Canter Bridge

By the time the writer gets to his exquisitely synthetic declaration, the Johannine tradition has already provided a reference point in the shadow of which mean dualisms fade:

Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.

The ‘Johannine community’ is a hypothetical entity that serves a deliciously heuristic role in the interpretation of the corresponding literature, even in those moments when nobody is quite sure what it is. One need not be skeptical about speculation so long as it knows its own mood. Probing for the legacy of John in a historical human community is no idle task and was carried out with particular élan by, say, the late Raymond Brown, S.S.

Regardless of the path, individual or commununal or both, that leads from John the apostle’s internship with Jesus to this third Johannine letter, the words can by this moment flow with uncommon ease regarding acts of kindness and the contemplation of God. One breath serves, so to speak, to articulate the synthesis of what are considered by lesser souls to be distinct and even contrary enterprises. The Johannines have not suffered this impoverishment.

This most dualistic of epistolary literature does not draw dualism’s sharp line between the practical and the mystical. Rather, the distinction that runs through humanity is drawn between those who live in light and those who live in darkness, those who do good deeds and those who do evil.

Over on the fortunate side where light and good deeds prevail, the Johannine pen can write of doing good and having seen God as quite proximate synonyms. Not for this writer, not for this tradition, not—one is tempted here to stretch, but only a little—for the Galilean teacher who shaped the apostle whose way with life overshadows the rich literature that bears his name, not for these that grotesque diminution of the human vocation that opposes thought to action and spirituality to practicality.

It is possible, in this light, to understand one of the more lethal perils of those who speak for God. That danger is just this: it is all too possible to have one’s necessary dualism firmly in place but to have drawn its constitutional line on a completely mistaken axis.