For this reason the liturgical representation of the Holy Spirit begins with the celebration of the Holy Trinity. Such a celebration tells us what the Spirit is: nothing in himself that one could put alongside others, but rather the mystery that God in love is entirely one, single, and that he is, however, at the same time counterpart, exchange, community. And from the Trinity, the Spirit tells us what God’s idea for us was: unity according to the image of God. He also tells us, however, that we men among ourselves can become one only when we find ourselves in a higher unity, as it were, in a third party. Only when we are one with God can we be united among ourselves. The way to the other leads over God. Without this medium of our unity, we would remain eternally separated from one another by abysses that no good will can bridge.
Everyone who experiences his humanity with alert senses perceives that we are not speaking of mere theological theories. The ultimate inaccessibility of the other, the impossibility of giving oneself to another and understanding one another for any length of time has perhaps seldom been learned so dramatically as in the twentieth century. “Life means being lonely, no one knows the other, everyone is alone”, Hermann Hesse formulated. When I speak with the other, it is as if a wall of translucent glass stood between us: we see each other, and yet we do not see each other; we are near to each other, and yet we cannot come near to each other. This is how Albert Camus described the same experience.
Pentecost, the presence of the trinitarian mystery in our human world, is the answer to this experience. The Holy Spirit is concerned with the basic human question: How can we come to each other? How can I remain myself, respect the otherness of the other, and, nevertheless, step outside the fence of loneliness and touch the other from inside? The Asiatic religions have answered this with the thought of nirvana. As long as there is an ego, it will not work, they say. The ego is itself the prison. I have to dissolve the ego, leave behind the personality as prison and as place of un-redemption, let myself fall into the void as if into the true universe. Redemption is dissolution [Entwerdung], and it must be exercised: the return to the void, the shedding of the ego as the sole true and final liberation. Whoever experiences day by day the burden of the ego and the burden of the Thou can understand the fascination of such a program. But is the void really better than being? Is the dissolution of the person better than his fulfillment?
Mere activism is no answer to such mystic flight. On the contrary, it brings about this flight. Then all new mechanisms that it creates become only new prisons if I and Thou are not reconciled. I and Thou, however, cannot reconcile if man remains unreconciled with his own I. But how should the I accept it, this ever-thirsty and covetous I, which calls for love, for the Thou, and at the same time feels wounded, threatened, and constricted by the Thou? In contrast to the great desire of the Asiatic religions, incidentally, the modern techniques of group dynamics, of the reconciliation of man with himself and with the Thou, are only poor substitutes for solutions despite their ingenious artifice. I and Thou are put, as it were, over a low flame, become accustomed to rules in order to take as little notice of each other as possible and in order not to have friction. Their divine passion is reduced to a couple of drives, and man is treated like an apparatus whose directions for use must be known. One tries to solve the problem of being human by denying man per se and treating him as a system of processes that one can set up and learn to control.
Now you may perhaps ask, what does all this have to do with the Holy Spirit and the Church? The answer is that the Christian alternative to nirvana is the Trinity, that ultimate unity in which the distinction between I and Thou is not withdrawn but joined to each other in the Holy Spirit. In God there are Persons, and so he is precisely the realization of ultimate unity. God did not create the person so that he might be dissolved but so that he might open himself in his entire height and in his innermost depth—there, where the Holy Spirit embraces him and is the unity of the divided persons. Now that sounds perhaps very theoretical. We must try step by step to approach the program of life that is contained within it.
We are on this path if we consider once again the progress of the liturgical celebrations of the Eastern Church. After the Feast of the Trinity on Pentecost Sunday, the outpouring of the Spirit, the foundation of the Church, is celebrated on Monday. On the following Sunday, the feast of All Saints is celebrated, as we said before. The communion of saints, that is, humanity formed according to the trinitarian pattern of unity, the future city that is still coming to be and which we try to build with our lives: the communion of saints is the ideal image of the Church, so to speak, at the end of the week, at whose beginning stands the earthly Church that began in the room of the Last Supper in Jerusalem. The Church in time is suspended between this Church of the beginning and the ever-growing Church of the end. In the artistic tradition of the East, the Church of the beginning, the Church of Pentecost, is the icon of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit becomes visible and depictable in the Church. If Christ is icon of the Father, the image of God, and at the same time the image of man, so the Church is the image of the Holy Spirit. From here we can understand what the Church actually is in the deepest part of her nature: namely, the overcoming of the boundary between I and Thou, the union of men among themselves through the radical transcendence of self into eternal love. Church is mankind being brought into the way of life of the trinitarian God. For this reason she is not something that belongs to a group or a circle of friends. For this reason she cannot become a national Church or be identified with a race or a class. She must, if this is true, be catholic in order “to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad”, as John’s Gospel (11:52) formulates.
