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Archives for October 2024

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 8:6-12 (Part 3)

October 29, 2024

“Then Noah sent forth a dove.”

(Here are the first and second parts of the scholion on this verse.)

As the raven was sent forth before the dove, the Holy Spirit goes forth mysteriously to prepare matter to receive God’s informing Word.  Thus, as the Spirit broods like a bird of prey at Creation, prior to God’s speaking, so the raven flies ‘to and fro’ over the waters before the re-creation after the Flood.  So, too, does the Holy Spirit overshadow the Virgin Mary to prepare her to conceive the Word Incarnate in her womb.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 8:6-12 (Part 2)

October 25, 2024

“Then Noah sent forth a dove.”

(Here is the first part of the scholion on this verse.)

Just as Noah sent forth the dove three times, so the Son of God is sent three times.  The first time, He comes as the Son of Man, with ‘nowhere to rest his head’ just as the dove found no place to rest.  His second coming is mystically, after the resurrection, and as the dove brought back an olive branch, so Jesus appears to His disciples saying, “Peace be with you.”  And so we recall this coming in peace before we consume the holy Eucharist each day.  When He comes the third time in glory, it will be the establishment of new heavens and a new earth, and He will no longer return to the Father, for God will be all in all.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 8:6-12 (Part 1)

October 22, 2024

“Then Noah sent forth a dove.”

The word for dove in Hebrew is jonah. We see from this, that just as Noah first sent forth a raven which went to and fro on the earth, God sent His Spirit to the Ninevites to prepare for the visit of Jonah, in order to open their hearts to His message. And just as the dove, when first sent, could find no place to set her foot, Jonah the prophet first went a direction opposite to that where God had sent him. He ultimately found no earth on which to set his foot, but only water, after he was thrown overboard. And as the dove, on its second venture found an olive branch, so did Jonah, when he went to Nineveh, find an earnest desire for peace and repentance, the sprigs of righteousness, even in a heathen land.

Ritual: Social Control? Or Liberation for Love?

October 18, 2024

Catholic and Orthodox believers are sometimes criticized because of the weight of ritualized behavior at worship and elsewhere: rote prayers, signs of the Cross, and so on. Ritual appears to be a form of social control that interferes with personal authenticity. Of course, what ‘authenticity’ means or whether it is an unambiguous good is not often examined, in my experience.

The fact is that we depend on ritualized behavior every day. Many, if not most, social interactions depend on ritualized behavior. I arrive at the train station at 7:05 and meet the train there at that time. I use the same desk everyday at work, and I expect that when I go to my superior’s office, he will be there and not someone else. Conversations make use of stock phrases, particularly at the beginning and end, and not to make use of these can be a sign of hostility. I turn on the television at a certain time, and at the same time, the people in the news studio begin to talk into a camera. The range of options for my clothing is limited by ritualistic restraints.

By following ritualized behavior, I help to create and sustain a sense of the ‘normal’, and make social life possible by making my behavior predictable to others in crucial ways. By steady adherence to such behavior, I demonstrate my dependability and make possible deeper levels of interaction by showing my trustworthiness. Ritual, it turns out, is in some measure the condition of commitment to others, even to love. It is a sign of my willingness to put others’ needs and expectations before my own at certain crucial times.

Of course, opening ourselves to this sort of basic love, as is the case with any kind of love, is a risk. Social rituals can be manipulated and the good faith of persons can be preyed upon by those with some control over rituals who do not have the common good at heart.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 8:4

October 15, 2024

“The ark came to rest.”

This completes the prophecy of 5: 29, “Lamech called his name Noah, saying, ‘Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us rest from our work and the toil of our hands.’”  Together, the prophecy and its fulfillment reveal the significance of the Sabbath that will be declared for mankind.  They also offer insight into the corruption of the earth (see here and here).

Failure to observe a Sabbath rest, to work endlessly, restlessly; to be constantly seeking for ways to improve efficiency, productivity and profit:  these corrupt the heart of man and do damage to the earth, too, as we know well in our own time.  The curse of the earth is there not to be overcome by man’s ingenuity, but as a spur to faith in the One ‘who gives the growth’ [1 Cor 3:6].

Lamech does not comprehend the essence of his prophecy.  As one who in his heart rebels against the curse and against the curative effect of work, he imagines that his offspring will carry through some kind of program that will undo the curse.  Instead, Noah’s birth portends God’s intervention and an imposed Sabbath over all the earth, that the damage done by man’s unbridled will might be undone, and that Noah might re-consecrate the earth to God by his sacrifice in the making of the Noachide covenant.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 7:19

October 11, 2024

“The waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered.”

