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Jesus of Nazareth: The Book by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

May 16, 2012

The unknowing reader might at first think that Jesus of Nazareth is coauthored. At the top of the dust jacket is “Joseph Ratzinger.” Then, directly below it, in much larger type, “Pope Benedict XVI.” Perhaps it was, in the manner of many books, written by the pope “with the assistance” of Joseph Ratzinger. But of course that is not the case. The book, we are told, has undergone a “long gestation.”

Most of it was written by Joseph Ratzinger when he was Joseph Ratzinger, and he says that, since becoming Benedict XVI, “I have used every free moment to make progress on the book.” As it is, Jesus of Nazareth is Part I of a larger project. It is the story of Jesus from his baptism in the Jordan to Peter’s confession of faith and the Transfiguration. Part II, including the infancy narratives, may or may not come later [It has. DJ], “As I do not know how much more time or strength I am still to be given.”

We [First Things] are very pleased to have published the review of Jesus of Nazareth by Richard Hays, the distinguished professor of New Testament at Duke University. It is, I believe, the very model of what a book review should be. It tells what the book is about, respectfully engages its arguments, and sets forth in an accessible way both its strengths and weaknesses. I expect the pope was pleased with Mr. Hays’ sympathetically critical treatment of the book. But, of course, and as always, there is more to be said.

Initial reports that the pope was going to publish the book emphasized the novelty of the idea. One British paper excitedly reported that the pope was declaring that he is not infallible. And indeed he writes: “It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but it is solely an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of Jesus.’ Everyone is free, then, to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding.” It also goes without saying — although the pope has just said it — that this book has nothing to do with infallibility, which is a very precise and narrowly defined exercise of teaching authority that ensures that the Church will never require anyone to believe what is false.

Nor is it unprecedented for a pope to publish a book that claims no magisterial authority. One thinks, for instance, of John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope and Memory and Identity, the former, like the present book, being an international bestseller. Some popes are undeniably prolific. Leo XIII, pope from 1878 to 1903, issued eighty-five encyclicals, plus hundreds of pastoral letters, bulls, and other documents. But it is true that in the past two centuries popes tended to be seen as rather remote figures who spoke in public seldom and then in the mode of magisterial authority. That changed dramatically with John Paul II, and Benedict is obviously following in his steps, and indeed going further. He has, for example, engaged in extended Q & A sessions in public gatherings.

The complaint is heard that John Paul, and now Benedict, are expanding papal authority and hogging the public spotlight, making the pope the teacher of the Church. Who listens to their bishop when they can listen to the pope? The same voices once complained that the papacy needed to be “humanized” and “personalized” rather than presenting itself as an oracle issuing occasional pronunciamentos from on high. There is no pleasing some people.

A Living Relationship
As to why he published Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict says, “It struck me as the most urgent priority to present the figure and the message of Jesus in his public ministry, and so to help foster the growth of a living relationship with him.” The entire book is marked by this sense of urgency. It is not so much another book about Jesus as it is an invitation to follow him in the adventure of discipleship. Of course it is also about Jesus and is supported by the scholarship pertinent to historical facts and the development of the Church’s understanding of his person, message, and mission. Although, as Richard Hays respectfully noted, some of the scholarship is rather dated.

Of the writing of books about Jesus there is no end. I don’t know whether Benedict had in mind and seeks to counter fabrications such as The Da Vinci Code and its predecessors and imitators, but it seems more than likely. I see Garry Wills has a new book out, What Jesus Meant. It purports to explain what Jesus meant to say and no doubt would have said had he the advantage of being Garry Wills. While Wills and likeminded authors depict a Jesus in radical discontinuity with the Church’s teaching, Benedict — convincingly, if not surprisingly — makes the case that, from the beginning and on all the really big questions, the Church got it right.

Benedict is taken with Jacob Neusner’s little book, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. In many ways, Benedict acknowledges, Jesus disappointed some messianic expectations. “What did Jesus actually bring,” Benedict asks, “if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world?” “The answer is very simple: He brought God.” He continues:

 He brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance, gradually, first to Abraham, then to Moses and the Prophets, and then in the Wisdom Literature — the God who revealed his face only in Israel, even though he was also honored among the pagans in various shadowy guises. It is this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true God, whom he has brought to the nations of the earth. . . . Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origins and destiny: faith, hope, and love. It is only because of the hardness of hearts that we think this is too little.

He is the “Christ,” meaning the Messiah. Since the title “made little sense outside of Semitic culture,” it was “joined with the name of Jesus: Jesus Christ. What began as an interpretation ended up as a name, and therein lies a deeper message: He is completely one with his office; his task and his person are totally inseparable from each other.” “In the end,” writes Benedict, “man needs just one thing, in which everything else is included; but he must first delve beyond his superficial wishes and longings in order to recognize what it is that he truly needs and truly wants. He needs God. And so we now realize what ultimately lies behind all the Johannine images: Jesus gives us ‘life’ because he gives us God.”

It is frequently claimed, Benedict writes, that the teachings of Jesus, especially in the Beatitudes, represent “the Christian ethics that is supposedly superior to the commands of the Old Testament.” This, he says, is wrong, since “Jesus always presupposed the validity of the Ten Commandments” and explicitly said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

Running throughout Jesus of Nazareth is a powerful anti-Marcionite insistence upon the inseparability of the Old and New Testaments. The German biblical scholar H. Gese is favorably quoted: “Jesus himself has become the divine word of revelation. The gospels could not illustrate it any more clearly or powerfully: Jesus himself is the Torah.”

In his “talk” with Jesus, Rabbi Neusner poses the question: What of the law and the prophets did Jesus leave out? The answer is “Nothing.” So what then did he add? The answer is “Himself.” To which Benedict adds, “Perfection, the state of being holy as God is holy as demanded by the Torah, now consists in following Jesus.”

Agreeing with Neusner, Benedict underscores that the crucial decision is in response to the question, Who is Jesus? Echoing Lumen Gentium (Light to the Nations), the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the Church, Benedict writes: “Jesus has brought the God of Israel to the nations, so that all the nations now pray to him and recognize Israel’s Scriptures as his word, the word of the living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one great definitive promise to Israel and the world. This universality, this faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob . . . is what proves him to be the Messiah.”

As an aside, Benedict takes exception to the now common use of the Tetragrammaton (“I am who I am”), the name of God given to Moses. This, he says, is who God is without qualification. “The Israelites therefore were perfectly right in refusing to utter this self-designation of God, expressed in the word YHWH, so as to avoid degrading it to the level of the names of pagan deities. By the same token, recent Bible translations were wrong to write out this name . . . as if it were just any old name. By doing so, they have dragged the mystery of God, which cannot be captured in images or in names that lips can utter, down to the level of some familiar item within a common history of religions.”

Benedict returns to the Jewish-Christian connection in his treatment of the parable of the prodigal son, which he prefers to call the parable of the two sons. A conventional interpretation is that the elder brother represents the Jews. In the parable, the father says to the elder brother, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” In this way, writes Benedict, “the father not only does not dispute the older brother’s fidelity but explicitly confirms his sonship.” Thus “it would be a false interpretation to read this as a condemnation of the Jews,” writes Benedict.

At the same time, there are those, both Jews and non-Jews, for whom “more than anything else, God is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relationship with God and in that relationship they are at rights with him. But God is greater: They need to convert from the Law-God to the greater God, the God of love. . . . In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, encouraging us, too, to convert truly and to find joy in our faith.” This is a delicate treatment of a delicate subject. Christians who affirm the universality of the mission of Christ cannot help but hope that all people, including Jews, will accept him as the promised Messiah. At the same time, one is somewhat surprised to find in the foregoing passage traces of the idea that Judaism is a religion of law while Christianity is a religion of love. That is an idea that is apparently rejected elsewhere in the book.

Jesus of Nazareth is indisputably a scholarly work, although a scholarly work that is readily accessible to the general reader. Benedict at several points addresses the problems associated with contemporary biblical scholarship. A purely historical approach to individual texts cannot recognize the Bible as the Bible, the book of the Church. Such a method “can intuit something of the ‘deeper value’ the words contain. It can in some sense catch the sounds of a higher dimension through the human word, and so open up the method to self-transcendence.

But its specific object is the human word as human.” “We have to keep in mind the limits of all efforts to know the past: We can never go beyond the domain of the hypothesis, because we simply cannot bring the past into the present.” Therefore, we must go beyond the historical-critical method to recognize that these texts constitute the one Scripture that speaks with a living voice and is to be understood by “taking account of the living tradition of the whole Church and of the analogy of faith (the intrinsic correspondence with the faith).”

An “Anonymous Community”
While recognizing the limits of much biblical scholarship, Benedict regularly invokes its practitioners, either to agree or disagree with them. In one paragraph, for instance, we encounter Peter Stuhlmacher, Martin Hengel, E. Ruckstuhl, and P. Dschulnigg. (German is, after all, the pope’s first language.) Many scholars claim that the high Christology to be found in, for instance, John’s gospel is the construction of the early community trying to make sense of their experience of Jesus. Benedict is skeptical. “The anonymous community,” he writes, “is credited with an astonishing level of theological genius — who were the great figures responsible for inventing all this?

No, the greatness, the dramatic newness, comes directly from Jesus; within the faith and life of the community it is further developed, but is not created. In fact, the ‘community’ would not even have emerged and survived at all unless some extraordinary reality had preceded it.” On question after question, critical biblical scholarship turns out to offer little more than “a graveyard of mutually contradictory hypotheses.” But as I said, while he recognizes the severe limits of such scholarship, Benedict nonetheless employs its findings and suppositions in advancing his argument.

Benedict does not mention by name Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose work he has elsewhere praised very highly, but one suspects Balthasar’s presence, if only to disagree with him, in the treatment of Christ’s descent into hell. There is this, for example, on the baptism of Jesus: “Jesus’ baptism, then, is understood as a repetition of the whole of history, which recapitulates the past and anticipates the future. His entering into the sin of others is a descent into the ‘inferno.’ . . . He goes down in the role of one whose suffering-with-others is a transforming suffering that turns the underworld around, knocking down and flinging open the gates of the abyss.”

And there is this: “The Apostles’ Creed speaks of Jesus’ descent ‘into hell.’ This descent not only took place in and after his death but accompanies him along his entire journey. He must recapitulate the whole of history from its beginnings — from Adam on; he must go through, suffer through, the whole of it, in order to transform it.” And again: “Thus it is not only after his death, but already by his death and during his whole life, that Jesus ‘descends into hell,’ as it were, into the domain of our temptations and defeats, in order to take us by the hand and carry us upward.” While employing aspects of its rhetorical force, Benedict distances himself from Balthasar’s contention that, in his descent, Jesus experienced the hell of the damned.

A striking feature of the book is the author’s delight in tackling biblical passages that strike many as strange, if not contradictory. He notes, for instance, that the “Good Shepherd” text of John 10 does not begin with “I am the good shepherd” but with another image, that of the door. “He who does not enter the sheep-fold by the door but climbs in by another way is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.” Then Jesus says, “I am the door of the sheep.” How to understand this? Benedict answers: “This can only really mean that Jesus is establishing the criterion for those who will shepherd his flock after his ascension to the Father. The proof of a true shepherd is that he enters through Jesus as the door. For in this way it is ultimately Jesus who is the shepherd — the flock ‘belongs’ to him alone.”

Or consider Luke 9:18, where we read, “As he was praying alone, the disciples were with him.” That is, says Benedict, a “deliberate paradox.” “The disciples are drawn into his solitude, his communion with the Father that is reserved to him alone. They are privileged to see him as the one who . . . speaks face-to-face with the Father, person to person. They are privileged to see him in his utterly unique filial being — at the point from which all his words, his deeds, and his powers issue.”

In his treatment of these and other passages, Benedict follows the pattern of the early Church Fathers. Nothing in the biblical text is accidental or out of place; every passage, every word, has its purpose. While his book does not address in detail the question of scriptural inspiration, the presupposition of divine direction is evident in every page.

As I said, the review by Richard Hays in the last issue is, in my judgment, altogether admirable and quite the best that I have seen anywhere. The foregoing reflection is simply intended to lift up additional aspects of the book, in the hope that it will encourage others to read it with the care that it deserves. Jesus of Nazareth is not, as the author himself takes pains to underscore, the last word on the subject. But it is a greatly needed word in a time when mass audiences are titillated by fanciful fabrications about the discovery of “the real Jesus.” The last word on the Word will be spoken when there is a final answer to the last words of the Bible, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Posted in Book Recommendations, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

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J.R.R. Tolkien On Entering Faerie — Bradley J. Birzer

May 8, 2012

Edward Robert Hughes “Midsummer Eve” ca. 1908

To enter faerie — that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation — is to open oneself to the gradual discovery of beauty, truth, and excellence. One arrives in faerie only by invitation and, even then, only at one’s peril. The truths to be found within faerie are greater than those that can be obtained through mere human understanding; and one finds within faerie that even the greatest works of man are as nothing compared with the majesty of creation. To enter faerie is, paradoxically, both a humbling and exhilarating experience. This is what the Oxford don and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien firmly believed.

The last story Tolkien published prior to his death, “Smith of Wootton Major,” follows a normal but charitably inclined man who has been graced with the ability to make extraordinarily beautiful things while metal smithing. Smith, as he is known, discovered the gift of grace on his tenth birthday, when the dawn engulfed him and “passed on like a wave of music into the West, as the sun rose above the rim of the world.”2 Like the earth at the end of Eliot’s “Wasteland,”

Tolkien’s Smith had been baptized, and through this gift he receives an invitation to faerie. While visiting that world, he discovers that in it he is the least of beings. Its beauty, however, entices him, and he spends entire days “looking only at one tree or one flower.” The depth of each thing astounds him. “Wonders and mysteries,” many of them terrifying in their overwhelming beauty and truth, abound in faerie, Smith discovers, and he dwells on such wonders even when he is no longer in faerie. Nevertheless, some encounters terrify him:

He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The elven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eye. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph, and his heart was shaken with fear, and he fell upon his face, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills.’
J.R.R. Tolkien, Smith of Wooten major and Farmer Giles of Ham

And yet, despite the fact that he portrayed the man Smith in prostration before such grand visions, the rest of the story reveals that it was not Tolkien’s intention to denigrate Smith’s importance, but only to emphasize his place — and therefore the place of humanity in general — in the economy of creation. The English Roman Catholic G. K. Chesterton, who served as a significant source of inspiration to Tolkien when he was a young man, once wrote that “[h]e not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed.” Likewise, Tolkien shows in “Smith of Wootton Major” that it is an understanding of the transcendent that allows Smith to fully become a man. This was a teaching to which Tolkien ascribed his entire life.

For Tolkien, one of the best ways to understand the gift of grace was through faerie, which offered a glimpse of the way in which sacrament and liturgy infuse the natural law and the natural order. Faerie connects a person to his past and helps order his understanding of the moral universe. In an essay describing the greatness of the medieval poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Tolkien wrote:

Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it received part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with the greater fairy-stories — of which this is one. There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy-story (by which I mean a real deep-rooted tale, told as a tale, and not a thinly disguised moral allegory).’
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

Not only does faerie teach us higher truths; it also bonds us together in communities, of which there are two kinds: the one which is of this time and place, and the one which transcends all time and all places. As Chesterton wrote, “[B]eauty and terror are very real things,” but they are also “related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.”

Certainly myth, of which faerie is one kind, holds an estranged place in the modern world, as Tolkien well knew But, he believed, so much the worse for the modern world. Indeed, myth might just be the thing needed to save the modern world from itself, as Tolkien suggested in his famous poem, “Mythopoeia,” which echoes the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).’°

Myth, Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that was intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures, and is therefore a more powerful weapon for cultural renewal than is modern rationalist science and technology.” Myth can emphasize the beauty of God’s creation as well as the sacramental nature of life. “Our time, sick nigh unto death of utilitarianism and literalness, cries out for myth and parable,” American novelist and political philosopher Russell Kirk explained. “Great myths are not merely susceptible of rational interpretation: they are truth, transcendent truth.” Tolkien believed that myth can teach men and women how to be fully and truly men and women, not mere cogs in the vast machine of modern technological society.

In his inimitable way, Chesterton once wrote that

Imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does not know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

Besides offering an essential path to the highest truths, myth plays a vital role in any culture because it binds together members of communities. “It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad,” Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy. Communities “share symbols and myths that provide meaning in their existence as a people and link them to some transcendent order,” political theorist Donald Lutz explains. “The shared meaning and a shared link to some transcendent order allow them to act as a people.” The man “who has no sympathy with myths,” Chesterton concluded, “has no sympathy with men.”" One cannot, it seems, separate men from their myths.

Yet many of our contemporaries — a bizarre combination of those who have embraced secular modernity as well as those who abhor it, the Christian fundamentalists — have rejected the importance of myth. For the modernist, imbued with the doctrines of Jamesian and Deweyite pragmatism, myth is a lie. One cannot, after all, see, feel, smell, taste, or hear myth. Myth remains just beyond our material and physical senses, and we most certainly cannot scientifically verify it. Though myth is essential to man qua man, as Chesterton rightly contended, one of modernity’s chief characteristics is the watering down of richly felt and imagined reality, and the substitution of cheap counterfeits and thin shadows for the mythic vision.

“In this new sphere,” wrote theologian Romano Guardini in the mid-1920s, “things are no longer directly detected, seen, grasped, formed, or enjoyed; rather, they are mediated by signs and substitutes.”‘ To the modernist, “myth,” like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.

For religious fundamentalists, myths also represent lies. Myths, the argument runs, constitute dangerous rivals to Christian truth and may lead the unwary astray, even into the very grip of hell. Why study The Volsunga or Homer, for example, when the Christian Gospels tell us all we need for salvation? It is likely, the fundamentalist concludes, that all myth comes from the devil and is an attempt to distract us from the truth of Christ. The ancient gods and demigods of Greece, Rome, and northern Europe, after all, must have been nothing more than demons in disguise.

For Tolkien, however, even pagan myths attempted to express God’s greater truths. True myth has the power to revive us, to serve as an anamnesis, or way of bringing to conscious experience ancient experiences with transcendence. But, Tolkien admitted, myth could be dangerous, or “perilous,” as he usually stated it, if it remained pagan. Therefore, Tolkien thought, one must sanctify it, that is, make it Christian and put it in God’s service. Medieval believers had the same idea, and the story told of the early-medieval saint Boniface of Crediton exemplifies one such attempt.

The story (a non-factual myth, certainly!) of Boniface claims that while evangelizing the pagan Germanic tribes in north-central Europe, he encountered a tribe that worshiped a large oak tree. To demonstrate the power of Christ as the True God, Boniface cut down the tree, much to the dismay of the tribe. But rather than seeing Boniface struck down by their gods, the pagan tribe saw an evergreen instantaneously spring up on the same spot. So that Boniface could continue preaching to the astounded pagans, the story continues, his followers placed candles on the newly grown evergreen, which eventually became the first Christmas tree. This motif of “sanctifying the pagan” has been repeated throughout history by Christians in a multitude of ways, and was instrumental in contributing to the wildly successful spread of the faith.

Christmas and Easter, for example, were placed on high pagan holidays; St. Paul attempted to convert the Athenians with reference to their statue of the “Unknown God”; St. Augustine re-read the works of Plato and Cicero in a Christian light in his City of God; St. Aquinas uncovered the synchronies between Aristotelian and Christian thought; and on our own continent, we see that Catholic monks built a monastery on top of the highest mound-temple in Cahokia, Illinois, former site of the priest-king of a vast Native American empire. Indeed, churches throughout Europe and North America sit on formerly sacred pagan sites. In building churches in such places Christians sought, in essence, to baptize the corrupt ground, just as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas baptized pagan ideas.

It was Tolkien’s understanding that man’s role in the sanctification of the world is a cooperative and limited one. Given the constraints of his materiality, man ultimately only catches a glimpse of the highest things, and his attempts to emulate them in their truth, beauty, and excellence are but meager. When Smith of Wootton Major discovers to his embarrassment that a doll of a beautiful woman his village has revered is horribly shabby and trite when compared to its transcendent model, the Faery Lady, whom he has just met, she calms his fears: “Do not be grieved for me… Nor too much ashamed of your own folk. Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awakening.” As an artist, a scholar, and a mythmaker, Tolkien gave us a glimpse of the truth, beauty, and excellence that lies beyond and behind our tangible world. That glimpse, which leads to real joy, Tolkien labeled the euchatastrophe.

Throughout his entire mythology — The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, and the other works on Middle-earth — Tolkien stubbornly affirmed that the hope of the modern world lay in a return to some form of the Christiana Res Publica. “Someday Christendom may come/Westward/Evening sun recedent/Set my resting vow/Hold in open heart,” cries the poet Mark Hollis. What form such a transfigured world would take, of course, is unclear. After all, Tolkien believed, man’s job is not to plan the universe, but to use the gifts God has given him for the betterment of all.

“The awful Author of our being,” one of Tolkien’s favorite thinkers, Edmund Burke, wrote, “is the author of our place in the order of existence.” He, “having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has, in and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the part assigned to us.”

In his thinking about truth, reason, science, art, and myth, and in his hope for a renewal of Christendom and an end to the ideologically inspired terror of the twentieth century, Tolkien fits in nicely with a group of twentieth-century scholars and artists which we might collectively label as “The Christian humanists.” The Christian humanist asks two fundamental questions:

(1)  What is the role of the human person within God’s creation? And

(2)  How does man order himself within God’s creation? Christian, or theocentric, humanism, as opposed to anthropocentric, secular, Renaissance, or Enlightenment humanism, argues that one cannot understand man’s position in the world until one first acknowledges that man is created in the image of God and lives under the natural law as well as the divine law

The ranks of the Christian humanists include such poets and scholars as T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, and Romano Guardini. (You will find examples of their writings under our Categories) Tolkien should be counted as one of their foremost thinkers and spokesmen.

Posted in G. K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Understanding Mythopoeia | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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Faithfulness – Dietrich von Hildebrand

May 1, 2012

Who do you know like this, a “traitor to themselves”? I’ve marked this off with the Cardinal Virtues as fortitude and faithfulness seem to run together.

*****************************************

AMONG THE ATTITUDES OF MAN WHICH ARE BASIC FOR HIS WHOLE MORAL LIFE, faithfulness is ranked next to reverence. One can speak of faithfulness in a narrow sense and in a large one. We have the narrow sense in mind when we speak of fidelity toward men, such as fidelity to a friend, marital fidelity, fidelity to one’s country or to oneself.

This type of fidelity throws into relief the other type. I refer here to the continuity which first gives to a man’s life its inner consistency, its inner unity. The building up of one’s personality is only possible if one holds firmly to those truths and values which one has already discovered.

The course of a man’s life contains a continual rhythmical replacement of one impression, one act, one decision by another and different impression, act or decision. We are unable to ponder over one thought for a long time and to keep our attention on one point for very long. Just as in the biological realm, hunger and satiety, fatigue and renewed strength succeed one another, so a certain rhythmical change is proper to the course of our spiritual life. Just as the various impressions which affect us give place to one another, and the stream of events offers to our mind a great variety of objects, so our attention cannot long remain focused on any one object with the same intensity.

A movement from one subject to another is therefore proper to our thought, as well as to our feeling and will. Even in the case of a very blissful experience, such as the long-desired meeting with a beloved person, we are unable to dwell permanently in this joyous experience. The rhythm of our inner life forces us to leave the full presence of a great joy and to turn our attention in another direction and to register different experiences.

But — and this must be stressed — the same man has different levels of depth. The psychical life of man is not restricted to the level on which this continual change unfolds itself; it is not restricted to the level of our express attention, of our present consciousness. While we proceed to another impression and give our attention to another mental object, the preceding impression or object does not vanish, but will, according to its significance, be retained in a deeper level, and will continue to live at that level. Memory is an expression of this capacity of the soul for super-actual life, and this continuity is seen in our capacity to remember, to connect past and present.

Above all we see this continuity in the super-actual survival of our attitudes toward the world, toward fundamental truths and values, which remain unchanged even though our present attention is turned in a completely different direction. Thus, for example, joy caused by some happy event continues to “live” in the depth of our souls and colors everything which we do, colors all our tasks of the moment, and colors our approach to all those things with which we are expressly concerned. So also our love for a beloved person remains living in the depth of our souls, even though we are occupied by work, and it constitutes a sort of background against which different events run their course.

Without this capacity for continuity, man would have no inner unity; he would be but a bundle of interwoven impressions and experiences. If one impression merely took the place of the preceding one, if the past should indiscriminately vanish, the inner life of man would be senseless and shallow; any building up, any development would be impossible. Above all there would be no personality.

Even though this capacity of retaining impressions and attitudes in a super-actual way, without which the individual life of a spiritual person is impossible, is a capacity common to every man, yet the degree to which a given individual possesses this inner continuous coherence is very different in each case. We say of many men that they live in the moment only; the present instant has such power over them that the past, even though its content be deeper and more important, vanishes before the insistent clamor of the present.

Men differ very much from each other in this regard. Some of them live exclusively on the exterior level of their present consciousness, so that one experience follows another without any relation to the one preceding. We could call such men “butterflies.” Others, on the contrary, also live in the deeper level of their being. In them nothing important is sacrificed because it is no longer present, but it becomes the unalterable possession of the man, according to its degree of importance, and the new meaningful experiences organically unite themselves with it. The last type alone can be said to have “personality.” Only in them can an inner spiritual plenitude be constituted.

How many people there are who are never lastingly influenced by great works of art, or by delight in beautiful landscapes, or by contact with great personalities. The momentary impression may be strong but it strikes no deep root in them; it is not firmly held in their super-actual life but disappears as soon as another impression makes its appearance. These men are like a sieve through which everything runs. Though they can be good, kindly and honest, they cleave to a childish, unconscious position; they have no depth. They elude one’s grasp, they are incapable of having deep relationships with other people because they are capable of no permanent relationship with anything. These men do not know responsibility because they know no lasting bond, because with them one day does not reach into the next one. Even though their impressions are strong, they do not penetrate down to the deepest level in which we find those attitudes which are over and above the changes of the moment.

These people honestly promise something one moment, and in the next it has completely disappeared from their memory. They make resolutions under a strong impression, but the next impression blows them away. They are so impressionable, that they are always held at the superficial level of their present consciousness. For these people, weight and value are not the preponderant factors determining their interest in things, but only the liveliness of the impression created by the actual presence of these things. What makes an impression upon them is the general advantage of “liveliness” which present impressions or situations have over those of the past.

There are two types of inconstant men. In the one, nothing ever truly penetrates to their deeper center. This deeper center, so to speak, remains void in them; they know only the strata of present consciousness. These men are at the same time superficial, deprived of profound life, and of any sort of inner “firmness.” They are like quicksand which yields without any resistance. If you seek in such men a permanent center upon which you can depend and rely, then you really snatch at the void. Of course, in a healthy man this is not absolutely and completely the case; a man who, in a literal sense, would be completely of this character would be a psychopath. But we often meet people whose lives, at least to a certain extent, unfold themselves in such a manner, although we could not therefore call them psychotic.

In the second type, we have to deal with men who actually do have deep impressions, in whose deeper strata much really does take root. Their deeper consciousness is therefore not void; they have created in themselves a firm, lasting center. But they are so imprisoned in the present moment that that which lies in their deeper strata is unable to carry its true weight; it cannot hold its ground against the power of the momentary impression. Only when the present, lively impression fades away, can the content of the deeper strata again come to light. Such men could, for example, very well nourish a deep, lasting love for another person, but a momentary situation, if it happens to be powerful, vivid and appealing, would capture them to such an extent that the beloved one would be almost forgotten. Then they say and do things which contradict the genuine and living love hidden in the depths of their souls.

Such people are continually in danger of becoming traitors to themselves or to others. For such persons, the one present, merely because he is present, has always the advantage over the absent. This is the case even when the absent person is, on the whole, dearer to them, and in the long run, plays a more important role. Suppose they have, for example, received a deep impression from a work of art: a lasting relation to this work of art has constituted itself in the depths of their souls. Nevertheless, new powerful impressions take hold of them to such an extent, that the prior impression is not firmly held in the new situation, and as a result one sees no trace of the first impression as long as the new one lasts. Later, when the immersing effect of the new situation has worn off, the old one, in itself deeper, re-enters into possession of its rightful place and authority.

In contradistinction to these two types, the persevering man holds on to everything which has revealed itself to him as a true genuine value. The advantage of liveliness which the present possesses over the past, has no power over his life when compared to the inner weight of deep truths which he has once recognized, and of values which he has once grasped. The importance of the role played by a given thing in his present consciousness is exclusively determined by the height of its value, and in no way by its mere presence.

Such men are, consequently, protected from the tyranny of fashion. A thing never makes a deep impression upon them merely because it is modern, because it is momentarily “in the air,” but only because it has a value, because it is beautiful, good and true. As a matter of fact, these persons consider that which is more important and has a higher value as itself the more “up to date.” Objects endowed with values never grow old for them, even if their concrete existence ceased long ago. The lives of these men are meaningfully integrated, and in their course reflects the objective gradation of values.

While the inconstant man is a prey to accidental impressions and situations, the constant man dominates his own impressions. Such men alone understand the sublime pre-eminence of values over any mere dimension of time, the unchanging and unfading character of values and truth. They understand that an important truth is not less interesting and less worthy of concern because we have known it for a long time. They understand, above all, that the obligation to respond to a good possessing a value is not limited to the moment in which it is grasped.

Only the man who is constant really grasps the demands of the world of values; only he is capable of the response to value which is due to objective values. A proper response to values is lasting, independent of the charm of novelty, and of the attractive force represented by the mere presence of a thing. He alone for whom values never lose their efficacy and charm, once they have been revealed to him, and who never lets a truth which he has grasped drop into oblivion will really do justice to the proper character of the world of truth and values; for he alone is capable of remaining faithful to objects possessing value.

This constancy or fidelity in the true sense of the world is, as we see, a fundamental moral attitude of man. It is a necessary consequence of all true understanding of values, and it is a component element of every true response to values, and consequently of the whole moral life. Only the constant response to values, the response which clings to a thing possessing a value, whether that thing is actually present or not, is a developed, a morally mature and fully conscious response to value. Only a man who responds in this way is truly morally awakened; he alone is reliable, he alone feels himself to be responsible for that which he has done in other situations, he alone is capable of a true contrition for previous misdeeds. In him alone all true obligations will dominate every situation of his life.

He alone will stand firm in trials. For the light of values will shine for him even in the humdrum situations of workaday life; yes, even at the moments of temptation. It is so because this man lives from the depth, and masters every moment from the depth. The more faithful, the more constant a man is, the richer and more substantial will he be, the more capable of becoming a vessel of moral values, a being in whom purity, justice, humility, love and goodness will dwell lastingly and will radiate from him to the world about him.

Were we to examine the different levels of life, we would find over and over again the basic significance of faithfulness in this larger sense. The basic attitude of constancy is a general presupposition for all spiritual growth of the person, and above all for every moral development and every moral progress. How can a man grow spiritually who does not firmly adhere to all the values which have been revealed to him, and for whom these values do not become a lasting possession? How could one who is dominated by short-lived momentary impressions ever succeed in a gradual development of his own moral structure?

When we have to deal with the type of radical inconstancy, we see that nothing at all reaches down into such a person’s deeper strata. Such men are inwardly dead; their personality lacks a lasting center. In men of the second type, there is lacking the possibility of a real formation of the course of life, for the values they once grasped, and which should be a permanent possession of their souls, have disappeared from their lives. They cannot therefore mold new impression by such values. What is the use of the best education if this contancy is missing? What is the use of the most pressing exhortations, of the most vivid revelation of values, if values once grasped remain either without any permanent roots or if they slumber in our souls?

As surprising as it may sound, inconstant people never change themselves. They retain the faults and features which they have inherited from their nature, but they acquire no moral values. Even though they really do for a moment recognize their faults, and form the best resolutions, their inconstancy prevents any lasting moral improvement.

Even when their will is good, education will have no lasting effect upon them. Not because they close themselves up, like the man who is victim of a cramping pride and to whom therefore the influence of values cannot penetrate, but because they give too much weight to every fleeting impression, and they are thus unable to retain what they have acquired.

All self-education presupposes this attitude of constancy. The constant man alone will be able to assimilate contradictory impressions, so as to draw that which is good out of each. He will learn from every situation of life and will grow in every situation, for in him the measure of genuine values remains alive; while the inconstant man yields now to one, now to another impression, and becomes so entirely a prey of each that in the depth of his soul everything passes on more or less without leaving a trace. This gradually withers his comprehension of values, and his susceptibility to their influence.

The constant man alone will prefer what is more important to what is less so, what is more valuable to the less, while the unstable person will at best respond indiscriminately to all values, recognizing no hierarchy in them. Nothing is, in fact, more important for moral growth, for the very moral life of a person, than consideration for the objective hierarchy of values, and the capacity to give priority to that which is objectively higher.

The fundamental attitude of fidelity is also the presupposition for reliability in every moral trial. How can he keep a promise or stand the test in a battle of ideas, who lives only in the present moment, in whom the past, present and future do not form significant unity? How can one rely upon such an inconstant person? The faithful man alone can inspire that confidence which forms the basis of any community. He alone possesses the high moral value of stability, reliability and trustworthiness.

But constancy is also a condition for any confidence on the part of the person himself and above all for heroic faith. The unstable man is not only undeserving of confidence, but he himself will be incapable of a firm, unshakable confidence either in other men, in truth, or in God Himself. For such a man lacks the strength to nourish his soul upon a value once discovered. Therefore when night and obscurity surround him, or when other strong impressions assail him, he loses faith. It is no accident that in Latin the word fides means both fidelity and faith. For constancy is an essential constituent of all capacity to believe, and consequently of all religion.

The eminent importance of faithfulness will stand out in a special way against the background of human relationships. (Here faithfulness is taken in its narrow sense, i.e. fidelity.) For what is love without fidelity? In the ultimate analysis, it is nothing but a lie. For the deepest meaning of every love, the inner “word” uttered in love is the interior orientation toward and giving of oneself to the beloved, a giving which knows no time limit. No fluctuation in the course of life can shatter it. Only a deep change in the beloved person can affect our love if it be true love. A man who would say: “I love you now, but how long it will last, I cannot tell,” does not truly love; he does not even suspect the very nature of love.

Faithfulness is so essentially one with love, that everyone, at least as long as he loves, must consider his devotion an undying devotion. This holds good for every love, for parental and filial love, for friendship and for spousal love. The deeper a love, the more it is pervaded by fidelity. It is precisely in this faithfulness that we find the specific moral splendor, the chaste beauty of love. The especially touching element of love, as expressed so uniquely in Beethoven’s Fide-ho, is essentially tied up with fidelity. The unalterable fidelity of a mother’s love, the victorious faithfulness of a friend, possess a specific moral beauty which touches the man whose heart is opened to values. Faithfulness is at the heart of every true and deep love. It is immanent to its very nature.

On the other hand, what is more base or more repulsive than outspoken unfaithfulness, that radical opposition to fidelity, which is far worse than mere inconstancy. What a heinous moral stain marks the traitor who by infidelity pierces the very heart which has confidently opened itself to him, and offers itself unprotected to him. He who is unfaithful in his basic attitudes is a Judas to the world of values.

There are people to whom fidelity appears in the light of a mere bourgeois virtue, a mere correctness, a technical loyalty. In the opinion of such people the man who is great, highly gifted and freed from “petty conventions,” has no concern with it. This is a senseless misunderstanding of the true nature of fidelity. It is true that too strong an emphasis on one’s own fidelity may create a painful impression. It is true that it is possible to give a certain harmless, good-natured cheap imitation of fidelity. The fact remains that true faithfulness is an indispensable element of all moral greatness, of all depth and strength of personality.

Fidelity is opposed to mere bourgeois loyalty, or to a pure clinging to habit. It would be an error to believe that fidelity is the mere result of a lazy temperament, and inconstancy the result of a spontaneous and vivacious one. No, this virtue is a free, meaningful response to the world of truth and of values, to the unchangeable and intrinsic importance, to the real demands, of that world. Without this basic attitude of fidelity, no culture, no progress in knowledge, no community, above all no moral personality, no moral growth, no substantial, inwardly unified spiritual life, no true love, are possible. This basic significance of fidelity, in the larger sense, must penetrate to the heart of every relationship, if it is not to be judged as a failure.

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The Catholic Notion of God — Monsignor Ronald Knox

March 30, 2012

The Old King by Georges Roualt, 1937

If the arguments adduced in the foregoing posts are valid, they commit us not only to a belief in the Existence of God, but to certain views as to his Nature. I do not mean to discuss or even enumerate here, as a text-book of theology would, the various Attributes of God, for fear of unduly crowding the canvas. It is enough for our present purposes to insist that the God who is postulated by a consideration of his works in Nature must be a transcendent God, an omnipotent God, and a personal God.

The very nerve of our contention is that the material world which meets us in our experience does not provide the explanation of its own existence, or of the forces which control it, or of the laws which govern it; that the explanation, consequently, must be looked for in something that is outside and beyond itself. Our thought can only be satisfied by the existence of some necessary Being, to which all this contingent existence around us, the world of creation, is secondary, and upon which it depends.

Upon which, or rather, upon whom. We must always explain the lower in terms of the higher, not the higher in terms of the lower. And the highest form of existence of which we have any experience is Spirit. Man finds himself possessed of this apparently unique privilege, that he can become the object of his own thought. He can focus his attention, not merely upon things outside himself, but upon himself the thinker, upon himself thinking. Adam must have had many strange experiences when he woke in Paradise, but none stranger than that of meeting himself. The difference between this self-consciousness and mere consciousness is as real, as vital, as the difference between consciousness itself and mere life, or the difference between life and mere existence.

This spiritual principle, this self-conscious life within man, is not accounted for (still less explained) by his needs as a mere citizen of the natural creation. It is something altogether outside the scheme of ordinary organic life; it exists for its own sake, and must therefore be regarded as a higher order of existence. It is to this higher order of existence, naturally, that he refers that highest of all possible existences which he calls by the name of God.

It has been a favorite taunt of the unbeliever, from Xenophanes down to Rupert Brooke, that if horses had conceived of theology, they would have imagined God like themselves, if fishes had invented a theology, they would have imagined God like themselves. The criticism is one of those which miss the mark so completely as to provide their own refutation. For the fact is that man is superior to horses and fishes in one point, namely, his self-consciousness, his spiritual life; and it is precisely in virtue of that spiritual quality, and of that alone, that he has dared to conceive of God as like to himself.

He conceives of God not as a Big Man, but as a Great Spirit, lacking precisely those features of inferiority which link man, in his dual nature, to the brutes. Man’s soul, which in memory, in intellect, and in will stands outside of and superior to the accidents of his mortality, is the only mirror he finds in Nature of that pure Act, that tireless Energy which is God.

And if God be Spirit, then he is a personal God. For all our experience of spirit, all our evidence for its existence, rests upon the first-hand consciousness which each man has of himself, and second-hand indications which point to the existence of a similar consciousness in his neighbor. Each spirit, as it is given to us in our experience, is a lonely point of conscious existence. Matter, as we know it, may enter into various combinations and assume various forms; we do not meet with spirit, we only meet with spirits.

And the notion that God is, not a Spirit, but the totality of existing spirits and nothing more; the notion that he is Spirit and not a Spirit is pure mythology. It overlooks that individuality, that incommunicableness, which belongs to all spirits in our experience. It is not suggested, of course, that the Being who created us is subject to all the limitations which our minds may happen to associate with the word “personality”. But in thinking of God as a Spirit, we cannot rule out the idea of conscious individuality; for that idea is essential to our whole conception of a spiritual nature.

We must not conceal from ourselves the fact that in so defining the Nature of God as transcendent, omnipotent, and personal, we have parted company with a great number of the more religiously affected of mankind. We have said nothing, so far, which could not be echoed by a Jew or by a Mohammedan. But we have quarreled, already, with that pantheistic conception of the Divine Being which has had such a profound influence on other religions of the East.

The vice of pantheism is that its theology takes Life, not Spirit, as its point of departure. Dichotomizing the world (wrongly) into matter and life, the pantheist assumes that the animal organism is the mirror of the universe. As, in the animal, matter finds a principle of life to organize it, so the whole sum of matter in existence must have a Life to organize it; a Life which is the summing up of all the life (vegetable or animal) which exists.

This Life is God; God is to the world what the soul (in the widest sense) is to the body. Thus, on the one hand, the pantheist theology contrives to give an explanation of existence which is no explanation at all; for the totality of our experience plus a World-Soul does not, by reason of the addition, provide any account of how or why it came into existence. And on the other hand it encumbers our thought with the concept of a God who is no God; who is, indeed, but an abstraction, as animal life divorced from matter is an abstraction; who can neither affect our destinies, nor prescribe our conduct, nor claim our worship; impotent, unmoral, and only demanding by courtesy the typographical compliment of a capital G.

So sharply is the God whom we Catholics worship — we Catholics, with the Jews and the Mohammedans — divided from the notion of deity which has syncretized, spiritualized, or superseded the many-headed monsters of the pagan East. Is the God of modern Protestantism so clearly marked off horn his Oriental counterpart? I confess that I entertain acute and growing misgivings on this point.

The tendency of Protestantism is to find its evidence of God’s existence rather in some supposed Instinct or intuition than in any inference from premises grounded in experience. But such methods of proof, even granted their validity, would only warrant us in accepting the fact of his existence, without telling us anything about Iris Nature. Most men believe in God; yes, but then a very large percentage of them are pantheists of one shade or another; the common belief of mankind does not, then, proclaim the existence of a Deity who is transcendent. There is in man’s nature an itch for worship, an instinct for religion; yes, but what sort of religion? Why should not Buddhism (for example) satisfy the craving?

