Way, Truth, Life

A Final, Summary Reflection on the Meaning of Being a Christian (For Now)

A PROPHETIC, near-indigent young Jew from an irrelevant village in a tiny province of the world’s largest empire preaches justice for the poor, fidelity to God and his Torah, and courts messianic associations in expectation of an imminent apocalypse. He ruffles the feathers of provincial authority sufficiently to justify a response: the imperial occupiers nail him to a cross as a prevenient warning to would-be political agitators. Rumours begin to spread that he has been seen after death. A small group of followers begin to exchange epistles and oral lore, establishing underground communities structured around commemorative rites, generally oriented toward watchful self-purification in preparation for his post-mortem return. They live in communes, bearing few (if any) personal possessions, and are said to speak in strange tongues and even perform miracles, like their Rabbi. Their movement grows and diversifies; with the fortuitous rise of the new technology of the codex, they take the opportunity to put their ideas into writing, searching for converts—both Jewish and gentile—with a fervent urgency. These documents are rife with a host of differing beliefs and convictions about this person; about his ministry, his touted return, and even the nature of his being. The earliest extant text of this sort likens him to a suffering servant, sees him preach tersely and epigrammatically—often concealing his ‘true’ doctrine from the masses—and links him directly to some of the most significant messianic prophecies of the Tanakh. Before the century’s end, another depicts him as the Logos present before the foundation of the world, in and through whom all things were made, prone to knowledgeable, paratactic discourses of an almost Latinate loquacity. Both texts later assume equal canonical authority. About three hundred years after this man’s death, he is proclaimed to have been consubstantial with the Most High God under the aegis of the utmost Roman authority; the empire which once murdered him now acts in his name, soon bearing the device of his execution on their very insignia. History is changed forever. Since, billions have called themselves ‘Christians’. What does this mean?

In my previous articles (here, here, and here), I sought to clarify, in some small measure, what I think is implied in staking claim to Christian faith. The initial impetus that moved me to write them was admittedly a critical one: there are, according to much reputable scholarship, a plethora of claims to historicity made by the traditional Christian narrative that are not justifiably believable given the evidence we have. Moreover, these include not merely incidental, extraneous, and ultimately inconsequent details—such as whether Jesus ordered his disciples to pack a stave for their peregrinations (Mk. 6:8) or not (Mt. 10:10, Lk. 9:3)—but also some events often taken as central to most Christian dogma, such as the veracity of Jesus’ prophecies, the authenticity of certain discourses, or (to be seasonally pertinent) the nativity narratives. However—irrespective of whether or not one wishes to honestly appraise this data or rather put one’s ecclesial fingers in one’s ears and chant the creed again—it seems to me abundantly apparent that if we took the discrediting of such historical claims as sufficient reason to discard the entirety of Christian religion, then we would have been doing something woefully wrong from the very first. My contention, broadly speaking, has been that the ‘truth’ of Christianity—if there is such a thing—cannot be contained, expressed, or lived in the dogmatic affirmation of an array of contingent facts, but rather for these purposes can and indeed must engage in other realms of philosophy, culture, and art, including what from the perspective of historical study is mythological fabrication. This is simply due to the nature of what such a truth is purporting to be: namely, not a local, intelligible datum that might serve as an element in a theorem or be neatly plotted on Cartesian coordinates, but the transcendent Truth in which all particular truths participate; the grand Truth of Being itself.

I would go so far as to say, in fact, that if we are capable of reducing our faith to propositions, then we are not yet really religious. If our religious truth can be totally expressed within the encompassing fold of abstract concepts, such that the veracity of our faith is quite literally nothing more than a matter of ‘being right’ in the same way we’d do our homework correctly, then what we are doing is fairly meaningless. If we are in all things looking to pin down, to limit, to enclose, to fix, to guard, rather than to open up, to venture forth, to set free, to let go, then we are by nature setting ourselves at an infinite remove from the Divine. We are there, at best, engaged in a parochial concern, a local interest, a private persuasion; a particular tribal creed wholly subject to negation in encounter with another.

But I fear I have spoken fairly negatively in those pieces, thundering over how Christian faith is so frequently misconstrued. So, positively, what could Christian identity signify?

