Suffered Under Pontius Pilate

Some of you here have heard me speak on other occasions about the phenomenon that was central to my doctoral research, for which I coined the somewhat pretentious term “paschal simultaneity”, the sense of the way in which like this lecture and last Thursday’s,  the events in our lives which in one way or another mirror those of  first Holy Week – episodes of crucifying pain, tomblike paralysis when we feel immobilized by suffering,  moments of resurrection-like joy -  don’t necessarily occur in order, and indeed sometimes collide. The sense, too, that this experience is underwritten in the Church’s liturgical and artistic tradition (so that our ancestors in the faith venerated the Cross on Easter Sunday as well as on Good Friday, and we have shimmering depictions of the Crucifixion such as the one before us this evening which we intuitively recognise not as evading but as expressing the reality of Calvary) and that there are particular resources here for consolation in suffering, that it is part, therefore, of the divine gift to us, part of what it means to say that Jesus is crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.

I’ll return briefly to paschal simultaneity at the end. I’m always glad of any excuse to do so, but it seems particularly fitting this Eastertide: many of us will surely have been struck by the shock and yet somehow also the fittingness of Pope Francis, united, as we say at every Catholic funeral, with Christ in a death like his, having given his blessing, Urbi et Orbi, for one last time, only a matter of hours before. And many of us too will surely have been equally moved by the radiant peace of the celebrations surrounding Pope Leo’s election and inauguration in the midst of global conflict and darkness.  Both are examples, and for me at any rate inspiring and consoling examples: Good Friday after Easter, yes, but also Easter and Good Friday at once.

But what I want principally to do this evening is to concentrate on the foundations of all this in the clause we have reached in our exploration of the Nicene Creed: the clause that follows the one that Gemma explored last week, the clause that proclaims that Jesus was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.

When this series of lectures was being devised, I volunteered  for this one, not so much because of Paschal Simultaneity  (as I’ve said, this opportunity to ride my favourite theological hobby horse only came along later!) but because I had just been asked to write and deliver a course of lectures primarily for men in formation for the priesthood at the Dominican Studium in Oxford on soteriology, the doctrine of Salvation and – rather clearly -  the Cross is likely to be central to any such enterprise. Along with my then-fellow chaplains, I thought of this lecture as “the soteriological one”, and hoped that my research and thinking for the Blackfriars course, and my preparation for tonight’s lecture would be symbiotically helpful. 

But, in the course of organizing my thoughts for tonight, I’ve come to believe that though it certainly is about salvation, actually it’s only partially correct, and potentially misleading, to see this clause of the Creed as “the soteriological one”, and before we go any further, I’d like to explore why this qualification is important.

One of the difficulties of a lecture series like this one, of course, is the temptation to treat each article of the Creed in splendid isolation, rather than as summaries of the chapters in a single narrative. But that is what in fact they are, and the entirety of that narrative is concerned with salvation:  and so, whilst the Nicene Creed asserts that it is “for us” that Jesus dies on the Cross, it also tells us that it is “for us and our salvation” that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity comes down from heaven and is Incarnate of the Virgin.

This realization of the Creed’s essential unity, and its essentially soteriological perspective, helps I think to subvert another closely related temptation when it comes to reflecting on the Creed and the Council(s) which gave birth to it.

It is rather common, in Catholic institutions of higher education and formation at any rate, for there to be separate dogmatic courses in Trinitarian doctrine, Christology, and soteriology, explicating these doctrines in turn and tracing their history,  one by one, and with some degree of abstraction from the lived experience of Christian believers, which might be dealt with, if at all, in courses on pastoral and sacramental practice. This is understandable, perhaps necessary, but it does, I think, have some regrettable consequences. On the one hand, it risks characterising the mysteries of the faith as complex intellectual questions which have deservedly commanded the attention of some of the greatest minds in history, but which we might struggle to relate to our own life of prayer and discipleship, and to our vocation – which in one way or another all Christians share – of helping others on their way of prayer and discipleship. On the other, it risks obscuring the sense that what we believe doctrinally has significance pastorally and existentially: that it matters what we believe about God, because there is genuine, even irreplaceable, consolation to be had in believing what the Church has historically wanted us to believe.

