If you have a couple of minutes, listen to Fr. Barron retell Luke’s story:
http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/12/25/christmas-with-fr-robert-barron/
And steal this Christmas prayer and use it sometime Christmas Day:
http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/12/25/god-of-love-father-of-all/
Merry Christmas 2012!
dj
Moses at the Burning Bush REMBRANDT (1606 – 1669)
The reason that the divine compassion can lay hold of our death and communicate its love to us is only by taking flesh among us. It is always in his body that the Word “comes” to save men: not only at his first coming in the flesh and at his Second Coming in glory but also in the time of kenosis in which we are now living.
The eternal liturgy, which Jesus celebrates at his Ascension and which takes form in his Church, permeates our world of death and gives it life; but the locus of this encounter and the path its light takes are always the body of Christ. How can this adorable body that lives now with the Father “come” into our mortal condition and become a wellspring of life for us?
Moses glimpsed the mystery of this “coming” in the theophany that inaugurated the prefigurative event of Passover (Exodus 3:1-6). The name of the holy Lord Jesus was first stammered here as it was entrusted to this man who “saw God” [This is how the Byzantine tradition speaks of Moses on his feast, which is celebrated on September 4.]. It was made known to him not by a course in theology or by an ecstasy that took him outside the flesh but in a very simple sign: a bush on fire.
There are thousands of bushes on the hills of this half-desert landscape, and even a bush that is on fire is not uncommon near camps. The surprising thing about the bush Moses sees is that it is not burned up. He says, “I must go across and see this strange sight and why the bush is not being burned up.” It is then that the overwhelming revelation takes place. He draws near to see and he hears Someone speaking. Through the sign that he sees, the mystery of the living God is made known to him: the Wholly Other who flames at the heart of the vision is the divine compassion that shares the distress of his people.
There is here neither pantheism nor a simple process of sacralization, for this presence is the presence of a person. The Holy One does not destroy but penetrates with his fire everything that is. Men are his holy land, and the divine glory permeates it all the more profoundly as the divine salvation draws closer. But the flame that burns us without consuming is not to be comprehended at first glance, no matter how penetrating this may be; it reveals itself by giving itself and becomes known by being received.
It is not our flesh that stands in the way of our seeing, as the ancient dualisms claim, but our lack of selfless generosity and love or, in other words, our death. Here everything is given gratuitously, both in the fire that reveals itself and in the heart that receives it. Here everything is full of life. The same mysterious flame burns both in the event and in the heart of the person present here; only in the heart that receives it does the fire become light.
When, in the fullness of time, the light enters the world in person, he who spoke to Moses takes a body and dwells among us. The Virgin conceived, formed, and gave birth to this “body of the Word” [Prayerbook (euchologion) of Saint Serapion, bishop of Thmuis (in Egypt, fourth century)] by the power of the Holy Spirit; John revealed it as the Lamb of God, the true Passover, and the suffering Servant. But men like ourselves also drew near to it. The “strange sight” on Sinai became what the Synoptic Gospels call a “miracle” and the fourth Gospel a “sign”, for the incarnate Word is the true burning bush. “Power came out of him that cured them all.” [Luke 6:19; see Mark 5:30] This energy of the Word amid our noise, of the light amid our darkness, of life amid our death, is henceforth the fire that leaps from the bush.
Those who draw near to him touch his body, but “his flesh is divine”; those who look upon him see a mortal man like themselves, but his face is “the face of life”.[Two expressions used by Saint Gregory of Nyssa in his Life of Moses] He is truly a man; he is truly God. The flame of his divinity does not consume his humanity but illumines it from within and shows through it.
His “astounding” actions, that is, his miracles, already bear witness in his mortal condition to the energies that will radiate from his incorruptible body when he rises from the dead. By his miracles Jesus shows himself to be the great and unique sacrament of God for man and of man for God. [When the first Christian community subsequently wrote down these miracles, it was "reminded" by the Spirit of their fleshly and historical coherence, but it was also guided by the Spirit to "the complete truth" about their abiding meaning, for it is in this way that the risen Lord continues to live among us in the last times. Understanding of the "spiritual meaning" of Scripture does not come through sophisticated thinking; rather the wholly simple energy of the Spirit reveals it by making Christians experience it. This is precisely one of the fruits of the liturgy.]
For example, one day Jesus gets into the boat with his disciples (Mark 4:35-41); they put out into open water, and, as they sail, he falls asleep. He is not pretending; he is truly a man who has grown tired both because of his human effort and because of the mysterious divine weariness of which the prophets speak (Isaiah 7: i 3). A squall roars down on the lake, and the waves crash over the boat and soon fill it. Then, like Moses, the disciples “draw near”: “Master, do you not care? We are lost!” How could he himself be anxious? In the midst of the storm he is, even in his humanity, the One in whom all things have their being and who holds all things in his hand. Nonetheless, in a movement that acquires its full meaning in the light of his Resurrection, he “awakes” and “arises”. With his bodily lips the Word who at every instant calls all things from nothingness into being says to the sea: “Quiet now! Be calm!”
The wind drops, the waves quiet, and there is a great calm. In this storm we are no longer at the dawn of creation but in the tragic time of human salvation; the divine energy no longer acts alone but, in the body of Christ, acts in synergy with a man; that is why Jesus is the great sacrament. For when the love of our God acts in our behalf, it calls for our cooperation, that is, our faith. But that faith, still very timid indeed, was present in the worried hearts of the disciples. They were afraid, these men of little faith; if Jesus nonetheless asks them, “Have you still no faith?” it is in order to liberate that faith from fear and to make it grow. Then they are overwhelmed by the awe that allows faith to expand and open itself to the divine presence: “Who can this be?”
The external setting at that time was a storm on Lake Tiberias; today it is new and different at every moment, but that changes nothing essential; the important thing is the event that is experienced, now as then, by the Word together with men, and this event always takes place in his body. Whether in the fullness of time or now in the last times, the body of the Lord Jesus is the sacrament that gives life to men. To convince ourselves of this, we must once more ascend a mountain, where the theophany of the burning bush finds its counterpart and fulfillment.
St. Stephen by Carlo Crivelli (1476)
Before he passed away in 2008, Avery Cardinal Dulles was asked to write an essay for a series of seminars sponsored by the Center for Catholic Studies and the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity at the Unversity of St. Thomas in Saint Paul MI. The following extended meditation on the nature of philosophy and theology was the fruit of that effort.
Among academic disciplines, philosophy and theology have a particular affinity with each other because both are concerned with ultimate meaning and transcendent truth. Both deal with the nature and order of reality as a whole and with the final purpose of human existence. They grapple with similar, even identical, questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the place of human beings in God’s plan? Whence do we come, why do we exist, what must we do, and what may we hope for?
Intimately related though they are, the two disciplines differ in their method and to some extent in their object. Philosophy ponders naturally knowable truth by the natural light of reason. It makes inferences from things known by common human experience, which is available to believers and nonbelievers a Theology, by contrast, uses human reason assisted by the added light of faith understand the truth that God has revealed. But since truth is always compatible with truth, the findings of philosophy and theology must, in the end, agree.
The question often arises: how is philosophy related to faith? I am sure that is a very actual question for all of you who teach philosophy in Catholic institutions or to Catholic students. It would be a mistake, I believe, to insist on any one answer to that question. Philosophy can be cultivated in a variety of relationships with faith and theology. I find convenient to distinguish four situations, giving rise to four states of philosophy.
The first state is one of philosophy untouched by Christian faith. All the philosophy produced before the time of Christ would fit into this category. Greeks, in particular, rose to great heights in the time of Plato and Aristotle, to mention but two pre-Christian philosophers. Many Christians have sought to write philosophical works that in no way depend upon the truth of Christian Revelation. Such reasoning at its best can establish many truths that are important for Christian faith; for example, the capacity of the human mind to attain abiding truth and to transcend shifting phenomena; and the possibility of demonstrating the existence and attributes of God, the spirituality and immortality of the human soul, and the obligation to do good and avoid evil.
The Catholic Church teaches that truths such as these can be proved by natural reason, without dependence on Christian faith. (The Church does not teach that these proofs have been constructed by nonbelievers, but only that it is possible for them to be so constructed.)
Philosophy of this type does not deliver a complete and self-contained system. It ends up with some pressing questions that, according to its champions, cannot be solved without revelation. Maurice Blondel, for example, ended his philosophical dissertation on Action with the open question as to whether or not there is a supernatural. Others would say (in the spirit of the early Karl Rahner, S.J.) that philosophy can raise the question of a possible revelation, but that it cannot say whether God will freely disclose himself, still less what that revelation will contain. Will God’s final word be one of condemnation or of pardon and absolution?
II
In a second state, philosophy is in dialogue with Christian faith. In a Christian civilization such as that of the West since the fourth century, it is almost impossible for philosophy not to be influenced by faith. It is forced to grapple with questions on which believers have taken a definite position, but it does not allow religious faith to dictate the answers to philosophical questions.
This second category is a very broad one because it makes room for philosophers who are variously disposed toward the Christian religion. Three subcategories may be distinguished.
Philosophers never begin their work in a cultural vacuum. Judeo-Christian ideas and values have so permeated the culture of the West that no philosopher can ignore them. They establish the framework in which philosophers think about the dignity and rights of the human person, freedom and responsibility, the human nostalgia for the transcendent and the divine, and many such themes. Even philosophers who do not want to be Christian deal with themes like these in ways closer to Christianity than any pre-Christian thinkers.
It can, of course, be debated whether the influence of Christian culture on philosophy is favorable or detrimental. A nonbeliever might try to escape any such influence as far as possible. But it has to be admitted that philosophy has developed to greater heights in the West than elsewhere in the world. The stimulus of Christianity has contributed significantly to that development.
III
In its third state, philosophy operates under the aegis of faith. The philosopher is confessedly a believer, who will not admit any contradiction between philosophy and what God has revealed through the Church. But at the same time, he or she recognizes a difference of method between the disciplines and does not wish to behave as a theologian. Writing strictly as a philosopher, he affirms only what can be established by philosophical methods. This is what John Paul II in his encyclical, Fides et Ratio, describes as Christian philosophy. As an example, one might also think of Jacques Maritain.
Minimally, faith operates as a negative norm. The philosopher knows that his discipline cannot prove anything contrary to the word of God. If philosophy seems to be inclined to assert this, it must have gotten off the track. Revelation therefore prevents philosophers from making mistakes they might otherwise make. It alerts them to errors such as atheism, pantheism, polytheism, materialism, determinism, etc.
As John Paul II remarks, the contribution of faith is not merely negative. It makes a twofold positive contribution, subjective and objective. Subjectively, faith purifies the heart of the philosopher, rendering him more perceptive. It overcomes the pride and presumptuousness that so often blind philosophers, and at the same time gives them the courage to tackle problems that might seem too daunting. Objectively, it gives a view of the universe that commends itself to human reason.
It suggests answers to properly philosophical problems that are in principle accessible to reason, but which philosophers might not be able to find without the hints given by revelation. I like to compare this situation to a textbook in mathematics that has the answers to the problems in the back of the book. Knowing the answers helps is no substitute for solving the problem; however it can help the student find the right solution. So, too, revelation suggests answers to philosophical problems that philosophers might not be able to find on their own.
Examples from the field of natural theology come readily to mind. Assisted by biblical revelation, philosophy is able to establish that there is only one God; that God is wise, loving, and personal; that he is eternal, infinite, immutable, etc. The arguments that philosophers make from the nature of God as ipsum esse subsistens do not depend intrinsically on any premises from revelation. They are philosophically valid but would not have occurred to philosophers without the extrinsic help of revelation.
So likewise in the field of anthropology, philosophy is able to show that the human being has a spiritual soul that is naturally immortal. In a Christian civilization, philosophers can find a solid philosophical basis for asserting the dignity and rights of the individual person, the freedom of the will, the capacity to commit sin and to merit rewards, etc. The contemporary debate about abortion too often overlooks the foundation for the rights of the unborn in reason. The problem is treated almost exclusively as a religious issue, indeed as a sectarian one.
The field of cosmology offers many instances of philosophy operating under the aegis of faith. As Christians, we believe that the world was freely created by God and this belief has suggested to philosophers arguments that the world does not exist by necessity, as the ancient Greeks supposed, but only because of a free decision of God’s will. The universe, therefore, is radically contingent. It lacks any reason for existence in itself.
