It was that tradition which does not shrink back from but rather celebrates passion62 that first gave trouble to Greek thinking, viz., that tradition which not only acknowledges but adores a Creator “who remain[s] outside the cosmos,”63 who is free in relation to physis, to “nature.”64 Perhaps Israel and the church that remembered Israel were less quick to grasp after an integral totality, because its people remembered what it was like to pray, frightened in the imperial desert of Egypt, and heard the declaration, “I am the Lord your God,” only as the command, “you shall love the alien as yourself,” still rang in their ears.65
And yet the church has not always remembered Israel well. The church’s intellectuals gradually, if unevenly, came to appropriate the synthetic presence of mind of the Gentiles of the northern Mediterranean basin. Doing so was a great and rewarding adventure. Their journey was long and difficult: from Jerusalem to Athens and to Rome,66 involving “some severe crises.”67 And how could crises not come? Both older and newer champions of physis had much to be said in their favor, of course. However, there was only so far the church’s gifted children could go toward synthesizing even the most purely idealized essences they and others had distilled from such decidedly uncongenial histories. Ideas never completely shake off the social bodies who gave them life. Before the Edict of Milan, more often than not both the members of the church and those of proper Roman society were struck and shaken by the difference that separated them, e.g., when from opposite sides of an open space,68 immeasurable in Roman feet, they turned their faces toward each other, a few in the bloody dust of the coliseum floor, many in the wooden or marble coliseum seats above.
Unlike the divine of the physicians of the Greeks (and their heirs), the Creator-God of the Testaments of the church was declared in its baptismal credo first to be “the Father” of the “one Lord Jesus Christ” and only then the “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, visible and invisible.” And the “one Lord Jesus Christ . . . through whom all things were made” is no universal, no centered identity, no bloodless, faceless integrity—but the one “who was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” Even when one finds in the texts of the young church what might be called “cosmic symbolism,” the cosmos is subsumed under the “one Lord Jesus Christ,” not the other way around. Indeed, the church’s Holy Scriptures affirm that the whole cosmos was created in, through, by, and for this abased/exalted one. Though freely and without anxiety welcomed into a roomy sanctuary, universality blinks before the broken body of the “one Lord Jesus Christ,” lifted up for all to see.69
Yet the church’s sages again and again struggled to find ways of thinking at once both the God at work in the Gospels and the “nature” that has neither work to do nor an outside in which to do it. It struggled to think them at once without forgetting the difference between the things of this world and the things of God. Certainly they recited the Creed of Chalcedon with gusto, forsaking all to follow the incarnate heavenly Logos. Certainly they knew in their bones that God is sharply different from this world. They sang doxologies to that God. And yet . . . it was so very hard to resist the temptation to gather all their thoughts on the way to a profitable vision of a more magnificent, integrated physis, one finally with everything inside.
What is impressive is the way this temptation was resisted time and time again in the work of the church’s doctors. Thus, though Francis of Assisi was certainly unlikely and exceptional, he was not even among intellectuals without foreshadowing. Yet it is perhaps telling that the revolt he heralded arose above all as he gave himself in naked prayer to the particular, human Jesus. That there might be revolution in this signals among these people the extent to which authorities (even ecclesiastical authorities) tend to pass by particularity—even that particularity—in order to get at the stable, integrating principles of which any particularity is by default taken to be an instance—and this, all the while rending a crusty, brown loaf of bread (bread the color of the skin of a tired young mother crossing the Sonoran Imperial Desert) and lifting a cup of deep red wine (wine the color of her thick blood starving for food, water, and air).
(She, sojourner that she is, finds no comfort in nature’s appropriation of God.70 She is not drawn to its physicians and the well-being they hawk. It is out into the open that she calls and steps. A God at home in the presence of “what is” lacks the freedom to turn to “what is not” simultaneously to call her Godward and into an open future. That is, the weak, the least, the stranger, the alien finds in physis only more of the same hopelessness that has always told her to get back in her place. That liturgy of the eucharist that fills her memory, on the other hand, invites her voice, her deeds, her body to the living God; it lays out before her a path to a holy eschaton71 that is coming for her and her little baby, a future free to place in radical crisis, say, an empire’s judgment concerning her value for its growth potential.)
Still . . . the liturgy of the eucharist . . . smiles hospitably upon any who would make it their own . . . to consume it. It only asks that in the eating and drinking a reversal take place. Adam is at this wedding banquet to defer to Christ. The bread and the wine of the eucharist are gifts to be given, of course; but we who eat and drink are to be consumed by them, to be written into their story.72 The eucharist is hospitable by definition, a good (eu-) grace (charis). It invites any and all who labor and are heavy-laden to come in and yield themselves, their gathered thoughts and deeds. All that is asked is that those “that are” in eating might be “reduced to nothing” and find fellowship with the elect from among “the things that are not” (1 Cor 1:28). In this they will find fellowship with that particular dark-skinned woodworker who during Holy Week was hanged on a wooden cross in solidarity with “the things that are not.” But they will find also that they will have been driven to this end by the life’s breath that drove him to the cross and awakened to new life by the gift that awakened him from the dead. Or so the liturgy of the eucharist promises.73
The promise is that in a living ecstatic sacrifice of worship a particular child held by his particular mother will have opened toward an eschatologically holy Trinity that in one life history places all claims to ownership under a crisis that crucifies/resurrects every worldly good (and evil), however tightly grasped. Indeed, to say “Trinity” is to say the “outside” of the “eschaton.” The Trinity occurs as the unspeakably exalted Father and the unspeakably abased Son are held apart and together by the unspeakably quick Spirit. (Thus the man who stands watch in the night of the Sonoran Desert prays—perhaps only because of his proximity to her74—to the Father through the Son in the Spirit, even if he would hardly admit that such words come and go with his heavy breath.75 He leans against a rock still warm from the day’s hot sun, and is drawn by the body of the friend of transgressors, who in their memory and hope is lifted up still.76 In that prayer in the darkness of the Sonoran Desert he is sent from the Father through the Son in the Spirit into the world that is bent on taking him out, along with the mother and child he had planned by now to have discarded. To him and to this woman and this baby a Mystery gently and lovingly calls out: “The Peace of God is coming and it is coming for you!”)
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