On the Sin of Envy

When I agreed to speak to you tonight, we were probably at the lowest point of the recession.  At that time of despondency, it did not look likely that the economy would show signs even of the beginnings of recovery before the middle of next year.  Now, the financial environment appears to be a little less gloomy, and analysts are daring to talk about ‘green shoots’.  I am no expert, so I can’t judge whether such hopes are well-founded.  In north-east England, there has been considerable attrition as a result of this tsunami and I expect it is the same here.  It will be years before we see manufacturing industry in the north-east revitalised, if it ever is, employment levels back to where they were earlier this decade, and inward investment in our region once more flourishing.

A disaffected public continues to ask why so little regulation has existed to check reckless speculation and the cynical exploitation of the markets.  We all hope, though we do not necessarily expect, that out of this debacle will emerge a more disciplined, more accountable culture that will begin to restore trust.  But a better managed economy will not necessarily address the underlying causes of this crisis.  These are, I am sure we agree, human, moral and spiritual in character.  Religious leaders are right to ask for some serious reflection on what the recession is teaching us about ourselves and our society.

One book to do this is remarkable for having been written by the chairman, formerly the chief executive, of one of the major world banks.  So it is an insider’s view on the crisis and a refreshingly honest analysis of its roots.  But its author, Stephen Green, is also a non-stipendiary priest of the Church of England.   He is not ashamed to identify what he sees as the underlying malaise in western society that he describes as its Faustian deal with Mephistopheles.  To simplify, this amounts to the selling of our collective soul for the sake of short term material gain.  There is nothing new in this, as the power of the Faust legend down the centuries illustrates.  What is new is the global scale on which this age-old drama is acted out in the world’s financial markets.  The near-failure of the world banking system last year was as near a miss from global disaster as the Cuba Missile Crisis.

Archbishop Rowan Williams has focused on the erosion of public values and regretted that there have been few signs that the powerful financial institutions and their leadership have begun to reflect on the moral and spiritual causes of this financial debacle.   He has called for repentance.  Repentance, as we know, means a change of mind.  It is close to what the third Benedictine vow calls conversio morum, the conversion of life.  It looks for a new way of living, a new set of attitudes and ambitions, a life that is focused not on our own selves but on God and what he looks for in humanity.  In a renewed, God-fearing society, there would still be accidents and they might be damaging, even catastrophic, but perhaps there would not be economic crises so patently traceable to basic faults due to the relentless pursuit of self-interest.  Such a society would be marked by caritas, generosity, mutuality, collaboration, self-giving and service.  The church is called to model precisely this vision of human beings living together in genuine koinonia.

But what are the sins which we should repent of, and from which we should want to be delivered?  The usual candidates among the seven deadly sins are gluttony (which is over-indulgence) and
avarice or greed (which is the inordinate hunger to acquire and possess).  These are both, like lust, sins of excess.  There is a long Christian tradition that understands these in relation to acquiring wealth.  What makes greed sinful, says Thomas Aquinas, is that it is the abandonment or collapse of spiritual desire for what is material and temporal.  Dante illustrates this in the Divine Comedy by depicting the greedy as tied up and laid face down on the ground because they concentrated too much on earthly things. (It is a good example of what is called contrapasso, literally ‘counter-suffering’: you are punished by the very thing you practise.) Stephen Green’s book suggests that the Faustian bargain so many wage their futures on is a symptom of precisely this symptom.

However, I want to suggest that Green doesn’t go deep enough into the human spirit.  All the sins of excess are disorders of desire, as Augustine so profoundly understood: it is not that we don’t love, but that our love is wrongly directed.  And if we ask where the origins of disordered desire are to be found, the answer is in the two fundamental sins of all.  The first of these is, of course, pride.  Pride is usually regarded as the worst of all sins because it is the most far-reaching in suppressing or perverting the love that should be directed outwards to God and to our neighbour.  It is, as Augustine says, ‘turned in on itself’.  And this obsession with ourselves is, says the tradition, nothing short of idolatry because there is no place in it for God.  (There is another graphic example of contrapasso in Dante where he shows the proud condemned to wander round for eternity bent double under the weight of their gorgeous copes which are made of lead.)

But there is another perversion of love which is turned outwards, or at least looks as if it is, and that is envy. I want to focus on envy this evening because I believe it is the besetting sin of our age, and because apart from texts on moral theology, it is not given nearly enough attention in Christian reflection on our human state.  I don’t know, for instance, when you last heard a sermon on envy or when I last preached one.   But the Bible focuses on it a great deal as I shall illustrate, possibly more than it does on pride.

What is envy?  It is an inward state of mind and heart.  I am careful not to say it is merely a feeling or emotion, though of course we experience it that way.  We could say that the seedbed of envy is our awareness that we lack something that someone else possesses.  This could be their material possessions, their human qualities, their successes or status in life, their religious faith, their personal relationships, their happiness.  All these can be the focus of envy.  But envy is not by itself knowing that someone else has something we do not possess.  Our chairman has the name Richard.  I do not have that name myself.  I recognise this lack.  But it does not make me envious of him.

Envy is born when I want what the other person has for myself, or simply wish that the other person could be deprived of it (which they would be if I took for myself what belonged to them).  

We need to be clear about the difference between envy and jealousy and resolve that we shall use these words accurately.  Jealousy is the fear of losing someone we love or who is important to us to another person.  Envy is the frustration caused by another person having something that I do not have myself. So envy involves simply two people, myself and another, and is focused on a thing, while jealousy involves three (or more) people and focuses on a threat posed to a significant relationship.  We use that word accurately when we say, ‘I love her jealously’, meaning ‘I will not let her go to another person’.  It is exactly in this sense that Yhwh is a ‘jealous God’ according to the Second Commandment, because he will not ‘lose’ his chosen people to the worship of idols and graven images but shows ‘steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments’ (Exod 20. 4-6).  Try substituting ‘envious’ for ‘jealous’ in that command, and it ceases to make sense.

Aquinas says that envy as sorrow on account of another person’s benefit or good, drawing on Aristotle’s definition of it as the pain caused by other peoples’ good fortune.  In this tradition, Dante says that envy is the love of my own good and resolve to pursue it perverted to a desire to deprive other people of theirs. In his Purgatorio, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. This tells us straight away that the other side of envy is Schadenfreude, the pleasure we get at other peoples’ misfortune.  They belong together because the usual way of dealing with envy is to damage or destroy the object of my envy, or to deprive the other person of it (possibly, though by no means necessarily, by taking it for myself).  In the last of the Ten Commandments, the prohibition against coveting what belongs to my neighbour is not forbidding me from admiring his house or his wife, his slave, his ox or his ass, nor acknowledging that I am not as well-endowed as he is.  It prohibits any
action of mine that could spoil his enjoyment of them, what the French call jouissance, a legal term meaning the ‘proper enjoyment of possession’, either by stealing them, damaging them, violating or abusing them, disparaging them, or (and this is the inward attitude the torah wants absolutely to guard against) becoming so fixated on my neighbour’s fortunes that I lose sight of him as a person and destroy myself in the process.  The moral and theological point is that envy dehumanises.  It degrades the image of God in us.  It robs us of our dignity and worth because it deflects us from a person-centered relationship with God and with other people, which alone is the way towards human flourishing, into an idolatrous concern with what is material and impersonal.

This dynamic of envy as emptiness or need allied to the instinct to ‘spoil’ the good that others have is studied extensively in the Bible,.  I should like to explore this theme in three Old Testament texts, the third of which begins to suggest how envy can be addressed as a spiritual problem.  I shall then comment on some New Testament texts that develop these themes before returning to our own day and asking what these biblical insights might suggest to us as we try to read the signs of the times and understand the human hungers and longings that permeate our society.

My first text is a locus classicus of envy, the story of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21.).  It is a simple enough narrative.  Naboth has a vineyard up against the royal palace.  King Ahab wants it: when it comes to real estate, location is everything.  Naboth will not sell his patrimony, whereupon Ahab goes to bed and sulks.  Jezebel devises a scheme whereby Naboth is accused of sacrilege for resisting the royal, and therefore divine, will.  Naboth is stoned to death and Ahab takes possession of the vineyard, only to find Elijah already there to pronounce judgment for his contempt of his subjects and of his God.

This looks like a story of avarice, inordinate desire, and so it is.  Ahab wants something so desperately that it occupies all his waking thoughts.  In his emptiness of spirit, the ennui that so many rich and powerful people know, he obsesses about something he does not need.  But there is an important clue about his deeper mental state.  ‘Ahab said to Naboth, “Give me your vineyard, so that I may have it as a vegetable garden”.’  In other words, the wanting is accompanied by a destructive impulse.  The vine, like the olive and the fig tree, symbolises the best and most productive that the land is capable of.  To degrade a vineyard into a vegetable patch is to spoil what has been handed down in an ancient family for centuries. What is spoiled is not simply a vineyard.  It is part of a family’s sacred geography.  It is terrain that holds long-cherished memories that are not transferrable to another place.  It is the patrimony not only of a man’s ancestry but of a people to whom the land was a divine gift and the charter of their freedom from tyranny.  Tyranny, always deeply implicated in envy, is precisely what Naboth resists.  A tyrant’s envy costs him his life, though as the story goes on to relate, the envier meets an altogether more ignoble end.