The word dis-solution that describes the spiritual process of the Asiatic religions may be little suited to represent the Christian way. It is true, however, that a breaking and a being broken belong to Christianity, just as must happen to the dead grain of wheat so that upon opening it brings fruit. Becoming a Christian is becoming united. The shards of the broken image of Adam must be fitted together again. Being a Christian is not self-affirmation but rather a departure into the great unity that envelops mankind of all places and times. The flame of eternal longing is not extinguished but rather directed so that it is united with the fire of the Holy Spirit. The Church does not begin, therefore, as a club: rather, she begins catholic. She speaks on her first day in all languages, in the languages of the planet. She was first universal before she brought forth local churches. The universal Church is not a federation of local churches but rather their mother. The universal Church gave birth to the particular churches, and these can remain church only by continuously losing their particularity and passing into the whole. Only in this way, only from the whole, are they icons of the Holy Spirit, who is the dynamism of unity.
If we speak of the Church as the icon of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of unity, we may not, however, overlook a noteworthy characteristic of the account of Pentecost. It says there: The tongues of fire separated; one of them rested on each of them (Acts 2:3). The Holy Spirit has been given to each one personally and to each one in his own way. Christ assumed human nature, that which binds us all and from which he binds us. The Holy Spirit, however, has been given to each as a person: through him, Christ becomes a personal answer for each of us. The unification of men as the Church should accomplish it does not occur through the extinguishing of the person but rather through his completion, which means his infinite openness. For this reason, on the one hand, the principle of catholicity belongs to the constitution of the Church. No one acts from merely his own will and his own genius. Everyone must act, speak, think, from the communion of the new We of the Church that stands in intercommunion with the We of the triune God.
But precisely for this reason, on the other hand, it is true that no one acts only as a representative of a group and of a collective system, but rather each stands in personal responsibility of conscience opened and purified in faith. Th
e elimination of arbitrariness and egotism should not be accomplished in the Church through proportional representation of groups and majority constraint but rather through conscience formed from faith, conscience that creates not from one’s own but rather from the faith received in common. In his farewell discourse, the Lord describes the essence of the Holy Spirit with these words: “He will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (Jn 16:13). Here the Spirit becomes the icon of the Church. Through the description of the Holy Spirit the Lord clarifies what the Church is and how she must live in order to be herself. Speaking and acting in a Christian way is accomplished in this way: Never be only I myself. Becoming Christian means receiving the whole Church into oneself, or, rather, allowing oneself to be taken up into her. When I speak, think, act, I do so as a Christian always in the whole and from the whole. Thus the Spirit comes to the Word, and thus men come together. They come outwardly to one another only if they came to one another inwardly: if I have become inwardly broad, open, and large: if I have received the others through my co-believing and co-loving so that I am no longer ever alone but rather my whole essence is characterized by this “co-”.
Such speaking from hearing, from receiving, and not in one’s own name, may at first glance hinder the ingenuity of the individual. It restricts it, to be sure, if ingenuity is only an exaggeration of the individual that tries to extend itself to a kind of divinity. The knowledge of truth and progress does certainly not, however, hinder this way of thinking. The Holy Spirit thus leads by acting in the whole truth, in the not yet spoken truth of Jesus, and precisely there he also announces the future: We do not receive new knowledge through closure of the I. Truth discloses itself only in thinking with him what was known before us. The greatness of man depends on the measure of his ability to share. Only in becoming small, in participating in the whole, does he become great.
Paul summarizes this in a wonderful formula when he describes his conversion and baptism with the words “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Being a Christian is essentially conversion, and conversion in the Christian sense is not the changing of a few ideas, but rather a process of death. The limits of the I are broken. The I loses itself in order to find itself anew in a larger subject that spans heaven and earth, past, present, and future, and therein touches truth itself. This “I and no longer I” is the Christian alternative to nirvana. We could also say: The Holy Spirit is this alternative. It is the power of opening and fusing into that new subject that we call the Body of Christ or the Church. Here we all see, to be sure, that the coming together is no easy process. Without the courage of conversion, without letting oneself be broken open like the grain of wheat, it is not possible. The Holy Spirit is fire; whoever does not want to be burned should not come near him. But he must then also know that he is sinking into the deadly loneliness of the closed I and that all communion that is attempted at the fire finally remains only a game, an empty appearance. “Whoever is near to me is near to the fire” is a non-biblical saying of Jesus as transmitted to us by Origen. It refers to the relationship between Christ, Holy Spirit, and Church in an inimitable way.
Let me close with a word of Saint John Chrysostom that goes in the same direction. It follows the account in the Acts of the Apostles in which Paul and Barnabas healed a lame person in Lystra. The excited crowd saw in the two peculiar men who had such power a visit of the gods Zeus and Hermes. The crowd called the priests and wanted to sacrifice a bull. Paul and Barnabas are horrified and call to the crowd: “We also are men, of like nature with you, and bring you good news” (Acts 14:8-18). Chrysostom mentions in this regard: Correct, they were men like others, but different from them, too, for a tongue of fire was added to their human nature. That constitutes the Christian—that a tongue of fire is given to him, to his human existence. Thus Church originates. She is given to each one quite personally. He is Christ as this person in a singular and unrepeatable way. He has “his Spirit”, his tongue of fire, so much so that we refer to this spirit of the other when we greet him liturgically: “and with your spirit”. The Holy Spirit has become his spirit, has become his tongue of fire. But because he is thus the One, we can, through him, address each other, build with each other the one Church.
