Incarnation and compassion

Another “mini-post” that wraps up my series from the draft of my forthcoming Medieval Wisdom: An Exploration with C S Lewis:

Compassion

A renewed incarnational awareness will also give us a renewed and particular energy toward compassionate ministry, as it did for 12^th-13^th c. Christians in the “charitable revolution” of those centuries – and indeed in the whole long Christian growth and development of the hospital. But more broadly in all forms of compassionate ministry. Medieval Christians’ acute awareness of the Incarnation was no theologically fuzzy, inward-turned “mysticism.” Especially as they began to enter emotionally into the events of the Passion, that horrific demonstration of God sharing in our embodied suffering, the compassion for Jesus that this stirred in them became “enabled them to perceive Jesus in other humans and to act compassionately for their benefit.” The resulting works of mercy helped build a strong, humane center holding together medieval society. Surely we need something like this again.

We have seen how attention to the humanity of Christ and his presence in others’ humanity encouraged hospitality and pastoral and even medical care, in Benedict’s and the Benedictines’ emphasis on “Christ in the guest,” in the particularity of the seven corporal (and spiritual) acts of mercy, in the specificity and concreteness of Aquinas’s ethical thought, and of course in the history of the innovative Christian institution we now call the hospital.

The Enemy of our souls will do anything he can to raise our eyes from the physical needs of others in a false super-spirituality, keeping us from achieving that incarnational awareness that would pour out from our hearts in compassionate ministry. As Screwtape tells the junior demon,

“On the seemingly pious ground that ‘praise and communion with God is the true prayer’, humans can often be lured into direct disobedience to the Enemy who (in His usual flat, commonplace, uninteresting way) has definitely told them to pray for their daily bread and the recovery of their sick. You will, of course, conceal from him the fact that the prayer for daily bread, interpreted in a ‘spiritual sense’, is really just as crudely petitionary as it is in any other sense.”[1]

Related articles

• Seeing His humanity and worshiping with all of ours – hearts and bodies included (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• “Raiders of the lost Incarnation”: The beginning of the end of my book about C S Lewis and the manifold wisdom of medieval faith (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• The Incarnation as the medieval “theory of everything” (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• C S Lewis on the Incarnation: Theosis, “coming down and drawing up,” the Great Dance, and statues coming to life (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
• How C S Lewis’s understanding of the Incarnation helped him – and helped him counsel others – in suffering (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)