Chiasmi of the Khristos: Word Above All Words

It seems that something has been knocked loose since last we spoke: indeed something was knocked loose in the very act of writing the last issue When Words Rear up and Roar in Your Face: the creative spirit that was lacking has returned and the poet has again found his Muse. As I was reflecting over the last issue, I thought of the thousands of ways in which words can be used, their connotations stretching their denotations further, metaphor and simile rendering them more flexible still. Yet it seemed to me that even beyond these standard usages, there was a way in which their usage could be further extended, a certain level of virtuosity employed with ordinary language, something like the musician on the verge of control, weaving now into the pulsing backbeat, now out, now above, now below, perpetually in control as he surfs the waves of sound, the poetry of wave and surfer. But perhaps the best description came to mind as I spontaneously penned a friend: “The wonderful thing about words is words are wonderful things. Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs. They’re bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy: fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. But the most wonderful things about words is I’m not limited to one.” (My subject title? “When Words Pounce.”) There does come a time in which the tops of words are made out of rubber and their bottoms of springs. (By the way, do you know what the rhetorical device is called that describes the crisscrossed symmetry of “the wonderful thing about words is words are wonderful things”? It is called a chiasmus [ky-AZ-mus], after the Greek letter chi we render as X, the same letter that begins the name of Christ [Khristos] and is seen in the IXΘYΣ set in the Christian ichthus symbol.)

On the subject of word play, I am reminded of a joke a friend sent recently regarding Mahatma Gandhi. As you probably know, this Indian holy man was rather frail, frequently barefoot, and observed a limited diet that unfortunately lent itself to bad breath, the one fact you probably were least likely to know. The anonymous author summed up all these attributes of Gandhi quite simply by noting that he was a “super callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.” Now ideally we need to have a bit of background knowledge to understand this humor, for had we never heard that silly song as a kid, we would have lost something of the flavor. So too, if we knew nothing of a certain striped tiger notorious for diving on his friends, we would lose something of the charm of the pouncing words. Yet I think that the fact these both appeal to the child and childlike says something about the nature of true creativity as well. It is a divine gift and it is not something we possess so much as something we learn to channel and unleash. There is a mindset in which these sorts of spontaneous displays of creativity come bubbling to the surface and rarely will this happen when we are uptight and caught up in the workaday world of the nine to five.

The same friend who sent me the collection of jokes featuring the one on Gandhi also sent me another paragraph she pulled out of a book she had been reading entitled Awareness written by Father Anthony de Mello. She told me that it reminded her of some of the thoughts shared in this last issue (When Words . . . Roar) and I believe she is correct. de Mello writes:

You see, there is a very close connection between the mystic, the artist, the seer, the visionary, and the ordinary man and woman of God. And what are these labels anyway? We are not ultimately talking about words, we are not concerning ourselves with titles as though they were badges of honor: we are talking about you and me and the way in which we live life, the way in which we approach the things that we do. It does not matter if God has given us the brush that paints the Mona Lisa or if He displays Himself quietly while we change the diapers on our newborn child: it is not about what we do, but about how we do it. It is, as the title of de Mello’s book indicates, a matter of consciousness, a spiritual awareness that can only be gotten by increasingly grasping that all things are possible to them that believe—without disclaimer or qualification. So then, I say again, it is not ultimately about words at all:

I believe this meditation precisely expresses the problem you and I often have when we approach Scripture. We often begin to read the words on the printed page and they become just that: words, words, words. But we forget to shake well: we forget that words are merely the containers of meaning, merely the shell upon which thought sits astride, merely the seed which must fall to the ground and die before it bears fruit, its ultimate destiny the flowering plant offering fragrance, beauty, and sustenance to all who happen by. We have been given the words of the Master, yes. But we have been given so much more than that: we have been given the very keys to His heart. Let us look more closely at this idea.

Recently a friend questioned me about Father Weinandy’s conception of God’s inability to suffer as we do (referring to the recent June 16, 2004, issue of Le Penseur Réfléchit), for there was at least one paragraph in particular that seemed contradictory to her. It is always harder to speak for another author when trying to elucidate a point clearly, but my attempts brought me to marvel anew at what Christ has accomplished for us. Perhaps an explanation is in order, my thoughts thankfully better organized now than what they were upon my first spontaneous attempt to cite what I believe is the merit of Weinandy’s argument.