My next text is more complex.  It is the story of Saul and David in the First Book of Samuel, one of the finest tales of the ancient world.  Its greatness as tragedy comes from recognising the need to ‘speak what we feel; not what we ought to say’, as Edgar puts it in the final speech of King Lear.  Like Lear, Saul is ‘every inch a king’: not ague-proof, but for all that, a man whose flawed dignity elicits our compassion and even our regard.  He starts out so well, the young, charismatic hero whose prowess with the sword wins him acclaim from the tribes of Israel longing, in their fragile bond, for some unifying symbol of their kinship that will offer stability in the chaotic, uncertain world of the 11th century BC.  But Saul’s problem is that he is never given the space to develop as king and as human being in his own right.  The scenery is always populated with others who surround him, in particular Samuel the prophet, Jonathan his son and heir, and David the bright-eyed youth whose magnetic looks and personality pulls all three of them into his orbit and whose sunny presence casts Saul into ever deepening shadows.  We have only to recall how Saul takes a rash oath to kill anyone who breaks a needlessly imposed fast, only to find that it is his own son Jonathan who is implicated, and how the people turn against Saul so that Jonathan may live; or how Saul is bowed down with melancholia and is soothed by David’s music; or how he frets about David’s absence from the feast, inventing every kind of reason why he has not come, then hurling a spear at his son because of his friendship with David; or the exquisitely crafted scene in the cave where David calls to Saul and delivers a long self-righteous speech, to which Saul listens and simply replies, ‘Is this your voice, my son David?’ and weeps; and at the emotional climax of the tragedy, the worn out king going in disguise by night to the woman at En-dor and learning from Samuel’s ghost that the coming day will be his last.

Tragedy, in the strict sense, is a story told about greatness that is brought down by some failure in character, some ‘basic fault’.  What is Saul’s?  I propose that it is envy.  His obsession is not his own grandiosity (this was Solomon’s fault).  It is his preoccupation with what others have that he himself does not (or, if he has had it, he becomes deprived of it).  Again, we sense the void in his life, the emptiness that gives birth to envy.  He is envious of Samuel (even after he is dead) because of his direct access to the word of the Lord, something Saul has once enjoyed but now lost: ‘Is not Saul also among the prophets?  He is envious of first of his own son Jonathan and then of David for their military success and popular acclaim, qualities that fitted them so well for leadership, an art in which Saul for all his good beginnings, progressively fell short of Israel’s aspirations for what was required in a king.  There is a telling moment in the story when David returns from killing Goliath.  The women turn out (‘to meet Saul’, the text says carefully, not to adulate David directly) dancing and singing: ‘Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands’.  It is meant, I think, as a celebration of them both, with the thousands-ten thousands comparison meant simply as a dramatic figure of speech to intensify their adulation: common enough, in Hebrew poetry.  But Saul takes it literally and is ‘very angry… “They have ascribed to David tens of thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands; what more can he have but the kingdom?”  So Saul eyed David from that day on’  (1 Samuel 18.6-9).  This malevolent ‘eyeing’ (or, we could say, the ‘evil eye’) is envy in its purest form, with all its destructive intention laid bare.

Most powerfully of all, in the way the story is told, he envies the love between David and Jonathan.  It is true that here we are dealing with a story about jealousy as well as envy, for both David and Jonathan pose a threat to Saul’s own attachment to each of them: each of them, he thinks, is taking the other away from him.  There are shades of Othello in this sad and beautiful tale.  But I think we can safely say that overshadowing his jealousy of his double attachment is his hard-edged envy of what existed between Jonathan the heir, and David, Saul’s friend turned (as he supposes) supplanter.  Such a friendship is what he does not have, and imagines he can never have.  And this, reinforced by his envy of David’s military success, is what he is determined to spoil by killing David and thereby destroy the very thing that animates and gives life to both his son and to himself, the love David is prepared to offer to them both.  There is only one way the mental distress of despair can end.  Saul falls on his own sword on Mount Gilboa, defeated by his own demons.  Who is to say whether, in the complex mysteries of the human mind, envy is the symptom or the cause?  But the symbolism is clear.  Envy always has the tendency to destroy.  In the end, say both the stories we have looked at, it visits destruction at home, in the very seat of the human soul.

I spoke about the symbolism of Saul’s mental collapse and suicide.  This is a layer of the story we should pay attention to.  I said that envy always has the propensity to spoil.  In the psychoanalytic literature, this insight is associated with Melanie Klein whose work Envy and Gratitude (1957) proved ground-breaking in post-Freudian theory.  She says of envy that it entails an attack on the ‘good’ object because of its goodness, because the awareness of being separated from the ‘good’ which arouses envy becomes intolerable.  So acting out envious impulses is to relieve the tension between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects.  Klein develops this theory in the light of her observation of infant behaviour at the mother’s breast, and the tendency of the infant to ‘split’ the ‘good breast’ from the ‘bad’.  What I want to stress is her insight that envy attacks the good object because it is good.  And this perfectly explains Saul’s erratic behaviour towards David.  The good that is ultimately spoiled by his own envy is not external but internal, his love for David and the wholesomeness that comes from it.  More than that, the clarity of his moral vision, the integrity of his own motives and attitudes becomes increasingly clouded and compromised through his envy.  In this sense, Saul has already ‘died’ as a human person long before he throws himself on to his own sword.  The seven sins, of which envy is perhaps the most potent, are rightly known as ‘deadly’.

My final text from the Hebrew Bible is one of the psalms.  Envy is a frequent theme in the Psalter, particularly among the wisdom Psalms.  Psalm 37 warns the feverish complainant against the destabilising effects of envy: ‘Fret not thyself because of the ungodly, neither be thou envious against the evil doers’.  The antidote here is a calm and equable spirit, for the evil doers will soon be cut down like the grass.  Psalm 49 is more probing.  ‘Be not thou afraid, though one be made rich: or if the glory of his house be increased; for he shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth; neither shall his pomp follow him.’  There, the argument turns on human mortality: there is no point in being consumed by envy when death is the great leveller of high and low, rich and poor.  It is a bleak way of dealing with envy, though undeniably potent.

However, the Psalter’s most searching anatomy of envy is to be found in Psalm 73.  It is unique in the Old Testament for its acute psychological and spiritual perception of human envy, not least as a meditation that autobiographically charts the landscape of the psalmist’s own life.

The Psalm begins with what looks like an orthodox statement of belief: ‘truly God is good to the upright’ (or to ‘Israel’ depending on how we read the Hebrew) (1).  Statements like this (perhaps meant to be read in implied quotation marks?) are very easy to make, but the theme of the Psalm is to test whether the credal assertion matches experience.  So, without further ado the psalmist launches out on his story.  ‘As for me, my feet had almost stumbled… for I was envious of the arrogant’ (2-3).  Psalm 37 may warn against futile worry, but here the psalmist could not help himself.  The prosperity of the arrogant is described with striking imagery as if the psalmist has personally had his nose rubbed in their graceless affluence.  He sees them gliding around ‘sound and sleek’ (4), wearing their pride like a necklace and violence like clothing (6), a kind of second skin.  Porcine eyes  bulbous with fat (7), mouths gaping open to the sky and tongues greedily scouring the earth for fodder (9) build up the unpleasant image of a grotesque self-inflated beast – for such people, to the psalmist, have forfeited their right to be called human.  And this is the symptom of their deadly underlying disease, the functional atheism we have already met in Psalm 14.  Like the fool who says, ‘there is no God’, the arrogant proudly defy their Maker with the question that most characterises the arrogant: ‘How can God know?  Is there knowledge in the Most High?’  What does a remote, transcendent deity know or care about anything (11)?

After this graphic and colourful portrait of hubris the psalmist returns to his testimony.  If the arrogant are so favoured, what is the point of being wise or good or religious – this is the heart of the psalmist’s dilemma.  ‘All in vain have I kept my heart clean, and washed my hands in innocence.  For all day long I have been plagued and am punished every morning’ (13-14).  The inward struggle between the faith of verse 1 and the experience of the following verses is an unbearable burden, for there is simply no answer to this conflict (15-16).  The circle of theodicy cannot be squared.  Until, that is, the great turning point of this Psalm.  ‘I went into the sanctuary of God’ (17).  In this life-changing moment, illumination happens; there is a sudden disclosure of how things truly are.  ‘Then I perceived their end’ (17).  It’s as if the psalmist has been given spectacles so that where previously there had only been hints and nudges of reality, now at last everything comes into focus.