So, this evening, I hope to undertake a very modest exercise in overcoming this disjunction. First, I’d like to look, in company with the Fathers of Nicaea, at what it might mean, at something of what they thought it might mean, to say “suffered under Pontius Pilate” of the one Who is God from God, and Who “for us and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate”. Secondly, I’d like to explore why it matters for us and for our salvation, that it does mean this. 

So, what does it mean to say that Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate? As I have already suggested – and, pleasingly, the framers of the Nicene Creed agree with me here! – this depends in no small part on Who we believe Jesus Christ to be. It is the contention of those who drew up the Creed that in Jesus Christ we see one Who is both fully divine (and not merely godlike) and fully human (and not a god playing at humanity like a fairy tale prince disguised as a peasant). How one can say true things about this paradox without toppling over into pious incoherence is, of course a profound mystery, and one that has preoccupied Christian theology throughout its history. For the next exciting chapter in this story stay tuned for our next series of lectures: Chalcedon at 1700, coming to a chaplaincy near you in just 126 years’ time.

But meanwhile, if in any sense, we are to read tonight’s article of the Creed with the mind of the Fathers of Nicaea, this must be the non-negotiable starting point for our parsing of these few words: crucified under Pontius Pilate.

It is clearly easier, surely, to see the crucifixion of Jesus as evidence for His humanity than for His divinity. The kind of historical ultra-scepticism that cast doubt on the actual human existence of Jesus is these days, I think, rather rare, and even among those who conscientiously cannot accept His divinity can scarcely deny that the accounts of the Passion in the NT have a human protagonist at their centre. Being human means, in part, being literally vulnerable, capable, that is, of being wounded in body and in mind, and capable, finally, of succumbing to such woundedness in death.  Jesus’ human flesh was bruised and scourged; Jesus’ human mind was sorrowful unto death in Gethsemane; Jesus humanly breathed His last and His human corpse was buried.  The sufferings of Jesus, then, were human sufferings: whatever, precisely it means to say that Christ died for us– and quantities of both ink and blood have of course been spilled over the centuries by His followers who disagree about what this means -it was a death like ours that He died, like ours, paradoxically, not least because not one of us here present will die precisely the human death that died, any more than any two of us  here present will die the same death.  Like all human deaths, and the sufferings that may accompany them, the death of Jesus is unique: it took place at a particular point in time and space - : in this case, in a particular province of the Roman Empire which can be located on a map, during the tenure of a particular colonial administrator whose term of office can be dated; and by means of the form of judicial murder then in vogue, at any rate for those below a certain rung on the sociological ladder of the day.  For this reason, the words we are considering tonight – crucified under Pontius Pilate - are, in the first place, an echo and a confirmation of what has been said earlier in the Creed when we are told that the One Who has come down from heaven has been made man. HHHH has truly taken human flesh which cannot be taken in the abstract. To be truly made man means truly to have a particular identity, a particular life-history, a particular ethnicity, a particular social status. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate – not, for instance, guillotined in 18^th century Paris.

It's slightly more audacious, to say the least. to claim that the article of the Creed under the microscope tonight is a statement not only about Jesus’ humanity but also about His divinity.  But our insistence that the Creed is the summary of a coherent narrative does commit us to saying just this. What happens at Calvary happens to one Who, we have just been told, is God from God, light from light, true God from true God. He it is Who is crucified under Pontius Pilate; He it is Who is tortured and killed for us.  Because this assertion is more obviously contestable, I’m going unapologetically to spend rather more time on it.

The assertion that God has been tortured and killed will have, in every age and cultural climate, an undeniable shock value, but the precise nature of the shock depends on exactly what we think we mean when we say God. For both the authors of the Nicene Creed and their Arian opponents, the claim would have been not merely staggering, but almost preposterous, because, in their milieu, as, indeed for most of Christian history, insofar as God can be defined, part of the definition of God is that He is im-passible, un-suffering.

The conviction of divine impassibility, indeed, is one of the more powerful engines driving Arius’s doctrine of the Trinity.  Clearly, the New Testament does present us, in Jesus, with a picture of One Who suffers, and this is deeply problematic if the Word incarnate is fully divine and God is impassible. If, on the other hand, God the Son was not consubstantial with God the Father, but One Who, though an unimaginably exalted creature deserved the title ‘God’ ultimately as only a courtesy title, god with a lower case ‘g’, as it were, then there is a way out of the oxymoronic bind: we can say that the One Who came down from heaven truly suffered under Pontius Pilate, without predicating suffering of the One true God.

