Holy Week in Chester 2: “I am the Resurrection and the Life”

Reading: John 11.17-27

This Holy Week, we are studying the great I AM sayings of St John’s Gospel. Last night we began with “I am the Door” in chapter 10. That saying is so closely associated with “I am the Good Shepherd” that you might expect us to come to it next. However, I want to save that for Good Friday for reasons that will make sense then. This evening we are going to move into the next chapter of the gospel and “I am the Resurrection and the Life”.

The raising of Jesus’ friend Lazarus in Chapter 11 of St John is a kind of preamble to the passion narrative. Already, Passover is drawing near. At the end of the chapter, the talk about arresting Jesus and putting him to death suddenly becomes more serious. “It is better for you to have one man to die for the people” says wily Caiaphas “than to have the whole nation destroyed”. In those days as in ours, leaders know all about “expediency”, never mind who suffers on its altar. Someone who goes around proclaiming himself to be God’s Son and bringing a dead man back to life is bound to subvert the good order of a well-regulated Roman province. The threat is, in the words of the authorities, that “the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” Jesus is already regarded as dangerous. The raising of Lazarus at Bethany raises the stakes considerably. No-one knows this better than him.

What St John sees in this beautiful story of a death and resurrection is a foreshadowing of the imminent events of Holy Week and Easter. It’s an analogy, a visual aid, if you like, of what will shortly come to pass. The pre-echoes of the resurrection story are unmistakeable: the woman weeping, the question “where have you laid him?”, the rolling away of the stone from the tomb, the details about the grave clothes. Why does John need to tell the story at all, so close to Jesus’ own passion and resurrection? Maybe it’s to allow some of the deeper meanings to emerge as a kind of commentary, so that when we come to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, that narrative can speak for itself without too much elaboration or interpolation. I’m thinking of when Jesus speaks about seeing in this sign the glory of God, and how he thanks his Father for having heard him so that everyone “may believe that you sent me”. And of course the saying we remember best of all from his dialogue with Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life”. 

We must have heard it at every Church of England funeral we’ve ever attended, the first of the sentences that are read as the coffin is processed into church. In the church service, I suppose we inevitably hear it in the way Martha replies to Jesus’s questions. To “your brother will rise again” Martha replies, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”. And this matters to us who instinctively want to keep death at bay, protest against its cruel extinction of all that it means to be alive. When we hear the words of committal at the end of the funeral rite, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, when we throw soil on to the coffin of a loved one or imagine it consigned to fire at the crematorium, we are faced with the brutality of death. We do not, most of us, want to “go gently into that good night”, at least not when we feel glad and grateful to be alive. Our faith is stretched on these occasions that confront us with our own mortality. The confidence of affirming “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead” isn’t always echoed in our own hearts.

What do those words mean to us? I can only say what they mean for me. I hear them in the light of the passage we are looking at tonight. It seems to me that Jesus is not asking us to base our faith on what will happen to the dead at the end of time, what will happen to me. Rather, the focus is on Jesus’ own resurrection, and its consequences for all of us in the present, here and now. The key is in the words believe and live. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Jesus did not say only, “I am the resurrection” (which is what Martha hears) but “I am the living resurrection, the resurrection and the life. This is about life now, God’s life that transforms us, irradiates even our darkest times with life and love. We need to recall, even in Holy Week, the Christmas gospel, “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people”. And in last night’s passage about the gate, “I have come that they may have life, life in all its fulness”. And in the best-known verse in the Bible, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” That means the abundant gift of God in our present experience. This is the sense in which believers “will never die”, for this eternal life transcends the worst that even physical death with all its terrors can do to mortals like Mary, Martha and Lazarus, like us. Death, where is your sting? Death, where is your victory?

This is what Jesus wants Martha to understand. But in St John, words by themselves aren’t enough. A sign is needed, the raising of Lazarus from the grave. I said that it’s a metaphor, like the feeding of the crowd or the healing of the blind man. What happened then, what John bears witness to has a significance infinitely greater than the event itself. For what it symbolises is nothing less than that death will no longer hold power over us, for Jesus has overcome it. In him, a new world is becoming a reality by virtue of his own death and resurrection; there is a new humanity already risen from the death our condition had brought upon us. And all this, I think, is what we are meant to draw from the resurrection and the life text when we hear it at a funeral. We do affirm it for the dead, of course, because we believe that God does not stop loving human beings when they die. But I think we affirm it even more for ourselves, who for now are still the living, and who, for as long as we live, will go on hoping and yearning and praying to be born anew as the children of God’s reign of grace and truth.

In these Holy Week addresses, I want to remind us that at its heart, Lent is the season when we prepare for the paschal celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus. For centuries, we have tended to separate Passiontide from Easter, as if the empty tomb were somehow the “happy ending” of the story of suffering and death. I think St John would point us back to the raising of Lazarus and remind us that death and resurrection – Jesus’s dying and living, our dying and living - belong together in the story of that first Holy Week and in the experience of believers. 

When we renew our baptism vows as part of the Easter liturgy, we are taken right back into the memory of passion and suffering, and enact ritually what St Paul meant when he spoke of being “crucified with Christ” and being “buried with Christ in baptism, so that we might rise to newness of life”. The Easter liturgy is the most powerful event of this Great Week precisely because it celebrates Jesus’ passion and resurrection, not simply as an event in the past but in its present reality, its extraordinary power to gather us up in the God-given movement from death to eternal life. As the cycle of the seasons brings us back once more to Holy Week, it reinforces our sense that this is where we experience being human in the most profoundly life-changing way. This is where we begin to understand ourselves as those whose lives are forever enfolded in the all-encompassing love of God.

For if Christianity is not about transformation, if it doesn’t touch our lives and make a difference when we most need to be ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, why are we here tonight at all? The raising of Lazarus is St John’s parable of what it means to cross the chasm from death to life in every dimension of human living. The whole gospel of Holy Week and Easter is here in this story. 

Here is Malcolm Guite’s sonnet on this saying.

How can you be the final resurrection?
That resurrection hasn’t happened yet.
Our broken world is still bent on destruction,
No sun can rise before that sun has set.
Our faith looks back to father Abraham
And toward to the one who is to come
How can you speak as though he knew your name?
How can you say: before he was I am?

Begin in me and I will read your riddle
And teach you truths my Spirit will defend
I am the End who meets you in the middle,
The new Beginning hidden in the End.
I am the victory, the end of strife
I am the resurrection and the life.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission.