A tongue of fire has been added to being human. We must now correct this expression. Fire is never something that is simply due to another and therefore exists beside him. Fire burns and transforms. Faith is a tongue of fire that burns us and melts us so that ever more it is true: I and no longer I. Whoever, of course, meets the average Christian of today must ask himself: Where is the tongue of fire? That which comes from Christian tongues is unfortunately frequently anything but fire. It tastes therefore like stale, barely lukewarm water, not warm and not cold. We do not want to burn ourselves or others, but in this way we keep distant from the Holy Spirit and Christian faith is downgraded to a self-made world-view that as far as possible does not want to infringe on any of our comforts and saves the sharpness of protest for where it can hardly disturb us in our way of life. When we yield to the burning fire of the Holy Spirit, being Christian becomes comfortable only at first glance. The comfort of the individual is the discomfort of the whole. When we no longer expose ourselves to the fire of God, the frictions with one another become unbearable and the Church is, as Basil expressed it, torn by the shouts of factions. Only when we do not fear the tongue of fire and the storm it brings with it does the Church become the icon of the Holy Spirit. And only then does she open the world to the light of God. Church began as the disciples assembled and prayed together in the room of the Last Supper. Thus she begins again and again. In prayer to the Holy Spirit we must call for this anew each day.
Corpus Christi
______
The Apse Mosaic of San Clemente
in Rome
If we enter the historically rich church of Saint Clement’s in Rome by way of the atrium, which, with its walkway of columns and the fountain in the middle, reminds us of the plan of the ancient Roman house, we are immediately seized by the sight of the great apse mosaic, with its golden background and shining colors. Our eye remains fixed on the picture of Christ in the middle. Christ has inclined his head and given his spirit into the hands of his Father. A great peace emanates from his face, from his entire figure. If we were to seek a title for this depiction of the Crucified, words like reconciliation and peace would immediately occur to us. Pain is overcome. Nothing of wrath, of bitterness, of accusation lies in the picture. The biblical saying that love is stronger than death can be seen here. Death is not the main thing we see. We see love that through death is not abolished but rather stands out more than ever. Earthly life is extinguished, but love remains. The Resurrection thus shines already through the scene of crucifixion.
Apse mosaic of Saint Clement’s Basilica in Rome (detail)
If we linger before the mosaic, we notice that this Cross is in reality a tree, from beneath which four sources of water originate, at which deer slake their thirst. The thought of the four rivers of paradise arises, and the phrase in the psalm comes to mind: “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God” (Ps 42:1-2). The tree that comes from living waters is fertile. We now notice that the rich network of branches that fills the entire breadth of the picture is not simply an ornament. It is a great vine whose branches grow forth from the roots and limbs of the tree of the Cross. They extend over the whole world in great circling motions, drawing it into itself. The world itself becomes a single large vineyard. Between its shoots and amid its coils, the fullness of historical life stirs. The work of shepherds, of peasants and monks, of animals and men of all kinds, the whole colorful diversity of existence, we find depicted in images full of fantasy and joie de vivre.
But there is still something else. The Cross not only grows in breadth. It has its height and its depth. We have alre
ady seen that it reaches below into the earth, waters it, and brings it to bloom. Now we must still regard its height. From above, out of the mystery of God, the hand of the Father reaches down. Thereby movement comes into the image. On the one hand, the divine hand appears to lower the Cross from the height of the eternal in order to bring the world life and reconciliation. But it draws upward at the same time. The descent of God’s goodness brings the whole tree, with all of its branches, into the ascent of the Son, into the upward dynamic of his love. The world moves from the Cross upward to the freedom and expanse of the promises of God. The Cross creates a new dynamic: the eternal, futile circling around what is always the same, the vain circular motion of endless repetition, is broken open. The descending Cross is, at the same time, the fishhook of God, with which he reels up the entire world to his height. No longer circling but ascent is now the direction of history and human life. Life has received a destination; it goes with Christ to the hands of God.
But now we must ask: Is all of that true? Or is this one of the never-fulfilled utopias with which mankind attempts to console itself over the vanity of its history? Does any reality stand behind the image? Can there be a reconciled world that has become life’s great garden of paradise? Two considerations may help us find an answer. The artist has not taken the picture of the world as God’s vineyard, growing out of the Cross, without good reason. He is thinking of the words of Christ: “I am the vine, you are the branches” (Jn 15:5). The Cross as vine points us from the mosaic below to the altar, on which the fruit of the earth again and again is changed into the wine of the love of Jesus Christ. In the Eucharist the vine of Christ grows into the whole breadth of the earth. In its worldwide celebration, God’s vine extends its circles over the earth and carries its life in fellowship with Christ. In such a way the image itself shows us the way to reality: Let yourself be drawn into the vine of God, it tells us. Give your life over to the holy tree that grows ever new from the Cross. Become a branch of it yourself. Keep your life in the reconciliation that comes from Christ, and let yourself be drawn upward by him.
Images of Hope Page 6