30 Seconds Away 9 comments

By Gregory Wolfe

Note: The following remarks were given as the opening meditation on the theme of Image’s Glen Workshop on July 27, 2009.

St. Ireneus of Lyons, writing in 185 AD, said: “Gloria Dei vivens homo.” “The glory of God is man fully alive.” This sentence has haunted me ever since I heard it many years ago.

What does it mean? Ireneus wrote those words in the context of his attack on the heresy of Gnosticism, which held that the created order—matter itself—was evil and that salvation could only come through a secret knowledge of how to escape into a purely spiritual realm. The Gnostics tended to assert that Jesus was not incarnate as a human being but something more like a ghostly projection—like the hologram of Obi-wan Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie.

Gnosticism may seem like an exotic and distant sect to modern ears, but it represents a persistent attitude that recurs throughout history.

This may sound perverse but I believe that the problem today isn’t that people don’t have a sufficient understanding of spirituality; it’s that people don’t understand their own humanity.

Perhaps Ireneus’s belief that the glory of God is man fully alive sounds a little scandalous to our ears. We tend to be pretty down on the human.

It is one thing to say that humanity is fallen and sinful, but too often the baby seems to go sailing out with the bathwater.

We say that we are made in the image and likeness of God but we are not comfortable in our own skins.

If human nature is irretrievably lost, then the alternatives are to strive to become either beasts or angels—alternatives that our culture provides us in abundance. Gnosticism, incidentally, tended to split into those who indulged their bodies because they were already polluted and those who abolished sexuality and marriage and lived an almost bulimic lifestyle.

Perhaps one of the symptoms of the Fall is a fear of our own embodiedness, and therefore of contingency, limitation, dependence, need.

But these are gifts to us. The religious sense, inherent in our human nature, grows out of the awareness of our dependence.

Our popular culture thrives by creating the myth of invulnerability—to time, aging, you name it.

Its goal is to create the immortal beast.

But our religious subcultures regularly take the opposite approach, asking us to live in the abstractions of apologetics and moralism, creating an invulnerable ideological ghetto, impervious to doubt and ambiguity.

Its goal is to create mortal angels.

This Christian tendency to move beyond the immediacy of the here and now causes some to speak of “The world as it ought to be” and the “Human being as he or she ought to be.”

With the greatest respect I think this is well-meaning but misguided. The danger is that it leads us away from our condition of embodiedness and contingency, toward some spiritual realm outside our present experience, some future that will never exist. It is thus a form of gnosticism.

What we need is not the notion of a world that ought to be but the capacity to see the dimension of grace within the world that is.

A few years ago a holy priest from Italy was on a visit to the Southwest and had to pass through Las Vegas. When his hosts showed him, with no little trepidation, the whole bizarre panoply that is Las Vegas he had one simple response.

“My God,” he said, “these people are all 30 seconds away from salvation.”

I think he is right. Our humanity—the human heart—is constituted by certain elementary needs—for happiness, justice, beauty. The tired old Christian approach of moralistic condemnation of the wrong pathways to the satisfaction of these needs misses the point.

What we need to see is the inherent religious sense in human beings; we need to awaken the connection between desire and its home in God. Nor, except in the rarest of cases—and here I’m thinking of certain mystics—can that pathway to God be found except in and through “the things of this world,” which also means the here and now.

Artists are uniquely situated to help us achieve this perception of grace within contingency.

The film director Kurosawa said that the “artist is the one who does not look away.” The artist maintains her gaze at human neediness and dependency and through the honesty and the beauty of the form she creates enables us to connect that need with its true source and lasting fulfillment.

The artist works in an incarnational medium, profoundly aware of contingency and embodiedness. And yet art’s very greatness is the way that it can adumbrate the presence of grace in and through the messiness of our lives.

If this is not true, then the doctrine of the Incarnation is meaningless.

That’s where Gnosticism creeps in. We don’t look at the Incarnation rightly. We see it as the divine descending, perhaps condescending, to the human level—as if Jesus had to hold his nose while taking human form.

The church fathers, including Ireneus, did not see it that way. According to the ancient and authoritative Athanasian creed, Christ’s incarnation means that human and divine are “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God....”

To paraphrase the art historian Hans Rookmaaker, “Christ did not come to make us Christians; he came to make us human beings.”

The artist does not show us the world as it ought to be; she shows us the world as it is, here and now, and enables us to see that our redemption is always present, always available. It is not a message to be communicated but a presence and a mystery to be experienced. Art at its best is a place where presence and mystery can be encountered and received.

We are all 30 seconds away from salvation.