"The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation." —Simone Weil
It can still sometimes take me by surprise when
it arrives, as it does, in the Divine Liturgy just before the anaphora, even
though I’ve heard it in that context for so many years. It changes the tone of
the service. Up until that point, we’ve addressed God in terms of repentance,
praise, or entreaty. Then, suddenly, we make this declaration that has the
uneasy feel of a loyalty statement.
I recited the creed aloud when I was
received into the Church by chrismation as part of that rite, and for a lot of
years I said it daily (it was among the morning prayers in the book I used—I wouldn’t have thought to add it to a rule of
prayer I came up with on my own). But
though I aimed to say it with conviction, that conviction had less to do with
understanding exactly what it meant than it did with my mostly sincere and
reasonable desire to adhere to what the Orthodox Church taught me. The fact is,
almost every statement in it raised more questions for me than it
answered. The further understanding of
its various elements I got through reading and later in seminary did nothing to
cure the sense of the ineffable that surrounded it. “Knowing” served only to
emphasize the impression of mystery.
Which
is why it always strikes me as odd when I hear the Nicene-Constantinopolitan
Creed used as an easy answer to a casual question along the lines of, “What do
you guys believe, anyway?” More than once I’ve heard the creed rattled off in
response to such a query with a kind of pride that the answer can be so
succinctly expressed. As though the speaker (most often one of us converts to
the Orthodox faith) is blithely certain of what he’s talking about, which I
believe simply cannot be true. Though
spouting off the creed is certainly a good way to end the conversation.
A quick trip through the creed can’t
do justice to my own complex relationship to it, but it can provide some random
examples of the kinds of impressions of truth and paradox that come up for me
when I say it. If you’re not interested
in these personal impressions, you can skip ahead to right after the “amen” on
page eight, where my conclusions begin.
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
“Believe,” per Webster’s 10th: “to accept as true, genuine, or real.” When I say I accept as true, genuine, or real
“one God,” is that a guard against the notion that more than one such entity might exist? As soon as I ask that question, I come up
against the notion of “exist.” A
creaturely category that even the some of the church fathers reasonably declare
God to be above or beyond. And God. A word for something (by no means
some “thing”) that is, as we continually declare, ineffable, inconceivable; a
word that stands in for this non-this.
The word, of course, does stand for something in itself, but we have to admit this “something” can’t be
described, and that it’s betrayed as soon as we open our mouths to say “he,”
“she,” or “it.” Negative terms are the least inaccurate: not evil, not circumscribed.
Positive terms are often almost pathetic. Like almighty. The thought of declaring God “almighty” makes me want to
chuckle. It’s like screaming that the sky’s blue. Apart from that, the language problem
continues. Wouldn’t this something also be above or beyond the category of “might”?
In
the midst of these paradoxes, I find it striking and touching to encounter the
simple, comforting-yet-radical image of God as “Father.”
Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things
visible and invisible.
God-as-creator ensures that the creation is good,
not some material evil in which we’re all trapped. But creation is another
difficult thing to get my head around. All things were made from a
preexisting…nothing? Was there only God and then God made something that was
not God? Then God is no longer
“eternally the same,” as we assert in the Liturgy. Or if he is indeed eternally
the same, then his creation must be coeternal or he would at some point have to
have become Creator. I really do
begin to come down on the side of Origen, who got in trouble for reasoning
something very much like that.
And in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God
With these words, we take our first steps into
the realm of the Trinity, that glorious, partially cataphatic notion by which
we mean that when we say the God-word, we’re not speaking of monad. Having just
spoken the word Father, we recognize
that we’re not going to be able to think of God as a supreme loving male parent
and leave it at that.
We
confess here the second person of the Trinity, calling this person “Son,”
though this sonhood doesn’t resemble any sonhood we’re familiar with in our
created existence. Though we identify
the Son as a person of the Trinity, we have to admit that the truth of “Father”
and “Son” here again points to something ineffable.
We
identify this second person of the Trinity with the man named Jesus, born
around 4 BC in the Roman province of Judea. It was this second person of the
Trinity who became a human being, rather than the others. I understand this to
safeguard the notion that each person of the Trinity is separate enitity, even
though each one reveals the other in some way, so that to know one is to know
something about the whole godhead.
This
One Lord Jesus is Christ, the one
anointed by God—“anointed,” meaning designated for a special purpose, of which
his is probably the most special purpose there ever was. And he is confessed as
“Lord,” a weird feudal term, it seems to me, but an admission of our complete
dependence upon him. We’ll declare so
much more about him in the lines ahead.
The Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before
all ages, Light of Light, True God of
True God, Begotten not made, of one essence with the Father, by whom all things
were made;
Is this where I’m supposed to sign and date? Now we’re getting into the part that really
does feel like a loyalty statement. This basically makes the person reciting
completely identify Jesus as God in every way, in case there was any question,
as there so often has been.
Who for us men and for our salvation came down
from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary and became
man.
