"Death slew him by means of the body which he had assumed, but that same body proved to be the weapon with which he conquered death. Concealed beneath the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain."
And in a passage similar to the great ancient homily for Holy Saturday, St. Ephrem meditates on Christ's descent into hell and his encounter with Eve:
"Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swalllow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld. This chariot was the body which he received from the Virgin; in it he invaded death's fortress, broke open its strongroom and scattered all its treasure."
This calls to mind nothing so much as the assaults upon the fearful fortresses of Morgoth, Angband and Thangorodruin, in Tolkien's Silmarillion. These are utterly impenetrable even to the High Elves; at times they succeed in smashing themselves valiantly against its walls, as when Fingolfin challenges Morgoth to single combat and even wounds his foot before being killed, or when Beren and Luthien succeed in breaking in and stealing one of the silmarils from Morgoth's iron crown by means of Luthien's enchantments. My last re-reading of the book made me realize how much of the story is a long and almost despairing defeat for the good guys, and a gradual complete victory for the ancient Dark Lord, Morgoth. Basically the Noldor arrive in Middle Earth at the height of their power and splendor, bound by oath to relentlessly oppose Morgoth. But one by one their fortresses are taken, their lords slain, and their people scattered. The awakening of human beings coincides with the arrival of the Noldor, but you realize that the vast majority are either allied with, or living in abject terror of the Dark Lord. The few tribes or ally themselves with the Noldor share their fate: strongholds, heroes fallen or enslaved. Finally, even the great enchanted kingdom of the Grey Elves, protected by their Queen, Melian (one of the maia, akin to Sauron), is defeated by the powers of darkness, leaving the whole northern world bereft of any protection against Morgoth.
A very similar realization came over me upon reading, in succession, the introductory notes to all the history books in my New American edition of the Old Testament: the history of the Jewish people in the land of promise is, for the vast majority of the time, a long tragedy. There are very few just Judges, and even your good ones, just in the sight of the Lord and anointed by God, often succumb to temptation of one sort or another (like Sampson), wasting all the good they'd achieved. And when God consents to giving the people kings, it is the same story again. Saul turns away, David and Solomon sin, and for much of the reigns of the heirs of David, the rulers of the chosen people do not direct the nation under God's rule. It's a sign of my unfamiliarity with the bible that I was surprised to see that the good rulers and good times for Israel were the exception, while wickedness and punishment for wickedness were not anomalies but the normal course of things.
Here is another similarity: the authors of the history books (Judges, Chronicles, Samuel, Kings, etc), as the introductory notes make clear, were not just recording facts: they were crafting literary artifacts, and the moral of the story often enough is that while the Lord is present in human history and particularly in the history of the children of Abraham, the Jewish people often represented in the person of the king refused for the most part to worship the one true God--refused, that is, not only to follow the right form of liturgy, but also what that liturgy signified for their personal lives and for the whole life of the people, they refused to order their lives according to the Commandments and the wisdom and the Law of God. In the Silmarillion, too, the author makes clear over the course of the book that the long despairing defeat is not only due to the evil and the power of the Dark Lord, but to the ways in which elves and men allowed that evil to enter their own hearts and gave it secret anchorage. Several of the main defeats in battle, including the last serious assault on Thangorodruin and the fall of Gondolin, were the result of jealousies and treachery among the Allies. The same goes for the deaths of several heroes, including the children of Hurin, the elf princess Finduilas, and Beleg Strongbow.
Thus in both stories, the fictional and the historical, all is lost and darkness covers the lands: in other words, things are ripe for eucatastrophe (Tolkien's wonderful coin).
The faithful remnant of Israel still prayed, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." It is interesting to read in Luke how the kin of Mary understood the Covenant given by God long ago to Abraham: "to set us free from the hands of our enemies, / free to worship him without fear, / holy and righteous in his sight all the days of our life." This is not exactly what we find in the book of Genesis, where God tells Abram "you are to become the father of a multitude of nations" and promises him "descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore" and that all nations will be blessed through the nation God is to make out of him. Yet Zechariah and Mary profess in their canticles a belief in God's fidelity, that one way or another he will rescue his people, and that the new kingdom to be established will be one in which the people is free to worship God aright. But at present the prayer is one of hoping against hope, for the kingdom and people have been brought low, and they are utterly incapable of saving themselves; . In the same way, every effort, however valiant, of the elves and men to defeat Morgoth ended in disaster, and by the end of the story the faithful remnant is hiding on the edge of Middle-earth, waiting for the end to come. In the Silmarillion, while they are waiting here, Manwë at last receives the command to act and the armies of the Valar come thundering out of the West to fall upon the fortress of Morgoth. In this epic telling, "that combat stupendous" is enacted physically; the whole earth shakes and is changed when the Valar turn Thangorodruin inside out, driving away all the dragons, balrogs, and orcs and finally binding Morgoth himself, to cast him beyond the circles of the world.
In the real story, the battle was not so visibly worked out in physical creation, but St. Ephrem helps us see it as no less epic and dramatic. On the surface indeed it was not noticeable: in a world filled with injustice, who notices one more helpless man unjustly killed? But "concealed within the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat."
When death, with its customary impudence, came foraging for her [the New Eve's] mortal fruit, it encountered its own destruction in the hidden life that fruit contained. All unsuspecting, it swallowed him up, and in so doing released life itself and set free a multitude of men.
We give glory to you, Lord, who raised up your cross to span the jaws of death like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living. We give glory to you who put on the body of a single mortal man and made it the source of life for every other mortal man. YOU ARE INCONTESTABLY ALIVE....
Come then, my brothers and sisters, let us offer the Lord the great and all-embracing sacrifice of our love, pouring out our treasury of hymns and prayers before him who offered his cross in sacrifice to God for the enrichment of us all."
Amen!
