The Things Above

Q-105 - 14th Dec 21 - Col  

Fr dear Fr: Could you explain as briefly as you can for an Indiana what the words of St Paul in the Letter to the Colossians actually mean, where in Ch 3:17 he speaks of "seeking the things that are from above, not the things of earth" - what does he mean by this sort of saying?

This very nice Question comes from up north in Leicestershire not far from the Oaks in Charnwood, a pleasant vale on the heights full of pleasant people including our own holy monks and our dear mentor Fr Theodore the Hermit and our old SD Fr Justin. The actual verse that the young man is looking for, a technician on aircraft, keeping us all alive when we fly abroad, is the verse at the beginning of the third chapter, at verse 2 rather than verse 17. It appears within an opening salvo true from the apostle to the gentiles in which he reminds the young fledgeling community that the resurrection of Christ is not just a once-off historical event in the dim and distant past but that it happens for each believer in the hic et nunc. They have all been resurrected morally with and within Christ and now must live righteously a resurrected life, not giving into the misdeeds of the old dead flesh they once enjoyed in the immoral lives of those regions of the Eastern Empire, and boy if Corinth the port is anything to go by, then those ports and cities were anything but moral. Eastern empires. Pretty sick even in Roman times. Xerxes in the modern and recent 300 Spartans movie being a visible case in point, well displayed by Hollywood as a pleasured plaything of dubious standing if he could stand at all.

So what is this authority or this power from above that the apostle to the gentiles refers to? Well it could be anything at first reading - since he was writing maybe to Jewish converts in the synagogues as was his wont at the early stage, then the hierarchy of the Jewish converts went to Antioch and Jerusalem and Alexandria, to those superior councils and sanhedrins. Since he could also have been writing to Greeks then that hierarchy might have included cities such as Thessalonika and Corinth and Athens at the time which the apostle thence visited. Or as it seemed also to have involved Roman citizens then that hierarchy of secular princes and governors might have included cities such as Brindisium and Latium and then Roma of course as the center of the ius gentium. A merely earthly authority in these senses seems to be excluded though, since it is quite obvious that the apostle is speaking of the resurrection and this seems to have been a trans-historical event transcending the limitations of the various individual empires of the Romans and the Greeks and even of the Hebrews - it is obviously something beyond those earthly hierarchies, an alternative society maybe that is made up of believers and martyrs and saints in the Colosseum and the like perhaps.

In the original Greek text of the New Testament, it is the place where Christ establishes his kathedra - his sedilla and throne of power, so yes, an alternative Christian society or kingdom or maybe even empire is being signalled here as seems to be hinted at elsewhere in Acts 17:7-8. Where this throne? Did the young resurrected Christos return to Egypt where he grew up and establish something there like a provisional throne or sedilla or defensive palace maybe in the ruins of Herod's palace in the desert of Sinai, recently vacated and part destroyed by Hercules the Zealot? Did Christ manage to establish another kingdom and another empire on earth that would be designed to survive the comings and goings of the Hebrew empire and the Greek empire and the Roman empire at this time? Were these the real reasons for the several visits of the young Christos to the Celtic Islands and Britannia of which we sing so much in these far distant isles in our several homages to Glastonbury and the Thorn of Arimathea? Wherever such a kingdom might lie, and we cannot exclude the plans of the resourceful young Christos at the time for another empire - maybe the Western Sea Empire that Patricius Romanus came across, the final answer to this intriguing and very apposite Question might not be nearly so physical or empirical or political even as we might think.

But in the Commentary of one of the great linguists of the Post-reformation world, that of the Rev Dr George Haydock on the Douai Rheims Bible, he takes a different non-geo-political angle, and he notes with some authority and force that here begins the great "moral instruction" of the Letter to the Colossians much after the manner of the Letter to the Ephesians, and it all hangs upon his remarks about the resurrected flesh of Jesus in which the individual convert believer now shares - as a consort to the divine nature -  conjointedly, consurrexistis in the Latin of Jerome - but the original Greek is ambiguous, it can mean if you have coresurrected TO Christ, as well as WITH Christ, then you must live for the things that are above with him, and so repudiate the old lives of the pagan temples around the ports here below. The deployment of the dative case here signals some sort of transition and journey and trajectory up above the plain of the visible confines of the human mordant flesh of this world. So the Apostles struggled hard to get the converts to leave aside the fleshly banquets of the pagan temples with the young priestesses promising communion with their local deity in return for some gold and silver as offerings at the temple shrines and flamines. Strong temptation indeed for what were in those days quite religious people, but easily duped by the young servitors of Isis and Serapis and Minerva.

So we might concur with the Rev Dr Haydock, and agree that this supernal authority, this search for the kingdom of higher things, higher values, is not to be found on earth - this is to be found in the supernatural domain of heaven evidently with the resurrected one on his throne. Authority for Christians lies elsewhere than here on a very empirical and sometimes empiricist earth. This cannot mean a sort of offworld supernaturalism with its disposal of all ties on earth to kith and kin or to family and friends and above all to patria, since after all, "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori", but it can mean that when we are evaluating our responses to patria, and the call to join armies in this present world, we might like to have one eye on the Resurrected Lord and then another on the demands of our country. Patria is important, everybody can read the inside pages of their passports for this sort of thing stated in black and white, or blue and white nowadays since the happy days of Brexit, but all to be evaluated intelligently and with one eye on the Resurrection of earthly flesh. "And in my flesh I shall see God", as Archbishop Kelly of Liverpool a major See used to put it, when preaching so ably at the Venerabile College in faraway places a long way from the hallowed halls and pillars of Mt St Bernard Cistercian Monastery deep within the National Forest near Sherwood.