The question of evolution has been a focus of heated debate. Here, again, Christian philosophers are called to make a contribution. Does intelligent design on the part of a Creator mean that God has to intervene at particular points in the process, or can a process that looks like sheer chance from below be identical with the execution of a divine plan? Scientists, philosophers, and theologians all have something to say in this area, but they can do better in collaboration than if they revive the wars of the past.
IV
The fourth situation of philosophy is within theology. John Paul II, turning to this situation in Fides et Ratio reflects on the term ancilla theologiae. At this point philosophers put their skills at the service of theology for the purpose of better understanding the data of revelation. The Greek Fathers and the early councils, as we know, made extensive use of philosophical terms and categories in order to ponder mysteries such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and predestination. While contributing their skills to theology, Christian philosophers enriched their own discipline.
The idea of subsistent relations, important for the doctrine of the Trinity, could not have arisen apart from theology. The same may be said for the concept of transubstantiation, much used in Eucharistic theology. Although these concepts first arise within philosophical theology, they have implications outside of theology. The theory of causality was perfected, for example, by the Christian doctrine of creation — a causal operation that presupposes nothing on the part of the recipient. Modern personalist philosophy has derived great benefit from theology. Personalist philosophy, for example, builds on the distinction between person and nature that was developed in theology.
At this fourth level, the distinction between philosophy and theology is more difficult to maintain. The philosophical theologian must be adept in both fields but still keep them apart. The same individual can speak now as a philosopher and now as a theologian. St. Thomas Aquinas, O.P., for example, wrote a number of purely philosophical works, such as his commentaries on Aristotle and his De ente et essentia. Francisco Suarez, S.J., produced the first Christian textbook on metaphysics, a purely philosophical work. Karl Rahner, S.J., composed some purely philosophical works, such as his Spirit in the World, and Karol Wojtyla did likewise in his The Acting Person.
V
The question may now be raised — and I put it only as a question — whether there is a level of discourse that transcends the distinction between philosophy and theology, blending them into one. As usually understood, theology deals with the contents of Christian revelation rather than with reality as a whole; philosophy deals with reality as a whole, but only without the light of faith. Believers have a hard time putting their faith into brackets and saying only what they could say if they lacked the help of revelation. For this reason I would like to think that there could be such a thing as integral wisdom, which studies the whole of reality with the tools of philosophy and theology together.
This kind of overarching worldview with the combined resources of reason and revelation does not lack a certain foundation in the Bible. In the very first paragraph of Fides et Ratio, John Paul II points out that similar questions are asked in the sacred literature of Israel and in that of India, China, and Greece.
In chapter 2, he notes that the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament picks up themes from that of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The first stage of divine revelation occurs in the book of nature, which, when read with the proper tools of human reason, can lead to knowledge of the Creator. But at a certain point human reason runs up against its limits and needs the added light of the gospel in order to transcend them. If it refuses this further revelation, reason becomes proud and turns into foolishness, as Paul points out in the opening chapter of Romans.
John Paul II seems to be pressing for a recovery of the broad concept of theology espoused by some of the early Christian thinkers. Clement of Alexandria, for example, declared that he had found in the gospel “the true philosophy,” and that “we call philosophers those who love the wisdom that is creator and mistress of all things, that is, knowledge of the Son of God.” Their philosophy, while it no longer restricts itself to the unaided light of reason, still seeks the wisdom that is the goal of philosophy itself.
Vatican II hints at this broader vision of wisdom. In the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, the Council declares that faith does not simply disclose a number of revealed truths; it “casts a new light on everything, manifests God’s design for man’s total vocation, and thus directs the mind toward solutions that are fully human.”
In its closing message “To Men of Thought and Science,” Vatican II exhorted intellectuals to see real science and real faith as friends of one another. “Have confidence in faith,” it declared, “this great friend of intelligence. Enlighten yourselves with its light in order to take hold of truth, the whole truth.”
‘Throughout Fides et Ratio John Paul II urges philosophers not to take refuge in merely linguistic or historical studies but to grapple with the great metaphysical questions that have always been the concern of the wise. As philosophy comes to deal with the true, the beautiful, and the good in their full range, it enters into closer relations with revealed religion.
VI
Before closing, I would like to say a few words about philosophy and the new evangelization. Paul VI, in launching the program, spoke of the need for an evangelization of cultures, because cultural situations can dispose people to be unreceptive to the gospel. The prevalent culture in the West, and increasingly throughout the world, is consumerist. Consumerism, though hardly a philosophical system, has philosophical roots that go back several centuries.
Influenced by the agnosticism of the Kantian school, people have lost confidence in the possibility of gaining real knowledge about anything that transcends what the senses can perceive. They consequently write off religious convictions as arbitrary decisions of the will, rooted perhaps in the unconscious or in ideology, but in any case unsupported by rational grounds. Religion is regarded as something like music — a hobby for those who are inclined to it. In this context people look for satisfactions here and now. The majority seek to pile up wealth and material goods that will secure such satisfactions.
Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio calls attention to a variety of contemporary philosophical deviations, such as subjectivism, relativism, historicism, scientism, and pragmatism. Because people doubt that it is possible to get to any solid truth in matters of religion, their religion is permeated with these errors. Subjectivism means an acceptance of the idea that there is no objectively binding truth, but that people may content themselves with finding what is true for them, as though each of us had a different truth. Historical or cultural relativism means that ideas are always culture-bound.
The wisdom of the past is no longer valid for today because it was conditioned by a cultural framework that no longer exists. The teaching of Scripture and tradition, therefore, can no longer be treated as having more than historical interest. Scientism means the presumption that true knowledge and progress are achievable only by exact measurement and rigorous calculation, which are thought to be the methods of science. Pragmatism means that truth is not to be found in abstract theory but in applicability, what actually pays off, what William James called “cash value.” Religion can be useful if it makes people happy and induces them to become better citizens, but it can also lead to hatred and violence, as is obvious in our day. Religion is therefore judged by purely secular criteria.
These errors, rather than others that are strictly theological, are the principal obstacles to religious faith and to the new evangelization. For this reason I would plead with you who are philosophers to take on these tendencies and expose their superficiality. I hope that as Christian and Catholic philosophers you will feel a sense of responsibility to secure the foundations of faith.
The new evangelization, to be successful, must be accompanied by a new apologetics. To clear the way for an effective proclamation of the gospel, philosophers must help to dispel the climate of opinion that makes people antecedently dismiss any such proclamation as incredible. Philosophers might also help to work out a theory of testimony. Paul VI and John Paul II agreed that the modern world is more influenced by witness than by argument. Most people, however, lack an adequate epistemology of testimony. What are the qualities that make a witness credible? The old textbooks spoke of competence and truthfulness, but further work is needed to show what witnesses are competent to be bearers of divine revelation, and what kind of truth is to be sought in the gospel. Some good work has been done in this field, but I doubt that it is known to most teachers and to their students.
While philosophy can make an essential contribution to the new evangelization, I would like to add a word of caution. Philosophy by itself cannot account for the whole process of coming to the faith. The key element in any conversion is the grace of God which enlightens the mind and attracts the will. To sort out the respective contributions of nature and grace requires a cooperative effort on the part of philosophers and theologians together. We must not be content to perpetuate a kind of departmental isolation that makes adherents of the two disciplines strangers to each other. This conference should help in a modest way to overcome the estrangement.
Salvador Dali, The Crucifixion
Law is not the enemy of freedom but precisely the condition for its possibility. What is joy but the experience of having attained the true good? Therefore in this more biblical way of looking at things joy (beatitude) is the consequence and not the enemy of law. What Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount, therefore, is that new law that would discipline our desires, our minds, and our bodies so as to make real happiness possible.
I would like to suggest a reading of the eight beatitudes that looks first at the more “positive” formulations and then, in light of those, at the more “negative” prescriptions. Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” (Matthew 5:7). This stands at the heart of the matter, for mercy or tender compassion (Chesed in the Hebrew of the Old Testament) is God’s most distinctive characteristic. Saint John would give this same idea a New Testament expression in saying “God is love” (1 John 4:16). Saint Augustine reminded us that we are, by our very nature, ordered to God: “O Lord, you have made us for yourself, and therefore our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”
If this is true, then nothing short of God, no substitute for God, will ever finally satisfy us. But since God is tender mercy, “having” God is tantamount to exercising compassion, being merciful ourselves. And attend to the way Jesus articulates this law: those who exercise mercy will themselves receive mercy. According to the “physics” of the spiritual order, the more one draws on the divine life, the more one receives that life, precisely because it is a gift and is properly infinite. God’s life is had, as it were, on the fly: when one receives it as a gift, he must give it away, since it only exists in gift form, and when he gives it away he will find more of it flooding into his heart. If you want to be happy, Jesus is saying, this divine love, this Chesed of God, must be central to your life; it must be your beginning, your middle, and your end, your “work day and Sabbath rest.” Everything else that is good will find its place around that central desire, which is why Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides” (Matthew 6:33).
We turn now to the closely related beatitude: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). This means that you will be happy if there is no ambiguity in your heart (the deepest center of the self) about what is most important. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that the saint is someone whose life is about one thing. He didn’t mean that the saint lives a monotonous existence; he meant that a truly holy person has ordered her heart toward pleasing God alone.
Again, many interests and passions and actions can cluster around that central longing, but none of them can finally compete with it. And thus, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied” (Matthew 5:6). We want many things — food, drink, shelter, fame, financial security, and so on — but what, most fundamentally, do we want? What is the Hunger that defines and orders the attendant and secondary hungers? What, in Paul Tillich’s language, is your “ultimate concern”? If it is anything other than the will and purpose of God righteousness — then you will be unhappy and unfulfilled.
The last of the “positive” beatitudes is: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Since God is the Creator, he is that power through which all creatures are connected to one another. As we have seen in the first chapter, God is a gathering force, the unifier of all that he has made. Therefore someone who has ordered himself fundamentally toward God is, ipso facto, a peacemaker, for he will necessarily channel the metaphysical energy that draws things and people together. One of the most readily recognizable marks of sanctity — on clear display in all the saints — is just this radiation of reconciling power. This is why peacemaking will make us children of God and therefore happy.
With these more positive beatitudes in mind we can turn with increased understanding to those beatitudes that can strike us initially as perhaps confounding and counterintuitive. The simple fact of the matter is that on account of the mysterious curvature of the will that we call original sin, we deviate from the very actions and attitudes thatwill make us happy. In the elegant formulation of Saint Augustine, we have turned from the Creator to creatures, and as a result we are wandering in “the land of unlikeness,” which is to say, a place of spiritual aridity. Jesus recommends a series of negative prescriptions, designed to orient us wanderers aright.
One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as “concupiscence,” but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term “addiction.”
When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never, in principle make us happy.
And so Jesus says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). This is neither a romanticizing of economic poverty nor a demonization of wealth, but rather a formula for detachment. Might I suggest a somewhat variant rendition: how blessed are you if you are not attached to material things, if you have not placed the goods that wealth can buy at the center of your concern? When the Kingdom of God is your ultimate concern, not only will you not become addicted to material things; you will, in fact, be able to use them with great effectiveness for God’s purposes. Under this same rubric of detachment consider the beatitude “Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).
Again, this can sound like the worst sort of masochism, but we have to dig deeper. We could render this adage as how blessed, how “lucky” (a legitimate rendering of makarios, according to some scholars) you are if you are not addicted to good feelings. Pleasant sensations — physical, emotional, psychological — are wonderful, but since they are only a finite good, they can easily drive an addiction, as can clearly be seen in the prevalence of psychotropic drugs, gluttonous habits of consumption, and pornography in our culture. Again, Jesus’ saying hasn’t a thing to do with puritanism; it has to do with detachment and hence with spiritual freedom. Unaddicted to sensual pleasure, one can unreservedly follow the will of God, even when such a path involves psychological or physical suffering.
Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land” (Matthew 5:5). I don’t know of any culture at any time that would be tempted to embrace this beatitude as a practical program of world conquest! Meek people don’t come to positions of political or institutional influence. But once more, Jesus is not so much passing judgment on institutions of power as he is showing a path of detachment. How lucky you are if you are not attached to the finite good of worldly power. Many people up and down the centuries have felt that the acquisition of power is the key to beatitude. In the temptation scene in the Gospel of Matthew, the devil, after luring Christ with the relatively low-level temptations toward sensual pleasure and pride, brings Jesus to the top of a tall mountain and reveals to him all of the kingdoms of the world in their glory and offers them to Jesus.
Matthew’s implication is that the drive to power is perhaps the strongest, most irresistible temptation of all. In the twentieth century, J. R. R. Tolkien, who had tasted at first hand the horrors of the First World War and had witnessed those of the Second, conceived a ring of power as the most tempting talisman in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. But if you are detached from worldly power, you can follow the will of God, even when that path involves extreme powerlessness. Meek – free from the addiction to ordinary power — you can become a conduit of true divine power to the world.
The last of the “negative” beatitudes is “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). We must read this, once again, in light of Thomas Aquinas’ analysis. If the call to poverty holds off the addiction to material things, and the summons to mourn counters the addiction to good feelings, and the valorization of meekness blocks the addiction to power, this last beatitude gets in the way of the addictive attachment to honor. Honor is good thing in the measure that it is a “flag of virtue,” signaling to others the presence of some excellence, but when love of honor becomes the center of one’s concern, it, like any other finite good, becomes a source of suffering.
Many people who are not terribly attracted to wealth, pleasure, or power are held captive by their desire for the approval of others, and they will, accordingly, order their lives, arrange their work, and plot their careers with the single value in mind of being noticed, honored, and endowed with titles. But this again involves the attempt to fill up the infinite longing with a finite good, and it produces, by the laws of spiritual physics, addiction. Therefore, how lucky are you if you are not attached to honor and hence are able to follow the will of God even when that path involves being ignored, dishonored, and, at the limit, persecuted.
Thomas Aquinas said that if you want to see the perfect exemplification of the beatitudes, you should look to Christ crucified. The saint specified this observation as follows: if you want beatitude (happiness) despise what Jesus despised on the cross and love what he loved on the cross. What did he despise on the cross but the four classical addictions? The crucified Jesus was utterly detached from wealth and worldly goods. He was stripped naked, and his hands, fixed to the wood of the cross could grasp at nothing. More to it, he was detached from pleasure.
On the cross, Jesus underwent the most agonizing kind of physical torment a pain that was literally excruciating (ex cruce, from the cross), but also experienced the extreme of psychological and even spiritual suffering (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). And he was bereft of power, even to the point of being unable to move or defend himself in any way. Finally on that terrible cross he was completely detached from the esteem of others. In a public place not far from the gate of Jerusalem, he hung from an instrument of torture, exposed to the mockery of the crowd, displayed as a common criminal. In this, he endured the ultimate of dishonor.
In the most dramatic way possible, therefore, the crucified Jesus demonstrates a liberation from the four principal temptations that lead us away from God. Saint Paul expressed this accomplishment in typically vivid language: “[13] And even when you were dead [in] transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; [14] obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross; [15] despoiling the principalities and the powers, he made a public spectacle of them, leading them away in triumph by it” (Colossians 2:15).
But what did Jesus love on the cross? He loved the will of his Father. His Father had sent him, as we saw, into the farthest reaches of godforsakenness in order to bring the divine love even to that darkest place, and Jesus loved that mission to the very end. And it was precisely his detachment from the four great temptations that enabled him to walk that walk. What he loved and what he despised were in a strange balance on the cross. Poor in spirit, meek, mourning, and persecuted, he was able to be pure of heart, to seek righteousness utterly, to become the ultimate peacemaker, and to be the perfect conduit of the divine mercy to the world.
Though it is supremely paradoxical to say so, the crucified Jesus is the man of beatitude, a truly happy man. And if we recall our discussion of freedom, we can say that Jesus nailed to the cross is the very icon of liberty, for he is free from those attachments that would prevent him from attaining the true good, which is doing the will of his Father.
The first glimpse of Jesus the warrior is at Bethlehem of Judea, the little town outside of Jerusalem, where Israel’s greatest fighter, King David, was born. The Christmas stories in the Gospels are not charming children’s tales, for they are full of the motifs of opposition and confrontation. C. S. Lewis, who saw these themes very clearly, asked, “Why did God enter into our human condition so quietly, as a baby horn in obscurity?” His answer: “because he had to slip clandestinely, behind enemy lines.”
Let us turn to Luke’s familiar telling of the story. The narrative commences, as one would expect poems and histories in the ancient world to commence, namely with the invocation of powerful and important people: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was … when Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:1-2). And these two mighty figures are doing something paradigmatically powerful, for by counting one’s people one could tax them more efficiently, draft them into the army more easily, and order them about more completely.
But then Luke pulls the rug out from under us, for we promptly learn that the story isn’t about Augustus and Quirinius but rather about two nobodies making their way from one forgotten outpost of Augustus’ empire to another. And the narrative will unfold as the tale of two emperors — rival claimants to power — the one in Rome and the one born to Mary in Bethlehem. When Mary and Joseph arrived in David’s city, there was no room, even at the crude traveler’s hostel so the child is born in a cave, or as some scholars have recently suggested, the lower level of a dwelling, the humble part of the house where the animals spent the night.
Who was the best protected person in the ancient world? It was undoubtedly Caesar Augustus in his palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome. But the true emperor, Luke is telling us arrives vulnerable and exposed, because the good life is not about the protection of the ego, but rather about the willingness to become open to the other in love. And we hear that the baby king was wrapped up Imagine a newborn infant, too weak even to raise its head, and now picture that child wrapped up from head to toe in swaddling bands. It is an image of consummate weakness.
Who was the rangiest and freest person in the ancient world? It was certainly Caesar Augustus, able to exert his will to the farthest reaches of the Mediterranean and to the wilds of Britain and Germany. Luke is telling us that true kingship hasn’t a thing to do with this sort of worldly dominion, but rather with the willingness to be bound for the sake of the other. The child was then placed in a manger, where the animals eat. Who was the best-fed person in the ancient world? It was Caesar in Rome, who could snap his fingers and taste of any sensual pleasure. But the true emperor, Luke insists, is not the one who feeds himself but who is willing to offer his life as food for the other. At the climax of his life, this child, come of age, would say to his friends, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me” (Luke 22:19).
There is one more telling detail from Luke’s infancy narrative to which I would draw attention. We hear that an angel appeared to shepherds keeping night watch over their flocks in the hills around Bethlehem. We shouldn’t get romantic or sentimental about angels, for in the biblical accounts the typical reaction to the appearance of an angel is fear. If a reality from a higher dimension suddenly broke into your world, fear would be your immediate and appropriate response. The angel announced the good news of the birth of Jesus and then, Luke informs us, there appeared with the angel an entire stratias of angels.
That Greek term is often rendered in English as “host,” but its most basic sense is “army.” Our words “strategy” and “strategic” come from it. Luke is informing us that an army of overwhelmingly frightening realities from heaven have appeared to signal their solidarity with the baby king. Who had the biggest army in the ancient world? Caesar Augustus in Rome, and that is precisely how he was able to dominate that world. Nevertheless, his army is nothing compared to this angelic stratias that has lined up behind the new emperor. Remember Isaiah’s prophecy that Yahweh would one day bare his mighty arm before all the nations. N. T. Wright has magnificently observed that the prophecy finds its fulfillment in the tiny arm of the baby Jesus coming out of his manger-crib.
The battle that began in Bethlehem, this lining up of two very different personifications of power, would play itself out in the life and ministry of Jesus. John Courtney Murray said that as the Gospels unfold we witness the ever increasing agon, or struggle, between Jesus and the powers that oppose him. From the moment of his arrival on the public scene, the demons screamed and the scribes and Pharisees schemed. Many of the major sections of the Gospels end with ominous phrases such as ‘[the devil] departed from him for a time” (Luke 4:13); and “the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where [Jesus] was, he should inform them, so that they might arrest him” (John 11:57); and “So they picked up stones to throw at him” (John 8:59).
This shouldn’t surprise us, for Jesus, God made flesh, entered a world that was distorted by sin, by deep-seated opposition to God. In fact, the very intensity of the divine presence in Jesus disclosed the powers of darkness most completely, just as a particularly intense light casts the deepest shadows. The fight would reach its culmination in Jerusalem, on the top of Mount Zion, where the Davidic warrior would confront definitively the enemies of Israel. The battle would be joined, not on an open field, but on a terrible instrument of torture.
On what we call Palm Sunday, Jesus entered the holy city, hailed as the Son of David, and almost immediately after his arrival he went into the Temple and picked a fight. As we have seen, his provocative action in the Temple was practically guaranteed to arouse the opposition of both the Jewish and the Roman establishment. But as the last week of his life unfolded, Jesus did not contrive to confront these powers in the conventional manner. Rather he allowed them to spend themselves on him; he permitted the darkness of the world to envelop him.
In the densely textured passion narratives of the Gospels we see all forms of human dysfunction on display. Jesus was met by betrayal, denial, institutional corruption, violence, stupidity, deep injustice, and incomparable cruelty, but he did not respond in kind. Rather, like the scapegoat, upon whom all the sins of Israel were symbolically placed on the Day of Atonement, Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world.
As he hung from the cross, he became sin, as Saint Paul would later put it, and bearing the full weight of that disorder he said, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Jesus on the cross drowned all the sins of the world in the infinite ocean of the divine mercy, and that is how he fought.
We can see here how important it is to affirm the divinity of Jesus for if he were only a human being, his death on the cross would be, at best, an inspiring example of dedication and courage. But as the Son of God, Jesus died a death that transfigured the world. The theological tradition has said that God the Father was pleased with this sacrifice of his Son, but we should never interpret this along sadistic lines, as though the Father needed to see the suffering of his Son in order to assuage his infinite anger. The Father loved the willingness of the Son to go to the very limits of god forsakenness — all the way to the bottom of sin — in order to manifest the divine mercy. The Father loved the courage of his Son, the nonviolent warrior.
Jesus claimed divinity, and I’ve been defending his divine status throughout this writing, but what finally prevents us from saying that the crucified Jesus wasn’t simply a failed revolutionary, an admirable idealist who was, sadly enough, ground under by the wheel of history? What prevents us from taking that route of interpretation is the stubborn unnerving fact upon which Christian faith is grounded: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. N. T. Wright has reminded us that from a strictly historical standpoint it is practically impossible to explain the emergence of Christianity as a messianic movement apart from the resurrection.
In the context of first-century Judaism, the clearest indication possible that someone was not the Messiah would be his death at the hands of Israel’s enemies, for, as we have seen, one of the tasks of the Messiah was to battle those enemies successfully and unite the nation. In the year 132, a Jew named Bar Kochba led a revolution against the Romans. Many of his followers proclaimed him the Messiah; they even minted coins stamped with the motto Year One of Bar Kochba. His rebellion was put down, he was executed by the Romans, and precisely no one further entertained the thought that he was the Messiah.
Yet the first Christians stubbornly and consistently proclaimed the crucified Jesus as Messiah. Paul refers time and again in his letters to Iesous Christos, which is his Greek rendition of Ieshoua Maschiach (Jesus the Messiah). The first disciples went to the ends of the world and to their deaths declaring the messiahship of Jesus. How can we realistically account for this apart from the actual resurrection of Jesus from the dead?
Far too many contemporary scholars attempt to explain away the resurrection, turning it into a myth, a legend, a symbol, a sign that the cause of Jesus goes on. But this kind of speculation is horn in faculty lounges, for few in the first century would have found that kind of talk the least hit convincing. Can you imagine Paul tearing into Corinth or Athens or Philippi with the message that there was an inspiring dead man who symbolized the presence of God? No one would have taken him seriously. Instead what Paul declared in all of those cities was anastasis (resurrection). What sent him and his colleagues all over the Mediterranean world (and their energy can be sensed on every page of the New Testament) was the shocking novelty of the resurrection of a dead man through the power of the Holy Spirit.
According to the Gospel accounts, the risen Jesus typically did two things: he showed his wounds and he pronounced a word of peace. The wounds of Jesus are a continual and salutary reminder of our sin. The author of life appeared in our midst and we killed him, and this gives the lie to any attempt at self-justification or exculpation. But the risen Lord never leaves us in guilt; instead, he says, “Peace be with you,” the Jewish greeting, Shalom (John 20:19).
This is the peace that the world cannot give, for it is the shalom that comes from the heart of God. In his letter to the Romans, Paul said, “For I am convinced that neither death, life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8: 39). How does Paul know this? He knows it because we killed God, God returned with forgiving love. He knows it because the enemies of Israel have been defeated.
As we saw, the Old Testament writers anticipated that Yahweh would gather the tribes, cleanse the Temple, fight the final battle, and finally would reign as Lord of all the nations. In the light of the resurrection, the first Christians understood that this great work had been accomplished and that Yahweh would reign precisely in the person of Jesus. And they saw their task as announcing this new state of affairs to the world. That is why Paul darted all over Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Greece, and why he longed to go to Spain, which for a first-century Jew would have meant the ends of the earth. If someone today wanted to get a message out far and wide, he would go to New York or Los Angeles or London — centers of culture and communication. Many of the first believers in Jesus — including Peter and Paul — went forth with a similar hope to Rome.
In the Roman Forum stands the Arch of Titus, which was built to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70. On the inside of the arch is a depiction of the conquering soldiers carrying the Menorah from the Temple. I believe it is fair to say that the soldiers involved in that conquest, as well as those men who designed the Arch of Titus, undoubtedly thought that this humiliating defeat signaled the end of the Jewish religion and the disappearance of the God of Israel. The supreme irony is that just before the destruction of the Temple, Peter, Paul, and their Christian colleagues arrived in Rome, and in proclaiming the risen Jesus they brought the God of Israel to Rome, and through Rome, to the world.
In the letters he wrote to the tiny Christian communities that he had founded Paul often spoke of Iesous Kyrios (Jesus the Lord). This can sound blandly “spiritual” to us, but in Paul’s time and place those were fighting words, for a watchword of the era was Kaiser Kyrios (Caesar the Lord). This was the way that one signaled one’s uncompromised loyalty to the Roman emperor, one’s conviction that Caesar was the one to whom final allegiance was due. The revolutionary message of Paul was that Jesus, the crucified Messiah, was Lord, and not Caesar.
Having unpacked that simple phrase, it is easy enough to see now why Paul spent so much time in jail! On the slopes of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, in the second half of the first century, a Christian named Mark had a residence. Mark had been a secretary, translator, and companion to Saint Peter, and around the year 70 Mark composed the first of what came to be called the “Gospels.” Here is the opening line of the text: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ [the Son of God]” (Mark 1:1). Again, this can sound anodyne and harmlessly pious to us, but those too were fighting words. Mark’s Greek term, euanggelion, which we render as “good news,” was a word that was typically used to describe an imperial victory. When the emperor won a battle or quelled a rebellion, he sent evangelists ahead with the good news.
Do you see how subversive Mark’s words were? He was writing from Rome, from the belly of the beast, from the heart of the empire whose leaders had killed his friends Peter and Paul just a few years before, and he was declaring that the true victory didn’t have a thing to do with Caesar, but rather with someone whom Caesar had put to death and whom God raised up.
In April of 2005 the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI came onto the front loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica to bless the crowds. Gathered around him on the adjoining balconies there appeared all of the cardinals who had just chosen him. The news cameras caught the remarkably pensive expression on the face of Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. When the cardinal returned home, reporters asked him what he was thinking about at that moment.
Here is what he said: “I was gazing over toward the Circus Maximus, toward the Palatine Hill where the Roman Emperors once resided and reigned and looked down upon the persecution of Christians, and I thought, `Where are their successors? Where is the successor of Caesar Augustus? Where is the successor of Marcus Aurelius? And finally, who cares? But if you want to see the successor of Peter, he is right next to me, smiling and waving at the crowds.”
Jesus Christ is Lord. That means that neither Caesar nor any of his descendants is Lord. Jesus Christ, the God-man risen from the dead, the one who gathered the tribes, cleansed the Temple, and fought with the enemies of the human race — he is the one to whom final allegiance is due. Christians are those who submit to this Lordship.
"The Garden of Eden" by Lucas Cranach der Ältere, a 16th century German depiction of Eden.
The Temple was everything to a first-century Israelite. It was the center of his political, cultural, and religious life; even more, it was appreciated literally as the dwelling place of God on earth. To get a sense of what Jesus’ provocative action (The Cleansing Of The Temple) might mean in an American context, we’d have to imagine the violation of some combination of the National Cathedral, the Lincoln Center, and the White House. Or perhaps we could evoke the texture of it more adequately if we compared it, in a Catholic context, to the desecration of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple most likely led directly to his crucifixion, for this action not only offended Jews but also alarmed the Romans, who were acutely sensitive to civil disturbances in and around the Temple. What in the world was Jesus doing, and what precisely did he mean when he spoke of tearing down the Temple and raising it up again? In order to answer these questions, we have to step back from this scene and examine the mystery of the Temple.
We have to go back to the very beginning, to the Genesis account of Adam and the garden. The ancient rabbinic interpreters appreciated the first human being as the prototypical priest and the Garden of Eden as the primordial temple. In fact, the same Hebrew term is used to designate Adam’s cultivation of the soil and, much later in the biblical narrative, the priest’s activity within the Jerusalem Temple. Adam, we hear, walked in easy fellowship with God in the cool of the evening and spoke to him as to a friend. This ordering of Adam to God meant that our first parent was effortlessly caught up in adoration.
The term “adoration” comes from Latin adoratio, which in turn is derived from “ad ora” (to the mouth). adore, therefore, is to be mouth to mouth with God, properly aligned to the divine source, breathing in God’s life. When one is in the stance adoration, the whole of one’s life — mind, will, emotions, imagination, sexuality — becomes ordered and harmonized, much as the elements of a rose window arrange themselves musically around a central point. The beautiful garden in which the first priest lived is symbolic of the personal and, indeed, cosmic order that follows from adoration.
This is why, by the biblical telling, orthodoxy, literally “right praise,” is consistently defended as the key to flourishing and why idolatry, incorrect worship, is always characterized as the prime source of mischief and disharmony. The worship of false gods — putting something other than the true God at the center of one’s concern — conduces to the disintegration of the self and the society.
Another way to formulate this idea is to say that we become what we worship. When the true God is our ultimate concern, become conformed to him; we become his sons and daughters. When we worship money, we become money men; when we worship power, become power brokers; when we worship popularity, we become popular men, and so on. How trenchantly the psalmist, speaking of carved idols and idolaters, spoke this truth: “They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see. They have ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell. They have hands but do not feel, feet but do not walk, and no sound rises from their throats. Their makers shall be like them, all who trust in the (Psalms 115:5-8).
I mentioned previously that God’s rescue operation required the formation of a people, and now we see why that people was marked, according to the book of Exodus, as “priestly.” The people Israel were shaped primarily according to the laws of right worship and derivatively by the laws of right behavior so that they could model to the nations how to praise and how to act. Some readers of Exodus and Leviticus appreciate the ethical teachings found in those books but puzzle over the lengthy excurses into the arcana of ritual and Temple practice that they find there.
This is to get things backward from a biblical perspective, for right belief is the necessary condition for right action, not the other way round. Once we know whom to worship, we then know what to do. At the heart of Jewish right praise was the formal and explicit worship of God, first in the desert tabernacle during the Exodus, then in provisional centers of worship in Hebron and Shiloh as the Israelites established themselves in the Promised Land, and finally in the great Jerusalem Temple constructed by David’s son Solomon.
When Isaiah dreamed of all the tribes of the world streaming to Mount Zion, he was thinking primarily of Mount Zion as the locale of the Temple. His hope was that the orthodoxy of Israel would prove compelling to the rest of the nations so that, in time, all the people of the world would come to the Temple, the proper place of praise. The Jerusalem Temple was constructed so as to be evocative of the Garden of Eden. It was covered inside and out with symbols of the cosmos — planets, stars, plants, animals, and so forth — because, as we have seen, the ultimate purpose of right praise was to order the universe itself.
Furthermore, the curtain that shielded the holy of holies was woven of fabrics dyed in four colors — purple for the sea, blue for the sky, green for the earth, and red for fire — for it represented the totality of the material realm that the immaterial God had made. In its temple worship, Israel saw itself as carrying forward Adam’s priestly vocation to “Eden-ize” the whole of culture and the whole of nature.
Now all of this was true in principle, but throughout its history Israel fell into the worship of false gods, sometimes the deities of the surrounding nations, but other times the gods of wealth, power, nationalism, and pleasure. When we read the great prophets, from Hosea and Amos through Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, we hear, again and again, the summons back to righteousness and away from idols and wicked deeds: “How has she turned adulteress, the faithful city, so upright! Justice used to lodge within her, but now, murderers…. Your princes are rebels and comrades of thieves…. The fatherless they defend not, and the widow’s plea does not reach them” (Isaiah 1:21-23); “But my people have changed their glory for useless things … Two evils have my people done: they have forsaken me, the source of living waters; They have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:11-13); and “[My people] consult their piece of wood, and their [divining rod] makes pronouncements for them … they commit harlotry, forsaking their God” (Hosea 4:12). For the prophets, the symbolic focus for this wickedness was the corruption of the Jerusalem Temple, the devolution of the place of right praise into a place of idol worship.
Isaiah expresses this by imagining God himself as disgusted with the sacrifices of the Temple: “I have had enough of whole-burnt rams and fat of fatlings; In the blood of calves, lambs and goats, I find no pleasure. . . When you spread out your hands, I close my eyes to you” (Is 1:11-15). But Ezekiel envisions it even more dramatically, imagining that, because of Israel’s corrupt worship, the glory of Yahweh has abandoned the Temple, forsaking its customary earthly dwelling place. However, he prophesies that one day Yahweh himself will return to the Temple and cleanse it of its impurities, and on that day water will flow forth from the side of the Temple for the renewal of the earth. This is, once again, the Edenic vocation of Israel.
Against this complex background of Temple theology and prophetic expectation, we can understand many of Jesus’ words and actions much more clearly. On one occasion Jesus said in reference to himself, “I say to you, something greater than the temple is here” (Matthew 12:6). This was, of course, still another example of Jesus’s outrageousness, for the only reality that could possibly be construed by a first-century Jewish audience as greater than the Temple would he Yahweh himself.
But this statement also serves as a particularly helpful interpretive lens for Jesus’ ministry. One would have come to the Temple for instruction in the Torah, for the healing of disease, and for the forgiveness of sin through sacrifice. If Jesus is, in his own person, the true Temple, then he should be the definitive source of teaching, healing, and forgiveness, and this is just what the Gospels tell us.
The enormous crowds gather on a Galilean hillside or on the seashore or even in the Temple precincts, but not to listen to the official scholars of the law. Rather they soak in Jesus’ teaching. The woman with the hemorrhage, the man born blind, the man with the shriveled hand, blind Bartimaeus — all find healing, not from the Temple priests, but from Jesus, the one greater than the Temple. And the woman caught in adultery, the woman at the well, Mary Madgalene, and Matthew the tax collector all find the divine forgiveness, but not through Temple sacrifice. They experience it through Jesus. He was not so much eliminating the Temple as redefining it, indeed relocating it, in relation to his own person.
It is fascinating in this context to consider the baptizing ministry of Jesus’ forerunner, John the Baptist. When a worshiper entered the Jerusalem Temple to offer sacrifice or to pray, he would cleanse himself in a ritual bath called a “rnikvah.” John, who was the son of a Temple priest and hence knew this ritual well, was offering a new mikvah, a cleansing in the Jordan, in preparation for a new priest, a new temple, a new sacrifice. When he spied Jesus, John said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). That, of course, was Temple language, designating the lamb that would be ritually sacrificed so as to affect forgiveness. John was telling those who had received his cleansing bath that the true Lamb had arrived.
Now we are ready to understand more adequately what Jesus way doing on the Temple Mount as he turned over the tables and announced the destruction of the Temple. He was not simply a 1960s-style radical, protesting against the political and religious establishment. He was reiterating the prophetic judgments of Isaiah and Ezekiel against the corruption of Israelite worship; but even more than this, he was acting in the very person of Yahweh who had come to cleanse his temple and to make it a place of true adoratio. Even the most vociferous of the prophets wanted only to reform the Temple, but Jesus declared that he would tear it down — and then re-establish it in his own body: “in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).