Retreat Address on the Psalms 3 - Prayer and Mortality (Psalm 49)

After two Psalms of celebration, we come to a trio of more downbeat psalms. Perhaps I should remind you that I am being led by your own matins psalm cycle in these reflections. Tomorrow’s (106) dwells on the historical memory of a people’s failure and shortcomings, and draws out lessons to be learned. Friday’s (79) is a cry of rage in the face of disaster, a lament that asks the familiar question, “how long?”  And so that you have the road map in mind, on Saturday, for the feast of Mary Magdalen, we are back to thankfulness again with a song of gladness (32) on the part of someone who knows what it is to be ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven.

Today’s Psalm 49 is a wisdom psalm, one of a small number in the Psalter that reflect on human experience in the light of faith. Psalms like these stretch the boundaries of Israel’s faith community, because the experiences they describe are not specific to the covenant community but are common to our whole race. You find this kind of writing in many ancient near eastern texts: Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian. They have a lot in common with the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible such as Job and Ecclesiastes that explore the problems of suffering and meaninglessness in human life. Some of the wisdom psalms such as 37 and 73 take up these familiar themes, why evil goes unchecked, why goodness is not honoured or rewarded, why the wicked prosper at the expense of the righteous. The common thread seems to be how to negotiate life’s perplexities with equanimity, insight and understanding, how not to be thrown into turmoil by the contradictions and unfairness of the human condition but to keep calm and carry on. 

This psalm focuses on the specific matter of our mortality. Memento mori it says to its readers, remember you must die. “Unresting death, one whole day nearer now” wrote Philip Larkin in “Aubade”, one of the darkest but most unflinching of his poems. This psalm is less appalled: it has seen too much of death to be frightened by it. But it does insist that death is a fact of life we need to meet thoughtfully and in a well-prepared spiritual state. Denial is no use: it needs coming to terms with. What does it mean to know that your life is limited, that one day you must go to the place of shadows the Hebrews called Sheol? That is both a fact and a mystery, for we can both know that it happens without at all knowing what it will mean for us. But the urgency of this psalm is driven by a set of existential questions that have not gone away in all of human history. How do we rise above being just another in the endless crocodile of the beasts that perish? How do I even make friends with it? What difference does death make to the way we live now? 

This question haunted everyone in the Middle Ages. Thanks to the visitations of war, famine and plague, death was never far away from people's thoughts. In Hexham Abbey near where we live, there is a series of four medieval paintings, part of a series depicting the “dance of death”. A lurid skeletal figure dances in turn with a king, an emperor, a pope and a cardinal. Maybe the lost panels showed more ordinary men and women as well as those in high office, not forgetting the young, the beautiful, the wise, for this is a dance no one can sit out. 

Like Job and Ecclesiastes, the psalm doesn’t probe the metaphysics or engage in conjecture. Hebrew spirituality, as we find it expressed in the psalms, is always realistic and practical. What it seeks to do is to suggest ways of living with realities that are too big to grasp. Here, the pressing question has to do with one that’s familiar in the Psalter: why are the powerful, the famous, the successful and the wealthy untouched by the misfortunes of life? What about the poor, the powerless, the voiceless and the wronged? Where is their reward?

The personal laments in the Psalter insist that God is on the side of these forgotten in Israel. He stands with them and will vindicate them in the day when he acts. But in this psalm the argument is different. Its answer is: however powerful you are, however successful, however wealthy, however wise, however well-spoken of and admired, it will all count for nothing in the face of death.  Everyone, low and high, rich and poor together, good and bad, intelligent and foolish, is equal when it comes to the grave.  No-one is advantaged: we can take nothing with us and our reputations will not save us.  Twice the bleak refrain returns: man, being in honour, hath no understanding: but is compared unto the beasts that perish (12, 20 BCP).  Death is the great leveller, unpitying, untiring. He shepherds his victims without mercy down to Sheol the shadowy place of the dead.  Why waste your energy on being envious? It isn’t worth it: it simply eats you up until it destroys you. Why should I fear in times of trouble, when the iniquity of my perecutors surrounds me, those who trust in their wealth and boast in the abundance of their riches? Here’s how to respond. Do not be afraid when some become rich, when the wealth of their houses increases.  For when they die they will carry nothing away… Though in their lifetime they count themselves happy…. they will go to the company of their ancestors who will never again see the light (16-19).  

So the psalm offers this crumb of reassurance to those at the bottom of the pile, the forgotten, the disappeared, the poor, the victim, the nobody: whatever our condition in this life, our ultimate destiny is the same.   

If this is comforting, it’s a peculiarly tough kind of comfort.  Or it would be, were it not for the glimmer of hope that for a moment penetrates the shadows. But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me (15).  This is one of those rare moments in the psalms when belief in an enduring life with God beyond the grave seems to surface.  This narrow, precarious shaft of light pierces the gloom for just an instant before being shut off again.  But it is enough.  For it recognises that a relationship with God is forever, not simply for the brief span of life in this world.  It’s not yet a Christian theology of resurrection: there is still a long path to climb before the Old Testament reaches that point.  But it is, indisputably, the belief in and hope of something beyond this life, however tentative. We meet it again in psalm 73, the Psalter’s equivalent to Job’s triumphant confession of faith in the midst of his terrible ordeals. Where Job says, ‘I know that my redeemer liveth… and though… worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’ (Job 19.25-27 AV), the psalm says: “nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory”.  

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Let me offer three reflections. First, we need to read this psalm in the broader context of the Psalter as a whole, and indeed of the entirety of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The measured, even resigned, tone of this meditation on life and death is very different from the confidence of the two we have already looked at this week. On its own, Psalm 49 might lead us into nihilism and despair.  Within the context of the
Psalter, and read in the light of psalms like 65 and 76 that celebrate God’s enthronement over all of life, it feels different.  For while it recognises the deep mystery of what it is to be a human being, and to stand on the edge of the abyss and ponder the enigmas of life and death, it understands how our existence is given meaning in the light of God and his everlasting reign. 

Still more is this true when we as Christian worshippers conclude this psalm with the doxology to the Sacred Trinity. That little glimpse of light that breaks through in the fifteenth verse, God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, we mustn’t lean too heavily on that by itself. But when we read this psalm back through the lens of our Christian experience of death and resurrection, it makes all the difference. Good
Friday and Easter do not take away the mysteries of inequality, evil and suffering. The valley of the shadow of death will not cease to be the dark place it always was. But the paschal mystery of Christ crucified and risen proclaims that God has himself entered into these abiding realities of our human condition. So death is no longer the great leveler where we are like the beasts that perish. Rather, it is the threshold of a new life where Christ has already gone before us. And as we sing in the Easter hymn, “death’s mightiest powers have done their worst”.

