SEEKING OUT WISDOM
28 January 2009
A SERMON PREACHED IN ST MARGARET’S CHURCH, WESTMINSTER,AT THE ADMISSION OF AIDEN HARGREAVES-SMITH AS REGISTRAR OF THE DIOCESE IN EUROPE AND BISHOP’S LEGAL SECRETARY, ON THE FEAST OF ST THOMAS AQUINAS, 2009.
“If the great Lord is willing, he will be filled with the spirit of understanding; he will pour forth words of wisdom of his own, and give thanks to the Lord in prayer.” (Ecclesiasticus, 39.6)
I first came across St Thomas Aquinas, that greatest of Christian thinkers whom we celebrate today, in a Sunday School prize, awarded to me about the age of nine in the traditional Anglican Catholic parish where I grew up, All Saints’, Alton. Published by Mowbrays and with illustrations by Enid Chadwick, who was also responsible for some of the frescoes in the Shrine Church at Walsingham, My Book of the Church’s Year, illustrated the seasons and the feasts, with pictures of nuns veiling crosses in Passiontide, and the Holy Sacrament to be adored at Corpus Christi, and a good selection of the saints commemorated day by day. There on the 28th January was a picture of a rotund Dominican friar, and underneath the words ‘St Thomas Aquinas wrote many books’ and, if I remember right, his words when he broke off writing his great Summa Theologica, ‘Compared with what I have seen, all I have written is as straw.’ It was a wise priest who gave me that book, and excited my imagination to know about the sweep of church history, and the saints who are the diagrams of God’s glory in every age. In the age of over-head projectors and a leap from the New Testament to the present day, that sense of the unfolding life of the Holy Spirit in the Church down the ages is sadly lost, and, as the late revered and lamented Henry Chadwick liked to say ‘a church which has lost its memory is as bad as a person who has lost their memory.’ Our memory, the church’s memory, shapes our identity; we need to know our story and be able to tell our story, and, as Newman somewhat provocatively put it, ‘egotism is true modesty.’
Today on this feast of a rather taciturn and corpulent friar, known popularly as ‘the dumb ox’, we admit a thin and spare lawyer to serve the Diocese in Europe as registrar and Bishop’s Legal Secretary. The text I have taken from our reading from Ecclesiasticus – or the wisdom of Jesus Ben-Sirach, to give the book its Hebrew name – speaks of God’s gift of understanding, which is the source of wisdom – and the context of that gift and that wisdom is prayer, our deep, lived relationship to God in the spirit in the Church which is God’s creation. It is a reading very appropriate for this feast, and for this occasion. Dom David Knowles wrote of Aquinas that his peculiar greatness ‘lies in his combination of fearless strength of reasoning with an entire absence of personal bias’ – surely a quality desired in a lawyer – ‘and’, Knowles goes on, ‘to recognize and produce harmony and order – to recognize them in the universe, and to produce them in his own thought – to a degree without parallel among the many great philosophers of the world.’ Thomas took the challenge of a newly discovered Aristotle, the threatening philosophy of the day, made it his own, and grounded it all in God. Without losing Aristotle’s concern with the rootedness of understanding in the empirical world, the material, the particular and the concrete, so that ‘the loftier the gaze, the weaker the reality’, Thomas set God at the very centre. ‘The infinitely rich, dynamic, existential reality is God, the creator and source of all being, goodness and truth, present in all being by power and essence, holding, and guiding and regarding every part of creation.’ God in the undergrowth, the God to which our senses of value, and causation, and beauty, all point; what Gerard Manley Hopkins, a devotee of another giant of mediaeval Christendom, Duns Scotus, called ‘the dearest freshness deep down things.’ And Thomas was generous: ‘we must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those opinions we reject. For both have laboured in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it’ – just as I suspect the best lawyers are those who understand deeply both claim and counter-claim.
St Thomas defines law as ‘an ordinance of reason for the sake of the common good commanded by the authority who has charge of the community and promulgated.’ (ST.1a-2ae.xc.4) He sees all law as derived from the Eternal Law, insofar as the law is right and reasonable. Because human beings find their end and goal in God, our orientation (in a truer and deeper sense than that word is commonly used these days) is to a supernatural end, the eternal joy which is in God. We therefore need to be guided by that Divine Law, which is over and above the Natural Law and codes of human law – be they Measures of General Synod, or directives of the European Union, or acts of Parliament. It is the Divine Law which Scripture says is to be written on our hearts, on our willing and our choosing. ‘The Gospel Law’ says Thomas ‘is the grace of the Holy Spirit given through faith in Christ… and even the Gospel words can kill but for the presence of inward healing grace.’ That is true for all Christians and not just for the lawyers amongst us.
It is remarkable how in the recent history of the Anglican Communion canon law has come to have such a significant place, not because we are legalists, but because good law – and good ecclesiastical law – enables us to have the ground-rules for living together, living as the body of Christ. T.S.Eliot famously reversed St Paul when he said ‘the spirit kills, but the letter gives life’ – not of course the Holy Spirit, but what an earlier generation might perhaps have called enthusiasm without ground rules. Play is joyful, free and exuberant, but the games we play must have ground rules. The Spirit in fact is not opposed to order, but from the first mention of the mighty wind sweeping over the waters in Genesis brings order out of chaos.
As Registrar of the Diocese in Europe Aiden will need to have the wisdom and understanding of history, and the place of Anglicanism in the context of the different cultures of Europe as expressed in their legal ordering. Law is there to serve mission and ministry and pastoral care in what is a growing Diocese. Bishop David and I go to Prague tomorrow; at the weekend I shall be in Moscow, in the Russia of Putin and Medvedev, for the enthroning of a new Russian Patriarch; before the end of the month I shall be in Malta and Istanbul, and each of these different contexts is capable of generating difficult issues of how this unique Diocese ordered by the law of the Church of England can operate. Aiden, you will need wisdom in all of this, and that rootedness in relationship to God that safeguards you and the law from serving imprisonment and hampering of the Gospel rather than the freedom which the Spirit gives. We cannot legislate sin away (though Governments sometimes act as though we could); for that grace is required; we do not have to legislate for everything, though sometimes books of church law can give the impression that you can and need to – as when I found in the index of O Pedalion - The Rudder - the compendium of Orthodox canon law, a reference to marshmallows. I looked it up and found that marshmallows were not to be offered to the Blessed Virgin (an offence to which I suspect none of us here have been tempted, and which I have never observed at Walsingham). Or there is the curious listing in the index of Garth Moore’s Introduction to Canon Law of giraffes and elephants – you wonder what they are doing there, and discover on looking them up that the incumbent’s right of herbage (grazing) in churchyards does not extend to these exotic species because they do not qualify as ‘cattle’ – but we need not worry for the incumbent’s right of herbage is not a law which applies in the Diocese in Europe.
Good lawyers, good church lawyers, enable the ministry and mission of the Church; they enable the church to act justly and so reflect the Divine ordering of all things. But in the end church law, like sacraments will cease, for as St Irenaeus said, the end of man is the vision of God. That is what Thomas Aquinas knew when on December 6th, 1273, he returned to his cell from the celebration of Mass, and left his great Summa Theologica uncompleted, for, as he said, ‘All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw – compared with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.’ To this same sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood we come this evening to receive our strength, and our true life, and to pray for our brother, Aiden, as we commission him for his new work in serving this Diocese stretching from Madeira to Vladivostok, and Casablanca to Trondheim. Aiden may the great Lord fill you with the spirit of understanding, that you may pour forth words of wisdom of your own, and by that same Spirit give you a right judgement in all things.
The Rt Revd Dr Geoffrey Rowell Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe