And the World Will be Done

Next to the church of St Levan in west Cornwall is a huge geological erratic boulder, split in two by some colossal force; if you believe the folklore, by St Levan striking it with his staff. The rhyme goes:

When with panniers astride
A packhorse can ride
Through Saint Levan's Stone
The world will be done

And, so the legend goes, on nights when the storms rage above the Penwith Peninsula the Devil comes and pulls the stone a little farther apart. Why he should want to do this when it means his inevitable final defeat, who knows, but then although the Devil is shrewd he has fundamentally got the wrong end of the stick, and is sadly misled about his chances.

The other day, feeling entirely unable to do anything other than read a bit, I took down off my shelves Essays Catholic and Radical, which, elderly though it is - it was jointly compiled by Archbishop Rowan Williams when he was but a slip of a college tutor, and when giants such as Fr Ken Leech and Fr Gresham Kirby still bestrode the land - I had never dipped into. 

To my surprise there is an essay included, by the aforesaid Gresham Kirby, entitled 'Kingdom Come: the Catholic Faith and Millennial Hopes'. Now this last year I have been grappling to bring together two impulses that I find warring within my outlook: a reformist instinct and an apocalyptic conviction. I want things to get better, for human beings (all human beings, so far as it can be arranged) to lead fuller and richer and happier lives, and for the lovely things that I have enjoyed so far in my life to continue, and for others to enjoy them too. Yet, at the same time, I am part of a faith which looks towards a cataclysmic upheaval ushering in the Kingdom, the everlasting reign of God, which presumes, at the very least, a sense of division, the final separation of good and evil, and that will not be an easy process. So I want someone to help me through this. 

Sadly Fr Kirby does not. Although his essay begins with a thorough castigation of the Catholic Movement for its Platonism and idealism, its neglect of eschatology, it turns out to be promoting another version of reformist Christianity, just a more radical and left-wing one than envisaged by the majority of the bench of bishops. The giveaway comes when he discusses the Ascension, dismissing any idea of Jesus's earthly return as 'a misreading of the symbols' - without even bothering to mention the statement the angels make to the disciples in Acts that 'you will see him return in the same way as you saw him depart'. I am far from ever arguing that the Scripture needs to be taken literally, but it does need to be taken in some way, and not just ignored because it doesn't fit.

What I think I am moving towards is the idea that the apocalyptic motion involves our efforts to reform the current order - that discovering the effects of our economic life on the planet, or the deep embedding of racial hierarchy and the legacy of Empire, or the things we may do or fail to do as a result of the pandemic, are themselves steps along the way towards the final crisis. It is not that we will be either passively waiting for Christ to return and doing nothing, or making the world so Godly and perfected that he will then return, or even that human effort at building the Kingdom is what the parousia means, and so that is the Apocalypse; but that our discoveries are an inescapable part of it - inescapable, because this trajectory is the will of God. It isn't the Devil who pulls apart the Stone of St Levan every storm-racked night: led by the Holy Spirit, it's us.