In these words he was drawing out the logical implication of his earlier statement “something greater than the temple is here” (Matthew 12:6), telling the people that the entire purpose of the earlier temple would be transfigured in him, transposed, as it were, into a new key. He himself would be the place where faithful Israel and faithful Yahweh would come together. This outrageous claim would be ratified, of course, in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, but also, more indirectly, in a curious event just after the death of Jesus.
We are told in John’s Gospel that a Roman soldier, in order to verify that Jesus was dead, thrust a lance into the side of the crucified Christ, “and immediately blood and water flowed out” (John 19:34). Physicians tell us that this is a credible account, given that the lance would have pierced the pericardium, the sac around the heart, which contains a watery substance; theologians have speculated that the blood and water have a symbolic valence, evoking the sacraments of Eucharist and Baptism. But which first-century Jew would have missed the most obvious interpretation: this was the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that when Yahweh cleansed his temple, water would flow forth for the renewal of the world?
Therefore Jesus gathered the tribes and he cleansed the Temple. But if Jesus truly is Yahweh moving among his people, we should also expect him to fight. As we have seen, one of the eschatological hopes of ancient Israel was that God would definitively deal with the enemies of the nation. That in the course of its history Israel had been enslaved by the Egyptians, harassed by the Philistines and Amalekites, overrun by the Assyrians, exiled by the Babylonians, and dominated by the Greeks and Romans was not simply a political or military problem; it was a profoundly theological problem. If Israel was God’s chosen people, meant magnetically to attract all the peoples of the world to true worship, then its subjugation was anomalous, puzzling, and frustrating. Had the people of Israel misunderstood the divine promise? Was God not truly faithful? Therefore the prophets longed for the day when Israel’s God, who had fought mightily for his people against Pharaoh and upon their entry into the Promised Land, would finally settle accounts with the Gentiles.
Isaiah expressed the hope this way: “The Lord has bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations; All the ends of the earth will behold the salvation of our God” (Isaiah 52:10). The uncovering of the arm of the Lord means the full display of his conquering power. A clear teaching of the Gospels is that Jesus was this divine fighter, but what a strange and surprising warrior he was.
“Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so…”
That is also very much the Gospel according to the English Catholic social anthropologists who have devoted thought to our issue: Professor Mary Douglas of London University and the late Professor Victor Turner, who at the end of his professional career crossed the Atlantic to a chair at the University of Chicago.
Mary Douglas opened her study Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology with an essay entitled Away from Ritual, which had appeared in somewhat different form in the house journal of the English Dominicans as The Contempt of Ritual in the summer of 1968. [M. Douglas, The Contempt of Ritual, New Blackfriars 49, nos. 577-78 (1968)] She warns that contempt for ritual forms eventually leads people to take a purely private view of religious experience, from where it is only a short step to the frank avowal of humanism.
One feature distinguishing social anthropologists from sociologists is that the former have a much more formidable, not to say sometimes impenetrable, conceptual apparatus at their disposal. The most easily grasped aspect of Douglas’ essay is her critique of the abolition by the bishops of England and Wales of compulsory abstinence from fleshfoods on Fridays, and this contains at any rate some major clues helpful in unraveling her approach.
The Friday abstinence is the only ritual that brings Christian symbols into kitchen and larder. Taking away one symbol that means something in that domain is, she pointed out, no guarantee that the spirit of a generalized charity will reign (as the bishops piously hoped) in its stead. It would have been preferable to have built upon this weekly ritual rather than to have sought platitudinous substitutes for it. Her explanation, as an anthropologist, for the bishops’ decision to abandon Friday abstinence is not especially flattering.
Owing to the manner of their education — she refers to the embourgeoisement of those whose families were once working class — the bishops were predictably peculiarly insensitive to nonverbal signals. The decision symptomizes this age of the Church: “It is as if the liturgical signal boxes were manned by color blind signalmen.” [M. Douglas, Natural Symbols].
The issue of Friday abstinence raises for her the whole question of the contemporary Church’s approach to ritual — to symbolically intense bodily activity as used in the worship of God. Her deeper argument is that the cosmos — the fundamental order of reality, including social reality — is always seen through the medium of the body, and notably through the kinds and range of actions in which the body intersects with nature and other people. Appealing to the exploration of family structure made in the 196os by her secular colleague Basil Bernstein, [B. Bernstein, Social Class and Psychotherapy, British Journal of Sociology 15 (1964)]
Douglas proposes that children whose families are “personal” rather than “positional” — children, that is, who come from families where common life and hierarchy are minimized in favor of, at least ideally, a unique communication between parent, on the one hand, and, on the other, each individual child — are likely to grow up with ears unattuned to the unspoken messages of ritual codes. And yet, as there is in fact no human being whose life does not need to “unfold in a coherent symbolic system”, those who resist ritual are missing out on something essential to humanity as such.
Such non-verbal symbols are capable of creating a structure of meaning, in which individuals can relate to one another and realise their own ultimate purposes…. Alas for the child from the personal home who longs for non-verbal forms of relationship but has only been equipped with words and a contempt for ritual forms. By rejecting ritualized speech he rejects his own faculty for pushing back the boundaries between inside and outside so as to incorporate in himself a patterned social world. At the same time, he thwarts his faculty for receiving immediate, condensed messages given obliquely along non-verbal channels.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols
This statement, incidentally, tells us much about the new phenomenon of Catholic individualism understood as the systematic disparagement of common structure, hierarchical authority, and traditional liturgy alike.
Among the causes of anti-ritualism, then, Mary Douglas places first and foremost social change. But if social change naturally tends to prompt a new cosmology, a new set of spectacles for looking at the world, then those concerned for the health of Catholic Christianity, which has its own cosmology based on traditional ritual, on the sacraments, and ultimately on the Incarnation, must try to break this causal chain.
The slackening of group and grid whereby change in social patterns, especially in the family, brings about contempt for rite, the lack of strong social articulation in an increasingly amorphous, excessively personalized, individualized, and de-hierarchicalized world: these processes, left to themselves, will tend to produce a “religion of effervescence”, incompatible with a sacramental faith. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the appearance of a euphoric Western European and North American radicalism in the late 1960s, she comments:
This is the sector of society which we expect to be weak in its perception of condensed symbols, preferring diffuse, emotive symbols of mass effect. The religious style is spontaneity, enthusiasm and effervescence. Bodily disassociation in trance, induced by dance or drugs, is valued along with other symbols of non-differentiation. Distinguishing social categories are devalued, but the individual is exalted. The self is presented without inhibition or shyness. There is little or no self-consciousness about sexual or other bodily orifices and functions. As to intellectual style, there is little concern with differentiated units of time, respect for past or program for the future. The dead are forgotten. Intellectual discriminations are not useful or valued.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols
And she concludes:
The general tone of this cosmological style is to express the current social experience. In the latter there is minimum differentiation and organization: symbolic behavior reflects this lack. In the field of intellect it is disastrous.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols
Relating all this to the Church, Douglas maintains that anti-ritualism is of a piece with the “generous warmth” of the “doctrinal latitude” of “reforming bishops and radical theologians”, their “critical dissolving of categories and attack on intellectual and administrative distinctions”. [M. Douglas, Natural Symbols] In her view, all these developments are generated by a particular social experience, that of unrestricted personalism, but the cosmology they promote is manifestly deficient from the standpoint both of the life of the mind at large and more especially that of the Christian intelligence.
In her own idiom, “The value of particular social forms can only be judged objectively by the analytic power of the elaborated code”: in other words, to decode that remark (!), the mediocrity of the spiritual and theological life typically produced by an anti-ritualist Church is the best possible proof of the inadequacy of the form of life in civil society that such a Church presupposes and represents.
The implication of Douglas’ work would seem to be, then, that we shall not get back an authentic liturgical life until we recover a rightly ordered society on the level both of the family, the micro-society, and of macro-society, society at large. A “rightly ordered society” in this context is one that gives due place to common life, hierarchy, and shared authoritative public doctrine as well as to personal freedom and creativity.
Here we can recall how for David Martin it is the error of the ideology of spontaneity not to realize that the second set of these terms positively requires the first. If this thought, that liturgical malaise will not be fully rectified until a Christian society is reinstituted, seems somewhat daunting, we can turn for counterbalance to a last British anthropologist, Victor Turner, who appears to allow a greater autonomy or shaping power to what he calls in the title of a major book “the ritual process”. [V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, 1969)]
In Turner’s view, traditional liturgy, precisely because of its archaic quality, has a power to modify and even reverse the assumptions made in secular living.
If ritual is not to be merely a reflection of secular social life, if its function is partly to protect and partly to express truths which make men free from the exigencies of their status-incumbencies, free to contemplate and pray as well as to speculate and invent, then its repertoire of liturgical actions should not be limited to a direct reflection of the contemporary scene.
[V. Turner, Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas, Worship 46(1972)]
Insisting that the archaic is not the obsolete, Turner maintains that, on the contrary, archaic patterns of action are necessary to protect what he calls “future free spaces”.
In this perspective he finds the de facto liturgical reform of the 1960s and 1970s somewhat incongruous. The reformers failed to appreciate the need of believers for repetition and archaism. He would not have appreciated the emphasis of Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, in his chronicle of the reform, on the “effort to make the rites speak the language of our own time”, [A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, 1948-1995 (Collegeville, Minn., 1990)] even though Bugnini wrote his exhaustive account from a commanding height as Secretary Of The Commission For Liturgical Reform established by Pius XII in 1948; Secretary Of The Preparatory Commission On The Liturgy At The Second Vatican Council (1960-1962); Peritus of that Council and its Commission On The Liturgy; Secretary Of The Concilium For The Implementation Of The Constitution On The Liturgy (1964-1966); and Secretary Of The Congregation for Divine Worship (1969-1975).
Like Flanagan later, Turner held that pastoral liturgists were intimidated by the reigning “structural functionalism” in sociology. For that school, just as ritual structure reflects social structure, so ritual should change as society changes. Turner’s own anthropological scheme, by contrast, privileges significant intervals where we cross what he calls limina (thresholds) in our passage between social experiences. In so doing, we periodically find ourselves separated from our statistically normal experience of identification with some limited group and enter at least for a while a state of what he terms communitas, a form of sociability where our capacity for identification with others is unrestricted by space, time, and even their biological dying, and we enter the experiential continuum he names “flow”.
Typically, ritual stands out from mundane culture in its use of a high language that abounds in lexical and grammatical forms no longer current in everyday speech. Optimally, ritual is a symphony of expressive genres, rather as opera works simultaneously through a multiplicity of art forms in prose and poetry, music and acting. Unlike opera, however, ritual escapes theatricality by the seriousness of its ultimate concerns.
In principle, what Turner says could be applied to the ritual activity of any society, Christian or not, in its religious dimension, and indeed his ideas were in part formulated through fieldwork among the Ndembu in Zambia. But in his essay “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Turner applies these notions more especially to the Western Mass.
The traditional liturgy displayed an essential concern for proper form in the representation of sacred mysteries and the performance of symbolic acts. This was the fruit of popular wisdom fertilized by developing doctrine, and shaped by esthetic as well as legalistic principle. Ritual traditions of any depth or complexity represent the consolidated understanding of many generations. They embody a deep knowledge of the nature of flow, and how and where to break it in order to instill truths about the nature of time, the human condition, and evil. They reveal an understanding of the religious benefit of flow as much for individuals in their interior meditations as for eliciting the spirit of communitas, or shared flow, in congregations at worship.
V. Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Worship 50 (1976)
And he continues:
A complete liturgical system represents an organized system of spiritual and rational achievements. It is a work of ages, not a hackwork of contemporaneous improvisation. In its multiplicity and variety (controlled, nevertheless, by hard-won rules), it exemplifies the many-faceted yet single spirit of mankind at prayer, of homo religiosus. Although each nacreous [vocab: 1: consisting of or resembling mother-of-pearl;2: having a play of lustrous rainbow-like colors.] increment which composes this pearl has been laid down at a particular time, the total liturgy is liberated from historical determinations. When men and women enter the “liminality”, the tract of sacred space-time, which is made available to them by such a traditional liturgy, they cease to be bound by the secular structures of their own age, and confront eternity which is equidistant from all ages.
V. Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Worship 50 (1976)
Whereas, so Turner pessimistically proposes, the “flow” elicited by the reformed Liturgy too often “bubbles on the surface” as a “transient communication”.
A motif running through all these authors is the claim that the theological strategy of cultural modernism is misconceived. Modernism — I use the word in the sense of an intellectual style, not that of a heresy in the doctrine of revelation — is too indebted to those features of the Enlightenment and Romanticism that set those movements at odds with the Catholic Church or at any rate presented obstacles (as well as, to some extent, opportunities) for an authentic ecclesial reform and renewal.
In the realm of liturgiology, if the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century discussion of liturgical revision had been better known and its lessons more fully pondered, if the foundational principles suggested by Trapp and shared by such leaders of the interwar liturgical movement as Casel and Guardini had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, much harm might have been avoided. As it was, and despite the wonderful erudition liturgical scholars brought to the remaking of the rites, liturgists, in Flanagan’s words, “managed to back modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism”. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]
This statement at least makes the point that there is now nothing particularly modern about cultural modernism. It may also be interpreted as hinting that the postmodernist phase into which, in literary theory, philosophy, and a wider sensibility, a significant portion of the Western intelligentsia has now passed could have formed a happier context in which both to transmit and in various discreet and prudent ways to enhance a traditional rite.
Statements of what postmodernism is are generally both elliptic and obscure, so much so that questions of how precisely it differs from modernism, what intellectual virtues it recommends, and whether it contains, at least implicitly, any broad truth-claims about the nature of reality are, at least for the present writer, unanswered. But let me mention on the basis of recent research at Cambridge some ways in which one liturgist writing in a confessedly postmodernist manner would find neglected resources in a traditional rite. Catherine Pickstock, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in her analysis of the old Roman Eucharistic rite, stresses the mobile character of the liturgical “I”, the self that worships. In liturgical action, I am not simply and in straightforward fashion myself: hence the inappropriateness of attempting to fit the Liturgy to the needs of the extra-liturgical personality, to make liturgy “relevant” to the ordinary persona of the self. Commenting on the Fore-Mass of the 1962 Missal, from the prayers of preparation to the Gloria, Pickstock writes:
By means of its dispossessed and impersonating character, its taking on of the roles of other characters thereby unsettling the claim to a secure poetic voice, the worshipping I is designated by the act of forgetting itself, by the forgetting of ordinary identity.
[C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis: Language, Death and Liturgy (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1996)]
And again:
This complex assuming of different voices leads to an interlacing of voices or polyphony at whose centre [here she refers to the opening of the Gloria] are the seraphic voices which are heard, alluded to, and intermingled with the human voices.
[C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis]
Impersonation, she stresses, “precedes an authentic voice”: that is, our Christian persona is formed by the way an extra-liturgical sense of the “I” is modified and extended by the Liturgy itself. “This is a de-centered `I’ which constantly moves from one identity to another, from immanent to transcendent locations, breaking the quarantining of the two worlds, but without ever compromising their difference” [C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis] In a pithy axiom: “In giving (doxologically) we become (ontologically).” In other words, by worship our Christian selves are forged; so worship is not to be judged by what our secular or non liturgical identity may desire or demand.
In her critique of the reform of the Roman rite, Pickstock argues that criticisms of the mediaeval Liturgy by conventional historians of the rite such as Theodor Klauser are misplaced. [T. Klauser, A Short History Of The Western Liturgy, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1979). One may add to Klauser's name that of the Italian liturgiologist influential in the drafting of the new anaphoras, Dom Cyprian Vagaggini, for whom the historic Roman Canon is disunified and illogical: "hardly a model of simplicity and clarity", The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform (London, 1967), 96. But note the criticism of these criticisms by the Anglican liturgiologist Geoffrey Willis, who wrote that they may arise from a "failure to understand the processes by which the Roman Canon Missae reached its present form and even a failure to apprehend the basic principles of its structure": The New Eucharistic Prayers: Some Comments, in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994), 91]
For Klauser the repetitious and sometimes seemingly random structure of the pre-conciliar rite (one thinks especially of the often attacked Offertory prayers) bears witness to a debasement of pure Liturgy, as does the concomitant emphasis on purification and requests for mercy. Pickstock, on the other hand, treats a certain randomness and repetitiveness as reassuring signs of the oral provenance of the Roman Liturgy, intrinsic aspects of a flow typical of speech rather than a written structure whose meanings are “spatially” compartmentalized in discrete sections. In similar fashion, she takes the repeated requests for purification as signs of an underlying apophaticism [vocab: the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not] that stresses our distance from God, not just our sinfulness, and emphasizes what she calls “the need for a constant re-beginning of liturgy because the true eschatological liturgy is in time endlessly postponed”. [Pickstock, The Sacred Polis]
That early fourth-century text so important for the makers of the reformed Roman rite, the Paradosis apostolike, or Apostolic Tradition, ascribed to Hippolytus, being as it is more of a treatise on Liturgy than a Liturgy itself, proved misleading, she thinks, for the program of liturgical recovery, not least in these respects.
Rather like Douglas, Pickstock holds that to reform an ancient Liturgy successfully in radical guise would ultimately entail remaking the entire social order, for earlier Liturgies formed part of a culture itself ritual in character. What the Church could have done, however, was to refrain from assimilating “linguistic and structural forms” from modernity, for these are precisely the elements most inimical to liturgical goals. The “clear and linear purpose” of modern Liturgy is, in her view, sadly of this age of the world and hence in its connotations immanent when compared with traditional rites she characterizes as “a liturgical stammer in the face of the sublime excess of God”.
For a Catholic Christian, in matters of the mind illumined by grace it is theology — sound and solid theology, drawn from Scripture and tradition under the guidance of the Magisterium — that is the queen of the sciences and not the cultural sciences that the writers whose ideas I have been rehearsing represent. That is not to say, however, that these benevolent warning voices can safely be disregarded.
On the basis of her bi-millennial experience, the Church has in the past been credited by sympathetic observers with a definite store of human wisdom. Like her divine Founder, she has known what is in man. The largely independent and convergent testimony of the men and women whose work I have described in this chapter suggests that of late the Church, which must mean here her members, has shown an uncharacteristic deficiency of such wisdom, in part in the conception of the liturgical reform, but even more in its execution. This is something the clergy and laity of the next century will eventually need to address.
Hagia Sophia had been built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian between the years 532-537 AD and was the largest church in the world.
The first concept to be rendered questionable by both this definition [To repeat from the previous post: Liturgy [wrote I. H. Dalmais in Principles of the Liturgy] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order.] and the sea change in sociological thinking charted by Flanagan is the notion of simplicity as a criterion for sound liturgical practice. To the sociologist, it is by no means self-evident that brief, clear rites have greater transformative potential than complex, abundant, lavish, rich, long rites, furnished with elaborate ceremonial. Noble simplicity of rite has been a theme of liturgical reforms since the Enlightenment, as the previous chapter noted. It had not commended itself, however, purely as an anthropological desideratum. It was also regarded as a hallmark of the primitive Church. Though falling outside the sociologist’s provenance, this too is now a matter of question.
The decision of the post-conciliar reformers to return to a pre-Carolingian Roman tradition as earlier and therefore simpler and so better was predictable given the influence on the tradition of liturgical scholarship of the “comparative liturgy” approach pioneered by the South German historian of liturgy Anton Baumstark. Baumstark’s book with that title was both liturgiologically pioneering and enormously successful; it was translated into various languages and enjoyed numerous reprintings. However, the work of F. S. West on Baumstark’s Comparative Liturgy [A. Baumstark, Liturgie comparee, 3d ed. (Chevetogne, 1953); the work's original is French, since it began life as lectures to Bauduin's monks at Amay.] in its intellectual setting has shown that his comparative method was itself drawn, somewhat strangely, from the biology of the German Naturphi!osophen (like Goethe) as well as from the comparative anatomy of such nineteenth-century natural scientists as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. [F. S. West, Anton Baumstark's Comparative Liturgy in Its Intellectual Contex", doctoral thesis (Notre Dame, Ind. 1988), described in P. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Origins of Early Liturgy (London, 1992)]
It assumed as a law, consequently, that liturgical evolution moved from simplicity and brevity to richness and prolixity, even though Baumstark had to admit that one could also see evidence of a contrary movement, a tendency later to abbreviate what earlier had been fuller. As the Anglican liturgiologist Paul Bradshaw, now professor of Liturgy at Notre Dame, Indiana, has pointed out:
This admission that liturgical development might in fact proceed in either direction robs [Baumstark's] classification of any predictive power. We cannot judge a liturgical phenomenon …..’late’ simply because it exhibits prolixity.
[Bradshaw, Search for the Origins]
Nor, a fortiori, can we make an adverse value judgment on some liturgical rite, text, or practice because it lacks that dubiously reliable hallmark of primitive authenticity. One member of the post-conciliar Consilium who found the eagerness to apply the criterion of simplicity quite excessive, the Premonstratensian liturgist and author of a standard study of the sources of the Roman Liturgy Dom Boniface Luykx, signified his displeasure rather strongly by transferring to the Byzantine ritual church where he is now abbot of the Byzantine-Ukrainian monastery of the Transfiguration in northern California. [18R Galadza, "Abbot Boniface Luykx as Liturgist and liturgisatel", in Following the Star from the East: Essays in Honor of Archimandrite Boniface Luykx, ed. A. Chirovsky (Ottawa, Chicago, Lviv, 1992)].
A second concept that Flanagan would see as treated by Churchmen with a marked degree of sociological naivete is that of intelligibility in rite. The notion that the more intelligible the sign, the more effectively it will enter the lives of the faithful is implausible to the sociological imagination. It cannot simply be assumed that people will naturally assent more deeply once they have comprehended.
As Flanagan explains, a certain opacity is essential to symbolic action in the sociologists’ account, so that to attempt to render symbols wholly transparent is, to their mind, a thoroughly misguided proceeding. “[Symbols] proclaim that which transcends the conditions under which clarity through intervention is possible. They embody that which is unavailable to rational manipulation. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] And if total vernacularization of liturgical language and the insistence on translation styles that win comprehension at the cost of banality were too frequently the result of the principle of immediate comprehensibility in the realm of the spoken word, an insistence on the complete visibility of every detail of what was happening at the altar (and hence not only the removal of rood screens but also the eventual victory of versus populum celebration) was its counterpart in the visual realm.
Here, as Flanagan remarks, it was not realized that, sociologically, “veiling”, “marking a distance”, and “tactful reticence” are necessary to reverence. But such terms as reverence, with its connotations of restraint, deference, and awe, soon became prominent by their absence in liturgical discussion.
A third key concept, community, has already been touched on apropos of Gueranger. To Flanagan, the concept of community as such — just like that, without any further qualification — is too vague to bear a specifically Christian meaning. Moreover, it can easily degenerate into the creation of a transiently benevolent atmosphere through (literal or metaphorical “glad-handing” (an eloquent Americanism). What liturgists needed but failed to find was a concept of community defined distinctively as the product of a ritual assembly itself keyed into a mystery exceeding that assembly’s limits.
As the English priest-sociologist Anthony Archer had pointed out in his study The Two Catholic Churches, the preconciliar Liturgy at least imposed a ritual authority on all classes and individuals, [A. Archer, The Two Catholic Churches: A Study in Oppression (London, 1986)] thus preventing the emergence of groups who would seize the Liturgy for their own purposes or of figures who would treat it as an opportunity for the display of their communications skills. It is not really clear whether clericalism, defined as the undue prominence, within an ecclesial community, of the sacramentally ordained, is less apparent or more apparent in a liturgical rite where the priest is constantly face to face with the congregation and encouraged to introduce some at least of the Liturgy’s salient parts, rather than being absorbed impersonally into a ritual role.