It is a neat solution, but one that the framers of the Creed were unable to accept, for reasons that, as we shall see, were ultimately soteriological. And so it was that Athanasius and his party were forced to say – at whatever cost to comprehensibility and indeed to apparent coherence – both that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate and that He was – not merely godly or godlike, but the incarnate form of One Who was very God of very God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father, begotten of the Father before all worlds.

And an intriguing case can be made for the idea that the article we are considering tonight, far from being an embarrassing, apparently inconsistent, addendum to this magnificent sketch of God the Word actually echoes and amplifies it. What is this case?  This once more is bound up with the question of what we think God is like, and specifically the question of whether or not it is legitimate to say that God suffers.

The doctrine of divine impassibility is often characterized by those Who conscientiously object to it (and, as we’ll see later, their objections are very conscientious, as well as very understandable, motivated by profound pastoral concern and sensitivity to human suffering) as a kind of sell-out on the part of the Fathers of the Church, who thereby dethrone the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and Father of  our Lord and Father Jesus, passionately committed to His creation, and replace Him with the so-called God of the philosophers, Who, incapable of suffering, is thereby held to be without empathy for human pain and consequently worse than useless to those undergoing affliction.  It possibly doesn’t help that impassibility sounds a lot like impassivity, and, equally unfortunately, that in its the Greek form a-patheia, without passion, it sounds even more like apathy. An impassive, apathetic God certainly would be a callously indifferent one. It is not, however, precisely what has classically been intended by describing God as impassible, as perhaps we will see more clearly later.

Belief in the alleged enforced abdication of the God of the Bible in favour of a deity Who – or perhaps which would be a more appropriate relative pronoun - has been dubbed the God of classical theism is sometimes referred to as the Hellenistic hypothesis, but, in fact, there is nothing distinctively Greek about the concept of divine impassibility.  Indeed, a significant part of the Patristic case for refusing to predicate suffering of God was precisely the way in which this differentiated the transcendent God of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures from both the anthropomorphic deities of the official imperial pantheon and perhaps especially the gods of the various ancient mystery religions that found their way into and flourished in the Graeco-Roman world, who clearly were subject to suffering, and even death.

The God of both Testaments, on the contrary, they held, is not only, as Jesus tells the Sadducees, the God of the living and not of the dead, but the living God, the God Who is – in the words of the letter of James, ‘without shadow of change or alteration’ (James 1.17), the God who, implicitly or explicitly is contrasted, throughout both Testaments in His illimitable, unquenchable life with the life-less idols of the nations. Paul and Barnabas made precisely this contrast in their refusal of the sacrifice that the priest of Zeus wanted to offer to them in today’s first reading at Mass: ‘turn from these vain things to a living God’(Acts 14.15) and we see something similar in, for instance, the prophet Ezekiel’s encounter with women bewailing the death of Tammuz, the Babylonian goddess of vegetation (cf. Ezekiel 8:14 ).  According to her myth, Tammuz dies annually at the beginning of the dry season, and is then drawn back up from the underworld, partly through the ritual mourning of her devotees, bringing with her the rains, and thus the fruitfulness of the crops on which the community depends.

Again, we will return to why this distinction matters, and specifically to its soteriological significance. But for now, it’s important to see that whilst Tammuz, for example, dies repeatedly, in obedience to the meteorological calendar and the agriculture that depends on it, Christ dies once for all and in rising ascends to where He was before, to what we might call His natural habitat of ceaseless, impassible life. And, once again, the unique, unrepeatable quality of that death is signalled by the point of historical reference provided by the assertion: crucified  under Pontius Pilate. Crucified, that is, as the old Anglican Passiontide hymn has it, once, only once and once for all.

But why does any of this matter? Why, in particular, according to the Fathers of Nicaea, is it necessary for us and our salvation that Jesus is doubly consubstantial, not only with the Father, as we say every time we recite the creed, but also with us – truly human and fully divine?

