On the End of this Temporal Life
by St Augustine of Hippo
Feast of the 45 Holy Martyrs of Nikopolis, Armenia
Anno Domini 2020, July 10
They say that many persons, including Christians, were laid low by the protracted famine. This also, however, the good and faithful turned to right use by bearing it with godliness. For those whom the famine slew it rescued from the ills of this life, as does bodily sickness, and those whom it did not slay it taught to live more moderately; it taught them to fast more diligently.
But many Christians were slaughtered, and many were consumed by a great variety of dreadful deaths. If this is hard to bear, however, it is at any rate common to all who have been born into this life. I know this: that no one has ever died who had not been going to die eventually. The end of life makes a long life the same as a short one; for the one is not better and the other worse, and the one is not greater and the other less, when both no longer exist. But what does it matter what kind of death has put an end to this life, as long as he whose life has ended is not compelled to die a second time? And when, under the daily contingencies of this life, every moral man is, so to speak, threatened with innumerable deaths, and it is uncertain which one of them will overtake him, is it, I ask, better to suffer one and die, or to live and fear them all? I do not overlook the fact that a man would rather live long and fear many deaths than die once and dread none of them thereafter. But it is one thing to consider death as something that the fearful instinct of the flesh seeks in its infirmity to flee from, and another to contemplate it carefully with the reason of the mind. Death is not to be deemed an evil when a good life precedes it; nor is death made an evil except by what follows death. Therefore, those who are of necessity bound to die need not care greatly by what means they will eventually die, but into what place they will be brought by dying. Since, then, Christians know how much better was the death of the godly pauper licked by the tongues of dogs than that of the impious rich man clad in purple and fine linen, what harm did those terrible deaths do to the dead who had lived well?
~City of God
Bk. 1, Chs. 10-11
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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