John Scotus Eriugena’s magisterial homily on the prologue to the Gospel of John opens with prayerful supplication: ‘The voice of the spiritual eagle strikes in the hearing of the church. May our outer senses grasp its transient sounds, may our inner spirit penetrate its enduring meaning’.¹ In an exegesis of the arrival at the empty tomb, Eriugena distinguishes the disciples Peter and John as archetypes of ‘faith and action’ and ‘contemplation and knowledge’ respectively. His allegorical reading elucidates a twofold structure to Christian belief.

Christ’s tomb is Holy Scripture, in which the mysteries of his divinity and humanity are secured by the weight of the letter, just as the tomb is secured by the stone.
[…]
Nevertheless—although they have both run to the tomb and both enter into it—Peter enters first, and John only enters after him. For if Peter symbolizes faith, then John signifies the intellect. Therefore, since it is written, “Unless you believe you will not understand,” faith necessarily enters first into the tomb of Holy Scripture, followed by the intellect, for which faith has prepared the entry.²

Peter, apotheosis of faith, commits himself to the event in a state of existential surrender, giving his whole being over to the mystery, relinquishing any attempts to understand what is occurring: literally walking into the dark without anyone to go before him. It is in his wake that John follows, and subsequently, in ‘the ineffable flight of his spirit beyond all things… enters into the very arcanum of the one principle of all’.³

I stated previously that right from the very origins of Christian literature we see authors imbuing the texts with their own persuasions and presuppositions, moving away from the ‘surface’ content of the life, death, and purported resurrection of Jesus in order to unearth its inner spiritual gnosis. Eriugena’s image may well prove a valuable way of conceptualising this attitude as a general posture for the modern Christian to relate to their religion’s ‘literal’ features. Recalling my earlier claim that our attempts to articulate truth should move up the scale ranging from stiff, gelid quantitative propositions to the lively, suggestive dynamism of qualitative symbol, it seems that this is just what Eriugena wants us to see in the figure of John. John’s prologue reveals a divine mystery that transcends the law of non-contradiction, residing ‘beyond all mind and meaning’:⁴ logically, the Word cannot be both with God and God. Yet Eriugena wishes to show us that the faith of Peter changes what we can know; that new vistas, hitherto closed, are suddenly thrown open (Rev. 3:8); that we have shot up the scale, from the lower echelons governed by the logic of the literal to the heady heights where a playful divine truth flickers prodigiously over the borders of the finite.

This is precisely the kind of ‘faith’, incidentally, that I believe we see exhibited and extolled in non-Christian texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Dao de Jing. In both cases, literal religious content that often calls for unavoidable disjunctions (such as morality or philosophy, which divide firmly into ‘good/evil’, ‘true/false’) are transcended in favour of a more numinous, elusive Reality. In the one this is the motion of bhakti toward Krishna alone, who envelops all worldly dichotomies; in the other it is the acceptance of the Dao, abidance in which requires the abandonment of virtue. In both cases, the transcendence of the literal is often expressed in contradictory formulations, such as ‘When seeing or hearing, touching or smelling… the one joined to yoga… thinks “I am not doing anything at all”’ (V.8), or ‘It is because [the Dao] never attempts itself to be great that it succeeds in becoming great’ (XXXIV). The gnosis is acquired precisely as a result of a relinquishment that moves in a direction opposite to the dogmatic impulse: a letting go rather than a tightening up.

So what does this practically mean when we encounter those obvious tensions that arise when historical study strikes down a sacred belief? Take the following as a case study: in Ambiguum 41, Maximus the Confessor provides a descending tree (à la Porphyry) depicting the various fissures cast across reality by sin, the base of which is the division of male and female. Maximus wants to present the Son as sewing together each of the diremptions through his incarnational exitus from and reditus to the Father; as such, he begins on this lowest rung by suggesting that Christ unites male and female by means of the virgin birth: his male body is born in and united to the maternal female without the ‘fallen’ passion of intercourse or (so tradition holds) pain of childbirth. To my mind, this is an astoundingly intelligent connection, indicative of Maximus’ shining exegetical acumen in linking the symbols of gospel narrative. The only issue: data pushes us modern readers to concede that the virgin birth was almost certainly a mythological embellishment rather than actual history. An interesting question follows: with the historical rug pulled out from beneath, does Maximus’ insight become utterly irrelevant?

