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.
No comments:
Post a Comment