St. John, Greatest Poet of Theology

The Professor's Bookshelf #5: Brilliant insights into the Prologue of the Last Gospel

Henceforth, Saturday posts will be free and open to the public. Unlike Monday and Thursday articles, which always have voiceovers (either me recording the post or another T&S writer), Saturday posts will not have voiceovers.

Preliminary note: If you have read any book by Anthony Esolen, you will know how delightful it is to read his gorgeous prose and be nourished by his deep insights into the truth of things. Among all the living Catholic writers I know, he is the most sensitive to linguistic beauty and rhetoric. One of my favorite books of recent years is his commentary on the Prologue of John, In the Beginning Was the Word, where, as a poet himself, he approaches John as a poet, and finds a partnership between theology and sublime art that propels the message God wishes to reveal through him. I will share below some favorite passages but really the entire book is chockablock with such wisdom. I am particularly struck by how relevant his comments are to many debates in the contemporary Church, including liturgical ones that he barely touches on. This book makes for excellent spiritual reading for all who attend the TLM, as it gives such a prominent place to the first fourteen verses of chapter 1. —PAK

Who’s more credulous?

Grant that John was no impostor. Could he have been an ignorant and credulous dupe? That was the line that the nineteenth century skeptics took. Scholarship is a prophylactic against credulity. But is it, really? Not if we examine the history of the past century, or the current fads of madness in our universities. People in the intellectual professions are usually the first to be fooled: they can reason their way into lies. Who but a comfortably padded and insulated professor could believe that women en masse could make soldiers as well as men? Who else could believe that socialism could eliminate human ambition, envy, and greed? But Peter and Andrew and James and John plied a trade that demanded attention to realities. You could not theorize your way around a dangerous body of water like the Sea of Galilee. You must know about wood, pitch, nets, fish, clouds, wind, rain, season, time of day. More than your livelihood, your life depended on it. (xxi-xxii)

Anti-word

The first prominent city in Genesis is Babel, emblem of the greatness and the folly of Babylon, and forever after the type of human confusion. Babel is the anti-word, the sign of human language itself falling into change and decay, into misunderstanding and strife. (11)

Suspicion

Note well: scholars are not to be trusted when they trim, flatten, or brush aside, for it is always more comfortable to make less of a great thing than to make less of yourself. Be suspicious whenever a scholar appears to set himself and his learning higher than the thing he is teaching about. (38)

We are the stories we tell ourselves

We are accustomed to stories that begin at a certain point, usually with a problem, and that work their way toward triumph or tragedy or, if you are many a modern author, an anti-triumph that yet makes some kind of declaration. Look at the stories man tells about himself. The people of Athens, with Athena casting the tiebreaking vote, acquit Orestes of murder, but the goddess invites the prosecuting Furies to look kindly upon the city, and when they agree, when they set aside their agony and vindictiveness, they become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. That is how Aeschylus, the most pious of the Greek tragedians, gives us the history of mankind proceeding from blood vengeance and pride, to justice meted out by a community of free men, men who still honor the old bonds of blood. Man ascends and becomes an Athenian. Or, to fall a bit from the sublime, people wrest their sustenance from a forbidding land, and gradually free themselves from darkness and superstition, giving themselves entirely to technology, so that they finally invent tractors, and all is well. Man ascends and becomes Henry Ford. Or, to fall farther, he invents synthetic estrogen, and becomes a liberated woman with a mortgage and no children. Call it progressive quicksand. The story goes somewhere, but the somewhere does not satisfy. We long not for progress but for transcendence, that which alone makes any sense of progress.

In the Christian story alone, and here I include the whole story of the children of Israel and the far-seeing and inward-enlightening visions of the prophets, do we find progress and return, consummation hidden in what is no bigger than a mustard seed, transcendence in the unseen action of a little yeast. I mean that here and here alone are all these things true at once: the story of mankind is the story of each man, singly, and really, not figuratively; mankind and each man has a beginning, and the end he strives for is already incorporated in that beginning; the end does not obliterate the beginning, but recovers it and redeems it and raises it to glory; and the end, a new heaven and a new earth, is among us now, but is not yet, and is in the flesh, yet a flesh that is as absolute light by comparison with the shadows we bear about with us. (54-55)

Real history

We are thus always enjoined to enter more fully and bravely into the real history of the world, which is the story of man’s salvation, wholly the work of Christ and therefore also the work of those in whom Christ works, and who become more truly themselves by it—or rather become themselves for the first time after all. (61)