Mystics have had direct experience of God’s Presence; it behooves us, then, to trust their experience rather than our own earth-bound imaginations — yes, but which mystics? The Christian or the Buddhist mystics? Unless we are prepared to fall back on the doctrine of Descartes and Berkeley, who would make God immediately responsible for those ideas through which alone we come in contact with any outside reality, it seems to me that all “direct” proofs of God’s existence yield only a blank formula, which we have no intellectual apparatus for filling in.

What kind of God, then, does Protestantism mean to propose for our worship? Our Idealist philosophers, still mournfully chewing the cud of Hegelianism, have no assurance to offer, either that God is omnipotent, or in what sense he is personal. There remains only the moral argument to distinguish Protestantism in its more adventurous forms from the cruder forms of pantheism. Doubtless it will always be held, at least in the Western Hemisphere, that the Supreme Being, however conceived, must be the summing-up of all those aspirations towards goodness which our own moral experience teaches us to indulge.

But is such a God necessarily the Judge of living and dead? Is it permissible to pray to him, in the sense of asking for favors which he can grant? Has he the Attributes of the God whom Jesus of Nazareth preached, and claimed, apparently, to reveal? Surely it is time that Protestant theologians should consider seriously the very fundamentals of their thought; and this question not least, What do we know of God’s Nature; and on what basis of thought does that knowledge rest? For in this matter the ideas of their hall hearted supporters are lamentably incoherent; and such hesitation may easily lend a handle, before long, to the propaganda of Theosophy.

The doctrine of God’s Omnipotence carries with it a further admission which will be of considerable importance in, the permanent possibility of miracle. If the laws of the natural creation are not an expression of God’s Nature, as the pantheist would hold, but merely of his Will, it follows that he is at liberty, if he will, to suspend their action; or rather, to supersede their action by that of higher laws which have not been made known to us. It is only reasonable — would that it were as common as it is reasonable — to have a clear notion as to the possibility of miracles happening, before we come to estimate the evidence, debatable in itself as all historical evidence must be, which claims that miracles have actually occurred in history.

A century and a half ago, it would have been necessary to investigate carefully, in this connection, the philosophic system known as Deism. It was but natural that the triumphs of mechanical science in the eighteenth century should impose on men’s minds the idea of mechanism; it was but natural that the Christian apologetic of the period should reflect this idea in its turn. Deism asserts strongly the first two scholastic proofs of God’s existence, while neglecting the third. If we think of God merely as the First Cause and the Prime Mover, it is not necessary to think of him as influencing the course of the natural Creation here and now.

You may think of him, instead, at some moment in the infinitely remote past, fashioning a world, giving it laws, physical and biological, to guide its movements, and then turning it adrift, like a ship with its tiller lashed, to reach its inevitable and foreseen destiny. Paley’s metaphor of the watch once for all wound up is, of course, the classic illustration of this Deist conception. It represents God as having made the universe, but not as guiding it from moment to moment, still less as actually holding it in being. Such a system was considerably embarrassed to find room for the possibility of miracle. To intrude miracle upon a cosmos so governed would have been to put a spoke in the wheels of the machine, with consequences fatally disturbing to the scheme of the whole.

Deism, nowadays, is cited only as a vagary of the past; it has few, if any, living supporters. It is hardly necessary, then, to remind the reader that laws do not carry themselves out; they are principles which need an executive to enforce them; and to conceive the laws of Nature as acting on their own initiative, independently of God’s concurrence, is to personify those laws, if not actually to deify them. The Catholic notion of God’s relation to the universe is summed up once for all in our Lord’s statement that no sparrow can fall to the ground without our Heavenly Father; there can be no event, however insignificant, however apparently fortuitous, however cruel in its bearing on the individual, which does not demand, here and now, the concurrence of the Divine Power.

I do not mean that Catholic thought bases this belief on our Lord’s utterance; it belongs to natural, not to revealed theology. God alone exists necessarily; our existence is contingent, depends, that is to say, from moment to moment upon an exercise of his will; he has not left the reins, he has not lashed the tiller; he works not by means of the laws, but only according to the laws, which he has laid down for himself in determining the governance of his creatures.

It will easily be seen that, once this view of the Divine economy is grasped, there can be no further talk of ruling out miracles on the ground of impossibility. It is still open to the objector to say that it would be inconsistent with our idea of’ God’s dignity to imagine him as interfering with his own laws; or that it would be a criticism on those laws themselves to suppose they could ever need to be suspended in favor of an individual need. Such objections we shall have to meet later; for the present, it is enough to point out that miracles, so far as their possibility is concerned, do fit into the scheme of things. Indeed, to describe God as Almighty is to admit that miracles are possible.

The difficulty, it may even be said, for our human imaginations is to understand the fall of the sparrow rather than to understand the feeding of the Five Thousand. For in the fall of the sparrow, as in the feeding of the multitude, the Divine Power is at work; only in this case the concurrence of God as the Primary Cause with those secondary “causes”, which we are apt to imagine as complete in themselves, is a thing as baffling to the imagination as it is necessary to thought.

We have been considering only the first article of the Creed which Catholics and Protestants alike recognize, “I believe in God the Father Almighty.” It will be seen that the outline of the Catholic system is already beginning to take shape on the canvas; it begins already to stand out in relief, not only as against the pantheistic religions of the East, never attractive to our fellow-countrymen, but against much vagueness and indecision which is to be read or to be suspected in non-Catholic works of theology.

It is not that Protestantism, in its official formularies, finds or has ever found cause of disagreement with us in such fundamental matters as these. But I shall be very much surprised if the arguments which I have adduced, and the conclusions I have inferred from them here do not cause some of my clerical critics to hold up their hands already at the intransigence, the medievalism of the thought which is here represented. The Catholic notion of God ought not to be distinct from the Protestant notion of God, but I fear that in practice a shadow of difference is already discernible between them.

If this is so, it must be attributed, first, to the departmentalism, the absence of system, which reigns among non-Catholic theologians; partly to the spirit of unauthorized adventure which makes them start out gaily in pursuit of some novel thesis; partly to the extreme incuriosity with which the average worshipper regards all details of doctrine. I wish I could think that my estimate of the situation was exaggerated, and my forebodings of the future a scruple.

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The God Who Hides Himself II – Msgr. Ronald Knox

March 29, 2012

Crucified Christ. "Rouault was intimate with the writers who formed the nucleus of the Catholic revival, that remarkable literary, intellectual, and -- to a lesser degree -- artistic renewal among France’s lay intelligentsia in the early 20th century. He counted as friends Léon Bloy, J.K. Huysmans and Jacques and Raissa Maritain, both also passionate supporters of his work. He was close to Georges Desvallires, co-founder with Maurice Denis of the Atelier de la Art Sacre.
The Atelier was precursor to the Sacred Art Movement, a brief effort to reanimate sacred art which French Catholic intellectuals agreed was in a dismal state. Huysmans wrote brilliantly on the hemorrhage of bad taste at Lourdes. Maritain similarly rejected conventional religious art as devilish ugliness. Rouault shared their disdain, fearful of admitting sullen convention into his work.Rouault’s penitential vision and epic sweep suited the temper of the years immediately after World War II. MoMA gave him a retrospective in 1945 and the Tate did the same the following year, pairing him with Braque. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1948 and enjoyed a flood of exhibitions in the 1950s. France inducted him into the Legion of Honor and, in 1958, gave him a state funeral.
Today, his work is rarely seen. Yet there is every reason to keep his accomplishment alive. Rouault was a graphically gifted, fastidious craftsman sympathetic to a world in travail. His subjects were few: clowns, prostitutes, judges, self-satisfied pillars of society, the down-hearted, and the Passion of Christ. Setting aside religious dimensions, his cast is similar to that of Lautrec, the youthful Picasso, and Daumier.
A Passiontide sensibility infuses his oeuvre with a distinctive solemnity. Isaiah’s man of sorrows, the crucified Christ, serves as an archetype of the human condition. However devout Rouault’s Catholicism, it is a mistake to pigeon-hole him as a devotional painter. He used Biblical iconography -- as did Max Beckmann and other German Expressionists -- as a source of recognizable metaphors. Every generation faces its Calvary and crucifixions accompany history. The lamentations of Jeremiah still resonate."
Maureen Mullarkey

It is possible to give some account of how the idea of God comes into men’s minds. Or again, if each human being independently discovered the idea of God for himself, we might hesitate to ascribe the phenomenon to mere coincidence. But the doctrine of God’s existence is one that is taught to childhood, one that is often bound up, superstitiously, with national hopes, with social ordinances. Even if there were no God, it is probable enough that many people would believe in his existence; it would not be more surprising than the belief in luck, for example, or the belief in omens.

No, the true lesson of this widespread and obstinate Theism among our fellow-men is a slightly different one. The fact that so many men believe in a God ought to set us wondering whether there are not, perhaps, reasons for such a belief, to which we have not hitherto devoted sufficient attention; or perhaps reasons which we scorned to look into, because we had vaguely been given to understand that they were out of date and unfashionable. Mankind’s belief in God is a rebuke to, and a condemnation of, the careless atheist. For it is the height of rashness or of pride to assume without investigation that so large a part of the race is giving credit to an illusion, for the existence of which no rational grounds cm be assigned.

In a word, the existence of religion is a challenge to us to consider eagerly whether there are not grounds for believing in God’s existence, philosophical grounds which will be as cogent for us as they have been for others. When I say “philosophical”, I do not mean that it is the duty of the bushman or of the charcoal-burner to go through a series of carefully arranged scholastic syllogisms. I mean that there exists among mankind a sort of rough, common-sense metaphysic which demands as its first postulate the existence of a divine principle in things. It can be refined, it can be reduced to terms, by the nice ratiocinations of the philosopher; it is equally valid (we hold) whether as it presents itself to the charcoal-burner or as it presents itself to the sage.

The schoolmen, whose method has left its stamp upon all subsequent Catholic apologetics, distinguished five avenues of approach by which we infer, from the conditions of our outward experience, the existence of a God.

  1. In all motion, or rather, as we should say, in all change, you can separate two elements, active and passive, that which is changed and that which changes it. But, in our experience, the agent in such change is not self-determined, but determined in its turn by some higher agent. Can this process go on ad infinitum? No, for an infinite series of agents, none of them self-determined, would not give us the finality which thought demands; there must be, at the beginning of the series, however long, an Agent who is self-determined, who is the ultimate Agent in the whole cycle of changes that proceeds from him.
  2. Similarly, in our experience every event is determined by a cause. But that cause in its turn is itself an event determined by a cause. An infinite series of causes would give no explanation of how the causation ever began. There must therefore be an uncaused Cause, which is the ultimate Cause of the whole nexus of events which proceeds from it.
  3. In our experience, we find nothing which exists in its own right; everything depends for its existence on something else. This is plain in the case of the organized individual; for plants, animals, etc., are born, live, and die; that is to say, their existence is only contingent, not necessary — it depends on conditions outside itself. Now, although the whole sum of matter does not, in our experience, increase or diminish, we cannot think of it as existing necessarily — it is just there. Its existence, then, must depend on something outside itself — something which exists necessarily, of its own right. That Something we call God.
  4. In our experience, there are various degrees of natural perfection. But the existence of the good and the better implies the existence of a Best; for (according to Plato’s sys tern of thought) this Best is itself the cause and the explanation of all good. But this Best is not found in our earthly  experience, therefore it must lie beyond our earthly experience; and it is this Best which we call God.
  5. Everywhere in Nature we observe the effects of order and system. If blind chance ruled everything, this prevalence of order would be inexplicable; it would be a stupendous coincidence. Order can only be conceived as the expression of a Mind; and, though our mind appreciates the existence of order in the world, it is not our mind which has introduced it there. There must therefore exist outside our experience, a Mind of which this order is the expression; and that Mind we call God.

It is often objected that this analysis of the facts is unnecessarily itemized; it repeats the same argument under different forms. For the purposes of the plain man, it may perhaps be admitted that the first three of these arguments are not readily distinguishable. He apprehends God in his Creation, first as all-powerful and the source of all power (1, 2, and 3); then is all-good and the source of all goodness (4); then as all-wise and the source of all wisdom (5). For all the changes that have swept over Europe since the twelfth century, he has not been bullied out of his conviction.

It is true, the little books of popular science which he reads in his corner of the railway train, talk as if all this process of thought were antiquated; as if something had happened in the meantime which made Creation self-explanatory without the postulate of a Creator. Their cocksure implications affect him like briers that flick a man across the face without turning him aside from his direction. They tell him that matter is indestructible, not elucidating their meaning, which is that Man is incapable of destroying it; but even so he will not believe that matter has existed, for no particular reason, from all eternity; in that, stranger still, it brought itself into existence.

They write of Force with a capital F, or Energy with a capital E, as if we had somehow managed to deify those conceptions. But he knows that whereas motion is a fact that can be observed, force is a concept with which he is only acquainted through his experience as a living creature; it is a function of life, and the forces of Nature (as they are called), over which neither man nor beast exercises any control, must be functions of a Life which is outside experience itself.

They write as if Science had made the problem of existence simpler by explaining the causes of things hitherto unexplained — by showing us that disease is due to the action of microbes, or that lightning comes from the electricity in the atmosphere. But he knows that all this only puts the question a stage further back; that he is still at liberty to ask what caused the microbes, what caused the electricity. The thought of an infinite series, whether of causes or of agents, is no more attractive to him than to St. Thomas.

Of course, it is possible to avoid all these speculations with a bovine murmur of “I don’t know nothing about that.” But this is to give up the riddle, and to give it up, not because you cannot find the answer, but because you have found the answer, and have found it to be unpalatable. The lines of our experience, even in the natural world outside us, converge towards one point, presuppose a Creator who has necessary existence, a Prime Mover, a First Cause. But the created universe points to the existence not merely of an uncreated Power, but of an uncreated Mind.