For those who have been on this mailing list for any length of time, you have surely seen a philosophical side to my personality that frequently pokes out its head, likely to emerge at any point throughout the newsletter, perhaps peeking from out behind of this sentence or sticking out rather prominently at the beginning of that one. Indeed, it is my philosophical side that has often buoyed my faith through the dry and troubled seasons of doubt. So it was with Weinandy’s article for me.

You may recall in That Which is and the Negation of Nature, we examined some truths about what a “thing” was. Lenny Esposito of Come Reason was answering a skeptical letter on the idea of God “creating sin,” which, it was claimed, was implicit in the notion that God has created everything. Esposito pointed out to the skeptic that sin is not a “thing,” but the absence of a thing: the absence of our full human potential. He used the example of “cold” which does not exist in itself: it is a term we use to convey the conception of the lack of heat (energy). So too, a vacuum is not a “thing,” but the absence of matter in a given space. With this thought about a “thing” versus the absence of thing in mind, I turn to a quotation from C.S. Lewis:

So then, if God is entirely self-sufficient, wanting nothing, complete within Himself, and unchanging, then He necessarily cannot be the negation of those things: He cannot be needy, in want, incomplete within Himself, and given to change. And to be needy, in want, incomplete, and subject to change is not perfection, but the lack thereof: a subtraction from the possible, a negation of the thing. You may also recall in What is Justice? A Socratic Dialog that we went on a quest to understand the definition of justice in Plato’s Republic. We determined that you cannot logically define “justice,” as “the absence of injustice” as first Thrasymachus and then Glaucon attempt to do in their sophistic argument. Do you see what the difference is (as in our earlier example) between defining “cold” as “the absence of heat,” versus defining “justice” as “the absence of injustice”? Maybe it would help if we defined “heat” as “the absence of cold”? Do you see why this poses some problems? In the instance of “heat” being “the absence of cold” and “justice” being “the absence of injustice” we are defining the “thing” by “the lack of the thing.” But we could not possibly define the “thing” by “the lack of the thing” if we did not first know what the thing was! We are using the term in our definition, a form of circular reasoning. Yet with this technical bit of housework clearing the cobwebs from our head, are there not times in which using negative definitions helps to clarify meaning?

Suppose you and I once attended the same school. One day, several years later, we meet up again and settle into conversation. You are describing to me Sally, a girl I can’t quite recall. I say to you, “Oh, I think I know who you mean. She was the blonde girl who always wore sweaters to class, even when it was ninety degrees outside.” And you say, “No, she was the redhead who always sat on the right side in Greevner’s class.” Your “no” has helped clarify to me who Sally was not, helping me (it is hoped) to better remember who she was. So too, suggests Father Weinandy, when the Church Fathers sat down to hammer out a systematic theology of God, there were times in which it was useful to not only define God by the positive (what He is) but also by the negative (what He is not).

Sometimes, in our minds, the negation of a thing takes on as much solidity as the thing it negates, particularly in matters of morality. So it is not immediately obvious to us when Thrasymachus and Glaucon define “justice” as “the absence of injustice,” for we well know what injustice looks like. Concrete examples spring to our mind: the bully who mercilessly teases others on the playground, the rapist who pitilessly violates a man’s wife while he is forced to look on, the murderer who kills in cold blood and then calmly walks away as if nothing happened. In this fashion, sometimes it can be incredibly helpful to say of God that He is not sadistic or cruel, for we are thinking of a general sense of sadism or cruelty based on our observation and understanding of the concrete examples of people who lack moral virtue. Yet taken a level deeper, we would see that sadism and cruelty are two concepts that were first derived because we understood that they represented a moral deficit. We knew things weren’t supposed to be this way: we knew that they were wrong, and wrongness implies the knowledge of rightness: implies the knowledge of the good. (How can something be wrong if nothing is right?)

Now, let us again return to the idea of God and His suffering—or lack thereof. Father Weinandy holds up for examination the utter perfection of a God who is wholly other, wholly transcendent, separate from His creation, or, in Weinandy’s own words: “As Creator, God is intimately related to and cares for His good creation, particularly His chosen people, and yet, as Creator, He is not one of the things created, and is thus completely other than all else that exists.” With this view in mind, what then, inquires Father Weinandy, are we to make of suffering?

