Advent 1: 28th November, 1999
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden, St Peter's Eastern Hill
Ours is the crowning era foretold in prophecy:
Born of Time, a great new cycle of centuries
Begins. Justice returns to earth, the Golden Age
Returns, and its first-born comes down from heaven above . .
Look . . . upon this infant's birth,
For with him shall hearts of iron cease, and hearts of gold inherit the whole
earth . . .
Even before we get to it, I'm tired of Christmas already, and have at last
decided to become New Age and search for spirituality not in scripture but in
the classical Latin poet Virgil, whom I have just quoted. And yet even my
passage from Virgil's fourth Eclogue might sound a little familiar: some will
recognise a similiarity to a few lines of the carol 'It Came upon the Midnight
Clear', whose writer was more familiar with Virgil than have been most of those
who have subsequently sung that carol. This morning, we are going to have what
might appear at first to be an excursion into the classics, instead of a
sermon.
Sibyl: a woman whose every word is a portent of disaster. This definition of
sibyl (my own) might be one with which Basil Fawlty would agree
whole-heartedly; but this rather narrow definition applies to more people who
have been referred to as sibyl that simply Basil's wife - indeed, it is not
primarily a personal name, but the term for a whole category of women.
Firstly, the term sibyl was used of women held to have prophetic gifts, and it
was applied in Greek and Latin sources to widely dispersed individuals - up to
ten in Latin sources - from Persia and Libya, to Delphi and Erythraea in
Greece, and Cumae, near Naples, in Italy. The primary sibyl in Greece was the
prophetess of the shrine at Delphi, the oracle, whose carefully worded and
discreetly ambiguous pronouncements were sought in times of crisis as a guide
to action by major figures in Greek history during the campaigns of Alexander
the great. The Delphic sibyl is given different names in various sources -
Amalthaea, Daphne, Manto, Deiphobe, Herophile. When courted by Apollo, she was
offered the fulfilment of any wish that she might name (the traditional formula
for a well-disguised curse) and asked for as many years the grains of sand she
held in her hand - forgetting to ask for health and beauty. She became a figure
rather like Miss Haversham in Dicken's Great Expectations. According to
Heraclitus, she 'reaches through thousands of years' with her voice.
Secondly, the original prophecies of these figures, the chief of whom belonged
to cults in the Greek and Latin worlds, are no longer extant, despite the
availability of a collection of literature known as the Sibilline Oracles. The
prophecies that were offered by a sibyl to Tarquin II, king of Rome, were
guarded by a college of priests in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline
Hill, and their reading during times of crisis took place following a decree by
the senate. However, the repository and their contents were burnt during the
uprising in the time of the dictator Sulla (c 83 BC). A subsequent collection
was created by seeking texts from shrines beyond Italy. The different ways in
which the prophecies were interpreted, sometimes in criticism of powerful
ruling figures, led the Augustus in 12AD to destroy some of them among
thousands of prophetic, politically subversive verses.
Thirdly, the eight extant books described as the Sibilline oracles began to be
written in a very different context from that of the sibyls to whom I have just
referred. They arose in the Jewish community in the period between the Old and
New Testaments, and ended in the Christian world in the seventh century. They
often fortell a destructive judgement. In the words of the Erythraean sibyl,
the sibyls were 'foreseeing on behalf of men, hardships difficult to bear'. But
among them are more positive visions. Indeed, the fourth book of the
collection, which comes from the intellectually sophisticated and liberal
Jewish community in Egypt, expected salvation to come through a non-Jewish
leader - one of the Ptolemy family, descendants of one of the generals of
Alexander the Great. Here the writer offered a positive expectation that
embraced a horizon bigger than his own particular race or culture.
Fourthly, the sibyls were of interest to the Christian, as well as to the
Jewish world. They were regarded as prophesying of the coming of a saviour,
providing an independent, non-Christian witness to Jesus. In Christian circles,
the number eventually rose to twelve, to match the number of Old Testament
prophets, and of the apostles.