A fourth crucial idea, after simplicity, intelligibility, and community, an idea not so much this tune in the Council’s Liturgy Constitution or any official text as in the commentators who took it upon themselves to interpret the reformed rite to the clergy and others, was that of liturgical agency, in other words, the role, increasingly personalized and sometimes in a pejorative sense theatrical, to be played by the celebrant of the Liturgy and other liturgical ministers. Here Flanagan notes that, sociologically, a priest cannot as celebrant present himself at Mass in the same fashion as that in which he greets his parishioners afterward. The liturgical role must conceal or at least detract attention from the person, so as to focus it the more strongly elsewhere.
The liturgical actor wishes to cast glory onto God in acts of worship that somehow minimize or preclude these elements of worth falling onto himself. Like the self, the social has to be present to enable the act to appear, but it has to disappear if the end of reverence is to be realized.
[Flanagan. Sociology and Liturgy]
To the sociological eye, rites work best when they are repetitive and formalized, so that the liturgical actor can practice a certain forgetfulness of self, “playing into his role, as Flanagan puts it, “embodying the possibility of its existence”. In this he may need a certain distance, at least at points, from other worshippers. As Flanagan explains, too unilateral an emphasis on proximity is sociologically misplaced. Rites that do not allow a sense of distance deny to the people, paradoxically, a means of appropriating the act of worship, crippling them just at the point where they could be taking off Godward by a leap of religious imagination. For liturgical actors, though presented within a social frame, have to convey properties of what lies beyond that frame, a rumor of angels.
But where does this leave the notion of participation, which is so key not only to the Enlightenment and Catholic Revival discussions in their different ways but also to that modern movement begun in the years before the Great War as well as, and not least, in the papacy’s gradual acceptance of its proposals in the pontificates of the last three “Pian” popes, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII? For Flanagan, active, outward participation is to be evaluated according to “the degree to which it generates inner appropriation, interior assent”. An English Benedictine liturgist, Dom Bernard McElligott of Ampleforth, founder of the Society of Saint Gregory, had commented on the philology as early as the year of the introduction of the Novus Ordo, 1970.
By using the word “active” for actuosa the Church’s intention has been misunderstood, and generally, if perhaps unconsciously, taken to mean bodily activity; whereas what the Church really asks for is full, sincere, mental activity, expressed externally by the body.
[B. McElligott, "Active Participation", in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994)]
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has emphasized, the term actuosa participatio at the Council included silence as well as speaking and singing and hence disqualifies any activist misconstrual of “living participation” (as Trapp had called it — See his liturgical essays in The Feast of Faith (San Francisco, 1986). Flanagan’s interpretation is, evidently, not unwarranted.
The absence in the postconciliar Liturgy of the atmosphere of intense silence and devotion once so striking to observers raises the question as to whether actuosa participatio, assessed in terms of Flanagan’s criterion, is more advanced or less advanced than it was before the Council opened. Here of course tricks of memory and nostalgia, as well as wishful thinking based on ecclesiastical partisanship, may deceive us. Not every eucharistic worshipper at a celebration according to the Missale Pianum before 1962 was burning with fervor, just as not everyone at a celebration according to the Missale Paulinum after 1970 is manifestly bored. But a German sociologist’s investigation of a large suburban parish in 1960 provides an example of the relatively objective testing possible. As Flanagan comments,
Many of his subjects reported that they came to Mass to find a space in which to reestablish their spiritual equilibrium, the calmness of the rite — a re-iterated notion — giving a context in which they could adjust the proportions of an often confused existence.
[Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]
Nor could one accuse Msgr. J. D. Crichton, the doyen of living liturgists in England, of insouciance toward the new rites, yet he has spoken recently of a loss of reverence which ultimately leads to a loss of the sense of the transcendent God who is the supreme Object of all worship. In a way we are in danger of forgetting what worship is about. It is not just a heartwarming experience for those who like that sort of thing. [J. D. Crichton, Worshipping with Awe and Reverence, Priests and People]
Or, as Father Anthony Conlon, a London parish priest, has put it in a paper read to the International Eucharistic Congress at Seville in 1994:
The overemphasis on active participation, which only conceives of worship in terms of the community realizing its group dynamic through a bias in favor of “doing things”, is a serious hindrance to any understanding of the Mass as essentially a liturgical setting of an historic action of divine mercy and sacrifice.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice in XLV Convenlus Eucharisticus Internationalis, Sevilla 1-13. Vi .1993, Christus Lumen Gentiuci, Euchanstia el Evangelizatio (Vatican City, 1993)]‘
Here then it is not simply a question of failing to advert properly to the divine transcendence in general. More devastatingly, when the Mass is at issue, there is inadequate advertence to that supreme act whereby the divine transcendence engaged itself in Trinitarian fashion for our definitive salvation on Calvary, when the Son offered himself to the Father in the Spirit so that his Sacrifice could be fruitful in the renewed pouring out of himself in the propitiatory intercession of the Eucharist and its foundation in his High Priestly prayer in the heavens.
Too much can be centered on the contribution made by the participants as though that alone made for the efficacy of the Eucharist and less attention — if any — may be paid to the sacramental offering of the great High Priest.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice]
The fact that in many parish celebrations the church building is evidently regarded as simply an assembly point before Mass starts and a place of concourse when Mass ends, in sharp contrast to the former practice when many people made prayers of preparation before Mass and prayers of thanksgiving after it and certainly were not disabled in so doing by other worshippers, points toward the same conclusion. If active participation is rightly evaluated by the quality of inner participation it arouses, then, it would seem, it has not yet succeeded in its task.
What from the sociologist’s standpoint has been overlooked is that, as Flanagan remarks, liturgical forms operate in the manner of icons — opening up a sense of the presence of the divine, not of course by the painterly means of color and line, but through social actions believed to be endowed and intended to be endowed with “holy purpose”.
Flanagan’s overall conclusion is that the Roman Liturgy has fallen into the hands of “convivial Puritans”. For these, procedures for worship are to be kept as simple as possible so as to maximize social relationships in the production of the rite. A ritual minimalism serves to sustain a relaxed atmosphere where all may contribute informally. “Bind us together” is the theme song of a liturgical life where hierarchy and ceremony are treated as deleterious to happy togetherness.
To Flanagan, as to Martin, this is simply wrongheaded.
Informal or endlessly adaptable Liturgy may be beau mais ce nest pas la guerre. The shape of the rite takes on “unfruitful unpredictability”, impairing its claim to constitute, indeed, a public order of worship. As the phenomenologist of religion Rudolf Otto saw at the beginning of this century, an undisciplined rite clamantly [vocab: loudly]asserting direct links with the production of the numinous has little chance of representing the latter successfully when compared with one that humbly petitions the holy in solemn mode.
Such tacit, mysterious qualities of rite, Flanagan continues, are, moreover, what permit its endless replaying. He likens to this the way a literary classic (The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick) can be endlessly reread if it be in a positive sense “ambiguous”, namely, not increasing the reader’s uncertainty about meaning but rather maintaining openness to ultimate meaning (the sacred).
Repeated use, so Flanagan concludes: “generates a passage of growth into understanding the implications of what cannot be grasped, and at the same time fuels a wish to have more revealed from what is concealed.” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The message is that the adhesive that holds rites together has become too diluted to stick, and Flanagan looks to older forms of the Latin Liturgy for assistance when he writes: “Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so .” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]
Fifty years earlier on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 1959, Pope John Paul XXIII had announced the convocation of a general council for the universal Church. And the Second Vatican Council was born.
Reporting on the world of British scholarship, it is a remarkable fact, which has not been as noticed as it deserves, that both Catholic and Anglican social anthropologists and sociologists have tended to take, from the standpoint of their own disciplines rather than simply from personal preference, a somewhat negative attitude toward the mid-twentieth-century liturgical reform that has had so marked an influence on both communions. They have a tendency to think that in the broader lines of its departures from the traditional Liturgy reform may, in certain of its characteristic emphases, rest on a mistake — not doctrinal mistake, but a failure in human prudence.
The idiom of the writers I shall be expounding is not easy, so perhaps we might begin relatively gently with a text written by an Anglican sociologist whose marks are, however, highly pertinent to the Catholic practice of Liturgy in the Western Church today. In Two Critiques of Spontaneity, Professor David Martin of the London School of Economics attacked what he called the “popular local heresy” of that “cult of choice” that wherever possible opts against an order of rules and roles in the name of spontaneity. [D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]
Though this “cult” has some respectable origins – he mentions religious notions of conscience and personal decision, and moral ideas of political liberty and existential authenticity, as well as the Romantic concept of genius and the psychoanalytical ideal of autonomy — the tree that grows from these roots has become stunted and deformed. Basically, one truth, or one collection of truths, has been stressed at the expense of the complementary truths that are their necessary counterpart. The result is a dangerous and destructive imbalance.
Libertarians stressing spontaneity — and Martin makes clear that such figures operate not only in civil society but also in ecclesial society and not least in its worship — ignore the preconditions of freedom in a determinate order of stable rules and defined roles that constitute, in Kantian language, the social a priori of personal identity, the latter’s necessary condition. In their anti-institutionalism, extreme personalists are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting.
“Institutions”, in the various senses of that word, are needful if persons with a definite sense of identity are to exist at all. When all is said and done, man, though he may not be as context-bound as an animal, is not as context-free as an angel. It is then the embedded character of freedom that is ignored by the partisans of spontaneity, and here we must include liturgical advocates of multiple choice, of endless adaptation and unscripted presidential intervention for the establishment of free rapport with others. For such libertarians, “the noumenal self [Martin means the underlying or essential `self'] is already full of experiential potency. Traditional modes are mere automatic transfers: everyman must start afresh.”[D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]
In the critique Martin is rejecting, traditional churches (that is, churches with traditional worship) are regarded as diverting the impulse to authenticity into “silted channels of alienated tradition and super-imposed forms”. Their “received rituals” and “automatic repetitions” are “frozen icons of freedom, stories from which the dynamism has been drained”. What the proponents of spontaneity would substitute for these Martin writes of scathingly as a “total and easy immersion in the All”. As he warns, “total immediacy produces total relativity.” Where each and every chosen experience is regarded as equally valuable, each by the same token may just as well be described as equally worthless.
Writing as a sociologist, Martin asserts the imperative need to defend discipline, habit, continuity, the located and familiar, the bounded and particularized, rules, roles, and relations. A rule, as he puts it, indicates the “existence of a regularity”: something that enables one to anticipate and so to act. Anticipating, acting, knowing where and who you are turn on the due existence of rules. The stability and definition of the latter are generative of psychological health, just as authority and hierarchy, rightly exercised, are necessary for the flourishing of that social health which Scripture calls “justice”. Without rules there would be only what Martin terms “unidimensional determination by peers”, the law of the jungle. [D. Martin, Two Critiques]
Martin regards the ideas of meaningful relationship and significant personal encounter as wholly impotent when considered as bases on which to found the life of groups or even individuals. Why? Because these concepts are virtually without content. “One seeks for the personally significant [but] nothing is signified.” The ideology of the experiencing self, in whose name traditional forms, including traditional liturgical rites, are rejected, is “literally self-defeating”, for beyond a certain point the emphasis on direct experience diminishes the very possibility of experience at all. How constricting, not least experientially, is a liturgy that insists on expressing the experience, the concrete self-understanding, of the immediate group that enacts it.
The experiential illumination of the Gospel depends, Martin considers, on rote and rite. As he puts it: “What is done by rote and performed in ritual provides the necessary substratum of habit on the basis of which experience becomes possible.” And invoking the literary critic George Steiner, [G. Steiner, Bluebeards Castle (London, 1971)] he asks what must it mean for a civilization to hear the Gospels repeated time and time again in the central rites of the Church. Not only, then, are repetition and ritual form not to be set over against authentic identity. More than this, they cannot be counterposed to creativity either. As Martin writes: “The shortest way to creativity is habituation to technical means of expression and steady soaking in an historical context.”[Martin, Two Critiques] And in a daring comparison with the Incarnation of the divine Word, he concludes: “Those who have accepted the conditions of confinement find they are present at a miraculous birth, limited by time and place, fully human, before which even angels cover their faces.” [Martin, Two Critiques]
A fuller account in the shape of a Catholic counterpart to Martin’s criticism is Kieran Flanagan’s Sociology and Liturgy, which marries an Anglo-American sociological tradition to the Germanophone theology of Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy: Representations of the Holy (London, 1991)] Flanagan, an Irishman who is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bristol, rejects what he regards as a consensus of practical liturgists who favor the maximizing of active participation so as to confer a democratic quality on rite and would keep liturgical symbols and actions as simple and intelligible as possible.
