Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!– Hilaire Belloc
And that, in part, was what drew me to the Christian faith, in the mid-noughties and my mid-twenties, at the Anglo-Catholic church of St Michael and All Angels, Exeter. It was the advertisement for “Vespers and meditation” which caught my eye: I had scant notion of the former, but rather fancied the latter. When I got there, I delighted in both. The road from plainchant and incense to the pub was blessedly short, and it took not too many pints to pressgang me into the choir for Sunday morning mass. That, too, I found, ended always with a box of wine at the back of the church, followed by lunch back in said pub and the company of bright, laughing, often young Christians, among them the new curate, who became a very dear friend. Until I met them, I thought Christianity bitter and dour. The laughter and wine were windows to new rays of sunshine in my life.
Yet the joy was in earnest. Church remained Larkin’s “serious house” of serious pursuits. The liturgy was solemn, the sermons sound and studied, but nothing was stolid, and the preachers’ words were salted just enough to bring out the richness of their flavour. We would hang off every one of Canon Thurmer’s, who though an octogenarian preached from perfect memory, emphasising points with a silent straightening of his spectacles.
It would be foolish to call it fun. We did not go to mass for fun. It was something better than that. There was fun in the pub, to be sure, but fun was more salt, not the meat of the matter. A life lived for fun is not well-spent. You see its scars etched around the eyes and lips of many a prematurely aged barfly. But a life lived for joy - now, that is another matter.
To what might one best compare that merry gravity of my early churchgoing days? I think: to play.
So much weight is given to the word “liturgy,” but I see no shame in calling it an act of play. With its inherited rules and roles and costumes, good liturgy is much like children absorbed in serious play. And should it not be? Our Lord, after all, counselled His disciples to become as little children.
Do not let patronising modern models of childhood get in the way of that command. Christ’s command to childlikeness was not meant to commend gullibility or docility under the mantle of so-called “innocence:” I trust He had more respect for children than that. It was rather to commend to us the activity proper to children, which is not so much to obey, as to play. Indeed, the Greek noun for child, as used in the gospels, is pais, cognate with the verb paizein, “to play,” showing the inseparability of children from their proper activity. Yet let us not deem it frivolous. For when children really play - that is, when they are fully immersed in the enchanted realms of their shared imagination - their concentration is total. The slightest slip of the rules, the momentary departure from the character which possesses them at that moment, breaks the magic. It is a sad thing when a little dreamer is startled into what the world considers wakefulness.
Play also enjoys a long philosophical pedigree. This may surprise those for whom the foremost image of the philosopher is a pipe-smoker shot in black and white. To be sure, those moderns who have made philosophy a mere ancillary to the natural sciences are not best known for their playfulness. Yet, to bowdlerise Nietzsche, I would only believe in a philosopher who can play. Socrates himself was a player on the stage of Plato’s dialogues, but also of philosophical games. The gadfly would buzz around the great men of his day, playing them with their own words into bafflement and outrage. At times, for all Plato’s averred contempt for poetry, he let Socrates be taken by the muse and spout dithyrambs. But when Socrates wanted to make a point in earnest, so as not to let the mask of the ignoramus drop, he would become most playful, and speak in myth. So, at times, would his interlocutors, most memorably at the Symposium and in the Timaeus. These “likely tales,” as Plato calls the creation myth of the latter dialogue, are intended not to replace hard reason, but to augment it, even to lift the hearer beyond it. Mythos does not muddy logos but elevates it closer to the place it cannot reach, engaging the vital faculty of imagination.
Such is the faculty which Plotinus invokes, particularly in Ennead 3.8, a discourse on contemplation. This he frames from the outset in terms of play. Strange though it may sounds, he says, he wants to play with idea that all things, even those lacking reason, strive for contemplation. He treats nature itself by analogy to a human craftsman. Plotinus is speaking here of nature as the principle of growth (physis is cognate with phuō, “I grow”) rather than red in tooth and claw. Although the artificer makes things by hand and guides the hand by reason, if he is capable of anything more than mere imitation, the shapes he forms come from some deeper and more inward faculty. Nature makes without reasoning, crafting or imitating at all, but by the same inward guiding principle as that which works in the depths of the human imagination. Nature’s gradual communication of form to matter is not willed or thought: it is closer, Plotinus suggests (3.8.4), to sleep, by which I take him as meaning the unwilled world of dreams. Rational thought is grounded not so much in a subconscious as a superconscious, active throughout all things, which can be accessed through contemplation. By this, I take Plotinus not to mean sitting for hours staring at a wall, so much as the recollection and retention of the natural, but largely lost, playful outlook on life which is natural to children.
This contemplative dimension of nature is analogous to God himself, whom Plotinus compares to a tree:
“Think of the Life coursing throughout some mighty tree while yet it is the stationary Principle of the whole, in no sense scattered over all that extent but, as it were, vested in the root: it is the giver of the entire and manifold life of the tree, but remains unmoved itself, not manifold but the Principle of that manifold life."
(tr. Stephen Mackenna)
Today may seem a strange one for playing among trees. Yet is not Good Friday also the story of a tree? Many of us will have sung the Pange Lingua of the sixth century hymnographer Venantius Fortunatus, including the verses:
Faithful Cross!
above all other,
one and only noble Tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
none in fruit thy peers may be;
sweetest wood and sweetest iron!
