Dead Christians Society

Two penance-related questions from students on the reading of Gregory's Pastoral Care, and my answers:

Here's a list from Tom Oden's 1984 Fortress Press book Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition. First, Oden argues modern pastoral care has become hopelessly muddled and weakened by a process of disassociation from its historical, theological roots. It must encounter "the classic tradition"--represented in particular by the book given to all Western bishops for a millennium: Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care. Oden argues that when modern pastoral care encounters this classic tradition, it will realize that it must change in some fundamental ways. And it will gain the resources to effect that change:

Remember as you look at this list that Oden had trained and practiced in both liberal theology and the many faddish techniques of counseling and psychotherapy that were so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. What a wonderful transformation he had experienced through his encounter with what he calls "the classical tradition of pastoral care"—that is, his readings in some of the people we would call "the church fathers":

"Patron Saints" class question on Gregory:

Q:     Did Gregory consider pride to be underlying most other sins (a more serious sin) – was that Church teaching at the time?

A:    The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, were first introduced when Greek monastic theologian Evagrius of Pontus drew up a list of eight offenses and deadly human passions, the sins as eight "passions", and they were, in order of increasing severity: gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride. Evagrius saw the escalating severity as representing increasing fixation with the self, with pride as the most egregious of the sins. Acedia (from the Greek "akedia," or "not to care") denoted "spiritual sloth."

In the late 6th century, St. Gregory the Great reduced the list to seven items, folding vainglory into pride, acedia into sadness, and adding envy. His ranking of the Sins' seriousness was based on the degree from which they offended against love. It was, from least serious to most: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride (abbreviated into the mnemonic palegas).

"Capital" here means that these sins stand at the head (Latin caput) of the other sins which proceed from them, e.g. avarice gives rise to theft and lust gives rise to adultery. Later theologians, most notably Thomas Aquinas, would contradict the notion that the seriousness of the sins would be ranked.

Pride (vanity) — A desire to be important or attractive to others or excessive love of self (holding self out of proper position toward God or fellows; Dante's definition was "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor"). In the Latin lists of the Seven Deadly Sins, pride is referred to as superbia.

A key source I used in preparing for class discussion of Margery Kempe —is a book by Martin Thornton, an Anglican priest/scholar, Margery Kempe: An Example in the English Pastoral Tradition (London: SPCK, 1960). Thornton, by the way, is a "priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd."

Here's another student question, and my answering ruminations, from our class's discussion of Margery Kempe:

Q: The weeping, etc. seems similar to some charismatic movements in terms of being characterized with outward emotional manifestations of the Spirit? Are movements similar to these found at other times in church history?

A: When I first encountered the stories of the life of St. Francis, for example in the near-contemporary accounts in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, I was struck by how similar that spirituality was to modern charismatic spirituality: visions, prostrations, prophecies, miraculous signs like levitations and healings, a vivid sense of the presence of God by his Spirit—all are present in Francis's 12^th-century spirituality. There are other examples too. This is from a newsletter I wrote while at Christian History:

In the Patron Saints class's discussions, I ask students to hand in questions in advance. The "uber-question" most people asked--in some form--after reading Margery Kempe was this: How are we to deal with the influence of medieval Catholic theology and practice on Margery's spirituality?

I jotted a few thoughts in response:

I sense behind this question, for some of you at least, some degree of fear: If we start messing with this Catholic stuff, will we end up taking in some theological poison? Can we really learn from people from whom we as evangelical Protestants have historically differed so much? I'm not going to try to answer those questions here—--we really can't try to do that, or we'll get too far afield.

I do want to point you to the best brief contemporary survey I have seen on Catholic-evangelical dialogue as it now stands. This is a recent Books & Culture cover article which is a concise condensation of a recent book.

In the "Patron Saints" class this week we spent time discussing Margery Kempe. Some great questions were asked in advance and as the discussion proceeded. Here's one that really made me think again about the strong visual and physical/tactile element in medieval devotion. The student's question comes first, then my thoughts in answer (including a clip on the medieval Corpus Christi festival). The page number reference is to the Penguin edition of Margery's Book, translated and introduced by B. Windeatt--a wonderful introduction, by the way:

On page 113 Margery witnesses a women who has an image of Jesus. This woman lets some of the other towns women dress it up and revere the image. Was this kind of thing common? I thought that the Western church didn't uphold use of icons, is this something different?

