Communion, Covenant, and Creativity: An Approach to the Communion of Saints through the Arts

Communion, Covenant, and Creativity

An Approach to the Communion of Saints through the Arts

by

Paul S. Fiddes, Brian Haymes,

and

Richard L. Kidd

Communion, Covenant, and Creativity

An Approach to the Communion of Saints through the Arts

Copyright ©

2020

Paul S. Fiddes, Brian Haymes, and Richard Kidd. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Cascade Books

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-6863-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-6864-7

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-6865-4

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Fiddes, Paul S., author and editor. | Haymes, Brian, author. | Kidd, Richard L., author.

Title: Communion, covenant, and creativity : an approach to the communion of saints through the arts. / by Paul S. Fiddes, Brian Haymes, and Richard L. Kidd.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

2020.

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-5326-6863-0 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-5326-6864-7 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-5326-6865-4 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Christianity and the arts. | Communion of saints in art. | Communion of saints in literature.

Classification:

br115.a8 2020

(print) |

br115.a8

(ebook)

Extracts from The Waste Land and Little Gidding from FOUR QUARTETS in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Volume

1

, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue ©Set Copyrights Limited

2015

are reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from Little Gidding from FOUR QUARTETS by T. S. Eliot. Copyright©

1942

by T. S. Eliot, renewed

1970

by Esmé Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Extracts from Via Negative and The Absence in R. S. Thomas: Collected Poems

1945

–

1990

©

1993

R. S. Thomas are reprinted by kind permission of The Orion Publishing Group, London.

Extracts from Story of a Soul, translated by John Clarke, O.C.D. are copyright ©

1975

,

1976

,

1996

by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, ICS Publications,

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Lincoln Road, N.E.Washington, DC

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Extracts from St. Therese of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations translated by John Clarke, O.C.D. are copyright ©1977

Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, ICS Publications,

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Lincoln Road, N.E.Washington, DC

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Extracts from St Therese, General Correspondence Volume Two translated by John Clarke, O.C.D. are copyright ©

1988

by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites ICS Publication,

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Lincoln Road, N.E.Washington, DC

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Extracts from Thérèse, Music by John Tavener, Text by Gerard McLarnon are © Copyright

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Chester Music Limited, all Rights Reserved, International Copyright Secured, and are used by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited.

The image We are Making a New World by Paul Nash ©The Imperial War Museum The Image (IWM) is reproduced by kind permission of the IWM, London.

The image "Landscape of the Vernal Equinox" by Paul Nash is reproduced by kind permission of Royal Collection Trust/All Rights Reserved.

The cover image "Black on Maroon. Sketch for Mural No.

6

",

1958

, by Mark Rothko (

1903

–

1970

) ©

1998

Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and DACS, London is reproduced by permission. The photo of this image is copright ©Tate, London

2019

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Manufactured in the U.S.A.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Three Literary Versions of Communion with the Dead

Chapter 2 - Perceiving an Absent Presence

Chapter 3 - Telling Little, Revealing Much

Chapter 4 - A Death Observed

Chapter 5 - The Journey and the Dwelling

Chapter 6 - One World

Chapter 7 - Hiddenness

Chapter 8 - Participation

Bibliography

Introduction

Communion, Covenant, and Creativity

A

ny visitor to the

Painted Monasteries of the Bucovina region in Romania will immediately perceive—through all the senses— how central the doctrine of the communion of the saints is to Orthodox worship.¹ Through the painted walls, both outside and inside the churches, worshipers and tourists alike are immersed into a fellowship of the living and the dead. In their setting among the forests, mountains, and rivers of the area, the icons which are open to the sky and exposed to wind and rain also seem to extend the communion they represent into the wider, natural world and to make connections with all living things. Confronted by this witness to the communion of saints, the tradition of nonconformist or Free Protestant churches seems poor in comparison, an aesthetic barrenness broken here and there only by stained-glass windows of a mainly Victorian piety.

However, Christians whose roots lie in the more radical wing of the Reformation—especially Baptists, Congregationalists, and Mennonites—do have a substantial theological contribution to make to the doctrine of the communion of saints. This is the idea of covenant, a biblical theme about the relation of God to people, and people to each other, which some Christians have made basic to the nature of the church. Indeed, we may even claim that there was an overlooked fourth strand of the Reformation (alongside the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican forms of reformation) that may be called covenant ecclesiology.² The conviction that God has made a new covenant with humankind through Christ, as a fulfillment of the old covenant with Israel, has of course been pervasive in Christian theology since the time of the New Testament. But it was a minority group of Christians at the time of the Reformation who applied this belief to the very structure of the church, to a way of gathering a congregation.

