe as a whole. It has always been the answer of the Thomist school to philosophical optimism that the ‘best of all possible worlds’ is a meaningless expression.

Criticus: I am suggesting that there are no ‘possible’ worlds. I should find it hard to believe that God could have a better purpose for his creation than the communication of himself in knowledge and love to his creatures, even if I could entertain the notion of God’s having any plan different from that which in fact he has.

Scholasticus: Our knowledge and love of him are created qualities. They must always be capable of increase.

Criticus: Yours and mine considered in isolation—but in view of the knowledge and love of him enjoyed by Christ in his sacred humanity, in which we participate?

Scholasticus: It is all the same.

Criticus: I wonder. Are you not perhaps the victim here of your imagination? A maximum quantity is unthinkable in itself, but an optimum quality not necessarily, I suggest. Could there be anything created of higher value than Christ’s human soul? And is not our world ‘ordered’ to Christ? Could God’s purpose have been achieved with a more perfect adaptation of means to end?

Scholasticus: What, then, do we mean by speaking of God’s generosity in redeeming us if there was no question of his not redeeming us, or of not redeeming us in the manner in which he has done?

Criticus: We mean, I suppose, that God’s unchanging and supreme generosity is here most clearly indicated to us.

Scholasticus: ’That is true. But there is more behind it—a mystery of God’s freedom which you are trying to evacuate. You seem to think that you can explain God’s proceedings. You are claiming to see things from his side. You seem to think that God must have a reason, a reason perceptible to yourself, for what he does. But he is the reason for his act of creation and for the terms of this act.

Criticus: The real question seems to be this: what do we know about God? Do we or do we not know what we mean when we call him supreme wisdom and superlative generosity? Do we know him as creating out of that superlative generosity? And, if so, when we are asked to believe that he could create a better world and has not done so, how can we help saying ‘why not’?

Scholasticus: God in creating has no end in view save his own glory. He cannot subordinate himself to our advantage.

Criticus: Gloria Dei vivens homo! You cannot be suggesting that God gains anything by his creation. And, since we do, isn’t it God’s purpose in creating that we should?

Scholasticus: St Thomas says that God does not will anything for any reason (except himself), although he wills one thing to be on account of some other thing, as means to end. Vult ergo hoc esse propter hoc: sed non propter hoc vult hoc.

Criticus: That is obvious enough if it means that God cannot be moved to will by anything outside himself. But if it is taken to mean that God has no concern with what he creates we are back at Aristotle’s First Mover. Again I ask: are we, as theologians, really so ignorant of God’s nature as your position would suggest? Is he so dark to us that we may as well give up trying to attach any meaning to liberty or necessity as applied to him and take refuge in the indifferentia dominatrix of the Thomist commentators? Or do we in fact find in the Christian God the reconciliation of liberty and necessity? God is love—and Lover of us.

Scholasticus: I can think of one recent Thomist who uses, up to a point, the sort of language which you wish to use, and he—oddly, in view of what you have just been saying—was considered excessively ‘agnostic’ by some of his fellow-Thomists. Sertillanges says that it is only a way of saying that the creature could not be or be otherwise when we say that God could have not produced it or produced it otherwise—that the world has no necessity of itself.

Criticus: Of course I agree that the world has no necessity of itself, and if that is all that I am called upon to say in this matter of God’s freedom, then there is no difficulty. It does not surprise me that Sertillanges was considered ‘agnostic’. It was his realization of who God is that made him reject so much which ordinarily passes for appropriate language about him.

Source

Hart’s Universalism and the Demands of Contingency

Fr Kimel recently released When God becomes Jack Bauer, a characteristically generous and detailed defense of David Bentley Hart’s universalism against Mats Wahlberg’s greater-good theodicy of hell. The argument is compelling. If God creates ex nihilo under no external constraint, then the eschatological outcome is revelatory of who God freely is, and any eternal remainder of unredeemed evil reduces divine goodness to a merely relative good. Such a God, Hart argues, has “made a bargain” with evil rather than conquered it. I find myself in deep sympathy with nearly everything Fr. Kimel has written, and I share his conviction that the infernalist tradition cannot withstand Hart’s argument against it.

