Wolfram’s Grail

On Thursday 18 October 2007, I attended a lecture at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Catholic Studies Program, entitled, “The Holy Grail versus the Crusades: Wolfram’s Concept of the Altar.” The lecturer, G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., is a scholar of German literature. A few years earlier I had attended another program by Fr. Murphy at a church in Georgetown based on his book, The Owl, The Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales. As part of that program he showed Disney’s “Snow White,” but no one could figure out how to get the sound working, so we watched it as a silent movie and he narrated, pointing out and explaining some of the symbolism. I recall talking to him at the reception afterwards about the meaning of mistletoe, which, I had heard, is canonically banned from Anglican churches. The present lecture was based on his most recent book, Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzival.


There are three authentic versions of the Grail story, which developed in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

Chrétien de Troyes (writing 1185-87) was the first to write the word Grail, by which he referred to a deep serving dish, big enough to hold a fish. Like a horn of plenty, it would produce whatever food you wanted – you had only to reach in and take it. The Grail was powered by a host in the bottom. Perceval, in Chrétien, is a naive young man whose mother does not want him to become a knight and get killed. He goes into the woods looking for his mother, sees her faint dead at a bridge, and rides off to look for the Grail. Chrétien never forgives him for letting his mother die. After years spent looking for the Grail, he returns to check on his mother, not seeming to realize she had died. Chrétien did not finish the story, but several other authors wrote endings.

For Robert de Boron (writing 1190-1200), the Grail is the cup from the Last Supper. He picks up on the Eucharist in a way that is very medieval and Catholic. Joseph of Arimathea comes for the body of Christ, a centurion stabs Christ to make sure he is dead, and Joseph catches the blood in a cup from the house of the Last Supper, which he got from Pilate. Being a good orthodox Jew, he wanted to stop the blood from seeping into the ground. The cup containing the blood was buried with Christ, and it was eventually found by St. Helena. [I’m not sure what this last sentence refers to. It does not match Robert de Boron’s version of the Grail story.]

Finally, Wolfram von Eschenbach (writing 1210) depicted the Grail not as a dish, but as a stone – a flat gemstone.

Chrétien’s word graal is not standard French or Latin. It could come from the Latin gradalis (step, a course of a meal) or gratalis (agreeable, gratifying), converted into bad dialectical French and then just transliterated into German.

We must ask the Passover question: Why is this Grail different from all others?

In 1187, Jerusalem had been captured by Muslims. In 1199 it was recaptured by Christians, knights who had sworn an oath to God to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusades were preached as an appeal to vassals who were needed by their Lord in Jerusalem. Their goals were 1) to free the Eastern Christians from the Muslims, and 2) to free the Holy Sepulcher.

The sign of the Holy Land is the palm. A “palmer” is a crusader. They did not call themselves crusaders, but pilgrims. When they took the oath, a bishop would give them a cloth cross to sew onto their clothes. It was worn on the shoulder because Christ carried the cross over his shoulder. The pilgrim would hold also his sword upside down as a cross. [Actually, a palmer can be any sort of pilgrim, not just a crusader.]

In 1204, greedy crusaders sacked Constantinople. This obviated the first reason for the Crusades. Relics from Constantinople were stolen, bought, or looted and taken to the West. Sainte-Chapelle, for example, was built to house the Crown of Thorns. It was in this context that Wolfram wrote his Parzival, in which he asserted that the Grail was a stone.

Precious metals and stones come from Paradise. (Eden means pleasure. A pleasure garden is a paradise.)

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stones are there. (Genesis 2:10-12)
The Pishon is probably the river that ends at Colchis, home of the Golden Fleece.

Gems are a remnant of Paradise that we can still play with after the Fall. Red and green stones – the ruby/emerald and garnet/peridot – are especially associated with Paradise. The ruby was thought to be formed from coal by geothermal pressure, its red color capturing the fire that is inside coal. Magnetite was a “magic” stone that could attract iron and point north. Amethyst (Greek for “not drunken”) was the color of wine. Turquoise (“from Turkey”) contains life – it never dries out and turns brown, but remains green forever. Rock crystal (quartz) was liked better than diamond because it was easier to polish. Diamond is the hardest stone known to man, yet light passes through it unhindered. Like the Holy Sepulcher – light passed right through it. Wolfram puts a green cloth around the Grail, representing life.

