BOOKS
Saving Paradise,
an excerpt from Rita Nakashima Brock
Excerpts from her book with Rebecca Parker, Beacon Press, forthcoming Spring 2007
For the first thousand years of
Christian art, Jesus Christ was not
depicted dead. Why not? Initially,
we didn't believe it could be true. Surely,
the art historians who reported this fact
were wrong. The crucified Christ was
too important to Western Christianity. How
could it be that images of Jesus' death
were absent from first millennium
churches?
The death of Jesus, it
seemed, was not a
touchstone of meaning, not
an image of devotion, not a
ritual symbol of faith for
the Christians who
worshipped in the
churches of early
Christianity. The Christ
they worshipped was the
incarnate, risen Christ, the
Lord of life.
Like most western
Christians we were
accustomed to images of a
Christ who died in agony,
hanging dead on the
cross. We had been taught
in church and in graduate
school that Christians
believed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ
saved the world and that this idea was
the core truth of Christian faith. In our
book Proverbs of Ashes we showed how
this idea contributed to sanctioning
intimate violence and war by claiming the highest form of love was self-sacrifice,
modeled by Jesus on the cross.
We regard such theology as a travesty - a
poisoning of souls to acquiesce to evil. It
is also a theological justification for
God's use of violence to save the
world. We found nothing life-giving or
redeeming in a theology that sanctified
the torture and execution of Jesus as
God's will. Even so, we were unprepared
for the possibility that Christians did not
focus on the death of Jesus for a
thousand years.
After our investigation of early Christian
art and research into art history, we
stepped back, astonished at the weight
of the reality: Jesus crucified was just not
there.
Only after it registered on
us that the crucifixion was
absent did we begin to
pay attention to what was
present in first millennium
churches. The
images were
beautiful. Worship spaces
placed Christians in a lush
visual environment. They
prayed and processed in
their churches,
surrounded by a cosmos
of stars in night skies,
sparkling rivers, and
exuberant fauna and flora.
These images penetrated
our consciousness until, at
last, we understood: We
stood in paradise.
The paradise we saw was not an
imaginary, idealized afterlife, not a
perfect world. It was, in fact, often
rather homely and ordinary in its
loveliness, life depicted with irregular
forms and rough edges. Nor was it a
return to a primordial Garden of Eden,
though its best features resembled the
Genesis descriptions of creation at its
dawn. It was something else. It was
paradise as this world, permeated and blessed by the presence of God. Divine
power illuminated ordinary life from
within. The images of paradise captured
the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape
and agricultural fecundity of the
Mediterranean world. In landscapes of
flowers, trees, and birds, fed by the four
rivers of paradise, departed apostles and
saints stood serenely, clothed in white
robes of glory.
Early theologians reasoned that God had
created the garden on the earth and it
was found here in this world. Through
baptism, Christians entered the church, "the paradise in this world. Sanctified
souls lived in a transfigured world and
found paradise there. Paradise was the
earth filled with the Spirit of God that
was breathed on all creation in Genesis
1—the same Spirit Jesus Christ later
bequeathed to the church. Paradise was
not heaven. The divine realm of heaven
was remote, mysterious, in the sky,
where God dwelt with the angels. The
paradise garden was created on the earth
from the materials of creation, or so
Augustine asserted in his third
commentary on Genesis. Joy and
wonder seeped into a world afflicted
with violence and sorrow. Life, granted
through the re-birth of baptism,
encompassed death and overcame it.
Paradise was especially in the church,
where a great cloud of witnesses who
had passed through the curtain of death
returned to bless their communities. The
paradise of the dead was not a place
removed from paradise on earth.
Physical death separated the departed
from the living, but it was a gossamer
golden curtain, strong enough to keep
Satan from passing through, but sheer
enough for prayers to seep across and
for the dead to visit in dreams and
visions to bless the living. Paradise was
infused by a life-giving power, one that could outlast the betrayals, denials,
despair, violence, and sorrows inflicted
by political might—the power of love,
the Holy Spirit of God.
In the cross-cultural inter-religious brew
that produced early Christianity, the
assurance of paradise in this world was
an inebriating grace, a life-giving recipe
drawn from many ancient sources.
Christians believed the spiritual journey
was not toward greater innocence and
purity, but toward a complex
understanding of the forces of life, an
understanding they called wisdom, Sophia, and its fruits were works of love,
a passion for justice, an appreciation of
beauty, the discernment of the spirit in
the world, and the embrace of this world
as good, as blessed.
This life-affirming sensibility began to
fade in Western Europe with the collapse
of the Roman Empire and the
unpredictable violence that escalated in
the seventh and eighth centuries.
Paradise was shifted into the afterlife.
Western Christianity transferred
salvation from incarnation,
transfiguration, and resurrection to
crucifixion, judgment, and the
destruction of this world. The hunger for
paradise lingered after it was displaced
by crucifixion. By the time Columbus
crossed the Atlantic, Western
Christianity had replaced paradise with
purgatory.
Abolition, women's suffrage movement,
the Social Gospel, the Civil Rights
movement, anti-war movements, and
liberation theology sought justice and
peace in this life, not salvation in the
next. Learning about pre-medieval
paradise offers us clues to what is
missing and what is necessary to the
renewal of a life-affirming faith today,
faith grounded in Sophia. And that faith
is sorely needed right now!
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Rita Nakashima Brock is an award-winning author, and a respected international lecturer and scholar who worked for two decades as a professor of religion. From 1997-2001, Dr. Brock directed the Fellowship Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, formerly known as the Bunting Institute, one of the nation’s premiere research institutes for women, called “America’s think tank for women” by the Boston Globe. From 2001-2002, she was a Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School.
Among her books are Journeys By Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power, Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States, and Proverbs of Ashes. Her current book project is Saving Paradise, forthcoming in the spring of 2007.
For more information on her current book project check, out her website www.faithvoices.org/programs/paradise.html
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