The Virgin Mary is important because we can see
in her all the human race; she stands as its culmination. Perhaps she was the
first person who was really up to the task of bringing God into the world, I
don’t know. In any case, it’s a subtle declaration that this incarnation was an
act of cooperation between humanity and Divinity. Why the Holy Spirit has to be the person of
the Trinity involved in this can be added to the list of things I don’t get.
And was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate and
suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the
Scriptures.
So, in the time of this particular historical
figure (noted, I take it, to make sure we confess this to be in real time and not
some fairy tale) Jesus was executed in a horrible way, though he was presumably
the most innocent person there ever was. It’s almost like such a death was
inevitable when ultimate good met a world headed the other direction. In any case, it’s an image of God’s kenosis, self-emptying, which is indeed
a critically important thing to say about God. To me, it seems the most
important thing of all.
Then, on the third day after his
death, Jesus was discovered not to be in the tomb where he’d been placed. Why the “third day” thing has to be in the
symbol of faith baffles me. As though
the number of days between burial and discovery of evidence of his resurrection
has to be an article of faith. If I
claimed it was two days or fifty would it make any difference?
“According to the scriptures.” This means that
the whole thing was predicted throughout the history of Israel, though this is
basically 20/20 hindsight. If you look closely at the verses in the Old
Testament that are referred to in the New as predicting the events of Jesus’s
life, death, and resurrection, you mostly end up scratching your head. This is
another thing I don’t understand the necessity of confessing. Prophecies don’t make the Christ event any
more wonderful to me.
And ascended into heaven and sits at the right
hand of the Father; and He shall come again in glory to judge the living and
the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end.
Here’s the part that’s hardest for me to take
literally, and I suspect there are a range of ways people perceive it: “Ascent,” “right hand,” and such. Is it all symbolic? I certainly hope so. When it comes to saying
he will come again in glory, I start getting to the point where I can say, “I
don’t need him to do that.” What’s the point? Is there something else that
needs to be accomplished?
Here’s where I start to realize I prefer the
glory of this moment, whatever that glory is, rather than some glory in a time
yet-to-come. The idea that Christ is coming to judge me makes me angry. Not because he’d not be the perfect sort of
judge, but because I don’t want to live my life in fear of judgment. The reward and judgment is right here as I
type these words and drink my coffee. The notion of living in hope of future
reward—or in hope of avoiding punishment--feels horribly misguided to me.
It’s hard
to come up with an image of a last judgment that doesn’t feel a little
ridiculous (Jesus sitting at the Father’s prestigious right hand included.
Where’s the Holy Spirit in this?
Hovering? He/she/it unfortunately
doesn’t fit in any sort of image), and even if I can let go of any image, I
still find the concept difficult: God,
waiting till some future date to call us all before him and let us know if our
actions result in salvation or damnation.
If there’s a judgment of God, I perceive it to be something that happens
moment-to-moment.
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of
Life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is
worshipped and glorified, Who spoke by the prophets.
Here the Holy Trinity is now fully
expressed in three-ness (though St.
Basil told us not to count…). The feudal “Lord” language continues. “Proceeds from the Father”: here’s the point where a lot of Orthodox
swell from pride of correctness, knowing that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, not from both
Father and Son, as other Christians came to say it. The idea is, I believe, that the relationship
between each person of the Trinity is unique, thus you can’t use the same word
to refer to the relationship between each of them. That seems reasonable, I
suppose, but to consider believing it a requirement for salvation seems a lot
less reasonable. This gets to the point where I’d prefer the creed to say
something like: “I believe in the urgent necessity of putting oneself before
others,” or something else that seems more important.
And in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
This is part of the creed that’s easiest to
unpack for a church school class.
“Apostolic” means that this goes back to the apostles, and it means that
the Church takes on the role of apostle (one who is sent) to the world. Does
the “one” mean what we identify today as the Orthodox Church, and if so, does
it include all jurisdictions? Or can I
dare to think of “church” as something not so easy to point at, as a virtual
community of Christians of good will, and then, perhaps, of all people of good will? And aren’t we all. The boundaries of this One Holy Catholic and
Apostolic church are difficult for me to locate.
I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of
sins.
This may be the hardest statement for me of all,
the one I can agree with least at face value, and then after face value as
well. Even if you assert that the rite of entry into the Christian community makes
sins go away (which I don’t believe), everyone admits that sins happen every
moment after this baptism and that repentance is possible. And “sin” is referred to as if we all know
what that means.
I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the
life of the world to come.
Anyone who denies the multiplicity of
possibilities inherent in that last statement is a liar.
Amen.
The Creed contains no unambiguous statement, no
declaration that doesn’t raise more questions than it answers. The parts of it that resonate with truth for
me are balanced against the parts that don’t. But then, it seems appropriate
that a handful of words can’t contain the experience of God. I’m compelled to marvel at it, to look beyond
or within it (or both)—but not to swell with confidence that I’ve somehow
pronounced a definition that’s completely satisfying and that does away with
any need to go further. The practice of
rattling it off as a shorthand version of “what we believe” is revealed to be
absurd the moment I consider doing it, and the Simone Weil quote I used for an
epigraph starts to make great sense: I’m led to regard the creed as an object
of contemplation.