Of all of the sibyls, the sibyl of Cumae, near Naples, features conspicuously
in medieval Western Christian texts. She is the sibyl referred to by the poet
Thomas of Celano in the hymn Dies Irae. But it is also because of this sibyl
that when Dante experiences his vision of the other worlds, it is Virgil, the
classical Roman poet who told the story of Aeneas, who guides him. Virgil had
earlier pictured Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, arriving in Italy and
seeking out the sibyl at Cumae, who guided him through an experience of the
underworld, a vision of heaven and hell, of the fields of Elysium and of the
tortures of Tartarus. But perhaps more importantly, Virgil pictured the sibyl
in the underworld giving Aeneas a vision of future greatness, a perception of
descendants and heirs who would be part of a universal benign influence, the
salvation of the world under the culture and empire of Rome. Dante, the
Christian poet, eventually had his great vision of the future of all of the
faithful, in a vision of Paradise, before which point Virgil leaves him, having
guided him through Hell and Purgatory. Virgil's sibyl guides Aeneas: Virgil
himself points the way for Dante. But one points to rulers and empires that
will eventually crumble; the other points to an empire without end.
The sibyls have been the subject of Christian art: Michelangelo and Raphael
among many others portrayed the sibyls in the context of ecclesiastical art.
Raphael's sibyls I recall in that small church at the foot of the hills leading
up to the Borghese gardens in Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo, decorated with
wonderful examples of work by Carravaggio. There are even two of them here in
this church. If you look at the reproduction of the Van Eyck altarpiece in the
Handfield chapel, at the panels exposed throughout Advent, you will see two
turbanned women in the small topmost panels, looking down on the space across
which the Virgin and the Archangel Gabriel face one another. One is the sibyl
of Cumae (on the right), the other the sibyl of Erythraea, whose symbol is
often the lily of the Annunciation.
What, you may have been thinking for some time, has all this to do with the
Christian hope, and where is it all leading?
To this point: the way we express our hope. Among traditional Christian claims
is the statement that Jesus is the Hope of the World, and it is towards this,
embodied at Christmas, that our Advent reflections point us. We make this claim
believing it to be true. But there are different ways in which we can express
this, different courses of action and different attitudes towards others that
can be followed, depending on how we see this hope, the hope we say is 'the
hope of the world' for others, not just for us.
One is to make them all like us, in our image: at worst, to create a religious
uniformity; and both Christian and Moslem in particular among the great
monotheisms have been guilty of trying to do this, in what at times have been
ugly ways, with ugly results.
But there is another possibility: when we affirm that Jesus is the hope of the
world, this might invite us to recognise, in people of all kinds who experience
who live in hope, something we share in common. The fourth book of the
Sibilline oracles, stemming as it did from a Jewish community who put their
heope in a future, guided by a leader who was of a different culture, race (and
religion), is one of many reminders from the past that our history includes
people whose faith has enabled them to be in some sense inclusive, whose hope
has embraced a wider horizon than their own immediate and personal one, and one
wider than their corporate identity. As churches, in our corporate identity,
internationally, nationally and within the wider local community, we have many
opportunities to express our oneness with others who do not formally identify
themselves as Christian, or indeed as believers of any kind, but who are
nevertheless people of hope. Hope is thus to be encouraged, in all who exercise
hope in some way.
Secondly, the epistle to the Hebrews defines hope as our trust in the promise
of things that as yet have not been completely (or even partially) fulfilled.
There is a recognition here that hope involves an element of risk, a commitment
to try to create a positive way for a future, whose denouement is not just a
foregone conclusion. There are many who share in hope of this kind. There are
those who expend great effort against what may often seem to be odds that have
been stacked against them: on various fronts, those who seek reconciliation and
justice in the face of longstanding divisions, whether on an international or a
smaller scale. There are those who exert great effort to reclaim some severely
impaired and damaged parts of our natural environment, in situations in which
it is still not clear whether they can be retrieved.
This is also true at a more personal individual level. Among my own circle of
acquaintance whom I would want to support as they exercise hope by making every
effort when the final outcome, or elements of it, are still unclear, such as
those who seriously pursue their education despite uncertainties over future
employment; those seeking or persevering in employment in much the same way;
and those who commit themselves to offering time and patience in various kinds
of personal relations.
To return to the quote from Virgil from which we began: we may not think -
indeed, we do not believe - that Virgil was in any sense referring to Jesus in
his poetry about the child whose birth would herald the return of the golden
age; we leave our medieval fellow-Christians at that and at many other points.
Nevertheless, in the end, I am suggesting that the element of hope that we
believe is for the world, is often not something new that we bring into every
situation into which we enter as our unique contribution as Christians. The God
in whom we hope, and the hope that he represents, is often already present in
and with others, waiting for us, as well as for them, to recognise.
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