What Reason Cannot Fathom

Let the clever world be angry that God's son should forsake his throne of honour, that he should clothe himself in flesh and blood and suffer as a human being. The greatest wisdom of this world must before the counsel of the most high become the greatest folly. What God has decided, reason cannot fathom; she is the blind leader who misleads the spiritually blind --
Recitative from Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (Cantata No. 152) -- J.S. Bach and S. Franck

Franck's lyrics screamed at me from the program page at a concert I recently attended. The epoch in which it was written marks a transition between the two great challenges of reason to the Christian faith. The older reasoning was skeptical that a metaphysical being ever could or would take a physical form. It was a bit of an epistemological jeu de verite , of course. Plato's concerns were more ethical than ontological. He despised the fabulous stories of the fallible Greek gods and was convinced that somewhere out there, the ideal Jupiter more likely smiled on his notions of virtue than gazed upon earth in search of his next lay. Eight centuries later, Augustine was faced with many of the same ethical concerns and eventually embraced the Christian faith, because it made relationship possible with an ideal Jupiter who still has transcended fallible human nature. The Christian faith provided the earthy stories that engaged the plebeians but grounded them in the virtue ethics of the aether beloved by the philosophers.

In these times, I only can explain the captivation of the wise with the exercise of unmitigated, uncorrected, unsupplemented, and arrogant reason with a genuine disregard for virtue outside their own private sphere. The recent feast of St. Michael and All Angels draws this problem into focus. Angels in popular Christian culture and sometimes theologically have served as a cipher for the mysteries of being. Tradition has assigned the motions of the stars, the turnings of the winds, and even reality itself to the communication of the aethereal plans of the Divine Maker into the quotidian reality of middle earth. Angels, originally mediators (jn the sense of communication) between God and men in the Holy Scriptures were transformed by Platonism into much more detail-oriented providers of divine information content. And so as our understanding of nature has improved, the natural philosophical need for angels has diminished to nearer its proper level, that is, nil, but those of a natural philosophical bent have forgotten that there are other philosophical needs beyond those of nature.

People certainly need angels for some reason. In the last year, we have been treated to a spectacle of a Norwegian royal princess and her business partner operating educational and practical programs for communication with angels. They do not have an exclusive monopoly on this kind of thing. All manner of folk will mediate communication with Ascended Masters, angels, spirit guides, and the dead these days. No matter in how much detail nature is put to the question for her secrets, most of the world still seeks realia beyond the most rigorous notions of the real.

The temptation of the new atheists has been to deride this kind of behavior. For them, a course in angel communication is no less a crime against reason and good mores than the kinds of things I say or do seven mornings per week. I can't imagine, honestly, why they never wonder if there might be something more to human notions of a metaphysics than neurochemistry, or perhaps, evolutionary adaptations that maintain social cohesion or that encourage risky behavior to enhancs sexual competition. The end point of this thinking is that our moral actions, our emotions, and the relationships we form are nothing more than a series of chemical reactions in a social context. Eventually, I do imagine that we will confront the moral and existential challenges of human life with the help of chemical buffers, for in a purely natural philosophical universe, the anxieties of those Germans whose funeral music I heard last Saturday night were very real, indeed tragically so, but they lacked any significance. And so with love and so with beauty. As we gain more and more of God's creative freedom among the things that are seen, we will seek to control the inconvenient manifestations of those things that are unseen.

In the first lesson at Evening Prayer last night, the Prophet Daniel is caught up in a vision on the banks of the Tigris. As for his companions, they see nothing but still sense something odd is occurring. Daniel encounters his unnamed Lord, which the rabbis who go for this kind of thing probably read as Metratron, the apotheosized Enoch, but who we traditionally read as the Second Person of the Trinity. The Lord tells Daniel that He strives with the Prince of Persia and soon with the Prince of Greece, but He only has the help of Michael, "your Prince", that is the Prince of the Jewish people. Persia and Greece are the great hegemonic powers of the era. The fate of God's chosen people will depend on their strategic decisions. It would be tempting to imagine the invisible hosts of heaven and hell striving on the battlefield in parallel to Alexander the Great or something, but we are reading prophecy rather than watching the Russian fantasy film, Night Watch . Instead, the Lord is speaking of the necessary struggles that precede His Incarnation. These struggles can be viewed to be of a temporal nature, requiring the restoration of the Jews to Judah and their cult at Jerusalem, but they also can be spiritual. Both Persia and Greece present to the Jews the whole new set of relations, ethics, emotions, and philosophies. The war against the Prince of Persia is less about Jewish power than about Jewish identity. (Which is the true power in the pre-Christian world in that it makes possible the Christ.) Daniel is stuck in the service of Persia, but the great question of his life is always whether he still can remain a Jew. The war in heaven is indeed a Platonic war, a war of ideas.

In the second lesson, we hear of the beginning of the final campaign is this universal war of ideas, in which the victorious Lamb finally is prepared to open the seven seals and transform natural philosophical reality entire in the image of his glorious resurrected Body. The precursor of this transformation is the transformation of primary mimetic form of that Body, that is, the Church, which is described as a kingdom of priests drawn from every tribe, race, language, and nation. In a time of exciting extrasolar planet discoveries, I find it significant that the scroll of the Lamb is sealed with seven seals, the canonical number of heavenly bodies and crystal spheres that the ancients at the time of John of Patmos's revelation believed separated us from God. For as the Apostle reminds us, "...our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." We will be misled if we project the natural philosophical world upon the worldview of the Old and New Testaments, which viewed the universe as a completely different set of relationships in which the physical and metaphysical worlds were connected. Thus, we have little to fear from Jupiter beyond its baleful influence on the long term evolution of Earth's orbit and the motions of asteroids and comets, but we have much to fear from the ideas, vices, and actions signified by Jupiter.

Ultimately, it's not easy for a modern to understand such things. Even the relicts of this worldview in our time are merely for show. No competent astrologer of the ancient world would publish the generalized horoscopes we see in the daily paper. Astrology didn't work because the stars have any influence on human affairs, it worked because looking to the stars allowed the astrologer to unconsciously gain insight into the psychology of the individual and his or her social relations. It is very little different than a mathematics professor I know who remembers theorems by staring at the foliage outside of his window.

So instead the tradition of the Church leaves us with angels to remind us of the gulf between us and God, the existence and significance of invisible things, and the wondrous mystery that the invisible things have crashed into this world once before and will do so again.

Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.