Fr. Murphy’s theory is that the Muslim capture of Jerusalem in 1187 ruined Chrétien’s planned ending of the Grail story, and that was why he abandoned it. But Wolfram picked up the story, revised it, and continued it to the end. In departing from the earlier versions of the Grail as a cup or a dish, Wolfram was not abandoning the Eucharistic symbolism but re-focusing it. In addition the paten and chalice, you need an altar. Priests on the Crusades carried portable altars of stone. The altar stone was cut with five crosses and a rectangular reliquary, called a “sepulcher,” which contains three pieces of the host in addition to a relic. Wolfram is saying, “You’re going off to the Holy Land to slaughter Muslims when every priest is already carrying a sepulcher in his saddle bag.” The medieval portable altar contained a shroud, host, relics, and incense. The lid had a translucent red or green stone. Do you want to see the Body of Christ? You don’t need to go to Turin – just go to Mass. Christ’s place of enthronement is the altar. In the presence of the altar, you’re back in Paradise. To get to Paradise, drop the reins (a Parzival reference).

Wolfram’s story ends with the Christian Parzival and his Muslim rival Feirefiz discovering that they are half-brothers.

There are two portable altars in the Diocesan Museum at Bamberg, Germany. Fr. Murphy believes that one of these, the Paradise Altar, was Wolfram’s inspiration for the Grail.

To illustrate the last part of the lecture, Fr. Murphy showed us an actual altar stone, as well as a half-scale model of a medieval portable altar that he had commissioned. He also showed slides of the Paradise Altar from various angles. He gave each person in his audience two tiny stones – a garnet and a peridot. A photo of the Paradise Altar appears below. This and another color photo appear in Fr. Murphy’s article in Company magazine.

(Addendum: Company magazine has disappeared from the Web. But another Jesuit magazine article can be found here.)

Archbishop Rowan on Moral Vision and Politics

On Tuesday, the Most Rev’d Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered the William Wilberforce Lecture in the city of Hull, the birthplace of the English reformer whose efforts led to the abolition of the slave trade. Websites that one would normally expect to be authoritative anticipated his subject variously as “Wilberforce and His Legacy”; “Moral vision should be at the heart of politics”; and “Freedom and Slavery.” The Telegraph titled its preview of the lecture, “Archbishop attacks 'erosion of Christian values',” while The Sunday Times called its extract of the speech, “Down with godless government.”

When the full lecture was published on the official website of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the title was “Freedom and Slavery.”

Archbishop Rowan is often described as a “liberal” — in fact he describes himself as such. But in this age when the terms liberal and conservative are used in numerous, mutually inconsistent ways, that label alone tells us little. Two short passages from the Times extract of his lecture should make it clear that, as an outspoken opponent of both individualism and relativism, he's the sort of liberal who often upsets other self-described liberals.

Wilberforce and his circle believed that if a sinful system existed and its sinfulness implicated them as well as others, they were under an obligation to end it. There is no simple gulf between personal and public morality; and Christian morality is not about “keeping yourself unspotted from the world” in any sense that implies withdrawing or ignoring public wrongs.

But if the state enacts or perpetuates in the corporate life of the nation what is directly contrary to the Christian understanding of God’s purpose, then Christian activism in respect of changing the law is justified, primarily when the state is responsible for — so to speak — compromising the morality of all its citizens.

This is at the heart of what Wilberforce was concerned about. He is not campaigning for the state to impose a personal morality, and would probably have agreed that such a policy would take away the essential aspect of personal liberty in choices about one’s own life. But he is campaigning for a moral state — that is, for a state that does not compromise its citizens, and that recognises wider considerations than those of immediate profit and security.