What I stated in the previous post hopefully gives substantial grounds to answer in the negative: given Truth itself is hardly reducible to the attenuated methodological focus of historical study, events which do not correspond to literal-historical criteria can still image the splendour of divine truth, and oftentimes much better. But I envisage criticism arising swiftly: a sceptic may well admit that my intervention is a goal-line save, but an embarrassment all the same given the haphazard defending that led to it. I leap to imaginative, symbolic talk because the event’s historicity has been decimated, and I wish to save face as best I can. Maximus’ original connection was borne by sheer historical happenstance: Mary’s purported virginity arose as a later tradition (not present in Paul or Mark (or even John, who may well be correcting Matthew and Luke)) appealing to a—possibly deliberate, possibly ignorant—mistranslation of the Hebrew ‘almah’ in Isaiah 7:14 from its original meaning of ‘young woman’ to the Greek ‘parthenos’. Contingent, contingent, contingent. My glean seems thoroughly arbitrary when set against the history that belies it; this is ostensibly not the orchestration of some ingenious, superintendent architect, at least as far as we can grasp it. This is history stumbling clumsily over itself, as always; twisting its limbs into nigh-comical torsions as it slouches dutifully onward. ‘Salvation history’, with its grand, booming intonations, seems thus to lose its stately sheen.

However, it is in just this regard—the sheer contingency; the convoluted, sinuous skein of doctrinal history that leads to the need for these inventive, unhistorical imaginations—that I wish to place my positive emphasis, and that I believe faith has its value. Just as I would reject the impulse to ward off mythologisation and blindly affirm historicity, so too do I think it best to reject attempts to conceal contingency in favour of an impression of necessary order: indeed, I believe we should push it even further to the fore. After all, we should note that this criticism still labours under the same prejudice as the first: it believes that historicity is a greater criterion for religious ‘legitimacy’ than myth. But moreover, if we take seriously Eriugena’s suggestion that faith reveals a knowledge that necessarily moves away from the strictures of literality, then we are prompted to not only consider the possibility of inhabiting our religion in such a way that frequently flouts our literal-historical paradigms, but its positivity too. Faith’s delightful indifference to our usual binaries (in this case, ‘historical/unhistorical’) levels the playing field, undoes our original modern bias, and emancipates us to discover in this new, imaginative mode the gnosis that we were searching for all along: the gnosis that, to underline the point, was solely responsible for giving our ‘historical’ inquiries any sort of appeal in the first place. As I stated especially in my pieces on Christ and historicity, the value of historical events is always contained in what they mean to us rather than simply the brute fact that they ‘are’: and so even in the most assuredly historical occurrence we are already ‘sliding up the scale’ as religious people, ascending from chthonic, frozen depths toward the heated realm the where myth has long since been, dancing freely about the blinding fire of Truth itself.

This altered posture enables and even encourages us to embrace the contingency of Christian doctrine, history, and tradition. We find microcosms of this attitude in the exegeses of the likes of Origen of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, Eriugena, Bernard of Clairvaux, and many more renowned for the length of their reach in allegorical allusion. Each often spend pages meditating on apparently trivial details, draw almost unthinkable connections, and lure their readers miles from the text itself. Yet this is simply the adventure of contingency at work; the play of exegetes not belaboured by modern, post-Enlightenment prejudices, and who in their shared Platonic heritage wish to demonstrate how all reality—even at its most seemingly menial—is ‘pointing up’ to the Divine; ‘crying out’ in worship of its Lord (Lk. 19:40). Notice how Eriugena’s commentary does just this: speaking historically, the race of Peter and John to the tomb was a meaningless coincidence of starting stances, creaky knees, cardiovascular endurance, and dubiously suitable footwear. Speaking theologically, Eriugena has formed a remarkable analogy from these events to make a transformative contribution that I, another Christian living a millennium later, can use to grapple with my religion. Meaning is drawn from even the most quotidian things to illuminate genuine truth, and guide us through the religious life just as any historical occurrence could—or, once more, perhaps even better.