Something very striking happens to the psalmist’s discourse here.  Up to now, the story has been told in the 1st and 3rd person: this is how it is with them; these are the consequences for me.  But no sooner has he experienced this sudden reorientation of perspective than he turns to address God himself.  ‘Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin’ (18).  Narrative turns into prayer, and remains in that mode for the rest of the Psalm.  In other words, it is as the psalmist turns towards God that everything else begins to make sense and his envy begins to subside.  He understands now the truth already sketched out in Psalms 37 and 49.  Above all, he recognises that good fortune is a chimera, an insubstantial dream (20); once seen for what it is, those favoured by it are to be pitied, for it blinds them to the infinitely better, more lasting rewards the psalmist has now discovered.

What are these rewards?  The psalmist likens his earlier, pre-enlightened state to that of a ‘brute beast’ (22).  So while the arrogant had become bestial through their pride and avarice, there had been a comparable risk to the psalmist: that he too would be brutalised through the sin of envy (3).  But what he now describes is how the corrupting effects of envy are transfigured by humanising desire.  This is no longer the destructive envy of others’ wealth and success but the life giving hunger for God.  Where envy had poisoned his vision, desire for God transforms and renews it.  And so the Psalm rises to a magnificent climax of faith: ‘Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.  You guide me with your counsel and afterward you will receive me with honour.  Whom have I in heaven but you?  And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.  My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever’ (23-26).  So the journey ends with an elaboration of the opening credal statement, but this time without quotation marks, for the conventional rewards-and-punishment formula he had trotted out has become his personal confession of a lived faith.  ‘But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge to tell of all your works’ (28).  He has made the pilgrimage from the words of religion to the inward experience of it, the most important journey a human being can ever make.

Melanie Klein’s work was entitled Envy and Gratitude.  Her thesis was that gratitude is the polar opposite to envy and the antidote to it.  She defines gratitude as our response to what we experience as the true ‘good’.  She means by this that when we experience something as gift, our response is not the envious instinct to attack and destroy but the loving instinct to care, appreciate and give in return.  It awakens a life-instinct that is generous and transformative and that is the antithesis of the death-instinct that gives birth to envy.  This is because contentment is the hard-won realisation that we are not empty after all: the good permeates our lives, if we can only see it.  And the recognition that our cup is, so to speak, full of what is good, and the gratitude that flows from it, drains the poison out of our propensity to envy.  I think we can see this transformation happening in Psalm 73, which provides us with a happier ending than the stories of either Naboth’s vineyard or King Saul.  The psalm’s turning point marks the threshold at which the psalmist crosses over from envy to gratitude, from destructive impulse to the opening up of the self to all that will be integrative and healing.

For a Christian theologian, this Kleinian language has strongly eucharistic overtones.  Eucharistia, thanksgiving, is of course a liturgical act commanded in the gospel in memory of Jesus on the threshold of his passion.  However, the eucharist is what it is in the larger sense that it expresses the offering of all of life to the Creator and Redeemer of the world.  To be a disciple is to live eucharistically.  To be the church is to be the community of disciples who are shaped by gratitude as the fundamental Christian virtue, and who are thereby being humanised by the transformative gift of grace.  So I want to say that in a fundamental sense, the antidote to envy is the eucharist, because it is in the eucharist that the human race does what it was created to do, to offer God its praise and thanksgiving, to ‘glorify God and enjoy him for ever’ as the Westminster Shorter Catechism has it.  And the consequence of this is as the broken, disordered fragments of our lives are gathered up, like the broken fragments of the eucharistic bread, and put back together again and healed.  Eucharistia is the answer to envy because it takes us out of our narcissistic self-absorption with our own envious desires, and instead invites us to gaze on larger things until, as the hymn says, we are ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’.  This integrative, individuating journey into divine lostness is envy’s ultimate anthithesis.

There is one passage among many in the New Testament that encapsulates this perfectly.  Writing to the Philippians, Paul constantly underlines the life-giving, transformative effect of gratitude and joy on the believer and the church.  Towards the end of this most beautiful of his letters, Paul captures his major themes.  His final chapter reiterates the command to rejoice in the Lord always, and promises that because of God’s goodness, believers do not need to worry about their needs (‘fret’, in the language of Psalm 37).  It is the peace of God, passing all understanding, that will guard against anxiety.  Therefore, believers are to focus on the ‘good’: ‘whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.’  Paul elaborates on his own circumstances.  ‘Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have.  I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty,  In any and all circumstances, I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and being in need.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me… My God will satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.’ (Philippians 4)

The key word here is contentment.  Autarkeia literally means ‘self-sufficiency’, being able to support oneself without being dependent on others.  By extension, it came to mean in Stoic philosophy being free of my own inner desires, a state of equilibrium in which I am no longer driven by my needs and drives and envious desires, in other words, ‘contentment’.  We could say this equates in a theological sense, to not being empty. This is, I think, what Paul means here.  He is saying that only when we have begun to transcend our envy with all its destructive tendencies can we experience true liberation.  In Stoic philosophy such a state is achieved by the discipline of living contemplatively.  It would be tempting to say that for Paul contentment is God-given, arising spontaneously in the heart of the believer because of his or her free justification by faith in Jesus Christ.  It is, of course, but not in a simpliste way that excludes the contemplative way we have explored in the Hebrew wisdom literature.  It is I think a subtle marriage of gift-and-response: gift, because salvation cannot be earned by anything that we do, even contemplation; response because the gift is nothing until we do the lifelong ‘work’ of making it our own and inhabiting it. ‘I have learned to be content’ he says.  It is spiritual askesis, part of the artistry of being formed in the image of Christ that is both God’s and
ours.  It begins with gratitude, for contentment means, theologically, that state of spiritual balance (to use a Benedictine idea) that comes from knowing that we are loved by God and are on the way to salvation.  Only then, as Paul says in the Letter to the Romans, can we offer our lives as as ‘living sacrifice’ (Romans 12.2).  With gratitude, it is an act of grace.  Without it, it is merely Pelagian effort.

Envy infiltrates every aspect of modern life.  The reckless competitiveness and bonuses on a scale that beggars belief that have driven our financial institutions to the brink of ruin are a clear symptom of it.  On a smaller scale (but not always so small in the context of modest domestic finances) the advertising industry cleverly plays straight into our envious propensities, and largely encourages them in the young, whether it is electronic games, fast cars, must-have gadgetry or the cult of youth and the body beautiful.  It is perhaps futile to expect society to change very much, for its values have been formed now over many generations.  I do not think we should be too quick to blame post-Enlightenment economics for this: Christians flourished in the 19th century market place by developing the virtues of thrift, prudence and an ethic of hard work.  Is it too much to ponder whether this was because our forebears had a deeper awareness of the importance of gratitude and contentment than we?  If so, then the cultivation of these virtues would seem to be a high priority if our society is, like the prodigal son, ever going to come to its senses and understand the life of a human being in a larger context than simply the gratifying of needs and desires.  I have argued that if envy is the besetting sin of our day, its greatest need for moral and spiritual health is to recapture the life-enhancing generosity of eucharistia and autarkeia, of gratitude and contentment.  With these given house-room as fundamental values in our society, we might perhaps lose interest in even considering, let alone embracing, the Faustian bargains that put our souls in such danger.

October 2009

Finding a Voice: a sermon on St Hild's Day

What’s your recurring nightmare? Falling off a cliff? Taking that exam? Having a tooth out?  One of mine is a dream quite common among clergy, apparently, being strangled by my own priestly vestments as I try to get out of them after a service.  Today’s gospel reading reminds me of another of my nightmares. When I hear Jesus’ parables about great feasts, I imagine myself at a party finding that I’m expected to do a ‘turn’.  There are two kinds of people: those who seize the main chance glimpsing celebrity just minutes away; and those who shrink from the awful certainty of public failure, embarrassment and shame. They know how to take the lowest place. We all know which class we belong to.  And even if there is some chance of faking it, you still feel in your heart of hearts that everyone is seeing through you. 

The Venerable Bede wrote about just such a shrinking violet in his History of the English Church and People.  It was late in the 7th century.  He says that when the guests at a feast were asked to entertain the gathering, a lay brother saw the harp coming his way, and got out as fast as he could, fleeing outside to a stable to sleep.  And his worst dream came back to haunt him: someone standing beside him telling him to sing something.  ‘I can’t sing’ he replied, ‘that’s why I left the party and came out here’.  ‘But you shall sing’ persisted his visitant.  ‘What about?’ asked Caedmon. ‘Sing about the creation of all things’.  And this untutored man who had never written or sung a verse in his life broke into the purest song of praise.  Next morning, he was brought to the abbess of the double monastery where there were both women and men.  She saw at once that divine inspiration had taken hold of him.  She had him admitted as a monk, and taught him the scriptures which he turned into verse and, says Bede, through his gift, inspired his hearers ‘to love and do good’ and prepare for the joys of heaven.  We sang about this in Canon Brown’s hymn.

Caedmon was the earliest English Christian poet.  I am telling you about him because of that abbess who recognised his gift: Hild, as the Saxons called her; Hilda in Bede’s Latin.  She was one of the great leaders of the Saxon church in the 7^th century, born 1400 years ago next year, a princess called back to Northumbria by St Aidan, admitted to the religious life and associated since then with three places in the North East commemorated on the kneelers executed by our broderers at the Hild altar in this Cathedral. The first is South Shields where the parish church in the town centre plausibly stands on an ancient Saxon place of worship. Next comes Hartlepool where one of the North East’s great churches, the grand gothic pile of St Hilda, stands on the numinous windy headland near the medieval sea wall where a plaque tells you that you are not far from the monastery where she was abbess.

