From
The June 2004 St John's Eagle
“The Crisis with the Names of God" - By John Harcourt
There are at least
125 scriptural names given to God and Christ, according to Cruden's
Concordance. A simple inspection of such a listing reveals the obvious:
these names are merely metaphors that can only point from afar to the
nameless One. As metaphors, they arise out of the personal experiences
and the cultural background of the individual writers.
Thus, ancient
Palestinian shepherds drew naturally upon their own world to express
their intimations of the divine. God is the Good Shepherd; we are
the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. This language
persists, even in cultures like ours that regard sheep as rather stupid
creatures: we enjoin people not to behave like sheep — except
when we are in church.
With the arrival
of monarchy, God is envisioned as the heavenly king. We are his subjects,
and even the present Prayer book has not totally eliminated the notion
of groveling before him . And both shepherds and kings reflect the basic
institution of the patriarchal father. We are God's children, even though
the secular world in which we live places far greater value on our role
as responsible adults.
After
Christianity became the official religion of the late Roman Empire,
it quite understandably adopted more and more of actions and symbols
appropriate to the visible images of imperial authority. Now god's earthly
representatives sit upon thrones clad in resplendent vestments. The
people kneel, genuflect, and offer incense. The simple super around
an ordinary table of the earliest Christian communities becomes a pontifical
mass. The element of unapproachable majesty is to heightened that to
this day in Orthodox liturgies, a curtain is drawn between celebrant
and people at the most solemn moments. God's celestial court is the
reference to which these earthly symbols point.
God's imperial
majesty is now so overwhelming that he must be approached through intermediaries
— The Blessed Virgin Mary, the saints. Dante beautifully reflects
the protocol of a medieval court. Mary, queen of heaven, perceives that
Dante is undergoing a mid-life crisis. She speaks a word to Lucy, a
major-league saint, who then nods to Beatrice, who is just an ordinary
girl who has died and gone to heaven. But Beatrice has no intention
of taking a trip through hell, of encountering Dante in his messy human
distress. She simple tells Virgil to take over — Virgil, a mere
pagan in Circle One of Hell. Virgil sighs and undertakes the task of
leading the besmirched poet to a state of renewed wholeness at the summit
of Mount Purgatory. Then, Beatrice takes charge, until even she merges
into the background of the highest heaven.
God, king,
patriarchal father —an apparently indissoluble triad that dominated
our world for millennia. But over the last several centuries, the triad
has been severely eroded. Kings have disappeared or dwindled into mere
figureheads. Shepherds are hard to find in an era of massive cattle
raising. The patriarchal father is so badly threatened that conservatives
worry loudly about the loss of "family values" (a concern
amply justified by the results of the most recent census). Hence, nothing
was more inevitable than that these changes should bring about a radical
reconsideration of our images of God. How can we reconcile the language
of our theology with democracy, with the feminists' demand that all
of thinking reflect the equality of the sexes?
We have hardly begun
to grasp the significance of this momentous paradigm shift. The change
from "vertical" thinking, from the traditional ordering of
reality in terms of rank,, to the newer explorations of "horizontal"
(i.e., democratic, egalitarian) thinking is nothing short of cataclysmic.
Small wonder that large segments of our society draw back in alarm;
the military, the more traditional churches cling desperately to the
ancient hierarchical structures.
Professor
Harcourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of
English Emeritus at Ithaca College.