What I address here is not the theodicy question as such (not the question whether evil can be justified, which Hart and Fr. Kimel have answered, rightly, in the negative) but something internal to Hart’s universalism itself: whether the metaphysical commitments Hart brings to the question of creation can actually sustain the strongest claim his universalism requires. This is a question about what universalism needs in order to be fully coherent, not a reopening of the debate Hart has already closed. Specifically, I want to draw attention to a fault line that Fr. Kimel’s essay, by its very success in presenting Hart’s argument, leaves hidden. A fault line not between Kimel and Hart, but within Hart himself. It is a fault line that matters considerably for how we understand what “answers to nothing” can finally mean.

Consider the two passages from Hart that Kimel quotes with approval. In The Doors of the Sea, Hart writes that “the entire history of sin and death is in an ultimate sense a pure contingency, one that is not as such desired by God,” and that suffering and evil have “no ultimate value or spiritual meaning at all… cosmic contingencies, ontological shadows, intrinsically devoid of substance or purpose.” These are among the most important sentences Hart has written on the subject of evil. They do not merely say that evil is ontologically privative (i.e. a lack of being rather than a positive force) though they say that too. They say something stronger and more theodically decisive: that evil is a pure contingency, that the history of suffering answers to nothing, serves no purpose, contributes nothing to any design. The word “pure” is doing real work here. It is unqualified. It doesn’t state the history of suffering is contingency within a necessary order, or privation alongside a gratuitous gift. It says pure contingency, period.

Now set beside this Hart’s mature metaphysical position, which Kimel also draws upon. In Light of Tabor (Hart’s most recent and in many ways most systematic volume) Hart writes that “the language of creation from nothingness is simply the most radical and rigorous formulation of the metaphysics of emanation imaginable,” that creation is “the total donation, out of the infinite plenitude of divine Being, of both essence and existence to creatures that are absolutely contingent on that infinite gift.” Creation, on this account, is the self-diffusion of the Good, the outpouring of infinite actuality into participated being, bonum diffusivum sui. The sun must shine. Finite being radiates necessarily from infinite Being because the infinite plenitude of divine goodness is, by its very nature, self-communicative, not because God is compelled by anything exterior to himself.

The question I want to raise is this: can these two positions be held together without remainder?

If creation is the necessary emanation of divine plenitude into participated being, then evil (however privative, however lacking in a nature and purpose of its own) is the “shadow side” of a necessary order. Necessary, not willed. Not desired. Not intrinsically purposeful. But structurally ineliminable from the kind of finite, participated, defectible existence that necessarily radiates from infinite actuality. The privation is real; the evil has no being of its own. But it is still the defect of an order that had to be this kind of order, given what it is: participated being, finite, capable of falling short of its source. On this account, evil is the shadow of necessary light. It answers to nothing in the sense that it has no substance or purpose of its own. But it cannot be a pure contingency, because the order whose defect it is was not itself contingent. Something cannot be the privation of a necessary order and also be purely contingent. The two claims, taken together, are incoherent.

There is a further complication on display in The Doors of the Sea itself. Hart there runs a free-will theodicy alongside his evil as privation account: God permits the history of sin and death because “the union of free spiritual creatures with the God of love is a thing so wonderful that the power of creation to enslave itself to death must be permitted by God.” Notice the force of “must.” This is not merely descriptive. It is a justification: a reason why the wager was worth laying. The horror was the acceptable cost of something God judged surpassingly good. And here, precisely, the child’s suffering is made to answer to something: the incomprehensible worth of free creaturely union with God. It is a greater-good argument which is carefully limited, temporally bounded, and ultimately overcome in the eschatological universalist consummation. Note that it is structurally the same move that Kimel, following Hart, so powerfully targets in the infernalist tradition — only deployed one level up, within the universalist framework itself. The permission has already done its theodicy work before the eschaton arrives to dissolve it.

Fr. Kimel’s essay does not notice this because it reads Hart as a unified position, and because the target is the infernalist greater-good argument rather than the universalist one. But the fault line runs through Hart’s position as such, present from the beginning, and unresolved across his work.