Finally comes Whitby which is properly Yorkshire but for today an honorary part of North East England and definitely Northumbria.  The marvellous abbey ruins on the cliffs above the town stand on the original Saxon site. Here too, Hild was abbess and hosted the Synod of 664 AD at which the Northumbrian church made the difficult choice to follow continental Roman customs for calculating the date of Easter rather than the Irish traditions of Lindisfarne in which she herself had been schooled.  I see her trying to find reconciliation between those two ways of being Christian, for unlike others, she did not abandon England when the decision went against Lindisfarne. 

I love the story of Hild taking in the unknown Caedmon as the midwife of his gift so as to bring it out into the open.  There is always a risk in this, discerning and nurturing what perplexes other people, recognising the work of God in the life of another human being.  In the gospel reading, Jesus speaks of the importance of invitation: it is the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind who should be welcomed to the banquet.  And this is what Hild did for Caedmon, recognising his gift of poetry and song, a gift not only of versification but of interpretation: understanding the ways and works of the Creator and speaking about them. It’s a lovely picture of how human beings grow and flourish when they are, so to speak, brought inside and their gifts and talents are celebrated.

Some of you have recently seen the film Little Voice. Jane Horrocks plays an ultra-timid daughter who is so dominated by her overbearing mother that she can’t speak above a stage-whisper.  She spends her days in her bedroom listening to LPs of songs from the shows: Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Bassey.  And she sings along with them, sings as them, for she can sing – not just hum or whistle but really sing.  One evening Little Voice is overheard by a seedy, dead-end talent scout, Michael Caine, who recognises her gift and realises this is his last big chance for a big prize. So he puts her on the stage.  It’s not a straightforward rags to riches story.  But it is a picture of finding one’s voice, and through it, finding herself. Through Hild, Caedmon, a 7^th century Little Voice, found his gift, found his voice, found his God, and found himself.

I see in this a metaphor of Christian ministry.  I don’t mean what the clergy do, but what we all do for one another as the people of God, our companions in the church. Isn’t the task of ministry to try to recognise what God is doing in the world and in those around us, and help make it conscious, articulate, so that they find their God, their voice and their gifts?  That is much harder than baldly stating the truths of Christianity or pressing home moral certainties. As I read the gospels, I find Jesus gong about his work in a way that brings out the possibilities inherent in ordinary men and women, enticing them into responding more fully to the love and grace of God: piping so that people not only listen but dance. It’s suggestive rather than insistent.  It offers people the freedom to say yes, or no, or maybe, or it’s hard, or I wish I could; but this is how to draw out of them the song they alone can sing.  Oscar Wilde said that what makes Jesus a poet is that he makes poets of us all.  Precisely this gift of opening the lips of others to proclaim the words and works of God is how I read Hild’s act in bringing another person to life. 

There are few things more important than to do this for one another.  We can never know how much a little word of encouragement can mean to someone else: ‘thank you’, ‘that touched me’, ‘God spoke to me through what you did for me’.  Words and gestures like these are so often how God gives us the gifts and the strength to carry on serving him as followers of Jesus.  It means being open to other people, responsive to them in their tentativeness and lack of confidence, glimpsing what God is doing and could do through them, as Hild discerned with Caedmon. There are those who have done this for us.  We must do it for others. 

 

This is how the church is built up as we respond together the to ‘one hope of our calling’.  Who knows whether there is a Caedmon somewhere waiting for us to prompt them, nudge them, encourage them to find their voice, open their mouths and sing?

Durham Cathedral, St Hild’s Day, 17 November 2013

Luke 14.7-14

Stones to Remember By: a sermon for Remembrance Sunday

Next year we mark the centenary of the Great War. This year I took part in a ceremony to mark the anniversary of a conflict much longer ago. The Battle of Flodden was fought on the border between the English and Scots in September 1513. It ended with terrible loss of life on both sides; for Scotland it marked a day of attrition that changed its history for ever. There is a granite cross on a hill where the battle was fought. Here many people both Scots and English came to mark the 500^th anniversary and lay wreaths in memory of named families who are known to have fallen. The cross has a simple inscription: TO THE BRAVE OF BOTH NATIONS.

That lonely cross stretching up to the sky has power to evoke a distant memory. Here in Durham Cathedral, we have a war memorial that takes us back even further, the screen behind the high altar that John Neville gave to commemorate victory in the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346. From the more recent past, the Durham Light Infantry battle-honours include the Peninsula wars of the early 19^th century. There are plaques that honour the fallen of the Crimean War of 1854-56 and the Sudan campaign of 1885-7. A tall cross on the mound outside the north door commemorates those who fell in the Boer Wars at the turn of the 20th century. The Great War is remembered in the pillar outside the Cathedral on the Bailey; in the DLI Chapel the wooden cross of Warlencourt is a relic of the Battle of the Somme of 1916. The garden by the cloister recalls those who fell in the 2^nd World War, among them Patrick Alington, the Dean’s son killed at Salerno in 1943 and remembered in a stained glass window at the west end. Opposite is the 2^nd World War memorial to the fallen of all three services where we shall lay wreathes today.

That long inventory of war memorials shows how war and the memory of it is embedded in the stones of this place. We can’t get away from these solid memory-markers. But our reasons for remembering have changed over the centuries. The Neville Screen is in memory of a victory won: then, it was normal to erect a monument to celebrate a triumph. But in the 19^th century as war became more mechanised and destructive, a new dimension began to creep in.  This instinct was the need to remember individual men and women who had fallen in conflict. For the cost of war is the loss of human lives, each remembered not only by families and friends but also those they fought alongside. When the unknown warrior was interred in Westminster Abbey in 1920, it was said that ‘we were burying every boy’s father, every woman’s lover, every mother’s child’. Remembrance Day puts this human cost to us every year as we listen to our memorials and to the fragile texture of human lives that they honour with both grief and gratitude.

In the reading from the Old Testament, Joshua has led the people of Israel across the river Jordan into the land of Canaan. It’s a threshold they must never forget. So they set up a stone monument at the site; not a war memorial exactly, but it has something in common: the need to remember, and to erect a visible reminder of the journey that has brought them to this point in their history. This is what war memorials and the rituals of remembrance do for us: they help us pay attention to the thresholds we cross as nations in war and conflict; they remind us how, when a people commit to war, it is also to a via dolorosa of grief and loss. Even in victory, life is not the same as it was before. Wars have shaped our world, changed the maps of nations, affected millions of human lives through death, bereavement, injury and unhealed memory. We can’t be indifferent to this cost if we have any feeling for history and compassion for suffering women, children and men. 

In stopping to create their memorial, the Hebrews had come to a point of recognition and reflection. Its purpose was so that they would not forget the hand of providence. I have been reading a book about men who served in the Great War. Its title is Six Weeks, the average life expectancy of junior officers who led their men over the top. As I read the diaries and letters of those men, I am struck by how many speak about God, invoke a childhood faith, have a strong some sense of One who holds destinies in his hands. Mostly, they did not believe in a god who crudely takes sides in conflict: good people of all faiths have served on every side of war. The Flodden memorial ‘to the brave of both sides’ speaks wisely. God honours the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude, as do we wherever we find them, and we do not claim them only for ourselves. Together with faith, hope and charity, they show how honourable human character is formed and shaped. That comes across strongly in the motives and attitudes of the young men in Six Weeks who knew that life was likely to be short. We should use the word ‘heroic’ sparingly. Better to speak of ‘goodness’, loyalty, doing what is required. These virtues exalt a nation and equip it to face the time of trial. Without them we are lost.

The unspoken message of war memorials is a warning about the danger of living without virtue, about the folly that gets us into war in the first place: wrath, greed, envy, lust, sloth, gluttony and pride. The seven deadly sins belong to nations as well as individual people. Today marks the 75^th anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht, the ‘night of broken glass’ when Jewish business and homes across Germany and Austria were brutally attacked. Many lost their lives. It is one instance of how the power of evil erupts into visibility: how many times such stories can be multiplied right up to the present day. These memories haunt us as we lay before God all the wrongs inflicted by humans on humans. We recognise that we need to be delivered from forces greater than our own by a power that is also greater than we are. We know we must work for a world that is wiser, more self-aware if we are to survive as a race. The question is: how do we free ourselves from our demons so that our virtues may heal us? Leaders, politicians, peacemakers and opinion-formers have a vital part to play. But there needs to be a radical change of attitude and will. This is where intelligent faith can make a difference by turning our ambitions towards the wise and the good.

