An incoherent mediation on Easter

UPDATE: The Guest (referred to in the body of this post) does much clarifying (surely nobody is surprised that he found it "a bit hard to recognize myself in your essay") here and here. I forbid you to read this post without reading the Guest's response, and I mean that quite seriously.

UPDATE: And I finally came close to saying what I wanted, in WAY fewer words, here. Probably you might as well skip this groping and incoherent post and get the distilled version.

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The thing about Easter is that Gethsemane is part and parcel of it. The New Testament ties Christ’s glory directly to His suffering...and then it goes on to tie our glory to suffering.

...he humbled himself and became obedient, even to death on a cross. For this reason God has exalted him and given him the name that is above every name...

...I consider that our present sufferings are not worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed in us... ...continue reading...

...we will share in his glory, if so be that we share in his sufferings...

...I fill up in my body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ...

...they rejoiced that they had been counted worthy to share in the sufferings of Christ...

I have a Jewish friend whose value is above rubies; he has a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of Christianity than I can ever hope to have of Judaism, along with a generosity of spirit and humility that I find admirable in the highest degree. It is fascinating to me to see how the teachings of Christianity are reflected in the prism of my friend’s emotional reactions, which of course are quite different from my own in many respects – under ordinary circumstances the emotional reactions you get from non-Christians have actually very little to do with Christian doctrine because they are usually emotional reactions to something that your non-Christian friend thinks is Christian doctrine but in fact is not. To know a person of high character and good will who is not a Christian but whose emotional reactions to Christian doctrine are genuinely reactions to the actual doctrines themselves...well, if you are yourself a Christian then I hope that in your life you find even a single such friend, so that you can see yourself and religion from the outside, with both clarity and charity.

My friend (the “Guest at the Feast”) and I both comment frequently over at Alexandra von Maltzen’s salon of a blog, and some time ago he said in passing something along the lines of how he thought God was merciful enough not to require "the awful sacrifice of himself," or "the abhorrent sacrifice of himself," or something along those lines -- I don't remember the exact words but clearly the Guest feels revulsion toward the idea of the crucifixion as sacrifical atonement. I started to write up a refutation but refutation doesn’t often do either party much good and instead I decided to live, if I could, in his emotions for a while, to try to bring into focus what was the emotional disagreement rather than the factual one. Of course I doubt I really felt what my friend felt, but I could at least do him the honor of trying.

(Let me emphasize here that this is the first the Guest has heard about this -- I have a long list of things I'd love to hear the Guest talk about and this was pretty far down the list, and I hadn't gotten around to raising this particular subject with him. So you certainly ought not hold the Guest responsible for the feelings I attribute to him; they are the product of my imagination and probably he doesn't really feel that way at all. His casual remark was my point de depart, that's all; and this meditation is about Easter and suffering and hope, not really about the Guest.)

As I settled in, I found my thoughts running in familiar channels, for of course this is hardly the first time a non-Christian friend has expressed the opinion that the God of Christianity is an insufficiently merciful God, as a truly merciful God would not exact such a horrific revenge before agreeing to overlook sin. I have never known how to communicate effectively that the Christian God is simply a more extreme God than the God my non-Christian friends seem to imagine. The God of Christianity (biblical Christianity, I mean, not Jack Spong’s God of Ultimate Political Correctness) is a terrible, terrifying God: He is a God Who wipes out practically the whole human race at a stroke in a flood, Who swallows the evil in earthquakes, Who orders the Israelites to commit genocide because of the detestable practices of the doomed culture, Who strikes a man dead simply because he puts his hand on the Ark of the Covenant to steady it or simply because he claims to be donating the entire price of a field when he’s only donating most of it, Who curses the entire human race for the choices of a single man and a single woman, Whose Angel of Death kills the firstborn of all Egypt, Who rains fire and brimstone upon Sodom, Who hands His own people over to conquest and oppression because they defy His Law, Whose holiness is so intolerable that even Moses and Elijah must hide their faces from His glory lest they be consumed, and that Isaiah finds that a burning coal on his theretofore unclean lips is less torment than the sight of the Lord, the King of Glory. The Guest, as well as most of my casually semi-religious Gentile friends who say things like “I believe in the New Testament God of love, not the Old Testament God of wrath,” seems to me not so much to underestimate how evil the human race is, as to underestimate how blazing and all-consuming is God’s holiness – and that His holiness is intrinsic to His nature and not something He can choose to set aside. The Passion and the Atonement make no sense unless you see that God Himself faced an intolerable dilemma because He cannot choose to be other than He is; and His holiness (for reasons beyond my understanding) requires atonement on the scale of His holiness; any atonement we could offer falls as far short of the atonement His holiness requires as our own holiness falls below His. Our God is a consuming fire, and dreadful it is to fall into His hands.

Yet, as even those with only a passing acquaintance of Christianity know, our faith says that His love blazes as intolerably hot as His holiness. If God were not so holy, then He would have no dilemma; he could be merciful in the sense that so many of my non-Christian friends think He should be: he could simply say, “I love you so I’m going to overlook the sin.” But...would it help for me to say that His holiness consumes us not because He chooses to consume us but because we simply cannot tolerate it? “The gates of Hell,” says (I think) Charles Williams, “are locked on the inside.” The sun might as well try to choose to allow us to live on its surface.

And if God did not love us so, then there would also be no dilemma; He could simply discard us. But He is that holy, and He does love us that much; and so God Himself makes the atonement and makes of Himself the bridge. But my point is that what my non-Christian friends see as a God who loves less than they think he ought (why would a loving God insist upon such unnecessary suffering?), is really a God who is holier than they can begin to imagine. He loves more, not less, than they think is necessary; but He is holier than they even begin to suspect.

Well, that was the refutation I would have written. But I was trying to feel, not refute; and so I tried to set that aside and simply feel. And when I did, what I found in my heart was – as emotions are wont to be for me – hard to express. But I think it is something like this:

I did find the sacrifice horrible, and yet at the same time I found it beautiful. But my friend does not, I think, find anything about it even remotely beautiful, only repulsive. I suddenly remembered Christopher Hitchens’s opinion that The Passion of the Christ was one long sadofest, and I remembered how if you start talking about how suffering can be a good thing the ordinary American agnostic (though not, I think, my friend the Guest) will instantly think, “sadomasochism.” Or else you try to say that suffering can be a good thing and they think you are downplaying the suffering, as if somehow you thought the suffering wasn’t really all that bad.

But the revolutionary force of Easter is not just that the suffering is turned to glory. It’s certainly nice to be told, when you’re in pain, “It’s all going to turn out okay” – at least if the person who tells you is someone you can believe. “I hope so,” we say; and if we have a passing familiarity with Christian doctrine or the New Testament we remind ourselves that hope is one of the three Theological Virtues. But how can I explain that Christian “hope” is something very much deeper than the mere crossing our fingers and hoping things will get better? Easter doesn’t just say that suffering ends in glory. It says that suffering is itself part of the glory; it is the very seed and embryo of the glory; and without the suffering the glory is never born. Easter cannot be separated from Gethsemane. We say, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” and that is true, but it is only a minor variation on the great central theme running throughout the Great Symphony. The drops of blood that fell in Gethsamane or that ran down Jesus’ brow to fall at the foot of the cross, were the seed of the Resurrection.

Dorothy Sayers has said – quite truthfully, in my experience – that you can tell the people who genuinely love Dante simply by asking them what is their favorite part of The Divine Comedy. In fact let me quote the first paragraph of her introduction to the Purgatorio:

Of the three books of the Commedia, the Purgatorio is, for English readers, the least known, the least quoted – and the most beloved. It forms, as it were, a test case. Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand...Press him, rather for an intelligent opinion on the Ship of Souls and Peter’s Gate; on Buonconte, Sapìa, and Arnaut Daniel; on the Prayer of the Proud, the theology of Free Judgement, Dante’s three Dreams, the Sacred Forest, and the symbolism of the Beatrician Pageant. If he cannot satisfy the examiners on these points, let him be to you as a heathen man and a publican. But if he can walk at ease in death’s second kingdom, then he is a true citizen of the Dantean Empire; and though he may still feel something of a stranger in Paradise, yet the odds are he will come to it in the end. For the Inferno may fill one with only an appalled fascination, and the Paradiso may daunt one at first by its intellectual severity; but if one is drawn to the Purgatorio at all, it is by the cords of love, which will not cease drawing till they have drawn the whole poem into the same embrace.