This argument from the order and systems to be found in Creation is not synonymous with the argument from design; the argument from design, in the narrow sense, is a department or application of the main thesis. Design implies the adaptation of means to ends; and it used to be confidently urged that there was one end which the Creator clearly had in view, the preservation of species, and one plain proof of his purposive working, namely, the nice proportion between the instincts or endowments of the various animal species and the environment in which they had to live. The warm coats of the Arctic animals, the differences of strength, speed, and cunning which enable the hunter and the hunted to live together without the extermination of either — these would he instances in point; modern research has given us still more salient instances of the same principle, such as the protective mimicry which renders a butterfly or a nest of eggs indistinguishable from its surroundings. Was it not a Mind which had so proportioned means to ends?

The argument was a dangerous one, so stated. It took no account of the animal species which have in fact become extinct; it presupposed, also, the fixity of animal types. God’s mercy, doubtless, is over all his works, but we are in no position to apply teleological criticism to its exercise and to decide on what principle the wart-hog has survived while the dodo has become extinct. In this precise form, then, the argument from order has suffered badly.

But the argument from order, as the schoolmen conceived it, was and is a much wider and less questionable consideration. It is not merely in the adaptation of means to ends, but in the reign of law throughout the whole field of Nature, that we find evidence of a creative Intelligence. By a curious trick of human vanity, we describe a newly-discovered principle in Nature as So-and-so’s Law, Boyle’s, or Newton’s, or Tyndall’s, as if the discoverer were himself the legislator.

I am not grudging honor to the pioneers of research; I am only commenting on an oddity of phrase. Surely, when a thing is unexpectedly found, we congratulate the person who has found it, but our next question is inevitably, “Who put it there?” And, if there are laws in Nature to be discovered, it is but natural to ask the same question, “Who put them there?” If it needs a mind to discover them, did it not need a Mind to devise them? If the whole of our experience is not a phantasmagoria of unrelated facts, if water does not flow uphill, and gases do not double in volume when the pressure on them is doubled, who was it willed that the thing should be so? Not we assuredly; not Boyle, not Newton. Not blind Chance, for there is a limit to coincidence. Not “Nature”, for there is no such person; she is only an abstraction. What hypothesis is left to us except that of an ordering Mind? Instinctively we speak of a law when we find a natural principle; and have we no right to argue from a law to a Legislator?

I know that to superior persons all this will sound very naive. But it is easy to suspect simplicity in your opponent’s mind, when the simplicity really lies in the facts. There are thoughts so obvious that we are apt not to reflect upon them, so familiar that we are in danger of forgetting them.

So far we have been dealing with the evidences for God’s existence which are concerned with outward nature, not with the inner life of man. The argument from perfection adduced by the schoolmen is not the modern argument from moral perfection. The plain man would probably conceive the relations between God and man in the moral sphere with more of directness, more of concreteness. He would tell us that the voice of conscience was a voice not his own; whose then can it be, if it be not Divine?

Or he would tell us, in Kant’s vein, that the sense of moral duty is the sense of an obligation imposed upon us by a sovereignty outside ourselves — whose sovereignty, if not God’s? Or he would tell us that the sense of compunction which he feels when he has done wrong is not to be explained away as mere disappointment with himself; it carries with it the sense that he has defied a power above himself — whose power, if it be not God’s?

To each his own appeal; there is little need to dwell on this side of the argument; for probably everyone who has the least hankerings after Theism feels the force of it in one form or another. Otherwise I would ask space to argue that the scholastic form of it has a special value, as the truest both to the philosophic and to the devotional instinct.

I have made no attempt in this chapter to deal with the objections which will present themselves to minds influenced by the more intimate doubts of Idealism. I have been forced to assume, what the schoolmen assumed, and most ordinary people assume, that our thought is an instrument adequate to the cognition of objective reality.

Still less have I attempted to ,anticipate the rejoinders of the Pragmatist — who, it seems to me, above all men should wish to be a Catholic, and above all men will find it difficult to become one. I have merely indicated the course which Catholic apologetic takes in this fundamental matter, trusting that the inquirer, if his doubts begin so early in the process, will find access to more lucid and more copious expositions than mine.

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The God Who Hides Himself I – Monsignor Ronald Knox

March 28, 2012

Roualt, Head of Christ, c. 1937. Rouault was born in Paris into a poor family. His mother encouraged his love for the arts, and in 1885 the fourteen-year-old Rouault embarked on an apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer, which lasted until 1890. This early experience as a glass painter has been suggested as a likely source of the heavy black contouring and glowing colours, likened to leaded glass, which characterize Rouault's mature painting style. During his apprenticeship, he also attended evening classes at the School of Fine Arts, and in 1891, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the official art school of France. There he studied under Gustave Moreau and became his favorite student. Rouault's earliest works show a symbolism in the use of colour that probably reflects Moreau's influence, and when Moreau died in 1898, Rouault was nominated as the curator of the Moreau Museum in Paris. In 1907, Rouault commenced a series of paintings dedicated to courts, clowns and prostitutes. These paintings are interpreted as moral and social criticism. He became attracted to Spiritualism and the dramatic existentialism of the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who remained a close friend for the rest of his life. After that, he dedicated himself to religious subjects. Human nature was always the focus of his interest. Rouault said: "A tree against the sky possesses the same interest, the same character, the same expression as the figure of a human."

Philosophers have continually been exercised by the question whether our knowledge of God is a direct or a derived knowledge; whether the idea of God is in some way native to the mind, or whether we arrive at it through our knowledge of other things, his creatures. The mystical temperament, which has a strong influence on the outlook of Protestant theologians, is naturally disposed to claim, if the claim can in any be justified, that our knowledge of God is direct. For it is instinct of the mystic to reject, as far as possible, all interference, all mediation, between God and the soul.

The simplest, the most plausible of all these theories is Traditionalism. As a matter of observation, it is plainly true the origin from which your knowledge of God is derived, or mine, is the assurance given to us in infancy by our mothers or those who were responsible for our education. What if this should be not only the origin, but the justification of the concept? Adam, we must suppose, had in some an experimental knowledge of God’s existence. Did not he, in the strength of that knowledge, make Theists of his sons and they of theirs, and so on down the whole series of history, until at last the information came to our mothers, and through them to us? The evidence we have, in that case, for the existence of God is a tradition, perpetuated through the long course of human history, and resting in the last resort on the testimony of men who had walked with God, who had had first-hand knowledge of the facts.

Or, failing that, there is a possible refuge in Fideism [vocab: Fideism is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths (see natural theology). The word fideism comes from fides, the Latin word for faith, and literally means "faith-ism."].

After all, religion is concerned with the supernatural order, which altogether transcends ours; why should there not be a special, supernatural revelation to man which enables him to apprehend the existence of God; made, if you will, before he is yet old enough to be conscious of the fact? Is it not, perhaps, the best account we can give of this persistent human belief in a Deity, to suppose that there is a special faculty implanted in all of us at birth, but obscured in some of us by faults of training or of character, which apprehends God by a simple act, un-intellectual because it is supra-intellectual?

One philosopher at least, Descartes, would go further than this, and claim that for this purpose no supernatural revelation was needed. The thinking mind, according to his analysis, was primarily conscious of two clear and distinct ideas, itself and God. Outward things, the phenomena of sense, were only mirrored for it through the medium of its own consciousness; but the two facts of its own existence and God’s were guaranteed to it antecedently to any reasoning whatsoever.

At the very basis of all our thought lay the perception of a God who was responsible for implanting in us the ideas with which our thought is concerned; his non-existence was worse than unthinkable, it would destroy the very possibility of all knowledge. You must believe in God in order to believe in anything at all.

This was at the dawn of Idealism; but a theory not altogether dissimilar had found patronage even in the scholastic age — I mean the “Ontological proof” which is usually connected with the name of St. Anselm. The idea of God was necessarily one of supreme Perfection; it was impossible to associate the notion of any fault or defect with the idea of God. But the notion of non-existence is the notion of a fault or defect — indeed, a very considerable one. Therefore it is impossible to associate the notion of non-existence with the idea of God. Therefore it is unthinkable that God should not exist; therefore God exists.

This attempt to prove the existence of God, or to declare the proof of it unnecessary, without reference to the effects of his power which we experience in his visible creation, is a permanent temptation to the human mind. Intellects as far removed from one another as those of Anselm, Descartes, and de Bonald have undertaken it, and it is probable that they will never lack successors. Protestant thought, in our day, is much wedded not to these but to similar speculations.

Thus, you will seldom read any piece of non-Catholic apologetic without coming across some reference to man’s sense of his need for God, or man’s notion of holiness, a notion which can only be perfectly realized in God. The triplication of all such language is that it is possible to argue directly from the existence of concepts in our own mind in the existence of real objects, to which those concepts correspond.

The Catholic Church discountenances all such methods of approach to the subject; some of them, at the Vatican Council she has actually condemned. She discountenances them, at least, if and in so far as they claim to be the sole or the main argument for the existence of God. The main, if not the sole argument for the existence of God — so she holds, and has always held — is the argument which proves the Unseen from the Seen, the existence of the Creator from his visible effects in Creation.

All these efforts at the solution of the problem really depend for their plausibility on a postulate which we do not grant — namely, that it would have been impossible for the human race to infer God’s existence from his creatures. If this were true, then it might be argued that the notion of God must be an idea directly communicated to our minds. Such an argument is perfectly valid if applied to our sense of right and wrong; it must be native to the mind, because there is nothing outside ourselves which could possibly have suggested such a notion to us.

But this is a simple idea, directly entertained; whereas the idea of God is a composite idea, and the attributes which we associate with it, power, wisdom, etc., are derived from our own experience. “If there had been no God,” said Napoleon, “it would have been necessary to invent him” — at least, we may say it would have been possible to invent him. Thus the fact that the idea of God is conceived by our minds does not necessarily mean that it is inborn in us, or that it is directly communicated to us by some supernatural light.

The supposition is an unnecessary one, and now, what has it to say for itself? If it were true, as Descartes held, that the idea of God was a clear and distinct idea, like that of our own existence, why is it that there are so few fools in the world who doubt their own existence, so many who say “there is no God”?

If the existence of God was one of the first principles of all our mental process, then the contrary idea, that there is no God, should be unthinkable — but is it unthinkable? People think it every day. “But at least,” St. Anselm would retort, “it is impossible to think of an imperfect God, and therefore it is impossible to think of a non-existent God.” To which the atheist replies with some justice that, since God does not exist, it is not necessary to think about him at all. You cannot argue from the ideal to the real order of things.

The apologist is on safer ground if he leaves the arena of philosophy altogether, and maintains that the notion of God, so far from being innate in our minds, is something supernaturally implanted in them by a kind of direct revelation. That some such revelation was made to our first parents, we have no ground for disputing; but it would need a robust faith in us to accept so momentous a doctrine on the remote authority of our first parents, even if popular science would give us leave to suppose that we had any. Can we really be certain that in so many centuries of transmission the revelation has remained intact — that the tale has not lost in the telling?

On the other hand, Fideism would have us believe that such a direct revelation is made not once for all to the human race, but to each individual soul. Is it? The argument is surely one of those which admit of no refutation and produce no conviction. It is impossible to disprove the assertion that a direct revelation was made to us at a time of life from which no memories remain to us; but equally it is impossible to prove it. And if some other account can be given of the means by which the race or the individual arrives at the knowledge of God, surely this rather desperate hypothesis is best left in the limbo of mere conjecture.

I know there is a fashion amongst modern apologists to write as if man possessed a religious sense, comparable to his sense of music. This sense (so the argument runs) is most highly developed in the saint, the mystic, who is the real artist, the real connoisseur; in most men it is much less developed; in some it is hardly developed at all. Not that anyone (God forbid!) can be born absolutely tone-deaf to the airs of this heavenly music; but, through lack of development, the talent is nearly buried; there is no response, or practically no response, made by such a soul to the Divine voice within.

The spiritual man discerns spiritual things; he cannot explain to you what his experiences are, or even how he knows that they are real, any more than the musical expert can explain his emotional experiences to the mere groundling. But he knows; he has had an unmistakable experience of God’s Presence; it does not become us, the ignorant amateurs, to dispute his judgment. We can only trust to his higher instincts; and hope that we, too, perhaps, may be privileged to hear now and again some echo of the strains that ravish him.

For the life of me I could never understand how far such authors mean their metaphor to be pressed. Is it really contended that we can argue from a state of mind to an objective reality which lies behind it? If a musical enthusiast, after listening to some rare but gay piece, should tell me that as he listened he could actually see elves and gnomes dancing before his eyes, I should be perfectly prepared to reverence both his own superior sensitiveness to musical impressions, and the subtle power of the art which could evoke such an imaginative experience.

I should not suppose that elves or gnomes had been present, unseen to myself. And I confess that if I lacked the sense of religion quite so thoroughly as I lack that of music, the disclosures of the mystic would leave me in very much the same position. I might feel the mystic to be of a spiritual calibre infinitely superior to my own; I might bestow my admiration on those methods of contemplative prayer which enabled him to achieve his sense of a Divine Presence, his sense of Union. But I should not for that reason be inclined to believe in the objective existence of God, his Angels, or his Saints, if I did not share those beliefs already.

I do not know if I am wholly removed from the generality of mankind in holding such sentiments; but this type of’ argument seems to me both logically unsound and theologically perilous. And the nerve of the fallacy lies, I think, in the use of the word “experience”. When we are asked to let ourselves be guided by the experiences of another in matters of common human importance, we acquiesce (if we do acquiesce) because the experiences in question are such as might have fallen to our lot instead of his; we have eyes, ears, and the other senses corresponding to his. And we can take the measure of his faculties from our own; if he says he saw a thing, we can relate that to our own experience of sight; if he says he heard a thing, we can relate it to our own sense of hearing.