Earlier we heard St Luke tell of the place where Jesus fell, a victim whose body was pierced and whose blood was poured out like those we remember today. His battle was with all that is cruel and destructive in our world. Its memorial is the cross that tells how a crucified God absorbs human wrong by becoming its victim. It gathers up our memories of those lost to us in a larger story. It proclaims a death and resurrection that point to a new order where peoples are reconciled and nations are friends. It helps us to see that all that we lament today was not in vain. It helps us not to lose heart in a future worth living for. As we stand silently among these stones and memorials, we know we can safely bring to this place not only our sorrow and our grief, but our pride and gratitude, our prayer, our longing and above all, our hope.

Durham Cathedral, Remembrance Sunday 2013
Joshua 4.1-14, Luke 23.39-49

Six Weeks: the short and gallant life of the British Officer in the First World War by John Lewis-Stempel, 2010. One reviewer says that it is 'the single most moving book I have read on the Great War'.

What is education for? Celebrating 750 years of Balliol College Oxford

I am honoured to be speaking to you at this service of celebration. It is exactly 40 years since I left Balliol, armed with degrees in maths and philosophy, and in theology. In those far-off years, I did not give much thought to the events of the 13^th century that brought our college into existence. In particular, I did not think at all about its northern origins. To me, a Londoner, the north of England was an unknown region, a distant, cold and sooty place, not blessed with the mild climate and mellow limestones of Oxford. It was not until I went to live and work there as a Northumberland parish priest that I began to appreciate its beautiful landscapes, its heritage and its genuine, hospitable communities.

Ten years ago I went back to the North East, this time as Dean of Durham. The whole world seems to love Durham Cathedral, and with good reason. My interest in the college’s North Eastern origins was awakened. The name Balliol is everywhere around Barnard Castle County Durham, for the family had large estates there. The neighbouring landowner was the Bishop of Durham whose palatine powers made him a not-so-petty monarch in the lands between the Tees and the Tyne. Somehow, these two got across each other. The story goes that in the 1250s, some of John Balliol’s retainers seized estates claimed by Bishop Walter de Kirkham. He in turn excommunicated them whereupon Balliol laid an ambush for him, subjected the kidnapped bishop to unspecified indignities and carried off part of his retinue. The bishop, supported by King Henry III, demanded reparation. So Balliol had to prostrate himself before the bishop dressed in penitential garb on the steps of my Cathedral. And here is where today comes in: the bishop required of Balliol a substantial act of charity: to endow a house for scholars at Oxford. This he did 750 years ago, in 1263.

The bishop died in 1260 and is buried under the floor of the Norman chapter house at Durham Cathedral. Several times a day, I walk across him as I process into services. I trust I do this in a spirit of piety, thankful for the penance that led to the founding of our college, one of Oxford’s oldest and, I need hardly say in this company, one of its greatest. By 1263, the year of the college’s foundation, universities in the sense we understand them had been established across Europe. But since the 11^th century, Durham Cathedral Priory was itself acquiring the reputation of being one of England’s great centres of learning with its legendary library and its large scholarly community of Benedictine monks. Bishop Kirkham himself patronised these developments. So Balliol, with its next-door neighbour which, to avoid the T-word I had better call Durham College because it was originally founded under that name by the monks of Durham, were both communities of learning that originated in the North East with links to its proud scholarly traditions.

The rest, as they say, is history, an honourable and at times glorious one. We have been right to celebrate it during this anniversary year and coming here to thank God for it today. The contribution our college has made to the intellectual life of the nation, especially since Benjamin Jowett’s mastership in the 19^th century, is something I don’t need to rehearse today. Instead, I should like to ask what it means to be a ‘community of learning’ in today’s era, so different in every respect from that that of our founding father and mother (for we must not forget the vital part played in the early history of the college by Devorguilla, John Balliol’s devoted wife).

The academy is of course a community of research, and of teaching and learning. In our knowledge-based economy, these things count for a very great deal. In particular, university education in a research-led environment inculcates the values of lifelong curiosity and rigour without which learning can never make a real difference to the way communities and individuals learn how to think. If anyone asks me what use a degree in maths and philosophy has been to my chosen vocation as a priest in the church, I reply at once that it taught me how to think well, how to express myself coherently, how to be at least semi-articulate in the different thought-worlds my work has taken me into, how to show an intelligent interest in other disciplines where my actual knowledge is little or non-existent. I doubt if I have often  invoked formal logic, topology, recursive function theory or Abelian groups in my day-job. But I owe them an incalculable debt, as I do to those who did not so much instruct me in them as helped me to learn them – yes and love them - for myself.

But I believe we need to understand the academy in more holistic ways than simply the training of the intellect. The medieval disciplines of the trivium and quadrivium which Balliol scholars learned in the college’s medieval centuries, cast their net wider. The study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music together imparted the perspective that human beings inhabit a large, mysterious and complex universe, and the properly educated student, on taking a degree, becomes, so to say, a grown-up citizen of that world, at home in its mystery and complexity. And one of the lessons that the study of theology in the middle ages inculcated was that to find our place in an often baffling world, what is needed is not just knowledge but wisdom. And wisdom, in the spiritual traditions of all the world faiths, is not only a matter of the mind, but of the whole person, or as the Bible speaks of it, the heart. It is about the formation of identity and character in both people and societies.

So what heart-work, as Rilke called it, do we need to do as a college and as its members, in which of course I include all of us who are proud to be alumni?  In other words, what is education ultimately for? Our founding traditions suggest that it is this cultivation of wisdom. As it says in Benjamin Jowett’s translation of his beloved Republic, ‘first among the virtues found in the state, wisdom comes into view’. Christian moral theology sees wisdom as the summation of virtue, expressed in the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence temperance and fortitude and in the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. These shape what it means to live well, for the wise understand what life requires of them and charts a course that will enhance human dignity against all the corrosive forces that would diminish it. In the New Testament, Jesus speaks about the values that belong to the kingdom of heaven and which he calls his followers to embrace now. In the Hebrew Bible, King Solomon prays at the outset of his reign for a ‘wise and understanding heart’ so that he will know how to govern ‘this great people’, discern what it means to be a guardian of all that ennobles human life. And when those same scriptures, in a classic wisdom text in the Book of Job, asks where wisdom can be found, it embarks on a long search that scans the ends of the earth before concluding: ‘the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding’. Find your place in creation, he says, by letting it teach you humility, reverence, worth, a good conscience, a sense of the divine.

Humanity faces huge challenges if our race is to prove capable of surviving the threats that face it. Climate change, simplistic politics, radical fundamentalisms and the terrors they spawn, the risk of collapse in our global financial systems not to mention the poor who are always with us: even far-seeing leaders like Jowett could not have glimpsed these futures, let alone John Balliol, Devorguilla and those who bequeathed us our college.  But perhaps the values of self-awareness, moral and spiritual intelligence, the ability to see into the life of things and understand the vicissitudes of human existence, in short, wisdom - perhaps these may yet save the world if we succeed in embedding it into our social, political and personal lives. As a person of faith, I believe these values to be ultimately God-given: Christ himself is called in the New Testament both 'the power of God and the wisdom of God'. Which is why, when the big storms break against the shores of our complacency, we need to cry, like the sailors at the beginning of The Tempest, ‘to prayers, to prayers!’.

In its first seven and a half centuries, Balliol College has added incalculably both to the world’s intellectual capital and its social, ethical and spiritual capital too. It has helped make it a better informed, a more deeply aware, a more compassionate, in short, a wiser place. This God-given work that builds up nations, societies and people in wisdom continues confidently as the college moves into the next three-quarters of a millennium. We gather today to celebrate the lasting achievement of our founders who came out of the north 750 years ago. On All Souls Day we remember them and our benefactors down the centuries since, and all who have helped make Balliol College the flourishing institution it is today.  More personally, we recall with gratitude all in this college who have played a part in forming and shaping us as human beings, helping to train our minds and hearts for the service of his kingdom of justice, truth and peace. It is right and good to celebrate today.

St Mary’s University Church, Oxford, 2 November 2013
1 Kings 3.3-14; Matthew 5.1-12

You can see a video recording of this sermon at

http://www.voicesfromoxford.org/video/sermon-by-michael-sadgrove-at-a-service-of-thanksgiving/303

 

Cathedrals in the 21st Century: learning from past and present

Introduction: the summer of Lindisfarne

Let’s begin with a recent part of Durham’s history. A hundred thousand people streamed through the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition and the Cathedral during the three months of the Gospels’ residency. They could have gone to the British Library to see the Gospels free.  So why did they pay to see them here?  For some it was an emotional connection with what many call an ‘iconic’ book for North East England. Yet this exhibition, including a magnificent array of manuscripts and artefacts, fourteen of them from our own Cathedral collections, was based on a serious intellectual premise. This was that to ‘read’ the Gospel Book in the medieval context it once belonged in makes all the difference. That context is partly about a physical place - Durham, but not only. It’s principally a theological and spiritual idea, its connection to the relics of St Cuthbert. As we know from the history of Cuthbert’s wandering community, the saint’s relics and his book travelled together. So the proper setting within which to understand the book must always be Cuthbert’s ‘place’. To Cuthbert’s community it would have been unthinkable to separate the saint from the book written in his honour. 

For the Cathedral, this posed important challenges about meanings and significance. What relevance does an early 8^th century manuscript, for all its exquisite beauty, have for people of the 21^st century?  It did not seem enough simply to interpret the book within a particular phase of cultural or artistic history. It was more a matter of celebrating the undiminished ‘power of this masterpiece to draw beholders back into its past, linking them to the vital traditions of spirituality, scholarship and craftsmanship that produced it’.[1] An exhibition that displayed an extraordinary collection of medieval manuscripts and artefacts cried out for some response to the question, what was this all for? And what might it all be for now?  Where is the gospel in the Gospels?

These questions are linked directly to others. Who is the man Cuthbert for us today and why should he still matter? Why should the Cathedral’s ‘brand’ continue to be the shrine of a Saxon saint if it is not just sacred nostalgia? And all this is merely a part of a larger question about the significance of the Cathedral itself and how it speaks into the present day to an admiring but sometimes baffled audience? In my book Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of North East England which was published to mark the Gospels’ residency, I called Durham Cathedral the ‘mystic heart’ of North East England[2]: because of Cuthbert, all roads in the region lead here. This explains why the Cathedral is symbolic of the North East, linked as it is to the way in which the wanderings of Cuthbert’s community helped to define the ‘idea’ of the north of England.  But it requires a degree of spiritual and historical intelligence, not to say imagination, to speak about this complex past in a way that makes connections for people today.

Cathedrals are among the most visited buildings in the world. Durham, in particular, has in recent years scored exceptionally highly in its reported capacity to enchant and delight. In 2011, it was voted Britain’s favourite building, not for the first time, in a Guardian poll. This year it came top of TripAdvisor’s list of UK landmark attractions on the basis of visitor reviews on their website. What do these clues to its popularity tell us not only about Durham Cathedral but also about cathedrals generally, and what a mostly non-religious public find themselves responding to? And what should the guardians of cathedrals do to exploit all this interest and help make them living entities, and not simply magnificent piles of stone?

 

Six Expressions of Durham Cathedral: learning from the past

Let’s stay in Durham for a little longer. As in so much else, if we are asking questions about the future of cathedrals, we need to understand their past. Every cathedral is unique, but each one can also be a case-study from which we can generalise. So what does Durham’s past suggest about its future?

We need to recognise that there is not one historical ‘Durham Cathedral’ but many. We can divide them into three main eras: Saxon, Benedictine and Modern.  Within these, we can I think identify three distinct expressions that belong to the Saxon era, and two that belong to the Modern. That makes six which we can list as follows.

ERA 1: SAXON                    1st expression: the Cathedral on Lindisfarne (635-875)

                                              2nd expression: the Migrating Cathedral (875-995)

                                              3rd expression: the Cathedral at Durham (995-1083)

ERA 2: BENEDICTINE      4th expression: the Monastic Cathedral (1083-1540)

ERA 3: MODERN                5th expression: the Reformation Cathedral (1540-1649)

                                              6th expression: the Restoration Cathedral (1660-present)

Like geological eras or French republics, this schema risks oversimplifying history, but I think there is something to commend it because of the distinctiveness of the Cathedral’s life during each period. What I want to demonstrate is the versatility of the Cathedral in adapting itself to different contexts and re-inventing itself according to the needs of the day. This ability to change while remaining true to its essential character seems to me to offer clues about the development of the Cathedral in the present and future.

THE FIRST ERA: THE SAXON CATHEDRAL

First (Saxon) Expression. The foundation that bequeathed to it its Saxon saints and the Lindisfarne Gospels is the ur-Durham, the Cathedral’s first embodiment. This oldest ‘layer’ of the Cathedral’s existence that has Cuthbert’s community, his Haliwerfolk, arrived on the peninsula, is intensely Cuthbert-focused. It is this era that connects the Cathedral back through the wanderings of his community to Lindisfarne and the foundation of the first convent there by St Aidan in 635. Crockford’s Clerical Directory is right to head its list of Durham bishops with Aidan, Finan, Colman, Tuda, Eata and Cuthbert, for Durham has always seen itself as simply the last and permanent expression of a church, bishop and cathedral that began on Lindisfarne. The fact that Holy Island is now in a different diocese does not alter the fact that Durham Cathedral, and by extension its diocese) is not simply the lineal descendant of that ancient community but, in a theological and spiritual sense, the same community. What this means for the identity of Durham Cathedral is of profound significance.

Second (Saxon) Expression. As we know, the Lindisfarne community left the island with its saints’ relics and its Gospel Book, it was said because of Viking raids, though the reasons may be more complex than that. The places where the community stayed were either the sites of existing churches or places where new churches were built, often dedicated to St Mary and St Cuthbert. And where Cuthbert’s rested with its bishop and community, there, for now, was the cathedral. From Norham to Chester-le-Street, this was the theological identity of that wandering community. So Durham’s second incarnation was that of a mobile cathedral, a Saxon ‘fresh expression’: where the bishop went, the cathedral went too.[3] This is a powerful idea especially in an age that mistrusts permanence. Like the people of Israel, the settled community never forgot its semi-nomadic origins, and indeed was commanded to embed that memory into its creedal story. So it is with Durham. We must always remember that we were once a cathedral on the move.

Third (Saxon) Expression. The Lindisfarne community’s arrival at Durham did not, in one sense, change anything. It installed itself on this peninsula, just one more site in a long chain of places across the north. The earliest churches the Saxons built here were not in principle different from those they had built anywhere else: like them they were dedicated to St Mary and St Cuthbert. Yet the conviction was dawning that Durham was not just one more stopping place. It was more like Chester-le-Street than Norham, a site where the community could plausibly expect to stay, for (as later medieval writers told the story), here was where their saint wished to be. The seeds of permanence were already being planted on this rocky peninsula.

This First Saxon Era can seem beguiling for its simplicity, its devotion, its closeness to the created world and its evangelistic energy, all symbolised by saints like Aidan and Cuthbert. It is tempting, especially for romantically-inclined people seduced by the current love-affair with ‘Celtic Christianity’, to regard it as defining for all time and to want to call the church back to a quasi-apostolic age. And of course going back to our origins, ad fontes, is always an important starting-point in the quest for meaning. However, it is not clear that post-Conquest generations spoke of Durham in that way. The following two eras show how very different the Cathedral came to be in the centuries that followed its arrival at Durham.

THE SECOND ERA: THE BENEDICTINE CATHEDRAL

The Second Era, equivalent to the Fourth (Benedictine) Expression of the Cathedral, is the easiest to define. It coincides with the Benedictine centuries, from 1083 when, as all over England in the generation after the Norman Conquest, French bishops displaced Saxon communities and installed the more disciplined monastic orders that had been founded across Europe in the early middle ages. As far as cathedrals were concerned, this overwhelmingly meant the Benedictine order. In Durham, Benedictine brothers were brought from the re-founded monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow where Bede had been a monk.

The Norman Benedictines’ appropriation of Cuthbert is an important example of the reinvention of Durham. At the same time as constructing a building next to a castle that would symbolise the Normans’ coersive power over the Saxons, they also adopted and invigorated the cult of a Saxon saint - Cuthbert. This was an astute move in the febrile post-Conquest world. It placed him in a setting that was entirely different from his Saxon origins, with its sophisticated power-world of Palatine earls and Cathedral priors.[4] It aligned him at once with the new, and to the Saxons deeply unwelcome, Norman hegemony. So 1083 was a true watershed, nothing less than Durham’s Norman Conquest. It led to a complete re-engineering of monastic life on the peninsula as thorough as the 16^th century Reformation would prove to be displacing one community in favour of another whose values were distinctively at odds with those it supplanted. Its tangible result was the present Romanesque Cathedral and its monastic buildings. Cuthbert’s shrine was now at the heart of the heavily fortified peninsula complex of castle and Cathedral. The Cathedral priory with its advanced organisation, its wealth and its trading relationships across the north[5] was as far removed from the isolation of the Inner Farne and the simplicity of Holy Island as it was possible to be.

But we must also see how the Normans brought about a new spiritual vision and energy in Durham. The new Romanesque cathedral was of course the visible symbol of this, especially if we read it as a building whose architectural masses, spaces, rhythms and proportions represent in stone of the values of the Benedictine Rule. The ideal of stability, being firmly rooted in one place, is strongly expressed in a building that stands securely on its bedrock surrounded by an ever-flowing river. Among the insights of the Benedictine rule is the ordering and shaping of human communities and individuals so that they come to reflect the well-ordered state the gospel calls the kingdom of God. The rediscovery of the rule as a source of inspiration and wisdom for lay people in ordinary life is a welcome development in recent years. So it is not surprising that the Benedictine influence remains strong in a place whose very buildings, the monastic dormitory, refectory, kitchen, treasury, Prior’s lodging and chapter house organised around the cloister survive as an intact visible memory of the monastic era.

