Saturday, July 22, 2017
Pentecost 6
Sermon for Pentecost 6
Proper 10 ~ Lectionary Year A
~ July 16, 2017
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
To set the mind
on the flesh is death,
but to set the
mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
At the end of the
nineteenth century, a fascinating controversy went on between two well-known
intellectuals, Sir Thomas Huxley and Prince Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin, over
the meaning of Darwin and evolution. It illustrates a difference in
what we have come to call paradigms.
From
the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level
as the gladiator's show. … Life was a continuous free fight, and beyond the limited
and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all
was the normal state of existence
So wrote Thomas Huxley in 1888. He developed his view of
“nature” into a theory that has come to be known as Social Darwinism,
according to which, since nature’s law is a law of competition, weeding out the
unfit, it will not do to help the weak and unfit survive to reproduce. That is
a recipe for the “degeneration” of the human race.
Kropotkin disagreed, to put it mildly. Here
is the opening paragraph of his great work in response to Huxley,
entitled Mutual Aid:
Two
aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my
youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the
extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals
have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life
which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of
life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other
was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I
failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle
for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which
was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the
dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.
“Don't compete!”
Kropotkin concluded. “That is the watchword which comes to us from the
bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. Therefore combine—practice mutual aid!”
Faced with the same data, the two scientists
arrived at different conclusions. This illustrates how paradigms work.
Stephen Jay Gould, in a recent article rehabilitating Kropotkin from his
caricature as an anarchist crank, would say that the difference in paradigm
included a difference of data, because Kropotkin studied
sparsely-populated Siberia, while Huxley and the British concentrated on
the crowded tropics. But Gould points out that Kropotkin was anything but
idiosyncratic: he represents the mainstream of Russian evolutionary thought,
which remains untranslated and almost unknown in the West. Prince
Kropotkin seems singular to us only because he is the only such thinker who
wrote in English.
Now this difference in paradigms
~ the lens through which we agree to look at the world ~ is what Paul
is talking about, I believe, in his Spirit / Flesh dichotomy.
The Huxley-Kropotkin controversy may serve as an analogy of the difference. It
is very important not to misunderstand Paul. Spirit vs. flesh is
not material vs. immaterial. Although many have
interpreted it that way, such a dichotomy is, in fact heresy. Material
creation is what the bible says God pronounced it to be: Very Good.
The heresy that holds that what is wrong
with human beings is our material bodies and our lives in the world is NOT what
Paul is talking about. He is talking about two different ways of
viewing human life ~ two different paradigms, and the very
different ways of life that proceed from each view of
life. The flesh , rather like Sir Thomas Huxley, sees the
human person as in competition with everybody else: the “war of each against
all.” Therefore, my job is to advance my own interests, and get as much wealth
as I can. The Spirit, rather like Prince Kropotkin, sees the human
person as part of a great whole characterized by mutual aid.
This is a difference, which I have called a
difference in paradigm, might also be called a difference in spiritual
temperament. And what one perceives as reality depends greatly on one’s
spiritual temperament; whether one sees reality as the dance of Cosmic Love or
as gladiatorial combat ~ “a tale told by an idiot, signifying
nothing”. Remember who uttered those words: the murderous Macbeth, his soul
deformed by his own ambition, one of the most frightening depictions of
Pauline flesh in all of literature.
Prof. Gould rightly warns us against the
trap of reading our own political preferences into nature, as both Huxley and
Kropotkin most certainly do. But from the perspective of religious
history, I think one may also conclude that Huxley’s fleshly conclusions
naturally proceed from a prior inclination to view the world as competition.
Kropotkin, on the other hand, grew up as a nobleman in feudal times, for the
rural Russia of his youth was entirely feudal. It was also entirely
Christian, and whatever Kropotkin’s conscious atheism, there is no doubt about
the influence that Orthodoxy had on his consciousness ~ it was part
of the paradigm by which he experienced the world. That is, it
was spiritual in the Pauline sense.
For all its pain
and death, the material world is beautiful, and human beings are
the image of God, however distorted. And as his great compatriot,
Dostoevsky, wrote: “the tragedy of humanity is that a paradise of beauty
blooms around us and we fail to see it.” That failure to see is flesh.
That is what brings death. The Spirit is the divine gift of
seeing the Beauty and Love that in fact rule the world ~ what our Lord called
the Kingdom of God. Anyone who has that gift is led by
the Spirit, in Paul’s terminology. Like Prince Kropotkin, they may not be
aware of it, but nevertheless, they are children of God, and if
children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS
