MASTER of Pratovecchio, Madonna and Child with Six Angels circa 1440s

 

I was zipping about the web recently and came across this little piece written back in 2007 by Brian Davies. I’ve been reading a lot of his stuff recently and preparing several pieces for posting on Paying Attention to the Sky. This is pithy and gives the atheists something to think about, which, God only knows, the poor souls need. Brian Davies is an English Dominican. He is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York.

Atheists make a great fuss about how God does not exist. This claim, they think, is at odds with what those who believe in God hold. But is it? What kind of God do the atheists have in mind? And can someone who believes in God not actually feel happy to say that God does not exist?

Ordinarily, of course, we think that something either exists or does not exist. So we say that the Eiffel Tower exists while the Colossus of Rhodes does not. And if, like some, we presume that belief in God is a scientific hypothesis, or that God is a top, invisible person, a celestial consciousness (with or without a beard) living alongside the Universe in time while learning about it from on high, then, presumably, He, too, either exists or does not exist, just like you and I. But there are other, and more traditional, ways of thinking about God.

Take, for example, what we find in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. He never thought of God as an entity seriously comparable to what we find in the Universe. He took God to be the cause of everything real and imaginable to us, the cause of all natural kinds and their members, the reason why there is something rather than nothing. Aquinas, of course, realized that when we talk of God we are forced to make use of words we have come up with to name and describe what we find in the world in which we live.

And since he took people to be higher forms of being than anything else around us, he naturally ascribed to God what we most value in ourselves — such as intelligence. But Aquinas was equally keen to emphasize that God is not a creature, not a member of the world, not a being among beings, not, in this sense, an existing thing. God, he says, “is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms”. For Aquinas, there is a serious sense in which it is true to assert that God does not exist. He would readily have agreed with Kierkegaard’s statement: “God does not exist, he is eternal.”

Or we can put it another way. There is a sense in which Aquinas holds that only God really exists. Creatures are there, right enough, but, for Aquinas, their being is derived or dependent. All that they are and do is God’s work in them. They have no reality from themselves. Creatures are temporal, finite, and caused to exist, while God is none of these things. Aquinas puts all this by saying that God’s existing does not differ from his substance, that God, and only God, exists by nature, that God is “subsistent being” while everything else “has” being — has it as given to it. You can find a similar line of thinking coming from St Anselm of Canterbury. God, he declares, is “the being who exists in a strict and absolute sense” since with Him there is nothing temporal and nothing received.

Traditionally speaking, therefore, it makes sense to say both that God does not exist and that only God exists, which means we should be careful when it comes to what we mean when we declare ourselves atheists or not. And there is surely a further sense in which all Jews, Muslims, and Christians can be thought of as atheists. For they do not believe there are any gods. They believe there is a Creator of all things visible and invisible, not that there is a class of gods to which the Creator belongs.

The first of the Ten Commandments tells us to have no gods. It effectively tells us to be atheists, to stop being interested in extremely powerful creatures and to focus instead on the unfathomable mystery behind and within the world that we can, to some extent, fathom. God the maker of all things cannot be a part of what He brings forth. He belongs to no category. He is not a god. There are no gods.

Seems you folks were right all along. My apologies …

If you are going to understand Aristotle and Aquinas, the first thing you need to do is put out of your mind everything that you’ve come to associate with words like “purpose,” “final cause,” “teleology,” and the like under the influence of what you’ve read about the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design debate, Paley’s design argument, etc. None of that is relevant.

If you think that what Aristotelians or Thomists mean when they say that teleology pervades the natural world is that certain natural objects exhibit “irreducible specified complexity,” or that some inorganic objects are analogous to machines and/or to biological organs, or that they are best explained as the means by which an “Intelligent Designer” is seeking to achieve certain goals, etc., then you are way off base. I realize that that’s the debate most people – including writers of pop apologetics books – think that arguments like the Fifth Way are about. They’re not. Think outside the box. “What hath Thomas Aquinas to do with William Paley?” Nothing. Forget Paley.

The core of the A-T “principle of finality” can be illustrated with the simplest sort of cause and effect relation you might care to take. As Aquinas sums it up: “Every agent acts for an end: otherwise one thing would not follow more than another from the action of the agent, unless it were by chance” (Summa Theologiae I.44.4). By “agent” he doesn’t mean only conscious rational actors like ourselves, but anything that serves as an efficient cause.

For example, insofar as a chunk of ice floating in the North Atlantic tends, all things being equal, to cause the water surrounding it to grow colder, it is an “agent” in the relevant sense. And what Aquinas is saying is that given that the ice will, unless impeded, cause the surrounding water to grow colder specifically – rather than to boil, to turn into Coca Cola, or to catch fire, and rather than having no effect at all – we have to suppose that there is in the ice a potency, power, or disposition which inherently “points to” the generation of that specific effect. That the ice is an efficient cause of coldness entails that generating coldness is the final cause of ice. And in general, if there is a regular efficient causal connection between a cause A and an effect B, then generating B is the final cause of A.

Now already I can hear some readers sputtering replies like the following: “So what divine ‘purpose’ is the ice supposed to serve, then? To chill our martinis? To give furriers a market for their products? What superstition! And what about that iceberg that sank the Titanic? What about hypothermia, frostbite, and the ‘brain freeze’ I suffered through the last time I had a Slurpee? Where’s the omni-benevolence of your Flying Spaghetti Monster sky-god now, huh? HUH?!”

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, and calm down. Nobody said anything about either human purposes or divine purposes. Indeed, there is nothing whatsoever in the specific claim under consideration that has anything to do with “purposes” at all, if what is meant by that is the idea that the ice or the coldness serve some end beyond themselves in the way that a bodily organ functions for the good of the organism of which it is a part, or a machine serves the ends of its designer.

To be sure, each of the latter examples would involve teleology of a sort; but it is not the sort in question here. The claim so far is only that where there is an efficient causal connection between A and B, then generating B is the final cause of A in the sense that A inherently “points to” B or is “directed at” B as its natural effect. That’s it. So far, then, nothing has been said about either “design” or a “designer,” because the point has nothing to do with design. Nor does it have anything to do with complexity, “specified” or otherwise.

We’re talking about ice here – ice! – not the bacterial flagellum, eyeballs, or any of the other hoary chestnuts of the Darwinism-versus-ID dispute. Indeed, we’re talking about something many naturalistic philosophers have come to endorse in contexts far removed from philosophy of religion or the Darwin wars – albeit without realizing that they are more or less reviving a Neo-Scholastic philosophy of nature.

When a mainstream naturalistic philosopher like David Armstrong speaks of the “dispositions” physical objects possess as manifesting a kind of “proto-intentionality,” and when a mainstream naturalistic philosopher like George Molnar argues that the causal powers of material objects exhibit a kind of “physical intentionality,” they are certainly not claiming that there is an intelligent designer who made the world with certain ends in view. But they are (even if unwittingly) more or less stating in modern jargon what the A-T tradition meant by the principle of finality.

As Christopher Martin notes in his important book Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations, modern philosophers tend to think that, where teleological arguments for God’s existence are concerned, getting from the existence of teleology to the existence of God is easy, but establishing that there really is any teleology in the natural order in the first place is difficult or impossible. But as Martin also notes, this is more or less the reverse of the view taken by thinkers like Aquinas.

For Aquinas, it is easy to show that teleology exists; for without it, efficient causation becomes unintelligible. (As I have noted many times, the moderns’ abandonment of final causality is the source of all the puzzles about causation that have plagued modern philosophy since Hume.) What takes work is showing that the existence of teleology entails the existence of God. After all, Aristotle himself, even though he firmly believed both in final causality and in the existence of an Unmoved Mover, did not think that final causality needed an explanation in terms of the Unmoved Mover, or indeed any explanation at all. He took it to be just a fundamental feature of the natural world; his argument for the Unmoved Mover begins instead with the existence of change or motion, not the existence of teleology.

Aquinas disagrees with Aristotle here. But, just as when arguing for the existence of teleology, so too when arguing from the existence of teleology to the existence of God, Aquinas does not appeal to “irreducible complexity,” to the way biological species are adapted to their environment, to the “fine tuning” of the laws of physics, nor to any other of the evidences emphasized by modern proponents of the “design argument.” Nor does he argue from a purported “analogy” between the universe and the products of human design. Nor does he weigh probabilities or argue “to the best explanation.”

Again, you need to put Paley and Co. completely out of your mind. And again, the basic idea is much simpler than all that. It is essentially this: For a cause to be efficacious – including a final cause – it has actually to exist in some way. It’s not just that for A to be the efficient cause of B, A must exist – as it obviously must – but also that for B to be the final cause of A, B must also exist, in some sense, otherwise, being nonexistent, it could not be efficacious. Hence for the “coldness” that the ice generates to function as a final cause, it has to exist in some way; for an oak to function as the final cause of an acorn, it too has to exist in some way; and so forth.

Now there are only three options here: B must exist either in the natural world; or in some Platonic heaven, as a Form; or in an intellect which “directs” A towards B as A’s natural end or goal (as a carpenter has the table in his intellect as the end or goal of his hammering and sawing). Now by hypothesis, B does not exist in the natural world: the whole point is that the coldness that the ice will produce, or the oak that the acorn will grow into, have not yet come about but are initially merely “pointed” to by the ice or the acorn. Nor does B exist as a Platonic Form – at least not if, like Aquinas, one endorses moderate (or Aristotelian) realism about universals, instead of Platonic realism.

The only place left for B to exist, then, is in an intellect; and it must be an intellect that exists outside the natural order altogether. For the causal relations in question are totally unintelligent: ice and acorns do not have intellects, nor is there any intelligence at the level of the even more fundamental causal processes studied by basic physics and chemistry. And all the intelligence that does exist within the material world – in us, for example – presupposes the operation of these unintelligent causal processes (since the existence of our bodies, and thus of us, presupposes them). So, there is no place left for the intellect in question to be than outside the natural order. That is to say, all the causal relations that exist in the natural order exist at all only because there is an intellect outside the natural order which “directs” causes to their effects.

Obviously this line of argument raises all sorts of questions: Why accept the metaphysical assumptions underlying the argument? Why assume that there is only one such intellect directing efficient causes to their effects, or that it has all the various divine attributes? Why should we believe that an intellect could be something outside the natural order, and thus something immaterial, in the first place? All good questions, and all dealt with in The Last Superstition and (in greater detail) in Aquinas. But the point for now is to give a sense of how very different is the argument summarized in Aquinas’s Fifth Way – and like all the Five Ways, it was only ever meant to be a brief summary, not a self-contained one-stop proof – from Paley’s “design argument.”

In particular, in addition to the differences already noted, there is this crucial one: To reject Paley’s divine designer is ipso facto to reject the “design” Paley claims to see in nature. But to reject Aquinas’s notion of a divine intellect is not ipso facto to reject the existence of teleology. One could instead adopt Aristotle’s view that teleology is just a basic feature of the natural order requiring no explanation.

To be sure, this may not be a defensible position at the end of the day – that teleology ultimately entails a divine intellect is precisely Aquinas’s claim. But the point is that, as Aquinas acknowledges and Paley and his successors do not, the inference from teleology to an ordering intelligence is not immediate. There is logical space for an alternative understanding of teleology, and it requires significant philosophical work to rule that alternative out. Establishing the existence of teleology in the natural order is a necessary condition for the success of an argument like the Fifth Way; it is not a sufficient one.

A Soul Brought to Heaven - Adolph William Bouguereau

An article by Fr. James Schall, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, from the early 90’s that quotes a variety of sources as it attempts to answer an age-old question. Fr. Schall is “one of the few renaissance men still among us”. His most recent book, The Order of Things, is available here.  

George MacDonald
Faith seeks intelligence in order that light might meet light. The Scottish divine and writer, George MacDonald, whom C. S. Lewis so much admired, gave a sermon in the latter part of the last century entitled simply “Light.” He suggested that we must first become “fit” for what we are to receive and have, but that our nature will indeed be completed. MacDonald, in a most beautiful passage, reminded us:

There are good things God must delay giving until His child has a pocket to hold them — till he gets His child to make that pocket. He must first make him fit to receive and to have. There is no part of our nature that shall not be satisfied and that not by lessening it, but by enlarging it to embrace an ever-enlarging enough.

Faith seeks intelligence in order to understand and be able to accept that we are given more than we can expect. We must also make ourselves ready for what we are and will receive. One of the good things God delays giving us is precisely Himself. Our individual lives, their narrative history, is the account of what we do with this delay, of what we do to prepare ourselves for the “ever-enlarging enough.”

Evelyn Waugh
In Evelyn Waugh’s autobiography, appropriately named for our purposes, <A Little Learning>, he included a chapter entitled, “A Brief History of My Religious Opinions,” a chapter that hints at just why “a little learning” in its classical statement in precisely “a dangerous thing.” Waugh began by citing a passage of 18 June 1921, from his own diary. He gravely wrote — he was all of eighteen at the time — that “in the last few weeks I have ceased to be a Christian. I have realized that for the last two terms at least I have been an atheist in all except the courage to admit it myself.”2 When he wrote this self-confession, Waugh was in his last year at Lancing, an Anglican prep boarding school in the South of England. He went up Oxford the following year.

In spite of his newly-found school atheism, however — he had gone to Lancing as a rather pious young man — Waugh still enjoyed being a sacristan at the school chapel. He even had a sort of atheist scruple about the impropriety of it all, a scruple prompted by his friend Drieburg who told him frankly that an atheist had no business “handling the altar cloths.”

So Waugh, with some atheist illogic, decided to consult the school chaplain about the matter. When Waugh arrived at his quarters, the chaplain and another master were just sitting down to have a smoke. With some embarrassment, he had to explain his strange perplexity to both chaplain and master. After soberly listening to his curious anguish — “adolescent doubts are very tedious to the mature,” Waugh admitted — the two masters “genially assured” him that “it was quite in order for an atheist to act as a sacristan.”

At the same time, Waugh had belonged to a school debating society called the “Dilettanti.” During his last two years at Lancing, he found himself “eager to dispute the intellectual foundations of Christianity.” The subjects of these school debates, he recalled with some amusement, were such propositions as these: ” ‘Resolved: This House does not believe in the immortality of the soul’; ‘This House believes the age of institutional religion is over’; ‘This House cannot reconcile divine omniscience with human freewill’, and so forth.”3 One wonders, on looking at this list, whether a school system that encourages such debates or one which ignores them is the more unhealthy one.

What is of interest to note about Waugh’s account of his youthful atheism and doubts, however, was the state of soul that resulted from them. He tells us: “I suffered no sense of loss in discarding the creed of my upbringing; still less of exhilaration. My diary is full of pagan gloom and the consideration of suicide.”4 Gloom, boredom, and suicide ironically seem, more often than not in intellectual history, to be the results of losing the joy that Christianity maintains itself ultimately to be. Indeed, it was into a world of gloom, boredom, and suicide that Christianity was first born in the Roman Empire; hence we have the abiding of the importance of Roman stoicism, cynicism, and epicureanism as well as of the insufficiency of their sober virtues.

Our Relation To God And To Truth Is Indeed Intellectual
These classic questions, which it is the function of faith and intelligence to ponder even from the beginning of our intellectual and spiritual lives (even in school debating societies) are, to be sure, ones that can make an atheist out of a Christian, or, equally often, a Christian out of an atheist. This possibility leads us to suspect that our relation to God and to truth is not merely intellectual, however much it is indeed intellectual. The immortality of the soul, after all, was advocated by no one less than Plato, hardly a Christian, except perhaps “naturaliter,” as many of his admirers ancient and modern have held.

Meantime, at least some institutional religion persists in all ages, in spite of all academic predictions or Gates of Hell prevailing to the contrary. Divine omniscience and freewill are questions an Aquinas, for instance, with perhaps a little more perception than the Dilettanti Debating Society in 1921, found non-contradictory and therefore theoretically quite compatible with each other. We could not even think of divine omniscience without its including a freewill that was really free.

The famous “dicta” that “faith seeks understanding” and that “understanding seeks faith” are ideas that go back at least to St. Augustine and St. Anselm, if not to Plato himself. Aristotle, in a remarkably fertile phrase, had said that the human mind has a capacity to know or to “be” all things. All that is. Aristotle had noted that if man were the highest being, politics would be the highest science; but, he added, that man is not the highest being so that he stands to the highest being as a “contemplative,” that is, as someone who must receive or behold what is not his to make or create. This conclusion is ultimately the real source of human freedom.

Aquinas also had argued that since we can in some essential fashion prove that God exists but not what He is like, not what His inner life consists in, we nevertheless continue to seek to know about God in His fullness. However little we can know about this First Being, Aristotle told us at the end of <The Ethics>, it remains worth all our efforts even in comparison to the admittedly important things of this world. We are curious about what this conclusion about God’s existence means. We cannot really let it go and remain consistent with ourselves, with our desire to know <what is>. For it leads our minds to establish the fact that finite being, including our own, whose limits we self-reflectively are aware of, is not and cannot be the cause of itself, even though, as we read in the <Book of Genesis>, we might be tempted to make ourselves, not God, the cause of the distinction of good and evil in the world.

Eric Voegelin and Allan Bloom
Eric Voegelin, in a most provocative lecture he gave in Montreal in 1980, to young university students, told them that they must be open to something beyond themselves because “we all experience our own existence as not existing out of itself but as coming from somewhere even if we don’t know where.”5 We should, furthermore, be aware that such a vital question concerning our own being will in all probability not be formally asked in any university of our immediate acquaintance. This fact is no doubt at the origin of the intellectual malaise and spiritual emptiness many of our friends and acquaintances find in themselves. Even though the pursuit of truth must in some sense depend on those who have been wise before us, and these not always the recognized “great” thinkers, it has almost become a private, not corporate, academic, or even religious enterprise for most of us.

Allan Bloom caused quite a scandal in recent years by suggesting that the unhappiest souls in our society are not those of the ghetto dwellers, or the dope addicts or peddlers, or even of the craftsmen, the businessman, the poet, or politician, if I might hint at the characters in <The Apology of Socrates.> Rather the unhappiest souls belong to those students in the twenty or thirty “best” universities, where they pay twenty-five thousand a year to attend and consequently assume they have entered onto the paths of worldly accomplishments and intellectual glory, only to be taught and too often themselves to believe that everything is quite relative and that there is no truth. The reason these particular souls are the “unhappiest” is the same reason Plato gave, namely, that the potential philosophers both encountered and chose a good that was less than what it is that could satisfy the being they were given. The real drama in each of our lives remains what Plato said it was: which good will we choose in a world where there really are differing goods and definite vices?

In a recent interview, Bloom was asked whether he could really fault the universities for this situation? He replied:

I do partly blame the universities. One of the reasons for students’ not reading seriously is their belief that they can’t learn important things from books. They believe books are just ideologies, mythologies or political tools of different parties. If the peaks of learning offered some shining goal in the distance, it would be very attractive to an awful lot of people — people with very diverse backgrounds. The golden thread of all education is in the first questions: How should I live? What’s the good life? What can I hope for? What must I do? What would be the terrible consequence if we knew the truth?
“A Most Uncommon Scold,” Interview with Allan Bloom, <Time>, October 17, 1988, p. 74

Bloom did not specifically mention, though there is no reason to think he was hostile to it, the question of “whether God has communicated to men anything either to know or to do?” The very fact that we experience ourselves reflectively as receivers of our own limited existences requires that we at least ask the question of the source of our particular being; for we cannot, and still remain authentic to ourselves, close it off as if the answer were not the most significant truth we must know about ourselves.

E. F. Schumacher
E. F. Schumacher, in his wonderful book, <A Guide for the Perplexed,> wrote in a similar vein. In recounting his own university days at Oxford, he discovered there that he was in a similar situation to Moses Maimonides, who wrote the original book entitled “A Guide for the Perplexed.” For the pious Jew or Muslim or Christian of the Middle Ages, intellectual perplexity was caused by the sudden eruption of Plato, Aristotle, and the post-Aristotelians into his seemingly complete religious life and culture. How was it that Plato and Aristotle knew so much compared to Scripture? What was it that Scripture knew that Plato and Aristotle did not? Were at least some of the things found both in the philosophers and the prophets the same? How could this be possible? As Maimonides and Aquinas and Avicenna sorted it all out, they wanted to know what was the relation of the teachings and practices of revelation to the analyses of Plato and Aristotle who stood for them, as they still stand for us, as the best in human wisdom itself?

For Schumacher, however, the perplexity of the modern student arose from another source.

All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me.
E. F. Schumacher, <A Guide for the Perplexed> (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), p. 1.

He finally began to understand that the very nature of modern science, itself the heart of society and of the university, itself a product of western intellectual history, methodologically excluded the most important questions that concern any human being.

The heart and mind, consequently, will remain empty especially at the highest and best of academic institutions because such education simply will not deal, as it could and should, with what is most important to know and to do. Anyone who completes a modern academic degree thinking he has a full heart will not have any idea about what his own heart is about. As Schumacher realized, to find the truth we must look elsewhere. We must again look at the classics. We must again look at the mystics and the metaphysicians. John Senior wrote in this regard something that is very true which will yet seem so mysterious to most of us:

The greatest contribution to the restoration of order in all human society would be the founding in every city, town, and rural region, of communities of contemplative religious committed to the life of consecrated silence, so that silence would be present to our works and days . . . to judge and measure all our noisy accomplishments.8

The contemplation of our own accomplishments reveals their grandeur but also their limits. We are a generation desperately in need of the freedom of limits.

C. S. Lewis
Not too long ago, I received a letter from a friend who had just arrived at a teaching position on a university campus, in Virginia, in fact. Since a new professor is not easily recognized in such exalted status at least until classes begin, my friend could go about, as she put it, “incognito.” Shades of Waugh at Lancing in 1921, she heard even today, that “religion is the same as superstition.” But what seemed to be the most “amazing” theme was this, that “it is dangerous to have high moral standards because, if you do, then you will impose them on others (and this is dangerous and bad), so, therefore, you ought to have low standards.” However much we are all sinners according to our religious traditions, vice and mediocrity are in the academic air as democratic and intellectually respectable.

Needless to say, for anyone familiar with a C. S. Lewis, such a viewpoint is nothing but a central strand of popular modern social and philosophic theory carried to its logical conclusion on a famous campus in Virginia or anywhere else. The “cause” of corruption, in such a view, is the good. The only truth is that there can be no claim to truth, no claim, that is, that might be spoken to others with authority and with earnestness. Therefore, any good must be subjective. It is impossible to distinguish one good and another. All activities and all thoughts in themselves are of equal weight even if they are contradictory to one another, even if they are dangerous. The low and the high are the same things. It makes no difference what we do just so long as what we do has no influence on any one else. We have all, in a famous phrase from Machiavelli, “lowered our sights” because the good is too good for any of us. The “modern project” in Leo Strauss’s phrase is complete. We allow nothing that has an origin outside of ourselves.