But if a man talks to us of “experiences” in which the faculties of outward sensation played no part, we are no longer in a position to sample those experiences for ourselves by proxy; we have no apparatus for sharing them with him. Where an experience of the outward senses is concerned, we are ready, from the analogy of our own experience, to believe that there was “something there”. But when the alleged experience has been apprehended through the use of spiritual faculties which we either do not possess or do not use, our confidence in the “something there” necessarily evaporates. Which is, I suppose, why the Church tells us that a private revelation may be such as to demand credence from the soul which experiences it, but can never, of itself, demand credence from other people.

Nevertheless the moderns, in their desire for an easy short cut to the proof of God’s existence, are learning to rest more and more weight on this tenuous argument — as I think, fatally. In the same way, they press for more than it is worth the argument, impressive enough in itself, that, when all is said and done, most people do believe in God. Buddhism, Hinduism, paganism have at least theologies of their own; Jewry and Islam acknowledge, no less than Christendom, one God who is both transcendent and omnipotent. In England itself, for all the decline of official Christianity,  how much is there of positive atheism?

Nor is the appeal to history less impressive; with a thousand strange vagaries of presentation, humanity has nearly always, nearly everywhere, attested its belief in the existence of unseen Powers; atheism nearly always, nearly everywhere, has been the reaction of a minority, a protest defying the popular instinct. Must there not, argues the apologist, be something in this popular certainty? Have we not been taught to remember that there is no smoke without fire?

We can hardly account for this vast conspiracy of mankind, determined to bow down before some august Power, conceived as intelligent and present to the worshipper; we can hardly account for the satisfaction of man’s highest instincts through such commerce with the Unseen, except on the supposition (which, after all, cannot be disproved) that the God so worshipped under a thousand forms and in a thousand manners does really exist.

This contention, put in its most naked form, means that each of us ought to believe in God because all the others do — an arrangement not differing much in principle from the economics of that famous country, whose inhabitants lived by taking in one another’s washing. Once more we must insist, you cannot argue from a mere state of mind to an objective reality which that state of mind appears to presuppose. If indeed there were no way of accounting for this strange idea having got into so many people’s heads, then the mere fact of its prevalence might make us suspect that there was something in it. [to be continued…]

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W. H. Auden on G. K. Chesterton’s Non-Fictional Prose

March 19, 2012

W. H. Auden

Auden casts a critical eye on Chesterton’s journalistic pieces and non-fiction essays: a tour of what’s good and what is not.

Oh, and happy 65th birthday to me. Old, sick and alone, I keep myself endlessly entertained — all thanks to being Catholic.

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I have always enjoyed Chesterton’s poetry and fiction, but I must admit that, until I started work on a selection for a publisher, it was many years since I had read any of his non-fictional prose.

The reasons for my neglect were, I think, two. Firstly, his reputation as an anti-Semite. Though he denied the charge and did, certainly, denounce Hitler’s persecution, he cannot, I fear, be completely exonerated.

“I said that a particular kind of Jew tended to be a tyrant and another particular kind of Jew tended to be a traitor. I say it again. Patent facts of this kind are permitted in the criticism of any other nation on the planet: it is not counted illiberal to say that a certain kind of Frenchman tends to be sensual…. I cannot see why the tyrants should not be called tyrants and the traitors traitors merely because they happen to be members of a race persecuted for other reasons and on other occasions.”

The disingenuousness of this argument is revealed by the quiet shift from the term nation. to the term race. It is always permissible to criticize a nation (including Israel), a religion (including Orthodox Judaism), or a culture, because these are the creations of human thought and will: a nation, a religion, a culture can always reform themselves, if they so choose. A man’s ethnic heritage, on the other hand, is not in his power to alter. If it were true, and there is no evidence whatsoever to suppose that it is, that certain moral defects or virtues are racially inherited, they could not become the subject for moral judgment by others.

That Chesterton should have spoken of the Jews as a race is particularly odd, since few writers of his generation denounced with greater contempt racial theories about Nordics, Anglo-Saxons, Celts, etc. I myself am inclined to put most of the blame on the influence of his brother and of Hilaire Belloc, and on the pernicious influence, both upon their generation and upon the succeeding generation of Eliot and Pound, exerted by the Action Francaise Movement. Be that as it may, it remains a regrettable blemish upon the writings of a man who was, according to the universal testimony of all who met him, an extraordinarily “decent” human being, astonishingly generous of mind and warm of heart.

My second reason for neglecting Chesterton was that I imagined him to be what he himself claimed, just a “Jolly Journalist,” a writer of weekly essays on “amusing” themes, such as What I found in my Pockets, On Lying in Bed, The Advantage Of Having One Leg, A Piece of Chalk, The Glory of Grey, Cheese and so forth.

In his generation, the Essay as a form of belles-lettres was still popular: in addition to Chesterton himself, there were a number of writers, Max Beerbohm, E. V. Lucas, Robert Lynd, for example, whose literary reputations rested largely upon their achievements in this genre. Today tastes have changed. We can appreciate a review or a critical essay devoted to a particular book or author, we can enjoy a discussion of a specific philosophical problem or political event, but we can no longer derive any pleasure from the kind of essay which is a fantasia upon whatever chance thoughts may come into the essayist’s head.

My objection to the prose fantasia is the same as my objection to “free” verse (to which Chesterton also objected), namely, that, while excellent examples of both exist, they are the exception not the rule. All too often the result of the absence of any rules and restrictions, of a meter to which the poet must conform, of a definite subject to which the essayist must stick, is a repetitious and self-indulgent “show-off” of the writer’s personality and stylistic mannerisms.

Chesterton’s insistence upon the treadmill of weekly journalism after it ceased to be financially necessary seems to have puzzled his friends as much as it puzzles me. Thus E. C. Bentley writes:

To live in this way was his deliberate choice. There can be no doubt of that, for it was a hard life, and a much easier one lay nearby to his hand. As a writer of books, as a poet, he had an assured position, and an inexhaustible fund of ideas: the friends who desired him to make the most of his position were many. But G. K. Chesterton preferred the existence of a regular contributor to the Press, bound by iron rules as to space and time. Getting his copy to the office before it was too late was often a struggle. Having to think of a dead-line at all was always an inconvenience

Whatever Chesterton’s reasons and motives for his choice, I am quite certain it was a mistake. “A journalist,” said Karl Kraus, “is stimulated by a dead-line: he writes worse if he has time.” If this is correct, then Chesterton was not, by nature, a journalist. His best thinking and best writing are to be found, not in his short weekly essays, but in his full-length books where he could take as much time and space as he pleased. (In fact, in my selection, I took very little from his volumes of collected essays.) Oddly enough, since he so detested them, Chesterton inherited from the aesthetes of the eighties and nineties the conviction that a writer should be continuously “bright” and epigrammatic. When he is really enthralled by a subject he is brilliant, without any doubt one of the finest aphorists in English literature, but, when his imagination is not fully held he can write an exasperating parody of himself, and this is most likely to happen when he has a dead-line to meet.

It is always difficult for a man as he grows older to “keep up” with the times, to understand what the younger generation is thinking and writing well enough to criticize it intelligently; for an overworked journalist like Chesterton it is quite impossible, since he simply does not have the time to read any new book carefully enough.

He was, for example, certainly intelligent enough and, judging by his criticisms of contemporary anthropology, equipped enough, to have written a serious critical study of Freud, had he taken the time and trouble to read him properly: his few flip remarks about dreams and psycho-analysis are proof that he did not.

Chesterton’s non-fictional prose has three concerns, literature, politics and religion.

Our day has seen the emergence of two kinds of literary critic, the documentor and the cryptologist. The former with meticulous accuracy collects and publishes every unearthable fact about an author’s life, from his love-letters to his dinner invitations and laundry bills, on the assumption that any fact, however trivial, about the man may throw light upon his writings. The latter approaches his work as if it were an anonymous and immensely difficult text, written in a private language which the ordinary reader cannot hope to understand until it is deciphered for him by experts.

Both such critics will no doubt dismiss Chesterton’s literary criticism as out-of-date, inaccurate and superficial, but if one were to ask any living novelist or poet which kind of critic he would personally prefer to write about his work. I have no doubt as to the answer. Every writer knows that certain events in his life, most of them in childhood, have been of decisive importance in forming his personal imaginative world, the kinds of things he likes to think about, the qualities in human beings he particularly admires or detests. He also knows that many things which are of great importance to him as a man, are irrelevant to his imagination. In the case of a love-poem, for example, no light is thrown upon either its content or its style by discovering the identity of the poet’s beloved.

This Chesterton understands. He thought, for example, that certain aspects of Dickens’ novels are better understood if we remember that, as a child, Dickens was expected to put on public performances to amuse his father, so he informs us of this fact. On the other hand, he thought that we shall not understand the novels any better if we learn all the details about the failure of Dickens’ marriage, so he omits them. In both cases, surely, he is right.

Again, while some writers are more “difficult” than others and cannot therefore hope to reach a very wide audience, no writer thinks he needs decoding in order to be understood. On the other hand, nearly every writer who has achieved some reputation complains of being misunderstood both by the critics and the public, because they come to his work with preconceived notions of what they are going to find in it. His admirers praise him and his detractors blame him for what, to him, seem imaginary reasons. The kind of critic an author hopes for is someone who will dispel these preconceived notions so that his readers may come to his writings with fresh eyes.

At this task of clearing the air, Chesterton was unusually efficient. It is popularly believed that a man who is in earnest about something speaks earnestly and that a man who keeps making jokes is not in earnest. The belief is not ill-founded since, more often than not, this is true. But there are exceptions and, as Chesterton pointed out, Bernard Shaw was one. The public misunderstood Shaw and thought him just a clown when, in fact, he was above all things a deadly serious preacher. In the case of Browning, Chesterton shows that many of his admirers had misunderstood him by reading into his obscurer passages intellectual profundities when in fact the poet was simply indulging his love of the grotesque.

Again, he shows us that Stevenson’s defect as a narrator was not, as it had become conventional to say, an over-ornate style but an over-ascetic one, a refusal to tell the reader anything about a character that was not absolutely essential. As a rule, it is journalism and literary gossip that is responsible for such misunderstandings; occasionally, though, it can be the author himself. Kipling would certainly have described himself as a patriotic Englishman who admired above all else the military virtues. In an extremely funny essay. Chesterton convincingly demonstrated that Kipling was really a cosmopolitan with no local roots, and he quotes in proof Kipling’s own words:

If England were what England seems,
How soon we’d chuck her, but She ain’t.

A patriot loves a country because, for better or worse, it is Is. Kipling is only prepared to love England so long as England a Great Power. As for Kipling’s militarism, Chesterton says:

Kipling’s subject is not that valour which properly belongs to war, but that interdependence and efficiency which belongs quite as much to engineers, or sailors, or mules, or railway engines…. The real poetry, the “true romance” which Mr. Kipling has taught is the romance of the division of labor and the discipline of all the trades. He sings the arts of peace much more accurately than the arts of war.

Chesterton’s literary criticism abounds in such observations which, once they have been made, seem so obviously true than one cannot understand why one had not seen them for oneself. It now seems obvious to us all that Shaw, the socialist, was in no sense a democrat but was a great republican; that there are two kinds of democrat, the man who, like Scott, sees the dignity of all men, and the man who, like Dickens, sees that all men are equally interesting and varied; that Milton was really an aesthete whose greatness “does not depend upon moral earnestness or upon anything connected with morality, but upon style alone, a style rather unusually separated from its substance”; that the Elizabethan Age, however brilliant, was not “spacious,” but in literature an age of conceits, in politics an age of conspiracies. But Chesterton was the first critic to see these things. As a literary critic, therefore, I rank him very high.

For various reasons I selected very little from his writings on historical and political subjects. Chesterton was not himself an historian, but he had both the gift and the position to make known to the general public the views of historians, like Belloc, who were challenging the Whig version of English History and the humanists’ version of cultural history. It must be difficult for anyone under forty to realize how taken for granted both of these were, even when I was a boy. Our school textbooks taught us that, once the papist-inclined and would-be tyrants, the Stuarts, had been got rid of, and the Protestant Succession assured, the road to Freedom, Democracy and Progress lay wide open; they also taught us that the civilization which had ended with the fall of the Roman Empire was re-born in the sixteenth century, between which dates lay twelve centuries of barbarism, superstition and fanaticism.

If today every informed person knows both accounts to be untrue, that the political result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was to hand over the government of the country to a small group of plutocrats, a state of affairs which certainly persisted until 1914, perhaps even until 1939, and that, whatever the Renaissance and the Reformation might signify, it was not a revolt of reason against fanaticism — on the contrary, it might be more fairly described as a revolt against the over-cultivation of logic by the late Middle Ages — Chesterton is not the least among those persons who are responsible for this change of view. The literary problem about any controversial writing is that, once it has won its battle, its interest to the average reader is apt to decline. Controversy always involves polemical exaggeration and it is this of which, once we have forgotten the exaggerations of the other side, we shall be most aware and critical.

Thus, Chesterton’s insistence, necessary at the time, upon all that was good in the twelfth century, his glossing over of all that was bad, seems today a romantic day-dream. Similarly, one is unconvinced by Belloc’s thesis in The Servile State, that if, when the monasteries were dissolved, the Crown had taken their revenues instead of allowing them to fall into the hands of a few of its subjects, the Crown would have used its power, not only to keep these few in order, but also for the benefit of the common people. The history of countries like France where the Crown remained stronger than the nobility gives no warrant for such optimism. Absolute monarchs who are anxious to win glory are much more likely 4 to waste the substance of their country in wars of conquest than plutocrats who are only interested in making money.

Chesterton’s negative criticisms of modern society, his distrust of bigness, big business, big shops, his alarm at the consequences of undirected and uncontrolled technological development, are oven more valid today than in his own. His positive political beliefs, that a good society would be a society of small property-owners, most of them living on the land, attractive as they sound, seem to me open to the same objection that he brings against the political ideas of the Americans and the French in the eighteenth century: “Theirs was a great ideal; but no modern state is small enough to achieve anything so great.” In the twentieth century, the England he wanted would pre-suppose the strictest control of the birth-rate, a policy which both his temperament and his religion forbade him to recommend.