This makes sense, though, only if it is possible to convince those who run things in the public sphere that there are human values and ethical norms to which an entire society is answerable. In our relativist climate, this is very difficult. What tends to happen is that nothing much is left as a substantive moral basis for public life except a poorly defined principle of tolerance or avoidance of mutual harm. The idea that you can give substance to a common social ethic, something to which society as a whole can be held accountable, is unfashionable and unwelcome. Even from the point of view of many who have no religious commitment, there is a recognition that this is a thin diet.

I believe that it is possible for a state to have a moral basis without thereby becoming confessional or theocratic. It involves a state being ready to recognise its own history; to say that its horizons and assumptions are indeed grounded in a set of particular beliefs, and to embody in its political practice ways of allowing those foundational commitments to be heard in public debate.

The establishment of the Church of England, as it has evolved in the past century or so, has turned out to be such a mechanism — a rather awkward one. But if the church were to be disestablished, the question would still be there in an acute form: how does the state properly expose itself to argument about its collective moral status?

One important point came through more clearly in the full lecture than in the Times extract: Criticism of slavery and the slave trade in the 18th century came only from Christians who were motivated by their religion; the theoretical egalitarianism of Enlightenment rationalism, for instance, was never translated into opposition to slavery.

Towards the end of his speech, Archbishop Rowan raised the issue of reparations for slavery, and, in the academic way he is known for, he hashed through various aspects of the issue without coming to a clear conclusion, bringing the speech to a rather weak and muddled ending. I can only hope it will not obscure his overarching theme of restoring moral vision to the vocation of politics.

Technology and Ethics in the 21st Century

On Monday 19 November 2001, I attended a panel discussion at Washington National Cathedral: "Are We Becoming an Endangered Species? Technology and Ethics in the 21st Century." I will attempt to capture the flow of the discussion between the four panelists and then offer some comments of my own on the important topics that were raised.

Judy Woodruff, anchor and senior correspondent at CNN, served as moderator. In addition to daily reporting, Woodruff anchors "Inside Politics," and she moderated several Republican presidential debates for CNN's Election 2000 coverage. She introduced the four panel members:

Bill Joy is co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a pioneer in development of the Internet. He entered this debate with his article, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," in the April 2000 issue of Wired.

Ray Kurzweil invented the first flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and "pattern recognition" designed to teach computers how to recognize the abstract patterns that dominate human thinking. He is the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Kurzweil came prepared with a briefing paper.

Anne Foerst is visiting professor for Theology and Computer Science at St. Bonaventure University. She recently served as a research scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and a theological advisor on MIT's projects to develop embodied, autonomous robots.

Bill McKibben, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, is author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about global warming, as well as The Age of Missing Information. (He also has the distinction of being classified as an "environmental wacko" by Rush Limbaugh.)

Woodruff introduced the topic by referring to Bill Joy's article: "It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause." Such technology makes for cheap production of goods, but an accident could destroy the world. It could also be used for warfare. It does not reproduce by means of succeeding generations – its memory lives forever, making for an inhuman intelligence. Meanwhile, dangerous information is widely available on the internet – a boon to science, but also a threat through availability to terrorists. Are we an endangered species?

Bill Joy: Yes, we are becoming an endangered species. Technology poses the danger of catastrophe. For example, research is currently under way to combine genetic material from the AIDS and Ebola viruses. Can we construct technological fixes to technological dangers? Defense is difficult – for instance, bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. We cannot look to technology to save us from technology.

Ray Kurzweil: Perhaps we should relinquish certain kinds of technology, on the grounds that we already have enough. If we had told people of the 18th century what the 20th century would look like, they would have said, "Let's not go there." But there were also advantages to technology – it has relieved suffering and extended life spans. There is still suffering that technology can relieve. And I cannot agree that defensive technology is necessarily weaker than the dangers.

Anne Foerst: We are created in God's image. When we are creative, we partake of God's mark in us. We cannot forbid technology. It is our nature to want to know things. Forbidding it would just push it underground, where it would no longer be subject to public scrutiny. Technology is often seen as "other" – as our opponent. But it is really an extension of us. The end of paradise came when man began judging what was good and evil – our knowledge is limited, unlike God's.