I mentioned C. S. Lewis in this context because however much we might be subject to such views, however much we run across them in books, in classes, in the media, or in our lives, we suspect that they cannot bear final examination. Lewis wrote that there are two points to keep in mind:

First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
C. S. Lewis, <Mere Christianity> (London: Collins, 1961), p. 19

Why does understanding seek faith? Precisely to explain why we try to justify these lowered sights, to think clearly about these things we cannot really get rid of if we reflect on ourselves. Why does faith seek understanding? Because it must know these facts, that there is a law, that we break it.

Dorothy Sayers
In her penetrating essay, “Creed or Chaos,” which she wrote in 1949, Dorothy Sayers spoke of running into a young and intelligent priest. The priest told her that one of the most hopeful signs in the world was the growing pessimism with which many of us viewed human nature. In these days in which even the President has decided that we must actually war against drug czars, not Communist ones, that we may be destroyed by drugs before we are overcome by ideology, these words seem even more pertinent. “There is a great deal of truth in what (the priest) says,” Dorothy Sayers reflected.

The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behavior at this time are those who think highly of <homo sapiens> as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the totalitarian states, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of capitalist society, are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and they feel as if the whole world had gone mad together.
Dorothy L. Sayers, “Creed or Chaos?” in <The Whimsical Christian> (New York: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 44-45

Faith Seeks Understanding Because From Faith We Learn That We Are Somehow Fallen
If it is best that we lower our sights lest we imply that there really is something objectively good for ourselves and for others; if finally the world we thought we wanted turns out to be a world that somehow seems to have gone “mad,” then we must begin to suspect the theories on which this world is built.

Why does understanding seek faith? It is because understanding does not succeed in explaining what it sets out to understand. Things actually happen and take place that do not explain themselves. There seems to be a constant diversity between the theories of modernity, which are based upon the autonomy of the human intellect that admits no knowledge but what proceeds from human will, and the kinds of things that actually happen to which our minds as original sources ought to be open. In other words, the troubled searching but never finding, which is characteristic of modern thought, the fear of finding out that something indeed arises outside of ourselves that we ought to do and hold, something that would require our change of hearts, leave their own empirical records in the lives and thoughts of our kind.

As this record becomes more and more negative, we begin to realize that the conditions of society and of soul are more accurately described by, say, Paul’s <Epistle to the Romans>, or Augustine’s <City of God>, or Plato’s <Laws>, than by what we are taught in the best universities, where we do little study of Paul or Augustine or even Plato because they find in things a right order. We are not academically allowed to suspect that these sources might indeed contain answers to our real problems. And if they do, we must wonder how is it that such a source can know more about ourselves than we, apparently the best of our kind, know about ourselves?

Why does faith seek intelligence? Lucy and Charlie Brown are talking over the stone fence. Charlie is clearly pretty bothered and down-in-the-mouth. Lucy with some uncharacteristic sympathy asks him, “Discouraged again, eh, Charlie Brown?” Charlie brightens up a bit at this show of interest as both he and Lucy gaze distantly over the fence. She continues, “You know what your trouble is? The whole trouble with you is that you’re you!” Immediately, Charlie turns about, somewhat annoyed, to face Lucy, “Well, what in the world can I do about that?” Finally, he simply stares at her when Lucy responds coolly, “I don’t pretend to be able to give advice. . . . I merely point out the trouble.”11

The trouble, in other words, lies somehow not in our institutions, even though they can be better or worse as Aristotle understood, nor in the structure of the world, nor in the skies. The trouble lies in ourselves, in our freedom. No one tells us this except orthodox religion and the philosophy developed in an effort to explain it. In Sigrid Undset’s biography of St. Catherine of Siena, we read: “Catherine’s opinion was that politics are never anything but the product of a person’s religious life.”12 The condition of our souls is anterior to the condition of our polities.

God Ultimately Requires Of Us Is Obedience To His Will
G. K. Chesterton once noticed an invitation in one of the London papers inviting general response to the set question: “What’s wrong with the world?” Chesterton immediately sat down and wrote a letter to the Editor in which he replied quite briefly: “Dear Sir: What’s wrong with the world? I am. Signed, G. K. Chesterton.” One of the main reasons faith seeks understanding is because from faith we learn that we are somehow fallen, that there is some disorder in our lives which we experience and need to account for but for which we have no apparent explanation. That there is something wrong is not merely a proposition of revelation. Aristotle himself often noted that man left to himself was the worst of the animals. No one gives a more graphic description of human corruption than a Plato. These classic philosophers knew that we were fallen, but they did not know of The Fall.

So faith seeks understanding. We have all encountered the young man or young woman, even the old professor, who informs us that he does not believe in God because of well, how could there be a God with all the poverty and pain and evil in the world? If we know of the Book of Job, of course, we are already prepared somewhat for the fact that what God ultimately requires of us is not the elimination of poverty or pain but obedience to his Will. Even those who are poor, even those who suffer, even those who are humiliated can reach that purpose for which each was primarily created. Some indeed think they can do so easier than those who are rich, intelligent, and well-made. The harlots and publicans evidently go first into the kingdom of God, a hard saying for us all. But what about it? Could we not have had a better universe, one in which pain and evil were eliminated? Isn’t God responsible for the mess we are in? Of course, we know that other worlds are quite possible. We know about <Perelandra> and the “Silent Planet.” The question that more directly concerns us, however, is whether we ourselves are possible in other worlds? And if not, do we have any reason for rejoicing in this one?

After all, some strange congruities are before us. In spite of the fact that there is so much disorder in ourselves and in the world against which the enlightened mind rebels as if it were not its own fault or concern, some things do seem to belong together. If it is a mystery about why there is pain or evil, a much more subtle mystery persists over the question of why there is joy than over why there is pain and evil.

Hillarie Belloc
Hillarie Belloc once wrote a perfectly wonderful novel, or perhaps an allegory of himself, called <The Four Men>, about Sussex, the heart of England, of what happened on a walk on Halloween, and All Hallows’ Day, and All Souls’ Day in 1902. On All Saints’ Day, All Hallows’ Day, the Four Men found an old inn “brilliantly lighted,” with small square panes and red curtains. They entered the inn, into a “pleasant bar” which opened out into a large room where about fifteen or twenty men were assembled to drink and sing.

Belloc continued:

Their meal was long done, but we ordered ours, which was of such excellence in the way of eggs and bacon as we had none of us until that moment thought possible upon this side of the grave. The cheese also, of which I have spoken, was put before us, and the new cottage loaves, so that this feast, unlike any other feast that yet was since the beginning of the world, exactly answered to all that the heart had expected of it, and we were contented and were filled.
Hilaire Belloc, <The Four Men> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 147

How is it, we wonder, that we are so made that the things that content us are actually found in this world? How are we to understand this? Can it be an accident? Did the eggs and the bacon and the cheese and the inn and the appetite all just happen? Or are we indeed made for these things and are they made for us, even when, like the cheeses, we make them ourselves?

A Promise Of Personal Salvation And A Way To It That Does Not Depend On The Social, Political Or Philosophical
Faith seeks understanding because we are “fit to receive and to have” such things, as George MacDonald implied. Yet, we must make ourselves ready to receive them. How is it that we are content and filled in anything? Must this completion be seen in the light of our experience that we did not cause ourselves either to be or to be human beings? We could never have guessed that things actually fit together. C. S. Lewis, in his usual way, put it well:

Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn’t have guessed. That’s one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It’s a religion you couldn’t have guessed. . . . What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face all the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is a battlefield in which they fight out an endless war.
C. S. Lewis, <The Case for Christianity> (New York: Macmillan, 1943), pp. 36-37

This universe we could not have guessed, yet it exists. Faith teaches which of these understandings is the correct one, either the good world in which something, something we find in ourselves, has gone wrong, or the endless war of the worlds.

But if something has gone wrong, some way to make it right is to be sought. Yet if there is a way to correct what is wrong, will we recognize it? And will it be the way we expected? Will we be among those who did not believe that any good could come out of Nazareth, because well, where is this Nazareth anyhow? This Incarnation is not the way to repair a world, this baptism, this greater love than this, this body and blood. These ways are, as Paul said of the philosophic Greeks, intellectual scandals. We need something practical, some plan. Yet we still find a Karol Wojtyla calmly telling a group of evidently hesitant bishops, in this case American ones:

We are the guardians of something given, and given to the Church universal, something which is not the result of reflection, however competent, on cultural and social questions of the day, and is not merely the best path among many, but the one and only path to salvation.
John Paul II, “I Confirm You to Truth,” Address to Joint Assembly of the U. S. Archbishops and the Department Heads of the Roman Curia, March 11, 1989, The Pope Speaks, 34 (September/October, 1989), pp. 254-55

At the same time, present in the world is a promise of personal salvation and a way to it that does not depend on anything arising from society, politics, or philosophy.

The Thesis Of Boredom
Samuel Johnson, in his famous trip to the Hebrides in 1774, told of stopping in October at the Island of Ulva, near which was a small adjacent island called Staffa, about which a famous book had been recently written, but concerning which tome no one on the island seemed to know anything. Johnson continued:

When the islanders were reproached for their ignorance, or insensitivity of the wonders of Staffa, they had not much to reply. They had indeed considered it little, because they had always seen it; and none but philosophers, nor they always, are struck with wonder, otherwise than by novelty.16

That we initially are struck by wonder, not need or want, was for Aristotle the foundation of all thought pursued for its own sake. But that we be struck even beyond the ordinary wonder, this was the classic purpose of miracles, of our being called specially to attend to certain events that we might otherwise not notice because, like the islanders on Ulva, we had always seen them.

Why does faith seek understanding? In modern cosmological speculation a fear has been prevalent that we would not find other intelligent life in the universe. We have now explored the last of the Planets of our own solar system. We can see pretty clearly that in this system we are quite alone. Neither radio astronomy nor space exploration has given us any indication that there is anything but us. To be sure, we read statistics showing that there are so many billions of stars in the universe that surely there must be, by the law of averages, other beings like unto ourselves. Other studies, however, hint that the specificity required that human life exist in the universe is so unlikely and rare that is begins to look like the formation of man was the very purpose of the universe.17 The discovery of only ourselves is anything but exhilarating for many, for if we are meant to be in some sense, then we have a purpose that is not entirely a product of our own will or intellect.

No doubt mankind has some mission toward the physical universe. Even on earth, however, there begin to be Hegelian type philosophers who now despair because evidently western liberalism has won the great battles and proved the ideologies designed to reorganize the world to be merely the tyrannies they are. Some find solace in the wars of religion that still rage on the planet, the Middle East, perhaps, because there at least something ultimate still seems at stake. But in essence intellectuals with a this-worldly perspective begin to speak a new kind of despair. <The Wall Street Journal> took pains to note the theories of Francis Fukuyama who has been attracting attention with this “end of history,” thesis, so reminiscent of Nietzsche. Fukuyama “thinks that democratic liberalism has triumphed (a good thing), that ideologies are disappearing (also good, he feels), but that the new order may bring on ‘centuries of boredom’.”18

This thesis of boredom is, after all, not unlike the “gloom” that Waugh on losing his faith experienced as a young man in England after World War I. And indeed it probably stems from the same source. Faith seeks understanding. Let us suppose it is true, for the sake of argument, that the ideologies are dead. Voegelin had already stressed this fact:

Exhausting The Ideologies
We have, since the mid-and late nineteenth century, since Comte, Marx, John Stuart Mill, Bakunin (and so on), no new ideologist. All ideologies belong, in their origin, before that period; there are no new ideologies in the twentieth century.19

If the twentieth century has exhausted the ideologies allowing them to work themselves out in practice so that we can see their results, it does not follow that liberalism itself is not one of these ideologies, one of the successful ones. The fact, if it is a fact, that it has won, does not mean that it is not itself a man-made theoretical construct that is itself reductionist, itself cutting man off from the true ends and issues for which he is made.

In the revelational tradition, the purpose of the world is not some sort of perfect world order, nor is it a kind of unlimited freedom to do whatever we wish, though we may seek both. Rather the world is a place of trial, a vale of tears, if you will. This does not deny that there may indeed be some kind of inner-worldly mission for mankind. But the drama of history and individual being relates directly to the ground of being, to God. The world exists for something other than itself. It exists in order that we might have time and space in which to choose what it is we are about. The drama of existence remains in the human heart; and the configurations of the world, its political and social orders, are merely, as Plato and Aristotle saw, reflections of these choices.

If faith seeks intelligence, as it does, it is to understand how the world might be seen as an arena for the action of God and the actions of men such that the very purpose of the world is achieved in the final actions of men with regard to that insufficiency that defines their very being. St. Thomas asked the question of whether the world was created in justice or mercy. He answered that it was created in mercy because it did not presuppose anything that God “had” to do. The order of the world, its diversities, inequalities, its vastness of time and space, are themselves good. We do not suffer any injustice in our being what we are. If our existence as such is not “unjust,” then it follows that it must come about from a source beyond justice. What is beyond justice is gift and generosity and love. If this is the source of our being, if this is what faith teaches intelligence, then we can begin to understand ourselves in a more lightsome way.

The Doctrine Of Salvation
Josef Pieper, in conclusion, remarked that “Christian doctrine is primarily concerned with the doctrine of salvation, not with interpreting reality or human existence. But it implies as well certain fundamental teachings on specific philosophic matters — the world and existence as such.”20 Faith seeks intelligence because it knows that all things do fit together, that nothing will be “true” and contradict the particular path of our salvation that is founded in faith. It is not just any way, but “the Way,” as the early Christians said of themselves.

When George MacDonald remarked “that there is no part of our nature that shall not be satisfied,” he intended to include our intelligence. St. Thomas insisted, therefore, that the primary locus and act of precisely the beatific vision, of our final receiving of God as our end, was not found in our will by which we loved God but in our intellect in which we knew Him as He is, face to face, to use Paul’s striking phrase.

We should, like the young Waugh, I think, be “eager to dispute the intellectual foundations of Christianity.” If we dispute with that openness to all truth and to all sources which Christianity insists to be required for its intellectual integrity, not reducing our attention by method or prejudice or bad will or corrupt lives, we will discover, much to our astonishment, that there are indeed intellectual foundations to this faith. We will not, for the most part, find these in the universities or in the culture except incidentally, in obscure books and in holy lives, in “consecrated silence,” in our concern about the gloom and boredom into which the culture by its own confession seems to be experiencing.

We will continue to be, like E. F. Schumacher, perplexed that the ultimate questions are never even mentioned or if mentioned, never given a fair hearing. Yet, there is Belloc, the suspicion that there are feasts unlike any other feasts since the beginning of the world that are exactly answers to what our heart might expect. There are strange incongruities that we will encounter that no system will explain to us. Is it, to recall Lewis’ alternative, a good world that has gone wrong or an eternal battlefield in which endless wars are fought in our fields or in our hearts?

When we think of these things are we, unlike the islanders of Staffa whom Johnson encountered, struck with the novelty of it all, struck enough to wonder as philosophers should about that “something that is not the product of human reflection,” something not just the best path but the only path? Let us indeed like Waugh give a “brief history of our own religious opinions” to see what it is we are incited to think because of our faith. We can indeed remain atheists even in the sacristy. Belief is both a gift and a choice. But we all have the experience that our own existence “does not exist out of itself.” We should not be either overly surprised or overly sad about the sad hearts in the best schools. Both the Greeks like Aeschylus and just men of the Old Testament like Job knew that man learns by suffering.

As Lucy told Charlie Brown, “the whole trouble is that you’re you.” Or to recall Chesterton’s answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” — “I am.” This is the location of what is wrong and of what is the whole trouble. This is why Christianity is first a doctrine of salvation, because this is what we know about ourselves, about our finiteness and about our actions. Yet, this is a good world in which something has gone wrong, often something to which we ourselves have contributed. The world was created in mercy, not justice.

There are indeed good things God must delay in giving us because of what we are, beings who know that they did not cause themselves to be. Yet, “there is no part of our nature that shall not be satisfied — and that not by lessening it, but by enlarging it. . . .” If this is what faith teaches us, as it does, even if we be in the best universities in our time, or at Lancing in Waugh’s time, or in Sussex on All Hallows’ Day with Belloc, or in Siena with St. Catherine, or at Paris with St. Thomas, or at Corinth with Paul, we need to know what the world is like in which both faith and intelligence can and do exist. This is why understanding ultimately arrives at something more it wants to hear because of what it has discovered about itself and the world. This is why faith seeks understanding, not merely itself.

Lee Strobel

A former atheist and hard-bitten journalist with The Chicago Tribune, in 1980 Lee Strobel began an investigation that would alter the course of his life forever. Observing the transformation in his wife following her conversion to Christianity, he began exploring the evidence supporting the truthfulness of the Christian faith. What he discovered eventually led to his own commitment to Christ in 1981.

Recounting the investigation process, Strobel remarks, “Some people are more experiential – they like to experience things – but because I come from a law background, a legal background, and a journalism background, I tend to respond to facts and evidence. My way of processing my spiritual journey was to ask the question ‘Is there any evidence that supports Christianity being true?’”

Lee Strobel knows a good story. More importantly, he knows how to sort through confusing facts and data in order to get to the bottom of the truth. As the former legal affairs editor for The Chicago Tribune, he has sat in courtrooms and police departments and done countless interviews to search out the story and get the facts. Says Strobel, “I proceeded to gather all the evidence pro and con and be as thorough as I can and ask all the tough questions, and then subject them to scrutiny of a skeptic. I determined to remain open and vowed that I would respond to whichever direction the evidence points. I think that is a rational way to behave. That is to say ‘If there is convincing evidence, then the most rational and logical thing I could do would be to follow that evidence regardless of which direction it took me.’”

The nearly two-year process led him to the conclusion that the evidence overwhelmingly supports Christianity as being true. It also led him to his current roles as best-selling author, sought-after speaker, and a teaching pastor and writer-in-residence at Saddleback Valley Community Church, one of the fastest growing churches in the nation. At Saddleback he regularly speaks to the 16,000 seekers and Christians at its weekend services.

In 1998 Strobel’s investigation formed the basis for the runaway bestseller The Case for Christ. “In this book, I retrace the spiritual journey I took for two years,” explains Strobel. “Instead of me reiterating the historical evidence that I found convincing, I went out and interviewed fourteen leading scholars and experts and I posed to them the tough questions I had as a skeptic. I forced them to give cogent and meaningful and convincing answers in terms of whether or not Christianity is indeed reliable. What I find a lot of people do is to get two copies [of the book]. They get one copy for themselves to strengthen their own faith, but then they get one to give to a friend who may be investigating Christianity or may not be a Christian but is open to the faith. This gives them a basis to discuss things and enter into a dialogue about it.”
(Author Blurb From ChristianBook.com)

The Theme Of Deity in John and The Synoptics
John makes very explicit claims about Jesus being God, which some attribute to the fact that he wrote later than the others and began embellishing things. (However), the theme of deity is in the synoptics, (although) it is more implicit.

Jesus’ Assertion Of Divinity I
For example, think of the story of Jesus walking on the water, found in Matthew 14: 22-33 and in Mark 6:45-52. Most English translations hide the Greek by quoting Jesus as saying, “Fear not, it is I.” Actually the Greek literally says, “Fear not, I am.” Those last two words are identical to what Jesus said in John 8:58, when he took upon himself the divine name “I AM”, which is the way God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3:14. So Jesus is revealing himself as the one who has the same divine power over nature as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.

Jesus’ Assertion Of Divinity II: Son Of Man
“Son of Man” is often thought to indicate the humanity of Jesus, just as the reflex expression “Son of God” indicates his divinity. In fact, just the opposite is true. Contrary to popular belief “Son of Man” does not primarily refer to Jesus’ humanity. Instead it is a direct allusion to Daniel 7: 13-14 ["In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.]

This is someone who approaches God himself in his heavenly throne room and is given universal authority and dominion; someone who would come at the end of the world to judge mankind and rule forever. That makes “Son of Man” a title of great exaltation, nor of mere humanity.

Jesus’ Assertion Of Divinity III: His Claims to Forgive Sin
Jesus claims to forgive sins in the synoptics, and that is something only God can do. Jesus accepts prayer and worship. Jesus says, “Whoever acknowledges me, I will acknowledge before my Father in heaven.” Final judgment is based upon one’s reaction to whom? This mere human being? No, that would be a very arrogant claim. Final judgment is based on one’s reaction to Jesus as God.

The Gospels’ Theological Agenda
In the ancient world the idea of writing dispassionate, objective history merely to chronicle events, with no ideological purpose, was unheard of. Nobody wrote history if there wasn’t a reason to learn from it. As with any ideological document, there are people who distort history to serve their ideological ends. But it is a mistake to think that that always happens. A modern parallel from the experience of the Jewish community clarifies this. Some people, usually for anti-Semitic purposes, deny or downplay the horrors of the Holocaust. But it has been the Jewish scholars who’ve created museums, written books, preserved artifacts and documented eyewitness testimony concerning the Holocaust. Now, they have a very ideological purpose – namely to ensure that such an atrocity never occurs again – but they have also been the most faithful and objective in their reporting of historical truth. Christianity was likewise based on certain historical claims that God uniquely entered into space an time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so the very ideology that Christians were trying to promote required as careful historical work as possible.

The Resurrection Is Not A Mythological Concept Developed in Legends
It’s important to remember that the books of the New Testament are not in chronological order. The gospels were written after almost all the letters of Paul, whose writing ministry probably began in the late 40s. Most of is major letters appeared during the50s. To find the earliest information, one goes to Paul’s epistles and then asks, “Are there signs that even earlier sources were used in writing them.

We find that Paul incorporated some creeds, confessions of faith, or hymns from the earliest Christian church. These go way back to the dawning of the church soon after the Resurrection. The most famous creeds include Philippians 2:6-11[Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death -- even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.] — which talk about Jesus being “in the very nature God,” and Colossians 1: 15-20 [He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.], — which describes him as being “the image of the invisible God,” who created all things and though whom all things are reconciled with God “ by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

Perhaps the most important creed in terms of the historical Jesus is 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul uses technical language to indicate he was passing along this oral tradition in relatively fixed form. [The apostle uses the technical terminology of passing on oral tradition as was commonly done in those biblical cultures when writing was rare. "I delivered" and "I received" are the technical terms for the transmission of an oral tradition. Similar expressions can be found in the written Mishnah that contains much of the oral tradition of Judaism from Jesus' time. The significance of this language is that it reflects a pattern of careful teaching and repetition to make sure that the teaching was correctly transferred from Paul to the Corinthian church.]

If the crucifixion was as early as A.D. 30, Paul’s conversion was about A.D. 32. Immediately Paul was ushered into Damascus, where he met with a Christian named Ananias and some other disciples. His first meeting with the apostle in Jerusalem would have been about A.D. 35. At some point Paul was given this creed, which had already been formulated and was being used in the early church. 1 Corinthians 15 contains the key facts about Jesus’ death for our sins, plus a detailed list of those to whom he appeared in resurrected form – all dating back to within two to five years of the events themselves. That’s not later mythology from forty or more years down the road as contrarians have suggested. A good case can be made for saying that Christian belief in the Resurrection, though not yet written down, can be dated to within two years of that very event – this is enormously significant. It’s not the thirty to sixty years with the five hundred years that’s generally acceptable for other data – you’re talking about two.

