John Donne (1572-1631) was what we would today call a second-career priest. He came to the priesthood following a very turbulent early life in which he wrote racy love-poems, studied at Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court, served in Parliament, and sought the sponsorship of various powerful men as a wannabee courtier. It did not help matters that he was a Roman Catholic or that he secretly married the niece of an erstwhile mentor. Eventually he made his peace with the Church of England and took Holy Orders, seemingly in part because he needed a steady job.

These negatives notwithstanding, Donne became one of the great English poets; it is largely by way of his poems that he is recognized today as a great Anglican theologian as well. Since he died on March 31, his feast often gets bumped from the liturgical calendar as it falls so close to Easter. This year he just manages to scrape by, and I'd like to share two of his works with you. Meditation XVII is poignant in light of the ongoing meltdown of the Anglican Communion; Holy Sonnet X is totally appropriate in this Easter season.

Meditation XVII

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tools for thee.

Holy Sonnet X

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, Kings and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
and better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

St John Chrysostom (347-407) was successively Patriarch of Antioch and Constantinople. A man of exceptional erudition and eloquence--his surname mean "golden-tongued"--he is credited with writing (more likely compiling) the eucharistic liturgy bearing his name, the one most frequently used in the Eastern churches. His paschal sermon is read aloud in all Orthodox churches on Easter Sunday.

Is there anyone who is a devout lover of God? Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival! Is there anyone who is a grateful servant? Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting? Let them now receive their wages! If any have toiled from the first hour, let them receive their due reward; if any have come after the third hour, let them with gratitude join in the Feast! And they that arrived after the sixth hour, let them not doubt; for they too shall sustain no loss. And if any delayed until the ninth hour, let them not hesitate; but let them come too. And they who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let them not be afraid by reason of their delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to them that come at the eleventh hour, as well as to them that toiled from the first. To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows. He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor. The deed He honors and the intention He commends.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord! First and last alike receive your reward; rich and poor, rejoice together! Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!

You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden! Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith. Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let none grieve at their poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let none mourn that they have fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hades when he descended into it. He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh. Isaiah foretold this when he said, "You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering him below."

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed. It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated. It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive. Hell took a body and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

O death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, O death, are annihilated! Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down. Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is Risen, and life is liberated! Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead; for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!

Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) was possibly the most preeminent Russian Orthodox theologian of the 20th century. Born into a clergy family, he went through a Marxist phase during his studies of law and economics at Moscow University but later recovered his faith. He was eventually ordained a priest but left Russia soon after in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. He spent the remainder of his life in Paris where he taught at the Institute St Serge, a seminary founded by White Russian exiles. He wrote a number of books that are dense and controversial in equal measures. I recently came across a not-so-dense quote on the Incarnation that I'd like to share with you. It appears originally in Du verbe incarne' and was translated by the English theologian Andrew Louth, who includes it in his essay "The place of theosis in Orthodox theology", which in turn appears in Partakers of the Divine Nature (Christensen and Wittung, eds., Baker Academic 2007).


God wants to communicate to the world his divine life and himself to "dwell" in the world, to become human, in order to make of human kind a god too. That transcends the limits of human imagination and daring, it is the mystery of the love of God "hidden from the beginning in God" (Eph 3:9), unknown to the angels themselves (Eph 3:10; 1 Pet 1:12; 1Tim 3:16). The love of God knows no limits and cannot reach its furthest limit in the fullness of the divine abnegation for the sake of the world: the Incarnation. And if the very nature of the world, raised from non-being to its created state, does not appear here as an obstacle, its fallen state is not one either. God comes even to a fallen world; the love of God is not repelled by the powerlessness of the creature, nor by his fallen image, nor even by the sin of the world: the Lamb of God, who voluntarily bears the sins of the world, is manifest in him. In this way, God gives all for the divinization of the world and its salvation, and nothing remains that he has not given. Such is the love of God, such is Love.

