Paying Attention To The Sky

Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson

Robert Hugh Benson
(1871-1914) Benson was educated at Eton College, and then studied Classics and Theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1893. In 1895, he was ordained a priest in the Church of England by his father, Edward White Benson, who was then Archbishop of Canterbury – a prince of the Anglican Church.

His father died suddenly in 1896, and Benson was sent on a trip to the Middle East to recover his own health. While there, he began to question the status of the Church of England and to consider the claims of the Roman Catholic Church. His own piety began to tend toward the High Church variety, and he started exploring religious life in various Anglican communities, eventually obtaining permission to join the Community of the Resurrection.

Benson made his profession as a member of the community in 1901, at which time he had no thoughts of leaving the Church of England. But as he continued his studies and began writing, he became more and more uneasy with his own doctrinal position, and on 11 September 1903 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church – in its time, perhaps one of the most shocking conversion.

He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904 and sent to Cambridge. He continued his writing career along with the usual elements of priestly ministry. He was appointed a Monsignor by Pope Pius X, and died in 1914 due to heart problems brought on by overwork, and pneumonia, being buried in the grounds of his home, Hare Street House, at Buntingford, near London.

If you would like a look at his home and the lovely chapel on its grounds (now a country estate for the Archbishop of Westminster) check out this blog.

Describing Religion
A man’s religion is, in its essence, that system of faith and morals by which he believes that he can enter and remain in right relations with God. In a description therefore of any religion in particular, three main points must be eminent:

(1)     the account given of God by that religion — His Being, His Nature, His Action;

(2)    the account given of man — his being, his origin, his nature, his final end;

(3)    the system by which it is hoped to bring about and to sustain right relations between God and man.

It is along these three main lines, therefore, that the following post will run. They will close with a few detached paragraphs on particular points that cannot well be dealt with in the course of the sustained exposition.

God In The Catholic Religion
The account given, by the Catholic Religion, of God is capable of literally endless expansion, since Infinity is the first thing predicated of Him. Every word or epithet, therefore, applied to God, is only applicable to Him in an analogical or derived sense. When He is called “Just” or “Holy,” He is so called since no better words are at our disposal; yet no word so applied to Him signifies exactly the same as when applied to man, since man is finite and God Infinite.

The Being of God
It is believed by Catholics that God is Eternal, that He has had no beginning and will have no end, that He is in Himself immutable, knowing no progress since He has always been Himself final and ultimate Perfection. His “essential glory” then can have no addition or diminution; it is His “accidental glory” only to which created wills can minister. He alone subsists of Himself; all else exists only by Him. He is “Personal,” yet without the limitations associated with that idea.

Three Persons
In the Divine Nature, however, there are Three “Persons,” all co-eternal and co-equal; and the names by which they are known to man are “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Ghost.” There is no inferiority between them, as the “Arian” heresy maintained; neither are they merely three various Actions or Aspects, as the “Sabellians” taught. They are distinct one from the other; yet they are one. A far-off analogy is sometimes used with regard to this “Mystery of the Blessed Trinity” — by which the union and yet the distinctness of the Memory, the Will, and the Understanding in man is thought to bear a certain resemblance to the relations of the Three Persons in the One God.

Another suggestive analogy is the consideration of the three things necessary to any action or any agent. There must be the Agent, the Action, and the Acting: the Lover, the Beloved, and the Loving; and a further suggestion as to the value of this analogy is to be found in the Christian term “The Eternal Word” as applied to the Second Person. Under this aspect it may be said that the “Father” is the Originator and Source, the “Son” the Word eternally uttered or “generated” by Him, and the “Holy Ghost” the personal Link between the two, “proceeding from both.” Yet it must be remembered that each is a “Person,” and each is equal to each; — in other words, that no analogy is exhaustive, or even perfect so far as it goes.

Finally, it must be said that every epithet and attribute that predicates goodness or beauty or truth can be applied fully and infinitely and ultimately to God alone. “There is none good save God.” All other persons and things are “good” only in proportion as they approach the Perfection of the Divine Will.

The Creation
So far the outline of God-in-Himself only has been considered — the outline, that is, which Catholic Dogmatic Theology lays down as revealed. Beyond that outline — beyond, that is to say, the numerous dogmas that further develop and safeguard the main Facts which Catholics claim have been revealed by God Himself — there remains a literally infinite field for speculation, beyond even those points on which theologians have disputed in the past. The knowledge of God in its entirety, so far as that is open to creatures, is only possible in the “Beatific Vision” Itself The next point, then, to consider, is the manner in which Catholics believe the universe to have come into existence.

The word used by the Church is Creation, by which she intends deliberately to rule out either that the Universe is a kind of emanation from God in such a sense that the word “Divine” can be applied to its nature; or that it has existed co-eternally along with God. She further explains her meaning by adding that God created all things that are or have been, out of nothing. It was in no sense by a necessity of His Being that He created the Universe; neither was it by any kind of evolution from Himself that it came to exist. He created all things out of nothing by a free act of His own Sovereign Will. And if it be asked, Why did He so create? it can only be answered, humanwise, that He saw that more “good” — more, that is, to His own “accidental” glory — would be the result than if He had not so acted. His Foreknowledge is perfect; yet it must be remembered also that the Catholic Church entirely denies Calvinistic teaching to the effect that that Foreknowledge constrains any will that He has created free. The situation may be tolerably summed up by saying, God foreordained because He foreknew; He did not foreknow because He foreordained.

Now this Act of God, called Creation, first brought into being an unknown number of beings purely spiritual, like God Himself. These are named generally Angels, and are divided into Nine Orders. It is further believed that these Angels underwent a certain probation; they possessed, therefore, free-wills; and in the event a certain proportion of these beings “fell.” There has been in the past much speculation among theologians as to the nature of the trial they underwent: yet nothing is dogmatically defined on the subject.

Following the creation of the Angels, there came at some unknown period that of the world in which men live; and, finally, of man himself. So far, however, definition is of the slightest. It is to these main dogmas only that the Church authoritatively witnesses. An enormous latitude is permitted to Catholics as regards the time and the place and the circumstances and even the interpretations of the events of which these doctrines speak. It is at the next point that a far more precise defining begins.

A More Precise Definition Of Man
Man, unlike the Angels, is not pure spirit: he is spirit incarnate. He was created innocent, with a certain knowledge of God, though not that full knowledge of which he is capable, and enjoyed Grace. Like the Angels, however, he was created free, and like the Angels who fell, he too fell.

Now this is an exceedingly significant doctrine, for upon it depends, in a sense, the entire system known as the Catholic Religion. If man were merely a creature struggling upwards always, the most fundamental Catholic dogmas would be evacuated of meaning. Certainly it is open to a Catholic to believe that a certain kind of evolution had place in the process of man’s creation, that his body, for example, was gradually fitted by selection and generation to be the habitation of an immortal rational soul. But it is an essential of the Catholic Faith that man’s spirit when first created was both free and innocent, and that it fell from innocence by the abuse of its own free-will.

Man was created, then, to know and serve God in this world and to enjoy Him for ever in the next world. Yet man’s first parents fell from this destiny, and transmitted that fallen nature to their descendants. And it is only possible for fallen man to regain his position by the aid of God’s Grace — that is, by free gifts from God of light and strength. Further, the Sin of Man is so great an outrage against God that nothing but an adequate sacrifice can compensate for it, or can win for man that access to Grace by which alone he can rise again to a state of friendship and union with his Creator. As to what this Sacrifice proves to be, and as to the various methods and channels by which Grace comes, we shall consider later.

This, then, the Church teaches, is the state in which the natural man finds himself in this world. He is fallen, but he is not (as Calvin taught) absolutely corrupt: he has still a conscience — that is, a faculty by which he can discern good and evil; he has still aspirations after good, and, by the mercy of God, a certain power of choosing it: he is still “free,” though his freedom is enormously hampered by that downward tendency that is the result of the Fall.

Further, it is taught, every man has sufficient grace for salvation — sufficient help, that is, from God, to regain the destiny for which God made him, and to avoid the final doom to which sin naturally leads. He is faced by two final states, and two only; and he has but this one life on earth for his probation. If he “corresponds” sufficiently with the grace that God gives him he passes gradually upwards to that union with God of which he is capable, and in Heaven enjoys eternally the “Beatific Vision” — a state in which he at once preserves his own individuality and yet is united to God.

If, on the other hand, he fails to correspond with grace, and yields to the downward drag of his fallen nature in such a degree as to be, when his probation closes with death, in a state of “enmity” with God, he passes to that state which he himself has, in effect, freely chosen, and in hell is excluded eternally from the presence of his Creator. Only, it must be noticed in passing, never yet on any individual has the Catholic Church uttered a decision of final condemnation, since the interior dispositions of a man at the time of his death can be known only to God.

No excommunication or anathema can be more than an approximate attempt to deal with the soul so far as she falls under the Church’s jurisdiction, and such are issued with the express hope of awakening such a soul to her own condition of danger. Neither does the Church for one moment dare to dogmatize as to the state of those who die outside her pale; for even though, as will be seen later, she claims to be the One Ark of Salvation, this does not in any sense derogate from God’s Sovereign right and power to deal with souls in His own way.

Central Doctrines
So far much that has been said is applicable to nearly all Theistic belief. It is as to the nature of the system by which fallen man may be restored that the differences begin to manifest themselves more particularly.

The central doctrine of the Catholic Religion is that of the Incarnation. This doctrine teaches that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity at a certain moment in history was “made man” in such a sense that He assumed complete Human Nature, both body and soul, yet without ceasing to be God or suffering any essential change, that He was born of a woman, lived a human life, and after His death reunited again in the Resurrection both Body and Soul, and finally took back in the Ascension that human nature with Him, perfected and transfigured, to the “Throne” of God. It is by this Incarnation, this “Hypostatic Union” between God and Man in Jesus Christ, that God and man are reunited. Intimately bound up with the doctrine of the Incarnation is that of the Atonement, in which it is believed that the free offering by Jesus Christ of Himself to God — an offering consummated in His Crucifixion on Calvary — constituted the Sacrifice which alone is adequate to compensate for the Sin of Man.

Heresies
Innumerable interpretations of these doctrines, especially of that of the Incarnation, have been successively rejected by the Church under the name of Heresies. It is necessary to touch on a few of these, since it was by their rejection that the Catholic doctrine itself has more precisely emerged. It must be remembered, however, that in the Catholic view all dealings of God with man — of the Infinite with the finite — are bound to be enveloped largely in mystery. The Church claims to state and safeguard the facts revealed by God, not always to reconcile and elucidate them exhaustively.

Two Classes of Heresies
Heresies on the Incarnation fall roughly into two classes namely, those which minimize, respectively, the Human Nature or the Divine Nature of Jesus Christ. The former, and the earlier in point of history, regarded the Human Nature of Christ as either so drowned in the Divinity as to be practically negligible, or as phantom-like and unreal.

In opposition to this the Catholic Church teaches that the Human Nature was completely real and that therefore the sufferings and needs of that Human Nature were also real. Without this reality the Sacrifice of Calvary would be no more than a drama acted for men’s imitation or admiration. Christ had, in fact, a Human Will also, and was capable therefore of feeling the stress of temptation, though Himself actually incapable of sin.

The later heresies, largely adopted at the present day by many who claim the name of Christian, minimize the Divinity of Christ, using that word only to denote either a superhuman quality of goodness or a human quality raised to the utmost intensity; and in opposition to this the Church teaches that the Person of Jesus Christ was, and has always continued to be, the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, immutable and unchanged; that He possessed therefore all the attributes of the Deity since He Himself was God even further, that His Human Nature, so intimate was its union with God, enjoyed always and unceasingly even upon earth the Beatific Vision; and, in virtue of that same union, was and is a proper object of adoration.

It will be seen plainly then that the doctrine of the Atonement depends absolutely upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Human Nature of Christ were in any sense unreal, the Incarnation would be unnecessary. If the Divinity of Christ were not absolute, His Sacrifice would, at the most, only differ from the death of martyrs and saints in degree but not in kind; and again the Incarnation would be unnecessary. As perfect God and perfect Man, however, He accomplished what neither God nor man could accomplish separately: He united real Humanity to real Divinity; and by His Sacrifice consummated that union, and atoned for that for which man alone was incapable of atoning.

Other Foundational Doctrines
This, very briefly, then, is the foundation of the Catholic Religion, and has been, at any rate, until comparatively recently, the foundation of all Protestantism as well. It is claimed, however, by Catholics that certain other doctrines follow inevitably (and were actually so revealed by Christ), and that the rejection of these doctrines by Protestantism has led to obscurity and even to positive heresy on the fundamental dogmas themselves.

First, then, the Catholic Religion teaches that the Grace and Spiritual Power released by the Incarnation and the Atonement need, and were supplied with, means by which such grace should be perpetually applied to the individual. Certainly the individual, where such means fail, can, by the mercy of God, interiorly apprehend the grace necessary for his salvation; but, it is claimed, Christ, who wrought these things under terms of time and space, has provided means also under terms of time and space by which such grace is applied.

Secondly, it is claimed that the truths revealed by Christ need in every age a Living Voice by which vital questions may be answered, and an infallible Authority by which such truths may be safeguarded. A Revelation enshrined in a written book ceases, by the variety of interpretations applied to it, to be a positive or certain Revelation at all, unless there he an authoritative and infallible Teacher on Earth to decide between such interpretations. The Catholic Church, therefore, unlike Protestantism, while she regards the Bible as the Word of God and as one fount of Truth, adds as a second and equally important fount of Truth, the Tradition committed to her by Christ, in the guardianship of which she believes herself divinely safeguarded.