Untangler of the Web of the Athenians: Mary and Universalism

by Matthew Milliner, Ph.D.

Hail, untangler of the web of the Athenians.
~Akathistos hymn~

As theological debates over the necessity of universal salvation continue, it might be worth remarking on one place where most Christian interlocutors on the subject might agree. Not the specifics of individual human destiny, but something prior to that: the atmosphere of hope generated by the revelation of God’s ineluctable decision for humanity in the first place.

On this point, most of human history has been in the dark. For the Greeks before Judaism and Christianity, “a divine will, sovereign and absolute, which governs all and is the cause of all being— such a concept is unknown.”ⁱ Instead, a chief metaphor for the destiny of individuals was the moirai, the fates, who expressed an overarching determinism through the metaphor of weaving. The motif appears to be distantly connected to the Ancient Near Eastern goddess of sex and war named Ishtar. “The noun minû, menu, ‘fate,’ occurs in the title of the Babylonian mother goddess Ishtar . . . she who decrees yes or no to the petitions of mankind.”ⁱⁱ We can imagine an ancient person, perhaps reeling from a recent personal or social catastrophe, wistfully observing a woman weaving at a loom, and concluding that protesting one’s own fate would be as pointless as a thread of a future carpet speaking up for itself. There is nothing facile about this ancient pagan understanding, one that was shared across many pre-Christian cultures. Perhaps it was the best our unaided species could do. “Fate is not a philosophically crude concept,” explains Karen Bek-Pedersen. “[Y]our fate is not that you cannot choose — your fate is that you choose exactly the way you do. . . . [therefore] the only choice may lie between the passive and active attitude towards fate — but that is still a choice.”ⁱⁱⁱ Even the gods were powerless to alter the dictates of fate. In the Illiad when Zeus aims to save his human son Sarpedon from death, Hera replies, “Dread majesty, son of Cronus—what are you saying? A man, a mere mortal, his doom sealed long ago? . . . leave Sarpedon there to die in the brutal onslaught.”^iv Regarding the dictates of destiny, Zeus cannot interfere.

For contrast, observe a standard Orthodox icon of the Annunciation. According to the tradition of the Protoevangelion, God’s intervention in the collective fate of human destiny, determined before time began and long foretold by the prophets, took place while Mary was weaving the temple veil. As Mary stitched the boundary between God and humanity, the dissolution of that boundary was woven in her womb. Proclus, a fourth-century Byzantine preacher put it this way: “In order to mend the primal robe, Wisdom herself took to the loom that was set up in the virginal workshop, weaving for herself a garment with a shuttle propelled by divine power.”^v So it was that Zeus and Hera’s reticence was supplanted by loving intent. The loose threads of individual destiny were woven into the luscious fabric of redemption. Ishtar and the moirai, not to mention Tyche the pagan goddess of fortune, were usurped by Mary’s assent in the incarnation, which shows, in the words of Gregory Nazianzus, that there was “nothing of irrationality or fortune or chance” in God.^vi

Still, the moirai got their revenge. The notion of fate found a backdoor into Christianity through the concept of double predestination, the idea prior to God’s love manifested in Christ was a primordial decision to apply this love to some and not others.^vii In its most extreme form, this “double decree” threw countless souls back into the vexing hands of fate. Surveying the contentious history of the divisive doctrine of predestination and the unsatisfying series of proposed solutions,^viii it is not difficult to see a resurfacing of pagan understandings. Discrete, fraying threads of human fate, so it appeared, were unraveled from the plan of Wisdom’s loom.

Theologians traditionally tell the story of the modern overcoming of this understanding by relating how Sergius Bulgakov (on the Orthodox side) or Karl Barth (on the Protestant one) recovered the more holistic understanding of Athanasius who proclaimed that all were predestined in Christ (whether all received the offer or not). But there is a visual way of telling this story as well. I’m afraid I must appeal to my own book, Mother of the Lamb, to make the case most completely, but the earlier wisdom always survived in painted form. If women such as Susanna Wesley most frequently resisted the logic of double predestination,^ix Mary’s knowing look in icons of the Annunciation had long been doing the same. Harriet Beecher Stowe complained that American discussions of predestination showed that “[W]oman’s nature has never been consulted in theology.”^x Whether or not that is an entirely accurate observation, iconography certainly did not make the same mistake. God’s plan to rescue of all of humanity is named Wisdom in the Bible, and Wisdom is represented by icons of the Virgin Mary, who represents us all. “There was never a time,” insisted Origen, “when in Wisdom there was not the prefiguration of the creatures that would come to existence.”^xi