Second, this psalm is an important antidote to naïve upbeat religion that is unaware of the profound questions all thinking human beings ask about life.  It is fatally easy to clap our hands and sway to cheerful choruses oblivious to the wicked who go on relentlessly wrecking the lives of the weak, and the powerful abuse the poor and the downtrodden who have no voice of their own unless it is to cry out to God.  Nothing is so damaging to the integrity and reputation of religion as a faith that oversimplifies the complexities of things, that is practised in (often wilful) ignorance of what the world is really like.  This psalm makes us pause before we come out with the easy speeches that comfort cruel men and discredit religion in the eyes of its detractors. It helps us to ground our faith in the lived experience of all human beings, and in our bafflement that the complexities of life are not susceptible to being reduced to simple formulae.

The spiritual challenge, I think, is how to recognize and embrace mystery, yet celebrate at the same time. To pledge our loyalty to our enthroned, exalted Lord, yet not to run away from the inescapable riddles of being human, that is wisdom indeed. In particular, we should not be afraid as Christian believers to make friends with the prospect of death as I suggested earlier. Previous generations, more familiar with the thousands of ways death was a familiar visitant in less defended times, found this much easier to do than we. To read Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying was a natural thing to do. His belief that we can only live a holy life if we are ready to die a holy death was nothing remarkable in his century, though the depth and insight he brought to the question was. Or as his contemporary Bishop Ken says in the great evening hymn we sang at my retirement (a kind of dying, or at least a clear threshold) and will again at my funeral, 

Teach me to live that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed;
Teach me to die, that so I may
Rise glorious at the aweful day. 

Third, this psalm helps us to address the problem of envy. It’s interesting that this is the spiritual and moral issue at the heart of three of the most important wisdom psalms – this morning’s, together with 37 and 73. For what it is worth, my view is (pace most theologians) that envy is the worst of the seven deadly sins, worse even than pride. My reason is that if you examine it as a moral failure, and if you examine your own experience of it, envy is not simply an attitude, a longing to possess what others have. If it is allowed to feed off that longing, it begins to cultivate an active wish to destroy what the other has, and even destroy the other person. Which of course inevitably ends up by destroying yourself, devouring your own soul on a feeding-frenzy of obsession, like a black hole pulling in everything within its gravitational field. So envy leads not only to avarice but also to hatred and all that follows. You can make a case for reading the Genesis story of the Fall as humanity’s envy of God for being God, being wise and powerful and the source of life. 

The classic study of envy is the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s great book Envy and Gratitude. And that tells you what the theological and spiritual answer to it is. “I have been young and now am old” says the world-weary sage in that psalm of envy, Psalm 37. I used to eat meals three times a day underneath those words (in Latin) in the dining hall of my college in Oxford. What that psalmist says is that he “never saw the righteous forsaken, nor their seed begging their bread”. Even as a student, I wondered if he needed to get out more, for he wouldn’t have had to walk far to notice the destitute and poor who are always with us. But a better reading might be to infer that he is simply learning to be content in old age. His own experience has led him to see how God’s generosity, his care, his provision and our constant gratitude for it are the central fact of all life. So the psalmist concludes that mature wisdom equates to acknowledging the source of all that is lovely and good in life, and learning, if not full-bodied thankfulness, at least contentment. 

And this, I think, lies at the heart of Psalm 49. The logic seems to be: we see the rich and powerful and are tempted to envy them. Don’t succumb. For they, like us, must face the grave and gate of death. So do not be afraid when some become rich, when the wealth of their houses increases. Not to be afraid is not far from equanimity and contentment. So let our common mortality teach us how to cultivate a contemplative view of life that helps us be content with who we are and what we have to enjoy now. I know that is to go beyond what the text itself says explicitly. But it seems implicit. And it links back to the first morning when we looked at Psalm 65 and saw how thankfulness, the eucharistic life, is the secret of happiness and the antidote to envy. 

In conclusion, I find this noble psalm to be an important indicator of “good religion”. I am not simply thinking of how it stops us from falling into the trap of simple binaries which, pushed to extremes, get expressed as triumphalism or despair. I mean the sense of wholesomeness that runs through this psalm, a wisdom that is grounded in the tough realities of having lived a while and seen something of life. This psalmist is among the most theologically literate of the Psalter. He knows how disconcerting it is not only to watch people fall for the illusions of power and wealth, success and reputation as if they were the only goals worth craving, but worse, to envy them for it. Perhaps he was one of them himself once, who nearly sold his soul for the sake of being a “somebody” until he realized that being a “nobody”, one of God’s humble poor, is far better in God’s sight. Or maybe he was one of the envious who paradoxically mirror the envied in that they too are at risk of selling their souls through being devoured by this most destructive of the seven deadly sins. 

Whichever it is, the psalmist’s reflections have stabilized him. They have taught him wisdom. They have shown him where true value lies, yes, and his own happiness and reward as well. When he looked with a steady eye at the sculpted statues and marble tombs erected to the “somebodies” of this world, he saw through these whited sepulchres to the reality. Which is this: before God, we are all the same. Dives or Lazarus, we must all face our Maker and give account to him. When this mortal must put on immortality, we must all come to terms with our judgment and learn to receive his forgiveness. And if, like Gerontius in John Henry Newman’s poem and Edward Elgar’s oratorio, when we are face to face with the living God, and hear ourselves crying out “take me away!”, it is only so that we may gently be immersed in that healing, cleansing sea where sins are taken away and we are made ready to inherit the mansions in our Father’s House where the risen Christ has gone to prepare a place for us. 

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For meditation today, we might want to think about our mortality and how it focuses our minds and wills on the tasks of living well. We might want to reflect on our propensity for envy, and on its antidote, all that we need to be more thankful for. And in the light of this meditation on death, just what it means for us to be members of this Community of the Resurrection.

Holy Week in Hymns 5: "Praise to the Holiest in the height"

Tonight’s hymn is one of the best-known and best-loved in the English language. It’s by John Henry Newman whose long life stretched across almost the whole of the nineteenth century. He was a brilliant Church of England priest who, with John Keble and Edmund Bouverie Pusey played a formative part in the Oxford Movement that was launched in 1833. They were called Tractarians because they published their ideas in a series of ninety tracts which, circulated, read and discussed in every corner of the land, you could think of the equivalent of social media today.

The Tracts called for the return of the Church of England to the historic catholic Anglican position that stood “’gainst popery and dissent”. They believed these ideals had been upheld by the Christian fathers and by those we now call the high churchmen of the 17^th century in England. To them, both medieval catholicism and Reformation protestantism had departed from an ideal of Christian faith and life that the church urgently needed to rediscover. The Oxford Movement only lasted a dozen years in its original flowering. By the 1840s Newman was coming to the conclusion that the Church of England could never have the marks of what he held to be a truly catholic church. In 1845 he was received into the Church of Rome. He died as Cardinal Newman in 1890.

