Creatureliness, Sin and Grace

10 July 2023

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us
where we are.

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the
same people you do.
Anne Lamott

Those who claim that their lives should be such as to console no one and to be a burden or the occasion of
grief to no one, who derive no joy from others’ success and inflict no bitterness on others with their own
perversity, I would call not human beings but beasts. They have only one goal: neither to love nor to be
loved by anyone.
Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship 2:52

Questions for discussion

What difference might it make to consider disappointment rather than pride or
concupiscence as an “index for original sin” (Skerrett)?

It’s astonishing that the question of “loving and being loved” does not emerge as a topic
in a chapter entitled “Human Nature, Sin and Grace”—a constant feature in Augustine
and medieval theologians, including Aelred of Rievaulx. Your thoughts on the quote
above?

Prepare a defense of both Augustine and Pelagius (Pelagians) on their dispute regarding
free will (we’ll have a brief in-class debate, and you don’t know which side you will be
on).

Art and theology

J. M. Turner, The Slave Ship
Gustav Dore, Paradise Lost (images)
Richard Pevear, translator, excerpt from Introduction, The Brothers Karamazov
Beverly Glenn-Copeland, ”Ghost House”
Jeremy Dutcher, performance of ”Ghost House”
Jeremy Dutcher, “Mehcinut” (Death Chant)

Alister E. McGrath, “Human Nature, Sin, and Grace”

Image of God (Latin: imago Dei), likeness of God (Gen. 1:27): In the first five centuries
of the Common Era (CE), unlike Christian exegesis, Jewish interpreters resist making a
direct connection between humans and God, while Christian interpreters use such a direct
connection to claim that humans are above, and distinct from, the rest of creation.
Contemporary eco-theologians refer to the ideas of Charles Darwin (discussed at the end
of McGrath’s chapter) among others, to take humans from the top of the pyramid into the
circle of all of life (see Elizabeth Johnson, Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for
a Planet in Peril).
Early Patristic theologians distinguish between “image of God” and “likeness of God”;
Tertullian, without saying that humans are God-like, the “image” was retained from the
original creation after the fall, and the “likeness” comes about through transformation in
the Spirit. Origen relates the “image” to the fallen body and “likeness” to an
eschatological perfection.

Particular human traits (reason, humans as speaking or social creatures, etc.) are
another way of talking about image of God. Rather than associating any “faculty” as
related to the “image of God,” Rowan Williams follows Athanasius’ and Augustine’s
focus on a capacity to relate appropriately to God our creator, implicated in human
redemption (transformation), but without an emphasis upon reason. Kathryn Tanner
(Christ the Key) also challenges the “traits” approach, and refers instead to human
malleability: the capacity to be transformed into powers that are beyond our own by
what is alien to us, through the opening granted to us through Christ, into the gifts of the
Trinity.

imago Dei is also taken to represent human dignity, solidarity with each other, an idea
that Lactantius (4th C) develops as human rights and responsibility: since we are all made
from one human, the “greatest crime is to hate humanity or do them harm. That is why
we are forbidden to develop or encourage hatred” (McGrath 328).

We cannot climb up to heaven; the Eternal word has come down to find you. To grow,
we must feed on truth. Simone Weil uses the images of humans as heliotropic: we need to
feed on light. Some people are unable to feed on light; they are not nourishable: “There is
only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost
all faults are possible” (Gravity and Grace 3). The afflicted in the novels of the New
Brunswick writer, David Adams Richards are those persons incapable of feeding on light,
unable to feel themselves to be loved.

The image of God doesn’t equal some kind of identity between God’s mind and ours but
awareness of hunger, desire, restlessness for God, an undefended heart/mind/spirit before
God. Sapientia (wisdom) the pathway to an openness to what we are not: the infinite
truth that is God. A unity of humans are made in divine image (City of God), a dramatic
contrast to the “default position” described by David Foster Wallace in This is Water
(“I’m the centre of the universe”) or Tucker Max in Assholes Finish First (I’m going to
get what I can, F the rest). The Max book was in one of those little free libraries on
Edinburgh Street—I glanced through it, appalled by the kind of behaviors justified by
such an attitude, and put it back.

Curiously, it is the immaterial (eternal) that allows us to embrace the material, the
“compromising and difficult life of the body and the emotions” (Kathleen Roberts
Skerrett). If we allow Wisdom to be our teacher, we will learn that no object satisfies our
deepest desire (which opens out onto God); we all are naked before God. The realization
that God is the object of our deepest desire is the realization of the image of God in
humans; becoming part of the divine life aware of itself, understanding itself and loving
itself.
To believe in the Incarnation or the Trinity is a skill of holy living as well as holy
thinking ... a revolution in your image of yourself ... learning a loving openness to the
infinite love of God. Growing in love is growing in Wisdom, freedom from functional
and possessive ways of thinking and loving.

Who introduced the idea of original sin?

Although its most memorable formulation appears in Augustine’s work, like most ideas,
the notion of original sin developed over a long time, and includes other Patristic fathers’
understanding of sin as the abuse of free will, and Evagrius Ponticus’s “thoughts,”
reintroduced in the Medieval period as the seven or eight deadly sins.

Traces of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin in the Eastern Greek Patristic tradition
include the mystical oneness of humanity with Adam (“in Adam’s fall, we sinned all”);
the notion that Adam’s fall affects human moral nature; and that Adam’s act of
disobedience (original sin) gets transmitted somehow to a disposition to sin within human
nature (329-330).

Salvation a reward for good behavior (merit) or God’s free gift?

The Pelagian controversy galvanizes debates about human nature in the church in the
early 5th C; while the Western Christian tradition sides with Augustine, the Pelagian view
is still influential. Pelagians (who includes Pelagius, Caelestius, Rufinus of Syria)
regard humans as totally free, uncompromised and therefore totally responsible: “since
perfection is possible for humanity, it is obligatory” (331). Jesus Christ and the Ten
Commandments are external guides to perfection: we have our example to imitate, so
we know what our moral duties are. This is justification through merit, as a reward. In
this view, grace is the use of an uncorrupted will and reasoning to avoid sin. A secular
example, that I recall from teaching Sexual Ethics at McGill as a graduate student, may
show the limits of this view. A woman reports in an essay that her parents taught her
she’s capable of doing anything she wants. When she experiences sexual harassment,
unequal pay, etc., her response is, “it’s me; I haven’t worked hard enough,” instead of
considering systemic issue of misogyny and patriarchy.

Augustine interprets “free will” (Latin liberum arbitrium) through a Pauline lens (the
good I would do, I do not do, and the evil I would not do is what I do)—how sin limits
human willing, tipped toward evil like a scale with one of the balance pans weighed
down with evil. Augustine’s analogies for original sin convey his understanding of “the
captive free will” (before conversion). Even with God’s grace, humans are perpetually
convalescing rather than being fully cured (illness metaphor). Augustine mixes his
metaphors: original sin is a hereditary disease, bondage, and guilt (juridical model), along
with corresponding images of salvation: Christ as physician, as liberator, as bearer of
forgiveness (McGrath 331-2). In his Confessions, Augustine has images of God as a slave
master punishing his slave; as a tender physician applying a bitter eye salve; and as
caring for God’s creation (which includes humans), sustaining it against a fall into
nothing, into the abyss, and of Augustine himself as prodigal son wandering away from
God, his true home.
Many Augustinians argue that Augustine’s theology is skewed if his strong sense of sin is
emphasized without attention to his equally strong sense of grace (gratia, free gift). In
his appreciative review of Sarah Ruden’s translation of the Confessions, Peter Brown
critiques her introduction for this misplaced emphasis: she refers to God scourging
Augustine but not to God’s tenderness, which is equally prominent in the Confessions.
For Augustine, grace is an active liberating force with which God heals human nature in
an ongoing way since there’s no cure for what ails humans, and certainly no self-cure,
rather by grace there’s a “real and redeeming presence of God in Christ within the
believer” (McGrath 333).

How does grace function according to Augusine?

