Against Macedonius

Preached Easter 6 (25th May) 2014, St Michael's, Camden Town

Acts 8:5-8,14-17
1 Peter 3:15-18
John 14:15-21

Today is the feast day of Gregory VII, one of the great medieval popes, provided you think greatness is about power. A pope so bold that he forced the most powerful man in Christendom, the Emperor of the West, to come to him to beg his forgiveness. In the snow. On bare feet. So aggressive that when I was taught about him, my tutor compared him to Stalin. Powerful he may have been, but he was not universally loved. By the end of his life, he was no longer in Rome and when he died, on this day in 1085, he cried ‘I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.’ We could say he lacks self knowledge.

And I say this because when I think about Philip (not our Fr Philip, he’s nothing like Stalin), but the Philip in our reading today, I can’t help feeling there is a lot of Gregory in him. From the account we have, Philip goes to Samaria to preach the gospel. He does so with what we might call a lack of subtlety. He performs a raft of miracles, they believe, usually because they have seen them. In a passage missed out of the reading today, he runs into a rival miracle worker, who the author of Acts calls a magician, and he beats him by doing better miracles. This is about power, not truth.

But then the next passage is fascinating. If you’re a researcher into the very early church, you get very excited about this because it gives you a hint about what is going on in Jerusalem; for the rest of us, it’s just surprising. The high command send Peter and John to do more. The Samaritans have accepted Christ, but it isn’t enough. They need to hear about the Spirit. Faith in Christ alone is not Christianity.

And I think we find that very uncomfortable, even now, perhaps especially now. For two thousand years, we have become very used to using Christ as a shorthand for our belief – that's understandable, we are called Christians. But it’s wrong. Our belief is in God: the Trinity, not just one person in it. In a few minutes, we will all recite what that means in the Creed, and the history of that is instructive.

If you’re uncomfortable with this, you’re not alone. If you’ll cast your mind back to the 350s and 360s, you’ll of course recall that it was a hot topic then too. Macedonius, who was bishop of Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, refused to accept that the Holy Spirit was God. That debate rewrote the creed that at Nicaea itself only said, we believe in the Holy Spirit, and became what you have on your service sheet. We are affirming that the Spirit is God, identifying what he does. Of course Christ is essential, but so is the Father, and so is the Spirit.

Why?

Because a belief in God without the Spirit would change how we think of the world. It would be greatly impoverished. To my mind the most important thing that John records in the Gospel today is that the Spirit will ‘be with you for ever.’ A second, gentler Gregory, Gregory of Nazianzus, one of my all time favourite theologians (like most of my all time favourite theologians them, long dead), was an opponent of Macedonius in the fourth century and wrote a long oration on the Holy Spirit opposing him. He talked about history.

There have been … two conspicuous changes of men’s lives, which are also called two Testaments… : the one from idols to the Law [he means Moses], the other from the Law to the Gospel [he means Jesus]. And we are taught in the Gospel of a third.
(Gregory of Nazianzus, On the Holy Spirit, 25)

For Gregory, the trinity hovers over these changes - as time goes on we have a greater understanding of the nature of the God – we call this progressive revelation. In the Old Testament, it is God the Father that is talked about openly, and the Son hinted at. In the gospel, it is obviously about Jesus, but introduces the Spirit. In the current age, what Gregory calls the third testament (Gregory of Nazianzus, On the Holy Spirit, 8), when Spirit is fully visible, we are moving towards the final age, where Gregory says there will be an Earth that ‘cannot be shaken or moved.’ For Gregory, the Spirit animates our history. In the Creed, we will say the Spirit spoke through the prophets; we could easily say he speaks through the church through the ages.

So what does he say?

Today’s gospel is pretty useful, and I should say, it is the very same text that Gregory used 1600 years ago. It calls the Spirit two things – the Spirit of Truth and then the word parakletos which is translated here as advocate, but elsewhere counsellor, comforter or helper. This Spirit is not a lawyer, but a support. He is there to sustain us and to nudge us gradually towards the truth. My wide may disagree, but this is not always a characteristic of lawyers.

But if the Spirit is not God, then we might be at the mercy of lawyers. Were there no Spirit, it would mean God would have had retreated after his victory on the cross. We would be living an echo of what was important; playing out something that as solely a memorial. Perplexingly, God would have been willing to die for us, but not to stay. God would not be present to support us when we, like the recipients of the epistle, are told to do good, to hold fast. But instead, the Spirit is here: we are sustained and comforted by the Spirit throughout history.

For that letter is old, written before 100 AD. Pentecostals and others like to think of the Spirit as something that gives them licence to kick against the tradition of the church as the voice of the Spirit comes to them. What presumption? what arrogance? What do they think the Spirit has been doing for the last 2,000 years? It is they who deny the divinity of the Spirit by their rejection of the past. The gospel says ‘you know him, because he is with you, he is in you.’ That is not a licence to take create doctrine afresh, but an invitation to the revelation of God, built on 2,000 years of his work, changing, yes, as God is progressively revealed, but built on the same teaching.