The Intentions Of The Gospels
Luke states a clear intention at the beginning of his gospel to write accurately about the things he investigated and found to be well supported by witnesses. While Mark and Matthew don’t have the explicit kind of statement that Luke does, they are close in terms of genre and it seem reasonable that Luke’s historical intent would closely mirror theirs. John contains a statement of purpose n 20:31. Consider also the way that the gospels are written – in a sober and responsible fashion, with accurate incidental details, with obvious care and exactitude. You don’t find the outlandish flourishes and blatant mythologizing that you see in a lot of other ancient writings…. Further, after Jesus’ ascension there were a number of controversies that threatened the early church – should believers be circumcised, how should speaking in tongues be regulated, how to keep Jew and Gentile united, what are the appropriate roles for women in ministry, whether believers could divorce non-Christian spouses. These issues could have been conveniently resolved if the early Christians had simply read back into the gospels what Jesus had told them from the world beyond. But his never happened. The continuance of these controversies demonstrates that Christians were interested in distinguishing between what happened during Jesus’ lifetime and what was debated later in the churches.

No Original New Testament Documentation
There is no original New Testament. This is not an issue that’s unique to the Bible; it’s a question that can be asked of other documents that have come down to us from antiquity. But what he New Testament has in its favor, especially compared with other ancient writings, this is the unprecedented multiplicity of copies that have survived. It’s important because the more often you have copies that agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross-check them to figure out what the original document was like. The only way they’d agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represented the descent of the manuscripts. We also have copies commencing within a couple of generations from the writing of the originals, whereas in the case of other ancient texts, maybe five , eight, or ten centuries elapsed between the original and the earliest surviving copy. In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospels into other languages at a relatively early time – into Latin, Syriac and Coptic. And beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic. And a lot of others – Georgian, Ethiopic, a great variety. Even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the New Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters, and so forth of the early church fathers.

…Consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about A.D. 116. His first six books exist today in only one manuscript and it was copied about A.D 850. Books eleven through sixteen are in another manuscript dating form the eleventh century. Books seven through ten are lost. So there is a long time between the time that Tacitus sought his information, wrote it down, and the existing copies.

…The quantity of New Testament material is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of antiquity. Next to the New Testament the greatest amount of manuscript testimony is of Homer’s Iliad, which was the bible of the ancient Greeks. There are more than 650 Greek manuscripts of it today. Some are quite fragmentary. They come to us from the second and third century A.D. and following. When you consider that Homer composed his epic about 800 B.C., you can see that’s a very lengthy gap…. There are 99 fragmentary pieces of papyrus that contain one or more passages or books of he New Testament. The most significant to come to light are the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, discovered about 1930. Of these the  Beatty Biblical Papyrus number one contains portions of the four gospels and the book of Acts and it dates from the third century. Papyrus number two contains large portions of eight letters of Paul, plus portions of Hebrews, dating to the about the year 200. Papyrus number three has a sizable section for the book of Revelation, dating form the third century…. The earliest portion we possess today is that of John, containing material from chapter 18. I t ahs five verses – three on one side, two on the other – and it measures about two and half by three and a half inches. It was purchased in Egypt as early as 1920, but it sat unnoticed for years among similar fragment of papyri. Then in 1934 C.H. Roberts of St. Johns College, Oxford was sorting through the papyri at the John Roland’s Library in Manchester, England. He immediately recognized this as preserving a portion of John’s gospel. He was able to date it from the style of the script. He concluded that it originated between A.D. 100 to A.D. 150…This was a stunning discovery because skeptical German theologians in the last century argued strenuously that the fourth gospel was not yet composed until at least the year 160 – too distant form the events of Jesus’ life to be of much historical use. They were able to influence generations of scholars, who scoffed at his gospels’ reliability… The New Testament then has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but it has survived in a purer form than any other great book – a form that is 99.5 percent pure…. It is unprecedented in its reliability.

Criteria For The New Testament
Basically the early church had three criteria: first, the books must have been written either by apostles themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by followers of the apostles. So in the case of Mark and Luke, while they weren’t among the twelve disciples, early tradition has it that Mark was a helper of Peter, and Luke was an associate of Paul. Second there was the criterion of conformity to what was called the rule of faith. That is, was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognized as normative? And then there was the criterion of whether a document had had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large.

How The New Testament Became Canonical
It is a simple truth to say that the New Testament became canonical because no one could stop them doing so. We can be confident that no other ancient books can compare with the New Testament in terms of importance for Christian history or doctrine. When one studies the early history of the canon, one walks away convinced that the New Testament contains the best sources for the history of Jesus, Those who discerned the limits of the canon had a clear and balanced perspective of the gospel of Christ.

Read these other documents for yourself. They’re written later than the four gospels, in the second, third, fourth, fifth, even sixth centuries, long after Jesus, and they’re generally quite banal. They carry names – like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Mary – that are unrelated to their real authorship. On the other hand, the four gospels in the New Testament were readily accepted with remarkable unanimity as being authentic in the story they told…The Gospel of Thomas ends with a note saying, ‘Let Mary go away from us, because women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus is quoted as saying: ‘Lo I shall lead her in order to make her a male, so that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter into the kingdom of heaven.’

A Passage From Testimonium Flavianum By Josephus
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

The above passage is generally accepted by both Christian and Jewish scholars as on the whole authentic, although there may be some interpolations. For example, the phrase “if indeed one ought to call him a man” seems to be inserted. “He was the Christ” is questionable because in another passage Josephus says in reference to James that Jesus “was called the Christ”. Finally the clear declaration of belief in the Resurrection makes it unlikely that Josephus authored that portion. (Despite all of that) Josephus corroborates important information about Jesus: that he was a martyred leader of the church in Jerusalem and that he was a wise teacher who had established a wide and lasting following, despite the fact that he had been crucified under Pilate at the instigation of some of the Jewish leaders.

Scholar Paul Maier wrote about the non-biblical attestation of the darkness that occurred at the time of Jesus’ death: “This phenomenon, evidently was visible in Rome, Athens, and other Mediterranean cities. According to Tertullian …it was a “cosmic” or “world event.” Phlegon, a Greek author from Caria writing a chronology soon after 137 A.D., reported that in the 4th year of the 202nd Olympiad (i.e. 33 A.D) there was “the greatest eclipse of the sun” and that it became night in the sixth hour of the day (i.e. noon) so that the stars even appeared in the heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia, and many things were overturned in Nicaea.”

Amen, Amen, I Say Unto You
Actually Jesus taught in and radically new way. He begins his teaching with the phrase ‘Amen I say to you’ which is to say, ‘I swear in advance to the truthfulness of what I’m about to say.’ This was absolutely revolutionary.

Jesus’ Use Of ‘Abba’
Jesus’ use of ‘Abba’ (a term of endearment in which a child would say to a parent ‘Father Dearest’) is quite significant. It implies that Jesus had a degree of intimacy with God that is unlike anything in the Judaism of his day…Jesus is saying that only through having a relationship with God does this kind of prayer language – this ‘Abba’ relationship with God – become possible. This says volumes about how he regarded himself.

The Incarnation
Philippians 2, where Paul tells us that Jesus, ‘being in the form of God, did not think equality with God was something to be exploited’ – that’s the way it should be translated – ‘but emptied himself.’ does not tell us precisely what the eternal Son emptied himself of. He emptied himself; he became a nobody. Some kind of emptying is at issue, but let’s be frank – you’re talking about the Incarnation, one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith. You’re dealing with a formless, bodiless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent spirit and finite, touchable, physical, time-bound creatures,. For one to become the other inevitable binds you up in mysteries. So part of the Christian theology has been concerned not with ‘explaining it all away’ but with trying to take the biblical evidence and, retaining it all fairly, find ways of synthesis that are rationally coherent, even if they’re not exhaustively explanatory.

The Scourging At The Pillar
Roman floggings were known to be terribly brutal. They usually consisted of thirty-nine lashes, but frequently were a lot more than that, depending upon the mood of the soldier applying the blows. The soldier would use a whip of braided leather thongs with metal balls woven into them. When the whip would strike the flesh, these balls would cause deep bruises or contusions, which would break open with further blows. And the whip had pieces of sharp bone as well which would cut the flesh severely. The back would be so shredded that part of the spine was sometimes exposed by the deep, deep cuts. The whipping would have gone all the way from the shoulders down to the back the buttocks and the back of the legs…. As the flogging continued, the lacerations would tear into the underlying skeletal muscles and produce quivering ribbons of bleeding flesh. A third century historian by the name of Eusebius described a flogging by saying: ‘The sufferer’s veins were laid bare, and the very muscles sinews and bowels of the victims were open to exposure.”

Crucifixion
Once a person is hanging in the vertical position, crucifixion is essentially an agonizingly slow death by asphyxiation. The reason is that the stresses on the muscles and diaphragm put the chest into the inhaled position; basically, in order to exhale, the individual must push up on his feet so the tension on the muscles would be eased for a moment. In doing so, the nail would tear through the foot, eventually locking up the tarsal bones.

After managing to exhale, the person would be able to relax down and take another breath in. Again he’d have to push himself up to exhale, scraping his bloodied back against the coarse wood of the cross. This would go on and on until complete exhaustion would take over, and the person wouldn’t be able to push up and breathe anymore.

As the person slows down his breathing, he goes into what is called respiratory acidosis – the carbon dioxide in the blood is dissolved as carbonic acid, causing the acidity of the blood to increase, this eventually leads to irregular heart beat. In fact with his heart beating erratically, Jesus would have known that he was at the moment of death, which is when he was able to say, ‘Lord into your hands I commend my spirit.’ And then he died of cardiac arrest. The hypovolemic shock that Jesus suffered from the flogging he had received earlier would have caused a sustained rapid heart rate that would have contributed to heart failure, resulting in the collection of fluid in the membrane around the heart, called pericardial effusion, as well as around the lungs, which is called a pleural effusion. This is significant because when the Roman soldier confirmed his death by thrusting a spear into his right side, the spear apparently went through the right lung and into the heart so when the spear was pulled out, some fluid – the pericardial effusion and the pleural effusion  — came out. This would have the appearance of a clear fluid, like water, followed by a large volume of blood, as the eyewitness John described in his gospel. John’s description is consistent with what modern medicine would have expected to have happened.

Corroborative Evidence
In the Verdict of History, historian Gary Habermas details a total of thirty-nine ancient sources documenting the life of Jesus, from which he enumerates more than one hundred reported facts concerning Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection. What’s more, twenty-four of the sources cited by Habermas, including seven secular sources and several of the earliest creeds of the church, specifically concern the divine nature of Jesus. “These creeds reveal that the church did not simply teach Jesus’ deity a generation later, as is so often repeated in contemporary theology, because this doctrine is definitely present in the earliest church…The best explanation for these creeds is that they properly represent Jesus’ own teachings.”

The Discoverers Of The Empty Tomb
When you understand the role of women in first-century Jewish society, what’s really extraordinary is that this empty tomb story should feature women as the discoverers of the empty tomb in the first place. Women were on a very low rung of the social ladder in first-century Palestine, There are old rabbinical sayings that said, ‘Let the words of the Law be burned rather than delivered to women’ and ‘Blessed is he whose children are male, but woe to him whose children are female.’ Women’s testimony was regarded as so worthless that they weren’t even allowed to serve as legal witnesses in a Jewish court of law. In light of this it is absolutely remarkable that the chief witnesses to the empty tomb are these women who were friends of Jesus. Any later legendary account would have certainly portrayed male disciples as discovering the tomb – Peter or John for example. The fact that women are the first witnesses to the empty tomb is most plausibly explained by the reality that – like it or not – they were the discoverers of the empty tomb! This shows that he gospel writers faithfully recorded what happened, even if it was embarrassing. This bespeaks the historicity of this tradition rather than its legendary status.

The Empty Tomb Is Historical Fact
The empty tomb is implicit in the early tradition that is passed along by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, which is a very old and reliable source of historical information about Jesus.

 Christian and Jew alike knew the site of Jesus’ tomb. So if it weren’t empty, it would have been impossible for a movement founded on belief in the Resurrection to have come into existence in the same city where this man had been publicly executed and buried.

We can tell from the language, grammar, and style that Mark got his empty tomb story from an earlier source. There’s evidence that it was written before A.D.37, which is much too early for legend to have seriously corrupted it. It would have been unprecedented anywhere in history for legend to have grown up that fast and significantly distorted the gospels.

Mark’s account of the story of the empty tomb is stark in its simplicity and unadorned by theological reflection.

The unanimous testimony that the empty tomb was discovered by women argues for the authenticity of the story, because this would have been embarrassing for the disciples to admit an most certainly would have been covered up if this were a legend.

The Significance Of The Dating Of The Creed
We know that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians between A.D. 55 and 57. He indicates in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 that he has already passed on this creed to the church at Corinth, which would mean it must predate his visit there in A.D. 51. Therefore the creed is being used within 20 years of the Resurrection, which is quite early. Various scholars trace it back even further to within two to eight years of the Resurrection, or from about A.D. 32 to 38, when Paul received it in either Damascus or Jerusalem. So this is incredibly early material – primitive, unadorned testimony to the fact that Jesus appeared alive to skeptics like Paul and James as well as to Peter and the rest of the disciples. The leading view is that Paul got his testimony from the eyewitnesses Peter and James themselves, and he took great pains to confirm its accuracy. Paul takes a trip to Jerusalem three years after his conversion and describes the trip in Galatians 1:18-19 where he uses the Greek word historeo. Paul played the role of examiner and made an investigative inquiry (and the use of the word reflects this.)

The Resurrection: The Central Proclamation
Acts is littered with references to Jesus appearances. The apostle Peter was adamant about it. He says in Acts 2:32 that “God has raised Jesus to life and we are all witnesses of the fact. In Acts 3:15 he repeats, “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.” He confirms to Cornelius in Acts 10:41 that he and others “ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead”…The earliest Christians didn’t just endorse Jesus’ teachings they were convinced they had seen him alive after his crucifixion. That’s what changed their lives and started the church…. Since this was their centermost conviction, they would have made absolutely sure that it was true…

The Amount Of Testimony
The amount of testimony and corroboration of Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearance is staggering. To put it all in perspective, if you were to call each one of the witnesses to a court of law to be cross-examined for just fifteen minutes each, and you went around the clock without a break, it would take you from breakfast on Monday until dinner on Friday to hear them all. After listening to 129 straight hours of eyewitness testimony, who could possibly walk away unconvinced?

The Change In The Apostles And Jesus’ Followers
When Jesus was crucified, his followers were discouraged and depressed. They not longer had confidence that Jesus had been sent by God, because they believed anyone crucified was accursed by God. They also had been taught that God would not let his Messiah suffer death. So they dispersed. The Jesus movement was all but stopped in its tracks. Then, after a short period of time we see them abandoning their occupations, regathering and committing themselves to spreading a very specific message – that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of God who died on a cross, returned to life and was seen alive by them. And they were willing to spend the rest of their lives proclaiming this , without any payoff from a human point of view. They often went without food, slept exposed to the elements, were ridiculed, beaten, imprisoned. And finally, most of them were executed in torturous ways. For what? For good intentions? No, most of them were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had seen Jesus Christ alive from the dead…the apostles were willing to die for something they had seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands. They were in a unique position not to just believe Jesus rose from the dead but to know for sure.

The Skeptics
There were hardened skeptics who didn’t believe Jesus before his crucifixion – and were dead-set against Christianity – who turned around and adopted the Christian faith after Jesus’ death…The Gospels tell us Jesus’ family, including James, were embarrassed by what he was claiming to be. They didn’t believe in him; they confronted him. In ancient Judaism it was highly embarrassing for a rabbi’s family not to accept him. Therefore the gospel writers would have no motive for fabricating this skepticism if it weren’t true

Revolutionizing Five Social Structures In Jewish Life
Five weeks after Christ is crucified, over ten thousand Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion.

They are no longer offering animal sacrifices

You don’t become an upstanding member of the Jewish community merely by keeping Moses’ laws.

Christians worship on Sundays, a 15 hundred year tradition changed.

The Jewish belief in monotheism is changed to three persons in one God: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

 Christians believe in a Messiah who suffered and died for the sins of the world, whereas Jews had been trained to believe that the Messiah was going to be a political leader who would destroy the Roman armies.

C.S. Lewis On The Evidence For Jesus
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or else he would be a devil from hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

BOSCH, Hieronymus "St John the Evangelist on Patmos," 1504-05

 A mishmash of poetry and readings intended to communicate my understanding of Revelation — a speech I gave to a bible study group a few years back. A Godawful Mess, those poor people. 

Sacred Scripture uses the image of the vine in various ways. In one, the vine serves to express the Mystery of the People of God, what for Christians St. Paul referred to as the Mystical Body of Christ. From this perspective which emphasizes the Church’s internal nature, the lay faithful are seen not simply as laborers who work in the vineyard, but as themselves being a part of the vineyard. In John 15:5, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Part of our responsibilities as lay faithful is to not only to accept the gospel in faith but to proclaim it by word and deed. 

The Boston Archdiocese, through the facilities at St. John’s Seminary has prepared a program called The Master of Arts Ministry to help build an informed laity that fulfills the vision of John Paul II in Christifidelis Laici. I finished up another course this past fall in Fundamental Theology and one of the assignments I had was to prepare a “reflection paper” on the meaning of Revelation. The paper was intended to serve as a basis for making a presentation to a group like ourselves here to help us explore the topic of Revelation. 

It is in many ways a vast topic, Fr. Paul Ritt who was my professor for the course, told us that everything, Faith, Hope, Charity, God and Man and his Salvation, Redemption, Scripture, Tradition, the whole kitchen sink of Catholic Theology begins and ends with Revelation. We read an encyclical Dei Verbum, devoted to the topic and written by the late Pope John Paul II. I thought I would begin my little presentation tonight by asking what Revelation means to you and how you would attempt to express that to others and see what we get as our group definition (Five Minute Group Discussion). 

Possible Answers: 

1. Self communication of God in history: God manifesting and giving us no less than God and in the process imparting knowledge about God.
2. God’s free gracious, efficacious (producing or capable of producing the desired effect; having the intended result; effective an “efficacious drug”) self-disclosure in words and deeds and ultimately in the person of Jesus Christ
3. General (God disclosing God in all created things, in all people) and special (God revealing God in the unique, unrepeatable revelations which is recorded in the Old (“dabar”) and New Testaments as handed down by the Church. Culminates in the Incarnation of God in Christ)
4. The word made flesh: scripture is the Word consigned to writing. Tradition is the word passed on in the life, doctrine and worship of the Church.
5.  Revelation as inner mystical experience imparting the grace of communion with Jesus Christ
6. God’s self-communication that elevates humanity’s self consciousness allowing it to see itself and the world in a new light
7. Revelation as symbolic disclosure (the Fig Tree) “The Fig Tree Parable:The point of the fig tree parable is the damnableness of an outward show of religion with none of the fruit of religion, which is the love of God and man. He is teaching not about fig trees but about men. It is always the season for men. There is no off season in which it would be against the order of nature for men to do their duty to God or their fellows. There is something here not altogether unlike the condemnation passed upon Satan for the Fall of our first parents – that henceforth he should go on his belly. How could a pure spirit go on his belly? But God was talking to Satan in serpent language. And our Lord is warning men in fig tree language.”– F. J. Sheed, To Know Christ Jesus

Fundamentally the concept of Revelation is an answer but I think it is always important never to forget the question. Many of us have been blessed by strong families and good upbringings and we may forget the question from time to time. And never to forget also that smugness, said the American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, is the great Catholic sin. 

I always find the question all around me in this secular world and never better expressed by Philip Larkin, an English Poet Laureat of the 1950 and 60’s. This is a shocking poem and I don’t mean to offend anyone but it displays a certain sneering cynicism that is high art:

(Reading One)
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don’t have any kids yourself.
Philip Larken, This Be The Verse 

So if this is the ethos (the characteristic and distinguishing attitudes, habits, beliefs, etc. of an individual or of a group) of those whom we are going to speak with, I think we are going to need some kind of attention grabber to start the conversation.

A Swedish Catholic Theologian, Soren Kierkegaard said that if he were a doctor and were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, he would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed, it would not be heard or heeded, for there is too much noise and busyness in our world. I often use poetry when I’m trying to communicate. Nothing quite like a man breaking into verse to stun those around him, particularly when he’s talking about death: 

(Reading Two)
How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?
Is there a horn we should not blow as proudly
For the meanest of us all, who creeps his days, 
Guarding his heart from blows, to die obscurely?
I am no king, have laid no kingdoms waste,
Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs
Of weeping women through long walls of trumpets;
Say rather, I am no one, or an atom;
Say rather, two great gods, in a vault of starlight,
Play ponderingly at chess, and at the game’s end
One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor
And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece
Forgotten there, left motionless, is I. . . 

Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,
Am only one of millions, mostly silent;
One who came with eyes and hands and a heart,
Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.
Say that the fates of time and space obscured me,
Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me,
Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders 
Dispatched me at their leisure. . .Well, what then?
Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,
The horns of glory blowing above my burial?
Conrad Aiken, Selection from Tetélestai

Blaise Pascal, the Catholic apologist, planned to begin his book, the Pensees, by talking about death because death creates silence – not just when it happens but also before that, when we contemplate it. This poem by Conrad Aiken which I quoted before does just that, contemplates death. Here’s a bit more, so I can get back to speaking about Revelation:

(Reading Three)
Morning and evening opened and closed above me:
Houses were built above me; trees let fall
Yellowing leaves upon me, hands of ghosts;
Rain has showered its arrows of silver upon me
Seeking my heart; winds have roared and tossed me;
Music in long blue waves of sound has borne me
A helpless weed to shores of unthought silence;
Time, above me, within me, crashed its gongs
Of terrible warning, sifting the dust of death;
And here I lie.Roar now above my decaying flesh, you winds, 
Whirl out your earth-scents over this body, tell me
Of ferns and stagnant pools, wild roses, hillsides!
Anoint me, rain, let crash your silver arrows
On this hard flesh! I am the one who named you,
I lived in you, and now I die in you.
I your son, your daughter, treader of music,
Lie broken, conquered. . .Let me not fall in silence.I, the restless one; the circler of circles;
Herdsman and roper of stars, who could not capture
The secret of self; I who was tyrant to weaklings,
Striker of children; destroyer of women; corrupter
Of innocent dreamers, and laugher at beauty;

I, Too easily brought to tears and weakness by music,
Baffled and broken by love, the helpless beholder
Of the war in my heart of desire with desire, the struggle
Of hatred with love, terror with hunger;
Who laughed without knowing the cause of my laughter, who grew
Without wishing to grow, a servant to my own body;
Loved without reason the laughter and flesh of a woman,
Enduring such torments to find her! I who at last
Grow weaker, struggle more feebly, relent in my purpose,
Choose for my triumph an easier end, look backward
At earlier conquests; or, caught in the web, cry out 
In a sudden and empty despair, ‘Tetélestai!’
Pity me, now! I, who was arrogant, beg you!
Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.
Blow horns of victory now, as I reel and am vanquished.
Shatter the sky with trumpets above my grave. 
Conrad Aiken, Selection from Tetélestai

 “Tetélestai” is the name of the poem. Do you know where that word comes  from or what it means?

“When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” [John 19:30] It is the Greek translation of that last word that Jesus utters from the Cross. Much of what is in that word, Tetélestai, its meaning and grammar, sum up a lot of what Revelation is: To end, to be finished, completed, fully executed, to discharge a debt totally and completely. Jesus is the completion of revelation, the slow and gradual process of God revealing himself to Moses and the Prophets, the story of the Old Testament. It began with the burning bush and his name “Yaweh.” It ends on the cross. 

It’s in the Perfect tense — Tetélestai.  The grammar that says finished in the past with the result that it stands finished forever, a completed action with emphasis on existing results of that past action: “I have baked a cake.” Action of baking finished; result the cake is here. The passive voice represents the subject, Jesus Christ, as being acted upon by someone else, God the father, who imputed our sins to Jesus Christ and judged every one of them.  The mood of the verb Tetélestai  is declarative for a dogmatic statement of doctrine; salvation is totally complete.  The present state: Eternal salvation life is available.  The past action: Jesus Christ was judged for our sins.  There is both good and bad news in this: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.”[John 3:36]. So it is decidedly not a cry of despair (like that which emanates from the poem, the man falling into silence) but one of triumph when we think of Jesus on the Cross. And belief in him will shatter the sky with trumpets above your grave. Thousands of years of salvation history, untold numbers of saints and believers marching to their deaths with joyous hymns on their lips, proclaim that victory. 

One of the propositions of Revelation is that of eternal life, a life with Jesus sharing in the life of God the Father. Malcolm Muggeridge, another English writer and like all of these I’m quoting here, a guardian angel of mine, wrote this thinking about that moment, on the cusp of reaching eternal life:  

(Reading Four)
Our Transformation At Death
So at last I may understand, and understanding believe; see my ancient carcass, prone between the sheets, stained and worn like a scrap of paper dropped in the gutter, muddy and marred with being trodden underfoot, and hover over it, myself, like a butterfly released from its chrysalis stage and ready to fly away. Are caterpillars told of their impending resurrection? How in dying they will be transformed from poor earth-crawlers into creatures of the air, with exquisitely pained wings? If told, do they believe it? Is it conceivable to them that so constricted an existence as this should burgeon into so gay and lightsome a one as a butterfly’s? I imagine the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads – no, it can’t be; it’s a fantasy, self-deception, a dream. Similarly, our wise secular voices. Yet in the limbo between living and dying, as the night clock tick remorselessly on, and the black sky implacably shows not one single streak or scratch of grey, I hear those words; I am the resurrection, and the life, and feel myself to be carried along on a great tide of joy and peace.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus 

How can we apprehend this meaning of revelation? There is so much to guide us and it begins in communion with others at the sacred store where we can read scripture, learn traditions and be in communion with the saints who have passed before us. We need to create for ourselves a space where we can come to understand the nature of Jesus’ministry: the pronouncement of the kingdom of God and the demand to repent our lives of sin and death in order to save our immortal souls. 

Is it not the nature of our experience of the world that gives rise to Revelation in the first place? Listen to Blaise Pascal:
We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness. 
Pensées 401 

Since no one can change human nature, no one can make us stop desiring truth, happiness or goodness; and no mere human being can give them to us. We can get these two things in crumbs and droplets while wishing for great loaves and waves, but we cannot create them; we are aqueducts not fountains, creatures not the creator. As C.S. Lewis said: “Human beings can’t make each other happy for very long.” 

The fundamental truth of all addicts and all men is that we do not create happiness or goodness. GK Chesterton, another guardian angel of mine, felt a “haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Robinson Crusoe’s ship—for even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise — according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.” That is the story of original sin. 

How can we apprehend the meaning of revelation?
Consider this poem, The Idea of Order at Key West, by Wallace Stevens, the subject is the voice of poetry but to me it is really considering nature and the transcendent (God), all from a walk along a sea wall at Key West and a view of the harbor as night falls:

(Reading Five)
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang. 

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. 

But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.      It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made. 

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. 

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. 
Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West 

I used to listen to this poem on a recording I had and when Stevens finishes reading, “keener sounds” seems to reverberate and if anyone were to ask me what revelation has meant to me, I can only think of this poem and “keener sounds:” a keener realization of what the truth is and an awareness, at times frightening, of how I must live and be held accountable to that truth. 

Ghostlier demarcations: revelation is an unfolding of God’s self-disclosure whether it be in the words and deeds recorded in the Old Testament and ultimately in the New Testament in the person of Jesus Christ or as an inner experience imparts the grace of communion with God (Avery Dulles). The latter is what I know and sense through this poem but it is the same as what is written and taught in my church, which calls herself the body of Christ. 

I am speaking to you here tonight on her behalf because as Avery Dulles has said, “the fruits of this process of God’s self disclosure are transmitted to believers by education in the church and in the living community of faith.” We all have stories or we damn well should have stories of our faith. And when you share them with others you do proclaim the gospel by word and deed. We become part of God’s self disclosure, a part of the unfolding of revelation itself. 

Here is Malcolm Muggeridge again proclaiming his moment of faith: 

(Reading Six)
“I want to cry out with the blind man to whom Jesus restored his sight: One thing that I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see. How, I ask myself, could I have missed it before? How not to mhave understood that the grey-silver light across the water, the cry of the sea-gulls and the sweep of their wings, everything on which my eyes rest and my ears hear is telling me about God.” 

                                This life’s dim Windows of the Soul
                                Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
                                And leads you to believe a Lie
                                When you see with, not thro’, the Eye.

Thus William Blake distinguishes between the fantasy that is seen with the eye and truth that is seen though it. 

There are two clearly demarcated kingdoms; and passing from one to the other, from the kingdom of fantasy to the kingdom of reality, gives inexpressible delight. As when the sun comes out, and a dark landscape is suddenly glorified, all that was obscure becoming clear, all that was incomprehensible, comprehensible. Fantasy’s joys and desires dissolve away and in their place is one joy, one desire; one Oneness—God. 

In this kingdom of reality, Simone Weil tells us, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy as goodness; no desert so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. There we may understand what St. Augustine meant when he insisted that ‘though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone, and how, in the light of this realization, all human progress, human morality, human law, based, as they are, on the opposite proposition – of the intrinsic superiority of the higher over the lower – is seen as written on water, scribbled on dust; like Jesus’ scribble while he was waiting for the accusers of the woman taken in adultery to disperse. 

What will it mean to you? What happens when you realize that there has been a God all throughout history who has tirelessly sought to show you the way and who exists at this very moment like an expectant father waiting for a son to return home after years of waste and sinful acts against the very life he gave him. Let others know it will become their very life and it is a life of joy. 

(Reading Seven)
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?  Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? 

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 

So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. 

I am in awe every time I read that. Chesterton has written: “There is perhaps nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in which Jesus seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colors into all the palaces and pavilions full of  the great name, Solomon, in national legend and glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels into nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you… 

It is like the building of a good tower of Babel by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination. 

Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower.” 

Talk show host Laura Ingraham had a terrible moment fighting breast cancer and chemo therapy, facing the end of her career when she sought the advice of a Catholic priest who took the time to speak quietly with her about her faith. She never forgot his comforting words: “Don’t worry, everything is going to be OK.” In her story I heard the echo of “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” People need to be comforted. 

In speaking of revelation to others, remember who they are, counsel from your heart and give comfort to those who are seeking. Above all, it is a message of love to be communicated lovingly and not something to be preached by argument. I hope you will find some of my poems and quotations useful. Thank you.

A reading selection from D.W. Fagerberg’s “The Size of Chesterton’s Catholicism.” I posted one on dogma and doctrine before. This functions as sort of a companion piece: on the authority that produces dogma.

Chesterton connects doctrine and authority because he believes doctrine requires a living authority. Some people eschew authority because they believe that freedom’s increase comes only in proportion to authority’s decrease; from such a starting point, both doctrine and authority are unwelcome impositions. Chesterton finds Catholic doctrine and authority imposing, to be sure, but he experiences them as an imposition in the way gravity imposes upon a body so it can walk the surface of the planet, or logic imposes itself on thought so that conversation can take place, or social rules impose on a society so we can cross a street without harm or enjoy a festive dinner party without anxiety.  The first objective will be to consider the paradox of freedom and limits, the second to organize the roomy images Chesterton uses to describe the Church, and the third to consider why he believes doctrine and authority require a real Church and do not function in the abstract.

We saw that Chesterton images doctrine as a map to a maze. But anyone who has been in a maze knows that the experience involves coming up against walls, fences, or gates which obstruct one’s original intentions. When one encounters such forced modifications of direction, what should be one’s general principle?

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution of law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it way. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.   

The truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
The Thing: Why I Am Catholic

What appear at first to be impositions placed upon us by an authority, turn out to be markers on an uncharted shore (which turns out to be England): someone has pioneered this path and has left warning markers if a certain way has been found dangerous or dehumanizing, or if it ill serves the cause of happiness. The purpose of the markers is the purpose of boundary lines on a playing field. “There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

As usual, Chesterton’s paradox operates by upsetting or inverting our normal assumptions. He suggests that the world conceives liberty “as something that merely works outwards,” whereas he has always “conceived it as something that works inwards.” This house is a strange and marvelous edifice: its inside is bigger than its outside. As the convert peers into the Catholic Church from the outside, “he often feels as if he were looking through a leper’s window. He is looking through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it; but it is an opening that looks towards the Altar. Only, when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside.” The house, as any house, must be designed and ordered in deference to certain laws, just as any house must take account of the law of gravity if it plans to keep the roof from crashing in. But within the limits laid down by authority there is more room for good things to run wild than if they dwelled in a wild, albeit limitless, wasteland. Domestic does not mean servile; it means that by limitations, like that of four walls, a roof and a cozy hearth, a place becomes holy and habitable. The sense of limits stimulates a memory Chesterton carries from childhood, the source of so many of his paradoxes.

It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving stones. in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself. I played that kind of game with myself all over the mats and boards and carpets of the house; and, at the risk of being detained during His Majesty’s pleasure, I will admit that I often play it still. In that sense I have constantly tried to cut down the actual space at my disposal; to divide and subdivide, into these happy prisons, the house in which I was suite free to run wild…The charm of Robinson Crusoe is not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island; but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it. It is the fact which gives an intensive interest and excitement to all the things that he had with him on the island; the axe and the parrot and the guns and the little hoard of grain…This game of self-limitation is one of the secret pleasures of life.
The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton

Limits permit creativity not only in the child’s game but in an artist’s drawing as well. “It is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. . . . The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.” And even on a metaphysical level it is evident that, “every act of will is an act of self’limitation.” At every real moment we are faced with a multitude of potentialities. To act is to make one choice, and to choose one act is to delimit the other possible acts. We are not faced with an infinity of potentialities. This belongs to the infinite Creator, not to finite creatures. “God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them. . . The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely.”

Chesterton really does want good things to run wild, but to do so good things must not themselves become wild things, because goodness lies in being proportioned to an end; disarrayed and erratic things cannot run to their good. That is why there is more room living within reason than without reason. Hence creeds and hierarchies were not organized, “as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.” We can be reasonably sure that a religion which liberates us from authority would leave us lighter, but we fear it would also, at the same time, liberate us from essential human goods the way a robber would leave us lighter one purse of gold.

Therefore Chesterton employs images of roominess to explain his experience of Catholicism as something which expands the mind, rather like the way post beams expand a room by holding up the ceiling, and our second objective in this chapter is to organize these images. He enlarges on the metaphor of size in three directions: the Catholic authoritative tradition makes our thought broader, longer, and taller. “The only difficulty about the evident reawakening of Catholicism in modern England is that conversion calls on a man to stretch his mind, as a man awakening from a sleep may stretch his arms and legs.”

The only antidote to narrow, heretical thinking is its antipode, Catholic thinking, so it is not surprising that we continue to find images of width at play when Chesterton defines “Catholic.” “Of nearly all the non-Catholic types of our time we can truly say, that any such type must broaden his mind to become a Catholic. He must grow more used than he is at present to the long avenues and the large spaces.” Chesterton propounds this thesis in the context of pointing out that being Catholic involves being catholic, i.e., universal, comprehensive in scope, including or concerning all humankind. Being Catholic obliges involvement with the very world which presence in the Roman Church leads the puritan to charge it with having become too worldly a church. The allegation that the Roman Church is pagan, we remember, means that it leaves open the back door to a very long avenue connecting us with pagan antiquity; and that it leaves open the side door to the town square peopled with all sorts of dubious and disreputable people, tramps and pedlars who make up the life of an open marketplace; and that it has too gaudily decorated the door fronting the (Roman) forum.

Now a great deal has been said by Protestants, naturally enough, and not a little even by Catholics, about the danger of displaying before the world a pomp and triumph that might easily be called worldly. Undoubtedly some harm was done, and some misunderstandings did arise, when the Popes of the Renaissance filled Rome with trophies that might have marked the triumphs of the Caesars. . . . But, taking human nature as a whole, the method is justified; because . . . the Faith belongs to the heights and the open spaces, and the circle of the whole world. . . . That is, it does express the first essential fact that Catholicism is not a narrow thing; that it knows more than the world knows about the potentialities and creative possibilities of the world, and that it will outlast all the worldly and temporary expressions of the same culture.”
The Well and the Shallows

This Church is rather more like a mobile tabernacle than a fixed edifice, in the sense that Catholicism has pitched its tent in many lands and it has not been untouched or undecorated by any one of them: the inhabitants of these lands have brought with them into that ambulatory temple their cultures and philosophies and arts. Catholicism has also pitched its tent in each historical era. “Becoming a Catholic broadens the mind     For instance, many a man who is not yet a Catholic calls himself a Mediaevalist. But a man who is only a Mediaevalist is very much broadened by becoming a Catholic…As a Mediaevalist I am still proudest of the Gothic; but as a Catholic I am proud of the Baroque.”

By such an authoritative tradition we have a longer perspective, too. Making room for so many inhabitants requires an extensible, resilient, and flexible institution which can grow older without growing stiffer. It is by consequence of our mind’s unreflective association that we think of old as stiff and creaky, and the idea of ancient conjures up crumbling columns and faded frescoes. “It is only by the analogy of animal bodies that we suppose that old things must be stilt. It is a mere metaphor from bones and arteries. In an intellectual sense old things are flexible…A thing as old as the Catholic Church has an accumulated armory and treasury to choose from; it can pick and choose among the centuries and brings one age to the rescue of another. It can call in the old world to redress the balance of the new.” With this armory of insights the Church can save “a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” The defense against thinking narrow thoughts is to think a long time, but every age tends to think only about what it sees, and it only sees what is current, which does not last very long at all. The current opinion is always narrow because it is conditioned by what has gone before. The only way to avoid a “revolt against revolts” and a “reaction against reactions” is to “teach men to stretch their minds and inhabit a larger period of time. . . . It will be more apparent than ever that these jerks of novelty do not create either a progress or an equilibrium.” Such jerks of novelty, yanking history first port, then starboard, Chesterton records in this quick summary.

Perhaps there is really no such thing as a Revolution recorded in history. What happened was always a Counter-Revolution. Men were always rebelling against the last rebels; or even repenting of the last rebellion. This could be seen in the most casual contemporary fashions, if the fashionable mind had not fallen into the habit of seeing the very latest revel as rebelling against all ages at once. The Modern Girl with the lipstick and the cocktail is as much a rebel against the Woman’s Rights Woman of the ‘80s, with her stiff stick-up collars and strict teetotalism, as the latter was a rebel against the Early Victorian lady of the languid waltz tunes and the album full of quotations from Byron; or as the last, again, was a rebel against a Puritan mother to whom the waltz was a wild orgy and Byron the Bolshevist of his age. Trace even the Puritan mother back through history and she represents a rebellion against the Cavalier laxity of the English Church, which was at first a rebel against the Catholic civilization, which had been a rebel against the Pagan civilization. Nobody but a lunatic could pretend that these things were a progress; for they obviously go first one way and then the other. But whichever is right, one thing is certainly wrong; and that is the modern habit of looking at them only from the modern end.
St. Thomas Aquinas

Chesterton believes there was, beside “mere fashion or mere fatigue. a reasonable plan of the proportions of things” and that the proportionate plan which has the most plausible look to it is the plan of the Catholic faith because it has purposely and conscientiously sought an eternal equilibrium which will persist through the vagarious imbalances of each age. It is not as if only a Catholic can oppose an actual untruth, but Chesterton does think the Catholic is in a better position to oppose potential untruths. There may be allies to the Catholic position on this end of the playing field today, but will they be allies when the attack on human dignity redirects to the other end of the field.

Even the High Church Party, even the Anglo-Catholic Party only confronts a particular heresy called Protestantism upon particular points. It defends ritual rightly or even sacramentalism rightly, because these are the things the Puritans attacked. It is not the heresy of an age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of an age. But since I have become a Catholic, I have become conscious of being in a much vaster arsenal, full of arms against countless other potential enemies. The Church, as the Church and not merely as ordinary opinion, has something to say to philosophies which the merely High Church has never had occasion to think about. If the next movement is the very reverse of Protestantism, the Church will have something to say about it; or rather has already something to say about it. You might unite all High Churchmen on the High Church quarrel, but what authority is to unite them when the devil declares his next war on the world.
Letter to Maurice Baring

To think really broad thoughts, one must have both history and authority. History alone will not suffice because it is only a record of the aging process, and where something has been does not tell you where it will go, or where it should go. Catholicism is not true because it is old, it is old because its deposit of truth refuses to age. “It is not an old religion; it is a religion that refuses to grow old.” It is not just an old tradition, but an eternal tradition, and “the great difficulty is whether a man can stretch his mind, or (as the moderns would say) can broaden his mind, enough to see the need for an eternal Church.”

Every age has its own outlook. Persons who agree with each other agree on the basis of that outlook, and persons who disagree with each other disagree on the basis of that outlook. The only way to be truly broadened is to take a longer outlook, one where eternity and history have kissed and left behind a mark known as the character of that age. That is what gives certain portions of the Catholic household an alien feel to us. They embody truths in a way that we find difficult to assimilate through our particular gatehouse. The Church holds in its treasure house truths beyond our limited outlook.

That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy Child amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honor of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahmanism, he who set forth all the science and rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? . . . Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sects of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy’s tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field.
The Everlasting Man

Thus far Chesterton has claimed that Catholic authoritative tradition is broader than our narrow minds, and longer than our present minds. He finally claims that the height of Catholic authority enables human beings to stand up taller than alternatives which tend to stoop the human being. The size of Catholicism prevents its authority from being dehumanizing.

Chesterton knows that this is not how submission to Catholic authority is commonly perceived. He knows that a modern meaning of “docile” has replaced “willing to be taught” with “obsequiousness.” He knows that servanthood is mistaken for servility, and being refractory (vocab: Obstinately resistant to authority or control) is thought heroic in principle. He knows that “the man who fears to enter the Church commonly fancies that what he feels is a sort of claustrophobia,” even though we have already seen that Chesterton believes this person in fact suffers a sort of agoraphobia. For skeptics, “the typical Catholic act is not going into a great thing like a church, but into a small thing like a confessional box. And to their nightmare fancy a confessional box is a sort of mantrap; and presents in its very appearance same combination of a coffin and a cage.” This thought seems to amuse Chesterton, for he returns to it on other occasions. He describes outsiders looking at the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber. But all they really know about it is that he has passed through a door. They do not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight. It is he who is, in the beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to go into. He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which is labeled as being very large; but he is quite sure he would be cramped in any of them.

Catholic heads are not hung in humiliation, they are bowed in humility. “When a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. .. . He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.” These youngsters attain passage through a doorway into a world bigger inside than it looks from the outside. In this small chamber, the free citizens of the cathedral do not hear Mr. Blatchford’s voice whispering through the cell bars that the will is already determined; neither do they hear Luther’s voice whispering that the will is already depraved nor Calvin’s voice that one’s salvation is already determined. This box wherein penitence can be performed and absolution bestowed is deliberately entered, and it accommodates the magnitudinous divine, human encounter. “It is almost a good thing that nobody outside should know what gigantic generosity, and even geniality, can be locked up in a box, as the legendary casket held the heart of the giant. It is a satisfaction, and almost a joke, that it is only in a dark corner and a cramped space that any man can discover that mountain of magnanimity.”

Catholic tyranny, if that is what those who do not understand want to call it, is less oppressive than Protestant liberty which keeps the authority’s hands off the goods by prohibiting the good itself.

The fact is that Protestant tyranny is totally different from Catholic tyranny; let alone Catholic liberty. It is ineradicably rooted in a total opposite motive and moral philosophy. . . . Protestantism is in its nature prone to what may be called Prohibitionism…I mean that the Protestant tends to prohibit, rather than to curtail or control. . . . When puritans abolish ritualism, it means there shall be no more ritual. When prohibitionists abolished beer, they swore that a whole new generation would grow up and never know the taste of it…Thus there is a fanatical quality, sweeping, final, almost suicidal, in Protestant reforms which there is not even in Catholic repressions.

In short, apart from Catholic liberty, Catholic tyranny is either temporary in the sense of a penance or a fast, or temporary in the sense of a state of siege or a proclamation of martial law. But Protestant liberty is far more oppressive than Catholic tyranny. For Protestant liberty is only the unlimited liberty of the rich to destroy an unlimited number of the liberties of the poor.
The Well and the Shallows

The moralist will have difficulty understanding asceticism because the moralist, as legalist, fails to understand that while there is one path to salvation there may be many paths to holiness. Some heroic saints may make their way to sanctity through celibacy and retreat to the desert; but that is not required of everyone for their salvation. It is the authoritative creed which assures that even while the solitary life in the desert is admired, political life in the city and married life in the home are affirmed. Any human tradition would make more of the heroes who suffered for something than of the human beings who simply benefited by it, Chesterton wrote, but that does not alter the fact that there are more human beingsthan heroes.

This multiplicity is exactly what an authoritative Church protects. The only other alternative is a religion of mood and feeling.

If, in the really Dark Ages, there had been a religion of feeling, it would have been a religion of black and suicidal feeling. It was the rigid creed that resisted the rush of suicidal feeling. The critics of asceticism arc probably right in supposing that many a Western hermit did feel rather like an Eastern fakir. But he could not really think like an Eastern fakir; because he was an orthodox Catholic. And what kept his thought in touch with healthier and more humanistic thought was simply and solely the Dogma. He could not deny that a good God had created the normal and natural world; he could not say that the devil had made the world; because he was not a Manichee. A thousand enthusiasts for celibacy, in the day of the great rush to the desert or the cloister, might have called marriage a sin, if they had only considered their individual ideals, in the modern manlier, and their own immediate feelings about marriage. Fortunately, they had to accept the Authority of the church, which had definitely said that marriage was not a sin.
St. Thomas Aquinas

Creed and authority and doctrine set up the markers within which a teeming variety of paths to sanctification may be explored.

Catholic tyranny is also less oppressive than servitude to the state, Chesterton contends, which is why the Church has always remained at about the same distance from the state and its experiments. “It is the Church that excommunicates; but, in that very word, implies that a communion stands open for a restored communicant. It is the State that exterminates. .