Praise to the Holiest is one of three familiar hymns by Newman, along with the endearing “Lead, kindly Light” written when he was still an Anglican, and “Firmly I believe, and truly” from the same source as tonight's hymn. That source is the celebrated poem Newman wrote in the 1860s, The Dream of Gerontius. The name, at least, will be familiar to many of you from Edward Elgar’s musical setting of it. It depicts the journey of a soul, an idea that at once gives it universal significance, for Gerontius, the dying man, is any of us and all of us. Memento mori, he is saying: remember you must die. None of us is exempt. As Jesus had to face death, so must we. Try not to be afraid of it. Learn what it means to die as a Christian. Let the example of Jesus on the cross inspire, comfort and sustain you.

The name Gerontius simply tells us that he is old: he has lived long and seen much. But age isn’t the point here: he stands for all of us. The Dream of Gerontius imagines his last journey. We meet him on his death bed praying to Jesus and Mary and being prayed for by his friends. Once he has died, his soul awakens to meet his guardian angel who will be with him on the path that lies before him. This takes him through the judgment court where the demons are assembling to “gather souls for hell”. But the hellish cacophony is dispelled by the choirs of angelicals whose unceasing praise of God Gerontius will one day join in. But not yet, not before he has been presented at the very throne of God. “Take me away” he cries, not because the vision isn’t unutterably beautiful, but because the holiness of God is too much for him. It is like looking into the sun. Overwhelmed, he realises that he is not yet ready for the beatific vision. So, filled with love for God, he is led gently into purgatory where God’s work of grace will be completed, so that when the time has come, his angel can return and lead him into heaven. “Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here, and I will come and wake thee on the morrow.”

Praise to the Holiest is the hymn of praise sung by the angelicals as Gerontius nears the throne of God. And when you realise this, you see how beautifully it belongs in its context. For its theme is redemption through suffering, the pain that the dying man went through in his lifetime, and the coming pain his soul must courageously endure as it is perfected and made ready for his meeting with his holy God. But its focus is not Gerontius, not any of us mortals. Its gaze is firmly set on the crucified Christ who has both come to our rescue and has shown us in his example what it means to suffer for love’s sake, for the sake of the Almighty, the Wise and Loving God, the Holiest in the height.

The opening stanza captures the height and depth of God’s concerns: there must be praise not only to the Holiest in the height, but also in the depth be praise. This is because God’s words and works have demonstrated that he is both marvellous and trustworthy: In all his words most wonderful, Most sure in all his ways.

Newman goes on by pointing to where these words most wonderful and ways most sure are seen in their fulness. It is, he says, out of the loving wisdom of our God. In most of our passion hymns it’s God’s mercy and kindness that are emphasised. At this point in Newman’s hymn it is loving wisdom. That phrase says to me that the redemption of the world was the choice of a God who needed to put right a disordered world, restore what was lost at the beginning when a noble, beautiful creation was corrupted and broken by sin and shame. And so he sent a Redeemer to rescue the human race. Here we are close to last night’s Bishop Fortunatus and the heroic rescue that the Son of God has brought about. For he, the second Adam has come as flesh and blood to struggle with the adversary who caused that same flesh and blood to fail in Adam and his children. But now, in Jesus, flesh and blood should strive and should prevail -should, and can, and has done. So the word prevail hangs in the air at the end of the verse as if to say, here is a prevailing that will last for ever. You can trust it, for this second Adam will never fail, will never let you down.

The next verse explains why. Newman speaks about a higher gift than grace given to refine, to cleanse and purify our soiled flesh and blood. What is that gift? God’s presence and his very self, and essence all divine. This is often taken to mean the gift of the Holy Sacrament, the everlasting sign of God’s presence here among us. I prefer to think of it as referring to the Incarnation, for the coming of Jesus imparts to our world nothing less than God’s very self, all that he is, all that he can ever be, now among us as flesh and blood to be broken, to be poured out for all humanity. What higher gift of grace could there be than the full incarnate reality that grace points to? This holy sacrament is precisely the divine gift for all of time that opens us up once more to the presence of the one who is the true Sacrament of God’s presence and his very self, the very Word incarnate.  

It’s the next two stanzas that point to what this higher gift than grace. They look back to the story of the Passion and make explicit what Newman had meant when he spoke about the second Adam coming to strive afresh against the foe. There, it was O wisest love! That is, I think, the resolve, the decision God has made to rescue lost humanity. But now it becomes O generous love! And this tells us what it was that prompted that decision. Grace, as theology understands it, is the choice God makes to act mercifully and kindly towards us, not holding our sins against us but seeing us as we are in Christ.

And, says the hymn, generous love entails that the second Adam, this immortal Man, can prevail only by being smitten himself, undergoing in his own self for mortals what every mortal knows he or she must undergo: this double agony of body and soul that The Dream of Gerontius lays bare so movingly. And like the height and the depth in the opening lines, Jesus models what it means to lay down his life, to suffer and to die in this heroic drama of redemption: And in the garden secretly, and on the Cross on high. In the secret agony of Gethsemane, Jesus prays that the cup may pass from him. It does not. He was born for this destiny. The Son of Man must suffer many things, says the gospel. And so, alone because his disciples have abandoned him, he goes out to Golgotha, to be nailed on the Cross on high.

But the hymn has one further insight to help us make sense of the Passion. What the crucified Lord does, says Newman, is to teach his brethren, and inspire to suffer and to die. Here is the poet taking up another aspect of the cross which is this. When you have recognised how God’s grace has reached out to you at such cost, when you have seen what kind of conflict it took to ransom and reconcile you and make you the human being you were destined to be, ponder the example and live it out yourself.

So Newman ends by inviting us to contemplate the example of Jesus on the cross. Given the setting in Gerontius, he is certainly telling us what makes for “holy dying” as the seventeenth century Bishop Jeremy Taylor put it. To die well is to accept the reality of death, prepare for it, focus on faith, hope and love, go thankfully and gently into that good night if we can. But to die well can have a redemptive effect on other people. I think Newman is telling us that we can be inspired to live, to suffer and to die as friends and companions to God and our fellow human beings, to be at peace with them, to be in a state of love like Jesus loved who, says the gospel, loved us to the end. Our own good deaths can be a gift to those who love us, just as Jesus’s has been.