Atheism blinds the eye

I do not need to give witness that life given up to the “world” is on a highway to disappointment and exhaustion. The worldly themselves testify. The atheist of our time does not rejoice in the beauty of the world around us, a beauty which might lead him to the threshold of faith. Instead he lays stress upon what he sees as its cruelty, its wastage, its ugliness, its unmeaning. The cosmos for him is no longer a cosmos but a chaos. The amoralist of our time does not rejoice in the beauty of the natural virtues, a beauty he does not feel. Instead he insists that there are no such things at all, so that he may indulge himself in vices that a healthy people would consider disgusting, unsightly, base, and abominable. Every one of our arts has reeled back into the beast. It appears that to love the created world as it deserves to be loved, man must not demand from it what only God can give. Man must not be of the world, if for no other reason than that he might love the world he is in. “Seek ye the kingdom of God,” says Jesus, “and all these things shall be added unto you” (Lk. 12:31). (61-62)

Gratitude

Gratitude is the virtue whereby the receiver of a gift participates in the generosity of the giver. The gift is free, and the thanks are free, and by “free” I mean more than that these things are uncompelled. They are free in an active and creative sense: they bespeak a soul that is free with itself, ready to give, flowing forth. Praise is the purest expression of gratitude, because then the gift is no third object but the very existence of the one whom we praise. It is the fundamental affirmation, as Josef Pieper puts it: “How good it is that you exist!” Not for your use, not for what you provide, but merely that you are: that is why we praise someone when we are at our most innocent and free. (70)

Nabbish rubbish

John is afire with poetic inspiration now (in verse 13), introducing several motifs, weaving them together in the braided form we have seen before, and returning, at the climax of the sentence, to two motifs of the greatest significance, the one in contrast with the other: man and God.

The New American Bible translators, allergic to poetry, render the sentence in the form of a coroner’s report: “Who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.” The dreadful result has John saying the same thing twice, in “human choice” and “a man’s decision.” What is the difference? It is like saying that not only did a man not choose it, he also did not decide upon it—so there. The verse, one of the most powerful and suggestive in all of Scripture, collapses into a sentence characterized by abstraction and redundancy, and all the meanings of blood, flesh, will, and man, and all their echoes throughout the Old Testament and the New, are smothered. What was their grudge against John that they should treat him so poorly? (81)

Archaic language for a reason

Think of the difference between seeing and beholding. My dog can see. Even a blind man can see, in a figurative sense. He may say, “I see,” meaning, “I understand.” But only a rational being can behold, because only a rational being can hold the object of his vision at a distance, to look upon it, to enter into its beauty or terror or grandeur. Think of an artist standing back from his painting, to see it as much with his mind and heart as with his eyes. Seeing may be a mere physical action. Beholding must be an intellectual action, and you can behold without understanding what you behold. Indeed, if you understood fully the object of your gaze, I might say that you could behold it no more. For you it would be a dead thing, pinned to the wall of facticity.

At this point someone may object that we no longer use the word behold in ordinary speech, so we should not use it in a translation of the Bible. That objection is foolish. Let me try to explain why, because Christian congregations seem these days to believe that there is something special about the demotic.

The objection assumes that Jesus and the people he preached to and the evangelists who spread the good news were as indifferent to poetry as we are. But in this regard, as I have tried to show, we are the bizarre ones, the outliers. Every human culture but our own has had its characteristic poetry, beloved by ordinary people and passed down from one generation to the next. And indeed Jesus often preached in poetic form, so that his words might strike the heart more powerfully, and the mind might retain them more readily and surely. The objection also assumes a linguistic monotone, a single register for all human enterprises. But again, we are projecting our unusual dullness upon others. Because all human cultures have their poetry, all human languages have a range of registers, including the poetic and the sacred. A man does not pray in the same words he uses to buy a mule. A man does not court a woman in the same words he uses to buy a mule, or at least he has not been known to do so in the past.

When Jesus and his apostles prayed and sang hymns at the Last Supper, it was probably in Hebrew, the old sacred language from which their everyday Aramaic had derived. If they sang a Hebrew psalm, the Hebrew they sang was not like the prosaic Hebrew of the historical books, such as the Chronicles. Some Hebrew words that we find in the psalms or in the poetry of the prophets we find there and there alone. So, for the translator, it is more precise, more faithful to the original, not less, to search for a poetic word that conveys a special meaning, rather than to settle for an ordinary word that misses both the meaning and the emotional and sacral force. (92-93)

The good of inequality

“The function of equality,” says C. S. Lewis in his essay, “Membership,” “is purely protective. It is medicine, not food.” It is “a quantitative term and therefore love often knows nothing of it.” It is a prophylactic in the secular state, to guard against evils, “but in the Church we strip off this disguise, we recover our real inequalities, and are thereby refreshed and quickened.” Jesus never talks about equality. He talks about love. He never talks about how in the kingdom of Heaven all shall be the same. He says that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. (105)

Private religion?

