Theological Reflections From A Greek Pilgrimage

 

My wife Zosia and I have just spent nearly two weeks travelling over 1200 miles around Greece. We set out to have an exhilarating, spiritual, theological and philosophical adventure - following in St. Paul's theological footsteps in some places (Corinth, Thessaloniki, Philippi, Veria, Kavala), following in Greece's rich historical and cultural footsteps in other places (Meteora, Drama, Pella, Mount Olympus, Preveza), and fulfilling both criteria in our visit to Athens.

We invited God in at every step to feed into our journey, fill us with more of Himself, and enhance our wisdom with every passing mile. He most certainly obliged - in fact, it's highly unlikely that one can embark on such a spiritual adventure with hunger, good intentions and an open heart, and not come away fed, blessed and fulfilled. That which we give to God in dedication, He gives back to us to an immeasurably greater degree.

Below is a reflection of some of the things I captured along the way, in this quest for nourishment on our pilgrimage. A small confession - as a writer, I did, of course, take my note book and pen, enchanted by the prospect of jotting things down profound wisdom like an ancient scribe - but the reality is, what was captured below was done so on the voice recorder and camera on my mobile phone. The ancient and the contemporary crossed paths, blended through the long passing of time.

Adventures of the kind we had, teach us about the new things contained in the adventure, but they also teach us new things about the life we've temporarily left behind - rather like how eating another nation's cuisine heightens our appreciation for our own national cuisine at the same time, or how reading literature teaches us important things about reading philosophy too (and vice-versa). Rudyard Kipling once said “What do they know of England, who only England know?”, and what he meant was, not only do you not know much of other countries if you only know England - you don't know so much of England either without knowing other countries with which to make comparisons. Travelling helps us understand the destinations better, but it also helps us understand our homeland better - and that can be extended into our psychological, philosophical and spiritual endowments too.

In some ways, the Greeks are so much more laid back about rules - it's a more liberating place than Britain, and hasn't yet been infected by the many cultural viruses that have plagued the UK. But it's less liberating in some senses too; for example, it has a very religious attitude to church buildings - you can't walk in to a church without the right coverings, especially if you're female. Greek orthodoxy and some of the Catholic tradition is mired in religiosity, and it heightened my appreciation for freer expressions of the faith found in countries like ours, where dogma has not ossified the faith in as many places.

In a monastery in Meteora, I read a sign that proudly stated that every year on Holy Saturday, for two millennia, the Holy Light is miraculously lit by lightning inside the Holy Sepulchre, and only of course in the presence of the Greek orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, to symbolise the resurrection of Christ. I do not believe a word of it. I think God neither endorses this nor deigns Himself to perform miracles during conditions under which such poorly motivated mechanical proclamations are at play. It reeks of false attestations made because the spiritual well of grace theology has dried up. Britain may not be half as religious as Greece, but for now the Christianity it does have seems for the most part to be suffused with grace as the pivot around which the power of the gospel revolves.

Walking around some places in Greece, taking pictures with modern mobile technology that the ancients couldn't possibly have conceived, gave me a sense that there are ways in which not much had changed in cultural pockets of Greece for hundreds of years. We are tendentious creatures; we often prefer to stick to the comfort zones. But it ought to be mentioned – even the great dramatists like Herodotus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus all at first seem ponderous to the boy who has only read Roald Dahl and Hans Christian Anderson, and even, perhaps, Oscar Wilde. And the comparison works at an extra level of significance too, because the Greek tragedies, set in a backdrop of cultural, political and military power, and colonialism, and cultural identity bring forth their slowness in being only a substitute for something better (as shown by the cultural worshipping of Dionysus – who had the exotic womanliness akin to the motherliness of bonding sacrificial love). In dramatisations of the tragedies on stage, the actors wore masks, and the masks transformed the actors in a similar way to how the masks of works transform our true identities as creatures liberated under grace. 

There is a reason why Christ talked of bringing not peace but a sword, and why He said conflicts were inevitable, and why He reiterated that He has come to divide families. I do not think it is simply because He knew that many would reject His gospel of grace, or that we would be forever falling out over how best to go about our business. I think it is because He knew that although life is lived forwards, it is only reviewed backwards with retrospect - and it is with such retrospection we are able to see that God never wanted homogeneity. Our very uniqueness in mental composition and in cultural influence is precisely what makes the reaching of our full potential so full of wonder, as we journey through the stages of growth. 

Herodotus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus only seem ponderous to the populist, not because easy fixes on Oscar Wilde are a bad thing (in many ways one could make a decent case that Oscar Wilde is better than all four), but because at our worst we can be so busy with our own masks on that we remain inattentive to where those tragedies lead us to when we are incarcerated in a cultural stasis, worshipping gods and images that were no more exalted than their best thinkers, and in many cases, worse.

I captured this photo as we were driving through Macedonia, because it brought to mind a line from C.S Lewis from his Surprised By Joy: "To prefer my own happiness to my neighbour's was like thinking that the nearest telegraph post was really the largest."

