Mythic Christianity

This morning I had a bash at singing the Te Deum. I always loose the tune at “O Lord, save thy people : and bless thine heritage” (“Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine, et benedic hereditati tuae”) so I worked on that a bit. The power of this poetry lies in the vividness of its mythological imagery: “The glorious company of the apostles praise thee; the goodly followship of the prophets praise thee; the noble army of martyrs praise thee …” You can imagine them all formed up in massed ranks carrying their books or the instruments of their death as in a mediaeval painting.

And then follows the solidly orthodox credal statements: “Thou [O Christ] art the everlasting Son of the Father … Thou sittest at the right hand of the Father” and so on. I was reminded of the period of the 4th century Christian Councils which laid all this down.  Christianity’s “unique selling point”, in the competition with the other products available at the time, was that it offered everlasting life, guaranteed by the proposition  that Jesus (a) was man and so could fully sympathis and identify with us; and (b) was also God and so really did carry the clout required to intercede with the Father in heaven. Never mind the logic: without this guarantee of everlasting life in heaven, you might just as well sign up for Gnosticism or Judaism which were logically tidier. And everlasting life (which Ravi Ravindra once described as “a threat, not a promise”) was, if it was in heaven, really worth it in comparison with the sort of life that most people struggled with in the days of the declining Roman Empire. (Richard Rubenstein’s “When Jesus became God” is a great book about this period).

At a rational level, I can bracket off this line of thought by reflecting that it is founded in St Paul rather than in the synoptic Gospels (whose preceding material was probably almost unknown to Paul). But it seems to be saying something important at the mythic level – at the depths of this level where logic becomes almost completely paradoxical – namely, that the pure Being which love sometimes enables us to see in a person is also present in the Absolute. Meister Eckhart and Dante had it right: “isness” is also “love”.