Origen exemplifies Eriugena’s model even more fully. His painstaking commitment to see Christ in Scripture might be considered his Petrine aspect, his fidelity to the letter or material event—his insistence on first procuring and steadying the receptacle before cracking it open. It was on this basis that he argued for the conservation of the Tanakh in Christian Scripture, believing it to be a trove of jewels that was now ‘unlocked’ (the ‘stone’ being ‘rolled away’, in Eriugena’s allegory) by the arrival of the Word, whose form was writ large across the numerous ‘types’ of Old Testament mythology and legend. The vast, rich, and dazzlingly imaginative insights Origen bestowed on tradition as a result of this faith might correspondingly be considered his Johannine aspect; the gnostica theoria, the jñāna, the ‘understanding’ that the darkness does not receive (Jn 1:5) which later becomes the substance of orthodox belief.

Once we realise that contingency is the positive condition of creation, we can see it as the medium of tradition’s adventure rather than a hindrance to our religious self-understanding. After all, the aversion we have to it is derived almost entirely from the stretching of our ego’s own plans over life, our insistence that all things be prim and proper according to our own tastes, rather than giving up just those predilections and accepting providence. With this faith, happenstance no longer appears an embarrassing plothole in the grand tale, but an opening ripe for exploration; indeed, all life thus becomes a latent symbol or allegory for God, waiting to be ‘unlocked’ so as to tell forth his glory (Ps. 19:1-4), with our minds no longer discriminating between its capacity for Godliness based on which side of a particular logical binary an object may land.

History thus read is a kaleidoscope shifting in an infinitude of interconnected forms, providing at each instant a unique configuration of temporal mediums disposed to articulate an eternal, changeless truth. My language, ethics, religion, culture, personality, ancestry, and all else converge to provide me this creed, this identity, these principles. Does this invalidate their truth? Not in the slightest, but it does remind me that they supply only a momentary, passing snapshot of the truth, one tasteful glimpse of the tantalising and inscrutable Source of all. Indelibly and assuredly true, but still transient, contingent, and perspectival. For instance, there was no guarantee that the claim of Genesis 1:27 would have come to hold such sway over Judeo-Christian conscience; that this specific passage would have assumed such an irrevocably central role to have it be considered by many ‘the’ major ethical contribution of the entire tradition. So many other claims of the Bible have fallen by the wayside of tradition’s emphasis, felled at the mercy of so many temperaments of theologians and incidental turns of fate. Our Christianity is a particular, infinite response to a particular, infinite call; one that is inexhaustible in either beckon or reply, but also always entirely cognisant that an equally valid, diverse, and unfathomable depth of mysteries might be unfolded in another time and place, another ‘possible world’, to invoke the leitmotif of many Analytic philosophers. To draw on another Eriugenian metaphor, these are glimmers of a torch radiating throughout a cathedral; one monk grasps it one way, another differently, but both see the same light. Or, as Sri Ramakrishna says, whether you have touched the Ganges in Haridwar or Gangasagar, you have still touched the Ganges.

Christianity concerns itself with a set of literal-historical materials, mixed in with all manner of mythological adornments: these serve as the critical lens through which we read the world. The total embrace of this lens is Petrine; the belief that it will truly yield valuable insight into the Heart of Reality, and so demands an unwavering commitment, irrespective of the frequent perplexity (squinted eyes, furrowed brows, exasperated sighs) it can oftentimes afford us readers. And just as the more creative, imaginative, and original the insight into the text, the more we commend the acuity of the critic, similarly those exegetes who attempt uncover Johannine wisdom by peering through the Petrine lens are commended precisely because they indulge in allegorical embellishment, drawing together hitherto unseen connections, passing freely over literal boundaries, deepening ever further the lavish, interwoven lore of Christian symbolism; thus heightening the resonances of the surface letter with each discovery and further emboldening the participation of Christian narrative in transcendent Truth.

