…AN ABSOLUTE GOD ?

Stage 49 / Sunday 14 June / Puente-la-Reina

 

On this sunny Sunday, how good it is to take a break! I covered 143 km in the seventh week, leaving
gentle France for the drier Navarre. Puente la Reina means Bridge of the Queen. The town draws its name from the bridge with six pointed arches and openwork pillars that were built in the 11th century by a queen for the pilgrims who needed to cross the Arga. This is one of the most beautiful roman style bridges known, and I linger to admire it. I also visit the churches in the area, on whose bell towers the storks clatter their bills. In a side chapel, I notice another pilgrim in tears before the statue of the Virgin and child. I am immediately filled with emotion by his pain!

 

Joy (almost) absolute followed by a visible suffering which tears at my guts: this contrast sends me again into my reflections of yesterday on the notion of the absolute! How can we understand in this world that there be marvels like this bridge rooted in time and history, but also the sadness which brings tears to your eyes, like the pain of that man. I will later learn: this pilgrim was crying over the death of his mother, who died just a few days before he set out en route to Compostela. The goodness of the face of the Virgin with her beautiful child in her arms unleashed in him an overflow of childhood memories and he fell sobbing. He was almost hiccupping when he told me his story.

 

How to know if God (if He exists) is concerned by the pain of this man? How to explain evil and the imperfections in this world that this God would have created, and which He seems little concerned for? One can see excesses much more serious than the pilgrim’s sobs. Is this the same God who is the direct cause, He who, canonically speaking, would be the cause of everything? One sees excesses much more serious than the sobs of this pilgrim. Is it the same God who is the direct cause of them? He who, canonically speaking, would be the cause of everything? The suffering caused by a tsunami, for example, which reveals the imperfection of creation, is this evil admissible on the part of a God in whom certain exegetes [text interpretors] see the One, the Unique, the totality of that which is and has been and will be (the absolute)?

 

This absolute totality would include both the perfection and imperfection that I observe today: the Roman bridge as much as the unbearable separation from a loved one. Then, if due to imperfection that he has created, I chisel away from the statue of the god I seek to sculpt this superb absolute that some attribute to him, everything will collapse! And what am I going to find? A pile of stones in which shall crumble the “all-power” of the “all-powerful Father, creator of all things visible and invisible,” an article of faith that Christians have affirmed for centuries in reciting their Creed!

 

But in fact, perhaps it’s better that way, my pile of stones in which is broken the image of a god harboring imperfection as much as perfection! For if it were necessary to envisage the god of Christians as simultaneously imperfect and all-powerful, it would become a source of terrifying evils which no exegete would want, nor me either! If there is such thing as all-power, on what would this concept rest? Is it on the selective grace of sparing this or that one from misfortune? On the indomitable power of explainable but uncontrollable phenomena: the volcanic eruption, the tidal wave, a meteor’s fall?

 

Perhaps in attributing to Him all power we should have confirmed a so-called superiority of one religion compared to the others, or compared to paganism? The translation “all-powerful” (omnipotentem) of the Creed in Latin, established at the Nicene Council, appeared after 325 AD but it already existed in the original Greek text with the word pantocrator (παντοκρατορ). The Christians of that time (still a small minority) were finally recognized by the emperor Constantine as having the “right” religion. He was himself partially converted in the year 312. And it was necessary to oppose the powerful current of Arianism, by imposing on others the unity of the empire with a clause of religious tolerance.

 

For Arius (256-336) and his followers, only the Father is eternal: the Son and the Spirit had been created. Obviously this put into question the validity of salvation offered for all by Jesus and subsequently affirmed by his followers as being the result, once and for all, of his free sacrifice on the cross. In fact, if Jesus were only a creature among others, how could one believe a simple human affirming that he is the path to eternity? No, surely not as much as a Son equal to the Father in his divinity, of the same substance as Him, of the same nature as the Father (consubstantiálem Patri)!

Now this concept of consubstantiality also became an article of faith imposed on converts by the “official” Christian authorities. One used, as an attribute of God’s only Son the word homoousion (ὁμοούσιοn) which means “of the same substance.” The Romans translated it into Latin with consubstantiálem. The battle between the partisans of Arius, this Lybian theologian of Berber origin and of Greek language, and those of Athanasius (298-373) bishop of Alexandria refuting the Arian thesis, would last for several centuries after their deaths. This shows how chaotic proved to be the survival of the Nicene-Constantinople creed, the one that continues to be taught by Christians today.

 

Let’s return to the word pantocrator (παντοκρατορ). This word was employed in the Greek translation (the Septuagint) of the Hebrew Bible wherever the Hebrew used the expressions Yahweh Sabaoth (which evokes the sovereignty of the God of Genesis) or El Shaddaï (which evokes His capacity to nourish). Certain theologians see in this term not an all-powerfulness, but rather a capacity to fortify and satisfy. And I know a priest who replaces, with great gentleness, moreover, the word “all powerful “with the word “all-loving”. This gives to God a very maternal and nourishing dimension. It suits me much better: I recognize my smallness in relation to the cosmos, and the dangers of life and uncertainties of nature. A God who is protective and benevolent for his children like a mother hen for her chicks, this is surely closer to my needs …

 

And there is this paradox. Only an all-powerful and sovereign God can give his subjects a complete freedom. Only an all-loving and nourishing God can satisfy the thirst and hunger for the absolute that these subjects discover in their helpless fragility facing the rest of creation. We are not marionettes, toys of a God with absolute power. We are not prevented from having, despite our absolute smallness, the possibility of turning toward an Almighty! Despite our smallness, we are not prevented from turning to the Almighty! His power could be described more precisely as “The One who has the last word.” For certain, neither you nor I, poor mortals, have this power! And this formula has the merit of suggestion that the risk taken by God in according freedom to human beings is finally quite moderate …

 

And there you are, my day of rest has confirmed to me that the supposedly untouchable block of God’s absoluteness, of His perfection, His omnipotence, as much as His person, the pitiless chisel of my examination has just heaped up a pretty pile of stones. Sitting on the bank of the Arga river, I start dreaming in imagination of a celestial Father taking a little nap in the clouds above the Queen’s Bridge. Why wouldn’t He too need to rest on the seventh day? And that comforts me and gives me much joy, for I find in Him a sense of humor … absolute!

 

Itinerary from Mauléon to Puente-la-Reina (7th week).