Tuesday, January 22, 2002 5:10 PM

The Holy Name

The following article is a review, by Jerome Bertram, of a book on ‘The Divine Name in Sacred Scripture’ by Fr Michael Lewis:

As you descend the steep path in the crack of the rock at Monte Spaccato, near Gaeta, on your way to the chapel where St Philip prayed, you may notice some graffiti cut in the stone beside the path: circles, and in them the letters YHS. They were cut by St Bernadine himself, for it was his mission to proclaim the Name of Jesus, and it was in that form that he abbreviated the Holy Name, even though others since have rendered it by the more familiar IHS.

Fr Lewis’s little book reveals much about the Holy Name, and about the amazing significance hidden in the letters which St Bernadine chose as his emblem. The name of Jesus Christ was given to us in a Greek form, and may be written in Greek capitals thus: IHCOYC XPICTOC. For centuries the standard way of abbreviating that name was to use simply the first and last letters, thus: IC XC, as you will find it on most Eastern icons. St Bernadine, in the early 15th century, changed all that, choosing to use the first two letters with the last, thus IHC and XPC. The Greek “c” is really an “s”, so it was natural to write IHS XPS, in which form the Holy Name has become very familiar.

But why did St Bernadine want to insert the “h” (really an “e”)? And why change the “i” into a “y”, a letter used neither in Italian nor Latin? The answer is that Christian Kabbalistic scholars had drawn attention to the fact that the Name of Jesus, in its original Hebraic form, contains the four letters of the Unspeakable Name of God revealed in the Old Testament, and with the addition of two extra Hebrew letters makes the Unpronounceable Name into one that we can pronounce.

The Name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3 is properly written only in consonants, YHWH, as we find it in the new Catechism. According to a 3,000 year-old tradition, it is not permitted to attempt to pronounce it, and no one really knows how it could be if it could. Fr Lewis notes that the Jerusalem Bible has, most unfortunately, introduced a possible way of speaking that Name, thus inducing modern Christians to try to pronounce it. Apart from being deeply offensive to our Jewish friends, this practice of turning the Unpronounceable Name into an ordinary one has the disastrous effect of making the revealed Name of the God of Israel appear to be an ordinary name like that of the godlings of the pagans.

That Name, YHWH, is not simply a name like any other: it has a meaning, which is that our God is the One Who Is, the only essential Being, the “ground of our being” as Tillich put it. We only exist because of Him. The Ineffable Name expresses that: He Is and He Will Be. By revealing His Name to Moses, God revealed something absolutely essential about Himself, and about His relationship with His people. The godlings of other nations had ordinary names like anyone else, Moloch or Astarte, Diana or Silenus, Tom or Harry. These names tell us something about their bearers, but not much.. they are really common names that could be borne by many people, just as St Paul numbered an Apollo and a Dionysius among his friends. God’s Name is different.

But the Name become a human name, by adding the Hebrew letters ‘shin’ and ‘ain’ to the original four, producing Yehoshuwah; the Hebrew form of the name we know as JESUS (though we usually write the original Hebrew form as Joshua). Thus the Divine Name becomes a human name, the inaccessible and unpronounceable becomes close and familiar; thus God becomes one of us, and the Name really is “Emmanuel – God with us”. St Joseph is given the tremendous privilege of giving the Name: “She will bear a son, and you will name him Jesus”.

In so doing, St Joseph transfers to the child the whole of the rich inheritance of Israel, making Our Lord the heir to all those names we read in the genealogies of Matthew and Luke. The Name is given again by Pontius Pilate, of all people, for the Hebrew form of the inscription on the Cross uses the four letters of the Divine Name as the initials of the four words: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Yeshu HaNozri, WaMelek Ha Yehudim. No wonder the chief priests were so upset! Pilate, unawares, had written up for all the world to see that his crucified Galilean is the eternal God, the Creator as well as the Redeemer of the World.

We may not pronounce the Exodus Name, but we may, and must, pronounce the Name of Jesus, as St Paul and all subsequent writers on prayer have emphasised. The great Greek writers who appear in the Philokalia teach us how to pray by repeating the Name of Jesus, in the Jesus Prayer, made familiar in the West in recent years by the translation of the Russian Way of a Pilgrim.

Fr Lewis contributes a much-needed warning against perverting this prayer into a form of mental gymnastics designed to “heighten our spiritual consciousness” or other such self-centred nonsense. We pray because we love Our God and want to grown in Its love: prayer must be God-centred, not a means of building ourselves up. “He must increase and we must decrease”, as St John the Baptist put it. The Jesus Prayer is an excellent way of growing in the love of God, but it must be prayed as the great spiritual masters teach it. And it is not, by any means, exclusive to the inscrutable East. Our own English mystics of the Middle Ages were well aware of this form of prayer, encouraging us to murmur the Holy Name silently at frequent intervals during the day.

St Bernadine of Siena, like all great preachers, was not teaching something new, but reminding his hearers of what they should have been well aware of already. In preaching he used to hold up a little wooden board, on which the IHS monogram he favoured was surrounded by twelve rays of light, and he encouraged “every knee to bow” before that monogram. Devotion to the Holy Name spread through Europe with astonishing rapidity. In 1432 Pope Eugenius IV issued a Bull promoting devotion to the written IHS symbol: six years later the almshouse chapel in the remote village of Ewelme in Oxfordshire was being decorated all over with that symbol. The IHS can be seen written up over doorways like the ancient Jewish mezuza; it is found carved, painted, embroidered, stamped, cast, reproduced on stone, metal, textile, glass, wood and ceramic.

Popular devotion led to the composition of an Office of the Holy Name, and the establishment of a feast day. The actual day varied over the centuries, but many remember it as the Sunday after Christmas, until 1969, when it was suppressed. But God is not mocked: our present Holy Father has reinstated it, and we discover in the newly-published Roman Martyrology that a memoria of the Holy Name will henceforth be celebrated on 3 January. Fr Lewis’s little book has appeared at a very timely moment, to herald the restoration of the Feast of the Holy Name.