For sheer natural gravitas, I think Mount Olympus was the most stunning place we visited - so named because, being the tallest mountain, it's the place where the Greeks thought the 12 Olympian gods lived. Made up gods don't live anywhere, of course, whereas the one true God lives everywhere (Psalm 139: 7-12) - and that is the power and spirit we took to the mountain. As we made our way up to the highest points accessible by car, I reflected on my past writing about how our ideas about multiple gods evolved into ideas about one God. The multiple gods the Greeks (and Romans, Scandinavians, etc) created over time represented the best and worst of our ideas about higher order values, and we began to refine them as we subjected them to a natural selection kind of filter, which inevitably led to the dying out of these invented gods.

As well as the rise of Christianity, the principal thing, I think, is that the gods of the Greeks were so obviously gods made in man’s image. Greek gods were in every way simulations of what the imagination can sense about the self if we are left to our own devices. Like us, they were on the most human of levels – their gods were often uncharitable, insensitive, base, incorrigibly proud, far too animalistic to be considered Divine, and nowhere near beautiful or numinous or ineffable enough to be worthy of our awe and worship. This gives them poor evolvability, because when subjected to selection pressure, humans will usually outgrow their deference to made up creatures and recognise these qualities in other humans instead. Many thousands of other gods and religions (although sadly, not all) went the same way for the same kind of reasons – the concepts associated with the ideas lost out to competing ideas, be they religious or non-religious.

The most rewarding part of Olympus was the secret waterfall we discovered. It was also the hardest place to reach, requiring a concerted effort on foot to get there. This, of course, is true of nearly all of the most rewarding pursuits in life - the things that are most worth discovering are the things that take the most effort to acquire.

 

As we visited the ancient ruins of Corinth and Philippi, and sensed St. Paul's influence there, I also felt myself moved with the regard for the struggles the early Christians endured for our sake in influencing the dissemination of the word. It is good to reflect on such matters, and clothe ourselves in humility and gratitude as we do so. We can also celebrate the fact that although the church throughout its early years endured severe persecution at the hands of both the Jews and the Romans, it flourished and grew rapidly. When we look at the Christians persecuted after the resurrection; under such conditions there were few earthly benefits for them for their unfeigned allegiance to Christ, only the cause of grace that they believed in. They were locked up, beaten and tortured, but still did not renounce their faith in Jesus as God, because they were stalwarts – real warriors for Christ and people who deserve our respect, our admiration, and our remembrance. They believed in the profound message of grace that would put right the wrongs of Roman oppression (a notion which quite a few Romans actually embraced).

Greece is steeped in Roman influence, of course, especially in terms of the influence Rome had on Christendom. If you are familiar with Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you can see parallels between the historical decline and the socio-cultural declension of the grace theology that should bootstrap the faith. Gibbon’s thesis is that the Roman Empire succumbed to external and internal sanguinary conflicts (including the degeneracy of the Roman army and the Praetorian guards) and its own gradual diminution because of loss of civic virtue among its citizens. The fall of the Empire, just like the fall of humankind, is not God’s primary dispensation – fallenness seems to be part of nature’s quintessence, as the true riches of God’s plans are played out in the poorness of a broken world. It seems to take a world of fallenness to see a world full of grace, which is what St. Paul writes about so comprehensively in his epistle to the Romans.

The other work that strikes a symbolic chord here is also Roman; it is Dante’s brilliant exposition of his own journey in Divine Comedy, journeying through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven towards our Triune God. Just as in the Psalms of lament (such as Psalm 12 where the Psalmist is bemoaning ungodliness, or Psalm 74 where the Psalmist is bemoaning a malcontent towards God Himself), God remains our the last refuge, because every part of our love and our virtue steers us towards Him – His feet and arms carry where ours are in despair, and dejection cannot even lift us off of our knees. And if He will lead us back into a standing position, fortified and consolidated in our readiness to progress, then He will put us right back on course with beatific visions, just as Christ did. The real secret wisdom in Dante choosing Beatrice (Beatific) to guide him through Heaven seems to me to be this; in being his ideal woman she must have most closely resembled the bride that he wanted to be. As a bride of Christ, she was the embodiment of the bride that he wanted to capture in himself (Revelation 18:23).

If Dante’s inferno was about our seeing sin for what it really is, then heaven must be our seeing what supreme grace really is. The in between “Mountain of Purgatory” is a brilliant allegorical depiction of the psychology of getting to know the first hints of grace theology by confronting the darkest that is in us. If the freely given cross of Christ is the answer to nature’s need of love and grace, and its encouragement to play a part in our own administering of the best love and grace we can, then our being brides of Christ is the security that underwrites that mission. In the words of Dante, the desires and the will are…

Being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
By the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

At the end of Divine Comedy, when Dante meets St. Peter and St. John, we get to understand something so inherently absent in Greek orthodoxy; we cannot easily express our deepest intuitions about grace because we are only sampling its true fullness. Legalism and stuffy religiosity is myopic to the fact that grace is the most liberating thing of all (John 8:31-32 - "the truth will set you free") - and consequently, the real power of grace can only be fully understood in relation to a perfect God who revealed grace in the mystery of Christ's simultaneous divinity and humanity – only by trying to grasp that with the help of the Holy Spirit can we become aligned with God's supreme grace.