The bulk of suffering, as we understand the term, is the product of sin and brokenness, whether directly (in a one to one correspondence) or, and perhaps most often, indirectly (by the universal effects of a world into which sin has been introduced). But what is sin? We could correctly say it is a form of disobedience to God. But what is disobedience? “Dis” reverses, or negates, “obedience,” so “disobedience” is quite simply “the lack of obedience.” And what were the effects of disobeying a God who is wholly and utterly complete? Essentially, the effect was the shattering of the imago Dei, which in practical terms fragmented mankind, affecting his physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being in the form of sickness and death, sorrow, suffering, pain, and separation from God. The net effect on the wounded psyche was—and is—a pervasive insecurity, a sense of unworthiness, a nagging sense that something isn’t quite right. Who among us has never felt the feelings of insecurity, worthlessness, guilt, shame, and fear, even if we have not yet tasted of death and separation and the deeper sorrow that such things bring? This psychological instability is the shattering of the imago Dei into thousands of pieces, the curse we brought upon our own heads that culminates in our eventual death, and, had not provision been made, our second, spiritual death as well. The shattering of sin is our undoing, our brokenness, the taking away from the wholeness that once was, rendering us less, not more.

Father Weinandy is correct in distancing God from this kind of brokenness and the sorrow that results from it, for God cannot suffer what He has never lost. But my friend’s question about Weinandy’s article lingers on the minute we begin to try to determine the particulars of his theology as they would be fleshed out in the Incarnation of Christ. For there indeed was a provision made and the Creator stepped into the world wearing the skin of the creature; though sinless and utterly complete within Himself, He bore our sins and infirmities for us. This then—the Creator becoming the creature—is the paradox of paradoxes, and we will soon, as my friend implicitly noted, be forced to leave logic alone behind—but not just yet.

In the days of Constantine, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the debate concerning the nature of Christ came to a fore: was He fully God? Fully man? A mixture of both? What percentage of God was He? What percentage man? And so, in 325 A.D., Constantine called together a Council at Nicea. From this historical meeting emerged the ubiquitous Nicene Creed which attests that Jesus Christ is at once fully God and fully man in one flesh. But with this dogma firmly in place, how then did the two natures interact with one another? To be fully man implies limitation; to be fully God implies no limitation. Wouldn’t the unlimited God nature swallow up the limited man nature? If Christ was fully God and fully man as well, how then did the two natures co-exist with one another? Hoping to ensure unity in the Roman Empire, on October 8, 451, newly ascended Emperor Marcian called together a council at Chalcedon, near Constantinople (modern Istanbul). The discussions were rather animated at times, but by the 22nd of October a consensus was released known as the Chalcedon Creed, accepted today by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant churches. It states that the two natures of Christ were “without confusion, without conversion, without severance, and without division.” They did not conflict with another, take away from one another, could not be separated, and existed simultaneously in harmony with one another.

In “For Those Whom the Father Has Given,” the fifth episode of the five-part broadcast series Hard Sayings of Jesus, R.C. Sproul identifies one such controversy in which the dual nature of Jesus is called into question. The extended discourse of Jesus to His disciples in Matthew 24 reveals a strange admission in the thirty-sixth verse, in which Jesus states: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” The problem, suggests Sproul, is that the Trinity is collectively omniscient—all-knowing, if you prefer the term. And it is also clear from passages such as John 1:1 that what theologians call the Second Person of the Trinity was the Son Eternal from before the beginning of time. As the January 04, 2002, issue of Le Penseur Réfléchit reveals:

