interview
faith and reasons

coming back home
He is an “educated man” and “a European of today.” JOHN HUGHES, an Anglican reverend and Cambridge Dean of Chapel, confronts Dostoevsky’s question: Is it still possible to believe in the divinity of Christ? The answer reveals itself through the encounters of his life.

by Samuele Busetto

Red brick walls, stone columns, and Gothic archways surrounded by green lawns and trees with lush foliage... Jesus College has been in existence since 1496, with all its austere charm. Initially, it was a monastery hosting a Benedictine community founded in the 12th century. Later on, this glorious landmark became the place where several pillars of British culture received their education–among others, the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the demography theoretician Robert Malthus, and the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton. Nowadays, the young Reverend Doctor John Hughes is the college’s Dean of Chapel. An Anglican, he was born in 1978. A lover of traveling and fine cooking, he teaches philosophy, ethics, and doctrine for the Cambridge University Faculty of Divinity. In 2007, he wrote The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism. As a student, he became involved in the Anglican movement Radical Orthodoxy, founded by the theologian John Milbank, through which he met a few students belonging to the Communion and Liberation movement. He is an educated man, a European of today, and he works in an environment steeped in secularism and positivistic thinking. For this reason, at the outset of the Year of Faith, we asked him to confront Dostoevsky’s question: “Can an educated man, a European of today, believe, really believe, in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ?”

Dr. Hughes, what is your answer to Dostoevsky’s challenging question?
Until twenty or thirty years ago, it was common to have a sympathy for the notion of Jesus as a good man, not taking into serious consideration His divinity. Today Dostoevsky’s challenge to European culture is becoming more stark. There are two strands that I notice amongst my students: those who have either no belief in Jesus even as a human–and, indeed, maybe not much belief in humanity; a sort of nihilism–and then on the other hand, a return to a kind of full-blooded Christianity in those for whom it’s about a living encounter with the real Christ, Who is Divine. This question seems to me as much alive as ever here today, among some of the most cultured (over-cultured sometimes) and academic Europeans. The question of the Divinity of Christ remains vibrant, and there are those who respond in an affirmative way. Some of the most cultured people here–academics and students alike–are those who have given their lives to Christ. I can think of at least a couple of people in the past few years, students and academics I have known, for whom their discovery of Christ began through a discovery of culture–it was through great Christian literature or poets that they began to encounter Christ.

What is the key to discovering the divinity of Christ in daily life?
In this respect, I feel I have learned a lot from CL, but also from other Catholic theologians whom I have read. The real danger of this culture, the university culture, is a separation of the heart from the mind, so that there is a tendency sometimes for people to want to speak of faith in purely intellectual terms, which no longer impact upon something real in their lives–or, at least, they are shy of really speaking of how it impacts upon their lives. And yet, I have discovered, while people get excited about ideas, it is (as Fr. Carrón said) this question of the heart that is decisive. I am not just talking about the heart in a sentimental sense, as opposed to the mind, but rather, the heart as the deepest wellspring of our identity, and what really our deepest desire is, how that comes together with our whole life.

The heart is the wellspring of my personal judgment on whatever I encounter, on what is in front of me...
Exactly. I am reminded that this was very strong in my own stirrings in discovering the faith, when I was a teenager. Now I have an annual catechesis where I prepare people for Baptism and Confirmation, and when I talk to them there I’m frequently quite moved by how these people, who will often be very intellectual, will also obviously often be very personal about how they have encountered Christ in their lives. One of them was the one I was thinking of earlier, who very much came to the faith through his studies, from no religious background at all–he was reading books about tragedy, as a matter of fact. Then, in his talk, he revealed that this was real and personal for him because somebody very close to him had been extremely ill. Beginning to pray about that situation was the way of bringing together what he was reading about and the lived experience of suffering and uncertainty about the future. Learning how to trust God through prayer in that situation led him to the decision to give his life to Christ. I think hearing about that has changed me.

Why?
It has made me more aware. Now, particularly on Sunday mornings, I try hard to preach with that in mind. In the ministry of Confession (which is not such a big part of the tradition in the Church of England–it is mostly regarded as an extra devotion), there are people who are asking for help in discovering how God is real for them in the day-to-day choices of their lives, in the moral and spiritual challenges that they face. I think this question of the heart is what I feel I have most learned from CL. It has really transformed my ministry, and has also helped me to see that it was something that all along was very important to many of my students.

What do you mean?
Within the college, there is a student group that has a pronounced Evangelical Protestant background. I think that spending time with CL people and rediscovering the importance of the heart in Christian life has really helped me to understand more clearly where they are coming from, and to appreciate the things they are often better at doing than am I–which is talking about exactly how Christ is real now, in this moment in our lives. It is so helpful in Fr. Giussani’s charism that, in affiriming the presence of Christ, he avoided the dangers of one-sidedness in affirming the heart. He managed to remind us of the importance of the heart, without it becoming a sentimentalism, or anti-intellectualism, or individualism–which are all dangers in our English version of pietism, because it comes together with the historicity of Christ, and the social nature of the Church.

You wrote a book on the meaning of work (The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism) in which you analyze different views on work–from Karl Marx to Pope John Paul II–and you describe the ongoing loss of connection with the transcendent, which is the true dignity of work. Fr. Carrón talks about a sort of embarrassment caused by an apparent distance between Christ and life. How do you perceive this distance of Christ from work in our society?
I think it can be twofold. First, the pressures of the secular culture will encourage us to think of these things as entirely excluded from God, to privatize our faith in Christ as only what we do in worship rather than something that shapes all our lives. But also the distance takes place when the work that we do for Christ can somehow become empty forms for its own sake. We can lose this relationship between our heart and Christ, which has to be the living wellspring of any Christian action, and of politics and labor. Even things like Bible study, prayer, and so on, when they are cut off from Christ, become nothing. “Without Me you are nothing.” We must meet this challenge of how to re-embed our daily lives, as individuals, as a society, in Christ, and in His heart and desire for us.

What helped you face this challenge?
Although I have read the books, for me it always began with a friendship, and that’s really what continues to be the case with Radical Orthodoxy and CL. I have learned the most from the relationships. And I think that is something my students here really realize.

Why?
Because students are in a particular time of life when they know how important relationships are, and there is so much energy and openness. This is when they are most open to Christ as well, in their friendships. That has also been the case for me in Radical Orthodoxy. For the past 14 years, these people–my teachers and my peers–have been my friends and they have shown me Christ, and what it means to follow Him today.

Does the lack of this experience have consequences on a cultural level?
One of the points I was exploring was how so much of the very shape of modern Western work, with the endless pursuit of money, its suspicion of leisure, its anxiety about profit, its desire to make everything useful, is the result of cutting off human work and life from the relationship with God.

Fr. Giussani points out that it is the relationship with Christ, with His divinity, that allows man’s humanity to flourish...
Yes, exactly. If Christ truly speaks to us it is because He is the One Who made us. That’s why His divinity matters, because He speaks to us in a way that no one else can, because He is our Creator, and that’s why He responds to and fulfills all our deepest needs–because He made us like that. This is what in theology we would call the orientation of creation to salvation. I think that I see that around me; when people discover a relationship with Christ, they discover it not as something strange, but as what they’ve always really wanted and been looking for. They’re home, they are coming home.