Such it is in the interior life of the Trinity, in the reciprocal surrender of the three hypostases, and such it is in the relation of God to the world. If it is in such a way that we are to understand the Incarnation--and Christ himself teaches us to understand it in such a way (Jn 3:16)--there is no longer any room to ask if the Incarnation would have taken place apart from the Fall. The greater contains the lesser, the conclusion presupposes the antecedent, and the concrete includes the general. The love of God for fallen humankind, which finds it in no way repugnant to take the failed nature of Adam, already contains the love of stainless humankind.

And that is expressed in the wisdom of the brief words of the Nicene Creed: "for our sake and for our salvation." This and, in all the diversity and all the generality of its meaning, contains the theology of the Incarnation. In particular, this and can be taken in the sense of identification (as that is to say). So it is understood by those who consider that salvation is the reason for the Incarnation; in fact, concretely, that is indeed what it signifies for fallen humanity. But this can equally be understood in a distinctive sense (that is to say, "and in particular," or similar expressions), separating the general from the particular, in other words, without limiting the power of the Incarnation nor exhausting it solely in redemption. The Word became flesh: one must understand this in all the plenitude of of its meaning, from the theological point of view and the cosmic, the anthropological, the Christological and the soteriological. The last, the most concrete, includes and does not exclude the other meanings; so too, the theology of the Incarnation cannot be limited to the bounds of soteriology; that would be, moreover, impossible, as the history of dogma bears witness....

The Incarnation is the interior basis of creation, its final cause. God did not create the world to hold it at a distance from him, at that insurmountable metaphysical distance that separates the Creator from the creation, but in order to surmount that distance and unite himself completely with the world; not only from the outside, as Creator, nor even as providence, but from within: "the Word became flesh". That is why the Incarnation is already predetermined in human kind.

Herbert was born in 1593 and became University Orator at Cambridge. He was quite ambitious and hoped to parlay this position into a brilliant career at court. He was elected to Parliament in 1624 but nothing much came of that. Within a couple of years James I and two of George's most influential patrons all died, and public life lost a lot of its allure. He decided to act on a long-suppressed vocation to Holy Orders. He became a priest in 1630 and was made vicar of Bemerton. He threw himself into the priesthood with total abandon, and soon earned his parishioners' sobriquet "Holy Mr Herbert." Alas, this only lasted until 1633, when he died at the age of 39.

George left behind a body of poetry(his chief claim to fame in the secular world) as well as A Priest to the Temple; or, The Country Parson, a sort of how-to-do-it for parish life in 17th century England. I've chosen a short bit from the latter (it fits me too well), in addition to one of his best poems, set to music by Vaughn Williams in his Five Mystical Songs. If you haven't heard this piece yet, do so by all means.

Scholar's Temptation

Curiosity in prying into high speculative and unprofitable questions is another great stumbling block to the holiness of scholars.

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here."
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?'

"Truth, Lord, but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.

The January 26 2008 edition of the Los Angeles Times has an interesting article by Stephanie Simon titled "What chores would Jesus do?" It describes a small commune of evangelical Christians in Billings, Montana, and their efforts to live the Gospel more fully.

The group started out with two married couples, a single man, and a total of five children. They shared a two-bedroom house in a very average suburban neighborhood (the single guy slept in the basement). The community still exists after a year, though with some changes in personnel.

This group is part of the so-called New Monasticism, itself an outgrowth of the Emergent evangelical movement. Useful references to the New Monasticism can be found here and here.

For well over thirty years now I've been interested in alternative communities and monasticism, and manage to practice a form of the latter within the limits of my married, householding lifestyle. What are my reactions to this article?

• For starters, the community has no rule of life. A rule sounds restrictive at first blush, but it sets out what members owe to the community in terms of commitments of money, labor, and time. It also specifies what the members can expect from the community. Christian monasticism has a 1700-year track record in large part because it has rules (preeminently the Rule of Benedict in the West) and adheres to them consistently. Rural America is littered with the ruins of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of communes that tanked because everyone was too busy getting enlightened to take out the garbage.
• Aside from group Bible studies, there is apparently no formal public worship and no emphasis on other spiritual practices (I'd think that lectio divina would be a natural for evangelicals. But have these folks even heard of lectio divina?