The following terms provide a framework for Medieval discussions of grace.
Prevenient grace (preveniens “going ahead”) prepares the human will for conversion.

Operative grace is God’s work in us without us. (In his Confessions, Leo Tolstoy
describes two warring wills, a will to live and a will to die. He notices that over time, a
change happens in the self; he’s aware that he did not make the desire for life ascendent,
but it becomes that way.)

Cooperative grace is growth in holiness after conversion which has liberated the
“captive free will” enabling the “liberated free will” to cooperate with God’s action
(McGrath 335).

Using the parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Mt 20: 1-16), Augustine emphasizes
that human transformation comes about not according to merit (Pelagians) but the
promise of God (promise made for a wage, regardless of hours worked), a promise of
grace, so that humans are given what they do not deserve, while not receiving the
punishment they deserve. Does this Augustinian model devalue human freedom and
moral responsibility as Pelagians claim?

In Confessions, Book 8, Augustine despairs of his slavery to habit (215-217), where

something that was chosen at one time has now become unchosen, a habit he can’t shake.
He disputes the Manichean notion of two natures, good and bad (227), and proposes the
soul in disunity that doesn’t will with the whole will. Before he arrives at this
understanding, he considers that when the mind commands the body, it obeys instantly
(raise your hand, the body does it). Why then, when the mind wants something, does it
command itself but not obey (227-228)?

During the time of the development of university based faculties of theology, and more
systematic theologies (including the refinement of theological vocabularies), Thomas
Aquinas (13th C) distinguishes between actual grace, “grace which is freely given” (God
acting upon human nature) and habitual grace, “grace which makes pleasing” (a “habit”
or permanent change in the receiver). The latter change in human nature makes it
acceptable to God. Most importantly for Aquinas, a person is changed by something
supernatural in the soul. Grace is understood as love, a freely given gift, and praise and
thanksgiving in response to that gift. As for merit, Aquinas has an intellectualist
understanding, namely that God can see the value of an action and reward it accordingly
(McGrath 335, 337).

William of Ockham’s (13th to 14th C) voluntarist understanding (in which will is the
fundamental or dominant view of the individual or God) cuts out the inessential
hypothesis of “habitual grace” (Ockham’s razor). God can accept the sinner without that
middle step. This understanding leads to the Reformation view that emphasizes the
“gracious favour” of God (“divine attitude toward humanity”) rather than a series of
interactions and transformations (“divine or quasi-divine substance within humanity”).
Ockham’s view of merit: no relation between the moral and meritorious value of an
action; God can reward an action any way God wants (McGrath 336-7).

Protestant Reformation 16th C

The 16th C is marked by controversy over the theological term justification. We see a
shift in priority in NT exegesis, from Augustine’s “salvation by grace,” an inner
righteousness given by God (Eph 2:5) to Martin Luther’s doctrine of the “justification
by faith” on the basis of Romans 5: 1-2, among other passages. The change in emphasis
may be due to the influence of humanism, and the focus on individual consciousness,
particularly in the work of Luther. How do we individually enter into relation with God?
Augustine anticipates such an emphasis upon humans in direct relation with God through
the prayers that make up his Confessions: “What are you to me? Who are you to me?”
(Book 1).

In an “autobiographical fragment” for the first volume of his Latin works, written a year
before his death, Luther describes being haunted by the righteousness of God” which he
originally understands to mean that God punishes unrighteous sinners, feeling his own
worthlessness with respect to works. A changed understanding of this phrase, to mean
that this righteousness is gifted to us by God through faith, gives him the feeling of being
reborn, of having walked right “through open gates of paradise.” He now sees “the whole
face of Scripture in a new light” (cited in McGrath 338). (As Iris Murdoch and Stanley
Hauerwas remind us, you can only act in the world you can see.) His new understanding,
“justification by faith alone” or “justification by grace through faith” (McGrath 338-
339) reveals that human faith does not justify, it is not a human work, but the gift of a
merciful God, that humans need only receive this gift of righteousness (and grace).