But in Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity is manifest in a new form, a form that our theologians have established is both fully man as well as fully God. The aspect that is fully God has always been a part of the Trinity; that aspect that is fully human was born in Bethlehem at the approximate year upon which our calendars hinge. So then, suggests Sproul, what are we to make of this claim of Jesus that not even the Son knows the day or the hour of His own return? If God knows everything and the Trinity is one, how then could the Son not know the day or the hour? But if the Son does know the day and the hour, then apparently He is lying, and to lie would fall short of utter perfection, something our Lord surely possessed. The dilemma is solved, Sproul believes, when we consider that there are two natures at work in Christ. There is the Son of God; there is also the Son of man. The Son of God has perfect knowledge, but, just as with the many prophets we encounter in the pages of our Bibles, He does not always reveal all He knows to humanity, though when He so chooses He can break in at any time. So too, apparently the Divine Nature of Christ—the Son of God—did not reveal this privileged knowledge to the human nature of Christ—the Son of man. Therefore, Christ, the man, was able to say with truthfulness and clarity that not even the Son of man knows the day or the hour upon which the Son of God will descend from the clouds in glory.

It is into just such a sticky mess that we are thrust when we start questioning whether God suffers, as Father Weinandy obviously does in our recent newsletter entitled, appropriately enough, Does God Suffer?. And his treatment of the topic is similar to Sproul’s, for he isolates the two natures. The nature of God cannot suffer from limitation of any type yet the suffering of Jesus can. And this is where we must leave our logic at the door, not because what we experience is illogical, but because it is the mystery of the ages and transcends all our attempts at logic. Do you see why such a statement is not illogical? As Kierkegaard points out to us in his critique of Hegelian dialectic, in order to reason, in order to have an “either/or” we must divide and contrast, splitting that which is into two, whether this be two camps, two classes, two degrees, two whatever it is that involves our focal point of logical analysis. If I say, “Either he is standing or he is sitting,” I have divided the total experience of the man in question into two divisions. I reason by rate of contrast. But what happens when all divisions, all “eithers” and “ors,” become the One? What happens when the halves come together to form the whole? Is there not that which transcends all divisions, that which is at back of all joining all together, that which unifies and includes all? Recall, as we have noted many times before, the ultimate choice is not between two things that are, but rather between that which is or that which is not: between the “thing” and the “no thing,” between “some thing” or “no thing”: between something or nothing. So to speak of nothing is to speak of nonsense: behind all that is (not that which is not), must exist a unifying something that transcends all divisions, all rates of contrast.

Now certainly I don’t imagine my friend had all of these ideas floating around in her mind when she framed her comments. But in our discussion about the ultimate mystery of Christ, she was reminded of the ultimate reason why Creator became creature. Leading up to this recollection of the ultimate reason, I had commented that, to me, the greatest mystery of all was found in the Incarnation, in the Creator becoming the creature, and if we could wrap our minds around that which is unlimited becoming limited without loss to itself, things such as whether (and if so, to what degree) God suffers are mere specks of froth in a vast ocean. The Apostle Paul so often spoke about the mystery of mysteries and he was anything but illogical! Rather, he had caught a glimpse of glory, of a unified whole that could not be separated, compared, and contrasted—only experienced, with gratitude.

The ultimate reason my friend supplied behind why the Creator became the creature was because of His limitless love: because He is love. And love lacks nothing, love transcends the halves of logic, love is whole, uniting all without diminishing itself. But I suspect there is a mystery to love that goes beyond any conceptual labels we could ever attach to it. Remember that words are “merely the shell upon which thought sits astride”; remember that we must grasp hold of our Master’s sentences and shake them until all the words fall off and only the essence remains. Words, in many ways, are the substance of logic: they limit, they elucidate, they illuminate, but in the end, they are merely signs along the roadside, symbols pointing to realities beyond themselves. But love? Love will never be captured entirely with words. It can only be experienced: only as He first loves us can we learn to love another. And His love can transform our lives, for love binds together all other virtues, giving consistency to our wisdom, purpose to our lives, meaning to our actions, and weight to our words. When my friend wrote to me of how all this reminded her of the ultimate reason the Creator became the creature, this spontaneous meditation emerged from the tips of my fingers:

I can’t think of a better way to end our discussion today, can you? If all our words were empowered by such love, we could then honestly say that “The wonderful thing about words is that words are wonderful things: their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs.” But of course, we would then have a whole new conception of exactly how filled with life such words really were for they would then come as close as ever words could to the thing itself: to life, and that more abundantly. If our lives were ever governed by such love, our words would all surely point to the one WORD from which all other words emanate, for “The WORD became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” There is no greater WORD than this.

“In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with God, and the WORD was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.”

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