Regarding Jn 1:16, “we have all received…”:

Perhaps the plural is a special revelation for us, as we in the western world are encouraged to affirm a contradiction in terms, namely, the privacy of religion. There can be no such thing, even if we think of it from the human side alone, since man is always and ineluctably a social being. He can no more have a private religion than he can have a private culture, a private society, or a private nation. Religion, culture, society, and nationhood may be many things, but private is not one of them. We can look at it also from the side of the divine. When Jesus is asked which of the commandments is the greatest, he replies thus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God will all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22:37–40) (107-8)

I… or we… or both?

I might put it this way. Man in his fallen nature is always in danger of losing his grasp upon the first person pronouns. His “I” is often a simulacrum, a piece of play-acting, a disguise, a muddle of fads and fashions in speech, clothing, behavior, and opinion. His “we” is a political caucus, a loose association, a tribe, or a mob. In Christ, he becomes a new creation, and he can say, with Saint Paul, “Not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20), living for God and for all men, in the “we” of the Church. (109)

Marriage

Moses speaks for God. He was the first and the greatest of all the prophets: “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Dt. 34:10). Yet one thing that Jesus does consistently is to place Moses in a subordinate and relative position. When Jesus says, boldly, that divorce is evil, for “what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mt. 19:6), the Pharisees press him further, asking him why Moses incorporated divorce into the Law. And Jesus replies, “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Mt. 19:8).

Let us think about this carefully. As we have had many an occasion to see, a variety of times are present to Jesus at once. We have “the beginning,” Greek arche again, and Hebrew reshith, referring to the original intentions of God the Creator; and notice that Jesus speaks authoritatively about that time in the beginning, as if he were present there. Then we have the time of Moses, which time includes the Pharisees who are speaking to Jesus right now. Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of your hearts, he says, as if they were among the wayward and stiff-necked people who so often gave Moses cause to grieve. Then we have the time of Jesus, who returns to the beginning. He does so not as a lover of the archaic, for “new wine must be put into new bottles” (Mk. 2:22), but as a redeemer and restorer: “And I say unto you, whoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery” (Mt. 19:9).

That high and holy view of marriage, by the way, is implied by Jesus’s miracle at Cana (Jn. 2:1–11), his use of the marriage feast as an emblem for the kingdom of God (cf. Mt. 22:1–14), his casting himself in the role of bridegroom (cf. Mt. 25:1–13, Mk. 2:19–20), the Baptist’s referring to him as the bridegroom (Jn 3:29), and the great revelation that the Church herself is the bride of Christ. So says John of the Apocalypse: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come” (Rev. 22:17). (110-11)

God’s existence

I have sometimes met people who say that they do not believe in God because they lack the evidence. They never tell me what evidence they are looking for. And what evidence can there be? If I see a print of a shoe in the mud, I infer that someone wearing a shoe has walked through my yard. It is a sign that one material thing, the shoe, has had an observable effect upon another material thing, the mud. The print functions as a sign because of the specific and finite characteristics of the two objects. Not everything is a shoe, and not everything is mud.

But God is ever in act, wholly, in every cranny of space, in every least flicker of time, in every tiniest bit of matter, in every working of every physical law that he himself has willed into being, so that he is as it were secreted away by being everywhere, rather than sipping some ambrosia upon Mount Olympus. He is also, unlike the Stoic abstraction of a Mind permeating all things as water permeates a sponge, a personal Being. He is not background radiation. How do you come to know a Person? Not by inferring his existence. That can be done without faith, hope, or charity. Satan knows that God exists. “The devils,” says Saint James, “also believe, and tremble” (Jas. 2:19).

You come to know a Person by encounter. God is no boor, forcing himself upon us. He would be sought. He gives us both the command to love Him, and the adventure of the quest. He honors us with a world that is wide open. By his nature he is hidden in his own unfathomable depths, and that might cause us to despair, except that he has come to us. (121-22)

Irrational refusal to believe

Suppose someone says that there is no proof that Jesus is the Son of God. He wants a sign. We have plenty of signs to give him. We give him the miracles that Jesus performed. Then he says that those miracles could not have happened, but that the accounts were made up by the disciples. And so we are damned both ways. He demands a miracle, and when we give him a miracle, he will not accept it, because it is a miracle, and he says that miracles are impossible. He will say that the history of the world is full of charlatans and sleight-of-hand artists. We then beg him to name for us a single charlatan or sleight-of-hand artist who did the things Jesus is reported to have done, and who said the things that Jesus said, things that, as I have noted, make the wisest moralist, a Lao-Tzu or Emerson or Epictetus, sound like a garrulous peddler of platitudes by comparison.

Then he may concede that Jesus was a great teacher. But when we beg him to notice that much of what Jesus taught was about who he is, they say that he was mistaken about that, or that his disciples made it up afterwards. So Jesus is a great teacher, and almost in the same breath he is a dupe; or the apostles are the slow addle-pated creatures they appear to be in the gospels, and almost in the same breath they are the crafters of a conspiracy unparalleled for its diabolical genius. What do people want? The apostles are illiterate and credulous laborers, and before the sentence is over they possess the strategic powers of Hannibal and the intellectual cunning of Socrates. We are damned both ways.

We see the same phenomenon at work when people say that the gospels of Matthew and Luke must have been written after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, because Jesus is obviously portrayed as foretelling it, in apocalyptic terms (Mt. 24, Lk. 21). Here I must confess complete astonishment. It required no man of keen insight into human history to foretell that the Romans would finally lose patience with the Jews and raze their capital to the ground! The Romans had been putting down rebellions there for a long time, and in the time of Jesus relations between them and the Jews were clearly tense, at best. The Barabbas whom Pontius Pilate released instead of Jesus was “a robber,” says John (23:19), using a word that suggests not petty thievery but sacking and plundering. Luke puts it more strongly: Barabbas “for a certain sedition made in the city, and for murder, was cast into prison” (Lk. 23:19). Caiaphas the high priest says that it would be better for one innocent man to die than for the whole people to perish, meaning that they must do what they can to keep the Romans from destroying them (Jn. 11:50). Why then must we think that the Son of God could not do what an ordinary political observer could do? (128-29)

Love gives sight

The theologian is not in the same position as is the physicist or even the historian. The physicist studies matter as matter, outside of himself. If he sins against his brother, still the hydrogen atom has one electron and not two. The historian may be involved with his subject in a human way, just to understand better the ways of men on their own terms. Still, Booth fired the shot in Ford’s Theater, and Lincoln fell. But one who wishes to say things about God and his Anointed One cannot treat the matter in that way, because we are in the realm of personhood here, the ultimate Person, who calls to each man as a person, saying, “Seek my face” (Ps. 27:8). The theologian cannot elude the call. God is not a respecter of pretended impersonality.

The theologian should attempt to treat as intelligently as possible the material and historical circumstances surrounding the person of Jesus and his life, but ultimately he must face the question that Jesus posed to the apostles: “But whom say ye that I am?” (Mt. 16:15). And here he must answer. He may wrap himself around with the fat of sentimentality, and pose as someone who feels deeply for the man who was so poorly understood by the religious people of his time. I suspect, however, that they who crucified him understood him better than the sentimentalist does. The question, in any case, is not whether Jesus deserves our esteem. To hell with human esteem. The question is whether we look to him as our savior, even if it means being nailed to a tree beside him.

If the answer to that question is yes, if we confess that Jesus is Lord, then despite our stupidities, our cowardice, our wickedness, and our sad attempts to be pure in heart for a single hour, we cannot treat of Jesus and the gospels as we treat of anyone or anything else in the world. We must come to know him. The theologian is the person who knows Jesus. The theologian is the person who prays, who obeys even if by fits and starts the invaluable commandments that Jesus gives to us as a grace, and who then attains what Jesus has promised him: light.

It is a commonplace of scholastic theology that love follows upon knowledge. The intellect sees what is good, and the will, in obedience, follows upon the vision, and that desire is what we call love. But love, says Richard of Saint Victor, opens us up to see. Where there is love, he says, there is an eye for seeing. (135-36)

What a codicil!

If I have said anything in this book that places a stumbling stone between any soul and the Lord, I pray that the Lord will not hold it against me, because I intended no such thing; and I beg such a soul to set the book aside and pray. If I have said anything that removes a stumbling stone between any soul and the Lord, it is none of my doing but his, the Lord’s. And I say with the thief, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into my kingdom” (Lk. 23:42). (136)

The foregoing excerpts are from Anthony Esolen’s “In the Beginning Was the Word.” If you’d like to read another passage from it, on what makes Christ unique, you will find it here at OnePeterFive.