Faith fiducia: the acceptance that that Christ born pro nobis, for us, different from
knowledge about something; trust unites the believer with Christ: “To know Christ is to
know his benefits” (Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague at Wittenburg). The sinner is
not capable of self-justification (self-cure).

“Alien righteousness” in eyes of God, viewed as righteous but in own eyes, inwardly,
still a sinner, expressed in Luther’s memorable phrase, simil iustus et peccator at once
justified/righteous and a sinner. This contrasts Augustine’s view that righteousness
becomes part of a person, and Aquinas’ view of “habitual grace.”
In a radical break from Augustine’s view that justification and sanctification are different
aspects of the same process (to be both declared and made righteous), Philip
Melanchthon’s “forensic justification” distinguishes between being declared righteous
(justification) and being made righteous (sanctification, regeneration), a distinction that
was to mark the Protestant position in contrast to the Catholic view formalized by the
Council of Trent. In his later writings, Luther similarly distinguishes between
justification as event relating to the outer status of sinner “in the sight of God” and
regeneration as altering the sinner’s inner nature, an interior renewal.

John Calvin formalizes the doctrine of justification for the later Protestant Reformation.
For Calvin, faith unites the believer with Christ in “mystical union,” which is similar to
Luther’s understanding of the real and personal presence of Christ in the believer through
faith. The “double grace” of this union 1) actualizes the person’s justification (through
Christ, the believer is declared righteous in the sight of God) and, 2) through the
believer’s union with Christ, the person begins the process of becoming Christ-like
(regeneration) (McGrath 341).

The Council of Trent (1545-1547) opposes Luther’s view and sides with Augustine.
Trent understands justification to include both the event and process of regeneration and
renewal within human nature, as a complementary change in the outer status and inner
nature of the sinner (whereas Protestants view these as distinct), an event (being declared
righteous through the work of Christ) and a process (being made righteous through the
internal work of the Holy Spirit). There was a concern that Luther’s position means that
being declared righteous is enough, without the need for spiritual transformation (while
not Luther’s position, some of his speeches might suggest this). Luther emphasizes the
need to trust boldly the promises of God, and he believes that good works would follow.
For the Council of Trent, there’s also a concern that no one can have absolute certitude
that they have the grace of God, and a worry that Luther and other reformers express an
“ungodly confidence” in their salvation (McGrath 343).

Predestination: Augustine, focussing on the particularity of grace, claims that some are
selected from fallen humanity, but it does not follow that others are actively condemned
to perdition (for some interpreters, his view seems to imply this).

Double Predestination: a Benedictine monk (9th C) Godescalc of Orbais, aka

Gottschalk: Christ died only for the elect, those who benefit (the reasoning: otherwise
Christ died for no good purpose). Calvin calls a related notion, “limited atonement,” in
his doctrine of predestination, which he calls a “dread decree.” This is how Calvin
understands an otherwise unanswerable question raised by something he observes as a
pastor: why do some follow God’s law while others do not? Unfortunately, a doctrine
best left alone was carried forward in the Five Points of Calvinism, with the mneumonic
TULIP summarizing a Reformed understanding of redemption. .

The Synod of Dort regards predestination is regarded as an individual matter: some are
predestined to salvation, others to damnation.
T=total depravity—sinful nature
U= unconditional election—not based on merit
L= limited atonement (Gottschalk)
I = irresistible grace
P = perseverance of the saints—no defectors (McGrath 346)

In his criticism of the Five Points, Jakob Arminius proposes a corporate view, known as
Arminianism: Christ died for all, not just the elect, and belief in Jesus Christ fulfills the
condition for being predestined to be part of the redeemed group. Arminianism influences
Methodism, as evident in Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Would Jesus have the sinner die?”
and in North America, Jonathan Edwards (McGrath 348)

Karl Barth, a neo-orthodox theologian, engages Reformed orthodoxy while giving it

new meaning: his Christocentric approach to predestination understands Jesus Christ as
the only one predestined to condemnation as the elected God and elected human being,
who “from all eternity willed to suffer for us.” No human is condemned regardless of
whether or not they believe—a belief in the universal salvation of humanity (McGrath
349)..

