Taming Leviathan

On Baptism

Thou shalt shew us wonderful things in thy righteousness, O God of our salvation :
thou that art the hope of all the ends of the earth, and of them that remain in the broad sea.

Who stilleth the raging of the sea :
and the noise of his waves, and the madness of the people.

– Psalm 65.5, 7

Dragons without…

In Job 40, we meet one of the stranger creatures of the biblical bestiary: Leviathan. She features in the stories of the Canaanite cult of Baal as a vast she-serpent beneath the sea, whose undulations stir the waves and raise storms. The Baal-worshippers spoke of their god taming her, but the God of Israel claims that victory for His own. He asks Job who it was who mastered Leviathan, who put a ring through her nose, who plays with her as with a bird. The dragon the Baalites feared is reduced to the status of a playful pet, nothing for us to fear at all. So a sailor’s much-loved Psalm of the sea sings of “that Leviathan, whom Thou hast made to play therein” (Ps 104:26).

Christ too was known to tame the waters, and by extension, all that dwells within them. His followers, grafted to Him, would have power over the serpents, a power linked with healing and spiritual warfare in the contested verses towards the end of St Mark’s Gospel:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

– Mark 16:17-18

Hence in later days, tales of saints and various reptilian entities abound. St Patrick is reputed to have driven the snakes out of Ireland. In some versions of his tale, St George did not kill the dragon, but tamed it, leading it through the streets of the city by the offered princess’ girdle. Like God Himself, such saints are not so much dragon-slayers as dragon-tamers.

…dragons within.

This bears closely connected metaphysical and spiritual senses. On the metaphysical level, from the beginning of the Bible, water means chaos and destruction, but also the potential for creativity and life. The Father speaks His Divine Word, “let there be light,” and breathes His Spirit over the void, shedding forth the spiritual beam that casts the darkness into discrete shadows, brings things out of no-thing, draws meaning out of the tumult. The descent of the Logos into the waters imbues mass and energy with the information that defines and delineates beings in all our complexity, harmony and order.

And yet, beneath the surface, the sea still swells, hidden, and within it wild things move. The water is the home of serpents, dragons, Leviathan and her kin, fallen down below from the heavenly waters above the firmament. I speak here of fallen angels, the fiery, snake-like seraphim who guard the throne of the Most High. A serpent slips even into Eden, threatening that strong mountain’s peace with the disorder of the abyss. Through that subtle dragon’s work, Adam and Eve are sent down the mountain, barred from re-ascent, pushed closer to the danger of the salt and waves.

From the wood on the water…

For ten generations, man continues his wilful descent, until God tires of holding back the waters. Unleashed, they wash away the detritus, making the land ready for a new creation, contained in microcosm in a wooden ark. Noah and his wife, last living bearers of the Logos in their day, steer the way to safety. But it is God’s Word alone who can bid the waves subside. Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Elijah, Elisha and Jonah, too, will pass through many waters at God’s Word, leading nations to repentance and new lives: the spiritual aspect of the metaphysical truth. Hence in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, their stories are rehearsed at the baptismal font in the following, sublime prayer:

Almighty and everlasting God, who of thy great mercy didst save Noah and his family in the ark from perishing by water; and also didst safely lead the children of Israel thy people through the Red Sea, figuring thereby thy holy Baptism; and by the Baptism of thy well-beloved Son Jesus Christ, in the river Jordan, didst sanctify the element of water to the mystical washing away of sin: We beseech thee, for thine infinite mercies, that thou wilt mercifully look upon these thy servants; wash them and sanctify them with the Holy Ghost; that they, being delivered from thy wrath, may be received into the ark of Christ's Church; and being stedfast in faith, joyful through hope, and rooted in charity, may so pass the waves of this troublesome world, that finally they may come to the land of everlasting life, there to reign with thee world without end, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Each of these stories is a fractal, non-identical repetition of the other. They are connected to one another and resemble one another as branches are connected to and resemble the tree from which they stem. Such is the pattern of biblical symbolism, stories within stories, because it is the pattern of all truth. The trunk of the tree, as it were, or the key to understanding these stories and the truth that each contains, is not found simply by chronology, by going back to the beginning with Genesis. God, after all, is beyond time. And in His due time, He revealed the fullness of this truth, the source code, the true myth that makes sense of all the others, through the Incarnation of the Divine Word in the person of Jesus Christ.

