Reading Saving Paradise: Chapter 6, Part II

The ethics of beauty

Brock and Parker write:  In Western thinking, ethics and aesthetics are often divided, and ethical concerns take priority.  

The ancient understanding of beauty, however, included both.  The ethics of beauty were grounded not in a mental list of rules to be obeyed, but in a loving orientation toward the world.  Transfigured in the Spirit and opened to beauty, the church was called to do the work of Christ in the world.  These ethical acts of generosity were inseparable from the Eucharist.  (Saving Paradise, p. 155)

The ancient Eucharist was designed to capture the wholeness of beauty and to imprint a right relationship to the world.  In the Eucharist, the threat of death lost its sting because those who died returned and visited the living.  The risen Christ was a sign of the return of life, appearing to the women at the doors of the tomb, to his disciples on the road, and to his friends in a meal of fish cooked on the beach with a charcoal fire.  (See p. 158)

Brock and Parker add: Though this emphasis on ritual beauty as the source of ethics may seem archaic, superstitious, or weak, each of us has experienced the Eucharist’s ethically transforming power.  We have seen it empower a shift that moves the ground of ethics from external rules to a sense of love...  (See pages 156-158 for their story of a modern congregation transformed by this love.)

Resisting Crucifixion

Despite the gospel narratives of Jesus’ passion and crucifixion, the early church avoided focusing on the crucifixion in its art and in the Eucharist.  Some liturgies even avoided mentioning it. (see p. 158-160)

The Didache, the oldest surviving Christian liturgical handbook, was written in first-century Syria – as early as the Gospels – and makes no reference to Jesus’ crucifixion.  The first example of a Eucharistic prayer that included words of brokenness was the mid-third-century prayer of Hippolytus of Rome:

Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you….

This is my blood, which is shed for you;

when you do this, you make my remembrance…

But church teachers made clear that this remembrance referred to the living body and blood of Christ – who had made this request before his death:

to destroy death…

to pour out his light upon the just,

to establish the covenant

and manifest his resurrection.

In early Eucharistic prayers, when Jesus’ crucifixion was mentioned it was listed among a series of events.  Jesus’ death was not the focus of the liturgy and was not the key to its meaning.  The entire story communicated the Spirit in life.  During the fourth century, associating the Eucharist with the Last Supper became commonplace, but even then these references were not universal.  The Liturgy of Addai and Mari, which originated in Anatolia in perhaps the third century, is still in use today by Christians in the Assyrian Church of the East.  It has no words of institution and makes no connection to ‘the night before Jesus died.’

The political, social, and theological meanings of Christian Eucharistic prayers varied over regions and diverse sects, but the early rituals consistently place their emphasis on Jesus’ incarnation, teaching, miracles of healing and feeding, his baptism, and his resurrection.  The remembrance of the crucifixion was not central to what the Eucharist remembered; instead, the Eucharist focused on incarnation and resurrection.  The feast remembered how Jesus overcame death with life, never to die again.  (see p. 161)  

Sermon on Easter by Melito of Sardis

The Jews held responsible for killing Christ

A few church leaders placed greater focus on the crucifixion, which sometimes had dangerous consequences.  Melito of Sardis argued in his mid-second-century homily that Easter should commemorate the crucifixion as well as the resurrection – and then he harshly assailed the Jews for killing Christ, portraying them as responsible for Jesus' death: 

‘O Israel, why have you committed this unheard-of crime?’ 

In rhetorically powerful language that builds through the sermon, Melito provides us with the earliest example of what became known as deicide - the belief that in killing Jesus, the Jewish people killed God.   

Brock and Parker write: Melito’s sermon shows how easily a focus on Jesus’ death spilled over into the vilification of the Jews.   When Christian baptism and Eucharist affix blame for killing Christ, then the rituals function to separate the ‘forgiven’ from the ‘guilty.’  History shows that ritually enacting this understanding can fuel a deadly dynamic that separates those worthy to live from those who deserve to die.  Such rituals shape who is embraced within the saved community, and who must be scapegoated or sacrificed to preserve the community’s identity.  (Saving Paradise, p. 161-162)

In the Western churches, the Eucharist continued to be understood as a feast of the Resurrection until the ninth century.  Eastern Orthodox churches continue to regard it so, and in recent years some Western Christians have revived the ancient understanding of the Eucharist and enlarged it in creative new directions.  (p. 163)

 The face of Christ at the heart of the cosmos 

Detail of the apse mosaic, St. Apollinare, Ravenna

The movements of beauty

When participating in the Eucharist, communicants examined the images in their churches. Mosaics and frescoes communicated the shining presence of God’s glory, embodied in the Creation and in Christ.   For the ancient Christians who worshiped in these spaces, these were more than illustrations of biblical texts.  Images had the power to shape the life and identity of those who encountered them.

Care with images was especially important in a ritual space, where souls were being trained to open their senses to recognize divinity within and around them – and to open their hearts to each other and the world.  Images transmitted the power of that which they portrayed, and so the liturgical shaping of vulnerable souls required beauty, truth, courage and grace to fill the space, or they might be wrongly formed.

Brock and Parker conclude:   

We believe the absence of images of the crucifixion can be understood partly in this light.  Since images emitted power, a display of the crucifixion might have allowed the evil that killed Jesus to gain access to the congregation.  Rather than opening the senses and the heart, the presence of violence usually hardens, numbs, or hurts people.  Conversely, the scenes of Christ teaching and healing, raising the dead, remaining steadfast through betrayal and trial, and appearing resurrected opened a channel for the power of these events to flow onto the congregation.  (See p 165)

And Brock and Parker ask,

What does it take to see the Spirit in all of life

and embrace the intrinsic value of the world? 

Our interpretive frameworks tell people what matters…. 

Whether we see or don’t see the doxa (the glory, the beauty) 

may determine whether we will save or destroy paradise.