It is often remarked – rightly – that there is no explicitly soteriological statement either in the Creed itself or indeed anywhere in the proceedings of the early councils, to parallel the Nicene fathers’ formulation of the relationship between Father and Son. But there was general agreement on precisely this question of what we might call ontological simultaneity: at one and the same time, in order to be our Saviour Jesus had to be divine; in order to be our Saviour, He had to be human.

On the one hand, all of creation needed redemption: if Jesus was finally a creature through and through, however uniquely splendid a One, He was, to put it crudely, not the solution but part of the problem, a problem that could only be solved by God: a non-divine Jesus would himself stand in need of a divine Saviour.   This is why Arius’ particular attempt to reconcile divine impassibility with Jesus’ undoubted passibility was for Athanasius and those who thought like him, a pseudo-solution.

At the same time, however, whilst Arius’ Jesus was not consubstantial with the Father, nor was He consubstantial with us. Rather, He inhabited a kind of liminal space between full divinity and true humanity, and again for Athanasius, this rendered Him impotent to save. This was because  of Athanasius’  rather intriguing take on the implications of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, the notion that God creates out of nothing, combined with an understanding of human nature, and specifically of the radical relatedness of human beings that, whilst we might frame it differently. Whilst we would perhaps most naturally think of the doctrine of ex nihilo creation as simply underlining the unique power of God – radically bringing into being as opposed to fashioning stuff into new configurations from pre-existent raw materials which is all that we can manage – Athanasius focuses on the “out of nothing” in a rather different way. Because, he holds, “nothing” is, so to speak, the raw material of creation, then it is natural that left to its own devices, creation will fall back into the nothingness from which it is made, into corruption, decomposition and, in the case of animate physical creation, death.   This is what has happened in consequence of the fateful events in the garden of Eden, when human beings stepped away from the closeness to God they had previously enjoyed.  Only God can provide a new infusion of life for a humanity slithering inexorably back towards the darkness of death. But it is, precisely, humanity that needs that infusion. Jesus has to be human, in order that henceforth all humans may be reinvigorated in this way.

Athanasius’ position depends, of course, on believing that the actions of particular human agents can affect subsequent generations in this way, and for him the biblical claim that in Adam all die so all in Christ are made alive was grounded in a Neoplatonic view of the world and of anthropology, whereby individual human beings participate in humanity: after the fall, humanity vitiated by Original Sin; after the coming of Christ in the revivified humanity He brings. Even if we do not share these particular philosophical convictions, perhaps the findings of both modern genetics and modern psychology might enable us to appropriate something not dissimilar: on account of both nature and nurture, none of us comes into the world a tabula rasa.

Nevertheless, we may still feel the kind of disjunctive unease that I mentioned earlier: we have just spent time on an inevitably superficial canter through a minute stretch of the vast terrain of Patristic soteriology, and perhaps it has been interesting and piqued our intellectual curiosity.  But does any of this really help when we are confronted with situations in our own lives, in the lives of those we love, in the life of the world, from which we cannot save ourselves but from which we long for release? Does it give us resources for conversation with contemporaries with whom we long to share our faith?

Perhaps, of course, we might not expect it to.  If we think of the past as a foreign country where they do things differently, why should the voices of the past have any contribution to make to such conversations today?

At least One of the aspects of this that was non-negotiable for our ancestors is perhaps especially alien: the axiom that God does not suffer might seem more of a liability than a strength, both in our own suffering and when we are confronted with questions about the so called problem of pain. In the first case we naturally feel the need for a fellow sufferer who understands; in the second, it might provide us with resources wherewith to justify the ways of God to humanity if we can point to a suffering God: we do not normally place a defendant in the dock for a crime of which they are themselves a victim.

One of the most striking factors in late modern theology was precisely the emergence of a conviction that God suffers. Not simply that Jesus suffered humanly for the 30 odd years of His Incarnate life, but that God suffers divinely and eternally. This, of course, would provide an alternative solution to the issue that troubled Arius: if God suffers, then there is no reason not to say simultaneously that Jesus suffers and that He is in the fullest sense God. But it was not this which energized the move of the doctrine of divine passibility from the theological margins to the mainstream.  Rather, this was motivated by reflection on the devastating suffering – and in many cases first-hand experience of that devastating suffering – of the first and second world wars. Among its earliest advocates were heroic military chaplains on the Western Front; its most poignant and succinct encapsulation – Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “only the suffering God can help - ” was written whilst its author was awaiting execution in a Nazi prison cell, though its context in his broader thinking makes the statement somewhat ambiguous, and it is of course a matter of great regret that Bonhoeffer did not survive to elucidate his meaning for us.