Bill McKibben: Are we at a moment that is in continuity with past development? Or are we, rather, at a special moment of discontinuity? [McKibben argues for the latter.] We have let technology grow too large, to the point where we can interfere with nature at the macro level. Theologians are now talking about a "trans-human" or "post-human" future. This marks the current moment as special – different from every moment since the world began.

(From here on, a paragraph might jump from one point to another, as a panelist responds in order to various comments by the other panelists, and my hurried notes do not provide much introductory and transitional material.)

Joy: If crazed individuals can determine the future, this is undemocratic – it gives us no say in our future. The Enlightenment had a moral basis in the relief of suffering, but now we have new gadgets just for convenience. The moral foundation of science is now absent.

Kurzweil: We cannot relinquish nanotechnology, without relinquishing all technology. Miniaturization is an ongoing trend in all technological fields, not a distinct field in itself. Banning technology would condemn billions to suffering. The fact that we have kept software viruses to a minor nuisance level shows that technological defense can work. We must increase the resources we devote to expansion of defensive technologies.

McKibben: Let's look at some concrete examples. Genetic manipulation can let us raise the intelligence or the height of our offspring. Nanotechnology that allows the construction of anything from carbon can produce technology more intelligent than humans. We are not philosophically equipped to come out on the other side of this looking anything like human beings – some tech advocates are quite candid about this. It is time for human beings to mature in a way that we have not done previously.

Kurzweil: The future will not be post-human, but post-biological.

Foerst: I bring perspectives from two fields – MIT robotics and theology. We as humans are part of nature – we eat, and drink, and die like all other animals. But we are distinct, in that we have cognition and intelligence. Experiments have shown that our cognition is embodied – that's what it means to be human. Our bodies are a means towards the end of community – we cannot download our intelligence and be disembodied humans. If we are in the image of God, we are relational – i.e., partners. We try to build machines that are partners, and they will be suitable partners, more like us than current machines, with built-in ("embedded") feelings and ethics. Even the most advanced current technology cannot match the embeddedness of insects. We cannot merge with technology, but we can interact with it, as we do with chimps and dolphins. In creating a new species of robots in our own image, we will fulfilling our own being in God's image.

Joy [citing as an example of hubris someone whose name I did not catch]: He wants to find that part of us that makes us believe in God – but only in order to decide whether to keep it or not. Why are we still doing research on anthrax? Vaccines already exist. (But malaria became worse as a result of having to resist vaccines.) We must see the world as it really is – not an idealized world of unlimited scientific progress.

Kurzweil: We are already close to breakthroughs versus disease. We need to have laws and ethics to limit and direct scientific research. We are seeing the next step of evolutionary progress – increasing complexity freeing thinking from the limitations of biological form is a spiritual quest. It would be immoral not to allow technological progress. We are the only species that uses language and whose technology progresses.

McKibben: The lust for technological development is a glib exercise in spiritual development. Humans have long tried to decide how to limit ourselves. Invention is not what makes us human, but the ability to decide not to do something that we are capable of.

After this, there was a period for questions from the audience.

A member of Friends of the Earth: We want to stop genetic engineering, cloning, and designer babies. Joy responds: The advice, "Think twice before doing something dangerous," is, unfortunately, not in the American spirit. Foerst responds: There was recently an ad in Ivy League magazines advertising for an egg from a woman who meets particular requirements for $50,000. The problem is that our society has an ideal type and punishes those who do not meet it.

Another environmentalist: Animals do not have the option of developing technological defenses to survive. Joy responds: Alfred Nobel wanted to improve the world, but killed his brother. We can't afford progress because we can't afford the budget for defense against it. We can't even fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Perhaps we need a market mechanism to make labs take out insurance against terrorist use of their experimental materials. Kurzweil responds: We are scared of the duality of our own nature. There are both good and bad sides of technology.