On a more mundane but very practical level, these people don't have enough living space. They're on top of each other most of the time when they're not asleep, and this naturally leads to stress and conflict. There was a '60's commune in Colorado (called Red Rock, I think) where several dozen people (and their kids) lived in a big geodesic dome--with no interior partitions. They were trying to create a new society from scratch. I wonder how many of them have MBA' s by now. There's a very good reason Benedictine monasteries transitioned from open dormitories to individual cells during the middle ages.

These folks could learn a few lessons from the Old Monasticism without compromising either their evangelicalism or their status as laypeople. If you insist on reinventing the wheel, you must be prepared for a wobbly ride.

The January 13 2008 issue of New York Magazine has a substantial and well-researched article on Episcopal solitaries. "A Hermit of the Heart" by Paul O'Donnell profiles three New York Episcopalians who combine life in this quintessence of urban madness with a deep commitment to contemplative prayer. These folks have real jobs and live alongside "normal" people yet manage to spend several hours per day in meditation and other forms of prayer. They are under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and are answerable on some level to the bishop of New York, yet they are not part of a monastic community. Each is, in effect, "a contemplative order of one." Since we observed the feast of St Anthony of Egypt on January 17, this topic is especially relevant.

The article is available here. A tip of the hood to Episcope for turning me on to it.

Brendan Sweetman teaches philosophy at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He has recently published Religion: key concepts in philosophy (London and New York, Continuum, 2007). This is a very basic and useful introduction to the philosophy of religion, especially if, like me, you are somewhat philosophically challenged. The following excerpt deals with the notion of religion and secularism as worldviews. This is relevant to those of us in the mainline churches who are confronted with liberal Protestant theology, particularly the variety exemplified by the Jesus Seminar or Bishop Spong, which tends to uncritically accept the truth-claims of post-Enlightenment secularism and reinterprets the tradition to accommodate secularism. The following quote is found on pages 10-11.

It is very common in the United States, but less so in other countries, to use the term 'faith' to describe religious belief. But this term can be quite misleading. The word 'faith' has unfortunate connotations, especially today, and can be used to set up a somewhat artificial distinction between faith on the one hand and reason on the other. The term frequently carries with it the connotation that religious beliefs are outside reason, or that religious believers are not interested in the rationality of their views, or worst of all, that religious beliefs are not even reasonable. This is often how secularists use the term, but it is also sometimes used this way by religious believers themselves.

The most important sense of the term from the point of view of philosophy of religion is the cognitive or propositional sense which refers to holding a belief for which the evidence is less than 100 per cent certain or decisive. Religious beliefs involve propositions about God, about God's relationship to the world and human beings, and about morality, among many other propositions. The religious believer cannot prove these propositions to be true in the sense of giving a scientific proof, or presenting decisive evidence for them. But he can at least try to show that they are rational to believe. This is the most appropriate use of the term 'faith' in philosophy of religion and marks the best understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. A religious believer holds many things on faith, but he hopes that it is a rational faith (not an irrational faith), and the work of philosophy of religion is, among other things, an attempt to investigate the rationality of religious belief.

On this understanding of the term 'faith', it is the case that all worldviews--religious or secularist--involve faith in this cognitive sense. That is to say, all worldviews hold beliefs about the nature of reality, the nature of the human person and the nature of morality, to which the adherents of the worldview pledge their commitment, but which they cannot prove decisively. Although it may be possible to back up some of these beliefs with rational arguments and evidence, it is still necessary to commit to them, since any arguments we have will fall short of proof, because of the subject matter involved. The subject matter of worldviews, which involves the three subjects mentioned, does not admit of scientific proof. This is true for all worldviews, secularist ones as well as religious ones. So if one accepts various beliefs about the nature of reality, or the human person, or morality, this acceptance will involve a commitment to these beliefs: a movement of the will as well as of the intellect. So, in fact, a religious believer and a secularist are in the same boat in this respect, a point frequently overlooked. We are often inclined simply to accept it as true without giving much thought to the matter that it is only religious belief that involves faith, but not secularism. But now that secularism is a positive worldview in itself, and a major cultural player to boot, it is no longer appropriate to overlook the fact that it is a worldview with many controversial beliefs that are the subject of contentious debate, and that its adherents accept many of these beliefs at least partially on faith.