Every Catholic enjoys much more freedom in Catholicism than any Liberal does under Bolshevism or Fascism. . . For the State has returned with all its ancient (errors out of antiquity; with the Gods of the City thundering from the sky.. . and we have begun to understand in what wide fields and playgrounds of liberty, the Faith that made us free has so long allowed us to wander and to play.” Chesterton finds Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Bernard Shaw to espouse the more captivating philosophy — and he does not mean enchanting or charming — when they propose repair of social chaos by sweeping sqcial regulations of the kind being championed by the early supporters of communism. “It is the very men who say that nothing can be classified, who say that everything must be codified. Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw said that the only golden rule is that there is no golden rule. He prefers an iron rule; as in Russia.”

Whence arises this confusion? How did authority come to figure so prominently in the impression the Catholic Church has made upon the modern mind? Chesterton has a theory. It is for the same reason that the monastic life of renunciation and austerity (which does exist in Catholicism “as a way of asserting the will against the power of nature, of thanking the Redeemer by partially sharing his sufferings, [and] of making a man ready for anything as a missionary or martyr”) also came to figure prominently in the picture held by a non-Catholic about Catholicism: “These happen to be rare in the modern industrial society of the West, outside his communion; and it is therefore assumed that they are the whole meaning of that communion. Because it is uncommon for an alderman to fast forty days, or a politician to take a Trappist vow of silence, or a man about town to live a life of strict celibacy, the average outsider is convinced, not only that Catholicism is nothing except asceticism, but that asceticism is nothing but pessimism.” The latter statement (that asceticism is pessimistic) is not true and the former statement (that Catholicism is nothing but asceticism) is not accurate. Defining Catholicism as asceticism is like naming the peacock tail blue; there is blue in it. But when the modern critic sees this unusual ascetic ideal in an authoritative Church, he is apt to say

“This is the result of Authority; it would be better to have Religion without Authority.” But in truth, a wider experience outside Brixton or Brighton would reveal the mistake. It is rare to find a fasting alderman or a Trappist politician, but it is still more rare to see nuns suspended in the air on hooks or spikes; it is unusual for a Catholic Evidence Guild orator in Hyde Park to begin his speech by gashing himself all over with knives; a stranger calling at an ordinary presbytery will seldom find the parish priest lying on the floor with a fire lighted on his chest and scorching him while he utters spiritual ejaculations…in short, a real knowledge of mankind will tell anybody that Religion is a very terrible thing; that it is truly a raging fire, and that Authority is often quite as much needed to restrain it as to impose it. Asceticism, or the war with the appetites, is itself an appetite. It can never be eliminated from among the strange ambitions of Man. But it can be kept in some reasonable control; and it is indulged in much saner proportion under Catholic Authority than in Pagan or Puritan anarchy.
St. Thomas Aquinas

Perhaps the reason our day fails to appreciate the service which authority renders in providing reasonable control and sane proportion is due to the fact that we are in very little danger of being overcome by religion as by a raging fire. But the day may come again when authority will have to protect us from ourselves.

Chesterton’s theory is that an outsider necessarily finds the most alien practices the most striking, and because they are the most striking they seem the most important, when in point of fact they may be either unimportant or moderate when balanced within the whole. The theory accounts for many common mistakes. A Catholic doctrine can only be accurately understood when comprehended within the community of doctrines, like Catholic discipline can be comprehended only when it is understood within the whole practice of the religion. “It may still be noted that the unconverted world, Puritan or Pagan, but perhaps especially when it is Puritan, has a very strange notion of the collective unity of Catholic things or thoughts. Its exponents, even when not in any rabid sense enemies, give the most curious list of things which they think make up the Catholic life; an odd assortment of objects, such as candles, rosaries, incense (they are always intensely impressed with the enormous importance and necessity of incense), vestments, pointed windows, and then all sorts of essentials or non-essentials thrown in in any sort of order; fasts, relics, penances or the Pope.” It is like hearing the words, but not knowing the grammar which holds the words together, and confusing adjectives for nouns, prepositions for verbs. How important any given practice is to the whole can only be grasped by knowing the whole. Unfortunately, people who “fly into a rage with the Catholic Church” always use an extraordinary diction in which “all sorts of incommensurate things are jumbled up together, so that the very order of the words is a joke.” Chesterton holds that he “never read an attack on Catholicism without finding this ignorant gabble of terms all topsy-turvy There is always some such medley of misused words, in which mitres, misereres, nones, aibs, croziers, virgins and viaticums tumble over each other without the wildest hope that anybody could possibly know what any of them mean.” Thus on one occasion he read a description of the Catholic religion as if the author thought it to consist primarily of rosaries or beads, or crucifixes, or paying for candles or masses. ‘Apparently the first object of a Catholic is to get a candle. If once he can get hold of a candle, and walk about everywhere clasping his candle, he is all right. But if he cannot get a candle, he has the alternative of purchasing a mass; an instrument that is a sort of substitute for a candle.”

On another occasion, Chesterton read a critic’s report that in Rome’s relation with the Russian Uniats (Eastern Christian churches that are in union with the Roman Catholic Church) Rome tolerates “strange heresies and even bearded and wedded clergy.” Chesterton does not go on to tell what strange heresies the author was referring to; perhaps the author did not himself go on to say; but it does not matter because Chesterton’s attention is arrested by the emphasis in those eight words. ‘As somebody tumbling down the stairs bumps upon every step, the writer comes a crash upon every word.” Each word is strange enough when juxtaposed with the other, “but by far the funniest and most fantastic thing in all that fantastic sentence is the word ‘even” because it is by that word that one grasps, finally, what this critic must think Catholicism is if he finds it surprising that Rome would “even” allow aberrant bearded clergy.

There is in the world, they would tell us, a powerful and persecuting superstition, intoxicated with the impious idea of having a monopoly of divine truth, and therefore cruelly crushing and exterminating everything else as error. It burns thinkers for thinking, discoverers for discovering, philosophers and theologians who differ by a hair’s breadth from its dogmas; it will tolerate no tiny change or shadow of variety even among its friends and followers; it sweeps the whole world with one encyclical cyclone of uniformity; it would destroy nations and empires for a word, so wedded is it to its fixed idea that its own word is the Word of God. When it is thus sweeping the world, it comes to a remote and rather barbarous region somewhere on the borders of Russia; where it stops suddenly; smiles broadly; and tells the people there that they can have the strangest heresies they like. . . We might well suppose; therefore, that the Church says benevolently to these fortunate Slays, “By all means worship Baphomet and Beelzebub; say the Lord’s Prayer backwards; continue to drink the blood of infants—nay, even,” and here her voice falters, till she rallies with an effort of generous resolution, “yes, even, if you really must, grow a beard.”
The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic

Chesterton solicits the sympathy of the reader to understand what despair falls upon “the hapless Catholic journalist at such moments.” How can he begin to explain the importance of authority, the hierarchy of truths, the fact “that a married clergy is a matter of discipline and not doctrine, that it can therefore be allowed locally without heresy — when all the time the man thinks a beard is as important as a wife and more important than a false religion?”

The title of the essay in which this appears is “What Do They Think?” and one of Chesterton’s answers to this self-directed question appears in the essay, “What We Think About.” There are critics who do not think, who refuse to think, and so it is easier for them to name all Catholicism by the one feature which they themselves cannot understand, in this case authority. Thus they conclude that Catholics are forbidden to think. Chesterton’s recommended cure: “Now what we have really got to hammer into the heads of all these people, somehow is that a thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism, but not deeper and deeper into difficulties about Catholicism. We have got to make them see that conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect. For that is the thing that they cannot at present bring themselves to believe.” How it happened that authority seems antithetical to thought is a riddle, when every child grows up knowing that what authorizes thought is a parent’s authoritative assurance that reality is a reasonable and trustworthy mystery, yet still the impression persists that Catholics have only half a brain because the clergy has shut down the other half. Chesterton himself had held this view of Catholicism until he began comparing what the theosophist said with what the theologian said. Then “dreadful seeds of doubt began to be sown in my mind. I was almost tempted to question the accuracy of the anti-clerical legend;…it seemed to me that the despised curates were rather more intelligent than anybody else; that they, alone in that world of intellectualism, were trying to use their intellects.”

How can there be less thought upon becoming a believer when the believer arrives at the conviction that life is worth thinking about because it is not absurd, and when revelation assures the believer of a reasonable hope of understanding the world because the same Creator made both mind and matter? How can there be less thought when the believer has so much more to think about and so many more people to think with? ‘A Catholic has fifty times more feeling of being free than a man caught in the net of the nervous compromises of Anglicanism. . . . He has the range of two thousand years full of twelve-hundred thousand controversies, thrashed out by thinker against thinker, school against school, guild against guild, nation against nation, with no limit except the fundamental logical fact that the things were worth arguing, because they could be ultimately solved and settled.” Could this impression be caused by the perpetually placid and eternally tranquil state of the Catholic Church, we ask, tongue-in-cheek. Then perhaps Chesterton could let the non-Catholic in upon a small secret. “If any one doubts that there is such a thing as Catholic liberty, I think it can do no harm to let him realize that there is such a thing as Catholic controversy; I mean controversy between Catholics.” Mr. Belloc may voice his opinion on matters as a Catholic, and because he is a Catholic, but this does not mean that other Catholics will agree. “On the contrary, each would say something quite different. It is not that they need agree with him; but that he need not agree with them…Catholics know the two or three transcendental truths on which they do agree; and take rather a pleasure in disagreeing on everything else.” Nevertheless, these differences do not rend the house or throw the family into denominational diaspora because of the consanguine understanding that nobody is trying to be an original individual, everybody is trying to express individually what the common fundaments mean. The family is confident that as different theologians with differing theologies draw nearer the beatific unity, they will draw nearer to each other. “The theology of a saint is simply the theism of a saint; or rather the theism of all saints. It is less individual, but it is much more intense. It is concerned with the common origin; but it is hardly an occasion for originality…Anyhow it is but natural that Augustine and Aquinas, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, all the doctors and the saints, should draw nearer to each other as they approach the divine unity in things.” If, as has been insisted all along, grace perfects nature and does not nullify it, then the Church, as sacrament, does not nullify thought but perfects it. Reason may stand in need of healing every bit as much as the bodies of those who cried out from the roadside as Jesus passed by, but upon being healed reason will not sit still.

In some muddled way people have confused the natural remarks of converts, about having found moral peace, with some idea of their having found mental rest, in the sense of mental inaction. They might as well say that a man who has completely recovered his health, after an attack of palsy . . . signalizes his healthy state by sitting absolutely still like a stone. Recovering his health means recovering his power of moving in the right way as distinct from the wrong way; but he will probably move a great deal more than before. To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move.
The Catholic Church and Conversion

Chesterton knows some will ask: “But even supposing that those doctrines do include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines? . . . If you see clearly the kernel of common sense in the nut of Christian orthodoxy, why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut?” Furthermore, we might wonder why one cannot take catholic teachings and leave the Roman Catholic Church? After all, Rome is a very tough nut to crack. The third objective in this chapter, then, is to explain why Chesterton thinks one must take the Church with the doctrines.

Part of Chesterton’s apology for why an authoritative institution is required in order to house abstract truths has already been presented: a religion of feeling does not hold the same way a religion of creed and doctrine does; the truths which we take are the ones we recognize but may not be the ones we need; and the truths which we find attractive may require other, less attractive truths in order to work. But the determinative reason why one can neither take truth without doctrine, nor doctrine without the Church, lies in Chesterton’s image of vitality. One can tell where a thing has been after it is dead, but one cannot know where a thing is going to go unless it is alive. By investigating the history of doctrine one can discover where Catholicism has been, but from that data one cannot know where the Catholic Church will go. The Church will know the answer as soon as the question is put, but for that a Catholic imagination is required, and an imagination is not contained in books and creeds; to learn it requires a living teacher. Vital doctrines breed and develop and are capable of protecting from specious outlooks only insofar as they dwell in a living Church which is a startling Church. “Any number of philosophies will repeat the platitudes of Christianity. But it is the ancient Church that can again startle the world with the paradoxes of Christianity.”

Chesterton describes the Church as an armory and treasure house, which is home to the Catholic imagination and which has never thrown any (good) thing away. Like some of our relative’s homes, this house of faith has a packed attic. “For the Catholic commentary on life has gone on so much longer, it has covered so many different social conditions, has dealt so carefully with countless fine shades of metaphysics or casuistry, that it really has a relation to almost any class of speculation that may arise.” Chesterton does not acclaim the Church’s treasure vaults because they are full of history; he is not interested in the past like a museum director (or worse yet, a mausoleum director) who lines the halls with dioramas of Catholicism’s bygone glory days. The treasure vaults are interesting the way the theory of hydraulics is interesting to someone whose city is burning down: from that historic treasury efficient doctrines can be produced — he means doctrines that can produce something, namely, human happiness. And since no one knows in advance under what conditions our quest for our happiness will have to be taken, the full resources of a living, imaginative Church are needed. It is, he confesses, the reason why he finally became Catholic. “The only way really to meet all the human needs of the future is to pass into the possession of all the Catholic thoughts of the past; and the only way to do that is really to become a Catholic…I was converted by the positive attractions of the things I had not yet got, and not by negative disparagements of such things as I had managed to get already.” His move to truth was not from false teaching, but from fractional teachings.

We have heard him say in The Autobiography that he believes other philosophies, in fact, each philosophy, contains a truth, so why isn’t it adequate to stack them together? For the reason a living body is not a stack of cells but an organism, and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. The collective mind looks all directions at once, in addition to looking in a particular direction at the moment. “Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. . . And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once. The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future.” Chesterton ungrudgingly admits that catholic truths have taken root outside the Roman Church. He does not think that only Catholicism contains universal truths; but he does think Catholicism contains only universal truths — i.e., truths which are intended for the whole of humanity and the whole of a human life. His reason for becoming Catholic is not that he thinks truths can only be found here, but because they can all be found here. “When the convert has once seen the world like that . . . [he] is not worried by being told that there is something in Spiritualism or something in Christian Science. He knows there is something in everything. But he is moved by the more impressive fact that he finds everything in something…There is nothing supercilious about his attitude; because he is well aware that he has only scratched the surface of the spiritual estate that is now open to him.” There are truths yet to be grown on the Catholic estate, and they will be grown when they are needed, because the Catholic possesses the field as well as the fruits. And the field is more important for the future than the fruits, because while this movement or that trend may share the field’s produce, it cannot know what the field is capable of producing next season when the wind will blow from another direction. “The men of the Oxford Movement….did discover the need of Catholic things, but they did discover the need of one thing at a time. They took their pick in the fields of Christendom, but they did not possess the fields; and, above all, they did not possess the fallow fields. They could not have all the riches, because they could not have all the reserves of the religion.”

In order to grow a doctrine from this estate a state of obedience is required, and this for two reasons. First, obedience in the sense of patience is required because if one continually plucks up the developing doctrine to transplant it, it will be killed. Chesterton was convinced of this even before his conversion.

A man who is always going back and picking to pieces his own first principles may be having an amusing time but he is not developing as Newman understood development. Newman meant that if you wanted a tree to grow you must plant it finally under some definite spot. It may be (I do not know and I do not care) that Catholic Christianity is just now passing through one of its numberless periods of undue repression and silence. But I do know this, that when the great flowers break forth again, the new epics and the new arts, they will break out on the ancient and living tree. They cannot break out upon the little shrubs that you are always pulling up by the roots to see if they are growing.
From an Essay in the Nation

Second, obedience in the sense of faithfulness is required because the truth grown on the Catholic estate is an inherited truth. What makes the Catholic Church unique is not that it has a message to proclaim. “Huxley has a message; Haeckel has a message; Bernard Shaw has a message. It is only necessary to ask the logical question, ‘From whom to raise a thousand things that the writers have never thought of. And it is typical of the confusion, that the same person who says that Haeckel has a message probably goes on to say that he is an entirely original thinker. It may be doubted, in any case, whether the professor desires to be regarded as a messenger boy. But, anyhow, we, none of us, desire a messenger boy who originates his own message.” Grant, then, that this attempt at accuracy in conveying the message requires a certain faithfulness, and this faithfulness requires a certain tenacity, a tenacity which the world interprets as stubbornness. “What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful pagan poets, about the priests and people of the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they were messengers. A messenger does not dream about what his message might be, or argue about what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is not a theory or a fancy but a fact. . . . All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority, and dogmatism and the refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural human attributes of a man with a message relating to a fact.” If understood correctly, the obstinacy signs a humbleness the Church feels about the amount of control it has over the message. Therefore the Church is serious about receiving, preserving, and passing on the whole message, in its entirety.

At this point we can see Chesterton’s sympathy with the democratic life expressed not only in space, but also in time. He makes apology not only for the vulgar Christmas celebration in the street, but for the reception of antique customs handed down by our ancestors. Actually, handing on any tradition is a stirring responsibility, part of “the awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”53 Handing on the faith tradition is a religious species of this very human process. Unless one believes that the Church is reconstituted in every generation by original pentecosts, it is a very necessary process. The Church is the body of Christ, a temple made of human stones, founded at a historical moment and historically maintained by people who have found the tradition true enough to tell it to their children and other sinners. The haughty heretic obtrudes his services, unbidden, and stands at the gateway to the past, sifting out what he considers unbelievable or unacceptable (too religious in the pagan sense or too irreligious in the Puritan sense) and excludes all other doctrines or practices he judges unfit for religious aristocracy, and this strikes Chesterton as distinctly undemocratic.

I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. .. . Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. . . . We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

Tradition means “to hand on,” and the word might better reveal itself as a verb: the faith has been “traditioned.” And the deposit of faith accrues interest; the Church is made roomier by tradition; the more traditional the Church, the greater its amplitude. This is not to say the message changes, if by that one means it changes into a different message; but the rolling stone established upon Peter does gather moss: the unchanged and unchanging message does agglomerate the truths through which it rolls. As the Church moves through history, the faith deposited in it accumulates and preserves the wisdom of the ages. It becomes the rock of ages, for the Church is “not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.” Traditioning does not idolize the past, or fear the future, or cling to the present. The task incumbent on the Church is neither to quick-freeze a bygone era nor bemoan the fate of being cast into a brave new world. The tradition is alive, after all.

Tradition is lived, and doctrines are living things, and therefore the Church is flexible and adaptable to hitherto unknown circumstances and forever young. “The Church had any number of opportunities of dying, and even of being respectfully interred. But the younger generation always began once again to knock at the door; and never louder than when it was knocking at the lid of the coffin, in which it had been prematurely buried.”56 Chesterton identifies five moments in the history of Western civilization when it appeared as though Catholicism was dead. “With the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Human skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. But in each of the five cases it was the dog that died.” Christianity rose after each death because “it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” One cannot take the doctrine without the Church because doctrines or pieties or spiritual movements tend to fossilize as soon as they die, and they die as soon as they are cut off from the living body. One cannot have the teaching without the teacher except as a dead thing.

The Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me tomorrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre.

Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The person who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a person always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to, morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth he has not seen before. .

When your father told you, walking about in the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelled sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say “My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining the deep delicate truths that flowers smell.” No; you believed your father, because you found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth tomorrow as well as today.

I give one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity…It takes all kinds to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. Celibacy is one flower in my father’s garden, of which I have not yet been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day.

This, then, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it be’ cause the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.

The teachings and the teacher are connected; one cannot take one and leave the other.

A chapter from David Fagerberg’s “The Size of Chesterton’s Catholicism that takes up Chesterton’s defense of dogma and doctrine. Most regard obedience to Church dogma as a negative (is it because dogmatic is derived from dogma?) but Chesterton shows dogma makes us more free and is a way of thinking. Doctrines are comple, Chesterton argues in the way a key is complex; they are vital in the sense of life-producing and life-protecting; they show a map to the mind which maintains by conviction what is otherwise maintained only by custom; and he says that doctrinal complexity, while single-minded, does not suffer the narrow-mindedness which cleaves revelation from reason and science. Fagerberg liberally uses quotes from Chesterton and brings together material from several different sources.

The images one uses to think about a thing will condition the way one thinks about that thing, because thought is facilitated by imagination. Chesterton’s mind is very imaginative, and his paradoxes enjoy upending – normal expectations, but his thoughts always express his experience. and he experiences doctrine as liberating rather than confining, vivifying instead of asphyxiating, brightening and not darkening the world. Therefore, he goes against the grain and defends doctrine on the grounds that it makes us more free to think and act, not less. Doctrine is a way of thinking, and for Chesterton thought is a way of accomplishing something. “When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.” Chesterton is first in line to volunteer to consider the very practical, useful, functional discipline of theorizing. “I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories…I for one have come to believe in going back to fundamentals.” He claims to revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by “the general hope of getting something done” and provides a parable to defend his choice.

Suppose a great a commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A greyclad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good …” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp post, the lamp post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmedieaval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
from Heretics

The size of the faith which Chesterton is circumscribing is sufficient to accommodate both practical religion, whose primary mode is not analysis, and doctrinal complexity, whose primary mode is. Though the sausage seller may practice the creed simply, the creed which he practices is not simple; it is a complex thing, composed of many parts, and to grasp it in its fullness has required a considerable amount of intellectual effort over a considerable number of centuries.

Thus the history of doctrine. Not everyone must perform this task (one of the advantages of belonging to a cooperative like the Church), but someone must perform this task, because “common things are never commonplace. And in the last analysis most common things will be found to be highly complicated.” Chesterton ridicules the stratagem of reduction as a means of avoiding complicated analysis. “Some men of science do indeed get over the difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they will call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct of self preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it.” The reductionist strategy of naming only one component of the complex is but a variant of the heretical procedure of doing injustice by decrementalism. Chesterton would have us widen our vision.

A thing can be said to be communal not only by virtue of being shared, but also by virtue of possessing multiple facets: like white light is a communion of colors. Although naming a rainbow “blue” is not false, because there is blue in it, this does not yet name the whole composite.

Catholicism is a community of beliefs, simple in the sense that it is accessible to the average person, but complex in the sense that it is not monochromatic. Therefore, Chesterton takes the charge that Catholicism is complex as a compliment. Against the feeling in his day that the heartfelt and intuitive religion of the Galilean is superior to complicated Roman creeds, Chesterton crows: “When once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it’s elaborately right.

Four images will be noted by which Chesterton argues against doctrinal pointillism in favor of Catholic complexity: a key, vitality, a map, and single-mindedness. In other words, he says that doctrines are complex in the way a key is complex; that they are vital in the sense of life-producing and life-protecting; that they show a map to the mind which maintains by conviction what is otherwise maintained only by custom; and he says that doctrinal complexity, while single-minded, does not suffer the narrow-mindedness which cleaves revelation from reason and science.

First, we have already seen that Chesterton described his journey to orthodoxy as a sailor whose attempted excursion to an uncharted island ultimately landed him upon a completely mapped shore. His point of embarkation was not a church catechism but a Dionysian love of the world which nonetheless felt a pang of despair. He describes the final moment of anchorage thus:

And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection — the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world — it had evidently been meant to go there — and then the strange things began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief . . . Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine.
from Orthodoxy

Chesterton returns often to the image of the dogmatic key fitting exactly into the world’s cavity, not only to affirm that Church doctrines fit the circumstances encountered in life, but also to suggest that only a complex key could fit a circumstance as complex as existence. “A stick might fit a hole or a stone or a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key.”

Of course, Catholics do not “worship a key”; the key’s value is in unlocking a door. And the early Christian “was very precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key.” Chesterton explicitly enumerates the three characteristics possessed by a key which drew him to image a creed in this way. First, “a key is above all things a thing with a shape,” and its value to us, as well as its own integrity, “depends entirely upon keeping its shape.” Second, “the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape.”

A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of abstractions; in that sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simpler key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar. And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and corners…If the faith had faced the world only with the platitudes and peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum. . . . There was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex; indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.
from The Everlasting Man

The image influences how one thinks about a thing, and Chesterton thinks of Christianity as something which came at the ancient world (or ours, too) not with the deconstructive force of a battering ram, but with the effectiveness of a key. The tool for opening the door is small, smaller than a crowbar, but it is sufficient because the shape of the key was made by the locksmith who fashioned the lock. We may open the world — if we have the key. Christianity is not, then, locked in an eternal, antagonistic struggle with the world. Christianity is the one thing which will permit the wonders of the world to open to us if only we would be directed to where the struggle really belongs, namely, the heart. The pagan has the right instinct in being drawn to the world, which is why the pagan could find the incarnate Christ; but when the pagan set out to enjoy himself, he soon found he could enjoy nothing else. The key to enjoying the world was lacking.

The complexity of the key permits Chesterton to accent the givenness of the creed, affirming that it is God’s revelation and not our construction, and at the same time permits him to account for the complexity of doctrine, which does bear the mark of the human mind.

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed by contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconscious of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.
from The Everlasting Man

Doctrines are not puzzles we must figure out before God will let us occupy heaven. They’re the product of a mind gifted by grace and commanded to figure out how on earth to be happy. Both faith and morality require thoughtfulness, a simplistic creed is inapt for nature faith “To say with the optimists that God is good, and therefore everything is good; or with the universalists that God is Love, and therefore everything is love; or with the Christian Scientists that God is Spirit, and therefore everything is spirit; or, for that matter, with the pessimists that God is cruel, and therefore every’ thing is a beastly shame; to say any of these things is to make a remark to which it is difficult to make any reply, except ‘Oh’; or possibly, in a rather feeble fashion, ‘Well, well.’ The statement is certainly, in one sense, very complete; possibly a little too complete; and we find ourselves wishing it were a little more complex.” Catholic complexity attempts to hold “the complete philosophy which keeps a man sane; and not some single fragment of it…Those who tried to make the Faith more simple invariably made it less sane.”

In the past century we have had our share of simple religions, Chesterton contends, each trying “to be more simple than the last. And the manifest mark of all these simplifications was, not only that they were finally sterile, but that they were very rapidly stale. A man had said the last word about them when he had said the first.”

Chesterton points out the inconsistency of desiring to keep the divine science in a retarded state even though we acknowledge the advantage of being deliberative in other departments of life. There appeared in the news’ papers of his day a cry for religion to be simplified, discarding both ritual and theology in favor of simple morality, in order to propound only loving one another, and the golden rule, and so forth, “as if the moral problem of man were perfectly simple” and one could address that problem without “long technical words, and talking about senseless ceremonies.” Chesterton counters:

It is exactly as if somebody were to say about the science of medicine: “All I ask is Health; what could be simpler than the beautiful gift of Health? Why not be content to enjoy for ever the glow of youth and the fresh enjoyment of being fit? Why study dry and dismal sciences of anatomy and physiology; why inquire about the whereabouts of obscure organs in the human body? Why pedantically distinguish between what is labelled a poison and what is labelled an antidote, when it is so simple to enjoy Health Why worry with a minute exactitude about the number of drops of laudanum or the strength of a dose of chloral (vocab: a sedative) , when it is so nice to be healthy? Away with your priestly apparatus of stethoscopes and clinical thermometers; with your ritualistic mummery of feeling pulses, putting out tongues, examining teeth, and the rest!

The god Aesculapius came on earth solely to inform us that Life is on the whole preferable to Death; and this thought will console many dying persons unattended by doctors.” The elementary love of the fishermen who left their beats to follow their Lord round the shores of Galilee was adequate to found the divine society, I but would rudimentary doctrine and discipline be adequate for a Church rigged to sail to every corner of the world with the key to transfigure every philosophy and every civilization? “Quite apart from the theory of a Church, if Christ had remained on earth for an indefinite time, trying to induce men to love one another, He would have found it necessary to have some tests, some methods, some way of dividing true love from false love, some way of distinguishing between tendencies that would ruin love and tendencies that would restore it. You cannot make a success of anything, even loving, entirely without thinking.”
from The Thing: Why I am a Catholic

A second image Chesterton uses to think about doctrine is vitality, meant both in the sense that doctrines are vitally important and in the sense that doctrines are animated, living, vital things themselves. We earlier saw Chesterton’s opinion that one cannot make a success of asceticism with’ out the controlling pressure of a creed because it is dogma that keeps asceticism from vilifying the body when it vivifies the spirit. It is no less true that a success cannot be made of mysticism without ecclesiastical and theological pressure. “Nothing on earth needs to be organized so much as Mysticism. You say that man tends naturally to religion; he does indeed; often in the form of human sacrifice of the temples of Sodom. Almost all extreme evil of that kind is mystical. The only way of keeping it healthy is to have some rules, some responsibilities, some definitions of dogma and moral function.” Neither can one make a success of human culture without debating the boundary lines. Creeds and doctrines identify the pressure points on the fault line, and though the points are minor, intellectual shifts can be seismic.

It is exactly this which explains the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It is only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfillment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. . . . If some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs?
from Orthodoxy

If doctrines consisted of nothing more vital than the esoteric prattle between opinionated pundits we would not be so concerned, but because doctrines will affect Christmas trees and holiday dances, statues and sacraments, Easter eggs and Easter hope, correctly formulating them is vitally important business. They concern the things that keep us alive, and the things that threaten to kill us. The Church has rarely had the luxury of deliberating in fields of serene quietude; the decibel level is usually quite high inside the world of conflicting ideals wherein the Church is called to keep its concentration on the run. Nothing is so simple as dying; it is staying alive and staying human that is complex. That’s why the Church is in possession of many ideas. “To us, Christian Scientists are simply people with one idea, which they have never learnt to balance and combine with all the other ideas. That is why the wealthy business man so often becomes a Christian Scientist. He is not used to ideas and one idea goes to his head, like one glass of wine to a starving man. But the Catholic Church is used to living with ideas and walks among all those very dangerous wild beasts with the poise and the lifted head of a lion-tamer.” Besides having the head for it, and keeping one’s feet on the ground when considering such heady matters, we must be able to evaluate ideas that come into our heads. As we have already established, ideas are dangerous, “but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer…The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler…Many, for example, avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had a vision. They might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man. People say of such a figure, in almost feverish whispers, ‘He knows his own mind, which is exactly like saying in equally feverish whispers, ‘He blows his own nose.

It is evident from these images why Chesterton does not think dogmas are dull: the matter out of which faith is formed is too rambunctious to ever be called drear, and the stakes are too high for the work to ever be called tedious. It would be surprising, indeed, to hear described as dull or trifling the struggle against forces which impede life, even if they are noetic forces; or, if Chesterton is right about the seismic consequences of ideas, precisely because they are noetic (vocab: of, relating to, or based on the intellect) . “Dogmas are not dull. Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve, but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything for miles round with dynamite, if our only objective is to give death. But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues, so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line.”

Not shying away from the implications of his vivacious metaphor, Chesterton goes so far as to say, several times, that doctrines are analogous to sex: they breed. (And in both cases things seem to fare better with an dcment of monogamy.) As human procreation cannot come from a single individual, neither can a single and individual thought sire doctrine. Trinitarian monotheism seems to Chesterton more fertile than Unitarian mono~ theism. “The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one; the greatness of God which levels all men. But the Moslem had not one thought to rub against another, because he really had not another. It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The Creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.” There are thoughts, Chesterton says, which feel too complete, and which therefore leave us with nothing to say in return. That is the problem with a simple thought, a complete thought.

We find ourselves wishing it were a little more complex. That is exactly the point. It is not complex enough to be a living organism. It has no vitality because it has no variety of function…And, meanwhile, any one Catholic peasant, while holding one small bead of the rosary in his fingers, can be conscious, not of one eternity, but of a complex and almost a conflict of eternities; as, for example, in the relations of Our Lord and Our Lady, of the fatherhood and the childhood of God, of the motherhood and childhood of Mary. Thoughts of that kind have, in a supernatural sense, something analogous to sex; they breed. They are fruitful and multiply; and there is no end to them.
from Where All Roads Lead

The person is wrong, therefore, who complains for the thousandth time that a living religion does not need dull and dusty dogmas. “We must stop him with a sort of shout and say, ‘There — you go wrong at the very start. If he would condescend to ask what the dogmas are, he would find out that it is precisely the dogmas that are living, that are inspiring, that are intellectually interesting. Zeal and charity and unction are admirable as flowers and fruit; but if you are really interested in the living principle you must be interested in the root or the seed.”

Living ideas share another characteristic with living things: they develop. Not only do doctrines increase in the sense of multiplying in number, but a doctrine itself can be said to increase, in the sense of developing. Of course, Chesterton does not mean develop in the sense of change, in the sense of going out of date, as if doctrine thought true by our ancestors can no longer possibly be thought so by us. Doctrinal development does not equal doctrinal dilution. However, he does definitely mean that it is not unnatural for doctrines to develop, if we understand the natural meaning of the word “development.”

There seems to be a queer ignorance, not only about the technical, but the natural meaning of the word Development. The critics of Catholic theology seem to suppose that it is not so much an evolution as an evasion; that it is at best an adaptation. They fancy that its very success is the success of surrender. But that is not the natural meaning of the word Development. When we talk of a child being well-developed, we mean that he has grown bigger and stronger with his own strength; not that he is padded with borrowed pillows or walks on stilts to make him look taller. When we say that a puppy develops into a dog, we do not mean that his growth is a gradual compromise with a cat; we mean that he becomes more doggy and not Less. Development is the expansion of all the possibilities and implications of a doctrine, as there is time to distinguish them and draw them out.
from St. Thomas Aquinas

And neither does the Church compromise its identity when it welcomes an occasional dragon to dinner or a penitent griffin to sleep in the spare bed. In fact, the way in which the faith becomes catholic is for St. Francis to invite Pan to Peter’s liturgy, and St. Thomas to invite Aristotle to submit categories to describe the indescribable repast. These two saintly persons are a moment of what Chesterton would call development in doctrine. “St. Thomas, every bit as much as St. Francis, felt subconsciously that the hold of his people was slipping on the solid Catholic doctrine and discipline, worn smooth by more than a thousand years of routine; and that the Faith needed to be shown under a new light and dealt with from another angle…It needed something like the shrewd and homely touch of Aristotle to turn it again into a religion of common sense.” God works on both sides of the Church-world equation. Baptizing into service of the Kingdom of God whatever truths of nature have been uncovered is a perfectly natural course of development for a Church entrusted with the key to transfiguring the world.

Chesterton’s third image of doctrine is that of a map through the world imagined as a walled maze. However, this map is not an escape map.

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like a map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel. There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially neatly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.

On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battlefields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheet precipice. By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past. . . . She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes, those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the, old mistakes.
from The Thing: Why I am a Catholic

This map shows the way through the maze; it shows where the fences should be put up for the protection of human life; it leads to artesian springs and away from infectious swamps; it distinguishes grass from poison, showing us meadows capable of supporting life; but it does not, as an insular and sectarian piety would have it, show us an escape tunnel leading out of this public and pagan polis. Doctrines are not for walling out the world, but for safeguarding our paradisiacal playing field.

“Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.”
From Orthodoxy

Human beings, being “doctrinal animals,” search for truth; and under the assumption that reality is complex, truthful expressions about reality will be complex. “I began to examine more exactly the general Christian theology which many execrated and few examined. I soon found that it did in fact correspond to many of these experiences of life; that even its paradoxes corresponded to the paradoxes of life.” The elaborateness of a doctrine signifies that the whole truth is being seen and not just that part of it visible to a very local vision. By reductionism, one philosopher can see one truth, like one person can see one color in the peacock tail, but to speak the real color or the real truth requires more than one word, maybe more than one speaker. Catholic theology is a two thousand-year-old mind which has kept intact its memory of what other speakers have said.

It is the only theology that has not only thought, but thought of everything. That almost any other theology or philosophy contains a truth, I do not at all deny; on the contrary, that is what I assert; and that is what I complain of. Of all the other systems or sects I know, every single one is content to follow a truth, theological or theosophical or ethical or metaphysical; and the more they claim to be universal, the more it means that they merely take something and apply it to everything. . . . I have only found one creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million such truths and yet is one. . . . Flowers grow best in a garden, and even grow biggest in a garden…
from the Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton

The kind of truth with which Chesterton is concerned — the kind opposed to heresy, I maintain — is not only the truth of verity but the truth of the garden. Heresy is not false because it has never thought a truth; heresy is diminutive because outside the Catholic garden it cannot grow big. A Catholic’s sense of being free derives from possessing “the range of two thousand years full of twelve hundred thousand controversies, thrashed out by thinker against thinker, school against school, guild against guild, nation against nation, with no limit except the fundamental logical fact that the things were worth arguing, because they could be ultimately solved and settled.”

In our modern wilderness we have withered worse than paganism, for at least in their wilderness they struggled to grow truth, believing that the questions were worth arguing. “All previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no answer to these questions, that the most we can do is to set up a few notice boards at places of obvious danger.” Catholic doctrine is more ambitious than setting up signs warning of thin ice or absolving itself of liability with warning labels on packages. It has the ambitious plan to build a firm foundation for living. The Church wills not only to preserve past truth by protecting it within the gardener’s wall, it wills also to persevere in its search for further truth. If an age no longer believes that truth can be found, then it will have lost its resoluteness and will no mote inaugurate a quest for truth than embark on a search for unicorns.

The argument in ages past between the heretic and the orthodox was about who was which. “In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. . . . But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it.” What this means is that people have lost concern for whether they are philosophically right, and at that point one can hardly get a good discussion off the ground, much less a productive argument.

Before Chesterton can arrive at the point of disagreement with heretics, these flighty minds would have to be able to arrive at a point of commitment themselves. One can’t argue about what is true when the heretic is more interested in being interesting than in being correct. That is the difficulty which Chesterton had felt with such people. “The truth of the matter is, I imagine, that these particular people never did believe or disbelieve in anything. They liked to go and hear stimulating lecturers; and they had a vague preference, almost impossible to reduce to any definable thesis, for those lecturers who were supposed to be in some way heterodox and unconventional. . . .I had begun to discover that, in all that welter of inconsistent and incompatible heresies, the one and only real unpardonable heresy was orthodoxy.” Perhaps this also accounts for the change in attitude toward creed. Perhaps doctrinal creeds looked less restrictive to a medieval person who wanted to reason things out than to a modern person who does not want to be held by the oppressive constraints of reasonability. To someone who doesn’t believe truth can be stated, the person who believes a stated truth looks gullible. “Creed and credence and credulity are words of the same origin and can be juggled backwards and forwards to any extent. But when a man assumes the absurdity of anything that anybody else believes, we wish first to know what he believes; on what principle he believes; and, above all, upon what principle he disbelieves.”

Christian doctrine looks adamantine not because our age suffers want of freedom, but because it suffers want of reason. In an earlier world, one which “was too stolid, Christianity returned in the form of a vagabond [i.e., Francis]; in a world that has grown a great deal too wild, Christianity has returned in the form of a teacher of logic [i.e., Thomas]. In the world of Herbert Spencer men wanted a cure for indigestion; in the world of Einstein they want a cure for vertigo.”

Just as the complexity of a key is a sign that it was made to fit a lock, so the labyrinthian quality of the map is a sign that it is a blueprint. The map might seem a canard if we never get anywhere by following it, but when we discover that this particular path does lead to happiness and that this particular wall does protect us from danger, just as the map predicts, then we determine that the maker of the map was also the maker of our minds and of our world. Chesterton’s argument for revelation is not in the least an argument against reason, and in this he follows St. Thomas. Every turn revealed by the map is a reasonable turn; each truth to which it leads, a reasonable truth.

St. Thomas is inclined to admit “that truth could be reached by a rational process, if only it were rational enough; and also long enough. . . That is, he does emphatically believe that men can be convinced by argument; when they reach the end of the argument. Only his common sense also told him that the argument never ends…Therefore men must receive the highest moral truths in a miraculous manner; or most men would not receive them at all.” Revelation does not short-circuit human rationality by disclosing things reason could never believe. Revelation is a source of truths which not every person has the luxury of time to arrive at by reasonable argument. Revelation delivers us from having to discover the dead ends by personal harm and detriment, but even the pagan, without benefit of revelation, would agree which ends are fatal for human beings. Revelation does not reveal anything contrary to reason.

Chesterton illustrates this understanding of natural law and revelation through the subject of human dignity and equality. Some say that belief “in the brotherhood of men was only founded on certain texts in the Bible, about all men being the children of Adam and Eve.” If this is true, if doctrine is grounded solely on revealed text without any ground of reason, then those who don’t believe those texts don’t have to believe the teaching.

But Chesterton thinks the texts aren’t required to make us start believing the teaching; in fact, the texts are most required when we stop believing the teaching. Millions of plain people all over the world have assumed obligations toward their neighbor without ever having clapped eyes on any sacred text, so it is not true that without revelation the belief would be unreasonable.

What is true is this: that if the nonsense of Nietzsche or some such sophist submerged current culture, so that it was the fashion to deny the duties of fraternity; then indeed it might be found that the group which still affirmed fraternity was the original group in whose sacred books was the text about Adam and Eve. Suppose some Prussian professor has opportunely discovered that Germans and lesser men are respectively descended from two such very different monkeys that they are in no sense brothers, but barely cousins (German) any number of times removed. And suppose he proceeds to remove them even further with a hatchet; suppose he bases on this a repetition of the conduct of Cain, saying not so much “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as “Is he really my brother?” And suppose this higher philosophy of the hatchet becomes prevalent in colleges and cultivated circles, as even more foolish philosophies have done. Then I agree it probably will be the Christian, the man who preserves the text about Cain, who will continue to assert that he is still the professor’s brother; that he is still the professor’s keeper. He may possibly add that, in his opinion, the professor seems to require a keeper. . .

It is the Christian church which continues to hold strongly, when the world for some reason has weakened on it, what many others hold at other times…But anybody who holds it at all will hold it as a philosophy, not hung on one text but on a hundred truths.
from What’s Wrong With The World

The doctrinal map is not nearly so private as the heretic would have us believe. The ancient Greeks called a private person an “idiotes,” meaning “not public” — self-contained in one’s own world. The Catholic believes the Bible is true because what it contains is public and can be recognized by reason; but the heretic, wishing to demonstrate revelation’s truth on the grounds that it is too unique for reason to recognize, would have us believe the Bible is true because it is idiotic. If this disjunction between revelation and reason comes about, then there is nothing to talk about, since dialogue requires that we have both a reason to talk and reason to talk with. Then civilized dialogue breaks off and civilization’s acerbic tongue makes its appearance. As a matter of fact, it is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer. That is why, in recent literature, there has been so little argument and so much sneering.”

It was not in St. Thomas’s character to sneer. “There is not a single occasion on which he indulged in a sneer. His curiously simple character, his lucid but laborious intellect, could not be better summed up than by saying that he did not know how to sneer.” And this remained true although he thought combatively, apologetically, and indulged in arguments of inordinate length. A sneer was not only not in his character, it was not in his theology.  Therefore the engagement between revelation and reason enlarged both the faith and the mind. In his Catholic theology, revelation did not end an argument, it began it, made sense of it, and revealed its end. St. Thomas thought one must understand the opponent’s position better than the opponent understood it himself

It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving he is wrong on somebody else’s principles, but not on his own. After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood as established; that we must cither not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours. We may do other things instead of arguing, according to our views of what actions are morally permissible; but if we argue we must argue [as Thomas put it] “on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves.”
from St. Thomas Aquinas

In a related way, one must understand the principle behind a practice better than the person who holds the position without reason It is not enough to be right only by prejudice, even if it is a valid prejudice, because with, out a principle the prejudice can’t be corrected when it starts to go awry. In evidence, Chesterton submits that although “most of our friends and acquaintances continue to entertain a healthy prejudice against cannibalism,” there are nevertheless attitudes appearing today toward the human body (our corporal mode of being human), which do not think the bodies of humans very much different from the bodies of animals. Among people who have reached this position, the reason for disapproving of cannibalism has already become very vague. It remains as a tradition and an instinct. Fortunately, thank God, though it is now very vague, it is still very strong.” But social sanities which we take for granted shan’t remain strong without a theological creed for a grounding principle. “All such social sanities are now the traditions of old Catholic dogmas. Like many other Catholic dogmas, they are felt in some vague way even by heathens, so long as they are healthy heathens. . . . They have the prejudice; and long may they retain it! We have the principle, and they are welcome to it when they want it.” If the heretic finds revelation unreasonable, it is because he has surrendered his principle of reason; at least the healthy heathen is in the position of being able to ascertam in revelation what he has reasonably expected. “Some people do not like the word ‘dogma. Fortunately they are free, and there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is a doctrine.”

This brings us to Chesterton’s fourth image. It is true that Catholic doctrine is rather single-minded: it persistently harps about love of God and justice on earth, eternal happiness and how one becomes capacitated for it, beatitude and other such topics which do tend to grab the mind’s attention. But single-mindedness should not be mistaken for narrow-mindedness. While it is true that Catholic doctrine has a quality which may be called undeviating, assiduous, and constant (so constant that those who were already too tired to hear it the first time will find it monotonously tiring the millionth time they hear it), it is not true that Catholic doctrine may be called narrow in ambition or modest in scope. This theology really does want to reconcile such diverse things as angels and octopuses, heaven and earth, revelation and reason, faith and science, Church and world, and all this because it believes grace perfects nature. Failure to perceive this is the cause of the puritan’s agoraphobia as New Rome invited Old Rome to help decorate St. Peter’s Basilica.

St. Thomas must make corrections to Aristotle where this philosopher has not accounted for a fact of revelation to come after him, but all that this wise pagan had right, Thomas keeps. Of whatever other faults scholasticism may be culpable, it cannot be charged with narrow-mindedness when it tries to accommodate, simultaneously, all the reality which heaven reveals and reason discovers. In its broad mindedness, scholasticism is unwilling to live in twin worlds, which is at the root of Thomas’s objection to his schizophrenic opponent, Siger of Brabant.