It seems to me that two New Testament sayings are enfolded in these lines of Newman’s hymn. Jesus says that greater love means to lay down our lives “for our friends”. He also says that that to serve means imitating him who gave up his life “as a ransom for many”. Don’t these embody the redemptive power of goodness in the world when ordinary men and women like us want to try to make a difference to the lives of others? In such ways, in the strength God gives us when we most need it, we participate in striving afresh against the foe. We strive and we prevail, because of the double agony Jesus underwent for us - and because he prevailed. We are “more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

And in the paschal song of triumph we sing in this Great Week of our salvation, this marvellous hymn gives us the words to celebrate this wisest love, this generous love that brought into our very midst God’s presence and his very self. With the angels we praise the Holy One in the height and depth of creation and in the length and breadth of the story of our redemption: in all his words most wonderful, most sure in all his ways!

Wakefield Cathedral, Wednesday in Holy Week 2017

 

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Praise to the Holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise;
in all his words most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways!

O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
a second Adam to the fight
and to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
which did in Adam fail,
should strive afresh against the foe,
should strive, and should prevail;

and that the highest gift of grace
should flesh and blood refine:
God's presence and his very self,
and essence all-divine.

O generous love! that he who smote
in man for man the foe,
the double agony in Man
for man should undergo.

And in the garden secretly,
and on the cross on high,
should teach his brethren, and inspire
to suffer and to die.

Praise to the Holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise;
in all his words most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways!

John Henry Newman, 1801-1890

 

 

On Seeing and Remembering: Some Theological Reflections on Photography

I want in this paper to reflect aloud on photography and its theological dimension. I am conscious that I am doing this in a city that can claim to be the cradle of the photographic image in the UK. It was here in St Andrews that pioneering photographers such as Robert Chambers, and John and Robert Adamson perfected what was first called the calotype in the 1840s. They used it to document the life of this city, its ancient buildings, its rich and its poor, its geology and its landscapes. St Andrews was the first city in the world to be systematically recorded through photography. Both natural and social science as well as the arts and humanities were quick to appropriate the photographic lens as a vital recording and analytic tool to complement the ever more exacting role it was already playing in the microscope and the telescope.

So light and lens played a key part in this late flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment in the mid-19^th century. This is the theme of an engaging book[1] by Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St Andrews that charts the work of those early photographers. He suggests that there was something about this place that was conducive to photography. Its ruined medieval buildings that spoke so eloquently about the history of Scotland, its dramatic shore-line rich in evidences of ancient geology and palaeontology, its beautiful hinterland, civic pride and civic decay. These were the immovable givens that created a fitting context for the new science. But there was also the life of the city itself which was compact enough to embrace within a small space the extremes of privilege and poverty, the contrasting lives of academics and artisans, portraits of the great, the good, the scoundrel and the plain ordinary. And to catalyse all this intellectually, there was the ancient University itself, together with a newly founded Lit and Phil, always the symbol of a thriving intelligentsia in a decent Victorian town.

But Crawford’s book also charts the rise of a photographic aesthetic, the debt early photography owed to painting and engraving, and the ways in which photography was breaking out of old artistic traditions to create new ones. The pioneers were perhaps not always aware that they were embarking on a new kind of journey, and that today we would be as interested in their photography as an activity and an art as we are in their product, those marvellous and invaluable documentary photographs so many of which survive. Crawford references theorists such as Barthes, Sontag and Berger to explore the work of the pioneers and its influence in the history of photography. Of that history, you and I and everyone else who decides to take a photograph is a part. We should not underestimate how 19^th century ways of seeing the world have coloured, mostly unconsciously, our view not only of what a ‘photograph’ should be, but what the world itself looks like.

I emphasised the phrase anyone else who decides to take a photograph.  I did this because I want to discuss photography as willed and intentional: a decision, not simply an activity. The vast majority of photos taken these days are either snapshots or illustrative documentary images. I don’t want to decry the role of either, even when I suspect that the behaviour of tourists with cameras at historic sites or on the beach is as much a kind of expected ritual as it is the need to record something and memorialise it. When I first visited the Holy Land, I was the only person among eighty who did not bring a camera with me. In those days, I had no interest in photography. When someone asked me why I hadn’t brought one and wasn’t conforming to the expected ritual behaviour, I said, a trifle pompously, that I preferred to write a journal of my experiences instead. I still have it, and it has served me well, though as I now read it I can already see hints of the photographic perspective I would have brought to what I saw and experienced. I remembered this when I wrote my book on the Christian heritage of North East England[2]. I did most of the photography myself, and found that the task of weaving text and images into an intelligent whole was both fascinating and demanding. It was much more complex than simply asking whether the written text should lead the images or the images the writing; for both are ‘texts’ in their own right. And although I did not make anything of it in what I wrote, I am aware that what the book called for was an intelligent inter-textual approach.  

So my love-affair with the camera, or rather, not with the camera but with photography, does not go back more than a decade. You may say that this hardly qualifies me to speak or write about it. However, when later life with its hard-won capacity for reflection brings with it some new discovery, the comparative rarity of that experience does seem to make it worth pondering, particularly for theologians whose business it is to ponder. So let me try to do this aloud.

Like the Victorian pioneers here at St Andrews, I owe this new-found opening to a particular place: Durham. Like St Andrews, it too is a compact and photogenic city that offers endless possibilities for photographers. The Cathedral and castle perched on their rocky acropolis with the river flowing round the peninsula, the narrow medieval streets, the liveliness of a university, commercial and once industrial environment, the landscapes of the North Pennines and the coast all contribute to Durham’s sense of place. Most of what I have learned about photography I have learned there.

But in reflecting on the past decade, I am aware that it is not simply the product of photography that intrigues me –using the technology, setting aperture, white balance, ISO, photo-shopping and so on. These are the themes of countless manuals and text books and they can only take you so far. It is the verbs – what a photographer is doing with his or her camera, what the vision is, what the personal perspective, why, how he or she composes the image, what meanings resides both in the image and the activity of creating it and how they are elicited. This to me makes photography important as a metaphor of so much else, not simply in human life but in the realms of the theological and spiritual as well. And while I don’t claim any great merit for my own photography, I can at least speak about them out of the experience of having created them myself, and in the case of those that have especially intrigued me, gone on to think about the meanings I associate to them. I want to do this by using a handful of theological ideas that I hope may help us to explore some of these, to me, central verbs of photography.

                                                              *******

Let me begin with the idea is disclosure. It is a commonplace to speak about visual art as disclosure, yet in the case of photography, the resonances are particularly suggestive. This is because the essence of photography lies entirely in the character of light and how the human eye responds to it. Those two things cannot be separated, for at its heart, photography is about a new way of seeing or, if you like, an opening of the ‘doors of perception’ as William Blake put it. To the pioneers, photography was a revelation of things not seen before, of a world apprehended in entirely new ways, whether it was landscape, architecture, geomorphology, botany or human life. The camera, therefore, soon began to be understood not as an unwelcome, obscuring technology that intruded itself between observer and the observed, but as an extension of the eye itself, as organically related to the human body as the painter’s brushes or the musician’s violin. 