…the Logos dives in.

When the Divine Word enters the waters Himself, in human flesh, the serpents who dwell within know that their reign of chaos is soon to end. He enters first the waters of the Blessed Virgin’s womb, source of all life: the miracle of woman is that her body bounds the unboundable. When aged 30 Jesus was baptised, it was not a cleansing from sin, for He was sinless. Rather, it was a cleansing of the waters by His presence. The Logos Incarnate descending into the water was a non-identical repetition of the eternally begotten Logos’ prehistoric speaking into the deep. Later, He would show His mastery over the water many times: able to rest in a boat even through a storm at sea, He awoke and calmed it; once, He sent up schools of fish into the disciples’ dragnet; once, He walked over the waves.

The Word’s fullest and deepest submersion, the source of this line of aquatic code, was not into the waters of this world, but into the unfathomable abyss below. The Logos completed His descent not on the wood of the ark but from the wood of the Cross. He entered not into the mouth of a fish but that of the great Dragon himself, tricking the Devil and cutting Himself out from within, freeing those the Beast had consumed. The Descent of the Logos into Hell was the final victory of the forming, informing Word over incoherent babble, of harmony over tumult, of unity over division, of love over death. For it is by the Descent of the Logos that the Resurrection and Ascension of all creation was made possible, and the meaning of the world perfectly revealed.

To walk on the water…

We are confronted with chaos every time we open our front door, our mouths, our hearts. The chaos we see outside is a macrocosm of the chaos within. In your heart there is an ocean. Within us rage the waters, and we walk on them or drown. Beneath those waves swim serpents that must be confronted and tamed. To rise above and walk upon them we must be willing to descend. When Peter saw Jesus walking on the water, he thought that he could do the same:

And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased.

– Matthew 14:29-32

Peter’s descent would be hard when it came at cockcrow, but how far would he one day ascend. Not, though, by his own power, but by faith. Like Peter waving and drowning, we lack the strength to lift ourselves above the waters. It is vain to try either to descend or to ascend by ourselves. We need a guide. We need the Logos, the firm hand of Christ to guide us safely through; we need the hands of the saints whose hands hold His, like St Peter and St Patrick and St George, nodes in the vast net that upholds creation. We need, that is, the wood of the Cross and the wood of the great ship of the Church.

…you must be willing to drown.

This is why Christians are baptized. Our descent into the water is no mere outward rite of passage, a treat for babies and for ladies who like hats. Baptism is a drowning with Christ, a dying on the Cross, a descent into the abyss, a journey into the Dragon’s maw, a taming of the serpents that assail us. Hence the candidate for baptism promises to “renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh.”

That promise made, the priest prays a battle-prayer over them:

Grant that they may have power and strength, to have victory, and to triumph against the devil, the world, and the flesh. Amen.

Take courage. We fight the serpents not alone, but with all the Hosts of Heaven, led by our great general and Lord, Jesus Christ. And the fight continues when we emerge from the font, “regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ's Church.” Though the war is won and ended, enemies hide behind our lines for skirmish and for sabotage. Hence, the newly baptised receives upon the forehead:

The Sign of the Cross, in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his Banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier, and servant unto his life’s end.

So let the Logos lead.

When you hear the serpents’ sibilant whisper telling you that life is meaningless, when they sap your morale with disinformation and propaganda, when they sow the seeds of discontent and discord in your heart, have no fear. The louder they hiss, the more desperate they are. The saints laugh hardest when the Devil shows his hand. When you face those ancient dragons, call upon the Name of the Lord for help, the blessed Name of the Divine Logos Incarnate, Jesus Christ. For He alone has power to calm the madness of the people, the noise of the waves, and in His righteousness, He will show you wonderful things: even the Way,

being made the children of God and of the light by faith in Jesus Christ, to walk answerably to your Christian calling, and as becometh the children of light; remembering always, that Baptism representeth unto us our profession; which is, to follow the example of our Saviour Christ, and to be made like unto him…