Siger of Brabant said this: the church must be right theologically, but she can be wrong scientifically. There are two truths; the truth of the supernatural world, and the truth of the natural world, which contradicts the supernatural world. While we are being naturalists, we can suppose that Christianity is all nonsense; but then, when we remember that we are Christians, we must admit that Christianity is true even if it is nonsense. In other words, Siger of Brabant split the human head in two, like the blow in an old legend of battle; and he declared that a man has two minds, with one of which he must entirely believe and with the other may utterly disbelieve. To many this would at least seem like a parody of Thomism. As a fact, it was the assassination of Thomism. It was not two ways of finding the same truth; it was an untruthful way of pretending that there are two truths. And it is extraordinarily interesting to note that this is the one occas~on when the Dumb Ox really came out like a wild bull. .

Those who complain that theologians draw fine distinctions could hardly find a better example of their own folly. In fact, a fine distinction can be a flat contradiction. It was notably so in this case. St. Thomas was willing to allow the one truth to be approached by two paths, precisely because he was sure there was only one truth. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing really deduced from the Faith could ultimately contradict the facts. It was in truth a curiously daring confidence in the reality of his religion; and though some may linger to dispute it, it has been justified.

“A man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.”44 That is why it was necessary for Chesterton, and for St. Thomas, that the Catholic faith be stretched large enough to cover everything. In the scholastic’s case, it resulted in “books enough to sink a ship or stock a library”; a review of Chesterton’s own bookshelves, and the range of interests they reveal, proves that it is not much different for him. If he had only needed a single truth, he could have been satisfied with any philosophy, because every half-truth contains some truth; but to be really convinced that Catholicism had the one whole truth, he tilted with a range of heresies. “Now anybody driven to the defense of what he does really mean must cover all the strategic field of the fight, and must fight at many points which he would not have chosen in fancy, but only in relation to fact. He cannot hope to deal only with heresies that amuse him; he must, in common fairness, deal seriously with heresies that bore him.”
from St. Thomas Aquinas

Catholic doctrine is still being stretched; the flowers in the garden are still growing. The matter which doctrine uses to develop, like the food which a child uses to grow, increases as actual, novel, historical events come to pass and the sum total of facts to chew on increases. As the world increases for us, doctrine will be animated, and thoughts will breed. So unless Siger of Brabant is right, and surely he isn’t, Catholicism does not have a conflicted mind about scriptural truth and scientific truth.

In the matter of the inspiration of Scripture, [Thomas] fixed first on the obvious fact. . . that the meaning of Scripture is very far from self-evident; and that we must often interpret it in the light of other truths. If a literal interpretation is really and flatly contradicted by an obvious fact, why then we can only say that the literal interpretation must be a false interpretation. But the fact must really be an obvious fact. And unfortunately, nineteenth century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were seventeenth century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation. Thus, private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, and premature theories about what the world ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy…and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion…If the matter had been left to [Thomas]. and men like him, there never would have been any quarrel between Science and Religion.
from St. Thomas Aquinas

Interpreting the meaning of Scripture in the light of other truths is an ongoing proposition, not a fundamentalist proposition which pulls the shade on the world’s bright lights: Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton, and so forth. In fact, a new pile of empirical fact was dumped in the university square at Paris for St. Thomas’s consideration by a new attitude toward empiricism cultivated by his teacher, Albert the Great.

It is not really so much a question of access to the facts, as of attitude to the facts. Most of the Schoolmen, if informed by the only informants they had that a unicorn has one horn or a salamander lives in the fire, still used it more as an illustration of logic than an incident of life. What they really said was, “If a unicorn has one horn, two unicorns have as many horns as one cow.” And that is not one inch the less a fact because the unicorn is a fable. But with Albertus in medieval times, as with Aristotle in ancient times, there did begin something like the idea of emphasizing the question: “But does the unicorn only have one horn or the salamander a fire instead of a fireside” Doubtless when the social and geographical limits of medieval life began to allow them to search the fire for salamanders or the desert for unicorns, they had to modify many of their scientific ideas. A fact which will expose them to the very proper scorn of a generation of scientists which has just discovered that Newton is nonsense, that space is limited, and that there is no such thing as an atom.
from St. Thomas Aquinas

From this world of facts sprang cosmological arguments as the natural world became grist for the reasoning of faith. It does seem to be agreed upon that the unruly child, Science, is really Christianity’s child. The willingness to poke Mother Nature with empirical syringes could not have come out of a pagan worldview which treated nature as quasi-divine. It required a worldview in which Nature is not our mother, but our sister. “We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us.” “Are you surprised that the same civilization which believed in the Trinity discovered steam?” With the discovery also comes obligations. As Chesterton has repeatedly told us, what’s wrong with the world is that we act without knowing to what end we are obliged. Our sister, Nature, is not mute about this knowledge, so St. Thomas listens to her, making him Huxley’s ideal agnostic: one cornmitted to the method of following reason as far as it will go.

Now the modern Anthropologists, who called themselves Agnostics, completely failed to be Anthropologists at all. Under their limitations, they could not get a complete theory of Man, let alone a complete theory of nature. They began by ruling out something which they called the Unknowable. . . But it rapidly became apparent that all sorts of things were unknowable, which were exactly the things that a man has got to know. It is necessary to know whether he is responsible or irresponsible, perfect or imperfect, perfectible or unperfectible, mortal or immortal, doomed or free, not in order to understand God, but in order to understand Man…. Has a man free will; or is his sense of choice an illusion? Has he a conscience, or has his conscience any authority; or is it only the prejudice of the tribal past? Is there any real hope of settling these things by human reason; and has that any authority? Is he to regard death as final; and is he to regard miraculous help as possible?
from St. Thomas Aquinas

Where St. Thomas and the agnostic part company is not in their answer — Thomas is supremely confident that God lies at the end of reason — but in the fact that only St. Thomas, and not the agnostic, really asks “Where does it go?” Because theology is not disjunctive to reason or empiricism, investigations of nature will contribute to the discussion about the end and essence of human beings, but only if that is being discussed. Unfortunately, the investigation will not treat what it declares at the outset as unknowable.

Thus it happens, says Chesterton, that the Catholic tradition can affirm both mystical knowledge and intellectual knowledge, for the very simple reason that they are both right. Again, the heretic’s ungainly position is to stand on a single footing, waving his arms frantically in apprehension of falling to either one side or the other—reason or mysticism. The Catholic stands upon both feet, on a base broad enough to house both Franciscans and Dominicans.

The Franciscan [Bonaventure] may be represented as the Father of all the Mystics; and the Mystics can be represented as men who maintain that the final fruition or joy of the soul is rather a sensation than a thought. The motto of the Mystics has always been, “Taste and see.” Now St. Thomas also began by saying, “Taste and see”; but he said it of the first rudimentary impressions of the human animal. It might well be maintained that the Franciscan puts Taste last and the Dominican puts it first. It might be said that the Thomist begins with something solid like the taste of an apple, and afterwards deduces a divine life for the intellect; while the Mystic exhausts the intellect first, and says finally that the sense of God is something like the taste of an apple…They are both right; if I may say so, it is a privilege of people who contradict each other in their cosmos to be both right. The Mystic is right in saying that the relation of God and Man is essentially a love-story; the pattern and type of all love-stories. The Dominican rationalist is equally right in saying that the intellect is at home in the topmost heavens; and that the appetite for truth may outlast and even devour all the duller appetites of man.
from St. Thomas Aquinas

Our hankering for love stories reminds us that we were made for love, and our craving for understanding reminds us that we were made for intellectual fulfillment. “Whether the supreme ecstasy is more affectional than intellectual is no very deadly matter of quarrel among men who believe it is both, but do not profess even to imagine the actual experience of either.”

 

David W. Fagerberg, an Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia College, has written a book about G. K. Chesterton’s theological and Catholic apologetical works, The Size Of Chesterton’s Catholicism.  He demonstrates Chesterton’s passion for his faith using the great one’s own words to reveal the Catholic paradox he was so fond of exploring.  Fagerberg draws on Chesterton’s theological writings — avoiding secondary sources –  so that the reader can encounter his thought as directly as possible. This selection takes up some of the more common accusations others make against the Church and how Chesterton dealt with them.

Humanity possesses a religious nature. Chesterton once said that it is a mistake to say that religions of the earth are the same in what they teach and only differ in their rites and forms. He believes the opposite. The religions of the earth differ greatly in what they teach, but they share the common machinery of rites and forms, holy priests and sacred texts, vows of virginity and sworn brotherhoods, venerable altars and hallowed days. Therefore he can state (in fact, slightly overstate) that these features are exactly the features he is proud to possess in Catholicism because they are the most humanitarian features of religion — even if they vex the Protestant.

As an apologist I am the reverse of apologetic. So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I lam especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity). for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated, I am very proud of what people call priestcraft; since even that accidental term of abuse preserves the medieval truth that a priest, like every other man, ought to be a craftsman. Jam very proud of what people call Mariolatry; because it introduced into religion in the darkest ages that element of chivalry which is now being belatedly and badly understood in the form of feminism. I am very proud of being orthodox about the mysteries of the Trinity or the Mass; I am proud of believing in the Confessional; I am proud of believing in the Papacy.
The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, p 85.

Why does Chesterton defend precisely those things which others assail as superstitious? He is going on the counteroffensive against objections typical of spiritualists who are troubled by the worldly quality of the Roman Church. Let’s amass some of these aggressive retorts.

An embodied Church is bound to be worldly, because it is practiced by beings who are bound to time and space. Worldliness is a consequence of heaven having descended into the world of matter. “The supreme spiritual power is now operating by the machinery of matter. . . It blesses even material gifts and keepsakes, as with relics or rosaries. It works through water or oil or bread or wine. Now that sort of mystical materialism may please or displease the Dean [Inge], or anybody else. But I cannot for the life of me understand why the Dean, or anybody else, does not see that the Incarnation is as much a part of that idea as the Mass; and that the Mass is as much a part of that idea as the Incarnation. A Puritan may think it blasphemous that God should become a wafer. A Moslem thinks it blasphemous that God should become a workman in Galilee.” Being worldly means being visible; in fact, it requires being visible. Christ did not come to add a philosophy to the queue but to found a Church which would proclaim him in the world; and an embodied, terrestrial, political force which will subsist throughout the historical life of humankind requires visible vestiges. A philosophy does not need a society, but the Church is a society. The ancient world had a bellyful of philosophies but it had not one Church. “Very early in its history this thing became visible to the civilization of antiquity,” and from the beginning it appeared as a Church, “with everything that is implied in a Church and much that is disliked in a Church. . . . It had a doctrine; it had a discipline; it had sacraments; it had degrees of initiation; it admitted people and expelled people; it affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with anathemas, If all these things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign of Antichrist followed very rapidly upon Christ.” There may be occasions when abuses by the Vicar of Christ need reform, but the way to do it is not to name him the Antichrist and remove the papacy along with the abusive pope.

I am struck by a brief thought, Chestertonian in form. Even the carping by critics about the Catholic Church discloses the Church to be exactly what it claims to be: catholic. Catholicity involves unity, and even persons antipathetic to Catholicism prove its unity by their practice of using a point from anywhere in the history of the Church to censure today’s institution. One might expect a Catholic to quote Augustine to endorse or dispute some issue on the current horizon, since the Catholic claims a universality for the Church mystically based in the transcendence of God, but for the critics to cite archaic practices of primitive monasteries, or the papal muscle of Gregory VII, or the Spanish Inquisition to the disfavor of today’s institution is a surprise. When the faultfinders use any one of these historical phenomena as a basis for criticizing today’s Church they assume the very connection between past and present, and between monk, pope, inquisitor, and philosopher, which the believer professes. So if the modern Catholic suffers guilt by association with the inquisitor and crusader, then the modern Catholic is also blessed by a tie which binds men and women, civilizations, cultures, and strangers across generations, eras, and epochs. What properties connect an American Catholic to a Spanish inquisitor? or a married layperson to the celibate hermit of the desert~ or a literary theologian to an illiterate friar? Only that they are all Catholic. That is the only reason why the former are asked to answer for the sins and excesses of the latter. The Reformers selected persons of preceding generations who fit their viewpoint; however, to deny affiliation with past movements because they are disapproved in light of current tendencies denies the very bonds which keep us from becoming ecclesiastical solipsists. We might not now approve of what Uncle Gregory did then, but members of the family are not voted in or out by each succeeding generation. We can only be blessed by the same ties which indict.

When Chesterton defends aspects of the medieval Church, he is not indulging in intellectual regression or nostalgic desire for bygone glory days. But what would we think of someone who looks into the mirror and cannot recognize his or her own countenance? Chesterton’s attitude toward our medieval ancestors is another exercise of the capacious catholic character. He does not say that everything in the Middle Ages was good, but he can say that Catholicism can contain everything which was good in the Middle Ages, while the medievalist cannot contain everything which is good in Catholicism.

Becoming a Catholic broadens the mind. . . . Standing in the centre where all roads meet, a man can look down each of the roads in turn and realize that they come from all points of the heavens. As long as he is still marching along his own road, that is the only road that can be seen, or sometimes even imagined. For instance, many a man who is not yet a Catholic calls himself a Mediaevalist. But a man who is only a Mediaevalist is very much broadened by becoming a Catholic. I am myself a Mediaevalist; in the sense that I think modern life has a great deal to learn from mediaeval life; that Guilds arc a better social system than Capitalism; the friars are fat less offensive than philanthropists. But I am a much more reasonable and moderate Mediaevalist than I was when I was only a Mediaevalist. For instance, I felt it necessary to be perpetually pitting Gothic architecture against Greek architecture, because it was necessary to back up Christians against Pagans. But now I am in no such fuss and I know what Coventry Patmore meant when he said calmly that it would have been quite as Catholic to decorate his mantelpiece with the Venus of Milo as with the Virgin. As a Mediaevalist I am still proudest of the Gothic; but as a Catholic I am proud of the Baroque.
The Catholic Church and Conversion, p.93.

It is said by some that the Catholic Church is violent because it has been a source of wars and conflict. Chesterton admits the human habit of fighting for what is precious, and asks us to examine what we find precious enough to fight for. Why is waging war over oil beneath the sand or imaginary boundary lines on a map more excusable than fighting for souls and salvation? Medieval wars and crusades were conducted when the stakes were eternal beatitude; why is an idealistic battle more forgivable than a religious battle? “The mere flinging of the polished pebble of Republican Idealism into the artificial lake of eighteenth century Europe produced a splash that seemed to splash the heavens, and a storm that drowned ten thousand men. What would happen if a star from heaven really fell into the slimy and bloody pool of a hopeless and decaying humanity? Men swept a city with the guillotine, a continent with the saber, because Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were too precious to be lost. How if Christianity was yet more maddening because it was yet more precious? . . [Thus] when the learned skeptic says: ‘Christianity produced wars and persecutions, we shall reply: ‘Naturally.’”

It is said by some that the Catholic Church is exclusive. This belief “is symbolized in the sort of man who says, ‘These ruthless bigots will refuse to bury me in consecrated ground, because I have always refused to be baptized.” Chesterton wonders why, if such a person “thinks that baptism does not matter, he should think that burial does matter. If it is in no way imprudent for a man to keep himself from a consecrated font, how can it be inhuman for other people to keep him from a consecrated field?” It is as though the revolutionaries insist upon the queen’s blessing as they behead her. Why is someone nettled by being excluded from the intimacies of a community he or she thinks is a mockery? “It is surely much nearer to mere superstition to attach importance to what is done to a dead body than to a live baby. I can understand a man thinking both superstitious, or both sacred; but I cannot see why he should grumble that other people do not give him as sanctities what he regards as superstitions.” Perhaps what annoys such a person is Catholicism’s adamantine (and, to them, antiquated) belief that where something is right, something can be wrong. Chesterton never fully understood what was meant by crediting the Reformation with obtaining a Promethean freedom to different points of view, when the value of possessing different viewpoints was to permit everyone to charge Rome with their favorite reproach. When the reformer boasts that, unlike Rome, Protestants grant many and varied free points of view, “he means that they give freedom to the Universalist to curse Rome for having too much predestination and to the Calvinist to curse her for having too little. He means that in that happy family there is a place for the No Popery man who finds Purgatory too tenderhearted and also for the other No Popery man who finds Hell too harsh. He means that the same description can somehow be made to cover the Tolstoyan who blames priests because they permit patriotism and the Diehard who blames priests because they represent Internationalism.”

It is said by some that the Catholic Church is extravagant, wasteful, too mystical. The very Church accused of having too worldly a polity is, on the other hand, denounced for having cathedrals that are too otherworldly. In the letter Chesterton writes to Frances during their engagement where he reckons up the estate he has to offer her, he includes as number six on the list a box of matches, and writes, “Every now and then I strike one of these, because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers. Some people think this a waste of matches: the same people who object to the building of Cathedrals.”

It is said by some that the Catholic Church suffers guilt by association with a medieval Church which is guilty of being exactly that: medieval. Very well, let it be as the Renaissance would have it, and let the Middle Ages be called the dark ages, brutal and in need of governance. Why, then, denounce the Church for trying to govern that society?

Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and all nations have been ashamed of them…The religious basis of government was not so much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary evils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern business man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: “It’s very horrible; but how else can society be conducted?” A mediaeval scholastic regarded the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a modern business man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death: “it is a shocking torture; but can you organize a painless world?” It is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without the question by hunger as we have done without the question by fire.
What’s Wrong With The World, p135

Did any interrogator involve himself in the Inquisition with the determined purpose of obfuscating the truth, and making the dark ages darker. Or were these admittedly misdirected methods employed in the hope of finding a way out of the dark? “The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defense of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.”⁴⁵

It is said by some that the Church opposes reason, and with it, science. But how does it happen that the very Church called an enemy of scholarship is also accused of suffering from scholasticism? Perhaps it is due to a general blur about those Middle Ages by a bleary mind which sees every previous century as backward because it is behind us. But by what anachronistic reading of history can the Church of any previous century be expected to know what the Church of the succeeding century knows? The proper question would be to examine how the Church judged science in comparison with others in its own century, not in comparison with persons in our own.

Serious historians are abandoning the absurd notion that the medieval Church persecuted all scientists as wizards. It is very nearly the opposite of the truth. The world sometimes persecuted them as wizards, and sometimes ran after them as wizards; the sort of pursuing that is the reverse of persecuting. The Church alone regarded them really and solely as scientists. Many an enquiring cleric was charged with mere magic in making his lenses and mirrors; he was charged by his rude and rustic neighbors; and would probably have been charged in exactly the same way if they had been Pagan neighbors or Puritan neighbors or Seventh’Day Adventist neighbors. But even then he stood a better chance when judged by the Papacy, than if he had been merely lynched by the laity. The Catholic Pontiff did not denounce Albertus Magnus as a magician. It was the half-heathen tribes of the north who admired him as a magician.
St. Thomas Aquinas, p55

When the critic impugns the medieval Church for not having lived up to its ideals, he thereby advocates the very ideals which the Church holds. “My point is that the world did not tire of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. . The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

It is said by some that Catholicism risks blasphemy for honoring Mary. This is accounted for by the general Protestant confusion of Mariology with Mariolatry, and it results in a ‘mad vigilance that watches for the first faint signs of the cult of Mary as for the spots of a plague; that apparently presumes her to be perpetually and secretly encroaching upon the prerogatives of Christ.” But the fantastic stories told in the Middle Ages of the Mother of God interceding for the sinner on judgment day do not mean there is any other way to heaven than by Christ. It is not as if Mary has an alternate set of keys than Peter (maybe only an additional set) and the power of the keys has only ever been Christ. Above the binding and loosing power entrusted to the Church on earth stands the Church of heaven, over which Mary is Queen in communion with the will of Christ. She is always in communion with the will of Christ, always inseparable from Christ. Mary does not change Christ’s will when she is spiritually filled by him, as once she was literally filled with him. The human Mother and the incarnate babe are inseparable ever since she said, “Let it be.”

When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry…But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in midair; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows as it followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.
The Everlasting Man p.303.

Finally, it is said by some that Catholicism is detachment from the world, and so Catholics are detached from real life. This position supposes that the most characteristic Catholic act, were one not too cowardly to do it, would be retreating from the world to a cloistered celibacy (monastic or clerical). Chesterton received quite a different impression from his en­counter with a certain celibate. In The Autobiography he relates the circum­stances under which he conceived the Father Brown mysteries, a set of detective stories revolving around a priest whose detective powers arc enhanced by a knowledge of human nature accrued over years of hearing confessions. Chesterton was already thinking of a possible storyline, though not yet with a clerical detective, when he shared the plot of vice and crime with Father John O’Connor during a walk. To his surprise, the priest pointed out some incredibilities in the plot line due to a naiveté on Chesterton’s part about the perverted practice. “In my own youth I had imagined for myself any amount of iniquity; and it was a curious experience to find that this quiet and pleasant celibate had plumbed those abysses far deeper than I. I had not imagined that the world could hold such horrors.”

When the two reached the house, Chesterton watched Father O’Connor chat with some of his other friends, a conversation of a completely different, lighter variety. When it had finished and the priest had left the room, Chesterton overheard one of his peers remark, ‘All the same, I don’t believe his sort of life is the right one. It’s all very well to like religious music and so on, when you’re all shut up in a sort of cloister and don’t know anything about the real evil in the world. But I don’t believe that’s the right idea. I believe in a fellow coming out into the world, and facing the evil that’s in it, and knowing something about the dangers and all that. It’s a very beautiful thing to be innocent and ignorant; but I think it’s a much finer thing not to be afraid of knowledge.” The coincidence of having just been taught something about wickedness by Father O’Connor and then hearing the opinion that the priest’s sheltered life made him naive about the ways of the world, in a pitiable sort of way, struck Chesterton as such an irony that he confesses to having nearly laughed out loud. “I was surprised at my own surprise. That the Catholic Church knew more about good than I did was easy to believe. That she knew more about evil than I did seemed in’ credible.”48 The charge that the priest’s knowledge of evil was unrealistic because Catholics are called upon to be innocent and ignorant could be met by the same reply Chesterton gives to his contemporaries who accuse the Victorians of being prudish. The Victorian was accused of trying to pre­serve innocence by averting his or her eyes from a realistic view of the world. This does not quite have it right. “What disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing that called names.

Chesterton refuses to say with the unrealistic optimist that there is nothing wrong with the world, but he also refuses to say with the unrealistic pessimist that the world is too evil to be enjoyed. The world can be enjoyed ideally, under the rules of conditional joy, and Catholicism preserves the conditions in order to protect the joys.

Have you ever dealt with those atheists who claim Christianity is indistinguishable from other “pagan myths?” Chesterton wrote the following about Christianity’s complex relationship to the mythological:

The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilizations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalize them, and even then only by trying to allegorize them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion.

The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers. Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness.

But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand extravagances, through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the moon or the world being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art, through all the stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world and displace the sky, it remained true to something about which there can be no argument; something that makes it possible for some artist of some school to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and say, ‘My dream has come true.’

Therefore do we all in fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems. Imagination has its own laws and triumphs; and a tremendous power began to clothe its images, whether images in the mind or in the mud, whether in the bamboo of the South Sea Islands or the marble of the mountains of Hellas.

