The Force of Nature

Ministerial Meandering

The force of nature

‘Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law -

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek'd against his creed -’

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1850 elegy, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ was written for his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died aged 22 in Vienna of a cerebral haemorrhage.  It ‘soothed and pleased’  Queen Victoria, and gave her much solace after the Prince Consort Albert’s death, possibly from typhoid fever, (though other diagnoses have been postulated).

It cannot be that we should pass by the most dramatic event in the church’s calendar without consideration of how Jesus must have viewed the savagery of his own torture and death.

I choose to engage with Tennyson’s poem because apart from it being an elegy, a requiem, and a dirge for a friend, a time, and a place, ‘In Memoriam’ also explores the random cruelty of Nature seen from the conflicting perspectives of materialist science and declining Christian faith in the Victorian era (1837–1901).  

This could as easily be today; only yesterday I watched a debate between a Christian theologian and apologist, and a confirmed atheist.  The arguments do not seem to have materially changed in the last 200 years.  It is worth noting, however, that Tennyson’s poem was written nine years before Charles Darwin published his ‘Origin of Species’.

If we are to properly enter into the reported words of Jesus from the Cross, it would be hard not to identify with his despair of abandonment in his cry of ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’  But this had to be so, for if, at the moment of his death, he suddenly appeared embodied with superhuman strength and resolve - who would believe he was ever human?

This, of course, was the premise put forward by the Gnostic movement that reached a peak in the mid-2nd century, holding that In the Gnostic Christian tradition, Christ was seen as a divine being that had taken human form in order to lead humanity back to recognition of its own divine nature.  The early Church Fathers refuted such heresy, and the movement gained little traction, though it hung around for many centuries.  There was a brief revival of interest in 1945 following the discovery of Egypt's Nag Hammadi library, a collection of rare early Christian and Gnostic texts. 

But I don’t want to plague you with ancient history - particularly of heretical ideas - especially in this Holy Week when what is essential is to recognise the humanity of Jesus.  Every moment of his remaining hours of life, from the end of his last supper with his friends and disciples, would have reinforced for him the truth of Tennyson’s view of the bloody brutality of ‘natural man’; each swing of the scourge, each rip of his flesh, each strike of a fist, each thud of a nail - reminded him of what he had come to save.  No wonder he said, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’

He was right - but only in one sense - and that they would learn later who they had put to death.  But he was wrong - in that they knew exactly what they were doing - because it came ‘naturally’ to them.

Tennyson’s conclusion, which deserves inclusion here, reveals his progress from doubt and despair to faith and hope:-

‘No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.’

Philip+