Indeed, part of the ‘universal value’ of the Durham World Heritage Site which the Cathedral and University share is that all its ‘heritage’ structures continue to be populated, working buildings. In the case of the Cathedral and its conventual spaces, they function in the same, or similar, ways as were envisaged when they were constructed in monastic times. This human ‘texture’ is one of the most valuable tangible assets of Durham where more of its monastic past survives intact in both its buildings and its library and treasures than anywhere else in England.

THE THIRD ERA: THE MODERN CATHEDRAL

The Fifth (Modern) Expression launched the Third and final Era, for the Reformation of the 16^th century introduced, dramatically, yet another layer to the Cathedral’s complex identity. As in 1083 when the Benedictines displaced the Saxon community, they in turn were to find themselves suppressed by the dissolution of the Cathedral Priory in 1539.[6] This was another great watershed in the Cathedral’s history, and as we all know, the Reformation left a permanent visible mark in the church with the stripping of its altars and the removal of almost all the marks of medieval religion. As a foundation, the Cathedral was secularised, given new statutes (hence a ‘New Foundation’) and became a cathedral of the reformed Church of England. It remained the seat (or cathedra) of the bishops of Durham, but in a way different from the middle ages where spiritual and temporal power belonged within a single jurisdiction (though vestiges of ‘prince-bishop’ temporal power survived as far as the early 19^th century). The well-documented conflicts between the (sometimes violently extreme) protestantism that wreaked such havoc on the building’s fabric in the century after the Reformation, and those like John Cosin who as a canon was inclined to what were perceived as ‘catholicising’ tendencies reveal a cathedral in search of its own identity. This conflict over the soul of the church was of course enacted in every part of England, although in Durham’s case this did not involve the significant loss of the built heritage that was among the costs of reform in other places.

However, the interior of the Cathedral as we see it today is largely the legacy not of the Fifth but the Sixth (Modern) and Final Expression which dates from the 17^th century. The Civil War precipitated yet another crisis in cathedrals which were suppressed for the duration of the Commonwealth. So there is a gap in the timeline of more than a decade: there was no such entity as Durham Cathedral under the Commonwealth. All its worship, all its common life, all governance were suppressed. The building stood as an empty shell, and we should not call it ‘Durham Cathedral’ except as a way of identifying the structure. The Scottish prisoners, stabled here in the winter of 1650-51 and left to fend for themselves in terrible conditions of cold, hunger and disease speaks volumes about Cromwell’s contempt for cathedrals. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 came the task of reconstruction. It was daunting to contemplate refurbishing the entire Cathedral, but luckily for Durham, a man who was equal to the task was appointed Bishop of Durham, John Cosin. 

In this, it is a quintessentially Anglican cathedral that despite subsequent alterations still retains in its layout and furnishings the ethos that Bishop Cosin conceived for the worship, spirituality and theology of the Church of England. His refurbishment of the Cathedral, as of other churches in his diocese, imagined The Book of Common Prayer expressed in sacred space. His gothic-revival (survival?) screens and stalls echo the Neville Screen as if to state pointedly that his cathedral stood firmly within the Benedictine tradition in the same way as the 1662 Prayer Book drew on the medieval offices in creating forms of prayer appropriate for a secular (i.e. non-monastic) era. Insofar as the identity of the Cathedral is largely a consequence of how it is ‘inhabited’ spiritually and liturgically, Cosin’s legacy remains influential in the present day. Whether the language of services is traditional or contemporary, the liturgical style is still as Cosin would have wanted it: beautiful, dignified ceremonial fit for a noble space, yet understated, restrained, comprehensible and, in the spirit of the renaissance, humane.

Six expressions of ‘cathedral’ in three distinct eras: Durham has been extraordinarily versatile in adapting to change and sometimes leading it. What is true here is true in every other cathedral in England. The ‘identity’ of a cathedral, and its understanding of its vocation, is so much shaped by its distinctive ‘story’.  But there are also many themes in common.  So we need to broaden the discussion to ask more generically what a cathedral is called to be and do in the 21^st century when we know that we are set in a world where the pace of change is increasing with every year that passes.

 

Cathedrals and Spiritual Capital: learning from the present

The ‘secularisation’ of this Cathedral and the other cathedral priories means merely that at the dissolution it ceased to function as the church of a monastic community living under vows.  They had to learn a new identity as ‘secular’ cathedrals, reinvent themselves as institutions with a monastic past and an entirely different present. But secularisation is also a metaphor of how the Cathedral tries to respond to the challenges of modernity. By this I mean that cathedrals have had to re-think their role as signs of faith in a modernising post-enlightenment world where Christianity is no longer a presumption shared by all. In such a diverse world of many meanings, where visitors are sometimes surprised, even irritated, that services are still held in cathedrals and are preventing them from walking round, the task of interpreting sacred space become ever more demanding.

A truly ‘secular’ cathedral is not afraid of the challenges of modernity.  On the contrary, it wants to make the most of the increasing opportunities it is given to reach out to its localities and regions which, whatever their perception of organised religion nevertheless look to cathedrals as symbols of inspiration and hope. That Britain’s best-loved building should  be a sacred space that continues to be a prominent sign of ‘public faith’ perhaps tells us something important about the public’s wish to continue to be engaged with religion, even at a distance and in what we might call a ‘liminal’ way.[7]

An important study of cathedrals published last year has helped clarify why they seem so successful in bucking the national trend when it comes to public interest in religion. Produced jointly by two research organisations, the Grubb Institute and Theos, it is called Spiritual Capital: the Present and Future of English Cathedrals. The report is based on evidence gathered across England, including questionnaires asking members of the public about their attitudes to cathedrals whether as visitor attractions, heritage sites, pilgrim destinations or places of worship. These were completed by 1700 people. In addition, six cathedrals were chosen as case-studies: Canterbury, Lichfield, Leicester, Manchester, Wells and Durham; nearly 2000 people were surveyed about their relationship to their particular cathedral, and over 250 of them were interviewed at depth. Many of these were civic leaders and others involved in different sectors in the locality; only some would describe themselves as practising Christians or indeed observant members of any other faith. The focus was on the life of each cathedral, and its relations with its city, diocese, county and region.

The statistics make interesting reading. Over one quarter of adults have visited a cathedral in the past year. This makes them serious players in the tourism stakes. Two thirds of the national sample saw cathedrals as both places of interest and of heritage, and in the local survey a remarkable 95% felt that their cathedral was ‘a space where people can get in touch with the spiritual and the sacred’; an equally remarkable 88% saw it as ‘a place of sanctuary, irrespective of what you believe’. Half the national survey believed that cathedrals welcome those of all faiths or none. All this says that the widespread perception is of cathedrals as sacred places which offer an experience of God even to those who do not believe, and that they reach out to the public in an inclusive way. Cathedral music as well as architecture featured strongly in this.

When it comes to their significance in the wider community, three quarters of the local sample believed that their cathedral was relevant to daily life. The same high proportion of the national sample thought that cathedrals contributed to the community and even more spoke positively about their importance to their cities. Locally, 87% thought that their cathedral was a symbol of local identity; 83% that it belonged to the whole community, not just the Church of England; 93% that it was a venue for important public occasions in the life of the city or county.

The report draws three important conclusions to which I attach three words: evangelism, engagement and embodiment.

First, it identifies that cathedrals have a particular capacity to connect spiritually with those who are on or beyond the Christian periphery. We can call this the imperative for evangelism. Of the 11 million or more people who visit cathedrals, the majority are not observant Christians yet tell us that they have an instinct for the spiritual, and experience cathedrals as places where they touch it. These are the many whom Grace Davie, a sociologist of religion, famously describes as those who practice ‘believing not belonging’, where we should speak of emergent faith rather than fully articulated belief. This calls for a more sophisticated understanding of how cathedrals interact with visitors than we may realise. It begins with welcome and hospitality, Benedictine values with which we are familiar here in Durham. Then comes explanation: helping guests learn what a cathedral is, what any sacred space is. And finally the all-important task of interpretation, drawing visitors into recognising its meaning and significance, the Christian faith a cathedral bears witness to. How this is done well has to be worked out in each cathedral in each generation.  What we cannot do is dodge the clear mandate to give an answer for the hope that is within us.

Secondly, the report suggests that cathedrals have an important role in providing what is called ‘bridging social capital’, ‘establishing and fostering the relationships between different groups within a community’. This is bound up with the idea of a cathedral symbolically carrying a community’s sense of common history and identity: here in Durham, we inhabit a city and a region that is defined by the saints and the places associated with them. This makes a cathedral a symbolic container for the meanings and aspirations members of a locality project on to it. We can call this the mandate for social engagement. No cathedral will want to disown this important role. But here again, the religious character of a cathedral makes it more than a rather grand civic space where public ceremonies can be enacted. Because it is ‘sacred’ space, it is charged with the meaning of God, and inevitably puts back to the community the implicit question, where do you sense that God is in the life of this region, county or city, in both its public institutions and its local communities? This opening up of a conversation about God is what we mean by ‘public faith’: not simply conversing about faith with individual people, but doing so on the bigger platform in the public square. In this way cathedrals have great potential to contribute to a thriving civil society. 