The following are reading selections from an article Rene Girard wrote called “Are the Gospels Mythical?” Professor Girard is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University. His many books include Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.  An introduction to Professor Girard and his work is featured in the previous post.  Many of the concepts introduced there are discussed  in the following.

The Notion Of Christianity As A Myth
From the earliest days of Christianity, the Gospels’ resemblance to certain myths has been used as an argument against Christian faith. When pagan apologists for the official pantheism of the Roman empire denied that the death-and-resurrection myth of Jesus differed in any significant way from the myths of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, etc., they failed to stem the rising Christian tide. In the last two hundred years, however, as anthropologists have discovered all over the world foundational myths that similarly resemble Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection, the notion of Christianity as a myth seems at last to have taken hold — even among Christian believers.

Beginning with some violent cosmic or social crisis, and culminating in the suffering of a mysterious victim (often at the hands of a furious mob), all these myths conclude with the triumphal return of the sufferer, thereby revealed as a divinity. The kind of anthropological research undertaken before World War II — in which theorists struggled to account for resemblances among myths — is regarded as a hopeless “metaphysical” failure by most anthropologists nowadays. Its failure seems, however, not to have weakened anthropology’s skeptical scientific spirit, but only to have weakened further, in some mysterious way, the plausibility of the dogmatic claims of religion that the earlier theorists had hoped to supersede: if science itself cannot formulate universal truths of human nature, then religion — as manifestly inferior to science — must be even more devalued than we had supposed.

This is the contemporary intellectual situation Christian thinkers face as they read the Scriptures. The Cross is incomparable insofar as its victim is the Son of God, but in every other respect it is a human event. An analysis of that event — exploring the anthropological aspects of the Passion that we cannot neglect if we take the dogma of the Incarnation seriously — not only reveals the falsity of contemporary anthropology’s skepticism about human nature. It also utterly discredits the notion that Christianity is in any sense mythological. The world’s myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.

What the Lord Said
Jesus does, of course, compare his own story to certain others when he says that his death will be like the death of the prophets: “The blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah” (Luke 11:50-51). What, we must ask, does the word like really mean here? In the death most strikingly similar to the Passion — that of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, chapters 52–53 — a crowd unites against a single victim, just as similar crowds unite against Jeremiah, Job, the narrators of the penitential psalms, etc. In Genesis, Joseph is cast out by the envious crowd of his brothers. All these episodes of violence have the same all-against-one structure.

Since John the Baptist is a prophet, we may expect his violent death in the New Testament to be similar, and indeed John dies because Herod’s guests turn into a murderous crowd. Herod himself is as inclined to spare John’s life as Pilate is to spare Jesus’ — but leaders who do not stand up to violent crowds are bound to join them, and join them both Herod and Pilate do. Ancient people typically regarded ritual dancing as the most mimetic of all arts, solidifying the participants of a sacrifice against the soon to be immolated victim. The hostile polarization against John results from Salome’s dancing — a result foreseen and cleverly engineered by Herodias for exactly that purpose.

There is no equivalent of Salome’s dancing in Jesus’ Passion, but a mimetic or imitative dimension is obviously present. The crowd that gathers against Jesus is the same that had enthusiastically welcomed him into Jerusalem a few days earlier. The sudden reversal is typical of unstable crowds everywhere: rather than a deep-seated hatred for the victim, it suggests a wave of contagious violence.

Skandalon And Satan
Peter spectacularly illustrates this mimetic contagion. When surrounded by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility. He obeys the same mimetic force, ultimately, as Pilate and Herod. Even the thieves crucified with Jesus obey that force and feel compelled to join the crowd. And yet, I think, the Gospels do not seek to stigmatize Peter, or the thieves, or the crowd as a whole, or the Jews as a people, but to reveal the enormous power of mimetic contagion — a revelation valid for the entire chain of murders stretching from the Passion back to “the foundation of the world.” The Gospels have an immensely powerful reason for their constant reference to these murders, and it concerns two essential and yet strangely neglected words, skandalon and Satan.

The traditional English translation of stumbling block is far superior to timid recent translations, for the Greek skandalon designates an unavoidable obstacle that somehow becomes more attractive (as well as repulsive) each time we stumble against it. The first time Jesus predicts his violent death (Matthew 16:21-23), his resignation appalls Peter, who tries to instill some worldly ambition in his master: Instead of imitating Jesus, Peter wants Jesus to imitate him. If two friends imitate each other’s desire, they both desire the same object. And if they cannot share this object, they will compete for it, each becoming simultaneously a model and an obstacle to the other. The competing desires intensify as model and obstacle reinforce each other, and an escalation of mimetic rivalry follows; admiration gives way to indignation, jealousy, envy, hatred, and, at last, violence and vengeance.  Had Jesus imitated Peter’s ambition, the two thereby would have begun competing for the leadership of some politicized “Jesus movement.” Sensing the danger, Jesus vehemently interrupts Peter: “Get behind me, Satan, you are a skandalon to me.”

The more our models impede our desires, the more fascinating they become as models. Scandals can be sexual, no doubt, but they are not primarily a matter of sex any more than of worldly ambition. They must be defined in terms not of their objects but of their obstacle/model escalation — their mimetic rivalry that is the sinful dynamics of human conflict and its psychic misery. If the problem of mimetic rivalry escapes us, we may mistake Jesus’ prescriptions for some social utopia. The truth is rather that scandals are such a threat that nothing should be spared to avoid them.  At the first hint, we should abandon the disputed object to our rivals and accede even to their most outrageous demands; we should “turn the other cheek.”

If we choose Jesus as our model, we simultaneously choose his own model, God the Father. Having no appropriative desire, Jesus proclaims the possibility of freedom from scandal. But if we choose possessive models we find ourselves in endless scandals, for our real model is Satan. A seductive tempter who suggests to us the desires most likely to generate rivalries, Satan prevents us from reaching whatever he simultaneously incites us to desire. He turns into a diabolos (another word that designates the obstacle/model of mimetic rivalry). Satan is skandalon personified, as Jesus makes explicit in his rebuke of Peter.

Since most human beings do not follow Jesus, scandals must happen (Matthew 18:7), proliferating in ways that ought to endanger the collective survival of the human race — for once we understand the terrifying power of escalating mimetic desire, no society seems capable of standing against it. And yet, though many societies perish, new societies manage to be born, and quite a few established societies manage to find ways to survive or regenerate. Some counterforce must be at work, not powerful enough to terminate scandals once and for all, and yet sufficient to moderate their impact and keep them under some control.

The Mythological Scapegoat
This counterforce is, I believe, the mythological scapegoat — the sacrificial victim of myth. When scandals proliferate, human beings become so obsessed with their rivals that they lose sight of the objects for which they compete and begin to focus angrily on one another. As the borrowing of the model’s object shifts to the borrowing of the rival’s hatred, acquisitive mimesis turns into a mimesis of antagonists. More and more individuals polarize against fewer and fewer enemies until, in the end, only one is left. Because everyone believes in the guilt of the last victim, they all turn against him — and since that victim is now isolated and helpless, they can do so with no danger of retaliation. As a result, no enemy remains for anybody in the community. Scandals evaporate and peace returns — for a while.

Society’s preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process. Before it begins, Jesus warns his disciples (and especially Peter) that they will be “scandalized” by him (Mark 14:27). This use of skandalizein suggests that the mimetic force at work in the all-against-one violence is the same violence at work in mimetic rivalries between individuals. In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an example of cathartic victimization.  A fascinating detail in the gospel makes clear the cathartic effects of the mimetic murder — and allows us to distinguish them from the Crucifixion’s Christian effects.

At the end of his Passion account, Luke writes, “And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other” (23:12). This reconciliation outwardly resembles Christian communion — since it originates in Jesus’ death — and yet it has nothing to do with it. It is a cathartic effect rooted in the mimetic contagion.

Jesus’ persecutors do not realize that they influence one another mimetically. Their ignorance does not cancel their responsibility, but it does lessen it: “Father, forgive them,” Jesus cries, “for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). A parallel statement in Acts 3:17 shows that this must be interpreted literally. Peter ascribes to ignorance the behavior of the crowd and its leaders. His personal experience of the mimetic compulsion that possesses crowds prevents him from regarding himself immune to the violent contagion of victimization.

The Mimetic Conception Of The Gospels
The role of Satan, the personification of scandals, helps us to understand the mimetic conception of the Gospels. To the question How can Satan cast out Satan? (Mark 3:23), the answer is unanimous victimization.

On the one hand, Satan is the instigator of scandal, the force that disintegrates communities; on the other hand, he is the resolution of scandal in unanimous victimization. This trick of last resort enables the prince of this world to rescue his possessions in extremis, when they are too badly threatened by his own disorder. Being both a principle of disorder and a principle of order, Satan is truly divided against himself.

The famous portrayal of the mimetic murder of John the Baptist occurs — in both Mark and Matthew — as a curious flashback. By beginning with an account of Herod’s eager seizing hold of the rumor of John’s resurrection, and only then going back in time to narrate John’s death, Mark and Matthew reveal the origin of Herod’s compulsive belief in his own decisive participation in the murder. The evangelists give a fleeting but precious example of mythic genesis — of the ordering power of violence, of its ability to found culture. Herod’s belief is vestigial, to be sure, but the fact that two Gospels mention it confirms, I think, the evangelical authenticity of the doctrine that grounds mythology in mimetic victimization.

Violence In The Bible And Myths
Modern Christians are often made uncomfortable by this false resurrection that seems to resemble the true one, but Mark and Matthew obviously do not share their embarrassment. Far from downplaying the similarities, they attract our attention to them, much as Luke attracts our attention to the resemblance between Christian communion and the unholy reconciliation of Herod and Pilate as a result of Jesus’ death. The evangelists see something very simple and fundamental that we ourselves should see.  As soon as we become reconciled to the similarities between violence in the Bible and myths, we can understand how the Bible is not mythical — how the reaction to violence recorded in the Bible radically differs from the reaction recorded in myth.

Beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible proclaims the innocence of mythical victims and the guilt of their victimizers. Living after the widespread promulgation of the gospel, we find this natural and never pause to think that in classical myths the opposite is true: the persecutors always seem to have a valid cause to persecute their victims. The Dionysiac myths regard even the most horrible lynchings as legitimate. Pentheus in the Bacchae is legitimately slain by his mother and sisters, for his contempt of the god Dionysus is a fault serious enough to warrant his death. Oedipus, too, deserves his fate. According to the myth, he has truly killed his father and married his mother, and is thus truly responsible for the plague that ravages Thebes. To cast him out is not merely a permissible action, but a religious duty.

Even if they are not accused of any crime, mythical victims are still supposed to die for a good cause, and their innocence makes their deaths no less legitimate. In the Vedic myth of Purusha, for instance, no wrongdoing is mentioned — but the tearing apart of the victim is nonetheless a holy deed. The pieces of Purusha’s body are needed to create the three great castes, the mainstay of Indian society. In myth, violent death is always justified.

If the violence of myths is purely mimetic — if it is like the Passion, as Jesus says — all these justifications are false. And yet, since they systematically reverse the true distribution of innocence and guilt, such myths cannot be purely fictional. They are lies, certainly, but the specific kind of lie called for by mimetic contagion — the false accusation that spreads mimetically throughout a disturbed human community at the climax when scandals polarize against the single scapegoat whose death reunites the community. The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.

There is nothing secret about the justifications espoused by myths; the stereotypical accusations of mob violence are always available when the search for scapegoats is on. In the Gospels, however, the scapegoating machinery is fully visible because it encounters opposition and no longer operates efficiently. The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization.

This interpretation is reinforced by the optimistic endings of myths. The conjunction of the guilty victim and the reconciled community is too frequent to be fortuitous. The only possible explanation is the distorted representation of unanimous victimization. The violent process is not effective unless it fools all witnesses, and the proof that it does, in the case of myths, is the harmonious and cathartic conclusion, rooted in a perfectly unanimous murder.

The Two Reactions To Mimetic Contagion
We hear nowadays that, behind every text and every event, there are an infinite number of interpretations, all more or less equivalent. Mimetic victimization makes the absurdity of this view manifest. Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self- deception we call mythology.

The second way is the road to the truth followed by the Bible.

Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals.

This difference is not merely “moralistic” (as Nietzsche believed) or a matter of subjective choice; it is a question of truth. When the Bible and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do not merely “take pity” on them. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities.

When we examine myths in the light of the Gospels, even their most enigmatic features become intelligible. Consider, for example, the disabilities and abnormalities that seem always to plague mythical heroes. Oedipus limps, as do quite a few of his fellow heroes and divinities. Others have only one leg, or one arm, or one eye, or are blind, hunchbacked, etc. Others still are unusually tall or unusually short. Some have a disgusting skin disease, or a body odor so strong that it plagues their neighbors. In a crowd, even minor disabilities and singularities will arouse discomfort and, should trouble erupt, their possessors are likely to be selected as victims. The preponderance of cripples and freaks among mythical heroes must be a statistical consequence of the type of victimization that generates mythology. So too the preponderance of “strangers”: in all isolated groups, outsiders arouse a curiosity that may quickly turn to hostility during a panic. Mimetic violence is essentially disoriented; deprived of valid causes, it selects its victims according to minuscule signs and pseudo-causes that we may identify as preferential signs of victimization.

In the Bible, the false or insignificant causes of mythical violence are effectively dismissed in the simple and sweeping statement, They hated me without a cause (John 15:25), in which Jesus quotes and virtually summarizes Psalm 35 — one of the “scapegoat psalms” that literally turns the mob’s mythical justifications inside out. Instead of the mob speaking to justify violence with causes that it perceives as legitimate, the victim speaks to denounce the causes as nonexistent.

To explicate archaic myths, we need only follow the method Jesus recommends and substitute this without cause for the false mythical causes.

The Danger Of Reducing The Gospels To Ordinary Myth
In the Byzantine Empire, I understand, the Oedipus tragedy was read as an analogue of the Christian Passion. If true, those early anthropologists were approaching the right problem from the wrong end. Their reduction of the Gospels to an ordinary myth snuffed the evangelical light with mythology.

In order to succeed, one must illuminate the obscurity of myth with the intelligence of the Gospels.

If unanimous victimization reconciles and reorders societies in direct proportion to its concealment, then it must lose its effectiveness in direct proportion to its revelation. When the mythical lie is publicly denounced, the polarization of scandals is no longer unanimous and the social catharsis weakens and disappears. Instead of reconciling the community, the victimization must intensify divisions and dissensions.

These disruptive consequences should be felt in the Gospels and, indeed, they are. In the Gospel of John, for instance, everything Jesus does and says has a divisive effect. Far from downplaying this fact, the author repeatedly draws our attention to it. Similarly, in Matthew 10:34, Jesus says, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” If the only peace humanity has ever enjoyed depends on unconscious victimization, the consciousness that the Gospels bring into the world can only destroy it.

The image of Satan-“a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) — also expresses this opposition between the mythical obscuring and the evangelical revealing of victimization. The Crucifixion as a defeat for Satan, Jesus’ prediction that Satan “is coming to an end” (Mark 3:26), implies less an orderly world than one in which Satan is on the loose. Instead of concluding with the reassuring harmony of myths, the New Testament opens up apocalyptic perspectives, in the synoptic Gospels equally with the Book of Revelation. To reach “the peace that surpasseth all understanding,” humanity must give up its old, partial peace founded on victimization — and a great deal of turmoil can be expected. The apocalyptic dimension is not an alien element that should be purged from the New Testament in order to “improve” Christianity, it is an integral part of revelation.

Satan tries to silence Jesus through the very process that Jesus subverts. He has good reasons to believe that his old mimetic trick should still produce, with Jesus as victim, what it has always produced in the past: one more myth of the usual type, a closed system of mythical lies. He has good reasons to believe that the mimetic contagion against Jesus will prove irresistible once again and that the revelation will be squelched.

Satan’s expectations are disappointed. The Gospels do everything that the Bible had done before, rehabilitating a victimized prophet, a wrongly accused victim. But they also universalize this rehabilitation. They show that, since the foundation of the world, the victims of all Passion-like murders have been victims of the same mimetic contagion as Jesus. The Gospels make the revelation complete. They give to the biblical denunciation of idolatry a concrete demonstration of how false gods and their violent cultural systems are generated. This is the truth missing from mythology, the truth that subverts the violent system of this world. If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.

Christianity, however, is not reducible to a logical scheme. The revelation of unanimous victimization cannot involve an entire community — else there would be no one to reveal it. It can only be the achievement of a dissenting minority bold enough to challenge the official truth, and yet too small to prevent a near-unanimous episode of victimization from occurring. Such a minority, however, is extremely vulnerable and ought normally to be swallowed up in the mimetic contagion. Humanly speaking, the revelation is an impossibility.

In most biblical texts, the dissenting minority remains invisible, but in the Gospels it coincides with the group of the first Christians. The Gospels dramatize the human impossibility by insisting on the disciples’ inability to resist the crowd during the Passion (especially Peter, who denies Jesus three times in the High Priest’s courtyard). And yet, after the Crucifixion — which should have made matters worse than ever — this pathetic handful of weaklings suddenly succeeds in doing what they had been unable to do when Jesus was still there to help them: boldly proclaim the innocence of the victim in open defiance of the victimizers, become the fearless apostles and missionaries of the early Church.

The True Resurrection
The Resurrection is responsible for this change, of course, but even this most amazing miracle would not have sufficed to transform these men so completely if it had been an isolated wonder rather than the first manifestation of the redemptive power of the Cross. An anthropological analysis enables us to say that, just as the revelation of the Christian victim differs from mythical revelations because it is not rooted in the illusion of the guilty scapegoat, so the Christian Resurrection differs from mythical ones because its witnesses are the people who ultimately overcome the contagion of victimization (such as Peter and Paul), and not the people who surrender to it (such as Herod and Pilate). The Christian Resurrection is indispensable to the purely anthropological revelation of unanimous victimization and to the demythologizing of mythical resurrections.

Jesus’ death is a source of grace not because the Father is “avenged” by it, but because Jesus lived and died in the manner that, if adopted by all, would do away with scandals and the victimization that follows from scandals. Jesus lived as all men should live in order to be united with a God Whose true nature he reveals.

Obeying perfectly the anti-mimetic prescriptions he recommends, Jesus has not the slightest tendency toward mimetic rivalry and victimization. And he dies, paradoxically, because of this perfect innocence. He becomes a victim of the process from which he will liberate mankind. When one man alone follows the prescriptions of the kingdom of God it seems an intolerable provocation to all those who do not, and this man automatically designates himself as the victim of all men. This paradox fully reveals “the sin of the world,” the inability of man to free himself from his violent ways.

During Jesus’ life, the dissenting minority of those who resist the mimetic contagion is really limited to one man, Jesus himself — who is simultaneously the most arbitrary victim (because he deserves his violent death less than anyone else) and the least arbitrary victim (because his perfection is an unforgivable insult to the violent world). He is the scapegoat of choice, the lamb of God whom we all choose unconsciously even when not aware of choosing any victim.

When Jesus dies alone, abandoned by his apostles, the persecutors are unanimous once again. Were the Gospels trying to tell a myth, the truth Jesus had tried to reveal would then be buried once and for all and the stage would be set for the triumphal revelation of the mythological victim as the divine source of the reordering of society through the “good” scapegoating violence that puts an end to the bad mimetic violence that had threatened the society.

If such a death-and-resurrection myth is not what happens this time — if Satan in the end is foiled — the immediate cause is a sudden burst of courage in the disciples. But the strength for that did not come from themselves. It visibly flows from the innocent death of Jesus. Divine grace makes the disciples more like Jesus, who had announced before his death that they would be helped by the Holy Spirit of truth. This is one reason, I believe, the Gospel of John calls the Spirit of God the Paraclete, a Greek word that simply means the lawyer for the defense, the defender of the accused before a tribunal. The Paraclete is, among other things, the counterpart of the Accuser: the Spirit of Truth who gives the definitive refutation of the satanic lie. That is why Paul writes, in 1 Corinthians 2:7-8: “We impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God. . . . None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

The true Resurrection is based not on the mythical lie of the guilty victim who deserves to die, but on the rectification of that lie, which comes from the true God and which reopens channels of communication mankind itself had closed through self-imprisonment in its own violent cultures. Divine grace alone can explain why, after the Resurrection, the disciples could become a dissenting minority in an ocean of victimization — could understand then what they had misunderstood earlier: the innocence not of Jesus alone but of all victims of all Passion-like murders since the foundation of the world.

Dr. Peter Kreeft

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the Cross.” in the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away.

And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us.
JOHN STOTT

Calvary is judo. The enemy’s own power is used to defeat him. Satan’s craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents Judas, Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas, culminated in the death of God. And this very event, Satan’s conclusion, was God’s premise. Satan’s end was God’s means. God won Satan’s captives — us — back to himself by freely dying in our place.

It is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at. And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs. We needed a surgeon, he came and reached into our wounds with bloody hands. He didn’t give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us himself.

He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a lover. He did the most important thing and he gave the most important gift: himself. It is a lover’s gift. Out of our tears, our waiting, our dark­ness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” he came, all the way, right into that cry.

He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? Do people despise us not for our evil but for our good, or attempted good? He was “despised and rejected of men.” Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, “Oh, no, not again! I can’t take it any more!”? Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper. Is our love betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.”

Does it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by or cast us out, as if we are sinking into uselessness and oblivion? He sinks with us. He too is passed over by the world, His way of suffering love is rejected, his own followers often the most guilty of all; they have made his name a scandal, especially among his own chosen people. What Jew finds the road to him free from the broken weapons of bloody prejudice? We have made it nearly impossible for his own people to love him, to see him as he is, free from the smoke of battle and holocaust,

How does he look upon us now? With continual sorrow, but never with scorn. We add to his wounds. There are two thousand nails in his cross. We, his beloved and longed for and passionately desired, are constantly cold and correct and distant to him. And still he keeps brooding over the world like a hen over an egg, like a mother who has had all of her beloved children turn against her. “Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you.” He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn his face from us, however much we turn our face from him.

Does he descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, “No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still.” Does he descend into violence? Yes, by suffering it and leaving us the solution that to this day only a few brave souls have dared to try, the most notable in our memory not even a Christian hut a Hindu. Does he descend into insanity? Yes, into that darkness too. Even into the insanity of suicide? Can he be there too? Yes, he can. “Even the darkness is not dark to him.” He finds or makes light even there, in the darkness of the mind — though perhaps not until the next world, until death’s release.

Love is why he came. It’s all love. The buzzing flies around the cross, the stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into his screamingly soft flesh, the infinitely harder stroke of his own people’s hammering hatred, hammering at his heart — why? For love. God is love, as the sun is fire and light, and he can no more stop loving than the sun can stop shining.

Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our hearts, we can know — we must know that he is here with us, taking our blows. Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes them his. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or his tear-filled ones? He came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If he does not heal all out broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished.

And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love. When those we love hang up on us, he keeps the lines open.

God’s answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened two thousand years ago, but it is still happening in our own lives. The solution to our suffering is our suffering! All our suffering can become part of his work, the greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we love eternal joy.