To be sure, I am not saying Hart is wrong to affirm universalism. He is right, and the argument Kimel presents on his behalf against Wahlberg is, I believe, essentially sound. Nor am I saying that Hart’s evil as privation is mistaken, it is largely correct as far as it goes. What I am saying is that “pure contingency” (the claim that the child’s suffering answers to nothing, serves no order, purchases no good) requires something Hart’s emanation logic does not provide. That the world itself, with the child’s suffering in it, need not have been at all. Not merely that God had no need of it (deflationary gratuity, a claim about God’s act). Not merely that evil has no substance (privation, a claim about evil’s ontological status). But that the whole order, including the space for privation within it, was genuinely received existence, contingent gift, the kind of thing that need not have been given.

This is the distinction I have been pressing in my own theodicy essays. The difference between what I call gratuity, which tells you something about the giver (i.e. that God had no need, that creation adds nothing to the divine fullness) and contingency, which tells you something about the given — that participated existence, as such, is received being, the kind of thing that need not have been. These are different claims, and their difference is precisely what the theodicy question turns on. Gratuity tells you that God overflows into creation from sheer plenitude, requiring nothing from the creature, the act adding nothing to God’s being. Contingency tells you that the creature’s very existence is the kind of thing that need not have been — that received being, as such, carries in its constitution the mark of genuine gift. Hart has the first in abundance. What his emanation logic resists giving him (and what ‘pure contingency’ requires) is the second. And the two are not the same, even when both are described as requiring nothing from God, even when both leave God’s life entirely unchanged by creation’s existence.

There is a passage in The Beauty of the Infinite which makes the tension evident with particular clarity, because Hart runs both moves in a single paragraph and treats them as compatible. He writes that “there might just as well have been no creation (for creation adds nothing to God, but only participates in him).” This is precisely the contingency claim, and stated with force. But the passage does not end there. It continues: “but assert nevertheless that creation is ‘necessary’ in another, aesthetic sense: it has been from eternity fitting to God’s goodness to be a loving creator, manifesting his trinitarian love in creatures.” Here are three moves: creation adds nothing to God (gratuity of act); there might just as well have been no creation (apparent contingency of object); but it has been from eternity fitting that God be a loving creator (aesthetic necessity re-asserting itself). The third move does not merely qualify the second: it retracts it. What is eternally fitting to God’s goodness is not something that might just as well not have been. “From eternity fitting” is a modal claim, and it is a necessitarian one, however softened by the word “aesthetic.” Hart gives the contingency with one hand and withdraws it with the other, in the same breath, apparently without noticing the tension. This is the fault line — running through a single paragraph of his earliest systematic work, and unresolved in his most recent.

One could say, I suppose, that Hart’s deflationary gratuity already covers this ground, that “there might just as well have been no creation” is all the contingency his position requires. I do not think it is. An overflow that proceeds necessarily from infinite plenitude (even an overflow that adds nothing to the source, even one described as fitting rather than logically compelled) is not the same as a gift that need not have been given. The sun adds nothing to its own light by shining. But the sun, in Hart’s own analogy, must shine. A gift that must be given — or that it has been from eternity fitting to give — is no longer, in the fullest sense, a gift. And an order whose existence is eternally fitting to divine goodness cannot generate pure contingencies.

None of this diminishes what Kimel has accomplished in his essay. The Jack Bauer analogy is, I think, more explosive than even he has recognized — because the God who permits the child’s suffering for the sake of freedom’s surpassing worth stands in the same structural position as the God who permits eternal damnation for the greater good of… something. Both Gods have made a bargain. Yes, the bargain’s terms differ enormously, but the structure is identical. The full force of Kimel’s argument, pushed to its limit, requires not just universalism but the claim that the history of suffering answers to nothing: no wager, no bargain, no worth-it. That is the claim. It is Hart’s own claim in The Doors of the Sea. It is also the claim Hart’s later emanation metaphysics struggles to sustain.

I raise this not to diminish Hart, whose work on these questions remains indispensable, but because the fault line matters and because Fr. Kimel’s essay has brought it newly to the fore. If evil is to answer to nothing (purely, without remainder, without having served any order or purchased any good) then the world’s existence must be contingent in the strong sense: genuinely received, genuinely a gift that need not have been given. That is the only ground on which Ivan Karamazov’s protest can be fully honored rather than merely absorbed. This is not a tension that emerged as Hart’s thinking developed. It is structural, present already in The Beauty of the Infinite, his earliest systematic work, and unresolved in his most recent. The ‘pure contingency’ that his universalism most needs is precisely what his emanation logic — consistent throughout — cannot supply. That is the tension Kimel’s essay has concealed. It is also the reason that universalism, if it is to carry the full weight Hart and Kimel rightly place upon it, requires a stronger doctrine of creation’s contingency than Hart’s metaphysics will bear.

The Salvation of Lilith

I scrambled to find the right words. How to explain to my old friend Frederica Mathewes-Green the theme of George MacDonald’s great fantasy novel Lilith? But the words would not come. Well, perhaps that’s not quite true. Words came, but they hardly made sense and certainly did not convey the profundity and depth of the story. I read Lilith for the first time in the spring of 2015. It did not take me long to realize that this was a story unlike anything I had read before, so I made the decision to just read it through, without pausing to wonder what was going on or what symbolized what. Just enjoy the story. After this initial reading, I knew I was going to have to reread it, but this time more slowly and attentively. A few months later I began my meditative perusal, one or two chapters a day. I think this was a good approach for me. Yet even still, I could not find the words to describe the story to Frederica. I finally just advised her to read a couple of MacDonald’s fairy tales (“The Golden Key,” “The Wise Woman,” and “Photogen and Nycteris” are three of my favorites) and then, if still interested, to tackle Lilith. But be prepared, I warned, for a very different kind of literary experience: in the story of Mr Vane and Lilith, theology becomes mythopoeia; eschatology, a fairy tale.

Lilith is a story of redemption—the redemption of the protagonist Vane but also the redemption of the evil princess Lilith. In some ways she reminds me of the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, desiring power and dominion above all else. Yet there are also differences. Lilith possesses a seductive, erotic attraction that Jadis does not have. She is a succubus who feeds on her victims to maintain her beauty and power. Revisioning Kabbalistic tradition, MacDonald portrays Lilith as an angelic being, given by God to Adam as his first wife. “Her first thought,” Adam tells Vane, “was POWER; she counted it slavery to be one with me, and bear children for Him who gave her being.” After giving birth to a daughter, she fled Adam and eventually ensnared the heart of the great Shadow, thus becoming the queen of Hell. Since that time she has sought to destroy her daughter, who, it is prophesied, will be her doom. “Vilest of God’s creatures, she lives by the blood and lives and souls of men. She consumes and slays, but is powerless to destroy as to create.”

Adam offers her the forgiveness of God: “Repent, I beseech thee; repent, and be again an angel of God!” “I will not repent,” she retorts. “I will drink the blood of thy child.” Her rejection of the Good is firm, obdurate, adamantine. She will not surrender. Can there be redemption for such a creature?

Lilith has a narrative counterpart—Mara, Lady of Sorrow and daughter of Adam and Eve. At one point she is referred to as the Magdalene, yet a strict identification seems inappropriate. Given her love of children and authority over evil, Orthodox and Catholic readers will immediately associate Mara with the Blessed Virgin Mary; but Eve is described in the book as the Mother, so again a strict identification seems inappropriate. Perhaps the best we can say is that in Eve and Mara, MacDonald has incorporated elements of the Theotokos.

Lilith is taken captive by Vane and brought to Mara for final deliverance. “I must do what I can,” Mara declares, “to make her repent.” Her words suggest a kind of coercion, perhaps even physical violence; yet if what Lilith endures is properly described as violence, it is violence of a special kind, a violence she brings upon herself as she seeks to deny her true self. Mara’s role is simply to restrain her while she suffers the revelation of God. Lilith must learn the one necessary truth—she did not create herself and cannot will her nonexistence. As long as she believes that she is an autonomous, self-sufficient being, she remains a slave to the Shadow. The conversation between Lilith and Mara is illuminating:

“Will you turn away from the wicked things you have been doing so long?” said Mara gently.

