cover - richard majormuslim to say, as the prayer book does, that it is god’s nature to have...

r [email protected] / Trinity Sunday , 30v10

Cover: François de Nomé, Fantastic Ruins with Saint Augustine and the Child(1623), now in the National Gallery, London; http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/francois-de-nome-fantastic-ruins-with-saint-augustine-and-the-child

Mass: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Missa Papæ Marcelli

Offertory: Alec Wyton, ‘The Vision of Isaiah’:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne,

high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings;

with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet,

and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said,

Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory.

And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.

Gospel: John xvi12-15

I HAVE YET MANY THINGS to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeitwhen he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for heshall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak:and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive ofmine, and shall shew it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine:therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you.

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WO BILLION CHRISTIANS LIVE on this astonishing planet. This week all ofus are celebrating the doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity.i And withtoday, Trinity Sunday, we reach the final mountain-top of the Church

year, the core of Christian belief, the hidden heart of the Faith. T

Why is it hidden? There are no secrets in Christianity. Anyone whowants can read all about the Blessèd Trinity in any encyclopædia. Nonetheless,the doctrine remains hidden from non-believers. It sounds to them like a sterileabstraction. They cannot understand how the doctrine of the Trinity dances inour minds like a flame, dazzling, burning us with a joy we can hardly bear.

It’s this dazzling, burning sensation I want to talk about. If our rules of engagement allowed me to preach for a couple of hours,

then I would pour forth things for hours about the Trinity: instead of a sermonyou’d have to hear a little encyclopædia. For the doctrine of the Trinity is ourcentral doctrine, and so its truths run off in every direction.

For instance: that beautiful saying, God is love. What does it mean? It’s notjust a fancy way of saying God loves, that He loves us, for instance. It meanswhat it says: that He is in Himself love. There is within the divine nature thelove of the Father for the Son, begetting and delighting in what is begotten; thelove of the Son for the Father, of the Spirit for Both. Unless God had revealedto us that He is a Trinity, it would be meaningless for us to say God is love.ii

I could go on for hours and tell you why the universe is as it is.Everywhere we look we see worlds within worlds. Everything is intoxicatinglyvast, fantastically ornate, roaring with energy, wildly balanced: a trillion trillionspinning parts held together by reason and order. Why? Why is every dandelionfashioned with as much invention as a symphony? Why is every atom complexas a little cosmos? Because God built that weed and that atom; and God is botha Unity and a complexity. He is intricate within Himself. The whole universebears the stamp of His Unity and Complexity. The doctrine of the Trinityexplains physics, biology, cosmology – and also, incidentally, the fantasticcomplexity of the human mind.

Here’s something else it explains. Do you know why there is suchantagonism between Muslims and Christians – why we’ve been at war, on andoff, for fourteen centuries? The chaps at C.N.N. and the Washington Post and theNew York Times never say, because they haven’t got a clue. This is why: Islam is aChristian heresy, a vast protest movement against the doctrine of the Trinity.There were plenty of decent people who in the first seven centuries recoiledfrom the extremities of the Christian claim. They wanted to tone down thefour-limbed, crucified God; they wanted to evade the eternal Threeness ofGod. And the most powerful of the anti-Trinitarian heresies did not arise

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within Christianity. It arose way out in the desert, beyond Christianity, and isfull of the fierceness and sadness of the desert.iii It is called Islam, and itsessence is the great cry God is but one God, utterly remote is He. Far be it from Him inHis glory that He should have a son.iv There’s something frank and noble about thatcry. Islam is never to be mentioned without a certain respect. Nonetheless,Islam is essentially Christianity minus the Trinity, thus Christianity minus theIncarnation. The Muslim God is the Christian God minus love: it is perfectlymeaningless within Islam to say God is love. God is not anything to the Muslim.He may act mercifully, but we can never know why: it is meaningless for aMuslim to say, as the Prayer Book does, that it is God’s nature to have mercy.God has no nature. God is unknowable, unseen, solitary, without attribute,impenetrably wise, ruling the universe by inexplicable decrees.v He is ‘utterlyremote’, and cannot possibly permeate the mental as physical realms, asChristians say the Spirit does. And so Islam has been a desolating influence onhuman happiness for over a thousand years.