We wish to avoid contingent turns of history—the kind that suddenly shake empire-founding doctrines into shocking irrelevance—because we fear theology or Scripture becoming enterprises both frightfully niche and helplessly picayune. A thousand jokes have been told about dancing angels and crowded pinheads for just this reason. But I see this as a disastrous capitulation. We should be doing quite the opposite; recognising that yes indeed, the contingent, even otherwise pointless details of archaic myths penned by writers of vastly different worlds and worldviews have resulted in the inherited material that we now take to signify the pattern of the universe itself. And it is precisely because of this remarkable contingency, almost arbitrary in the eyes of the sceptic, that we are free to discover God as manifest in all things rather than our own petty corner; that tradition is able to trace new lines of calligraphic pattern as the Divine streaks across history and culture, thought and liturgy. We discover in this way that there is no end to our readings, that the Divine ‘meaning’ cannot be enclosed in a binary of ‘true/false’, ‘historical/unhistorical’, but makes happy embrace of all available modes of expression within existence.

Some implications follow. On one basic level this means that we happily accept that our responses to God, and our attempts to comport ourselves to him, will most often assume the form of those aspects of life that do usually inspire the ebb and flow of human history, rather than anything radically different or ‘other-than-life’ (as though this would somehow ‘authenticate’ or ‘legitimise’ our religious existence). We will be prompted to religious passion by some charismatic leader, some sublime natural event, some sweeping new ideology, some economic crisis of our age. From these exigencies manifest a host of new responses, habits, rites, beliefs; sparks flying in various directions at various speeds in accordance with the conditions that created and propelled them. As the Reformation tears from the regal richness of Catholic mageristerium, ecclesial aesthetics become problematic, and soon monasteries are dissolved, cathedrals smashed, and barren, aniconic churches erected. Likewise, as Salafism gains power in modernity, dargahs across the Islamic world are besmirched and bulldozed, all du’a and salat forbidden at these shrines for risk of committing shirk. Many in those ages (and plenty in our present) would anathematise you based on the propositional claims, the tribal allegiance: you are not a true Christian if you do not believe this, not a true Muslim if you believe that…. But a religious life is far more fluid than such reductions allow. Indeed, it is really nothing other than a particular way of riding incidental currents like these, distinguished by varying sensitivities which at once react to and create similar issues—a grand tapestry sewn through with an uninterrupted continuum of ever-mutable problems, calling for a ceaseless posture of tactful, patient, nimble response; a religious existence that will always be different in each instant, and so categorically unreliant on and transcendent of any cumbersome, flat-footed dogmatism that will always fail to grasp what life really is.

Our lens guides us: we as Christians chase God through one alluring trail, having glimpsed him in one inexplicable man. We assume many of the rites and principles of our parental faiths, Jewish and Hellene, as tools for excavation, equipment for eager quest. This trail, as we work through it, as we plunge its ever-alluring intrigue, remains our ‘touchstone’ for relating to and understanding God. Tradition provides a meagre kit for this expedition into the infinite: when we want to know the unknowable God, wishing for guidance in the darksome wood with the right road lost, we have a small collation of scriptures, hagiography, clergy, theology, hymnody and the like; sources glowing with excitement, having tasted the trail’s mystery, encouraging us in our own kindred but irreducibly personal pursuits. Our ancestors have walked this path, and made great discoveries too, and from their accumulated wisdom we draw inspiration; some helpful clues as to how to be. But the mystery can never be extinguished, even by poring endlessly over the Scriptures: never in doubt is the fact that there is something wholly distinctive about the path we personally take; about its divets and gullies, rivulets and dells, those features to which we respond and through which we navigate as we clamber onward in our lives.