It is understandable that such overwhelming experience of suffering and evil would provoke such a reaction.  The moral and intellectual authority of passibilist theologians is not for a moment in question. But there are questions, nevertheless, which have been increasingly put to this response to the mystery of suffering in the last quarter century or so.  Whereas in the 1980s it was common to describe divine passibility as the “new orthodoxy”; since around the Millenium dissenting voices have been from a surprisingly wide spectrum of theological allegiance. At a conference on the theology of suffering that I attended shortly before the onset of COVID, I spoke to at least one committed passibilist who felt herself to be decidedly in the minority, and several of the keynote speakers outlined their personal unease with the notion of an eternally suffering God. And interestingly, my experience was not dissimilar at an online seminar in 2020. It certainly seems as though the pandemic did not reignite enthusiasm for the doctrine.

 The renewed enthusiasm for divine impassiblity is not about blind allegiance to an outmoded paradigm, nor is it simply a matter of theological point scoring for the sake of it. Rather, it comes from positions of engagement with the suffering world just as real as those of the mid-20^th century passibilists. To mention just one possible cause for concern: feminist theology has produced advocates of s more classically normative doctrine of God, and I think highly reasonably: given that we are made in the divine image, is it really good news for anyone, and for women in particular, that God eternally suffers? 

And there is also another kind of question. It may be obvious why the Somme, Auschwitz and Hiroshima – episodes that scarred their generations and reverberated far beyond them provoked the conviction that God suffers, but why did not earlier experiences of intense and extensive communal trauma do the same? Why did our ancestors in the faith not reach similar conclusions in the face, for instance, of the terrifying and often grotesque campaigns of persecution in the pre-Constantinian Church? Or during the Black Death? If the only credible God in 1945 is the Suffering God, why is this not equally true in the year 177 or the year 1436?

And, so, if there are problems with simple acceptance of Divine Passibility, and we agree that a merely creaturely Jesus cannot be our Saviour, might it not be worth looking at the consolatory resources to be found in reading our clause of the Creed through what I have suggested is the Nicene lens, from the perspective I have called ontological simultaneity, the perspective that sees Jesus, crucified for us under Pontius Pilate as at once vulnerably human and impassibly divine?

In around the year 177, a particularly brutal and humiliating imperial persecution campaign broke out against the Church in southern France, centred on Lugdanum, modern-day Lyons, with Christians accused, inter alia, of cannibalism, and culminating in the condemnation to death of around 50 of them.  Among the martyrs were the aged local bishop, a fifteen year old boy, and a slave girl named Blandina, who, with some of her companions, was consigned to the local circus for the entertainment of the populace. A moving and disturbing account of her martyrdom survives:

“Blandina was hung up on a beam and presented as food for the wild beasts which were set against her. This woman, by being seen hanging in the form of a cross and by her vigorous prayers, caused great eagerness in those who were struggling for the prize. For, thanks to their sister, they were able in their struggle to see, even with their outward eyes, the One Who was crucified for them…she had put on Christ, the great and unconquerable athlete, and had routed her adversary in many bouts and had, on account of her contest, been crowned with the crown of incorruptibility”.

What is striking, of course, in this description is the way in which Blandina, in her sufferings, constitutes for those who are with her a kind of living icon of Jesus himself: in her they saw Him Who was crucified for them. But this is not heroic but merely extrinsic emulation on Blandina’s part: she is able to image Christ, because she has entered into Christ: she has “put on Christ, the great and unconquerable athlete”.

Something rather similar is going on in the similar (and approximately contemporary) story of Perpetua, and of her response to the prison guard who taunts her as she is giving birth shortly before her martyrdom in the arena in Carthage. When her jailor sneers that if she is incapable of bearing the pains of labour, she will never be able to face the lions, she responds that she is now suffering alone, whereas then Christ will be suffering in her.

