Anthony Esolen - Reflections on the Christian Life

Anthony Esolen

Reflections on the
Christian Life

How Our Story
Is Gods Story

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS

Manchester, New Hampshire

Copyright 2012 Anthony Esolen

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Cover design by Carolyn McKinney

Scriptural quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Esolen, Anthony M. Reflections on the Christian life : how our story is Gods story / Anthony Esolen. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-933184-85-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) eBook ISBN 978-1-622821-50-1
1. Christian life. 2. Storytelling Religious aspects Christianity. I. Title. BV4501.3.E845 2013

248.4 dc23

2012037395

To my wife, Debra, and
my children, Jessica and David

Contents

Foreword

This book is an attempt to meditate upon the meaning of a Christian life insofar as it is a story, and as the story of the life of Jesus sheds light upon it. My qualifications to write such a work seem paltry enough. Im not a saint, I have had no private revelations, and I do not teach theology. If the reader wishes to enter most deeply into the life of the God-Man who walked the hills of Palestine twenty centuries ago, I should recommend Karl Adams The Lord, Edward Leens In the Likeness of Christ, G. K. Chestertons Everlasting Man, and Franois Mauriacs exquisite Life of Christ. All I can bring forth in my defense is my teaching of literature. I have spent many years introducing students to the works of the masters, Homer and Virgil, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Virgil and Ovid, Saint Paul and Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas, Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Herbert and Milton, and many more. So I have had to think a great deal about what it means to live in a world of stories, and what makes the Christian narrative so distinct, fulfilling all that is true in the others, and surpassing them.

If I should say anything here that in any way strikes the reader as inconsistent with the plain meaning of the word of God, or with the teachings of the Church, or even with the advice and insights bequeathed to us by the saints, I beg him to forget what I say and forgive me my error. I dont wish to commit the sin of originality. But if these words can point one soul in the way toward the true Author and Judge of all, they will have done their modest work.

Reflections on the Christian Life

Chapter 1

At the Shores of Eternity

Some years ago a young man, intelligent and lonely, found himself in a European airport with a day and night to wait for his flight back to America. He was hungry and had no money. Then an older man sat beside him and engaged him in conversation. The older man saw that the lad had nothing to eat, so he offered him his ham sandwich. The man was a Catholic priest.

That young fellow, as it turned out, had never been baptized, but he was on a search for truth for what it means to be a good and fulfilled human being. He did not forget the priests act of kindness. A few weeks later, at the school where he was enrolled as a first-year graduate student, he attended a pulled-pork party thronged with fifty or sixty other English students and professors. Some of them were cheerfully indulging in a favorite pastime, singing old Appalachian hymns in shape-note harmony. That was when he tossed out the opinion that Saint Paul was a bigot, because of what he said about women not being chosen for the ordained ministry. A young Roman Catholic heard him, put down his plate, and took up the challenge to set him right.

What happened after that, Ill wait to tell. First I want to make an observation about time; for we cant appreciate fully what it means to live in a world of stories, unless we see what it means for God to be the Lord of time.

When Saint Augustine was a young pagan struggling to understand the truth about God, he had first to clear away his fleshly notion of what it meant that God should be everywhere. He thought, as the old Stoics did, that God was present throughout the universe, like air or light that fills a room, with more of God being in a big thing, such as the earth, and less of God being in a little thing, such as a grain of sand. He didnt see then that he had demoted God to the status of a creature, if even the greatest creature imaginable. It took him years he says this with honest embarrassment to conceive of just what God meant when He said to Moses, I AM. If God is the One Who Is, He cannot be divided into parts, or bounded by boundaries, or parceled out into more and less. That means not only that God is everywhere. It means that the fullness of God is everywhere, God in His infinity. G. K. Chesterton put it marvelously in a lyric poem. The speaker asks the wise men of the world whether they know what is in the smallest of the seeds. Scientists cant say, and philosophers cant say, but the believer sings out in wonder:

God Almighty, and with Him
Cherubim and seraphim,
Filling all eternity,
Adonai Elohim.

Thats something the secularists of our time cant or wont understand. When a Richard Dawkins, the rather silly atheist zoologist, conceives of God, he imagines some big creature tinkering with the laws of the universe at the onset of the big bang, turning knobs and pressing buttons so as to fine-tune everything to result in the world we know, the world with blue jays and mockingbirds, dogs and cats, puffy clouds in the sky, and grass beneath our feet. Then he says that it is absurd to suppose that such a creature exists. Well, it is absurd, because that imaginary creature is not God. First, God is not just big. He is infinite and omnipotent. It is easier for God to create a universe billions of light-years in its vastness than it is for me to add seven and three infinitely easier, for easy and difficult do not apply to God. That is one of the things the sacred author meant when he was inspired to write, And God said, Let there be light, and there was light (Gen. 1:3). Just like that; He spoke, and it came into being.

But second, God is not next to or outside of His world. He is present in His fullness everywhere. So it is not a matter of fine-tuning from a distance. In the wisp of a dandelion seed, what is there but God, all of Him, and the hosts of heaven singing His praises? In the dash of a photon along an optical fiber, what is there but God, all of Him, in His infinite act? He is not simply great because He comprehends the greatest of things. He is great also because He is comprehended by the smallest of things; and that too is a measure of His love.

Now what is true of God and objects in space is true also of God and objects in time. The Deists of the eighteenth century got themselves tangled up in error because they had a childish view of God. They often thought of Him as a creator, a kind of clock maker, who existed before the universe, who then fashioned this vast machine, and then let it run by itself. If they had read Augustine, they would have learned that there is no before and after with God, because it is God who created time to begin with. Just as God is present in His fullness in the most far-flung galaxy and in the tiniest of particles for the whole universe is as nothing to Him so He is present in His eternity in the most fleeting of moments, just as in the billions of years since the world burst into being. That is what Scripture means when we read, One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8).

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