This is a significant part of the influence driving my desire for following in Paul's footsteps in Greece and Rome (I aspire to go to Ephesus too in the future). Where Dante seems to find the greater refuge in meeting St. Peter and St. John, my own gravitation was always more forcefully pulled towards St. Paul – for I think he is the greatest Christian explicator who has ever lived. His epistles take the Divine level of Jesus (through St. Paul’s own encounter with the Holy Spirit), and the human level of Jesus (through St. Paul’s own humility, weakness and suffering) to convey the most advanced and enlightened grace theology ever written. 

Contained within St. Paul’s epistles, we find not just the greatest explicator of grace that we have ever seen, we find a mind hugely tormented and assailed by the world outside of him – a mind of devotion that was able to disconnect him from the faults and weaknesses of others in order that he could counsel them best and serve their needs by using his own strength in Christ as a bridge to grace. One of the best examples of this is his approach in Areopagus - a place that we had the pleasure of visiting - where Greek philosophy had a huge hold on the people there – a place of strong intellectual vigour and a legacy of philosophical wisdom. St. Paul begins by bringing together the virtues of mankind by praising them for being worshipfully inclined, but he then proffers the suggestion that what draws a man towards worship must be greater than anything humans can construct:

"Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands."

Although human virtue is the first step of a good conceptual footing – its goodness is relative to the God behind this grace theology – and the mind of St. Paul probably understood that better than anyone. His greatest thinking led him to see that no earthly richness could compare to knowing Christ, as he rightly considered everything else a loss when compared with knowing Christ. He powerfully declared that that neither earth nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord – and this is the ultimate grace theology – the best the world has ever known. 

Given the foregoing, standing on Areopagus hill was one of my personal highlights on the trip.

I imagined Paul preaching there to the masses steeped in Greek philosophy - and having read the works of Aristotle and Plato in the past - I can well imagine their reaction was not exactly very positive. Nevertheless, St. Paul was at pains to point out that grace extends to everyone – there are no philosophical hoops to jump through because recognition of grace is recognition of Christ’s expression, both human and Divine - and that is what Divine inclusion is. Perhaps at a subliminal level the Pagan (and the atheist in general) has to 'hope' in the absence of faith, and the Christian 'trusts' in the absence of unbelieving 'hope'. Maybe that's why Zeus left "hope" at the bottom of Pandora's Box - seeing it as shaving off trust and leaving hope that one's future is in one's control and not the gods. St. Paul was delighted to put his life in Christ’s control, and that is where we know true blessedness will be achieved. 

It also serves a good reminder that theology is a formal subject to us moderns, but it wasn't so much to Paul - it was a mission, a state of necessary being, in order for the gospel to be propagated - just like, to the physicist, componential study of light reveals transportations of energy through electromagnetic radiation; but to the 1st century man lost in the forest at night, the flame on his candle is seen only as the source of the way out. 

Areopagus hill has another important place in my heart, as it was also the influence of Areopagitica, the great work by John Milton - and possibly the best book ever on free speech and freedom of expression. Milton lays down the edict about the necessity of having a free press, the liberty to not be silenced or censored, and the wisdom that people who try to impede the freedom of expression in others harm themselves too, because they rob themselves of the ability to hear and think.

By the time we had visited Athens, I acquired another strong sense of how God was speaking to us on this pilgrimage. We felt so close to Him throughout the adventure, and we sensed a profound level of favour in everything we did - in all the little details of our journey, from public transport arriving just when we needed it to be, to favourable weather, to room upgrades, to all the right people being there just when we needed them. I believe God wanted to remind us how much favour there is in drawing near to Him. Favour of this kind doesn't mean everything will always go exactly as we think we want it to go, but it does mean that everything will always go exactly as we need it to go in order for God to ultimately bless us and teach us what we need to learn.

I'm sure that this pilgrimage has opened doors for God to speak to us in new ways, and a short piece like this is quite inadequate to the task of capturing the full essence of what God has said to us, and plans to do further within us. For quite often, we find that the most powerful ways that God connects with us are beyond the scope of our own articulation. And we all know too that the surest way to undermine something satisfying is to try to break it down into constituent analyses. Introspection aimed at joy and pleasure only leaves us with the by-product, not the thing in itself - like the ripples in the river after the current hits the rock.

We planned and researched this trip ourselves, and as such, we spanned the entire country with a sense of freedom and liberation, entirely open to what God wanted to do in us and through us on this pilgrimage. I sense that on top of what I've conveyed above, further seeds have been planted that will bear more fruit in the future. For anyone inclined to embark on a similar journey of this kind, I cannot recommend it enough. Apart from maybe a trip to the Holy Land of Israel, a spiritual pilgrimage in Greece in the footsteps of St. Paul is perhaps the most rewarding excursion a Christian can make.