It's easy to be more spiritual than God.
A central text for "Good Friday," celebrated a little over a month from today, is "The veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." [*] This is said to have occurred at the moment of Jesus Christ's death on the cross.
The veil in question was a large curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple in Jerusalem. The Holy of Holies was the temple's most sacred part, believed to be the earthly dwelling place of God's presence. According to Jewish law, only the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies. The tearing of the temple veil meant bridging the divide between the sacred and the secular. All people have access to God, "saints and sinners," not just the elect, the elite, or those deemed worthy—a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. (If the word "God" gets in your way, as a contemporary hymn puts it, "Bring many names, beautiful and good." Initially, the name "God" was considered too holy to utter; to this day, many observant Jews write G-D.)
The veil torn in two brings to mind two heresies representative of the dualism in the early Church: Donatism and Marcionism. Both express kinds of dualism that separate God and humanity. For them, the veil of the temple is not torn in two. Donatism emphasized the church's purity and a clear divide between the "pure" and the "impure," the virtuous and the sinful, with the latter excluded from church membership. Marcionism revered two distinct gods: a lower deity who had created an evil, material world and a separate, higher, loving God who created a good, spiritual realm.
The irony here is that the logic of purity and exclusion is unsustainable and, ultimately, splinters, giving birth to its own form of diversity that, in turn, sees the Other as a threat. As the critic Terry Eagleton said about fundamentalism of any stripe, "Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition of those who do not see that roughness is not a defect of human existence, but what makes it work." The Creation story says we were created in the image of God from dirt, not pixie dust.
Old dualisms of purity and exclusion persist, often reinforced by religion: body/mind, material/spiritual, secular/sacred, nature/grace, holy/profane. Etc. "The veil of the temple torn in two" means that while both sides are still separate, there is no barrier between them — not no difference, no barrier. As an earlier text says, "The sun shines on the just and the unjust." Everything is grace; grace means undeserved favor (what did we do to deserve life?). The ultimate is intimate, as close as our next breath. Earth and heaven meet. "Every common bush is afire with God, but only those who see take off their shoes; the rest sit around it and pluck blackberries."
A common tendency is to create a false divide between the spiritual and the physical. In Jesus, God is shown to be down to earth, "flesh of our flesh, bone of our bones." The body is holy; the material is spiritual; the ordinary is sacred. Irenaeus, an early Church leader, said, "The glory of God is humanity fully alive." Grace is motivation to work for justice and confront evil, offering strength to the sufferer as well as an opportunity to display love and understanding towards others.
Much of what causes bitterness and division today is reminiscent of the earlier dualisms of Donatism and Marcionism. The Donatist separation of the "pure" and the "impure," the virtuous and the sinful, is endlessly reflected in the "holier than thou" movements of reformers, whether religious or political, which divide the world into narrow definitions of "us" vs. "them. The Marcionite separation of the spiritual from the material echoes in the "mind over matter" appeal of pop psychology, the "name it and claim it" Prosperity Gospel, and the positive thinking industry.
Contrary to dualisms old and new, and in the spirit of Irenaeus, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins concludes his sonnet, "God's Grandeur," writing,
"All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
"And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."
Notes
"The glory of God is humanity fully alive." Irenaeus, written around 180 C.E. in Against Heresies, Book 4, 20:7.
{ * } "The veil of the temple..." - Matthew 27:50-51). Similar accounts are given in Mark 15 and Luke 23.
"Bring Many Names" - Brian Wren, hymn - Congregational minister, poet, and hymn writer (1986).
Donatism, Marcionism - The Cambridge History of Christianity (Volume 2) - Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris (2014).
"The irony here..." - Thanks for this observation, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Twitter (X) - February 17, 2024.
"Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition..." - Terry Eagleton, "Pedants and partisans," The Guardian (February 22, 2003).
"God's Grandeur" - Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985). Written in 1877 and published posthumously in 1918.
Other
"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses." - C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory cited in "Shine As the Sun: C.S. Lewis and the Doctrine of Deification" - A Journal of Christian Scholarship (October 31, 2007).
"Why We Need Maurice Blondel" - Oliva Blanchette, Boston College, former president of the Metaphysical Society of America - Communio 38 (Spring 2011). "In a world where the secular and the religious, the human and the divine, still seem at odds with one another, we could say that we still need Blondel's help to work through this crisis in our own historical consciousness."
"The Benedict Option or the Augustinian Call?" - James K.A, Smith, Comment (March 16, 2017). "The Augustinian counsel of stability is an admonishment to stay in the mix of things, among those in error—to inhabit our callings in the mixed-up-ness of the time between cross and kingdom come."