John Cassian and the Israel-Palestine Conflict
John Cassian was a fourth-century Christian theologian who founded two monasteries, and wrote three major treatises: The Institutes, The Conferences, and On the Incarnation of Christ against Nestorius. The Conferences, from which this short reflection draws, is written in a dialogical form that is common to antiquity. Much like Platonic dialogues, this means that cherry-picking certain passages can be problematic because the work isn’t put together as a straightforward argument. Rather, they ought to be carefully and discerningly read with an eye toward the whole. Yet, for the purposes of this paper, there are a few very basic points that are made that will help illustrate the tragic irony that occurs when the language of the Bible is used to justify the military occupation of Palestine and the horrors of illegal settlements.
Cassian’s exegesis relies on four categories of interpretation in The Conferences: literal-historical, allegorical, anagogical, and tropological. We are lucky enough that the example that Cassian uses when explaining his hermeneutic, which takes place in the 14th conference, is the words Israel and Jerusalem. The various ways Jerusalem is interpreted in what follows are Cassian’s, not my own.
As you would expect, the literal-historical method examines the historical interpretation of the text. For example, that Jerusalem was the historical city of the Jews. While early Christian theologians like John Cassian did not deny the literal-historical interpretation of a text, theirs was a layered exegesis that engaged scripture on deeper and more meaningful levels than the literal-historical often offers. The other three categories of interpretation help us approach what Cassian refers to as the spiritual understanding that scripture conveys.
The allegorical refers to the revelatory sense of scripture. In this context, Jerusalem as a symbol prefiguring the Church of Christ. The tropological sense of the text refers to the practical moral lessons that we can derive from scripture – Jerusalem, as the soul of human beings who are in need of moral instruction. Finally, the anagogical interpretation approaches the mystical sense of scripture. In this case, Jerusalem is understood by Cassian as the “heavenly city of God, which is the Mother of us all.” The spiritual sense that key words like ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Israel’, and ‘Land’ carry, reveals how tragic and ironic the unequivocal support of the secular state of Israel by so many Christians is.
From an anagogical perspective, the ‘land of Jerusalem’ was understood by Cassian as the promised land of the soul which is the proper teleological end of the Christian faith. To illustrate the point, the exile of the nation of Israel from Egypt not only conveys the literal history of the ancient Jews, it symbolizes the exile that every Christian must make from the slavery of vice to the promised land of virtue. Reminiscent of Gregory of Nyssa’s classic work, The Life of Moses, Cassian argues the seven nations that the Lord promised to the children of Israel are, in a sense, symbols for the vices of gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and ultimately, pride. In this sense, the nations promised to the children of Israel are understood by Cassian as a metaphor for the transfiguration of our being from the old Adam to the New. Cassian writes:
“We understand that we are commanded to possess the lands of those wicked nations for our well-being in this way. Each vice has its own place in our heart. Claiming this for itself, it destroys the Israel that is in the depths of our soul – namely, the contemplation of the highest holy realities, which it never ceases to resist. For virtue cannot live together with vice.”
-John Cassian. The Conferences. New York: Paulist Press. 1997. 14th Conference.
In the view of Cassian, it is in the transformation of the carnal vices into spiritual virtues that the ‘land’ of our soul is transformed from the figurative slavery of Egypt to the freedom of Jerusalem. The tragic irony that clearly reveals itself is that Biblical language that speaks of a promised land and Israel of our soul, most often associated with virtues such as mercy, forgiveness, compassion, justice, and charity, is used to justify murder, theft, and innumerable other injustices that have resulted from the occupation of Palestine. What would the prophets of old say?
There has been widespread support for the state of Israel from within the broad Christian community, and for this reason, Christians are complicit in the military occupation of Palestine. Let us consider how this injustice might distort and afflict the “Israel that is in the depth of our soul,” and the Jerusalem that is the “Church of Christ,” and see how we can turn away from injustice and promote peace in the Middle East.
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