Again, do you know why political systems in the Christian world are socomplicated? Because our civilisation is founded on the doctrine of the BlessèdTrinity, whether people realise it or not. We have a prejudice in favour ofenergetic distinctions, paradoxical arrangements, deputations, intricate divisions– constitutions, in other words. The Muslim, believing in the utter solitude andimpenetrable Oneness of God, is moved by stark simplicity, on earth as inheaven. The Muslim likes absolute government. He likes fixed rules ofconduct. His mosque is a serene barrenness of geometric design, blue on blue.But Western governments are a clamour of competing rights, mysteriousmovement, convoluted power.vi

Look around you: this church, like every church in Christendom, is a riotof all possible colours and shapes. Even the carvings have carvings, everydrape of every vestment is embroidered. The fabric is busy with scores offaces, in paint and glass and stone. Why? Because our civilisation and ourpolitics, as well as our religion, are founded on the fact that God is complex.He is not simple. He is a Trinity.

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But enough of that. Since this is a sermon and not an encyclopædia, I want totalk about just thing this Trinity Sunday. I want us to take a subjective tack. Iwant us to consider not the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, but what we feelabout the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity.

You’ll tell me that feelings are never that important in the ChristianFaith. And of course you’re right. The bits of us that matter most are our

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minds and our wills. Our emotions are less important because they’re lessintegral. Our emotions largely depend on what is happening, what we’ve justseen or heard or (especially) what we’re eaten. They are not under our control,and we will never grow up until we free ourselves from our moods.

Yes: but there is one emotion, a very unusual emotion, that is ofparticular interest to the Christian – especially today. It’s the emotion inspired(most of all) by thinking about the Holy Trinity. We occasionally feel thisemotion now, in this lifetime. In eternity we’ll experience it without pause,forever, because we shall never stop thinking about the Holy Trinity. So today,Trinity Sunday, we may as well get used to it.

Today’s a rehearsal for eternity. This is the only Sunday of the year whenwe’re not pondering the action of God. We’re not thinking about how Godcreated us, nor how He loves us, nor how He became a Man for us, and diedand rose, nor how He orders the struggle of our lives. We are thinking aboutGod. We are contemplating what He is in Himself: we are looking toward thedazzling Threeness-and-Oneness that was before time or matter began. Ineternity, after every struggle is over, God is what we will think of, and eternityshall seem to us like a endless Trinity Sunday, burning forever with thisparticular emotion.

How can I describe it?One of the cleverest men who ever lived, St Augustine, wrote a book

called on the subject of the Blessèd Trinity , De Trinitate.vii It’s a brilliant book,it’s pretty much the standard work. And it is said that while he was working onthis great book St Augustine had a dream. He wandered by night on a beachbeside the ocean, and found a child with a spoon. The child had scooped out alittle pit in the sand and was scampering back and forth to the moonlit surf,bringing back a spoonful of seawater each trip and tipping it into his hole.“What are you doing?” asked Augustine, and the child replied, “Please MrBishop, I am decanting the ocean into my pit.” “But you can’t do that,” saidAugustine, with the mad clarity that comes to us in dreams. “The ocean won’tfit.” “Well it’s no more foolish,” remarked the terrifying child, before vanishing,

“than trying to fathom the Holy Trinityin a book.”

Now: catch it before it vanishes.What does that story inspire in you?

We have not fathomed God oncewe have confessed that He is threePersons in One Godhead. That fact is atrue fact. Its truth is guaranteed. That

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fact is essential: we have remarked how our whole Faith, even our wholeculture, is based on the doctrine of the Trinity.

But that fact is not the end of our knowledge of God. It is thebeginning of our knowledge of God. When we have said that God is Three inOne, then we have come to the shore of the sea. We are on that beach at night,with St Augustine, at the edge of the limitless waters, seeing how much morethere is to know of God, feeling terror and rapture. When we have confessedthe Trinity, when we have consumed books about the Trinity, then we have justbegun to look out on an infinity of truth, lying open to us, but inexhaustible.We look out on the nature of God, and the nature of God is beautiful,intricate, splendid, beyond all words.

Beyond all words – that’s the point. We contemplate God in Hiscomplexity, and we are lifted to a place where normal words don’t apply, wherethought buckles under the weight of glory. To contemplate God is to be, in asense, off our heads with joy and passionate awe. Praise is, as it were, torn outof us. We behold with a dazzling lucidity, so intense it is not entirely unlikepain. But it is pain we desire above all other experience.

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I’ve described this experience clumsily; I hope you know what I mean. Theword for it is ecstasy. Ecstasy means έκ-στασις, being ex, outside, stasis, the placewhere one stands. It means to be ripped out of oneself and put elsewhere.

Ecstasy is what infinite complexity inspires in finite minds. The passionwe call ecstasy is our response (the only proper response) to the approach tothe sight of the Blessed Trinity. For God, in His unity and complexity, is thebeauty from which all beauty proceeds. He is the ocean of joy from which alljoy in the cosmos comes, like flecks of sea-spray. He is the truth that makes allother truths true, as all water comes from the ocean and hurries back to theocean. When we approach the truth of Him we are ecstastic, we are off ourheads, as Augustine went off his head in his dream, suddenly rememberingwith What he had to deal.

We are familiar with ecstasy from Christian art. A saint, caught up insome hint of the perfection and endlessness of God, stands rigid, his eyesrolled upwards in rapture, his the hands flung outward or frozen. St Alban, theyoung soldier in the mural above our high altar, is in ecstasy – in a ratherrestrained fashion; but then, of course, Alban was a Briton.

Christian music conjures up ecstasy, Palestrina’s music, perhaps, morethan any other. Our choir this morning acts out what ecstasy is like: the calm ofPalestrina breaks into almost insupportable complexity, flowering upward and

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sideways so to speak, stretched to the limit of where the human heart and earcan go.

Ecstasy is wonder that tears the heart open, that exhilarates the mind.Ecstasy is a little like intoxication: yet it makes the mind not blurred divinelyclear. Ecstasy is a little like the physical rapture of love: but instead of beingsudden and violent, it is slow, profound, it sinks deeper into us, growing inintensity. Ecstasy is like artistic reverie, but it is not diffuse. When we areecstatic we are not vague: we see at once the unity of all things, and theirfantastic, detailed, unspeakable richness. That double insight is what seems tolift the skull off our heads, so the bright winds of infinity flow over our brains.

Ecstasy is what infinite complexity inspires in finite minds. God is aTrinity. God is complex, not simple. Ecstasy is what God causes in Hiscreatures.

When time is over and death is behind us, when we are beyond thisblinding, lovely world, when we have been freed of the sickness in our mindsthat blurs our vision, then we shall begin to see God as He is. We shall findHim unthinkably more complicated than the universe we left behind. Theuniverse is dust at the edge of the Most Blessèd Trinity. It’s the sand on thebeach. In eternity it is our role to be mariners, to voyage forever over thatlimitless sea, understanding more, loving more, desiring more, delighted more,the more we know of Him. We will Seek His face evermore, as the psalmist cries.We shall never reach the end of knowledge. We shall never reach the limit ofawe.

The undying seraphim have stood before God since the worlds weremade, veiling the glory of their faces against the intolerable glory of theirCreator, seeing more and more, never seeing to the end, never ceasing to shoutSanctus, Sanctus in ecstasy at what they see. At every Mass we are allowed tostand beside them for a minute and mingle our shouts of Sanctus with theirs. Inthe end we shall never leave their side, and their voyage shall be ours.viii

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So much for eternity. In the meantime, even on Trinity Sundays, ecstasy mayseem beyond what we can manage. Ecstasy may rarely come to the front of ourconsciousness; or never at all.

But it is there, you know. We know what it is like. Ecstasy is tucked awaywithin us, beneath the ash. Its embers glow under our grayest depressions.

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When our salvation is complete and we have our first glimpse of theFace of God, then ecstasy will flame up within us, consuming every otheremotion. There can never be room again for discontent or boredom or sadness.

And even now, in this world, we sometimes shake on the edge. Theworld is the complex artisanship of God. Every mote of dust that dances inthe sunlight before your eyes is an icon of the Trinity, being rich, subtle,beautiful and highly-wrought beyond words. Even the world can be enough toshow us Him. We notice the sky, say, perforated with stars or unfathomablyblue. All in an instant we see what the world is really like and we are ravishedinto ecstasy – that sublime state, that higher sanity.

Whenever we speak to God, whenever we approach His physicalPresence in the Mass, we reach the frontiers of the ecstatic.

We feel the stir of ecstasy when we recall the Father, unthinkable, Whoholds the worlds in His hands and yet wants your company and mine.

We feel the stir of ecstasy because the Son made Himself human for youand me, and is physically here now, waiting to embrace us at the altar like alover.

You feel the approach of ecstasy because the Holy Ghost burns in yourmind, a dancing flame of the divine clarity.

We are in ecstasy because these Three are one Holy Trinity, one impulseof tenderness and desire toward us, and toward every soul the Trinity utteredforth.

We are in ecstasy because God is love.

In the Name of the Most Blessèd and Holy Trinity:

Amen.

© The Rev’d Dr Richard Major [email protected]

Nansough Manor, near Ladock, Cornwall TR2 4PB2601 Quantico Street, Arlington, Virginia 22207, U.S.A.

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AUGUSTINE’S DREAMThe story is a very late legend – but why should that bother us? Wise stories occur to the Church at all seasons.

The story has an interesting life of its own – at least, it interests me. It wasn’t in the text of The GoldenLegend, so when William Caxton translated and printed that book he added it in.

I will set herein one miracle, which I have seen painted on an altar of S. Austin at the black frirsat Antwerp, howbeit I find it not in the legend, mine exemplar, neither in English, French, ne inLatin. It was so that this glorious doctor made and compiled many volumes, The gloriousdoctor made and compiled many volumes, as afore is said, among whom he made a book of theTrinity, in which he studied and mused sore in his mind, so far forth that on a time as he went bythe sea-side in Africa, studying on the Trinity, he found by the sea-side a little child which hadmade a little pit in the sand, and in his hand a little spoon. And with the spoon he took outwater of the large sea and poured it into the pit. And when S. Augustin beheld him hemarvelled, and demanded him what he did. And he answered and said: I will lade out and bringall this water of the sea into this pit. What? said he, it is impossible, how may it be done, sith thesea is so great and large, and thy pit and spoon so little? Yes, forsooth, said he, I shall lightlierand sooner draw all the water of the sea and bring it into this pit than thou shalt bring themystery of the Trinity and his divinity into thy little understanding as to the regard thereof; forthe mystery of the Trinity is greater and larger to the comparison of thy wit and brain than isthis great sea unto this little pit. And therewith the child vanished away. Then here may everyman take ensample that no man, and especially simple lettered men, ne unlearned, presume tointermit ne to muse on high things of the godhead, farther than we be informed by our faith,for our only faith shall suffice us.ix

Augustine’s vision was delicately plagiarised by Sir Isaac Newton, who “a little before he died, said, ‘I don’tknow what I may seem to the world; but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary whilstthe great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” (Joseph Spence, Anecdotes (1858), p. 40, quoting thatattractive Jacobite hero, the Chevalier Ramsay.

And this is from Don Juan:

They accuse me – Me – the present writer ofThe present poem – of – I know not what –

A tendency to under-rate and scoffAt human power and virtue, and all that;

And this they say in language rather rough.Good God! I wonder what they would be at!

I say no more than hath been said in Danté’sVerse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes;

By Swift, by Machiavel, by Rochefoucault,By Fénélon, by Luther, and by Plato;

By Tillotson, and Wesley, and Rousseau,Who knew this life was not worth a potato.

’T is not their fault, nor mine, if this be so, – For my part, I pretend not to be Cato,

Nor even Diogenes. – We live and die,But which is best, you know no more than I.

Socrates said, our only knowledge was“To know that nothing could be known;”

a pleasant Science enough, which levels to an assEach man of wisdom, future, past, or present.

Newton (that proverb of the mind), alas! Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent,

That he himself felt only “like a youthPicking up shells by the great ocean – Truth.”

The same story serves Caxton’s mild fideism, Newton’s gentle scepticism, and Byron’s moody nihilism.

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THREE AFTERTHOUGHTS ON ISLAMJust in case anyone is reading this (which seemsincredible), and cares about Muslim-baiting (whichseems almost as unlikely), let me expand mythought.

I.The first Christians rushed out into the worldshouting that God had become a Man and walkedabout in Palestine. This was supremely shocking andamazing news. It set the world by its ears. Godbecame a Man in what sense? What do we mean byGod, then?

It took centuries for the Church to hammerout the exact implications of the truth of Christ –and by hammered we do mean that the process wasoften violent. Emperors were overthrown, citiesrioted, wars were fought. (It is customary to sneer atthese events; but then consider what sordid topicsinspire the worst violence in modern politics! We arestrangely calm about the articles of the Creed – orperhaps we are abnormally dull. We let repetitionblunt these extraordinary claims, whereas it wouldbe appropriate to finish each phrase with a gasp, oreven a shriek of terror.)

At the end of the violent process the CatholicChurch had established two extreme doctrines:Christ’s Incarnation, and what logically followedfrom the co-eternity of the Son, the the Trinity.

Many Christians recoiled from the extremity.They founded heretical movements, furnished with

dismal technical names: Sabellians and Monarchians and Arians, Monophysites and Nestorians, all “full of madreversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expenseof the sincerity of his soul.”x

We should be just to these heretics. Their impulse was to be scrupulous about God’s honour, morescrupulous than He was Himself. We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeksfoolishnessxi – and to the Arab, we might add, blasphemy, a blasphemy against the self-evident solitude andchangelessness of God, blazing as the sun. The advancing armies of Islam scooped up the Monophysiteprovinces of Byzantium. Those Christians who could not endure the thought of a human Jesus resolved theirtroubles by abandoning Incarnation and Trinity altogether, and accepting the simple new revelation ofMohammed.

It is not really courteous to our opponents to pretend that all ‘Abrahamic religions’ are much thesame.xii Islam came into existence to destroy Christianity’s betrayal (as the Prophet thought) of puremonotheism. Inevitably the only two world religions will be at odds.

For fourteen centuries, on and off, they have been at war. Thrice – in the eighth, sixteenth andseventeenth centuries – the armies of Islam came close to conquering Europe and blotting out Christian error. This painting by Veronese of The Battle of Lepanto (1572) shows a committee of saints – Peter, Roch, Justine(patron of Padua) and Mark (patron of Venice) – imploring Our Lady to grant victory to the Christian fleet.Justine quite frankly grasps a sword. An angel enters into the spirit of the thing, and hurls burning arrows atthe Turks. Europe survives, and is defined by its long war against Islam.

For the last few centuries the conflict has taken a different form: Europe, now only semi-Christian,first colonised the Muslim world, and then reimported Muslim labour into the heart of Christendom.Nonetheless the debate, whether it takes the form of Crusades or of Islamicist agitation in Western cities, istheological. It concerns the Trinity. It continues on a global scale of the theological riots in the Byzantinestreets. Of course it can never end.

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II.A subtle point is made by Chesterton (Lord Kitchener, 1917):

There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in thedesert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one maysay, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something thatis not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of God. There is the same extremesimplification in the solitary figure of the Prophet; and yet this isolation perpetually reacts intoits own opposite. A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and againby a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thingthat can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse canonly be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equalitycan only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogmathat there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.

Chesterton was thinking of the ‘Mad Mahdi’, but he also prophesies bin Laden and our present troubles.

III.One final point. That war between Christ’s God and Mohammed’s has been fought with daring, energy,courage and savagery on both sides. The two civilisations confront each other with mutual respect,exasperation, terror and admiration.

But there is an asymmetry. Islam calls itself a religion of peace, and the Koran is less homicidal thanthe Torah (as Islam is historically less homicidal than Judaism). But the historical fact is that Islam establisheditself by conquest, whereas Christianity grew through three centuries of persecuted evangelism. And thishistorical difference proceeds from a theological one.

In 1391 the bookish Emperor Manuel II, in winter barracks near Ankara while fending off Ottomanassault, enjoyed a long colloquy with a learned Persian; later the Emperor noted down what they said.xiii ManuelPaleologus argued against jihad because religious violence is incompatible with the nature of God. “God is notpleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (συ ν λόγω, according to logos) is contrary to God’s nature.” Themodern editor of the dialogue, Theodore Khoury, observes: “For the Emperor, as a Byzantine shaped byGreek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. Hiswill is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”xiv Exactly! One way of understandingJohn’s formula, In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum, is to say Logic was with Godfrom the start, and Logic is God. God is reasonable: He accords with the patterns of our human reason, notbecause we invented Him, but because He is a Trinity and the Son, a reasonable Man, shows us the fullness ofthe Father.

Unitarian Islam is a religion of surrender to an unknowable God, who might very well decree violenceto overawe the vagaries of the human mind. Christians have often lapsed into aggression and violentconversion, but that is because we are sinner. Christianity is a religion of rationality because it is Trinitarian.xv

Here is a revolting painting by a fellow named Grebber,evidently some sort of adoptionist or Socinian, of God Inviting Christ to Sit on the Throne at His Right Hand (1645).

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iNOTES

i Our Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic brothers keep today as All Saints’ Sunday, having celebrated the ‘ThirdDay of the Trinity’ on Tuesday, the third day of Pentecost, five days ago (since 2010 is one of those happy years when East andWest keep Easter on the same day).

The total of 2.1 billion includes 500 million Protestants, some of them are credally Christian and some not. Most keepa Trinitarian feast today, in a confused and vestigial fashion. We pray the Holy Ghost might inflame them into clearer thinkingand swift conversion.ii Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925):

If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadfulexample of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the co-Eternity of theDivine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure andsimple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, God is Love. Yet the two statementsare almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logicalway of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, wasHe loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is themeaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His ownnature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it hasbegotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea likelove. If the modems really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. Thetruth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem orChristmas Day, never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the coldcompromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God ofcolourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who wasfighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for thatvery balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature ….

iii Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908): “out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the

lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.” iv Sura iv: 171 (Asad’s translation (http://www.islamawakened.com/quran/4/171/default.htm):

O followers of the Gospel! Do not overstep the bounds in your religious beliefs, and do not say of God anythingbut the truth. The Christ Jesus, son of Mary, was but God’s Apostle - His promise which He had conveyed untoMary - and a soul created by Him. Believe, then, in God and His apostles, and do not say, “A trinity”. Desist foryour own good. God is but One God; utterly remote is He, in His glory, from having a son: unto Him belongs allthat is in the heavens and all that is on earth; and none is as worthy of trust as God.

I have to point out – it is not meant as a cheap jibe – that Mohammed, a merchant living hundreds of miles from thefrontiers of Byzantine civilisation, seems not to have heard (or understood) the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. Hisfulminations are against unbelievers who say, ‘God is the Messiah, Mary’s son’ (Sura v:17), or even that ‘God is the Third of Three’ (72-73):formulæ which would have got a man burned alive at Constantinople!v Sura v:72-73: Verily whoso associates with God anything, God shall prohibit him entrance to Paradise, and his refuge shall be the Fire.” The

ecstatic tradition in Islam, Sufism, has always been regarded as a bit heterodox. vi Chesterton, ‘The Fall of Chivalry’ in The New Jerusalem (1920):

It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow. And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavyrule. Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed of those simple and masculine but mostlyrather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord. As it had the simplest sort of religion,monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactly the same direct spirit in itsdespotism as in its deism. The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of charters and chivalric vows, did notgrow in that golden desert. The great sun was in the sky and the great Saladin was in his tent, and he must beobeyed unless he were assassinated. Those who complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that theelaborate Western creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions; and that they are elaborate becausethey are emancipated.

vii Surprisingly readable, and readable online at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf103.txtviii

Pope Benedict XVI’s Angelus address of 28 August 2005, at Castel Gandolfo (from the Vatican site,http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/angelus/2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ang_20050828_en.html):

St Augustine ... has some marvellous thoughts about the invitation found in Psalm cv: Quærite faciem eius semperSeek His face evermore. He points out that this invitation is not only valid for this life but also for eternity. Thediscovery of ‘God’s Face’ is never ending. The further we penetrate into the splendour of divine love, the morebeautiful it is to pursue our search, so that Amore crescente inquisitio crescat inventi, “The greater love grows, thefurther we will seek the One who has been found.” Enarr. in Ps 105104: 3; CCL 40, 1537.

This is the experience to which, deep down, we too aspire. May the intercession of the great Bishop ofHippo obtain it for us! May the motherly help of Mary, the Star of Evangelization whom we now invoke with theprayer of the Angelus, obtain it for us.

The Holy Father is infallible, but his office forces him to use the lumpen modern popish psalter. I have improved his words byreplacing it with the B.C.P. ix

Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, Legenda aurea, 1275, englished by William Caxton in 1483; text athttp://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-volume5.htm#Augustine. You’ll notice that I’ve movedthe story from the south shore of the Mediterranean to the ocean. Mare Nostrum, proverbially big to the ancients, seems cosy andcute to us. RJCMx Chesterton, ‘The Age of the Crusades’ in A Short History of England (1917).

xi I Corinthians i23.

xii Abrahamic’ is a nice fomula, but what do we value in Abraham? Is it his witness of an inscrutable deity who demands Isaac’ssacrifice (Genesis xxii), the horror of great darkness ... a smoking furnace ... that passed between the bisected holocauts (xv)? Or thecomprehensible God Who offers a divine ram for Isaac and appears as a hospitable Triad at Mamre (xiv)? Modern Judaismexults in obedience to hukim, laws for which there are no apparent rational explanation, because they come from the unhumanGod and prove His inscrutability.xiii http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/manuel_paleologus_dialogue7_trans.htmxiv

Manuel II’s dialogue achieved notoriety in 2006 when the Pope quoted it in the course of an excellent defence of Christianrationality (‘Faith, Reason and the University’, a lecture at the University of Regensburg,http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html).

Manuel was understandably peeved – the Muslims were close to obliterating his Empire – and he remarked, says thePope, “with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationshipbetween religion and violence in general, saying: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will findthings only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’”

Many Muslims, and many cloth-eared secular Westerners, thought or pretended to think Benedict himself had calledtheir religion evil and inhuman. There were idiot columns in American newspapers and idiot riots in the Orient. The AustralianPrime Minister, an Anglican and a Catholic, remarked that Muslim anger was “disproportionate, strange and disappointing.... Idon’t, at the moment, note terrorist groups killing people and invoking the authority of the CatholicChurch”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI_Islam_controversy#Initial_reactions). To appreciate this remarkyou must read it aloud in a strong Strine accent.

Benedict’s literary manners are gentlemanly. I recommend having a look at the text of his lecture. On “the essentialrelationship between faith and reason,” he says, “I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic”, whichis nicely put. And he concludes thus:

I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophicalopinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all thesefalse notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he would be deprived of thetruth of existence and would suffer a great loss. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questionswhich underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth ofreason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblicalfaith enters into the debates of our time. ‘Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature ofGod’, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. Itis to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.

My own literary manners are not gentlemanly, and I remark with, I hope, a startling brusqueness that human breadth of reasonis exactly what, on the Pope’s own showing, Islam says is irrelevant in theological matters. Our Trinitarian civilisation shouldn’texpect too much from a dialogue with its antithesis. (How’s that for polemic?) xv All unitarianisms, all pure undiluted monotheisms, have to insist on the ultimate unknowability of God, His unhumanness. IfHe is inscrutably transcendent, then there is nothing to stop Him violating human reason, or ordering reformation of mankindthrough killing. There is little to choose between the unitarian murderousness of Robespierre, Ben-Gurion and bin Laden.

RJCM 29v10

cover - richard majormuslim to say, as the prayer book does, that it is god’s nature to have...

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