Thus rather than being static inscriptions, doctrines are to be traced as moving, intersecting lines on the mutable, conditioned kaleidoscope. Orthodoxy functions as an organic but modally unnecessary whole, emerging from a negotiation with the past whose currents and trajectories are carried over into the present, rather than being something imposed ‘from above’. By ‘organic’, I do not take up John Henry Newman’s meaning, whereby we attempt to awkwardly spoonfeed the rational structure of current orthodoxy back into the erratic, labile plays of power that led to its incipience and perpetuation through the vicissitudes. I mean rather the opposite, or something like it: an attitude that allows us to undo the obdurate clinging (upādāna) to propositional claims that, even if true, hinder our spiritual progression because of our stubborn relationship to them, and thereby discover the ubiquity of God as manifest and ‘spelled out’ in particular, determinate (often inherited) narratives, rites, and doctrines. There is a kind of ‘cartography’ at play here as we tentatively feel our way through the dark maze; taking careful note of dead ends, sharp turns, and potential openings—as opposed to the prideful, would-be omniscient marching forth that will likely result in a broken nose; where we insist that Maximus’ Mariology has to be historical, and then feel the entire religion trembling and giving way underfoot when some sour evidence comes to light. This also means, incidentally, that when we encounter knots in a tradition that do not go anywhere, that have reached their logical terminus, we can undo and retie them for the sake of new connections; sometimes even (with utmost caution, keenly aware of the likelihood our own ignorance) being so bold as to pencil in a question mark next to our ancestors’ instructions, or maybe on the rarest of occasions cross them out altogether. Perhaps those notes were of help in their voyage, but ours is a different journey.⁵

Pastorally speaking, Petrine faith might be considered nothing more than the ‘living out’ of our religions in a total acceptance of this unknowing darkness—and so, although being inherently elusive of definition, it can certainly be said that this precludes dogmatism. That would, after all, represent an attempt to map the maze before we have entered it, to believe smugly that we know precisely in which shapes and forms providence will unfold, and so to really reveal a fear within us that refuses to surrender our white-knuckled grip on reality. But once we are in the dark, real faith is the embodied, agonising, stumbling, awkward, impassioned, uncomely, and sometimes just banal process of trundling on through. This is the vow; the ‘for better or worse’ that we say to God, to set ourselves up for a married life that contains every arduous element of human matrimony and more. Our frailty soon disabuses us of any honeymoon idealism. Sometimes our pains are dramatic; a weeping repentance to God for past transgression in the morning, followed by a revelry in heinous sin that very night—the kind of bathetic turn of soul reminiscent of Dmitri Karamazov. But most times they are folded laundry, TV dinners on trays, and a quiet, sorrowful wondering where all those decades have gone, and what might be waiting at the end of all this obtrusively perplexing mystery, this life to which you have spent your days acclimatising only to realise at its approaching end that you still have no clue what it is. It is in those moments that we are most acutely sensitive to the question of why we do this, just why we have entered into this marriage, why we are religious; and there the Johannine ‘meaning’ comes to the fore. We surrender so as to see: so what do we Christians see?

We must not forget that to ask for sight is already a peculiar request if we have plunged ourselves into darkness. But in this petition, I believe, we find some of the irreducible uniqueness of our faith. The Christian narrative is paradoxical through and through in that it identifies God’s supreme glory with the utter desolation and poverty of the world, and promises that only a full and unmitigated confrontation with the cruelty and suffering of human existence can result in the final triumph of love over death. Only this can usurp the order of sin’s dominion, revoke its tragic necessity, and so with marvelous irreverence for the rule of our world return husbands to the arms of hopeless widows and teddy bears to the hands of tearful children. Peter’s floundering entry of the tomb uncovers for John an incomprehensible ‘superluminous darkness’ (as Eriugena, after Pseudo-Dionysius, terms it); the logic of paradox seen most blatantly in the Paschal coincidence of death and life, but unfurling in fractal spiral throughout the annals of Jesus’ life, ministry, and the theology of the Church he founds.