Readers of this book in North America and the UK may find unexpected common ground here in their heritages. A definitive expression of the covenant ecclesiology approach can be found in a record of a group of early seventeenth-century English believers, Separatists from the recently established Church of England, who met in two congregations in nearby villages in Lincolnshire—Gainsborough and Scrooby. One of their number, William Bradford, was later to become Governor of the Plymouth Bay Colony in the New World, and in his memoir recalled many years later an occasion of covenanting together in

1606

or

1607

:

They joyned them selves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a Church estate, in the fellowship of the gospell, to walke in all his wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.³

Brief though it is, this account contains the essence of a covenant ecclesiology, conceiving covenant in two dimensions at once, vertical and horizontal; that is, the church was gathered by the members’ making a covenant or solemn agreement both with God and with each other. There is the characteristic pledge to walk in the Lord’s ways, which reaches back to the earlier congregational covenants in a Separatist heritage, and forward to the many covenants of local Congregationalist (or Independent) and Baptist churches from the late seventeenth century onwards.

Within a year of the covenant-making in England the part of the congregation that gathered in Gainsborough would be in exile in Amsterdam with their pastor, John Smyth, and within two years would have adopted the practice of believers’ baptism. Some members of that church would return to England in

1611

with Thomas Helwys as their pastor to found the first General Baptist church on English soil. The other part of the original covenanting group, who worshiped in Scrooby, were to follow their fellow believers to Holland, though not into Baptist convictions. From their church in Leiden, served by John Robinson as its pastor, many of them would sail for America on the Mayflower—including William Bradford—and would contribute to the story of Congregationalism in New England. North America was also gradually to become a place of refuge for other Baptists and Congregationalists from England and Wales, as well as for Anabaptists—including Mennonites and Amish—from the European continent, who had a separate history of gathering their churches by covenant.⁴

We, the authors of this volume, have cowritten an earlier one in which we set out to integrate this kind of covenant ecclesiology with the traditional doctrine of the communion of saints as inherited within the Orthodox tradition in the East, and in the Roman Catholic tradition in the West.⁵ In that book we suggested that a covenantal perspective could assist in developing the idea of an ongoing communion of prayer with the saints, alive and dead, which did not depend on the dualism of a disembodied soul existing after death but which strongly affirmed the Christian tradition of the resurrection of the body. We proposed there that dwelling in the triune God after death, and God’s maintaining of the identity of human persons, were illuminated by convictions about an ecclesiology of covenant. We placed this doctrinal proposal in the context of such typical human phenomena as the gifts of memory, the persistence of hope, and the experience of mysterious interconnections between events and people.

In this new volume, which may be read on its own and does not require the reader to be familiar with the first, we continue to explore the idea of the communion of saints against the background of such human experiences. This time we weave a third strand of creativity into the braiding together of covenant and communion, giving special attention to the arts of painting, music, poetry, story-writing, and liturgy. We explore the various ways that artists express the sense of what we can discern, from a Christian theological perspective, to be a communion of saints. Without imposing religious intentions on artists when they do not own them, we suggest that the idea of the communion of saints can contribute to our appreciation of art even when reference is not being explicitly made to any doctrinal idea, and that our understanding of this communion will be deepened by reflection on the arts. Without distorting the works being reviewed, we can find indications, rumors, or hints of a communion—especially prayer—between all those living and dead whom God is making holy, or is leading to a life of personal well-being and self-giving love for others.

In this project the importance of a non-dualistic approach to the world is further stressed, with attention to encounter with God through the materials and bodies of creation. On the one hand we think that this approach contributes to a distinctively Christian approach to aesthetics. On the other hand we aim to show that Christian churches have been hampered by a dualistic understanding of existence, and that their life and mission would be transformed through a proper concern for bodies in the human and the natural world, and by giving a central place to the doctrine of the communion of saints.

The book is not a mere series of essays but, as with our earlier book, presents a sustained argument on which we, as authors, have worked together for a number of years. Five chapters which follow this introduction relate the idea of the communion of saints to the work of various artists—two painters, two poets, a prose writer, a devotional writer, a librettist, and three composers of music. Confidence in the doctrine is built, and credibility is increased, through the accumulation of imaginative forms. Through this exegesis a collection of creative work is also being put together which can be the object of further analysis in the second section of the book, where each of the authors comments on the work of his fellow-authors, and highlights a particular emphasis that has run throughout the chapters—non-dualism in one world, hiddenness and participation.