A progressive: Progress is not only technological development, but also improving equity in the social system – in this case, greater access to the benefits of technology. Foerst responds: The "world-wide web" is a misnomer – it is not world-wide. It promises a sort of Kingdom of God that it cannot deliver. Communities are more inclusive – we have learned to accept that people are different from us. People from other cultures are offended by the strength of Western values, which displace other value systems. Kurzweil responds: Technological advances reduce prices. The lagging edge of technology also moves ahead, even if it remains behind the leading edge.

A literature professor, whose class was reading Frankenstein: When humans begin to create life, is this the ultimate evil? Foerst responds: I interpret the story differently. It is not about hubris and a monster, but about denying a creature's personhood because of external criteria.

A questioner asked about the Kyoto Treaty. McKibben responds: It is not good that we were the only country to opt out of this and other treaties. There is no need to create of a race of robots to interact with – we have 6 million people to interact with. We are now breeding super-salmon that are four times as big as natural salmon, and they are already escaping and interbreeding with wild salmon. This is just one more example of our re-making the world according to our own self-serving criteria.

A final questioner: What needs to happen in the education system to bring about the moral decision-making required? Foerst responds: We need more interdisciplinarity. Science and the humanities need to learn from each other. We need to stop teaching current science as objective truth and teach the history and philosophy of science with it. This will make for more responsible citizens.


My comments

When Ray Kurzweil says, "The future will not be post-human, but post-biological," he reveals quite candidly the heresy that he is advocating: Gnosticism. The notion that our humanity is separable from our biology is irreconcilable with the incarnational principle that lies at the heart of Christianity – and of reality itself. A non-biological being, by definition, cannot be human (though perhaps it could be a person).

But others, with better semantic grounding than Kurzweil, are just as Gnostic in explicitly advocating a post-human future. Here is where hard technology meets the soft New Age – in the notion that we must "evolve" to a "higher level," shedding our obsolete humanity along the way. (This use of "evolve" has nothing to do with the more familiar use of the term in biology, but those who advocate post-humanity enjoy at least sounding like they are being scientific.) This is just another statement of Gnostic religion.

As always, Gnostic religion is opposed by Incarnational religion. For Christians, our humanity is not something to outgrow and discard, but something to fulfill, perfect, and glorify, by the grace of God. Gnosticism relies on the obvious but false premise that divinity and humanity are mutually exclusive and, moreover, mutually antagonistic. For the Gnostic, in order to become more divine one must become less human. But we look to the example of Christ, who was fully human and fully divine. In him, we see that it is only by fulfilling our God-given human nature that we can hope to become divine.

Kurzweil also expresses the modern notion that suffering is the ultimate (only?) evil, and that the alleviation of suffering trumps every other concern. I suppose that downloading our brains into machines would eliminate all physical suffering. But suffering is part of being human. While we ought to work to relieve the suffering of our brothers and sisters, we must not sacrifice our humanity or theirs in pursuit of this goal. Rather, we must remember that Christ, who shared our humanity, also shared our suffering.

The other panelists all opposed Kurzweil's gospel of technological salvation, at least some of the time in some ways. McKibben showed particular awareness of the importance of defending and preserving our humanity in the face of technological threats. Joy warned against the amorality and hubris that always seem to accompany modernity and technology. And Foerst emphasized the incarnate nature of our humanity and of community.

On the other hand, I think Foerst is naive in her vision of a future race of robot buddies for mankind. She says this creative urge is just evidence that we are made in God's image. I would suggest it is evidence that we are still falling for the serpent's lie that we can become like God by satisfying our curiosity.