That the offer is made to everyone is one thing, that all will accept it (universalism) is another. “Not all hear this word. Not all are obedient to him,” inveighed Karl Barth. “But it comes to all, it is relevant to all, it is said for all and to all, it is said clearly and acceptably enough for all.”^xii I fear that to completely abandon the possibility of human choice would be to slip back into the pagan understanding with which I began, where choice holds no power at all. Still, that grace can overwhelm human choice also seems evident enough. If I am not completely convinced by recent cases made for universalism, I’m even less convinced by overly confident refutations. To say such a position does not take sin seriously fails to reckon with universalists like Bulgakov, who insists “the idea that one can avoid with impunity the consequences of sin is insane, craven, and false.”^xiii

Still, when I read the classic figures appealed to defend universalism—Origen and Gregory of Nyssa—I find expressly non-universalist moments as well.^xiv When I hear the Scriptures routinely read aloud in my Anglican church, a full-scale embrace of universalism frequently (but not always) seems discordant. Above all, I can’t help but shake the fact that (as Huston Smith once argued), if it is the case that universalism is true, we shouldn’t be so loud about it.^xv

All of this tethers me to the unoriginal position of seeing universal salvation as “hope not doctrine,” even if recent work on the subject has considerably fortified that hope. But debate about universalism should not occlude what (for Christians at least) can be universally endorsed. The ancients were bound by the moirai: Clotho who spun, Lachesis who allotted, and Atropos “the unturnable” who delivered death. But the Gospel that followed from Mary’s yes insists that it is God who spins, God who allots, God who enables our turning and rescues us from death. This is the opposite of fate, and the world did not always know it. I hope legitimate arguments about how many will receive this message don’t distract us from what is not a matter of debate: the infinite kindness and present comfort of the message itself.

Footnotes

i Yehezkel Kaufman, Moseh Greenberg, translator, The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 21-22.

ii S. Langdon, “The Semitic Goddess of Fate, Fortuna-Tyche,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland , Jan., 1930, No. 1 (Jan., 1930), 26, 28.

iii Karen Bek-Pedersen, “Fate and Weaving: Justification of a Metaphor,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2009, Vol. 5 (2009), 25-27.

iv Homer, Illiad, Book 16, II (Fagle’s translation), cited in Edward T. Oakes, A Theology of Grace in Six Controversies (Grand Rapids, MI: Eermans, 2016), 140.

v PG 65.713A. Cited in Nicholas P. Constas, “Weaving the Body of God: Proclus of Constantinople, the Theotokos, and the Loom of the Flesh,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 3, Number 2 (Summer 1995), 183.

vi Jaroslav Pelikan, “From Tyche to Telos,” in Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 160.

vii See the excellent survey by Matthew Levering, Predestination: Biblical and Theological Paths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

viii That vast impact of this doctrine, especially in its influence on North America, is expertly surveyed by Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

ix Theusen, Predestination, 111. Other women protesters of the doctrine include Ellen White, (123), Jarena Lee (118), etc.

x Theusen, Predestination, 133.

xi Origen, On First Principles 1.4.40, cited in Ramelli, Evagrius’s Kephalaia Gnostika: A New Translation of the Unreformed Text from the Syriac (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015), xlii.

xii Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,1956), 317.

xiii Sergius Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 484. Compare the remarks of Evagrius of Pontus, a classic universalist, who advises we “think of what awaits sinners: the shame before God and Christ himself… and all the places of punishment: the fire in the next world, the worm that does not die.” Ramelli, trans., Kephalia Gnostika lxii. As Ramelli points out, even if Evagrius doesn’t consider the worms or fire eternal, he still advises our meditation upon them.

xiv See Ignatius Green’s introduction to St. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Discourse (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019), 46. “[A] great number of scholars… affirm without reservation that Gregory is a universalist, while a Nyssen scholar of such repute as Daniélou states to the contrary, ‘One cannot say that he maintains the thesis of universal salvation'” (Daniélou, “Apocatastase,” in L’être e le temps, 224). Likewise Green cites Norris: “In scattered places Origen says quite clearly that he thinks all created intelligence will be restored to God at the end of Time. In other places he says, equally clearly that only souls who make the choice for God and practice the virtues God demands will come to rest in heaven.” Frederik W. Norris, “Apokatastasis,” in The Westminster Handbook to Origen, ed. John Anthony McGuckin (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 59-62.

xv Smith met Father Lazarus, an Orthodox missionary, while researching Hindu holy men in India. “[Universal salvation] is the fact of the matter, Father Lazarus believed, but it must not be told because the uncomprehending would take it as a license for irresponsibility. If they are going to be saved eventually, why bother?” Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 269.

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Dr Matthew Milliner is Professor of Art History at Wheaton College and is author of The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations and Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon.