Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
—Collect, Holy Name of the Lord
The New Testament, according to Susan Garrett’s The Demise of the Devil, carries on a polemic against magic. And this is needful. Even Christians are susceptible to seeking out magical formulas in place of a simple trust in Christ. We can read a series of sermons delivered by John Mason Neale (1818-1866) to see how the symbol of the “holy name of Jesus” can become unmagical. Contemplation of Christ’s holy name changes the intentionality of the believer who may seek control away from self-centeredness.
But Garrett’s claim deserves some elaboration first. The Book of Revelation imagines a “false prophet” who will seduce followers to idolatry through magic (19:20). St Luke sees the devil as already the ruler of this world (4:6), who seizes divine glory, so that Jesus must distinguish his power as coming rather “from the finger of God” (11:20), much like Moses defeating the magicians of Egypt (Ex. 8:19). If Jesus, who withstands Satan’s temptations, sees Satan “fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” (10:18) as resurrection triumphs over death, the early church still had to deal with magicians.
In Acts, the missionaries preach “the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 8:12) for baptism, meaning a turning from the authority of the devil to that of God. As if to convince us that this is not magic, Luke introduces Simon Magus, who amazes with magic, and upon seeing the signs and miracles of the early Christians, self-interestedly (and idolatrously) asks “Give me also this power so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit” (19). He is rejected. Like the false prophet who is to come, he drew others to himself with magic and gained renown: “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets” (Luke 6:26).
Later, in Ephesus, the “seven sons of Sceva” were driving out evil spirits in the “name of Jesus” (19:13). They, however, were subsequently overcome by the possessed man. Like Simon Magus, they seem to be magicians: they are “exorcists” who attempt to “adjure” the spirit. But Jesus’ name cannot be a magic incantation, and their failure causes the people of Ephesus to lose faith in magic, if not the name of Jesus, which is held in “high honor” (17). As Fabrizio Marcello has recently written, any use of the holy name must be bound with genuine “faith in the name of Jesus” (3:16) and the missionary task of the early church, which involves being drawn into a difficult narrative in which, as the Lord says, one “must suffer for my name” (9:16) and not seek the self-glorification of the now-familiar magician.
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How do John Mason Neale’s sermons on the holy name echo this anti-magical orientation? First, who was John Mason Neale? Perhaps best remembered for the original hymn “Good King Wenceslas,” Neale was a polyglot hymnodist, liturgist, and historian who was contemporaneous with the figures of the Oxford Movement but saw them as having missed the “influence of Aestheticks.” (Also, as his first biographer, Eleanor Towle, writes, his knowledge of church history, particularly of the East, meant he could regard Christian divisions as “matters of sorrowful regret, rather than of perplexed disquietude.”) Neale saw architecture, with the 14th-century Gothic as exemplary, as similar to Scripture in presenting outwardly what was to be read mystically as the expression of inner truths.
If Neale does not seem like a writer who will be attentive to how symbols, however dazzling, can become vehicles for self-interest, this caution is not absent in his thought. In an essay with his friend and colleague, Benjamin Webb, Neale writes that something material that becomes sacramental bears “its own corrective with its own temptation,” as we learn to live “above our senses,” so that “symbolism is thus the true Sign of the Cross, hallowing the unholy, and making safe the dangerous.” Neale is also aware of unconsciously bad symbolism, namely of “the spiritual pride, the luxury, the self-sufficiency, the bigotry of the congregations of too many a pew-rented Episcopal Church,” where “the Royal Arms occupy a conspicuous position; for it is a chapel of the Establishment,” and even the cast-iron pillars symbolize that the building is held up by the congregation, presumably at the expense of divine initiative.
Neale also established a nursing religious order of sisters, the Society of St. Margaret, in 1855, before which he gave annual sermons on the holy name of Jesus, seven of which were later published. (The order, to which Neale devoted much of his time, still exists.) In these sermons, we can see how meditating on the holy name is meant to draw one away from idolatrous uses of it; the experience of a symbol becomes its corrective.
For one thing, Neale was fascinated by martyrdom. As Leon Litvack writes, what drew Neale to the Orthodox East was “its simplicity, immutability, and strength in the face of persecution even unto death.” His sermons draw upon martyrdom and affliction as contemplation of the holy name puts one in company with those who also looked to it without any hope of earthly glory or reward—those facing persecution, on a ship at the moment of its sinking, or in the hospital wards during the great plague of Milan. Neale remembers that when St Ignatius was martyred by lions in the amphitheater in second-century Rome, the name of Jesus was found written in his heart.
Of course, martyrdom can be overly romanticized, but for Neale contemplation of the holy name is a way to let go of our attempts to influence history. We recognize that we hear sermons about the holy name just as the listeners of St. Bernard in 12th-century Citeaux, even though “not one stone stands now upon another” and “the farm-horses are watered from the stone coffins of those early monks.”
Something remains fresh, but imperceptibly so, like a hidden name written on the heart. In a sermon about Peter and John’s healing of the “man lame from birth” in Acts—“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk” (3:6), Neale notes the miracle confusingly took place after Jesus likely had passed the “impotent man” in Jerusalem before. “The impotent man shall be made whole in time: the trouble you suffer shall be removed in due season,” even in a “cold and wintry world.”
The name reminds us of a “wonderful plan,” however inscrutable. We may even imagine that we have a special task that could advance God’s kingdom and finally lead to our lasting happiness, but Neale tells us to remember that St. Paul and his companions were “on fire” to preach the gospel in Asia Minor but were kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching there, forbidden to enter present-day Turkey (16:6-7).
If contemplation of the holy name leads us to imagine a historical narrative that is God’s and not ours, it also leads us to stop comparing ourselves with others. In a sermon on “By what power, or by what Name have ye done this” (Acts 4:7), Neale says that contemplating God’s name means simultaneously recognizing the sinfulness of humanity, because of all the names we call Christ—Emmanuel, King of Kings, Messiah—the holy name of Jesus “alone speaks of sins,” literally meaning “God saves.” Thus, “It was our sin that brought out his love.”
When annoyed by others, then, “That Name” can become our “pattern,” so that our lips bring forth Jesus’ “gracious words” to others, those whom he loved in their sinfulness and whose love we may imitate. (Neale draws an interesting comparison of Jesus as high priest to the earthly priest who must listen to harsh comments about a person whose confession he hears, secretly knowing about all this person’s humility, sorrows, and faith amid the criticism.)
Further, Neale illustrates the paradox in which contemplation of the holy name does not lead to the attainment of wizardry but self-awareness of our need for grace. He notes St. Bernard’s sermon that challenges, “Why should you not exert yourselves more?” but gives way to a prayer distinguished by its humility: “Draw me: we will run after Thee,” for “walk? I cannot even stand, without Thy grace.”
In a later sermon on “Where is it that thou dost ask after My Name?” (Gen. 32:29), Neale writes of Jacob wrestling with an angel for a blessing, but this most active of struggles becomes receptivity, as when we say, “I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me,” we do so by imagining “over and over again … this blessed Name to be the strong Tower into which [we] run and are safe.” As Neale quotes Proverbs, “The name of the Lord is a strong tower” (18:10), but it is our tower “because He trod the winepress alone.”
Neale preached against anything that would reduce “clinging to that Name” to a possession, leaving the self to its fantasies. Never liking anything he considered “Protestant,” he recounted a story about Oliver Cromwell’s deathbed, where the Lord Protector asked if anyone who had been in a state of grace could fall from it, and upon being told, “Neither fatally nor finally,” responded, “Then I must be saved: for I know that I was once in grace.” For Neale, we must instead keep clinging to him—“Thou shalt call His Name Jesus”—because, ultimately, we must be saved “from that which is most dangerous of all, from ourselves.”
For Neale, contemplation of the holy name frees us from what we might otherwise do with that name, likely trying to secure our self-glorification, as it reminds us of two things, not only that the Lord has done great things for us, but also “how often we have failed” and remain in need of grace. “[I]t mentions as well that from which we are saved, as that into which we are brought.”
In a sermon to the sisters delivered on August 7, 1857, Neale mentioned that they had celebrated the Transfiguration just the day before: “Yesterday, what He was with the Father He showed by the exceeding brightness of His mortal body: to-day He manifests how His humility, by taking man’s flesh, wrought out man’s salvation. … The one in the Country, the other in the way.”
Liturgically, then, contemplating the holy name corrects our very contemplation of it. Imaginatively, we who would be magicians, we who seek control and power, find ourselves one with the shipwrecked, drawn into an unknown and difficult providence, and called to love mimetically those whom we disdained, even as our strenuous activity passes into humble receptivity before one who trod the winepress alone and whose grace we will always need, even if on the way to an unseen victory. Why speak of the “holy name of Jesus” instead of just faith? Perhaps because “the holy name of Jesus” is unmagical: we begin as wizards to end like penitents.
Neil Dhingra, PhD is an academic adviser at the University of Maryland.