Our first Gregory, Gregory VII gave us another famous quotation, also with some difficulties. He said ‘The Lord did not say I am custom, but I am truth.’ Through the Holy Spirit, the supporter and sustainer of all of us in this age, we often do not have to choose. For he is with us forever.

Amen.

All borders are equal, but some are more equal than others

In my books database I categorise European history geographically into only six countries, and everything east of Austria is 'Russia.'* In part this is a function of my interests (I refuse to have a Poland section with only two books in it; I'd have many more subdivisions if I was a specialist in Bulgaria), but it also reflects a genuine difficulty in the history of Eastern Europe: the geographical units aren't stable, whereas in the west, they are. Here's a map from 1000 where you can see most of the big western countries, but not a lot that's recognisable in the east. And many of the eastern countries are false friends too. Ironically, the centre of 'Russian' civilisation is in Kiev, and Asia Minor doesn't yet have any Turks in it. Even into the nineteenth century, it still looks pretty strange, though at least the Turks have arrived in Turkey. 

Regardless of the big movements, it is certainly the case that, even in Western Europe, detailed borders took a very long time to work out. We just about stabilise the borders of the UK component countries in the sixteenth century (if we ignore 1922); Spain in the seventeenth, France in the eighteenth, and Italy in the nineteenth, though all of the continental countries had border adjustments well into the twentieth century. Germany, of course, was completely redrawn in 1945. Some of those borders have only been bought with a lot of blood, and a lot of time. And it remains messy: ask the German speakers  in eastern Belgium, or the Poles in the Baltic states. Borders are complicated, and there's no simple principle in determining them that will arrive at a perfect answer. I don't think the Anglosphere really understands that. America only really thinks about the frontier; though I'm fascinated by the thought that they took seriously at one point the assumption that the US would include all Mexico, and although they get some credit for Canada, there was plenty of room to go round. Britain, Australia and New Zealand are islands so its relatively simple. Even in Ireland, which we've made such a great job of, the counties are old, so the lines themselves are easier, even if the principles aren't. 

This is important. When we argue about Ukraine, we do so from the perspective of stable, relatively simple borders and national identities. In reality, all the Soviet states had their already pretty fluid ethnic and historical geography wrecked by the communists - Vilnius, until the Russians got their hands on it, was Wilno, one of the great Polish medieval cities (along with Lwow, ironically now in Ukraine) - and only in some cases effectively reconstituted. Certainly Ukraine had no pre-existing independent identity before the 1990s and no recent history outside Russia. When the Russians essentially say that Ukraine isn't a country, they have point. It's certainly not a country with the same stable, deep rooted identity of a Britain or a France. Of course, it's more of a real country than Austria, or Portugal, or any of the other accidents of European history, but that's another matter.

None of this means that territorial integrity isn't important - borders are critical for stability and respecting them is the best means yet to avoid barbarism. Nor do I want to give any credence to anti-American bilge that parts of the left have been spouting. However, in the inevitable deal that will be brokered, we shouldn't look for false equivalences: Ukraine surrendering Crimea is not Alsace-Lorraine again, the Donetsk region is not like Britain losing Kent, or even Gibraltar. Let's not pretend it is. 

By the by, should Ukraine fracture, I've been trying to work out what to call the western bit. I think its Galicia (i.e., the old Austrian Kingdom of Galicia), but I'm not sure that's quite right. Ruthenia doesn't work either. Historically of course it's southern Poland, but I don't think that's an option. I'm really hoping they hold together.

*For the record, the UK, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia. Outside Europe, they only get five categories - the Colonies (including the entire Americas), the Near East, Africa, India and China (NB. includes Japan). Obviously, the classical world and its successor states are catalogued differently.

Bibliography, April 2014

BOTM: D. Hendy, Life on air: a history of Radio 4


M. Bradbury, Eating people is wrong
I. Calvino, Why read the Classics?
A. Christie, The man in the brown suit
C. Emmerson, 1913: The world before the Great War
H. Nicolson, Sweet Waters
J. Pidgeon, Slade in Flame
N. Shute, A town like Alice
P.G. Wodehouse, The adventures of Sally

It could have been A town like Alice which was a) lovely, and b) very well done. However, I was helpless before a well executed history of Radio 4. In part, this has absolutely nothing to do with the writing - I place R4 on very high pedestal, and would probably have read a poor account with pleasure - but it was well done, thorough, and with some lovely lines. I would have said that the story is a good one, but it is essentially about radio scheduling, so it is testament to the writing that even discussions over broadcast frequencies were gripping. So much so that I actually cried during the sections towards the end when the home counties marched on Broadcasting House to preserve Long Wave in the 1990s. Richly documented, and richly rewarding.