Photography sometimes plays on this aspect of its own art in self-referential films and images. I am thinking of the film Blow Up, where a photographer enlarges a routine image only to discover that he has unwittingly captured a murder on film. I have had this experience once or twice. One of my earliest images I have kept is a night-time scene in Durham city-centre. There used to be a famous block of eight red telephone boxes in the market place. In urban settings at night, there is nothing so forlorn, sinister even, as an empty telephone box. With my daughter’s cast-off compact camera that I used in those days, I photographed the empty scene under the harsh yellow glare of the sodium lamps. When I examined the image, I found that the square was not empty at all. There was a young man standing by the telephone boxes watching me at work. At once, the image took on quite a different meaning from the intended one because it now suggested a narrative. Was he waiting for a call? Or was he about to make one? If so, was it a lover, or maybe a crime in the planning, or perhaps (because there is no limit to what the imagination is capable of in the small hours) he was even stalking me, so intense was his stare. It was my first experience of an objet trouvé, an unwitting disclosure within the image that can completely change the way it is read and even subvert it entirely.

We know how pervasive images of light and perception are in the discourse of religion. Ideas like revelation, enlightenment, epiphany, illumination and eikon are among the most common in the language of faith especially in connection with the Incarnation. The Fourth Gospel, to take only one biblical text, begins, in an echo of Genesis, with the proclamation of the light that shines in the darkness, which the darkness cannot extinguish. Jesus proclaims himself to be the Light of the World. A central narrative concerns the healing of a man born blind who joyfully greets a world he can now see. And if later mystical theologians suggested that the truth of spiritual experience was more rich and complex, more chiaroscuro than a straightforward linear movement from darkness to light, the metaphor still remains firmly in the arena of visual perception. For the Greek church in particular, no doubt influenced by neo-Platonism, the idea of photismos, illumination, was a central word in the vocabulary of baptism and the spiritual path.[3]

This is where photography seems particularly well placed to offer theological and spiritual commentary on the faith tradition.  Precisely because the camera is an extension of the eye, attention is focused not only what the photographer sees and decides is worth recording, but also on how he or she does this. That is to say, it is fundamentally responsive to what is ‘there’. To me, photography only becomes an art when it finds its own authentic language, its ‘word’ that says ‘let there be light’ through the camera lens and let light do its creative work on film or digital sensor or in the light box. It becomes a form of speech that responds to whatever it encounters through both eye and lens and the decision of the photographer that here is something worth seeing. Zola said, with all the confidence of his century’s belief in the power of technology, that ‘seeing means having photographed it’; that is to say, we only truly ‘see’ when we make the choice to ‘focus’ (a suggestive word) on something in particular rather than everything in general – which in practice means nothing at all. The decision to place a frame round a small sector of reality, is not simply a description of photography but of any truly authentic act of seeing. David Brown quotes Browning’s ‘Fra Lippi Lippi’ to make the point:

            For don’t you mark? We’re made so that we love
            First when we see them painted, things we have passed
            Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
            And so they are better, painted – better to us,
            Which is the same thing. Art was given for that.[4]

Framing is central to the photographic project. Early photographers influenced by surrealism found that juxtaposing random objects or points of focus in an image and placing a frame round them established unexpected connections in the mind of the photographer. As in theatre and film, the photographic mise-en-scène is what created meaning, even the apparently pointless, not to say meaningless. We could say that photography pioneered essentially postmodern readings of the world in which the frame created endless possibilities of bricolage. The act of framing is perhaps an interesting analogy of how religion might understand providence. In the baffling cosmos inhabited, for example, by wisdom writers like Job and Qoheleth, where theodicy cannot work because no laws seem to govern change and chance, the only way to elicit meaning out of existence is to put a frame round a part of it and reflect on the connections that emerge. This is the subjective judgment of faith, not the objective act of description. Within that frame, a tiny fragment of chaos might appear after all to be susceptible of being ordered in the eye and mind of the beholder. This approach to the ordinary in all its incoherence and perplexity is well embedded in mainstream ‘art’ photography where even the detritus of human life or civilisation frequently constitute the content of an image that makes us look at them in a new way.  This is, I think, close to what David Brown calls ‘enchantment’ in his essay on the discernment of the divine in both the natural and cultural contexts.[5]  For him, the religious quest is not restricted to revealed religion or ecclesial liturgy but often finds its most fruitful expressions in the experience of the ‘ordinary’ in ways that not only ‘make connections’ but engender a new vision or way of seeing.

I think this is what Leonardo da Vinci meant when he said of painting: ‘where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art’. Spirit could mean the human spirit or the Spirit of God. I like to think it means both, that is, the action of God’s Spirit within the human person in the way Paul speaks about when he says that the Spirit within us echoes the pangs and prayers of a created order longing for freedom[6]. We could say that it is an act of recognition: the Spirit within recognising the Spirit without. When, so to speak, the circuit is complete, there is not only recognition and prayer but art. So it is a profoundly theological statement about the character of art that links creativity and interpretation to the responsive, recognising soul of a person or community.  That reality will not be all light or all dark – if it were, there would be no photographic image. It is in the infinitely complex lands in between, in the interplay of light and shadow, life’s greyscales if you like, where life is lived and the creation waits for us to respond to both its beauty and its pain. It is when the photographer understands what he or she is trying to do, and has some sense of why, and sufficient understanding of the art, the craft and whatever technology is serving them, that real disclosure happens. A photograph becomes (to use a suggestive word) not simply a picture but an icon, an ‘image’ that marries the subject to one person’s perception of and response to it. What is more, like an orthodox icon, the image is not only ‘written’ by the photographer as a responsive act, but also draws the observer into itself to experience its life from within.