Sweetest Weight is hung on thee!
Yet this second tree is rooted in one far older:
Eating of the tree forbidden,
man had sunk in Satan's snare,
when our pitying Creator did
this second tree prepare;
destined, many ages later,
that first evil to repair.
To the literal minded, the Cross is of course not a tree, but was only made from one. A more ancient and expansive imagination connected the Cross directly to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, even claiming that the Cross was made from the wood of that very tree, requested by Seth from the angel who guarded the gate of Eden. Before we scoff, we may gain from entering the imagination and playing with that myth a while.
Some see the Fall and the Cross primarily in their tragic dimensions, thinking that God, like Zeus in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (176ff.), τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοῦς ὁδώσαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν, “setting mortals on the path to understanding ... made it law to learn by suffering.” Adam’s story is one of hubris and inevitable downfall, a justification for the fundamental absurdity of life in the face of death and evil. The Cross is then the machina of the tragic stage ex qua Deus descendit in a sort of cosmic rescue mission. Whether one reads the Tree and the Cross with bare-bones literalism or as completely allegorical, the relationship of the two to one another and indeed to history is equally tenuous. Neither Tree nor Cross is strictly necessary to the nature of things nor to their salvation: on the purely literalist reading, they are simply the vehicles God willed, and He might equally have chosen different ones; on the purely allegorical reading, they are symbols, perhaps the best available, but theoretically interchangeable with others that convey the same meaning. Both readings are rationalist, and fit with some of the more forensic understandings of the atonement.
Yet if we follow the ancients and put the wood of the singular tree at the centre of the story, the tragedy yields to something more like a fairytale. I mean this not in a derogatory sense but in that of a story of transformation mediated, in many cases, by a magical object. Here we have a magical tree, universally regarded as a symbol of life, growth, and right order, rooted in the dark waters of the fertile earth yet ever reaching for the light and warmth above. Adam and Eve live in the shade of its boughs, made for nothing but play with all of God’s good things. It is beautiful, and they can look upon it, contemplate it, for elsewhere they have fruits enough to eat. But that is not enough for them. They want to know the rules. And so by breaking off its fruit, they break the dream and spoil the game; its sweet juices give them a taste for things they cannot stomach. Yet that selfsame tree would be the antidote to its own poison. Legend has it that the wood of that tree was used for the staff on which the bronze serpent was raised in the wilderness; and later, that by the black fruit of Christ’s body hanging from it, the forked tongue’s promise of life abundant would finally, despite its speaker’s intent, prove true. No deus ex machina, no rival to Zeus’ power suspended from a cunning frame: the same one God, the same one tree.
As Christians kiss the wood of the Cross on Good Friday, held by a priest in vestments redolent of Christ’s blood or of the blackness of mourning, we may fall into the trap of thinking that our story, the Christian story, is a tragedy. It is not. The Tree brought death and suffering into the world, and Christ suffered and died upon it, yes. But the same tree flowers into the abundance of the Resurrection. In the self-emptying of Christ upon the Cross is the fullness of life. Hence English speakers call this Friday “Good.” It is grave, yes, the remembrance of the pain and suffering of one man which invokes our own and that of our war-torn world. Yet in the gravity is merriness. Not frivolity, not a callous toying with life or a delusional inoculation against pain, but that merry-grave sensibility of the One who yields everything in the firm knowledge that there is so much more. For life is not fundamentally absurd; the absurdity is only incidental. Life is fundamentally good, for it is a sharing in the goodness of its giver.
I hardly need point out the darkness of the day. It saddens me deeply that the Church is so clouded with it. Conservatives and liberals alike vent bitterness and frustration at one another, feeling besieged. Activists on both sides have entrenched angrily in convention, using canon law or safeguarding guidelines as weapons to crush dissent and exclude unwanted opinions. Liturgy descends into crass pedagogy, overexplaining and patronising, or being turned to some political end. New conventions of language are established and imposed to mark out the enlightened. The game is lost in disputes over rules.
This is not the Church I knew and loved. It is a church that, like the world, has forgotten how to play. But we must not let our imaginations be confined to the dimensions of a gloss-black screen. We must not be blinded by a crass materialism to the transcendent goodness that animates the world and all its people, even those we do not like. We do not need a proliferation of liturgical innovations conformed to the hectoring narrowness of clerical committees’ choice political convictions. We need the old game we know so well, so naturally, that the rules need no explaining. We need the expansive rites broad and familiar enough to let the mind adventure, not the trap of weekly changing photocopies and tedious rehearsals of call and response. We need more time in church, and less time meeting about church – which, after all, leaves more time for the pub.
And above all, on Good Friday, we need to re-enter the dream of the Rood. For:
The Son was successful in that journey,
mighty and victorious, when he came with a multitude,
a great host of souls, into God’s kingdom,
the one Ruler almighty, the angels rejoicing
and all the saints already in heaven
dwelling in glory, when almighty God,
their Ruler, returned to his rightful home.(The Dream of the Rood, Tr. Roy Liuzza)