We hope that this account of the communion of saints, interwoven with a theology of the covenant and reflection on human creativity, will be of interest beyond those who already hold to an ecclesiology of covenant. We would like both volumes to contribute to an ecumenical theology, and in particular to a convergence between covenant and the ecclesiology of communio or koinonia. Both these latter terms, indicating fellowship between churches and also wider human relationships with the triune God, have emerged in ecumenical conversations initiated by the World Council of Churches, and in the Roman Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council.⁶ Conversations between the Baptist World Alliance and the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity of the Catholic Church have identified a fruitful overlap between covenant and communio or koinonia: all these terms, it has been agreed, seek to link local congregations with the universal church, and integrate a horizontal vector of fellowship between members of Christian communities with a vertical vector of fellowship with a triune God whose life is characterized by relationships. An agreed statement between Baptists and Roman Catholics runs:

The koinonia of the church may also be understood as a covenant community although this language is less familiar to Catholics than to Baptists. Covenant expresses at once both the initiative and prior activity of God in making relationship with his people through Christ, and the willing commitment of people to each other and to God. The church is a gift in the sense that it is gathered by Christ, and it gathers in response to the call of Christ. The term ekklesia indicates an assembly that is called out by God. Calling the church a fellowship of believers does not mean that the church is constituted only by faith: faith is always a response to the initiating grace of God.⁷

Supplementing the comment that covenant language is less familiar to Catholics than Baptists, the report goes on to note that "‘covenant ecclesiology’ is parallel to ‘communion ecclesiology’, and will be more familiar language to Baptists."⁸ Baptists and Catholics agreed this communion, koinonia, or covenant relationship means that the local fellowship does not derive from the universal church, nor is the universal a mere sum of various local forms, but that there is mutual existence and coinherence between the local and universal church of Christ.⁹ The report, if briefly, extends this convergence on the language of covenant and communion to the communion of saints. Urging that Local churches must be in visible and not only spiritual communion with each other, or else communion will lack fullness, it goes on to assert that Both Baptists and Catholics hold that they are in communion with the blessed in heaven in the communion of saints.¹⁰ Understanding prayer to be to the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit the report affirms that "We pray like this in the company of all the saints who are praying with Christ, those who are alive and those who have gone before us. So the church prays with Mary (Acts

1

:

14

) and learns to pray like Mary in the communion of saints."¹¹

Despite this agreement, however, Roman Catholic conversation-partners do not generally show themselves aware of covenant as shaping the very structure of the church itself. The authors of this book hope that ecumenical convergence might deepen through exploring the reality of the communion of saints from a different direction than is normally to be found in ecumenical reports. This is a book about communion, covenant, and creativity. Through artifacts of the imagination, and through the embodiment in art of human relations across even the divide of death, we aim to explore that commitment of the triune God to the material world to which the painted monasteries of Bucovina bear witness. The image of the communion of saints makes clear that this divine commitment never comes to an end.

1

. Sinigalia and Boldura, Medieval Monuments of Bukovina,

9

–

22

,

195

–

97

. One of the authors made such a visit in November

2018

.

2

. See Fiddes, Fourth Strand of the Reformation,

1

–

14

.

3

. Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation,

1

:

20

–

22

.

4

. See Yarnell, Covenant Theology of the Early Anabaptists,

15

–

62

.

5

. Fiddes et al., Baptists and the Communion of Saints.

6

. Kasper, Harvesting the Fruits,

72

–

78.

7

. Word of God in the Life of the Church,

40

.

8

. Word of God in the Life of the Church. The link between communion and covenant has been made in Roman Catholic theology by Ratzinger, Called to Communion,

32

.

9

. Ratzinger, Called to Communion,

37

. For the idea of coinherence or perichoresis in ecclesiology see Fiddes, Church Local and Universal,

108

–

15

.

10

. Word of God in the Life of the Church,

25

.

11

. Word of God in the Life of the Church,

88

.

1

Three Literary Versions of Communion with the Dead

Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot

Paul S. Fiddes

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether it is a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?¹

I

n this passage from

his poem The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot evokes a common human experience, that those who have died can in some moments seem close to us, joining our company in a mysterious way, unexpectedly making their presence felt. In his own notes to his poem Eliot recalls one such instance of which he has read and which—he says—stimulated his lines here: on an Arctic expedition, it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted. At an earlier point in the notes to the poem he also recalls the Gospel story of the disciples journeying on the road to Emmaus, joined by the unrecognized figure of the Christ who had been crucified, and associates him with the one who walks beside you.² Later we shall return to the Emmaus narrative as giving a significant clue to the nature of this phenomenon of the company of the dead, but it certainly happens more widely than on either occasion to which Eliot alludes.