Max Weber (1864-1920) interprets predestination as “a new spirit of capitalism” in the

16th C in Calvinist societies. For believers looking for evidence of salvation, I work in
order to exhibit signs that I prosper, and this confirms that I am elected. Thus the
syllogism: the elected show signs of election; I exhibit signs of election; therefore I am
among the elect. Religious ideas have a way of migrating into different domains, as Jean
Bethke Elshtain discusses in her book, Sovereignty: God, State, Self.

Christian theology, in some of its classical strains, views humans as the apex of creation
(created in the image of God), while Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, in The
Descent of Man, 1871, among others, tries to square this with his findings of natural
selection, or “lowly [biological] origin” (cited by McGrath 351).

Christians have responded to Darwin’s theory in a variety of ways, by 1) interpreting the

“days” of the Genesis creation story as either corresponding to 24 hours (young-
creationism) or as lengthy eras (old-earth creationism), or 2) introducing the notion of
a “designer” (with a goal, though the “designer” is not identified) behind what appear as
random events in evolution (intelligent design), or positing a divinely ordered and
directed process of evolution (evolutionary theism). Also, not mentioned by McGrath,
Darwin’s theory is also appealed to by ecotheologians to support a view of humans as
part of the circle of life, rather than outside or above their environment. McGrath notes
that Darwinism can be interpreted as either opposed to or supporting Christian belief, and
also makes the important point that the approach to biblical interpretation associated
with conservative American Protestantism (“plain sense of Scripture”) is in fact quite
“nuanced and complex” (352).
Kathleen Roberts Skerrett, “Is that all there is? For the disappointed”
Like other feminist theologians, Skerrett asks us to consider an alternative to pride or
concupiscence as an index of original sin: disappointment.

For example, Valerie Saiving (early 1960s) does this in her gendered account of sin, in
her essay, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.” Saiving contrasts male sin (pride,
self-assertion) with female sin by arguing that women’s temptations may have more to do
with negation of the self, lack of assertion, characterized by “triviality, distractibility, and
diffuseness; lack of an organizing centre or focus; dependence on others for one’s own
self definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence; inability to respect the
boundaries of privacy; sentimentality; gossipy sociability, and mistrust of reason” (37). (I
can’t help noticing that the majority of aspects of Saiving’s “female sin” has become
more generalized through the overuse of social media, as described by theorists of media
like Sherry Turkle.)

Disappointment leaves us stranded as if we are looking in the windows of our house with
no way to get in, because we devalue the life we have and what it has taken to create that
life (we become vengeful toward the life we have) in favour of a life we fantasize about
(where there are no resistances, no conflicts, no boundaries). We can become very
destructive (if we have the social power) or self-destructive if we do not (or both).

Disappointment seems innocuous but it can become degradation, disillusionment,

destructiveness. Its origins are enigmatic, and its manifestations (envy, jealousy,
resentment, vengefulness) have a repetitive monotony that isn’t easily arrested by praise
or grief. Its imperviousness to praise or grief has to do with the moral imagination being
fixated on fantasies of “what life should have been” or “the tensionless life that was lost”
rather than attention to the particularities of the life we do have, its “densities” and
“contingencies.” In other words, disappointment is “more lapse than choice.” (Here
Skerrett engages the classical privation theory of evil—only good is substantive, evil is
loss of some possible good, an incapacity, a lack of some good disposition.) Attempts at
self-cure fail to attend to what sustains us, and how difficult it was to create what sustains
us, and how impossible it may be to reproduce.

She asks us to consider ‘tuning’ the intervals between the life we have and that we long
for, being present within, actually living, the life we have, through practices of grief and
praise which allow us to live into our losses, contradictions, frustrations, joys, delight,
anguish, what we have given up through our loves, without the expectation of resolution
(though we may be surprised by them). To put Skerrett’s insights into a question—are
you able to choose the life that you have?

