Jer. 3314-16
Ps 25:1-9
1 Thess 3: 9-13
Luke 21: 25-36
Our love is our weight. That is what St. Augustine claimed. There are two saints named Augustine on our calendar,
Augustine of Hippo, the late 4th-early 5th century philosopher and theologian, and Augustine of Canterbury,
the first archbishop of Canterbury, who lived in the 6th century. It is Augustine of Hippo, the philosopher and
theologian, who said our love is our weight.
What Augustine is saying has become obscure to us. The reason is that we just don’t
think in terms of Aristotle’s physics. We think of weight as gravitational pull towards the earth and, metaphorically,
as a burden, something that drags us down, or else sometimes as something weighty, where weight means seriousness. None of
these meanings is very close to what Augustine meant.
For Aristotle everything in the cosmos is drawn to its natural place, and
being drawn to its natural place is what Aristotle means by weight. Rocks fall to the earth because of their weight, just
as we would suppose. But for Aristotle it is also because of its “weight” that fire rises. In this context, the
context of Aristotle’s physics, Augustine’s claim that our love is our weight begins to make sense.
If we were
cattle, Augustine says, we would love what pleases the senses; this would be our good, and we would be drawn to it. “If
we were trees we would not be able to love anything through sensual experience yet we would seem to have a kind of desire
for increased fertility and more abundant fruitfulness. If we were stones or waves or wind or flame, or anything of that kind,
lacking sense and life,” he continues, “we would still have something like a desire for our own places and order.
For the specific weight of bodies is, in a manner, their love, whether bodies tend towards earth in virtue of their heaviness
or strive upwards in virtue of their lightness. A material body,” Augustine concludes, “is borne along by its
weight in a particular direction, just as a soul is by its love.” (City of God 11. 28)
Our love draws us to what we love,
whatever we love. And we are drawn to whatever we are drawn to, says Augustine, because it delights us.
Here we are at the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning
of the church year. “May the Lord make you abound in love to one another” says Paul to the Thessalonians. We are
to be drawn to one another. But it is not enough that we be drawn just to one another. My favorite church father is actually
not Augustine but the much less well-known Maximus the Confessor, a great Greek philosopher and theologian of the 7th
century who, like Augustine, passes on the traditions of classical antiquity to the medieval era. And Maximus held that human
beings are to be the mediators of everything that is fractured in creation.
Maximus has a list of what he takes to be the five most fundamental divisions.
The first of these is between God and creation. The second is between what is perceived by the mind, for example, mathematics
and angels, and, on the other hand, the empirical world that we see with our eyes. His third division is between the visible
heavens, the sun and moon and stars, and the earth, and the fourth between paradise, in other words, the Garden of Eden, and
the inhabited world. The fifth is the division between male and female.
This is a list that sounds to us both familiar and quaint.
Male and female, red states and blue states, dioceses that stay or leave, in these and a thousand other ways, we are divided.
But whatever the divisions, says Maximus, the work of humanity is to reverse them. And, importantly, for Maximus, we are to
reverse our divisions not by obliterating them, but by overcoming their divisiveness.
To do this, says Maximus, each of
us must first overcome the divisions within ourselves. When we are no longer at war with ourselves, we can begin to appreciate
the differences among us; the humanity we all share can exemplify the diversity which images the Trinitarian God rather than
being a source of conflict.
If we human beings are at peace with one another, we will be able to experience and respect the earth with all its
variety of creatures. This is what Maximus means by uniting the inhabited world with Eden. Maximus even
thinks that human beings can unite earth and heaven by coming to have knowledge in the way he believes angels do, a way that
does not divide things up into parts. Then, finally, it is humanity that will through pure love unite created nature with
God (Ambigua 41).
One of the reasons I like Maximus so much is that, unlike most philosophers and theologians in the ancient world,
his is an all-compassing vision of peace that respects and values difference. All those divisions he describes sound terribly
abstract, but when he says it is humanity’s work to overcome them, what he really is expressing is the hope we think
of as Advent, the time when we look forward to the birth of Christ in Jesus, and in us, the time when we reflect that sheep
and cattle too were present in the stable. Maximus wrote a meditation (Ambigua 71) on a line from one of Gregory
of Nazienzen’s poems: “the high Word plays in every kind of form.” It seems that Gerard Manley Hopkins loved
Gregory’s poem too (as one of Maximus’ translators points out). The ending of Hopkin’s poem “As Kingfishers
Catch Fire” is: “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father
through the features of men’s faces.” God became human, incarnate in all creation.
We human beings are terrible at
reading the signs of the times. We not only don’t read the future in the sun and the moon and the stars, as the author
of Luke has Jesus say, we have a hard time recognizing what is happening in our own society and our own times. What will history
say 2010 was about? Or even 2009, which we have already experienced? I can think of some answers that look plausible now,
but what are we not seeing? Yet even though that is true, there are some things we can know.
We can know, for example, that our love is our weight; it is that which draws us to God and to one another
and to creation. And we can know that as we strive to mediate the divisions that have fractured creation we are not alone.
Augustine wrote about how there is something like desire or love in trees and stones and wave and wind and flame. We can know
that it is there because “the high Word plays in every kind of form.” To invert Augustine’s metaphor, God’s
love is God’s weight, and God is drawn into creation. “For Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs
and lovely in eyes not his.” This is why we can recognize and respect the integrity of creation, uniting the inhabited
world with paradise and created nature with uncreated nature. This is why our divisions can be overcome.
