TURNING THE WORLD UPSIDE-DOWN: ST PETER DAMIAN’S THEOLOGY OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE: Gordon Mursell, Former Anglican Bishop of Stratford

 

TURNING THE WORLD UPSIDE-DOWN

ST PETER DAMIAN’S THEOLOGY OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE: Gordon Mursell, Former Anglican Bishop of Stratford

There is a paradox at the heart of Peter Damian’s theology of the spiritual life, which is nowhere clearer than in his view of the world, and of the nature of human beings. On the one hand, he makes it clear that our existence in this world is transitory in the perspective of eternity: “if we were to compare the immense space of time in which God existed before the world was, and that in which he will continue to exist after its end, with the tiny amount of time from the beginning of the world to its end, it would be less than if you were to throw a handful of water into the sea.”  And he accepts St Paul’s sober view of human fallenness: all human beings have sinned, and Christ died for all. As a monk he persistently refers to himself as “Peter the monk and sinner (Petrus peccator monachus)”, even after being made bishop.  Yet, on the other hand, precisely in making this latter point he insists on the universal scope of Christ’s redeeming work: “the blood of Christ is the redemption of all the world (sanguis Christi redemptio totius est mundi).”  Note his wording: Christ died for all the world, not just for the Church, or even for all humanity. And here is one aspect of the paradox: this transitory world, a world from which Damian counsels his audience to flee to the spiritual safety of the monastery (or, better still, the hermitage), is precisely the world for which Christ gave his life. This paradox is not new: it informs the understanding of “the world” to be found in the Johannine writings in the New Testament: in them we find that, whilst Christ prays to the Father to deliver his disciples from the world and warns those disciples of the hostility the world will direct at them,  he also declares that “God so loved the world (not “the people of God”, or even “all humanity”) that he gave his only Son…God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him”; and Christ goes on to pray that his disciples may reproduce in their common life the mutual indwelling and love of the Father and the Son, “so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

The world, then, in the sense of the created order, is (for Peter Damian as for the evangelist John) both transitory and hostile - and yet Christ died for it, not just for a small number of the elect or even just for all humanity.  And the paradox is further heightened by Damian’s understanding of the human person: each fragile, sinful individual is at the same time a microcosm of “the world”, in that each person contains the four fundamental elements believed to be constitutive of the created order – and he takes that classical Greek view of the human person further in maintaining that each Christian is a “little church” (quasi quaedam minor ecclesia), since each is capable of receiving all the sacraments by which Christ’s redemptive work becomes efficacious in individual human lives.  Elsewhere he writes of the human person as “a lesser world (minori mundo)”, reproducing within his or her interior life the conflict that Damian believes to exist at the heart of the created order.