The emergence of Christian “celebrities” in modern America is an anomaly and represents the corruption of cultural accommodation in the last stages of Christendom. The church of the future after Christendom will be more like the church of the past when Christians and their leaders will live unseen as members of a distinctive community adhering to an alternative way of being in the world.
In a letter to a presbyter, the great Antiochene theologian of the fifth century, Theodoret of Cyrus, quoted “one of the men who used to be called wise” who said, “Live unseen,” and he declared, “I try to live unseen, and above all men I am a lover of peace and quiet” (Epistle 62).
Whoever first publicized the saying “Live unseen” expressed an attitude that was widely shared in the ancient world. Alexander Pope epitomized the ancient attitude in his Ode on Solitude by imitating Horace: “Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; / Thus lamented let me dye; / Steal from the world, and not a stone / Tell where I lye.”
This same attitude was assumed by many ancient Christians. Christian teaching frowned on seeking popularity as being a sin of pleasing men rather than God. The “world” — the realm of sarx, disordered flesh, not the kosmos, the ordered creation of God — was shunned as a delusion of the devil, a place of false values and foolishness. The aim was to live apart from the world and close to God.
In his beautiful work of prose and poetry, The Consolation of Philosophy, composed during his political imprisonment prior to his execution, Boethius (480-524) demonstrates how Christians adopted the ways of wisdom of ancient philosophy. In Book I, Lady Wisdom says to Boethius, “But even if you do not know the stories of the foreign philosophers, how Anaxagoras was banished from Athens, how Socrates was put to death by poisoning, and how Zeno was tortured, you do know of Romans like Canius, Seneca and Soranus, whose memory is still fresh and celebrated. The sole cause of their tragic sufferings was their obvious and complete contempt of the pursuits of immoral men which my teaching had instilled in them. It is hardly surprising if we are driven by the blasts of storms when our chief aim on this sea of life is to displease wicked men. And though their numbers are great, we can afford to despise them because they have no one to lead them and are carried along only by ignorance which distracts them at random first one way then another. When their forces attack us in superior numbers, our general conducts a tactical withdrawal of his forces to a strong point, and they are left to encumber themselves with useless plunder. Safe from their furious activity on our ramparts above, we can smile at their efforts to collect all the most useless booty: our citadel cannot fall to the assaults of folly.” Boethius inserts into his account of Lady Wisdom’s discourse one of his poems which begins,
Let men compose themselves and live at peace,
Set haughty fate beneath their feet,
And look unmoved on fortune good and bad,
And keep unchanging countenance….[translation, Victor Watts].
When the history of the church is told, it leaves out the part played by 99.99 percent of the participants, the unknown laypersons located in communities all over the Roman Empire and in the East beyond the bounds of the Empire. They made Christianity the formidable force that it became, but no one knows their names.
Even the names of most of the bishops, presbyters, deacons, and other officers of the church are forgotten. They were known and respected in their parishes, but they were content to abide in obscurity, many of them residing in obscure places, going about their lives focused on what mattered in life rather than on being recognized. Indeed these things are true not only of the formative centuries of church history, but of the life of the church always and everywhere.
The whole monastic movement was built upon the desire to live unseen. Monasteries provided an opportunity for men and women to spend their entire lives freed from the occupations and distractions of the world to learn how to pray and to repent in a ceaseless turning toward God. The monks did not waste their lives; they spent them on the most important things.
Unlike monks who lived as hermits or dwelled in communes, most people had to live unseen by continuing to live an ordinary life as citizens, but by the standards of a distinctive community of support and accountability, the Christian church. The few Christians who were well-known, usually bishops like Basil, Ambrose, and Augustine, would have much preferred that quiet and peaceful life of a reclusive contemplative over the vexatious and soul-wearing tasks of episcopacy that sometimes required them to joust with the political powers of the world.
It is often said that Christians strive to live for “something bigger than themselves.” This is true, but it doesn’t mean what some modern mainline Protestants say it means. It does not mean turning oneself into some activist for an ideological cause, some progressive revolution or a counter-revolution.
Living for something bigger than ourselves means learning to love the Ordinary Real. The Christian life is an immersion into the ordinary existence of human life — learning and working, playing and celebrating, marrying and rearing children, worshiping with others and being friendly with one’s neighbors, performing the duties of citizenship and taking care of one’s small part of the good earth, growing old and dying.
Immersion daily into the Ordinary Real is known from the message of the gospel. It comes from knowing that this world is God’s good creation; that the incarnate Son of God Jesus Christ “recapitulated” all of human life from birth to death as Irenaeus of Lyons said, sanctifying every age of living and every dimension of existence; that the Holy Spirit of God is already transforming this creation into a new creation and enabling each of us to be born anew as participants in this new creation by living ordinary life according to the Way of Christ and the gifts of the Spirit.
The Christian is truly free to live unseen because he or she knows that we are seen by the living God and therefore have a home in God’s world as God’s people. The people of God, living in the eye of our Creator and Redeemer, have no need or desire to be seen by the world, the realm of sarx — disordered flesh. Rather that world is a distraction and a lure away from the Ordinary Real in which we human beings experience peace, joy and hope.
Timothy W. Whitaker is a Retired United Methodist Church bishop who served the Florida Area.
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