It may be helpful to give a concrete example of the “privation theory of evil,”

encountered here through large scale atrocities, can also have their counterpart in the
domestic sphere, in a much smaller playing field. In her 1995 essay, “Augustine’s Evil,
Arendt’s Eichmann” in Augustine and the Limits of Politics, Jean Bethke Elshtain
(1941-2013) persuasively argues that Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” redeploys
Augustine’s “evil as privation.”
Elshtain argues that Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” a phrase she uses to think about
the perplexing habits/dispositions of Adolf Eichmann (on trial in Jerusalem in the early
1960s for Nazi era war crimes), was something she first learned from Augustine, namely
the orthodoxy of the “privation of evil” that Augustine develops in an argument with
Manicheism.

Arendt (1906-1975) uses the phrase, the banality of evil to challenge a popular view of
the romantic grandeur and largeness of evil, specifically, in coming to terms with what
she witnessed at the trial, and read in trial documents, concerning Adolf Eichmann’s
actions during the Third Reich. Arendt does not develop a theory or explanation of
Eichmann’s actions, preferring to mark the lessons one might learn: “remoteness from
reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken
together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was the lesson one could learn in
Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory
about it” (288, Eichmann in Jerusalem, italics added)

In The Life of the Mind, published posthumously, Arendt revisits the banality of evil in
relation to Adolf Eichmann: “what I was confronted with was utterly different and still
undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it
impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or
motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on
trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous….it was
not stupidity but thoughtlessness …. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to
conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially
recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our
thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence …. It was this
absence of thinking—which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life where we
have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think—that awakened my
attention” (cited in Elshtain 86-87).

The privation of evil is a classical Christian doctrine formalized by Augustine against his
earlier view as a Manichee, namely, that evil is a material, active presence working
against an equally and opposed material good. Augustine, affirming the goodness of
creation (“what is, is good”) thinks of evil as absence, a loss of good in relationships
(tangible by its harm, rather than as the agency of some monstrous figure), a falling away
from what is good and true within relationships. (As Elshtain points out, to call a person a
monster is to fail to hold them to account—a monster act evilly by nature, cannot do
otherwise.) Evil in a banal or “privation” sense is a lack of empathy, an inability to
consider another person’s point of view, a lack of moral tact and generosity, a lack of
incarnate presence. This imagines evil as dis-carnate, consistent with patristic theologians
imagining demons not to have bodies.

The chapter “Sin and Evil” in Constructive Theology (eds. Serene Jones and Paul
Lakeland) refers to Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between the Adamic myth and the tragic
myth as two ways to narrate evil in Western culture. The Adamic myth relates to the
Genesis story of Adam and Eve, and tells the story of evil as breaking into the world
through free choice that rebels against God’s will and destroys the created innocence of
humans, imposing suffering and guilt emerging from sin (122-124). Here free choice is
central, with the figure of the perpetrator, who is guilty as a result of sin. The tragic
myth is expressed in ancient Greek tragedies (Aeschylus and Sophocles, among others),
and considers evil to emerge out of the conditions of mortal human existence—finitude,
fragility, fatedness. Here there is much more emphasis upon human powerlessness,
undeserved suffering, victimhood, language of lament (124-5). Ricoeur notes, however,
that these two myths are interwoven even in the Adam and Eve story.

Cassian (360-435), Conferences

Cassian spent years in Egypt studying with Egyptian hermits and monks, and eventually
found his way to Rome, and from there to Provence, where he founded a monastic house
in Marseilles. He communicated his knowledge of the Egyptian models (practical
organization and spiritual life) to the West in two books, Institutes and Conferences.

The immediate aim of the monks is purity of heart or charity expressed in unceasing
prayer (see bottom of page 237, relates to the end of Book 1, Confessions); the ultimate
goal of their way of life is the kingdom of God. To these ends, they use various
techniques: “solitude, watches in the night, manual labour, nakedness, reading and the
other disciplines” (197-199).

Perfect prayer, Abba Isaac says, is the “keystone in the arch of all virtues” (215), and
prayer requires preparation so that “before we begin to pray, we ought to be trying to be
the kind of people whom we wish God to find when we pray” (215). His image of a
feather restored to its “natural buoyancy,” that is, not weighed down with dampness (sin),
reveals the more optimistic view of human nature in this book (as compared with
Augustine) (215-6) for those of you who might like a middle road between Augustine and
Pelagius. Like Augustine, Abba Isaac also “miniaturizes” sin as cares and distractions
(rather than focusing on more blatant sins). Why do you think he does this?

Prayer is as changeable as moods and feelings (219): “the same person according to his
diversity of affective states will use prayers of repentance or offering or intercession or
thanksgiving” (220). Variety of prayers expressive of the “anatomy of all the parts of the
soul” (Calvin cited by Serene Jones. I cannot resist including Anne Lamott’s list of
essential prayers, also responsive to different affect: “Help!” “Wow” and “Thanks.” The
highest form of prayer is speechless groaning (or possibly ecstasy) not translatable into
words after the event (221, 229, 244), in contemporary terms, right brain thinking.

The formula offered—a prayer that steadies the monk in all kinds of moods and
inclinations (despair, worry, happiness, suffering, sorrow, in temptation to pride, or
vanity, or criticism of other monks and so on)—“O God, make speed to save me: O Lord,
make haste to help me” (240).

The monks are counselled to know their own fragility and waywardness, and “to make
the thoughts of the psalms his own … as born of his own prayers” (243). We’ve seen this
in Augustine’s Confessions (Book 1) and it also resonates with Serene Jones’ discussion
of John Calvin.

Serene Jones, “Soul Anatomy” in

Later in her book Trauma & Grace, Serene Jones writes about the personal
circumstances that led her to rethink grace “in ways that do not require pure outcomes or
an impossible, radical newness” (156) and that includes “liturgies of the flesh” (158). In a
short period of time, Jones suffered the loss of a pregnancy, the end of a marriage, a
severe illness, the death of a friend, her daughter almost dying, cancer, betrayal, among
other things (152).

How might the Psalms become a way of claiming the authority of suffering/our
experience through a borrowed script when we have become voiceless? Referring to
performance and drama, Jones invokes a spatial understanding of enacting the revelation
of God in Scripture, the Psalms specifically, an enactment that is both a way of seeing
the world, and a way of acting in the world made visible in this way, a world where
God is in control, listens, and thereby enables a traumatized person to regain a sense of
agency (given the focus on the Psalms, Jones doesn’t relate this to the crucifixion here,
but does later in the book). This spatial sensibility is consistent with an approach taken in
Jones’ Feminist Theory and Feminist Theology: Cartographies of Grace.

A reader of the Psalms might do well to consider Augustine scholar James Wetzel’s
remarks about reading Augustine: “To be a good reader of Augustine, I need to allow him
the chance of addressing me and not restrict myself to erudite eavesdropping on his
conversation with God. I give him this chance less by sharing his beliefs and empathizing
with his experiences than by keeping an eye on the motive I have for reading him at all.
What do I expect from Augustine?”

Calvin understands the Psalms as the “anatomy of all parts of the soul” (Jones 43). While
there’s a tendency to associate Calvin with a profoundly internal sense of sin, Jones
considers events from his life in exile, with fellow refugees from France who faced
helplessness, having been terrorized by external persecution, a “terror of mind” related to
real external threats of death or imprisonment rather than an internal sense of sin (though
inwardness becomes more acutely present).

She considers soul craft, as imaginative practices, vision, “liturgies of the flesh,” guided
by an understanding of Scripture as glasses to see with and a drama in progress that may
be entered (46). The language of the Psalms is like Paul’s groaning before God, an
awareness of the “griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities...all the
distracting emotions” which awaken self-examination (51). In Chadwick’s translation of
Augustine: “I became a problem to myself.” A “sense of need” awakens the heart to
prayer when it trusts the promises of God (53); the psalms a practice (script) to hold
suffering in prayer. I have a letter that my mother wrote to her family in the city from the
village in Friesland where she was sent (for reasons unknown to me and now
undiscoverable) in the last year of the war. The letter details not only the uneven progress
(chaos) of liberation in the last week of the war but also lists the psalms sung in worship
services in the midst of this uncertainty, and in the horror of learning about death camps.

