Brian Hamilton-Vise

The permanence of the flesh?

Rowan Williams is always meticulously fair in his reading of other theologians; his disdain for cliché and caricature is part of what makes him such a helpful voice on the world stage. He appears resolutely uninterested in crafting anything like his own “school” of theology, though he would have the intellectual prowess and charisma to do it. Instead he has built up his corpus on the firm stones of careful and sympathetic studies of other thinkers. All this is certainly true of The Wound of Knowledge, his brilliant study in the evolution of Christian spirituality. There is no attempt to banish those with whom he disagrees, only to interrogate them closely, to bring their conclusions under the redeeming judgment of the incarnate Word of God. On the other hand, there is no one who escapes this interrogation. Not Irenaeus or Origen, not Gregory or Augustine–no one is given a free ride.

Which is not to say, obviously, that the archbishop’s judgment is always identical with God’s. And in this book I wonder if Williams is quite able to rid himself of the caricature of Origen as a Platonist hater-of-the-flesh. He does break all kinds of false perceptions here, insisting that Origen did not think Christ a dispensable aspect of Christian belief and that it really will be historical obedience and humility in the measure of Christ’s–not knowledge, as with the Gnostics–that marks humanity’s perfection. Yet the question still remains for Williams (and I don’t for a moment deny that this is a real and arguable question) “whether, in spite of it all, Origen’s view of the incarnation is too ‘instrumentalist’ to be really acceptable, too concerned with the incarnate life as a means to some superior end” (p. 55). As he goes on to say, “Origen is concerned about the glorifying of God in the world, and yet is unwilling to see this as emerging, in Jesus or in ourselves, from trial or moral struggle” (p. 56).

I won’t make this a matter of “properly interpreting Origen,” since Williams obviously knows him better than I do. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether the effort to hold the fleshly and material in such high regard–as indeed we must, since the church seems never to have been able to shake that Gnostic impulse–leads us too unthinkingly to imagine the flesh as its own end, never to be surpassed. There is no question that this material existence is, according to Origen, penultimate for us, though that’s not to say that it’s a shackle or a curse. On the contrary, our flesh is a gift from God, affording us a space and a history in which to learn humility and righteousness. The value of the material world is pedagogical, as Williams seems sometimes to notice: “the body is the means whereby the likeness of Christ in the world is formed” (p. 50). The imitation of Jesus in our bodies works to form our whole person (i.e., if you will, our soul) in the kind of self-giving love characteristic of God, in the flesh or beyond it. For Origen, it’s through the flesh and in no other way that we learn the spirit and will of God–which is why Williams seems just to go against his best insights when he says that Origen is unwilling to see the glorifying of God emerge from the struggles of fleshly life. The difficulty and struggle of fleshly life has no other purpose than that the glorifying of God emerge from it! The real rub, I think, is that for Origen the struggles of the flesh are preparation for a life beyond the flesh (or for an ‘otherwise fleshly’ life), whereas Williams wants to insist that historical, bodily, loving obedience is both the journey and the goal.

The question I’m left with is whether the idea of a “life beyond the flesh,” as Origen and the Cappadocians all imagine it, is necessarily contrary to the Christian vision. If it contradicts or mitigates the hope for a genuinely bodily resurrection, I would say it is–though certainly none of these thinkers denied the doctrine. (Origen chides those with overly material conceptions of the resurrection, saying “our hope is not one of worms, nor does our soul desire a body that has rotted” [Cels 5.19].) It seems to me, actually, that some such language is entirely necessary if we aren’t to lose sight of the transformation the cosmos has in store for it. The “new heavens and new earth” aren’t just the same old heavens and earth but without the sadness. As Paul says regarding the resurrection, “you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed…. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:37, 43–44). At the end of the day we cannot deny some measure of an “instrumentalist” character to the incarnation: Christ became poor, not to affirm the basic goodness of our poverty, but so that we might become rich.

21 September 2008 | Comments (0)
Tags: Eschatology, Origen, Rowan Williams