The
creed contains some of our basic agreements of things that can be said about
God, but I can’t imagine any of the fathers who worked to formulate it took it
to be a comprehensive explanation of
reality. Surely they understood the
experience of God to be beyond or above any word or concept, and that words or
concepts would naturally be transcended by anyone who approached God with
sincerity. Yet, paradoxically, they
found that words mattered, and mattered urgently. That the words were meant to
be transcended made them more rather than less important. If words can’t describe God, they are still
powerful symbols capable of setting us in God’s direction, like a rudder guides
a boat. And there can be words that
purport to point us toward God but that don’t do so at all, and which can thus
be considered untrue. I take the creed
to be a corrective to that most pernicious species of untrue words, providing
us with a configuration of words truly capable of setting us on the infinite
path that leads God’s direction--words that can, in that sense, be considered
true. It must have been a daunting
task for the fathers, not only because the language had to be so carefully
considered, but because no matter how
careful they were with them, there was no way to prevent the words from being perceived in ways that compromised
their truth. They probably knew the
words could become quite untrue if
clung to as ends in themselves.
St.
Isaac of Syria, writing several centuries after the creed was finalized, said
that “One can only have a simple knowledge of God, beyond all words, ideas,
colors, pictures, or names, and this ignorance
is greater than all knowledge.” Yet
he probably said the creed as often as any of us do today, and I’m sure he
found no contradiction in doing so. I
have to suspect he’d have found himself in agreement with Simone Weil. When the
words of the creed are regarded as definitions beyond which one need look no
further, they become, ironically, like idols that stand in the way of God. But when they are regarded as objects of
contemplation, as gateways to the paradox appropriate to experiencing God, they
vibrate with life. To transcend the words is neither to reject nor to surpass
them. In transcending them, we can only
regard them with greater gratitude and awe.
They are capable of leading us to that experience of God that St. Isaac
so wonderfully called “ignorance,” but they can do that only if the temptation
to make idols of them is avoided.
“The
great sin remains idolatry,” Thomas Merton once wrote, “and there is an
idolatry of concepts as well as of
graven images.” It’s a truth I come up
against in myself every day. The
tendency toward idolatry hovers around words and concepts of every kind, but
potent words like those of the creed are particularly susceptible to it. It’s just so much easier to stop at words,
pretending that the words themselves tell us everything we need, than it is to
live with the paradoxes that inevitably arise from them. It’s easier to do that
than it is to come up against the fact that truth leads to paradox. The problem
with the kind of idolatry that arises
from taking this easy way out is that it can seem quite innocent, both to those
of us guilty of it and those of us who observe it. It masquerades as “faith” or
as humble trust in a greater wisdom, but it is neither of those things, and its
effects are pervasive. It closes our eyes and hardens our hearts toward any
truth we perceive to be a challenge to the words to which we’ve attached
ourselves. And maybe worse, to regard with pity, fear, or suspicion our
brothers and sisters who might seem to present a challenge to them. I see this kind of idolatry as the
explanation for every form of fundamentalism in every realm of life,
“religious” and otherwise. It’s a mental compromise that infects our hearts and
flows into our acts. I would go so far as to say that idolatry cuts off the
compassion that arises naturally, virtually unconsciously, from the honest
encounter with the other, and replaces it with conscious acts that imitate
compassion. I’m of one mind with Merton
in identifying idolatry as the great sin.
Idolatry surrounded the creed from the
beginning—contemporary accounts reveal the population getting worked up over
some of its finer points as passionately as football fans for their teams. There was never a golden age when everyone
was immune to the trap of words. And idolatry is of course not limited to the creed; it arises any time
we put a concept in the place of God.
But our relationship to the potent words of the creed is a particularly
useful place to observe it. For me, the
good news is that when I understand and acknowledge the limitations of words
and the ease with which they can be taken as ends in themselves, I can begin to
see their genuine utility: they truly can lead us toward God. Seeing that, gratitude arises in me for the
creed, and for the other such light-bearing words all around us. And gratitude
arises for the fathers who struggled to come up with the words. Though I must suspect the participation in
the process of that aspect of God to which we’ve assigned the words Holy Spirit. It’s hard to imagine we’d
have been able to come up with the creed all on our own.
The creed stops me in my tracks. None
of its words provide a resting place for my mind or heart, but I’m compelled to
remain there with them, neither “solving” the paradoxes that arise from them
nor retreating from them either, confronted by the fact that the pursuit of
truth inevitably leads to paradox, and
that the embrace of the paradox is where God is met. By setting me in that God-ward direction, the
creed leads me toward the kind of knowledge of God that St. Isaac saw and could
only describe as ignorance. I’m rendered
speechless, as is appropriate. If it
weren’t for the fact that I see the proclivity toward idolatry within me and
all around me, there would be no need to say another word about it.
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