Here, there are decisions to be made about the photographer’s intent. I am not talking about how an image is composed in the viewfinder (I take it that because photography is about the eye and how it sees, the viewfinder is a required necessity. The LCD ‘live-view’ is only for use in awkward positions where the viewfinder is inaccessible. But it is almost impossible to find a decent compact camera these days that has one. It’s a sign that mass photography in the digital age when even the camera itself is under threat from mobile devices has all but abandoned the idea of seeing).  Before that, he or she has to decide what the intent of the photograph is to be. Take landscapes. When you live in the kingdom of Fife, or in North East England, it is impossible to resist the allure of photographing coast, countryside and natural or human heritage. You set out to create an image that is ‘beautiful’, awe-inspiring or as the immediate forebears of the first photographers would have said, picturesque or sublime. Images like these are the staple of picture books, calendars and post cards. They are colourful, pretty, easy on the eye, and post-production editing will remove any blemishes and perfect the subject. But such images, even when taken by the best of professional photographers, often seem to have a conventional, stylised quality about them; they lack vitality, fall into cliché. This is the problem with the view of Durham Cathedral from the bridge, as it is of many great landscape features and buildings. The question is, how can the familiar become a true disclosure, invite us to see in a different way, open the doors of perception, challenge us to a new vision? Or to use another theological image, how can a photograph transfigure our view of the world, invite us into a more contemplative way not only of perceiving a landscape but even of inhabiting it, or to put it into a different category of theological thought, sacramentalise our vision of reality?

An important word in this context could be insight. Wordsworth, in his ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’ speaks about ‘seeing into the life of things’. It is a great phrase that does not need to read simply as part of the romantic vision of the world. It is closely akin to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘inscape’, a way of achieving this contemplative way of seeing that photography invites us to explore. And we should regard ‘seeing’ as an active, not a passive, process, for as I suggested, the latter is not really ‘seeing’ at all, not in the sense of noticing and paying attention. We are familiar with the capacity of a photograph to change our view of things. I am thinking, for example, of how war photographers have unexpectedly influenced public opinion through widely-circulated images of Viet Nam, Cambodia and Iraq to take some well-known examples. Documentary photography of the Great War, only slowly and reluctantly released to the British public at home, markedly affected their perception of the war and the true horrors of mechanised armed conflict. Or in a genre more familiar to me, the images of gothic cathedrals by the great early 20^th century photographer Frederick Evans that respond with such grace and insight to the vision of heavenly harmony, order and light, the kind of understanding Abbé Suger brought to the world’s first Gothic cathedral at St Denis in the 12^th century.[7] This is not to say that the photographer’s intent is necessarily conscious. But it is to suggest that there are times when the photographic image speaks in ways that awaken the conscience and activate the will. An image can have a transformative effect, become a living word that challenges the status quo and demands a change of attitude.

I link this with the frequency with which Hebrew prophets were galvanised by their ‘seeing’ something that re-shaped their vision. ‘He said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “a basket of summer fruit’”.[8] ‘“Jeremiah, what do you see?” And I said, “I see a branch of an almond tree”’.[9] The seeing, the noticing, the attentive response, all lead to the prophet’s act of recognition of what the Lord is saying. The association suggested by the word-play (in these two cases) drives the meaning far beyond a surface reading of the image itself, into the image in a way that constitutes not only a new insightful awareness on the prophet’s part but an imperative that comes to direct his career. In a fascinating narrative at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel where, as we have noticed, light and sight are key themes, the Messiah comes to be recognised first by John the Baptist and then by a succession of disciples: all on the basis of seeing and recognising. Jesus is the homme trouvé in the human landscape. ‘Nathanael said to Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see”.  We should not ignore the resonances of that verb for St John. Not only that, but the connection is established in the reciprocal act of being seen and recognised as well. ‘Nathanael asked Jesus, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” [10] This playful exchange does not feel far away from the dynamic of photography where recording an image is an act both of sight (in this elevated sense) and recognition. We might even take it further and ask whether it makes sense to say that the subject of the image sees and recognises the camera before ever the camera recognises it. 

The Fourth Gospel, however, tantalises us with its subtle use of the imagery of seeing. One of its central narratives, is the healing of the man born blind. The evangelist links this at the outset with Jesus’ proclamation ‘I am the light of the world’. As one of the Johannine ‘signs’ of messiahship, the journey from blindness to sight is a metaphor of the dawning of inward conviction about Jesus, and this in turn leads to a protracted debate with the Pharisees about who can and cannot ‘see’ in its profoundest sense.[11] This understanding is carried into the upper room discourses where Jesus says ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’.[12] But in the resurrection narratives verbs of seeing are given a new twist. Mary Magdalen announces to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’, yet sight turns out not to be the central issue after all. When it comes to Thomas, Jesus says: ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Happy are those who have not seen, and yet come to believe.’[13] And precisely this, or something like it, turns out to have been the journey the ‘other disciple’ has already made earlier at the empty tomb. ‘He saw, and believed’ it says[14] –not in Thomas’ way, gazing on the risen Jesus for himself, but taking in evidence of the empty tomb and inferring resurrection from it, despite not yet ‘understanding the scripture, that he must rise from the dead’.

So the new beatitude of Easter turns out to be about not-seeing. And this too is suggestive for photography. Even before the digital age one of the principal threats to photography was its own promiscuity, both as to content (photograph everything for the sake of collecting and hoarding images) and technique (the ‘scatter-gun’ approach – don’t bother to compose, just take hundreds of rapid-fire shots in the hope that one of them may be worth preserving). Digital technology and television have made the risk of debasing the purity of the photographer’s vision infinitely higher. Susan Sontag discusses the effect of the superfluity of images on contemporary sensitivities, particularly in relation to suffering. ‘An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen….Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image… A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness – just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling.’[15] She speaks about ‘war-tourism’, underlining the danger that the photographer observes but never participates. We could say the same about mass tourism’s effects on photography. Perversely, mass photography subverts its own function by contributing to ‘not-seeing’, not as a gospel benediction, but as a reversion to a kind of blindness or at least to a distorted vision. In this case, photography would turn out to be a curse. 

Does ‘not seeing’ imply the superiority of text over image (for example, ‘understanding the scripture’, in John’s phrase)? If so, might we follow Sontag in exploring how an image without a caption, an epiphany without a story, is incapable of communicating unambiguously because context and narrative are missing? Or does the Fourth Gospel move us into an altogether different cognitive world in which words and images fall away because all are provisional? If so, and we find ourselves in the borderlands of the apophatic way, the via negativa, then not just a particular photographic image but photography itself is under judgment, together with all the visual arts, because the activity of physical sight is merely a temporary state. In a universe where there is, to quote John Donne’s famous sermon, ‘no darkness or dazzling but one equal light’, there can be no photography and no visual art.

This leads me to turn finally to another aspect of photography with suggestive theological associations. This is the idea of memory.  I am tempted at this point to divert into an important aspect of photography which is its memory of the long tradition of visual art. Commentators have long observed how, for example, war photography can sometimes uncannily replicate images of the Pietà, Via Dolorosa and Crucifixion in the way perpetrators of violence and especially their victims are portrayed.  Like other texts, photography can reference the tradition consciously or, I suspect more often, unconsciously. But it is rather different aspect of photographic memory that I want to explore here.

