God Does Not Want to be Everything (Pt 4)

notes on an apophatic anthropology and the theology of ordination

Jacob de Wit | Figure Studies for Moses Selecting the Seventy Elders | 1735

Hide Me Behind the Cross: Ordination as a Sacrament of Anonymity

“O God, cover me in the blood, hide me behind the cross so Jesus is exalted, Jesus alone.”
Bishop G.E. Patterson

I argued in the previous posts (pt 1, pt 2, pt 3) that the Moses of Numbers 11 is an icon of Christ and so a prototype and gauge for ordained ministry. I also tried to make the case that ordained ministry is needed by the church precisely because all of us, thanks to Christ, are meant to share of our spirit just as Moses did. In this fourth post, I want to explore how ordination baptizes us into the anonymity that makes it possible for us to be true to God and true to ourselves.

Holy Anonymity

In the early 6th century, a new set of works came suddenly to light, bearing the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of St Paul mentioned in Acts 17. The corpus—comprised of four treatises (The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology) and ten letters—quickly came to hold quasi-apostolic authority in the East and later in the West as well. (Aquinas, for example, refers to the work hundreds of times.) There were, of course, some (including Nicholas of Cusa) who recognized the work as pseudonymous, but most nonetheless regarded it as authoritative. During the Renaissance, the tides began to shift, as can be heard in Luther’s dismissal of Dionysius as “more Platonist than Christian,” and his warning to “stay away from him—whoever he was!”

Since the late 19th century, it has been common to refer to these works as a “forgery,” suggesting that “Pseudo-Dionysius,” as he came to be called, deceived his readers by stealing authority from an ancient in order to give credence to his neo-Platonic ideas. In truth, however, the pseudonymity was not fraudulent. By taking the name of another, by hiding his own name, the writer was not fictionalizing his identity, not stealing a saint’s glory to win ascendency for his own ideas, but forming his identity by imitating Paul’s imitation of Christ, clearing space in himself for the indwelling of the Lord.¹

Simone Weil, in her last notebooks, argues that love is supernatural—truly itself—only when it is “unconditioned.” A mother’s love is the most natural image of this love, she says, but “even even a mother’s love wears out if all the conditions for its renewal are lacking.” So, “only the love of God and the anonymous love of one’s neighbor are unconditioned.”

Following her insight, we can see that the sacrament of ordination imparts the gift of holy anonymity for the sake of unconditioned love. In other words, it creates a hiding of the self that makes room for growth into the fullness of Christ’s life, into the “full measure” of his “stature.” In this process, the self is not lost or destroyed but fully given—and just in that way fully received. As with Mary and her Yes, this making room is not an erasure of identity but a clearing of space within one’s spirit for God, the emptying out of ego and self-will so that the mind and heart of Christ can take root.

This is what Dionysius knew. In taking another’s name, he hid his own—not to deceive but to disciple, to lead others into the unknowing that allows us to be present to the unknowable God. His anonymity was no act of theft but an offering, a surrender into unconditioned, all-conditioning love.

The Pentecostal preachers who first fired my faith knew this too. “Hide me behind the cross,” they would pray before their sermons. In this, they sought not to negate the humanity but to open it—fully, wholly—to God and so to us. In that posture, they took on the shape of Christ who is among us not as one who reclines at the table, but as one who serves. Fasting from themselves, they were free to wait on us in our feasting.

To Be Humble Is To Be Fully Alive

Kent Dunnington is right. The gospel makes it plain that “the life of glorification” is inseparably bound up with “the life of humiliation.” That does not mean that humiliation is in itself a good or that it does us any good by itself. It does mean that the good shows its glory in and for the humiliated. And humility is the name of that goodness.

Humility is a grace, a virtue—not a contrivance or outcome. It is given not by humiliation or even in it but for it by the Spirit. As Dunnington says, humility as the virtue that enables us to “know how to go on even when we do not know who we are,” and the grace that allows us to “love still, even when everything we thought made us impressive has been stripped away.” Hence, to be humble is to be fully alive (in Irenaeus’ sense), so present to our neighbor as to be truly open to God and so open to God as to be truly present to our neighbor.

Humility is How God is God

Meister Eckhart, in one of his lectures, takes up a line from Dionysius—“he speaks most fittingly of God who can best hold his peace”—and insists that such resting, such self-control, is nothing we can give to or get for ourselves. We are called to humble ourselves, yes, but “this cannot be done sufficiently unless God does it.” The “naughting and shrinking of self” is necessary, he says, but impossible apart from God. We must be naughted by God into God, into God’s own nothingness. “Only then is humility sufficient, when God humbles a man with that man.”²

By this saying— “God humbles a man with that man”—I take Eckhart to mean both that God cooperates with us in our humbling, rather than imposing it on us, and that God does so by allowing us to face ourselves, granting us the awareness of the truth of our being—our utter helplessness and constant need, our frailty, our disease. Yet in that painful awareness, we are also given to see that our being is always most deeply being-in-God. And the essence of being-in-God is humility. Humility is how God is God.

To Be Ordained is to Be Crossed Out

The humility by which God is God was realized and revealed on the Cross, where death at its most humiliating was filled up with the glory of the uncreated life purposed from before all beginnings for us. To be ordained, then, is to be drawn into that hour—to consent to be pierced by the double truth of our being before God, agreeing to a life of self-denial and self-effacement, and relinquishing the name you have made or might make for yourself, hiding it behind the name of Christ—not for the sake of your own salvation but for the good of those you are bound to serve.

Humility is the vocation of every believer, of course. No one can truly live without it. The ordained are called to embody it in a unique and uniquely public way, however. Their lives as well as their ministries are to be living sacrifices that point us toward the peace all are meant to share—the peace that comes from and to the heart fully surrendered to God, emptied out for the sake of others, and oriented to the future only God in Christ can bring about.

Insofar as they are true to their calling, inasmuch as they live lives worthy of it, the ordained bear witness to the truth that life is fullest and most fulfilling when it is lived for the good of others. That, really, is the bottom line. Our lives are not our own. The ordained are there to remind us of this fact—and to lead us into the joy and freedom it promises.

1. Charles M. Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Aeropagite: “No Longer I.” (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2, 204-205.

2. Meister Eckhart, The Complete Works (New York: Crossroads, 2009), 522.