The princess did not answer. Mara put the question again, in the same soft, inviting tone.

Still there was no sign of hearing. She spoke the words a third time.

Then the seeming corpse opened its mouth and answered, its words appearing to frame themselves of something else than sound.—I cannot shape the thing further: sounds they were not, yet they were words to me.

“I will not,” she said. “I will be myself and not another!”

“Alas, you are another now, not yourself! Will you not be your real self?”

“I will be what I mean myself now.”

“If you were restored, would you not make what amends you could for the misery you have caused?”

“I would do after my nature.”

“You do not know it: your nature is good, and you do evil!”

“I will do as my Self pleases—as my Self desires.”

“You will do as the Shadow, overshadowing your Self inclines you?”

“I will do what I will to do.”

“You have killed your daughter, Lilith!”

“I have killed thousands. She is my own!”

“She was never yours as you are another’s.”

“I am not another’s; I am my own, and my daughter is mine.”

“Then, alas, your hour is come!”

“I care not. I am what I am; no one can take from me myself!”

“You are not the Self you imagine.”

“So long as I feel myself what it pleases me to think myself, I care not. I am content to be to myself what I would be. What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!”

“But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have made yourself. You will not be able much longer to look to yourself anything but what he sees you! You will not much longer have satisfaction in the thought of yourself. At this moment you are aware of the coming change!”

We might well describe Lilith as the ultimate libertarian: she is free, so she thinks, as long as she is free to make herself, to assert her independence from absolute reality, to be absolute reality. “What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!”

Traditional theology has long believed that God stands impotent before the resolute assertion of the creaturely self. What more can he do than summon to repentance? The Lord knocks at the door, but if the creature refuses to open it, Omnipotence is defeated. For such a being there can only be hell. But MacDonald sees more deeply and hopes more truly.

Lilith speaks again:

“No one ever made me. I defy that Power to unmake me from a free woman! You are his slave, and I defy you! You may be able to torture me—I do not know, but you shall not compel me to anything against my will!”

“Such a compulsion would be without value. But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another’s—not the Shadow’s. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it!”

“That light shall not enter me: I hate it!—Begone, slave!”

“I am no slave, for I love that light, and will with the deeper will which created mine. There is no slave but the creature that wills against its creator. Who is a slave but her who cries, ‘I am free,’ yet cannot cease to exist!”

God is not restricted to being a being external to the creature. His uncreated Fire knows no such boundaries. The Creator wills the salvation of every rational being. As Adam later tells Vane: “Every creature must one night yield himself and lie down: he was made for liberty, and must not be left a slave!” Precisely as the transcendent source of being, God is able to work in the immanent depths of persons for their healing and liberation.

The redemption of Lilith takes place in four stages:

(1) The fire of God enters her. It takes the form of a worm that creeps out of the hearth—“white-hot, vivid as incandescent silver, the live heart of essential fire.” Penetrating into her heart and soul, it reveals to Lilith the self she was created to be and the evil she has become. Vane desires to rescue her from her torment but Mara stops him:

“You cannot go near her,” she said. “She is far away from us, afar in the hell of her self-consciousness. The central fire of the universe is radiating into her the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of what she is. She sees at last the good she is not, the evil she is. She knows that she is herself the fire in which she is burning, but she does not know that the Light of Life is the heart of that fire. Her torment is that she is what she is. Do not fear for her; she is not forsaken. No gentler way to help her was left. Wait and watch.”

Lilith throws herself on the floor, weeping, yet still defiantly resolute in her self-assertion. She now knows that she did not create herself, but blames God for what she has become. She cries out for annihilation. “I will not be made any longer!” she inveighs. “Unmake yourself, then,” says Mara. “Alas, I cannot! You know it, and mock me! How often have I not agonised to cease, but the tyrant keeps me being! I curse him!–Now let him kill me!” Lilith has been forced to acknowledge a fundamental truth of her existence: she is not her own Creator—and this fact has become her torment. Orthodox readers will no doubt be reminded of the famous words of St Isaac the Syrian: “I also maintain that those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love.” Yet Lilith remains firm in her rebellion and hatred of God. The struggle for her salvation must continue.