Stressing by contrast the ceremonious, formal, and allegorical qualities of ritual as well as what he terms ritual’s “ambiguity”, Flanagan describes the pastoral-liturgical consensus in bald terms as “sociologically misconceived”. It ignores the question of “how the cultural is domesticated and harnessed in a ritual performance that proclaims a distinctive witness.” [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] Emphasizing the functions of ceremony, the opacity of symbols, the complexity of actions, and the qualities of beauty and holiness that give the social form of rite a distinctive coloration, Flanagan echoes Martin in deploring
the rise of consumer-friendly rites and a demand for loose and lax “happy clappy” events full of meet and greet transactions. These trivialize the social, preclude deeper meanings being read into the action, and skate along the surface of some very thin ice where all attention to danger, awe and reverence is bracketed. These are rites of the immediate that demand instantaneous theological results.”
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]
“Liberal” liturgists are in fact dismantling the entire sacred superstructure that rites exist to serve.
The apparent theological strong point of such pastoral liturgical approaches lies, Flanagan remarks, in the notion of the missionary significance of duly adapted rites. A century and more earlier, Dom Gueranger had also spoken of the evangelical power of the Liturgy, but he had seen this as expressed indirectly in its spiritual beauty. Now, however, it is to be expressed directly in a conscious opening of the Church to the world.
Unfortunately, so Flanagan explains, this “delivers Christianity to a school of sociological thought that regards rituals as social constructions shaped to express and to mirror the ideological sensitivities of the age”. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The result is that the rite comes to be seen as the projection of the dispositions of the actors involved in the act of worship rather than as first and foremost the work of grace, a bestowal of transcendence that (to be sure) makes use of human agents for its enactment but does not, Pelagius-like, consist of such agency. In favor of traditional ritual, by contrast, is the fact that the quality of habit (one of Martin’s favorite words) endows liturgical action with “an impunity, an absence of worry about the credibility of what is represented”.
As Flanagan would see things, the Second Vatican Council simply took place too early so far as the history of sociology is concerned. In a retrospective view of the revisionist phase of the liturgical movement in the period from the Second World War to the Council and the subsequent reform, he writes:
Theology inserted the notion of cultural praxis into its approach to liturgy, but failed to secure the sociological instruments through which this could be monitored and understood. The relationship of rite to the cultural was far more ambiguous and complex than had been understood at the time of the Council. The question of the significance of the social came from within theological efforts to renew liturgical form — not from sociology. Only recently has a form of sociology emerged that could offer a means of understanding liturgical operations in a way that is compatible with their theological basis.’
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]
The principal schools of sociology “available” when the Council opened were positivist, empiricist, or functionalist. Only in the course of the 1960s and 1970s did the stress of the late-nineteenth-century German philosopher of method Wilhelm Dilthey on the distinctive nature of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) have its impact on sociology, as sociologists began to realize the need for a sociological imagination if they were to grasp the meaning of social forms for those human subjects who live in and with them. At last they started to ask themselves how belief systems, now taken seriously even or especially if they were religious, succeed in having cultural expression. Alas, it was then too late for such sociologists to be of use to the actual liturgical reformers. The postconciliar Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia was wound up in 1975 through absorption into the Congregation for Divine Worship, that year coinciding more or less with a real turning point in the anthropology of religion as new schools of thought began to emphasize meaning, not explanation, the non-rational as well as the rational, and ritual’s transformative power: all of which led to a new respect for the formal, ceremonious ordering of rite, the very thing that avant-garde liturgists most abhorred and the liturgical reform itself preserved only in severely truncated guise.
Yeats’ rhetorical question “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?” was suddenly grasped in the academy as it ceased to be understood in the Church. And Flanagan suggests (albeit cautiously) that the consequent mishandling of the modernization of rite accelerated the decline of such traditional churches as his own.
He contrasts the impoverished concepts used to “deliver rite to the cultural” — simplicity, intelligibility, adaptation to “modern man” — with the subtle description of the Liturgy given by the Dominican liturgiologist Irenee-Henri Dalmais in his contribution to Canon Aime Martimort’s four-volume study The Church at Prayer.
Liturgy [wrote Dalmais] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order. [I. H. Dalmais, "The Liturgy as Celebration of the Mystery of Salvation", in Principles of the Liturgy, vol. 1 of The Church at Prayer, ed. A. G. Martimort (London, 1967)]
The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.
I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.
Just the point at which to introduce the comparison with Mary: Hopkins characterizes this other mother by two features of her role as Catholic Christianity sees it. The first is her divine motherhood, by which she became the Theotokos or God-bearer, giving welcome in “womb and breast” to the “infinity” of the person of God the Word, now become what the medievals called Verbum abbreviatum, the “abbreviated Word”, inasmuch as his divine hypostasis, from the moment of the Annunciation onward, acts as the personalizing subject of an instance of human nature.
Thus is the Godhead of the Son “dwindled to infancy” in the Christ-child — without, for all that, suffering the loss of those divine attributes which make him the foundation of the universe and of the moral law. The role of our Lady at the Annunciation is so essential to Incarnation robustly conceived that it already justifies, in classical Christian vocabulary, the exalted language of channel of divine grace, which, in point of theological fact, Hopkins will use for her under a second distinct heading.
Drawing on a doctrinal tradition, which has never (yet) attained dogmatic status, he affirms that she “mothers each new grace / That now does reach our race”. The inclusion of the words “each new” here goes beyond what Mary’s divine motherhood by itself could lead us to say; it is a confession of Mary’s “sub-mediation” of the grace of Christ to individuals here and now. Were we in any doubt on the matter, Hopkins himself dispels it for us in a sermon:
Now holiness God promotes by giving grace; the grace he gives not direct but as if stooping and drawing it from her vessel, taking it down from her storehouse and cupboard. It is in some way laid up in her.
The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)
So “Mary Immaculate” — a title which had surged in popularity through the ex cathedra definition of the all-holiness of the Mother of God in 1854, delighting those who followed the via Scoti, “Scotus’ way” — is “Merely a woman” and yet her “presence” and “power” is “great as no goddess’s / Was deemed, dreamed”.
This is a deliberately uncomfortable paradox, and Hopkins is positively willing us to ask whether he has not mired himself in contradiction. Can Mary of Nazareth, someone whose being is altogether finite (as the being of the Word incarnate is not), have so divine a role without calling into question her finitude or God’s infinitude or both? Hopkins resolves the issue by reimagining this role as that of a pane of glass which has no more — and no less — to do that letting the Light shine through it. She “This one work has to do — / Let all God’s glory through”, and even this is feasible only by the divine antecedent will and covenant: “God’s glory which would go / Through her and from her flow / Off, and no way but so”. St Bernard, a major articulator of this tradition, remarks simply in his sermons: “It is God’s will that we should receive all graces through Mary”. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo VII de Aguaeductu.
The following lines (35 to 45) develop one of the loveliest titles for Mary in Latin devotion: Mater misericordiae, the “Mother of mercy”. Hopkins finds a functional identification between Mary and mercy: We are “wound / With mercy round and round” just as we are by air, and that is because we are also so wound by the “wild web, wondrous robe” of Mary as it “Mantles the guilty globe”.
There are two implications. First, the mercy which is first and foremost an attribute of God, both in Himself and in the saving economy whereby the Holy Trinity reaches out to us, is more palpably itself — that is, so far as human experience is concerned — when God wills that mercy to be mediated by Mary.
Human beings respond more fully to the mercy of God when they receive it from the hands of a mother. Hopkins as believer experiences the Mother of the Lord not merely as an occasional dispenser of divine mercy but as that very mercy: “more than almoner, / The sweet alms’ self is her”. (Of course that must be understood in terms of the interrelation of finite and infinite discussed above.) The second implication can be stated more shortly, as Hopkins himself states it: “men are meant to share / Her life”. It is an appeal to Christians who benefit from Mary’s attention to make some effort consciously to reciprocate.
In lines 46 to 72 Hopkins restates the problem of a confession of the Blessed Virgin’s universal mediation and develops, this time at more length, an explicitly Christological attempt to solve it. First, he reiterates the omnicompetence of Mary’s gracious sub-mediation: “She holds high motherhood / Towards all our ghostly good” (emphasis added). It is her “part” to “lay” — allay, or lay low — concupiscence, man’s potentially fatal trend, even after baptismal regeneration, toward evil, the “deathdance in his blood”. This is the heart of what the ascetic tradition calls holy warfare, and nothing could be more pertinent to our final salvation. So, once again, how can a mere creature receive this role? Hopkins proposes an answer in terms of the mystery of Jesus Christ, the one and only (non-subordinated) “Mediator between God and men” (1 Timothy 2:5).
Any “part” Mary has consists, in one or another way, in disposing us to be the “place” where Jesus Christ comes to be in us. She has no part that will not be “Christ our Savior still”. He continues to take on — mysterically — substantial life in the faithful, as once he did biologically in the womb of her who is, in the words of ancient litany, the “Faith of all the faithful”, the mother of all believers. Hopkins cries out with wonder — “O marvelous!” — at this truth of mystical theology, namely that Christ makes of his members “New Nazareths”, “New Bethlems”.
And he finds here the key to the puzzle of Mary’s universal task in our regard. Her role is precisely to “conceive / Him, morning, noon and eve” in us. And this explains how her mediation is both utterly comprehensive and yet altogether without derogation from the mediation of Christ. Hopkins emphasizes that this is no abstruse theory, since it concerns the ultimate issue in practical reason: my personal raising to nobility of stature. What is at stake is “New self and nobler me”. In his essay “On Personality, Grace and Freewill”, Hopkins called the divine action in sanctifying a person and bringing him to the condition of deification “a lifting him from one self to another self, which is a most marvelous display of divine power”.[The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)] God appropriately does this through Christ by way of Mary, since the unique Mediator is “Both God’s and Mary’s Son”.
Hopkins would hardly be Hopkins if, thinking about air and its translucence, he did not look up at the sky. And so he bids the reader, “look overhead / How air is azured”. On a fine day, the air above us is shot through with blue, “sapphire-shot”, but that can hardly be said to “stain” light, to detract from its purity. Well, so it is with the grace of God when it comes to men through the hands of our blessed Lady. So far from distorting the real relations of God, man, and the redeemed creation, this Marian impregnation enables them to stand out with greater distinctness. “The glass-blue days are those / When every color glows”. And he adds that “this blue heaven / The seven or seven times seven / Hued sunbeam will transmit / Perfect, not alter it”. Hopkins had worked out this aspect of the controlling analogy of the poem in a sermon given at Leigh in 1879:
St Bernard’s saying, All grace given through Mary: this is a mystery. Like blue sky, which for all its richness of color does not stain the sunlight, though smoke and red clouds do, so God’s graces come to us unchanged but all through her. Moreover she gladdens the Catholic’s heaven and when she is brightest so is the sun her Son.
Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)
As Hopkins declares in the poetic version of this claim, if some change in the light conditions on earth does have an effect in terms of “Bloom breathe” — encouraging the opening of buds into blossom, then that “one breath more / Earth is the fairer for”.
Without that translucent yet protecting atmosphere, by contrast, our earth would be unlivable, such as we can assume planets of thin atmosphere too close to their own suns to be. In an extraordinary disruption of tone, producing an infernal effect worthy of Milton (lines 94 to 102), Hopkins imagines how, if air did not “slake” the sun’s “fire”, the heavens would be transmogrified into a “grimy vasty vault”, the centre of the solar system a “blear and blinding ball / With blackness bound”.
And lest we miss the point he rubs it in. That is how men would look at deity were it not for the Incarnation: “So God was god of old”. The “limbs like ours”, which the humanized Word developed from the body of the Virgin, are what endear the dreadful God of the cosmic spaces to us. Were his glory — his majestic radiance — shown us “bare”, either it would “blind” our minds or at least “less would win” them. The interposing hand of Mary, through which the glory shown in Christ is showered down on us “leaves his light / Sifted to suit our sight”.
The poem ends with a personal appeal from the poet to the Mother of Christ to be with effect for him what he by his words has declared her to be in principle for everyone.
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