Bishop Kallistos on Primacy and Prayer

On Wednesday 20 June, I visited St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church, near Fairfax, VA, to hear Bishop Kallistos Ware speak. I will briefly describe the service of Vespers that preceded the bishop's talk and the iconography of the church, and then summarize both his formal address and his brief pastoral talk. Coptic Vespers. I arrived about a third of the way through Vespers, just as they were beginning a series of doxologies to the Virgin Mary, the angels, the apostles, St. Mark the Evangelist (founder of the Church in Egypt, according to local tradition), St. Athanasius, and St. Anthony. Each doxology consisted of a series of short verses recounting the histories of the saints and requesting their prayers. The cantor would sing a verse in Coptic, and then the choir and congregation would sing the next in English. The bulletin included each verse in both languages, making it easy to follow. (Coptic is surprisingly easy to follow, since it uses an expanded version of the Greek alphabet and borrows a lot of Greek vocabulary for liturgical use.) A proper psalm and gospel reading followed the doxologies, and the service concluded with a series of prayers (during which we recited the Lord's Prayer at least three times). They used the traditional monophysite interpolations in the Trisagion, including the line, "Holy mighty one, who was crucified for us," which once caused so much controversy (some feared that it implied Patripassianism). The only other thing that struck me as strange was the repeated application of the term Pantocrator to the Father, rather than the Son. The church is quite new – until recently, St. Mark's worshiped at a small, old church west of Tyson's Corner. There is a large central dome over the square nave and a smaller dome over the apse. The window treatment above the side aisles gives it a Middle Eastern feel. Where the royal doors and the deacon's doors would be in a Byzantine iconostasis, St. Mark's has heavy maroon curtains. The iconography is of mixed types. The central image of the Last Supper above the middle curtain was very Western and representational. The icons along the side aisles are somewhat more stylized, but less so than Byzantine icons. And all of the other icons at the front of the church, corresponding to a Byzantine iconostasis, were in a style I later heard described as "neo-Coptic." It appeared to have heavy Ethiopian influence, with round faces and large eyes. Icons of Christ Pantocrator and the Theotokos flanked the central curtain to the right and left. On the far right was the Baptism of Christ and on the far left St. Michael. Above the side curtains were panels with the twelve apostles. You can find links to neo-Coptic images on this page (you have to click twice to make the buttons work). Power, Authority, and Service. Bishop Kallistos was in town for the Orientale Lumen Conference, which he attends every year around this time at Catholic University. The theme for this year's conference was "Primacy and Conciliarity: Finding a Common Vision." A brief description of the conference, including a photo of Vespers at St. Mark's, can be found here. The bishop's address on Wednesday evening stuck to the theme of the conference, exploring the issues of power, authority, and service in the Church. (I did not take notes, so this will all be from memory. I hope I will represent Bp. Kallistos's thoughts accurately.) His first text came from the Synoptic Gospels: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever is great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:25-28). He also read the somewhat different version of this saying from Luke 22:25-27. In the Church, authority comes from diakonia and primacy from kenosis. Leadership in the Church is so different from the worldly political realm that it can only be misleading to compare them. Authority in the Church is, first, the authority of Christ. He shares his authority with his Bride, the Church. He does not delegate, but shares his authority. Bp. Kallistos singled out the title "Vicar of Christ" for special criticism. This title, usually applied to the Pope, has, in recent times, been applied to all bishops. But it is terribly inappropriate. A vicar is one who exercises authority on behalf of another who is absent. But Christ is not absent from the Church, as this title would imply. Bp. Kallistos pointed more favorably to another papal title that is a favorite of John Paul II: the Servant of the Servants of God. His second text came from John: "You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you" (15:14-15). We are still to obey Christ's commands, but we now do so not blindly as servants, but in knowledge, as friends. And it is not only the bishops who are Christ's friends, but all Christians! That Christ's knowledge and authority are shared by all the faithful is embodied in the traditional formulation, sensus fidelium. It is not only the bishops who are responsible for defining and guarding the faith, but the entire Church. The pronouncements of councils of bishops must be received by the whole Church before they can be taken as final and definitive. There have been times when most of the bishops bowed to heresy, but the laity preserved the true faith. This, of course, is not to say that bishops have no special role to play in the Church, or that the Pope has no special role to play among the bishops. But the Pope's traditional primacy among the bishops is often misunderstood. This is demonstrated clearly by the recent ARCIC statement, "The Gift of Authority," which focuses on the primacy of the Pope and the authority of diocesan bishops. The document ignores the many intermediate levels of primacy – patriarchs, primates, metropolitans – in an effort to emphasize the special role of the Pope. But the Pope and other patriarchs have no special ontological status separate from the rest of the episcopacy. They do not receive a fourth ordination. Any special authority they have can only be understood as relative authority within the college of bishops. It is only within this context that Papal primacy can be properly understood. Pray Without Ceasing. The formal address of Bp. Kallistos was followed by a lively musical interlude by the parish choir, featuring chant and percussion. I took this opportunity to get a better look at the icons in the side aisles, all of which depicted Egyptian saints – some familiar (Anthony) and some not (Mina). The bishop then gave a brief pastoral talk to a much smaller audience, consisting mostly of members of the parish. His text was St. Paul's instruction, "Pray without ceasing." He offered practical advice on how to approach this goal more closely in our own lives. His suggestions included: 1) Upon awaking, begin the day by making the sign of the cross. And at the end of the day, make the sign of the cross again before going to bed. 2) During moments of free time say an "arrow prayer" – a prayer like the Jesus Prayer that is short and goes straight to the target. 3) Give thanks before eating. 4) Be conscious of God's presence in our daily activities – for example, to see our encounters with other people as opportunities to meet God. 5) When reading Scripture, read it as if it is God's word to you.