On the subject of international politics, Chesterton was, to put it mildly, unreliable. He seems to have believed that, in political life, there is a direct relation between Faith and Morals: a Catholic State, holding the true faith, will behave better politically than a Protestant State. France, Austria, Poland were to be trusted: Prussia was not. It so happened that, in his early manhood, the greatest threat to world peace lay, as he believed, in Prussian militarism. After its defeat in 1918, he continued to cling to his old belief so that, when Hitler came to power in 1933, he misread this as a Prussian phenomenon.

In fact, aside from the economic conditions which enabled it to succeed, the National Socialist Movement was essentially the revenge of Catholic Bavaria and Austria for their previous subordination to Protestant Bismarckian Prussia. It was not an accident that Hitler was a lapsed Catholic. The nationalism of the German-speaking minority in the Hapsburg Empire had always been racist, and the hot-bed of anti-Semitism was Vienna not Berlin. Hitler himself hated the Prussian Junkers and was planning, if he won the war, to liquidate them all.

Chesterton was brought up a Unitarian, became an Anglican and finally, in 1922, was converted to Roman Catholicism. Today, reading such a book as Heretics, published in 1905, one is surprised that he was not converted earlier.

If his criticisms of Protestantism are not very interesting, this is not his fault. It was a period when Protestant theology (and, perhaps, Catholic too) was at a low ebb, Kierkegaard had not been re-discovered and Karl Barth had not yet been translated. Small fry like Dean Inge and the ineffable Bishop Barnes were too easy game for a mind of his caliber. Where he is at his best is in exposing the hidden dogmas of anthropologists, psychologists and their ilk who claim to be purely objective and “scientific.” Nobody has written more intelligently and sympathetically about mythology or polytheism.

Critical Judgment and Personal Taste are different kinds of evaluation which always overlap but seldom coincide exactly. On the whole and in the long run, Critical Judgment is a public, matter; we agree as to what we consider artistic virtues and artistic defects. Our personal tastes, however, differ. For each of us, them are writers whom we enjoy reading, despite their defects, and others who, for all their virtues, give us little pleasure. In order for us to find a writer “sympathetic,” there must be some kinship between his imaginative preferences and our own. As Chesterton wrote:

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about.

This is equally true of every reader’s mind. Our personal patterns, too, unlike our scale of critical values, which we need much time and experience to arrive at, are formed quite early in life, probably before the age of ten.

In “The Ethics of Elfland” Chesterton tells us how his own pattern was derived from fairy stories. If I can always enjoy reading him, even at his silliest, I sure the reason is that many elements in my own pattern are derived from the same source. (There is one gulf between us: Chesterton had no feeling for or understanding of music.) There are, I know, because I have met them, persons to whom Grimm and Andersen mean little or nothing: Chesterton will not be for them.

Posted in G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Auden | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

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The God of Jesus Christ III — by Jean Daniélou

March 16, 2012

The Holy Spirit 1750 by Corrado Giaquinto

In this concluding piece of his meditation on the God of Jesus Christ. Cardinal Jean Daniélou brings together the theology of the Holy Spirit that we find in the Old and New Testaments. A tour de force, a companion piece of which you can find here (The God of the Philosophers).

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It is first of all in the order of creation that the activity of the Spirit is revealed. It is the Creator Spiritus; and indeed it makes its first appearance in verse 2 of Genesis: “The spirit (ruah) of God was stirring above the waters.” The image is that of the eagle beating the air above its nest to make the eaglets fly. So the Spirit of God arouses creation from nothingness. This theme appears again and again in the Old Testament:

If he were to take back his spirit to himself,
withdraw to himself his breath,
All flesh would perish together,
and man would return to the dust
Job 34:14-15.

The liturgy takes this up, applying it justly to the cosmos renewed by grace, in the verse that the Psalms apply to the first creation:

When you send forth your spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.
Psalms 103(104):30

The action of the Spirit is later revealed in history. It is to be exercised in two ways: first it is the Spirit of Yahweh who seizes upon certain people to arouse them by superhuman power to the accomplishment of certain great works of God. This appears especially in the Book of Judges, which refers to the conquest of Canaan. “The Spirit of the Lord enveloped Gideon, and he blew the horn” (Judges, 6:34); thus he aroused the courage of the troops and led them to victory. It was the same Spirit that “came upon” Samson, giving him strength to rend a young lion with his bare hands, and to slay thirty men single-handedly (Judges, 14:6-19), to break, “as flax that is consumed by fire”, the new cords that bound his arms, and then, armed with the jawbone of a donkey, to slay a thousand Philistines (Judges 15:14-15).

Elsewhere the Spirit gives certain men knowledge of God’s plan. We say in the Creed, “He has spoken through the prophets.” The prophet is he to whom the Holy Spirit shows the secret of his ways. It is the Holy Spirit alone who fathoms the depths of God and shows us his mystery. In other words, the Holy Spirit leads history through his anointed and explains it through his prophets; but it is he who is here the primal cause.

We should have to quote all the prophets at this point. Thus David: “The Spirit of the Lord hath spoken by me: and his word by my tongue” (2 Sam [2 Kings] 23:2). Thus Ezekiel: “The spirit entered into me … and he set me upon my feet: and I heard him speaking to me” (Ezek 2:2). The Second Epistle of Peter recalls this doctrine: “Holy men of God spoke, inspired by the Holy Spirit” (1:21).

Pagan antiquity also had a doctrine of prophecy and divination, but among the Ancients divination was based on another phenomenon; it was connected with the idea of pneuma; but it is a question here of a material breath, emanating from the earth, which in trances enters into the diviner, puts him in relation with unknown cosmic forces, and enables him to perceive connections that escape ordinary consciousness.

Verbeke gives a useful account of this process: “The power to predict coming events is allied to universal sympathy, to the interdependence of cosmic events; all the happenings of the cosmos are elements in a great whole, among which there is continual interaction. However, all men are not able to discover these secret connections. Yet there are certain privileged men who can attain divinatory enthusiasm.” [La Doctrine du Pneuma, p. 529] We see here the difference between the two conceptions: for pagan thought, it is a matter of hidden energies in the cosmos that must be tapped; in the biblical perspective the action of ruah raises man above his nature, bringing him into the world of God.

This action of the Spirit, which directs sacred history, is to appear in all its fullness in the third stage of the magnalia of God, that of the Incarnation. It is the Holy Spirit that is the agent here. The archangel Gabriel says to Mary, “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee”;[ Luke Ch.35] and in Matthew: “Before they came together, she was found with child, of the Holy Spirit.” [Matthew 1:18] At the Baptism, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove, to inaugurate his public life and his prophetic ministry: “And Jesus being full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the desert.” [Luke 4:1] Jesus applies to himself the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord … hath anointed me”, [Luke 4:18] and “I cast out devils by the Spirit of God.” [Matthew 12:28]

Thus the Incarnation opened a new age in the history of the world, that in which the Holy Spirit was plenteously spread abroad through the manhood of Jesus. After the Ascension, the Spirit that was in him was communicated to the Church, which is his Body. This outpouring of the Spirit took place on the day of Pentecost: “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting…. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak with divers tongues.” [Acts 2:2, 4]

The result of this descent of the Spirit is twofold. On the one hand, it aroused the Apostles, those weak men who had been scattered on Good Friday, with a new, superhuman power. They went forth now to bear witness, to perform the great acts of God. There came upon them a divine power whereby they spoke with authority, and with an effect beyond that of human words; they performed miracles, they converted hearts.

But all these facts that continue the action of the Spirit in the Old Testament only translate this action in an outward manner; for the new event of Pentecost is the coming of the Spirit into souls, to communicate to them the new life, that of grace. As the Spirit at the beginning brooded upon the waters, arousing in them biological life, so now the Holy Spirit performs a new act of creation, that of the spiritual life in the strict sense of the word. This life is superior to the forces of nature and intellect, for it shares in the life of God himself. The chief text here is that of the Epistle to the Romans: “You have received the spirit of adoption of sons, whereby we cry: Abba” (Father). [Romans 8:15] Only the Holy Spirit can permit us to know in faith “the deep things of God”. [1 Corinthians 2:10]

In this new activity, which is that of the creation of the cosmos of grace, the Holy Spirit is revealed with greater clarity. First it appears as divine; it is the Holy Spirit, that is, its function is, strictly speaking, the divinization of the soul; it brings us into the sphere of God, and that is the whole purpose of Christianity. Already, from the beginning, it has appeared to us as performing works beyond the power of man. But here it appears as performing a work that is strictly holy and divinizing. Henceforth, the nature of ruah is revealed in this way. It is truly a divine force working in history to achieve the transfiguration of the world and the edification of the Body of Christ. The Spirit is the living, working soul of the Church, edifying the mystical Christ through the centuries.

But a further aspect, of hidden origin, now makes its appearance: this is the personal character of the Spirit. It is not only a question of an impersonal power, as the Old Testament might lead us to suppose. Christ presents the Spirit as a new intercessor and puts it on the same level as himself — and his own personality is beyond question. The Acts attribute to it personal activity; it bears witness, it teaches, it feels sorrow at unfaithfulness, it dwells in the soul; it is thus a personal presence, a presence more intimately concerned with man than the general presence of God in creation, and even connected with the nature of grace. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit, says St. Paul (1 Corinthians 3:16). Thus man is fully entitled to pray,

Veni Creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita.

We began by discussing the activity of the Holy Spirit in the life of the cosmos; then we saw how it operated in history, and finally in the world of grace. In this way it is revealed in all its reality, as God and as a Person. But elsewhere we have seen that the Word was also revealed to us as God and as a Person. Before them, the Father appeared to us as the original principle, he also being both God and a Person. Thus, little by little, the mystery has been unveiled before us of a God in whom there are Three Persons. This result is obtained by studying the evidence presented by the facts recorded in the Old and New Testaments.

But now comes the final question — that of the relationships between these Persons. For we see that, before they are revealed in nature and history, they exist eternally in God. Therefore there must be eternal relationships between them. These relationships are to be seen reflected in the mirror of the missions of the Trinity. It will be the task of theologians — and St. John is their leader — to begin with the biblical data that have an essential bearing on the activity of the Three Persons in time, and to try to contemplate and express their eternal relationships. Thus theology will rise toward primordial reality, shrouded in darkness and forbidden to human sight, but accessible to man’s understanding through its activity in the world.

The life of the Trinity is a perfect unity. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are but a single God. “I and the Father are one”, says Christ in St. John (10:30). This implies the joint possession of the same single divine nature: “All things whatsoever the Father hath, are mine” (John 16:1 5). For “the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things which himself doth” (John 5:20). He communicates to the Son the life that is his: “For as the Father hath life in himself, so he hath given to the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). And as he has the power of judgment, he “bath given him power to do judgment” (John:27). Thus Christ can say of the Father, “All my things are thine, and thine are mine” (John 17:10). This perfect unity is the pattern and source of all unity: “That they may be one, as we also are one” (John 17:22).

However, this union is not the communication by the Father of a life that he first possessed alone. As Pere Lebreton has written, St. John insists on the eternal character of this union and on the perfect mutuality that it implies. He expresses this through the doctrine of the immanence of the divine Persons in one another, which implies their eternal coexistence: “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” (John, 14:10). And Christ continues, “The words that I speak to you, I speak not of myself. But the Father who abideth in me, he doth the works. Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?” (John 14:10-11).

This mutual immanence of the Persons is the seal of their coeternity. It constitutes the insurmountable barrier between the doctrine of the Trinity and any philosophy of emanation. It makes the Trinity of Persons constitute the very being of God, and not a secondary feature in the unity of nature.

It follows from this that the Son was perfectly with the Father; he who knows him knows the Father in him in his perfect likeness, since there is nothing that distinguishes the Father except the being of the Son. This is the meaning of Christ’s reply to Philip, who asked Him, “Lord, shew us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Christ replies, “Have I been so long a time with you; and have you not known me? Philip, he that seeth me seeth the Father also” (John 14:8-9). Accordingly, he that honors the Father honors the Son also (John 5:23). Conversely, the Jews reject Christ “because they have not known the Father, nor me” (John 16:3). “He who honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father” (John 5:23); and “what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner” (John 5:19).

But this unique Godhead, the object of a unique worship, is possessed by each Person according to his distinguishing property. This node of possession is what formally constitutes him as a Person, since this alone is proper to him. The Son is he who is begotten by the Father. Throughout St. John’s Gospel, this generation is expressed by the dependence of the Son in relation to the Father, which implies no inferiority, but only a certain order: “Amen, amen, I say unto you, the Son cannot do anything of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner” (John 5:19).

As Pere Lebreton again points out, it is not a question here of the human actions of Christ, but of his eternal, divine activity. [Origines du dogme de la Trinite, 1, 523] Similarly this eternal preexistence of the Word “in the beginning with God” was stated in the Prologue. St. John returns to this theme in his Gospel, when he reports Christ as speaking of “the glory which I had, before the world was, with thee” (John 17:5).

Just as the Son is the One God with the Father, so is he with the Spirit. As the Son perfectly knows the Father, “For the Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep things of God…. So the things also that are of God no man knoweth, but the Spirit of God.” (1 Corinthians 2: 10-11). But its own character is that it possesses this fullness of the divine Being by receiving it both from the Father and the Son. On the one hand, St. John tells us that the Spirit “proceedeth from the Father” (John 15:26) and is “the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name” (John 14:26). But elsewhere St. John shows us the Spirit as a river of living water whose source is in the Son: “He that believeth in me, as the scripture saith, Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38).

Similarly, in most cases, the Spirit is presented as proceeding both from the Father and the Son. This appears in a series of texts that are seldom brought together, describing the mysterious counsels of the Three Persons during the ten days that separate the Ascension of Christ from the outpouring of the Spirit — texts that are full of a silence like that which preceded the creation of the world.

But these passages enable us to glimpse something of that “hidden mystery accomplished in the silence of God”. The only begotten Son, raised to the right hand of the Father in his glorified humanity, prays to the Father that “he shall give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you forever” (John 14:16). The equivalence of these two Comforters already signifies that they belong to the same nature. Elsewhere, we have already seen that the Spirit can only be given by the Father, from whom it proceeds, but not without the mediation of the Son.