The question is how we should understand such experiences, in the light of the kind of theology of the communion of saints we are developing in this book. I and my fellow-authors intend to warn against the supposition that the dead are present with us in the same way as the living, since this does not take account of the decisive breach in life made by death. We want to contest a dualistic account of the human person, whereby an individual soul might leave an outer shell of the body behind at the point of death, and so be able under some circumstances to appear to the living as if they were still essentially the same as before. Such a concept, we argue, owes more to Platonism than to Jewish-Christian concepts. If we think of the communion of saints from the perspective of a covenanted community that transcends the boundaries of the living and the dead—such as held in the Baptist tradition—it cannot be a gathering of disembodied souls. We have already tackled this issue extensively in the first book on the communion of saints that we wrote together (although it is certainly not necessary to have read that former volume to make sense of the present one).³ Now I want to approach it from a different direction, by exploring three presentations in creative literature of communion with those who have died, to see how imagination might shape a theology.

Thomas Hardy: Communion in Absence

Thomas Hardy may seem a curious witness to call in a book about the communion of saints. His renunciation of the orthodox Christian faith of his early years is well-known, and integral to his mature viewpoint was a firmly-held and bleakly-expressed conviction that death is the total end to life. His poems (we shall not be concerned here with his novels) look mortality unflinchingly in the face, as the destiny towards which life and remorseless fate steer every living being. The places which he celebrates testify to the absence of those who were once loved and have passed into oblivion. They are no longer here, and yet the very place with which they were associated will not—it seems—let them go; the place preserves their presence, and the more their absence is dwelt upon, the stronger their presence is felt.

Given Hardy’s theoretical belief in an unconscious, immanent Will operative through laws of nature,⁴ one might be inclined to call this a poeticizing of memory—that all that is really meant is that the person is still present in the mind and emotions of the poet, especially in a guilty conscience, and that the place triggers the recollection. But it is not easy to reduce the poetry to this rational statement: the poetry itself constantly says more. Nor can it be reduced to a belief in animism, the sense of a literal spirit inhabiting physical place, though Hardy was interested in the studies made of such primitive beliefs by the Oxford anthropologist Max Müller.⁵ What his poetry is telling us is that there is presence in absence, indeed communion in absence, an experience that defies rationalization.

This is true preeminently of poems about his dead first wife, Emma, who is memorialized in some hundred and fifty poems, among which the small collection entitled Poems

1912–1913

form what has been rightly called the most intense elegiac writing in English.⁶ The poems owe their effect to Hardy’s expression of his feelings in terms of place, and a mysterious oscillation there between a sense of absence and presence in the operation of memory. Here I want to comment in detail on only one example, The Voice,⁷ which begins in a paradoxical sense of loss—the woman missing and yet also speaking:

Woman much missed,⁸ how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

The experience of hearing the voice of a beloved dead person is common in bereavement, but here the voice seems conveniently to be reinforcing the view of the poet about the tragic, slow disintegration of their marriage over the years. While Emma had become more querulous and censorious of him, especially in her disapproval of his attack on Christian marriage in Jude the Obscure, his attention had wandered to younger women elsewhere. In this opening stanza he has her admitting that she was the one who had changed. The poet seems to be aware of this imbalance, and doubts arise: Can it be you that I hear? For reassurance he turns to place, to the locations in Cornwall that had been the scene of their courting and first love, a much-loved landscape which she had desperately wanted to revisit in her last years, and where he had refused to take her. After her death, in grief and guilt, he made an actual pilgrimage to those places of their past happiness, recording the traces of her voiceless ghost⁹ on the cliffs where she rode, and in the waterfall and cave where once they haunted here together. In the poem After a Journey the poet exclaims, I see what you are doing: you are leading me on.¹⁰ In The Voice, however, he is making the journey in imagination, traveling in memory to the town of Boscastle where, in August

1870

he had returned to see the young Emma Gifford whom he had met for the first time the previous March:

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!¹¹

The place evokes the presence (yes), and yet it is an absent-presence. Poignantly, she is wearing an air-blue gown,¹² not—as we might expect—a sky-blue gown. The critic John Bullen has pointed out that sky-blue (. . .) hovers in our minds, producing the sense of a bright summer’s day, but the adjective chosen is air-blue, producing the impression of weightless substance, an evanescence which Bullen suggests introduces into the poem a single note of sensuous pleasure.¹³ It also introduces, I suggest, a curious note of absence into this welcome appearance, just as in the poem After a Journey the poet ends:¹⁴

Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

Yet he asks her, bring me here again!

In The Voice the note of uncertainty introduced by the air-blue gown gains force in the next stanza as Hardy is transported back from Boscastle to Max Gate, his house on the water meadows of Fordington Fields where Emma had died:

Or it is only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,¹⁵

Heard no more again far or near?

The woman of the air-blue gown is dissolving into air, just as listlessness breaks down into wistlessness. Again, the sense of place is strong, this time of wet mead, and the poet staggers forward into the harsh, unyielding autumnal landscape in his search for his wife:

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

In contrast to the second stanza, the prevailing tone of this fourth is that of absence and desolation, and yet it ends with the impact of a