Ms. Sayers lists several possible explanations for the general modern neglect of the Purgatorio, but I think that for Americans at least the deepest explanation is one that she does not put forward as such, though her commentary elsewhere helps throw it into sharp relief. Americans, I think, find the Purgatorio perverse (or would if they read it) because it seems sadomasochistic: the souls in Purgatory embrace and apparently rejoice in their suffering. To quote Ms. Sayers again:

It has been well said by a great saint [St. Catherine of Genoa] that the fire of Hell is simply the light of God as experienced by those who reject it; to those, that is, who hold fast to their darling illusion of sin, the burning reality of holiness is a thing unbearable. To the penitent, that reality is a torment so long and only so long as any vestige of illusion remains to hamper their assent to it: they welcome the torment, as a sick man welcomes the pain of surgery, in order that the last crippling illusion may be burned away...Purgatory is the resolute breaking-down, at whatever cost, of the prison walls, so that the soul may be able to emerge at last into liberty and endure unscathed the unveiled light of reality. To this end:

...heavenly justice keeps desire
Set toward the pain as once ’twas toward the sin.

...One consideration alone sets limits to the generous friendliness of the Penitent, and even for this they abound in polite apology. If Dante is (as always) disposed to linger in conversation, it is not now Virgil but the shades who urge him on his way...Every moment spared to Dante is a distraction from the blissful pain (“I call it pain; solace, I ought to say”) – a distraction which, even for charity’s sake, must not be prolonged out of measure. Dallying is a postponement of beatitude; even, in a sense, a robbery of God, who looks for the home-coming of his own. “Zeal to be moving goads us so that stay we cannot”; “Now go; I am reluctant to allow thy longer stay; thy presence stems my tears”; “Time’s precious, and I make too long delay”; thus they excuse themselves....That is the mark of Purgatory, the thing which Hell cannot understand...Their desire is turned to the torment as aforetime to the sin; they suffer no coercion but their own unwavering will: “my heart is fixed, O Lord, my heart is fixed.”

I am not trying to turn this into a treatise on Dante, or even to convince you to read him (though I can think of no better Lenten reading than the Purgatorio, with Sayers’s indispensable commentary and in her unexcelled translation for those of us who have forgotten our Italian). But what struck me is that Hitchens would surely react to the Purgatorio in precisely the same terms that he reacted to The Passion of the Christ: “sadomasochism.” He would see in the Christian attitude to the pains of Purgatory – indeed, in the entire Christian attitude toward suffering – the marks of sexual perversion.

The Guest will, someday, tell me how he actually feels about all this, I hope; but I had by this time stopped trying to put myself in his shoes and was exploring my own emotional world. And as I compared the charge of sadomasochism to what my own feelings actually were, a penny dropped. We say that sadomasochism is a sexual perversion, and by this we mean that sex is a good thing but that sadomasochism twists it into an evil direction. But I have just realized that it is the curse of our post-Freudian age that it sees sexuality in everything. And the man who pursues suffering because he finds in suffering sexual ecstacy has not merely corrupted the good of sex. He has also corrupted the good of suffering. The modern man cannot see a person rejoicing in suffering without thinking “sadomasochism” because he can hardly imagine a pleasure that is not sexual, that’s true to a certain extent; but the deeper truth is that he cannot imagine that there is really any good in suffering and therefore thinks rejoicing in suffering must be a sign of something terribly wrong in a person’s psyche; and Freud has taught us all to think that if something’s wrong with somebody it probably comes down to sex.

Yet the Christian virtue of hope is the settling into our heart of the conviction not only that Easter was not a lie, but that Gethsemane and the Cross were not optional features of Easter; that the Passion and the Resurrection are one inseperable and terrible and glorious act; that suffering is the seed of glory; that God Himself chose as the path to glory the Via Dolorosa – for it was the only path. It is true that sex is good; it is also true that suffering is good – not pleasureable, by any means, and not good in itself without reference to the fruit it bears; but good because God has redeemed human suffering on the Cross and every tear we shed can be drawn into his suffering and thus ultimately flower into glory unimaginable. Sadomasochism says that orgasm is good and suffering is good because suffering brings orgasm. Christians say that sex is good and that suffering is also, in a mystery, good, but that sadomasochism is a perversion of both. The Hitchensian agnostic hears the Christian say that one should rejoice in suffering even as one recognizes that it is indeed suffering and that it is terrible and painful, and the agnostic says, “Masochism!”

But that is only because the agnostic is on the wrong side of the Cross -- and of the empty tomb.

UPDATE: My apologies to the Guest for dragging him into this without warning...

UPDATE: Welcome to ATB'ers. I'm not very happy with this post, to tell the truth; so I'd sort of rather you read this one. For one thing it's shorter...

Oh, and don't miss North by Northwest's exceptionally insightful comment leading off the ATB discussion, which comment is better than anything I said in all my rambling.