The Christ Who suffers in Perpetua, the Christ Who clothes Blandina is, precisely, the great and unconquerable Christ, the One of whom their fellow martyr Ignatius of Antioch and Justin Martyr say respectively that He is “first subject to suffering and then beyond it; Jesus Christ our Lord” and that He is “first made subject to suffering and then returned to heaven”.  Christ’s impassiblity then is a quality of His Resurrection life, the life of His native divine habitat. And Perpetua and Blandina are only able to suffer to the edification of their fellow Christians because they already participate embryonically in this resurrection, and look forward to its fulness, in virtue of the impassible Christ fighting in them, and they in Him.  This does not remotely diminish the human anguish the martyrs endured, either in their deaths or in their anticipation of them: rather touchingly, in the midst of an otherwise rather hair-raising passage in one of his letters where Ignatius describes his desire for martyrdom, he says in parenthesis that he only hopes the lions will do their business swiftly. And nor does it diminish the martyrs’ sense that Jesus experienced similar human anguish. One other stratagem besides that which Arius was to advocate for at Nicaea, for reading the New Testament account of the Passion alongside the conviction that God is impassible, popular among Ignatius’ contemporaries was to deny, not that Jesus was God, but that His sufferings were real. Ignatius has no time for it: he wouldn’t, he says effectively, be putting his life on the line for a mere phantom. But the God Who strengthens the martyrs in Jesus holds out to them the promise of sharing His impassiblity.

In the 14^th century, meanwhile, in the era of two popes and a pandemic, as dubiously tasteful memes circulating during Covid put it, one of the most interesting voices we might consider is that of Julian of Norwich. There are, of course, few figures in the Christian tradition who speak with more intrinsic authority here than she who spent decades reflecting on the theological implications of her own visionary encounter of Christ crucified, and we do not have time this evening to reflect on her reflections in anything like the detail or depth they deserve. But I think a couple of points are in order.

Julian was typical of her age in her conviction that though Jesus’ human sufferings were so horrific that she came to regret her request for an eyewitness closeness to them, the God Who became incarnate in Jesus was nonetheless impassible. All the Trinity, she remarked, was at work in the Passion: only the maiden’s Son – only Jesus in the humanity He assumed in the Virgin’s womb – suffered.

And Christ’s dual consubstantiality with both the impassible Father and suffering humanity has some interesting and suggestive consequences for Julian. For her, the uniqueness of the constitution of Jesus, His ontological simultaneity, is the ground, not of separation and distance from us, as so much 20^th century reflection feared, but, doubly, of the most intimate possible connection with creaturely experience of pain.  In the first place, as Julian puts it, “the onyng of the Godhede gave strength to the manhode for love to suffre more than al man myght suffryn” Secondly, it has been suggested that Julian’s description of Christ’s “tender” flesh might be intended to evoke a uniquely exquisite physical sensitivity.  If Jesus’ human agony is of unsurpassable intensity, this perhaps opens the way to seeing His pain as enveloping all human pain, and thus to soothing the clamour for a (divine) fellow-sufferer who understands.

Julian is certainly convinced that though Christ is now impassible, not only in His divinity but in His glorified humanity, He continues to suffer in the afflictions of the members of His body. Julian has many variations on this theme, perhaps most notably in the near verbatim parallel between one of her typically mundane but therefore especially powerful images for the affliction of Christ on the one hand and of His Church on the other.  Thus the skin and  flesh of Christ, sagging away from the bone under its own weight on the Cross, is described as “hangyng up in the eyr as men hang a cloth to drye”. Meanwhile, she tells us “God’s servants, holy church, shal be shakyn in sorows and anguis and tribulation in this world, as men shakyn a cloth in the wynde”.

This last point is an important one, and it brings us back to that concept of Paschal Simultaneity.  I have suggested that our rather frequent human experience of darkness after light, of living in the light and the darkness at once, is mirrored in the liturgy and the art of the Church. But this simultaneous quality of art and liturgy is, of course, founded on the gospel itself, which tells us that Jesus both reigns in impassible divinity from the tree and rises with His human scars still visible. And it is because we are incorporated into His body – because, as I’ve heard it said more than once recently, we are one in the One – that our sufferings are the sufferings of the one crucified under Pontius Pilate, sufferings He understands as our fellow-sufferer, sufferings whose transfiguration into impassible bliss we may hope for ,since where the head has gone in glory, the body is called to follow.