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War on Ash Wednesday: A Brief Christological reflection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Michael Hanby
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Extract

At perhaps no time in recent memory has the temptation to hopelessness been so great or the relative powerlessness of most of the world’s humanity so obvious. As I sit to write this essay, safely complicit in the “protection” afforded by the world’s richest and most powerful nation and yet strangely imprisoned by it, we appear to be careening ineluctably toward war—or escalating an ongoing war largely invisible to the public eye—against a country half of whose population is under the age of fifteen. Vast opposition in the United Nations is greeted with incredulity and incomprehension by President Bush on our half-willing behalf, and massive protests worldwide are countered simultaneously with piety about the blessings of free expression and an indifference which shows that such liberty is countenanced, such displays encouraged even, because sovereign power and a bland pluralism of purely private opinion have drained these expressions of any weight. This impotence is what we have learned to call freedom. In Washington, war protesters dutifully apply for permits to register their dissatisfaction. Could there be a clearer example of modern democracy’s ingenious capacity to domesticate dissent simply by permitting and embracing it?

It is particularly appropriate, as we are plunged helplessly and headlong into war, that we are also invited by the Ash Wednesday liturgy and the season which it announces to contemplate this powerlessness, to offer sacrifices of repentance worthy of it, by dwelling on the fact and meaning—or perhaps the meaninglessness— of our deaths. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 84 , Issue 986 , April 2003 , pp. 168 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Hans, Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Puschale: The Mystev of Easter, translated by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 168Google Scholar.

2 II Cor. 5.21. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God.”

3 See Carolyn, Marvin and David, W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Hag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. For a fuller theological critique of American civil religion in the light of Augustine’s City of God, as well as a fuller explication of the Trinitarian and Christological position articulated here, see my forthcoming article: Michael, Hanby, “Democracy and its Demons,” in Kim, Paffenroth, Kevin, Hughes and John, Doody (eds.), Augustine and Politics (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 Phil. 2.8.

5 Lk. 4.28.

6 Lk. 6.11.

7 Herbert, McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), p. 97Google Scholar. Though there are obvious and profound differences which it is not my concern to sort out, my account is also influenced by Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, pp. 112-17 and John Milbank, “Christ the Exception,” available at http://www.ctinquiry.orglpublications/milbank.htm.

8 Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, p. 114.

9 Lk. 23.47.

10 Lk. 9.22, See Mk. 8.33, Mt. 16.21.

11 Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII. 11.15. For an important new interpretation that frees St. Anselm from the burden of this sort of propitiation account, see David B. Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo,” Pro Ecclesia 7 (Summer, 1998), pp. 333-49.

12 Jürgen, Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 23Google Scholar.

13 “To replace the phrase ‘the Impassible suffers’ with ‘the Passible suffers’ immediately purges the suffering of all incarnational significance.” Thomas Weinandy’s explication of Cyril of Jerusalem’s Christology relative to the question of impassibility is helpful here. See Thomas, G. Weinandy, Cap, O.F.M.., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), pp. 204-05Google Scholar.

14 “[A]ll infidelity to the divine image that man bears in him, every breach with God, is at the same time a disruption of human unity.” Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, translated by Lancelot Sheppard and Sister Elizabeth Englund OCD (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), p. 33.

15 See my Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003). pp. 47-55.

16 See Augustine, City of God, IV. 15.

17 Commenting on the sacrificial theology of the Letter to the Hebrews, John Howard Yoder notes, “It is not that he is a better victim because he is a divine victim, but he is a better priest because it is himself that he gives.” Yoder, Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002), p. 119.

18 Herein lies the real problem with Moltmann’s understanding; it renders God finite. He writes, “In order to be completely itself, love has to suffer. It suffers from whatever contradicts its own nature” The Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 33. But the fullness of God is not a thing to be opposed; it is beyond contradiction. Failure to see that can only result in a dialectic that grants providential purpose to evil and thus aids and abets a secular economy of sacrifice.

19 For a wonderful interpretation of the continuity between Jesus’ temptations in the desert, Gethsemane, and his arrest, see John, Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Behold the Man! Our Victorious Lamb (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). pp. 45-48Google Scholar.

20 Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII.13.17.

21 Ez. 18.32.

22 Jn. 17.5, Eph. 1.4. Thomas’ conclusion, that God created a multitude of creatures because no one could give adequate expression to the divine goodness, is important for this understanding. The resurrection is central to an “aesthetics of the cross,” and aesthetics are central to its meaning. The resurrection is God’s refusal to let our sin mar the beauty of his creation. His “pointless” self-giving affirms his delight in that beauty. See Aquinas, ST I, 47, resp.

23 Augustine, De Doct. I.4 ... 4; see also De Trin., VI.10.12. I would argue that it is in the context of this eternal delight that we should interpret the testimony of 2 Peter 1.16 to the Transfiguration and the Father’s joy in the Son at Jesus’ baptism. Jesus’ obedience and submission in the Jordan and on Calvary are the consequence and expression of this delight and only the “cause” of it to the extent that they manifest the eternal glory of the Son, the eternal delight of the Father-an analogue to the Son’s “causing” the Father simply in being the Son and an indication that Father and Son are terms of relation. For once again, only this delight supplies a “motive” for the incarnation, though D.C. Schindler rightly argues that delight contains an element of novelty, of surprise, that is irreducible to “motive” and yet not arbitrary. This is because delight entails the intrinsic “coaction” of consent. See Schindler, “Freedom Beyond our Choosing: Augustine on the Will and its Objects,” in Augustine and Politics (forthcoming), op cit.

24 Matt, 27.51, Luke 23.45.

25 Jn. 11.51-52.

26 See Augustine, De Civ., X.6. “Since, therefore true sacrifices are works of mercy shown to ourselves and to our neighbours, and done with reference to God; and since works of mercy have no object other than to set us free from misery and thereby to make us blessed; and since this cannot be done other than through that good of which it is said, ‘It is good for me to be very near to God’:it surely follows that the whole of the redeemed City—that is, the congregation and fellowship of the saints—is offered to God as a universal sacrifice for us through the High Priest who, in his Passion, offered even Himself for us in the form of a servant, that we might be the body of so great a Head.” Augustine cites Ps. 73.28 and Phil. 2.7.

27 Ps. 51.18, the recitation of which is a staple of the Ash Wednesday liturgy.

28 I Cor. 1.25. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

29 See Ps. 17.10, KJV, though admittedly I have not placed us in the position of the Psalmist.

30 Isa. 58.4. See 58.1-12.

31 Gillian Rose, who served as a consultant to the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz, drew the following conclusions after witnessing the sad spectacle of American Holocaust museums engaged in a bidding war for the last wooden barracks from Auschwitz-Birkenau. “The Holocaust has become a civil religion in the United States, with Auschwitz as the anti-city of the American political community.” Counter-identification with this anti-city, reinforced through countless productions of the military-entertainment complex, then justifies the accumulation of power, once again demonstrating the Augustinian insight that imperial power is dependent upon the evil it claims to deplore. (See pgs. 42-50 for a devastating critique of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in this regard; one could add Saving Private Ryan in the interim.) See Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 26-31.

32 Isa. 58.12.

33 The “regret” of virtue, or the entailment of grief within theological virtue, I take to be the conclusion of Augustine’s arguments against the sufficiency of pagan virtue in De Civ., XIV.8-9 and XIX.4. Consider how this argument applies to war at XIX.7.

34 For an account of how this understanding would affect the Christian conception of just war, see my “Democracy and its Demons” op cit.