Medieval piety was intensely visual. I don't know about "revering images," but Francis's innovation of the crèche, the elaborate tapestries often unfurled and used as backdrops by traveling preachers, and of course the story-based stained glass and statuary in the churches themselves all communicated spiritual things in visual ways. On the other hand, at the festival of Corpus Christi, we move from image as instruction or visual aid to the veneration of the Body and Blood of Jesus himself, by way of the theology of transubstantiation:

[clipped from the very helpful glossary of Margery Kempe's Book]: Corpus Christi became a universal Christian feast in 1317. Celebrating the sacramental body and blood of Jesus Christ, the feast day typically involves eucharistic processions.  This was a highly popular late medieval feast; its focus was the Passion and redemptive act of Christ and it brought all of a town together for communal activities. Margery Kempe speaks of a "solemn procession with many candles and great solemnity (that) went through the town" (MK Ch. 45).  [Essentially carrying the consecrated bread and wine around the town in a special receptacle, which was a focus of worship.] Often dramatic performances were associated with it, such as the "interlude" paid for by the city of Lynn in 1384 for the embellishment of the feast. 

A more general observation is that the strongly visual and tactile devotion of Margery's day is strongly related to the emotional nature of that devotion. Among the different aspects of our human nature, our emotions seem especially closely tied with our physical bodies. We use the same word, "feeling" or "being touched," for the physical senses and for emotional experiences.

My question is: Where has the sense of "touch," of "physicality" gone in today's culture? Does it, can it ever, communicate anything true or spiritual? We have plenty of vision in our TV- and movie-soaked culture. But how often do we experience anything significant through touch? The most intense, ecstatic touch-experiences, those of sex, have been devalued and dehumanized through obsessive attention and being made the commodities of the impersonal marketplace. I think our sex- and violence-saturated culture has contributed to making us leery of committing anything so serious and foundational as our religious lives to this realm of the tactile and the emotional. It's not that we're Gnostic, denying the reality or goodness of the physical. It's that we're super-saturated by vulgar, meaningless exploitations of the sense of touch, the sense of vision (especially, for males, associated with sexuality), and the emotions.

So it becomes very difficult for us to relate to such practices as pilgrimage, for example. When I described, in a class at Gordon-Conwell during the mid-90s, the huge influxes of eager believers, every day, by the busload, to the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 that launched Pentecostalism, and the long streams of eager "pilgrims" that made their way to the Toronto Airport Vineyard church in the [80s? 90s?] and the Brownsville/Pensecola revivals of the [90s?], one student asked, with obvious disbelief in his voice, the following question: "Why do Pentecostals and charismatics feel that it's so important to actually go to the place where a revival is supposedly happening, to 'bring back' that revival to their home churches?"

The answer, it seems to me, resonates strongly with the medieval practice of pilgrimage: people go where God is reputed to be moving in a special way because they recognize the essentially personal, visual, tactile, and emotional nature of this historic faith of Christianity. God continues to incarnate himself in Christ—in the body of Christ—which is his people, his "living stones," wherever he chooses to build them together. We may not venerate Saints today or seek out their relics, but we do crave the kind of physically and emotionally mediated contact with Christ that comes to us in special gatherings of his people—his body—where he seems to be doing special things uniquely "for our time and place." However un-Protestant, or at least un-Reformed-Protestant, that may seem, I believe it reflects a deep truth about the incarnational nature of our faith.

A friend stumbled across this brief conversation on a fellow-traveling blog triggered by the recent www.christianitytoday.com article mentioned below. Links there lead to responses from both poles: very pro-emergent, very anti-emergent.

A new column will be appearing on www.christianitytoday.com related to this "Patron Saints for Postmoderns" blog, book, & course. The first installment is here.

Welcome to a blog that really is Grateful to the Dead! If you are new to the blog, I suggest you click through a couple of the categories in the left-hand "category" area.

The category "THE BOOK: Patron Saints for Postmoderns" contains the ur-post--my original explanation of what this blog is all about.

The category "THE COURSES" has been one of the most active areas, drawing comments and exchanges from students in the Bethel Seminary course I am currently teaching that has the same name as the book. It also contains some further introductory material clipped from the notes for a brief course I taught at the wonderful Cornerstone Festival in Illinois this past summer.

Of course, feel free to browse through any of the categories that bear the names of the nine "patron and matron saints" who will be featured in my book (eight of these are the focus of the Bethel course).

If you want to vote for a favorite "patron or matron saint" as the tenth figure for the book, feel free to respond to this post with suggestions. (See THE BOOK category for my criteria in selecting the other nine.)

Thanks for dropping by.

Peace,

Chris Armstrong
associate professor of church history, Bethel Seminary
senior editor, Christian History & Biography