Theorists of photography often draw attention to its elegiac character. It preserves memories that are already in the past when the image is captured. It is like looking up at the night sky and knowing that what we see is a journey not in the present but into the past. Photographic landscapes and townscapes show what places once looked like: they are familiar yet not familiar. Francis Frith’s great harvest of photographs of both British and overseas sites as they were in the 19^th century is probably more popular now than ever. Eugene Atget’s classic oeuvre documenting Paris before Haussman’s re-engineering of the city holds the same appeal as do Dorothea Lange’s wonderful photographs of the Great Depression. As I have already said, the St Andrews pioneers produced a marvellous series of images that are invaluable in understanding the social history of this city and its people. Portraits are especially powerful in this respect because they preserve faces of people who are distant, have aged or have died. The dead in particular may have no other memorial but for a photograph: even unidentified, they are memorialised and live on: gone but not forgotten.

In the film Dead Poets’ Society, the teacher takes his class of boys to look at the faded curling sepia images of the school’s past sporting heroes lovingly preserved, with trophies and other past memorabilia in glass cases. ‘Where are they now, these people?’ he asks the boys rhetorically. ‘They are food for worms.’ But not just that, because their conserved images become, in the film, a life-changing tool to help the young discover their place in the world. The lesson these images of dead people teach is: carpe diem, seize the day, live in the present because the present is a transient gift. In the language of the Ash Wednesday liturgy that echoes the book of Genesis, ‘Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.’ As a memento mori, photography performs the vital pedagogical function both of highlighting our mortality and to helping us to grasp life’s potentiality while we have it. We can read an old photo merely as nostalgia. But its poignancy originates in a deeper understanding of how it mirrors our condition. One day, we shall be remembered in this way ourselves.  Susan Sontag coins the phrase ‘melancholy objects’ for photographs[16], claiming that as soon as the image has been taken, it becomes one. ‘To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.’[17]

In an important passage in his classic work on photography, John Berger writes:

           Has the camera replaced the eye of God? The decline of religion coincides with the rise of the photograph. … The faculty of memory led men everywhere to ask whether, just as they themselves could preserve certain events from oblivion, there might not be other eyes noting and recording otherwise unwitnessed events. Such eyes they then accredited to their ancestors, to spirits, to gods or to their single deity. What was seen by this supernatural eye was inseparably linked with the principle of justice. It was possible to escape the justice of men, but not this higher justice from which nothing or little could be hidden. Memory implies a certain act of redemption. What is remembered has been saved from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned. If all events are seen, instantaneously, outside time, by a supernatural eye, the distinction between remembering and forgetting is transformed into an act of judgment, into the rendering of justice, whereby recognition is close to being remembered and condemnation is close to being forgotten. Such a presentiment, extracted from man’s long, painful experience of time, is to be found in varying forms in almost every culture and religion, and, very clearly, in Christianity.[18]

As Berger acknowledges, this taps into a rich vein of Judaeo-Christian understanding that celebrates memory in this dynamic way. To re-enact the Passover haggadah is ritually to remind the community of the covenant that God’s redeeming activity in history has not been forgotten, that God himself has not been forgotten. But the heart of the ceremony is more, I think, to make conscious and explicit that his people have not been forgotten by God. They exist, are redeemed, are here because they have not been forgotten. God has remembered. At the elevation of the bread and wine in the Christian eucharist, precisely this not being forgotten is ‘offered’ to God in memory of the saving work of Jesus. Memory kept alive with power to transform the present and future is what the New Testament means by anamnesis. And this is perhaps a uniquely powerful function of photography – to enable past moments, chronos as well as kairos, to live again in the present.

Berger goes on to say that ‘the spectacle creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: memory ceases to be necessary or desirable…The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget’.[19] Berger’s point as a Marxist theorist (and here he follows Sontag) is that this god is a capitalist deity that devours photographic images to feed its self-serving avarice. For him a debased photography does two things. It supplies a never-ending flow of still and moving images to service mass consumption, and thanks to its omniscience, makes possible Orwellian systems of surveillance and control. The first serves forgetfulness (don’t remember what you already have or what you have seen – crave what is new); the second, a malevolent form of recall where remembering has the potential to become an oppressive, destructive act.

But Berger wants a world in which an alternative, purified photography ‘remembers well’ so as to create better futures for humanity. ‘The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.’[20] This calls for a re-examining of the photographer’s motive in an almost vocational way that serves not the purposes of pleasing or shocking for their own sake, but the subject itself, in an encounter in which the integrity of the subject is met by the photographer’s own integrity. Cor ad cor loquitur is the watchword not only of the writer or composer but of the photographer as well.

Anamnesis is about this encounter between the remembered and the remembrancer (to revert to an old-fashioned word with the connotation of making memory a pious duty). This belongs both to the realm of purified liturgy and purified photography and is a theological task because both perform an essential ritualised function as it were on God’s behalf. In the liturgy, God remembers. And if the camera is Berger’s all-seeing representative eye that observes, records and captures reality, then by allowing it not simply to see but to see into (or for that matter, choose not to see) can also be said also to be a theological and spiritual work in which the photographic image can play a truly redemptive, transfiguring role.

It would take a von Balthasar to do justice to how a theology of light could articulate photography’s role in seeing and disclosing the beauty and the tragedy of the world as essentially theological in character. However, he did not, to my knowledge, discuss photography at all in his exhaustive studies of theological aesthetics. It is interesting to ask why photography, compared with painting or film, is under-explored by theologians. Perhaps it is time to put this right.

Given at the Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts, St Andrews University, March 2014

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[1] Crawford, Robert, The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrew’s, Scandal and the Birth of Photography, Edinburgh 2011.

[2] Sadgrove, Michael, Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of North East England, London 2013.

[3] Nichols, Aidan, The Word has been Abroad: a Guide through Balthasar’s Aesthetics, 1998, 29-30.

[4] Brown, David, God and Enchantment of Place, 2004, 107.

[5] Ibid, especially chapter 1.

[6] Romans 8.22ff.

[7] Peterson, Brian, ‘Frederick Evans and the Theology of Light’, http://www.nccsc.net/legacy/frederick-evans-and-the-theology-of-light.

[8] Amos 8.1ff.

[9] Jeremiah 1.11-12.

[10] John 1.29-51.

[11] John 9.

[12] John 14.9.

[13] John 20.29.

[14] John 20.8.

[15] Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003, 94.

[16] Sontag, Susan, On Photography, 1977, 51ff.

[17] Ibid., 15-16.

[18] Berger, John, Understanding a Photograph, 53-54.

[19] Ibid., 55.

[20] Ibid., 57.