Thirdly, cathedrals are recognised for the way in which they not only convey the history and heritage of the Christian presence within the region but also incarnate and articulate local and regional identity. This emerged very strongly in all the national and local samples, not only among people sympathetic to faith, but also those most hostile to it. It is perhaps more difficult to describe this role than the first two, yet I believe we who inhabit cathedrals understand it when we see it.  I mean the capacity to live symbolically at the heart of a community, to bless and consecrate all that we see to be of God in it, and to critique those aspects that we believe to fall short of what makes for the healthy, flourishing society that God wants for our life together. This is the function of embodiment. It is what makes a cathedral distinctive within its geography, enables it to speak with the local accent, stand in solidarity with a community in both celebration and lament.

As an example of these three functions of a cathedral at work, let me take a familiar example. The Durham Miners’ service is held on the day of the ‘Big Meeting’ or Gala in Durham City each July. Probably no-one who has not attended this service fully understands what the Cathedral means to the communities and people of County Durham. Once upon a time, no Labour politician could expect a future without being seen at this vast public demonstration of solidarity among those living and working on the Durham Coalfield. In the days when coal was king, the Gala Service was an occasion of pride in the achievements of working people and of confidence in their future. It was also an occasion to memorialise the human cost of mining when banners of collieries that had experienced pit disasters were processed into the Cathedral wreathed in black crepe.

With the pits gone, what still brings huge numbers of people from mining communities into the city of Durham each year, proudly processing their banners behind their colliery bands? It is tempting to say that it is nostalgia for a lost part of Durham’s industrial heritage. Perhaps it is for some. However, the event is much more than this. It is an act of corporate remembering wedded to the celebration of how an industry once touched the life of every community and individual in the county, bound them together with a sense of common purpose and gave them identity. ‘It’s all about pride in our heritage’ says George Robson who organises the Gala each year.[8] The Cathedral with its memorial to men killed in county’s mines, and with its colliery banner permanently hanging in the south transept, seems to be regarded as the emblem that gathers up scores of local stories and by giving them meaning within a larger context, validates and honours them. The service is an example of how Durham Cathedral reflects and responds to the particularities of life in North East England.

Mapping our three priority tasks on to this event, I think we can say straight away that the Cathedral is seen as a place of embodiment where the working communities of the North East feel not only welcomed but understood. In an important way, the Cathedral is not simply being hospitable to thousands of incomers, but is acting out a vital understanding that people have on this day, that they are not in fact incomers: the Cathedral is their natural home. Equally, we can see how, by bringing together many different communities under one sacred canopy, it provides a way towards real engagement where each one sees itself as part of a bigger whole, and not just a communal whole but an ecclesial one: for this hour, they are not simply working people but worshippers, a congregation before God. And this, finally, gives the opportunity to help bring faith to a clearer articulation through a ceremony that provides a language in which to speak about God in words most of those present would not easily be able to express for themselves. So the task of the preacher is to interpret to the gathering where he or she perceives God to be present in what is happening, and because Christian proclamation is always pointing to the kingdom of God, it is genuinely an act of evangelism, telling the good news, which preaching must always be. 

There is a final point I need to mention. It is to do with the definition of ‘cathedral’ which means ‘the seat (or see) of the bishop’. Where does the idea of the bishop’s church (and by extension that of the diocese) fit into what we have said so far?

The Spiritual Capital report has a chapter on this topic. It is tempting to see this as rather different from the issues raised in the rest of the report, though my reading of it is that the diocesan role of cathedrals is simply a special case of the three we have already explored. That is to say, as the bishop’s seat, it is a centre of mission (part of its legal definition in the Cathedrals Measure), and the mission of the Cathedral ought to be aligned to, indeed be an expression of, the mission of the diocese. So as a focus for the proclamation of the gospel, the evangelistic task of the cathedral belongs to the bishop’s calling as chief missioner: the cathedral is his symbolic platform from which he teaches the faith. The same is true of his engagement with the wider community of the diocese, for here too the cathedral provides a place in which he is given visibility as the chief pastor of the diocese, who by his presence gathers up the diverse and disparate church communities of the diocese into a single whole. The bishop always inhabits the same symbol-system as the cathedral: as we saw with Cuthbert, where the bishop goes, the cathedral goes and vice-versa. But his presence in the cathedral gives special force to his ministry as a ‘focus of unity’, and this represents the third aspect of embodiment that we looked at earlier.

Cathedrals are often said to be among the church’s success stories of the present day. As I have said, their worshipping communities largely buck the national (indeed, western European) trend in the decline in religious observance. I put this down to a chemistry particular to cathedrals and greater churches: beautiful liturgy and music in a noble architectural setting, faith intelligently presented through thoughtful preaching, a form of community life that has space for many different ways of belonging and participating. You could say that cathedrals do organised religion very well, and not only in a traditional way. They are places of experiment and discovery, ‘laboratories of the spirit’. Meanwhile, visitor numbers, especially where there is no admission charge, are on the increase. There seems no limit to the numbers of men, women and children who want to volunteer in them or participate in arts, cultural and educational events in these wonderful spaces. How to respond well to this huge public interest in cathedrals, and enlarge the ‘public benefit’ they bring is a major priority.

I have tried to show how ‘Durham Cathedral’ is an idea that has taken different forms in the eras of its history: Saxon, Benedictine and Modern.  I have talked about the way cathedrals hold the identity of local communities, but we have seen from their complex histories that the ‘identity’ of cathedrals themselves is a more elusive idea than we might have thought. They have so many layers, so many gifts to offer, and so many demands on them. In the today’s world, a Cathedral is often a battle-ground for competing claims as to its purpose. It can be regarded, especially by those not sensitised to its religious purpose, principally as ‘heritage’ or as a venue for culture and the arts. This in turn raises sharp issues about the kinds of expectation people bring to a cathedral and the transactions appropriate to it. Does an entrance fee pull the visitor into experiencing a Cathedral as a heritage site or museum rather than as a place of spirituality and pilgrimage? At Durham, the Chapter suspects that this is the case, which is why it has consistently resisted charging for entry. But this ‘public benefit’ comes at an enormous cost, while staff still need to be paid and buildings maintained. When major events take place in and around the Cathedral, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition and ‘Lumière’, both hugely successful, how far should the daily Benedictine rhythms of prayer, study and work ‘bend’ to accommodate an influx of thousands of people in the space of a few weeks or days? Questions such as these have led the Chapter to devise a purpose statement for the Cathedral that tries to recognise its many roles but captures the central priorities that belong to it as a sacred space.

Asking these difficult questions may help us to look with self-awareness and self-criticism at what our cathedrals can be as both institutions and communities. In an important essay, a previous Dean of Salisbury reflects on the importance of a cathedral’s daimon or ‘spirit of the place’ being ‘tuned…to the purposes of love and holiness’.[9] ‘I want to suggest’, he concludes, that it is possible that from such a platform the Christian Gospel can challenge and address the demonic aspects of the systems of our society in the name of God.’ The aspiration written into the stones and saints of a Cathedral, its lived experience of liturgy, its cherished memories and traditions, need constantly to be applied to the judgment and renewal of its own life if its ‘soul’ is to be a vital, living reality. As a privileged place with a rich history, generous resources and large reservoirs of good will both within its own community and across the region, our cathedral should not have too easy a conscience in an age uncertain about religion and suspicious of triumphalism. Durham’s history and heritage can teach it to be both humble and humane in the spirit of its founding saints and those who followed them. And because it all comes down to being faithful disciples of Christ called to live together in community, to worship God and to bear witness to the promise of a kingdom yet to come, what is true for Durham is true for every cathedral in the land.

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[1] Gameson, Richard, From Holy Island to Durham: the Contexts and Meanings of the Lindisfarne Gospels, London 2013, 142.

[2] Sadgrove, Michael, Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of the North East, London 2013, 61ff.

[3] Bonner, G., Rollason, D. and Stancliffe, C., eds., St Cuthbert, his cult and his community to A.D. 1200, Woodbridge 1989.

[4] Rollason, D., Harvey, M. and Prestwich, M., eds., Anglo-Norman Durham 1093-1193, Woodbridge 1994; Aird, William M., St Cuthbert and the Normans: the Church at Durham, 1071-1153, Woodbridge 1998

[5] Threlfall-Holmes, Miranda, Monks and Markets: Durham Cathedral Priory 1460-1520, Oxford 2005

[6] Moorhouse, Geoffrey, The Last Office: 1539 and the Dissolution of a Monastery, London 2008.

[7] Lewis, Christopher, ‘Glory and Pride: the Church and its Cathedrals’ in Platten, S. and Lewis, C., eds., Dreaming Spires? Cathedrals in a New Age, London 2006, 60.

[8] Crookston, Peter, The Pitmen’s Requiem, Newcastle upon Tyne 2010, 65ff.

[9] Dickinson, Hugh, ‘Cathedrals and Christian Imagination’ in MacKenzie, Iain M., ed., Cathedrals Now: their Use and Place in Society, Norwich 1996, 61.

Durham, 23 October 2013
A lecture given to the Friends of Durham Cathedral