With this chiasmic pattern reverberating sonorously through the Christian vision, it bears an astounding potential (though perhaps equally astoundingly untapped) to realise a brilliantly self-effacing quality to its truth. Although when prompted to define their Christianity many will speak in terms of dogma and identity—means of closing down, stabilising, excluding—I would observe to the contrary that our attempts to live after God will inevitably have the opposite effect. Our religiosity, our ‘Christianness’, becomes ever more fully realised only when we ever more wholly surrender the idols of our own religious convictions, for it is only then that we begin to worship the dynamic Heart of Being toward which those convictions feebly gesture. When we begin to let God be God rather than the provincial autocrat our egos would like him to be—the daddy who beats up the other kids on the playground, who always says that we’re the ones who are right—then we begin to see him manifest in all things, even beyond the border of our own tradition, and so are more readily able to acknowledge that the contingent elements of reality are no less capable of being a source of true revelation because we have not dictated from the outset where revelation can or should occur. There is thus a distinctive way of living after God as a Christian that in one undivided motion sweeps away all benighted fundamentalism and exclusivism, and glides enamoured toward the infinite, resplendent allure of eternally open Love, quibbling no longer over how God shows himself, but falling before his throne in utter vulnerability, in total acceptance of whatever should come, kenosis complete (Mt. 26:39, Rev. 4:10). I truly believe that to fall in love with the Christian path is at once also to relinquish all dogmatic defence of it; to discover its truth is to reveal all human disputes over it as, in the words of Aquinas, ‘nothing but straw’.

Just as Peter’s faith enables John, so too John’s revelation emboldens Peter. The Johannine insight into Being’s paradoxical essence is only possible through a continuous motion of Petrine surrender that looks to fall through the ‘solidity’ of our literal, material lives, which we so frequently misuse as a field of idolatry on which to rest instead of our source of True Rest (Mt. 11:28). If we can shift our spiritual dispositions, let go of the convictions that put the world to use for us, and instead take everything in our experience to be ‘allegories’ through which we can ‘read’ the inscrutable Divine, then we will have taken up the mystical path sketched by so many great figures of the Christian tradition: those who—radically, daringly, scandalously—actually take Jesus seriously when he commands us to leave the world behind and follow him (Mt. 4:19, 6:33, 8:22, 9:9, 10:38, 16:24, 19:21; Mk. 2:14, 8:34, 10:21; Lk. 5:27, 9:23, 14:26, 18:22; Jn. 1:43, 8:12, 10:27, 12:26; etc.). So much of Christian history, I lament, has been to the effect of diminishing and belittling Christ in order to make ourselves more comfortable with him. A cognitive dissonance has assailed Christendom for much of its history, given its twin commitments (hardly Petrine!) toward both Christ and the world, to such an extent that when a spiritual genius like Marguerite Porete actually reneges on all things earthly and speaks of total annihilation in God, this is all a little much for the Church, and she who preaches unconditional love is soon aflame at the stake. What might a world look like where all Christians truly gave up the world? Where all understood—with the kind of obvious clarity present in various Buddhist traditions, for example—that this did not merely refer to shunning rock music, psychedelics, and swear words, but (far more meaningfully) to giving up our clinging to identities, allegiances, tribes; including that very Christian identity that prompts such a motion in the first place? Above all, the question that must urgently be put to every believer: how can we truly give up all to follow Christ if we refuse to give up our Christianity?

It is high time that we discarded the base impulses of clan warfare when trying to answer the question of what it means to be a Christian. The answer cannot merely be located in cultural allegiance, personal sentiment, or propositional assent. Rather, I contend that it is a matter of living freely after the universal God in the particular form of Jesus whereby we have known him, and all the infinite implications and associations that form evokes within us. The shibboleths do not flow so easily under this definition; the border patrols find it difficult to keep out and keep in, to erect clear walls of nationalist pride, to separate ‘me’ from ‘you’, ‘in’ camp from ‘out’ camp. Good. If Christian revelation is worth half its fee, it has nothing to do with walls; if it tells us anything about God, it tells us he is outside, trembling in the cold, knocking meekly and hoping that we will answer his pleas to enter. Dogmatism, being worldly, fearful, and miserly, marshals its identity with a resounding No; but religion truly lived is the open, vulnerable, and loving utterance of an eternal Yes.

1. John Scottus Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle: Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John, trans. Christopher Bamford (New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1990), 21.

2. Ibid., 23.

3. Ibid., 21.

4. Ibid.

5. We might, to let slip my own humble suggestions, even recognise the need for the odd loan word to fill in the blank, where the specifics of our inherited language might not efficiently guide us. A Sufi flush here; a Daoist daub there. We are always already syncretistic, after all; it would merely represent a lapse into that tired tribal scuffle were we to try to erect those exclusionary borders around the faith we once strained to discard.