Thus the Spirit is sent by the Father, but in the Name of the Son — and this is a new term, referring to its twofold procession: “But the Paraclete … the Father will send in my name” (John 14:26). We may note here that the Father is always present as the origin, but the Son is always associated with him, in a procession resembling the mission of the Spirit, and this makes it clear that the Spirit proceeds from both these Persons, but according to the proper nature of each of them.

Another text, not this time from St. John, describes the Pentecost itself as the sending of the Spirit by the Son, in dependence on the Father: “Being exalted therefore by the right hand of God, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he hath poured forth this which you see and hear” (Acts 2:3 3).

But the words of Christ in St. John’s Gospel already announced this outpouring of the Spirit in its twofold relationship with the Father and the Son: “When the Paraclete cometh, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceedeth from the Father, he shall give testimony of me” (15:26). We return again and again to this twofold dependence and this order in dependence, whose primary origin is always hidden in the Father, though it is nevertheless the Son who is immediately responsible for sending the Spirit. This order of mission is a reflection of that of possession.

So it is with justice that, in the vision that we have been quoting and which dominates the Johannine writings, the Spirit is presented in the eternal outpouring of its existence and not merely in its Pentecostal descent, which is the created reflection of the “a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1).

Posted in Fr. Jean Daniélou, The Trinitarian God | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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The God of Jesus Christ II — by Jean Daniélou

March 15, 2012

Allegory of Wisdom and Strength 1580 by Paolo Veronese

These are the properties of the Persons, of which we must now speak. We shall do this by turning first to the testimony of Scripture, in which each of the Persons is revealed through the pattern of salvation. Only later shall we be able, by reflecting on the facts as given there, to understand something of the eternal relationships between the Persons. I shall chiefly emphasize the Word and the Spirit, the understanding of which is vital to the New Testament.

The first revelation is that of the Father. He is the principle, the origin, the archè of the Trinity. Thus in creation, which is the joint work of the Three, like all their works ad extra, the Father reveals himself in a special manner. It is he who proffers the creative Word: “God said, Let there be light.” And it is he who is well pleased when he surveys the accomplished work: “God saw that it was good.”

Here Gregory of Nazianzen is right in saying that the Old Testament is a revelation of the Father, although, strictly speaking, it is the revelation of the One God, and everything in it is the joint work of the Three Persons. But insofar as it is a question of origination, of the origin of creation, the origin of election, the origin of mission, the Old Testament refers especially to him.

It shows him to us also as the Father. This fatherhood with regard to creation seems to be a reflection, in the order of mission, of the eternal relationships. Thus when Christ speaks of “your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust,” [Matthew 5:45] he is not speaking of the Father in the eternal relationship that he has with his only begotten Son, but in the paternal Providence that is the continuation of creation.

Similarly, when Hosea says of God, “Because Israel was a child, and I loved him: and I called my son out of Egypt” (Hosea11: 1), he refers, as we have seen, to the relationship created by election and the covenant between Yahweh and Israel, which is a visible theophany of his Fatherhood in relation to his own begotten Son.

Thus the Person of the Father appears in the Old Testament in the reflection of his creative, providential action. But it will be fully revealed only in the New Testament, for it cannot openly appear except in relation to the Son, whom only the New Testament reveals in his personal reality. But even so, it is not at first revealed directly, but in relation to the Son in his Incarnation. So again it is through the redemptive pattern that the Fatherhood is revealed.

It is through the works he accomplishes that Christ appears in relation to his Father, when he is singled out for approval at the Baptism, when he beseeches him to let the cup pass at the Passion, when he commends his Spirit into the Father’s hands. The Trinity appears here in the mirror of the divine economy.

This becomes still clearer in the Second Person. The Old Testament reveals him darkly as the Word of the Father. The phrase here must again be carefully interpreted. The Hebrew dabar, which the Greek translates as logos and the Latin as verbum, has a well-defined content. For the Greeks, the logos is chiefly the word as intelligibly enunciated; this is how the expression comes to mean the inward law of things, their reason. But the Hebrew dabar has quite another meaning, as Gerhard Kittel has noted. [Theological Works, N.T., IV, 89 ff] The word appears here as performing what it enunciates, as the speech of blessing or cursing. It is an act, not merely a meaning. 

Applied to the divine sphere, the Word of God is revealed, above all, as a force. It is, first of all, a creative force. “By the words of the Lord are his works”, says the son of Sirach. [Sirach 42:15] St. John, too, proclaiming the identity of the creative Word with that of the Incarnate Word, says: “All things were made by him.” The efficacy of the Word of God is clearly shown in Isaiah:

And as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And return no more thither,
But soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring,
And give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater:
So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth .. .
But it shall do whatsoever I please.
Isaiah 55:10-11

It is this creative Word, by whom all was made, and by whom every moment of time is provided, that St. John, by a foreshortening that throws into relief the staggering paradox of Christianity, shows to be none other than Jesus of Nazareth: “And the Word was made flesh.” For it is in fact the same Word on whose pattern the Father made man in the beginning, who, according to St. Irenaeus, came to touch again this plasma that was his (though it had strayed far from him), and to restore it in himself in a conclusive manner.

But the work of the Word is not only that of creation. He is also the Word who judges, the sharp sword that divides, that saves and condemns. Thus the Book of Wisdom shows him to us:

For while all things were in quiet silence,
And the night was in the midst of her course.
Thy almighty word leapt down from heaven …
With a sharp sword carrying thy unfeigned commandment.”
Wisdom 18:14-16

The Roman liturgy applies this text to the Incarnation of the Word in the introit to the Mass for Sunday in the Octave of Christmas; and Tauler comments on the eternal generation of the Word in the soul of the saints. St. John likewise applies this theme to the Incarnate Word: “And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called faithful and true, and with justice doth he judge and fight … And he was clothed with a garment sprinkled with blood; and his name is called, The Word of God…. And out of his mouth proceedeth a sharp two edged sword.” [Revelations 19:11-15]; The Epistle to the Hebrews cries in its turn, “For the Word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword; and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit.” [Hebrews 4:12]

Finally, the Word of God is a revealing Word. It is to this that the Book of Samuel (1Kings) refers when it tells us that the child Samuel did not recognize him, because “the word of the Lord was precious in those days, there was no manifest Vision.” [1 Kings 3:1] It is this Word that is delivered to the prophets, and is the principle, as we have said, by which the revelation comes to them. But this revelation that is made to men is only a created reflection of that eternal manifestation by which the Father proffers the eternal Word, who is his perfect in-age, in whom he acknowledges his whole presence, and in whom he rejoices infinitely. Through the mission of the Word, it is eternal generation that is revealed.

If St. John shows us in the Second Person the creative, illuminative Word, St. Paul prefers to describe him as subsistent wisdom. Here again it is by reference to the Old Testament that the Second Person is characterized. Wisdom, hohkma, which the Greeks translated as sophia, meant, for the peoples of the East, prudence in the conduct of life, such as they found in the sayings of wise men.

Thus the princes of Oriental monarchies compiled books of wisdom for the education of their subjects. When Solomon made Israel a great monarchy in the Oriental style, he wished likewise to endow his people with a monument of sagacity. “Solomon also spoke three thousand parables: and his poems were a thousand and five”, as we are told in the Book of Kings. [3 Kings 4:32]  For this reason the Bible puts his name to the Books of Proverbs and Wisdom.

But the idea of “wisdom” takes on a new character when it is transplanted into Yahwist religion. It is no longer simply human prudence, but the conduct of life according to the ways of Yahweh. For Israel, the sole rule governing man’s existence is the Law of God revealed to Moses and the prophets. Wisdom is thus identified with the Torah, the Law, and it comes to mean, not merely the Law of God, such as existed in his communication with man, but the very thought of God, the underlying archetype of that law. Thus it is Wisdom that presides over the whole divine scheme; in Wisdom God has formed the plan of his mighty works, and in Wisdom he watches over their completion.

The Wisdom literature devotes some noble passages to the praise of this aspect of divinity. Proverbs contains this description:

The Lord begot me, the first-born of his ways,
the forerunner of his prodigies of long ago;
From of old I was poured forth, at the first, before the earth ..
Before the mountains were settled into place,
before the hills, I was brought forth…
Then was I beside him as his craftsman,
and I was his delight day by day,
Playing before him all the while,
playing on the surface of his earth
[and I found delight in the sons of men].”
Proverbs 8:22-31

Wisdom presides over God’s creation, but precedes it, being founded from eternity. This is one of the texts that are most often quoted by subsequent theologians.

Wisdom is described in turn by the Book of Wisdom as presiding not only over creation, but also over the destiny of God’s people. It shows Wisdom saving Noah at the time of the Flood and Lot at the destruction of Sodom. It is Wisdom who leads Joseph “in the right way” and delivers Israel from the Egyptian captivity. Here we find the sources of Irenaeus’ conception of the function of the Word in the history of salvation. Through these manifestations Wisdom reveals her essence:

For she is an aura of the might of God
and a pure effusion of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nought that is sullied enters into her.
For she is the refulgence of eternal light,
the spotless mirror of the power of God,
the image of his goodness…
indeed, she reaches from end to end mightily
and governs all things well.”
Wisdom 7:25-8:1

Thus Wisdom appears in her eternal reality as the perfect image of God, as the complete expression of his infinite perfection.

Moreover, it is with this language that St. Paul and the whole tradition after him describe the Second Person. In Jesus there is revealed the subsistent personal reality of that Wisdom which the Old Testament described in her manifestations, though without showing them as subsistent. Thus, at the outset of the Epistle to the Colossians, Paul writes of the Son, “who is the image (eikon) of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For in him were all things created in heaven and on earth.” [Colossians 1:15-16] So, too, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, inspired by St. Paul, in a text that is the leitmotif of our present chapter, applies to the Second Person the language of Wisdom:

God, who, at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world. Who being the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance and upholding all things by the word of his power, making purgation of sins, sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high.
Hebrews 1:1-3

Here is expressed the whole basic theology of the Word, such as the New Testament itself inaugurates. The Apostles were confronted with the fact of Christ, who claimed divine authority and power. This was the basic, elemental, fundamental datum of revelation.

When they sought for language in which to express this fact, the Apostles turned to the Old Testament and borrowed their terminology from it. That is why this basic theology is an entirely biblical theology, showing the presence, in the Person of Christ, of that Wisdom of which the Old Testament only provided glimpses, but which is revealed in the New Testament in all its personal subsistence.

However, the term that brings us deepest into the understanding of the Second Person is that of “the Son” — an expression frequently used in the Old Testament in various senses. But its use in the New Testament, and especially by Christ himself, proves, as Vincent Taylor says, that it belongs to the knowledge that Jesus had of himself, that he was in a special sense the Son of God. [The Names of Jesus, p. 65] The first text in which the word appears makes this clear. It comes from Matthew: “All things are delivered to me by my Father. And no man knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal him.” [Matthew 11:27] It is clear from this that there is between the Son and the Father a unique relationship, that they belong to the same sphere of existence, that there is complete mutual contact between them.

This is the theology of the Son that pervades the Gospel according to St. John, while that of the Word appears only in the Prologue. The Son comes from the Father: “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world.” [John 16:28] He belongs to the same order of existence as the Father. He alone knows the Father, and this is why he alone can make him known. He is the object of the Father’s love, and this love is concentrated in him. He is the Son in whom the Father is well pleased. He has one thought and one will with the Father: “The Son cannot do anything of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing.” [John 5:19] His likeness to the Father is such that he who has seen him has seen the Father. Between the Father and him there is mutual immanence: “Thou, Father, in me, and I in thee.” [John 17:21]

Thus, according to St. John, the relations between the Father and the Son in the order of the divine economy make transparently clear the perfect unity of their divine nature and the perfect distinction between their Persons. Never will human eyes penetrate more deeply into the innermost relationship between the Father and the Son than did those of the Apostle who lay upon Jesus’ breast.

The revelation of the Spirit presents a similar development, with the addition, as Gregory of Nazianzen well understood, that the Gospels are only a small part of the Spirit’s activity, and that this activity is set forth in the time of the Church, beginning at Pentecost. The Hebrew word that the Greek has translated pneuma is ruah. More than anywhere else, we must be careful here to find the exact meaning, for the word esprit is susceptible of a multitude of ambiguities that give entirely distinct meanings, as we shall see first in a frequent image, that of “breath”.

The Greeks preserved here the idea of a subtle form of matter; thus it serves to describe the nonmaterial element in man, the soul as contrasted with the body. Such is the familiar philosophical contrast. [See Verbeke, La Doctrine du Pneuma]

But for the Hebrews ruah means a breath of wind as it appears in the storm. The ideas connected with it are not those of non-materiality, but of power, of irresistible force. Consequently the idea of esprit, applied to God, does not mean his non-materiality, but his irresistible power, by which he accomplishes his mighty works. Thus in the scene at Pentecost, the outpouring of the Spirit is accompanied by a shaking of the whole house.

Applied to man, it refers to that in him which is the work of God’s power. Thus the Pauline contrast between spirit and flesh does not by any means cover that of soul and body. It is the contrast between the whole man, soul and body, when it is enlivened by divine energy, and the whole man, soul and body, when it is abandoned to its own misery. It is thus that for St. Paul there are spiritual bodies and carnal spirits, which would be a contradiction if body were contrasted with spirit.

We see how many false problems may be resolved in this way. Christians are often accused of despising the body, and it is true that we often encounter this depreciation; but this error is due to substituting Platonic opposites for Christian opposites. This can be a source of grave errors in spirituality. Similarly, Christians may give the impression that they are on the side of the world of intellect against that of matter. Again, even the word “spirituality” is ambiguous. When we speak of “Eastern spirituality”, we speak of the possession of its true inwardness; when we speak of Christian spirituality, we speak of the supernatural works of the Holy Spirit in the soul.

Posted in Fr. Jean Daniélou, The Trinitarian God | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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