This is a notice not merely respecting the great extent of the Flood, but the action of ‘covering’, much like that of ‘blotting out’ (cf. Psalm 51, the “Miserere”), carries with it sacrificial and expiatory connotations.  Mountain tops are places of communication with the divine, and these had been defiled by the corruption of flesh.  Perhaps they were even places where false gods had received sacrifice.  By covering them all, God wipes away the stain of this corruption.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 7:17

October 8, 2024

“The waters…bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. ”

To be lifted “higher than the mountains” is to prefigure the eternal Mount Zion, which “shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills.”  This place of communication with the one, true God is a place of holiness.  Only those with “clean hands and pure heart” can climb the Lord’s mountain.  Likewise, only Noah, who was just before God, was worthy to ascend above the waters in the sacred ark.

Meditations on Heaven: Angels and Spirits

October 4, 2024

“Jesus said to them, ‘Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?  For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.’” [Mark 12: 24-25]

When we rise, “we shall all be changed” [1 Cor 15: 51] from this life as we know it to a life akin to the angelic life.  What does this mean for us?  What are angels, exactly, and why should the angelic life be desirable?

God “makes the winds his messengers,” as Psalm 104 (103): 4 tells us.  Unfortunately, this is not the best translation for our present purposes.  It is another of those places where the old, rickety translation better conveys the tradition.  The Douay-Rheims renders the verse this way:  “Who makest thy angels spirits.”  For good measure, the King James Bible reads almost exactly the same: “Who maketh his angels spirits.”

So if, in the life of the world to come, at the resurrection, we will ‘be like the angels,” this must mean something like the privileging, enlarging and fulfillment of our spiritual natures.  It does not mean the loss of our bodies, but their transformation by the illumination of grace, into pure ‘spiritual bodies’.  (N.B.  All of 1 Corinthians 15 is worth reading in this context.  I will append what I consider to be the core of that chapter’s message at the end of this post.)

Here, alas, we come to a major stumbling block for discussing the life of the world to come.  For when we speak today of ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, we mean something like the very opposite of what is meant in classical theology, which is to say that we have largely reduced these concepts to the very physical realm from which they ought to be distinguished.  When persons today claim to be ‘spiritual’ and not religious, they often sense something overly ‘fleshly’ in religious observance:  legalism, party spirit and the like.  But in setting out to find something ‘spiritual’ instead, they most frequently fall into the mistake of elevating feelings above reason, of seeking freedom in autonomy—the freedom, that is, to create their own rules.  And frequently these ad hoc rules privilege emotions in such a way as to imprison us in our ‘flesh’, that part of us to which emotions properly belong.

Similarly, ‘soul’ is used almost exclusively in contemporary parlance to mean ‘feeling’.  To the earnest, urgent question that taxed classical philosophers from Aristotle to Gregory of Nyssa—“What is the soul”—we moderns can jokingly respond, “What a jazz musician has.”  When we refer to ‘soul music’, we do not mean that it is music which displays an elevation of intellectual and aesthetic qualities.  This is not to say that soul music has no place in our world, only to point out the degradation suffered by the soul in such casual re-definitions.

Traditionally, the soul and spirit have been taken to be that part of us which is ‘spiritual’, the part that separates us from ‘brute’ animals.  Our spiritual nature consists of intelligence, imagination, creativity, appreciation of beauty, free will and the acknowledgment of moral choices, and so on.  It is these faculties that make us already ‘like the angels in heaven’.  To the extent that we live at the spiritual level of existence, we already live the angelic life.  This does not in any way denigrate the body, but elevates the body to its proper pitch, directing the emotions toward their proper fulfillment as well.  The Transfiguration of Christ is a foretaste of how the body appears when the spirit is revealed in its final state.  That this can happen already on earth is manifest in many lives of the saints.

***

1 Corinthians 15: 35-53

But some one will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”  You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.  But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.  For not all flesh is alike, but there is one kind for men, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.  There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.  There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.  Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.  But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual.  The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.  As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven.  Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.  I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.  For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 6:14 (Part 3)

October 1, 2024

“Make yourself an ark…and cover it inside and out with pitch.”

(Here are the first and second parts of the scholion on this verse.)

God could easily have destroyed the entire cosmos and started over.  Creating from nothing poses no obstacle to God’s designs.  However, He spares those who find favor with him.  Even more, He desires that men and women participate in the reconstitution: Noah must save the animals and his family (and we are not told if they have found favor with God as Noah did).  God will not work to defeat evil, nor to recreate, without Noah.

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