(2) After further struggle Lilith begins to cry. These are not tears of repentance, Mara explains to Vane, but rather tears of self-loathing. They are helpful only if they lead the sinner to the merciful embrace of the Creator: “Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father’s arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates. Once with his father, he is to himself of no more account. It will be so with her.” Still Lilith refuses to repent. She will not admit her wickedness.

(3) And now Lilith endures the final consequence of her rebellion. God gives her that which she believes she desires—escape from self, world, God … the outer darkness.

Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew we did not feel what she felt, but we knew we felt something of the misery it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us; its reflex, her misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she was in the outer darkness, we present with her who was in it! We were not in the outer darkness; had we been, we could not have been WITH her; we should have been timelessly, spacelessly, absolutely apart. The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it.

Something was gone from her, which then first, by its absence, she knew to have been with her every moment of her wicked years. The source of life had withdrawn itself; all that was left her of conscious being was the dregs of her dead and corrupted life.

She stood rigid. Mara buried her head in her hands. I gazed on the face of one who knew existence but not love—knew nor life, nor joy, nor good; with my eyes I saw the face of a live death! She knew life only to know that it was dead, and that, in her, death lived. It was not merely that life had ceased in her, but that she was consciously a dead thing. She had killed her life, and was dead—and knew it. She must DEATH IT for ever and ever! She had tried her hardest to unmake herself, and could not! she was a dead life! she could not cease! she must BE! In her face I saw and read beyond its misery–saw in its dismay that the dismay behind it was more than it could manifest. It sent out a livid gloom; the light that was in her was darkness, and after its kind it shone. She was what God could not have created. She had usurped beyond her share in self-creation, and her part had undone His! She saw now what she had made, and behold, it was not good! She was as a conscious corpse, whose coffin would never come to pieces, never set her free! Her bodily eyes stood wide open, as if gazing into the heart of horror essential—her own indestructible evil. Her right hand also was now clenched—upon existent Nothing—her inheritance!

But with God all things are possible: He can save even the rich!

At that moment, Lilith yields. “I cannot hold out. I am defeated.” All of her illusions have been shattered. She is no longer capable of denying the truth.

(Read MacDonald’s reflections on repentance and the outer darkness in his unspoken sermon “The Last Farthing.”)

(4) Yet there remains one final thing that must be done. Lilith’s left hand is clenched upon something that does not belong to her. We are not told what this thing is, though we do learn that it becomes the source for the renewal of the world. Perhaps it is not an object at all. Yet try as hard as she might, Lilith finds herself powerless to open her hand. All she can do is acknowledge her impotence: “I have no power over myself; I am a slave! … Let me die.”

Mara now speaks to her the words of assurance that Lilith could not hear until this point: “A slave thou art that shall one day be a child! Verily, thou shalt die, but not as thou thinkest. Thou shalt die out of death into life. Now is the Life for, that never was against thee!” Mara embraces Lilith and kisses her on the forehead. Misery departs from Lilith’s eyes, and she weeps tears of gratitude. Yet her hand remains clenched. She must be taken to the House of Death and given over to the care of Adam.

Lilith lies down on the bed of rebirth, yet she is unable to sleep. “Lilith, you will not sleep, if you lie there a thousand years, until you have opened your hand, and yielded that which is not yours to give or to withhold,” Mara tells her. Lilith assures her that she is trying with all of her strength, but to no avail. She begs Adam to cut off her hand with the sword entrusted to him by an angel. “I heard him who bore it say it would divide whatever was not one and indivisible!” Adam consents. He severs the clenched hand from her arm. Lilith gives a single moan and falls fast asleep.

Thus begins Lilith’s interior healing and transformation. She must dream … and forget … and having forgotten remember, as she awaits her awakening “in the morning of the universe.”

(23 January 2017)

Reblog: Gospel, Grammar, and the Infallibility of Dogma

I have revised and published on Substack my series of articles on dogma and infallibility that I wrote a few years ago for Eclectic Orthodoxy. Perhaps readers might want to revisit them. Click here to go to the first article.