Jones traces the “three stages of psalmic healing” as resonant with Judith Herman’s
stages of healing from trauma:
1. safety: God’s sovereign reign, God hears, oriented to God’s will, healing
external/internal focus (55-58)
2. remembrance and mourning: testify and witness to God, God’s witness of harm,
and demonizing oppressor (58-60)
3. reclaim the ordinary: work that takes a life time; thanksgiving even in the midst of
terror (61-63).

How may liturgy offer practices of healing in the events and afterlife of traumatic events?
The repetitive, incarnate practice of singing the Psalms: “by singing the psalms the
church performed itself into a new and ever renewed form of embodied community”
(65); the physicality of transformation and hope. Jones also warns that it is possible to
foment hatred against others using the Psalms as models, to create despised “others”
since that rhetoric is in the psalms (Ps 83: “make [enemies] like whirling dust, like chaff
before the wind. As fire consumes the forest, as the flame sets the mountains ablaze, so
pursue them with your tempest, and terrify them with your hurricane...Let them be put to
shame and dismayed forever.”)

Rowan Williams, “The Soul in Paraphrase: Augustine as Interpreter of the Psalms” in

On Augustine (“Humanity Transfigured,” the sermon that concludes Being Human, gives
a condensed version of this argument). Both Natasha and Nick have raised questions
related to what follows.

Like Jones, Williams accentuates the pastoral work of Augustine’s interpretation of the
Psalms. Calvin may be commenting on Augustine in his work on the Psalms, since
Augustine refers to being set on fire by the words of the Psalmist, that express his “most
intimate sensations” (25).

Augustine makes an astonishing claim: singing the Psalms, the members of the body of
Christ, the church, become the voice of Christ, after Christ: Christ takes on the suffering
sinful flesh of humankind, and we replicate this by singing the words of the Psalms to
God. The practice (a habit of life and a vision of life, Platonic contemplation gives only
the latter, 33), enables us to greater realization of our sensations and emotions (“You
have enlarged my heart,” says Teresa of Avila), and creates a sense of wholeness for a
life lived in faith, however provisional and muddling that life is, and remains, in fact.
Jesus Christ utters the words, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22) as
the Head of the Body that undergoes the transformation of grace (28). The relation, not
surprisingly, is multilayered: “He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our Head,
he is prayed to by us as our God” (28). A hymn puts it this way: “He will sanctify to you
your deepest distress.”
Through the humiliation and humility of Christ becoming incarnate, we are reconciled,
and learn to accept our lovelessness, unloveability, limitations, sin, frustrations,
vengefulness, an acceptance of which is the beginning of a holy life (31).

Even so, inner life remains a mystery, a cavern (Confessions 186), a space of frustration
(35), but also God within, and a radical hopefulness in something I know not what (36).
To tell a truthful story I need an exposure not only to what another person can reveal to
me, or my self-questioning (usually in response to another person’s habits, or shocking
events) but to the noncontingent Truth that God is.

Augustine’s image of the angels in book 13 of the Confessions: they “read” the purposes
of God that we have to decipher from a material text: a reading that gives them the key
(musically speaking) of God’s purpose, and therefore they know “what to choose and
how to love. Legunt, eligunt, et diligent....they read, they choose, they love.”

Virginia Woolf talks about her writing practice as holding the fragments, all the
fragments in some kind of shimmering whole. For Christians, Christ mediates this unity
to us.

In the sermon that concludes Being Human, Williams speaks of a pastoral practice that
begins with our own transformation through the Holy Spirit, that not only “enables us …
to be a new kind of being but to see human beings afresh and to hear them differently”
(109). Jesus life initiates the possibility for us of this new way of seeing and hearing:
“Jesus’ humanity [takes] into [the endless life of God] all the difficult, resistant,
unpleasant bits of our humanity, taking them into the heart of love where … they can be
healed and transfigured.”