Borg and Wright

Last night I attended a lecture/debate at National Cathedral featuring Prof. Marcus J. Borg of the Jesus Seminar and the Rev. N.T. (Tom) Wright, Dean of Lichfield Cathedral. It was billed as "An Evening of Detente in the Jesus Wars." While the two men differ strongly on critical points regarding who Jesus was, they are longtime friends who studied at the same school under the same adviser, and they have written a new book together, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (which was for sale on site). The center section of the nave of the cathedral was nearly full.

Wright won the coin toss and opted to speak first. He tried to downplay the extent of his differences with Borg, saying it is not entirely correct to depict himself as a "traditionalist" and Borg as a "revisionist." In some ways they are both traditionalists (they are practicing Christians), while in others they are both revisionists (they are academic historians whose goal is to understand Jesus in the context of 1st century Judaism). This allowed them both to focus on the points where they actually disagree.

Wright understands Jesus in terms of contemporary Jewish apocalypticism. Many sects of that era expected God's direct intervention in history. For Wright, Jesus was not just a teacher of wisdom, but a prophet warning his hearers to prepare to meet God. He believes that Jesus consciously identified himself with the rampant messianic hopes of his era, while interpreting the role of messiah somewhat differently than popular expectation. And he believes in a literal resurrection of the body of Jesus. He does not believe in a simple "resuscitation of the corpse" (who does?); rather, he describes the resurrection as a transformation of Jesus' body into "a different mode of physicality."

Borg interprets Jesus as a Jewish mystic. By "mystic," he means a person with direct experience of God. He would also include the Buddha and a few others in this category on a basis equal to that of Jesus. He believes that Jesus was a healer, but he does not believe in other miracles, such as the feeding of the 5,000 or walking on water. He does not believe Jesus thought of himself as messiah or son of God, but believes, rather, that these identifications were made by the early Church after Jesus' death. And he understands the resurrection as a purely spiritual phenomenon, involving the union of Jesus' spirit with that of God, and the Church's real sense of Jesus' ongoing presence in the Christian community.

Each man spoke for about 20 minutes, and then they went back and forth, critiquing each other's ideas and responding to these critiques. Finally, people from the audience lined up to ask question, some more interesting than others. One complimented them for their criticism of the Enlightenment, and then asked if there was some other era in the Church's history when the Church, in its understanding of Jesus, "got it right." However, neither speaker claimed the objectivity to judge our own century, and both men's expertise is so focused on the 1st century that they did not feel qualified to pose as experts on the intervening 18 centuries. A couple of questions addressed to Borg challenged his unorthodox beliefs on the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, but he made a plausible case for his being a traditional Christian while holding to untraditional understandings of these doctrines. And Wright, while expressing belief in the Virgin Conception, said he could not consider this belief essential to understanding the doctrine of the Incarnation, since Matthew did not draw theological inferences from the fact of the Virgin Conception, and Luke barely did so.

The event ended about an hour and a half after it began. The authors were available afterwards to sign copies of their books, which were for sale at the cathedral.