CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART ONE – The Crumbling City of God

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

PART TWO – God, Creator through Evolution

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

PART THREE – The Advent of Man

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

PART FOUR – God the Environer of Man

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

PART FIVE – The Disorder of Sin

Chapter 13

PART SIX – Jesus Christ, Saviour and Redeemer

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

PART SEVEN – The Kingdom in the World

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

PART EIGHT – Christ and Man Today

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

POSTSCRIPT

CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART ONE

THE CRUMBLING OF THE

CITY OF GOD

The Book is available from Faith Keyway Trust http://www.faith.org.uk

CHAPTER ONE

Thoughts about the Times

If anything constant remains in our days of recurring crisis, it is that the certainties have gone out of life, out of the life of the individual, and out of the life of society.

It is a heartbreaking realisation.

The feeling of insecurity is bad enough, but much worse, especially for the young, is the feeling that life has no purpose and no direction. Unless life has a worthwhile purpose, and ideals have a meaning in the end, a man finds that he has no heart for great works and hard works.

The end of this century will see many things in dissolution; there is no sign yet that what is put in its place will be built on love and stable order. War ravages our lives, and the noisy propaganda of accusations and hatred. Fear deepens in intensity, while men speak of peace and say they long for it.

It will not come.

There can be no peace yet. Peace is the harmony of good order. Good order is the membering of man in ready acceptance and honest love. Behind our wars there is a fury worse than the sword, though many do not understand what it is about. It is the fury of thought—the pen is always more deadly than the sword.

Breakdown is coming in any event from agnosticism and lust within Western society, but it threatens to come much more quickly, and with violence, from the philosophy of Marxist Atheism which now controls one-third of the world. This system of thought is not just a matter of economics, it believes that struggle is of the very essence of life, and runs through the whole course of evolution. It believes that ‘right’ is proved by ‘might’, because the progress of Nature cannot be frustrated, progress is inevitable. Therefore, truth is proved by achievement, facts are the very judgements of history itself, and history is Nature in evolution, and Nature cannot make mistakes on the big issues.

We cannot be sure that dread of a scientific war will be deterrent enough to prevent it. This may prove to be so, but there is a unique temptation for the leaders of Marxist States in the world of today.

Men have said before that their war was the ‘war to end wars’ and this was a mocking illusion. Today, however, it is really possible to believe it. The planet has grown so small, and human societies are so interlocked that philosophers who believe that war is necessary to progress might judge that one more terrible war would bring about the synthesis of the whole world. Despite the appalling ruin, they might think it worth it. After all, it would be the last war.

It can be argued that scientific knowledge is too widespread for our scientific civilisation to be wiped out, destroyed to the roots. The great Marxist nations spread from Europe to the Bering Strait, and down again to the Indian Ocean. It is possible to believe that so vast a unit could survive even nuclear exchange. The temptation, and the Chinese are obviously toying with it, is very great because one thing alone is certain—that the victor would be he who could retain some basic power to command and organise within his own territories. If he could ensure this, he would have at his feet a world conquered beyond the conceit of an Alexander to conceive.

For the Marxist it is all a matter of faith, and of the manner in which you interpret your beliefs.

Who possesses such great faith that at the press of a button he is willing to move mountains into the seas and blast the nations with fire come down from the heaven?

The question matters, because the driving force of militant Atheism is based on ‘Faith’ not upon scientific demonstration. There is no possible experiment that can be performed to disprove the existence of God! Marxism is a scientific Faith which believes without doubting in the necessity and inevitability of progress, and that through struggle the evolution of the Communist World State must come. If it must come, then it will survive the destructive powers of mankind at this present stage in history.

The Chinese appear to have the simple, bold faith of all peasants. They would invoke the certainty of history, and the almighty providence of the Dialectic—every bit as infallible and authoritative as the God who is ‘out’. They would believe with a full and devout heart, and believing, press all the buttons, release all the germs.

The Russians are not so sure; they have lived with the vision of Heaven on earth for some fifty years now, and that is the trouble. The strong and simple profession of the Faith comes from lips frozen with doubt, and scepticism drags the feet of the faith that moves mountains. The Russians, or at least some of them, know quite well that the personality of man is not fulfilled and ennobled by Marxist-Leninism or by any other law of nature. The system will not stand by itself, and unless there is some ultimate beyond the Dialectic, man is irredeemable.

Nevertheless, the danger of some cataclysmic ‘act of faith’ has not passed away. The weakness of the culture which confronts them in the West, its uncertainty and selfishness, sharpens the temptation to take the big risk for leaders who believe that history shapes the deeds of men, not men the deeds of history.

For the West is a confusion of empty arrogance, humbug, and sensualism divorced from creative ideal. It has long been led by its social prophets, the rationalists, the agnostic, and the scientific humanist so-called, deep into the interior deserts of the soul, where their silly tracks have meandered incoherently for a while before they petered out, as they must. Nobody knows anything for sure, and so nobody creates, nobody commands with ultimate authority, and so anarchy abounds. Where there is no seer and no vision, the people perish.

Now, as men begin to die of thirst in the desert of their own souls, these prophets round on the Church, and abuse her for having done so little for mankind. Let her now bring forth waters in the desert! This is the whining of worthless little souls. Gentlemen, get on with it. You have taken over from the grey-faced Nazarene. It is several generations now since you crucified him, and gloated to see him hang. Why blaspheme because he does not come down from the Cross for you? Did he the first time?

The dead stay dead, don't they?

Whom do you say Man is?

Nobody needs to tell the man in the street that the certainties of Religion by which he used to live have fallen away, and nothing is given to replace them. He also knows that mankind is on the march again in history, armed with powers of destruction far beyond his moral stature to control. He does not care to think what may be there at journey's end, but in his heart he expects no better end from men whose lips spew hate, and lies, and double-dealing. This is the old recipe, not the formula for heaven on earth.

Poor laddie, man in the streets of every nation! It is always the brave new world they promise you, and you run after the piping in every generation. You never learn that the Kingdom of God is within you, in case there is a price to pay. Because you do not want to know, you pay the price harshly enough, and never so miserably as now.

You liked to listen to the high priests of Reason, and chuckled to see the parson squirm. It was nice for a lad to make up his own mind about his life and morals, cut the chain and padlock off his private, and be finished with ‘sin’ and those Ten Inhibitions.

‘Man is made to the image and likeness of God,’ said the simple catechism you learnt as a child,...’and this likeness to God is chiefly in my soul.’ You liked that bit.

Nothing was more true than the old-fashioned catechism, as man, proud and adventurous, probed the hidden structure of matter, and won secret upon secret. Certainly this was no mean achievement, because we had not been given any of the blueprints behind this work, we had no key that might unlock the riddle of the meanings and patterns of being that might be woven out of these elemental energies.

Is it not a strange thing that men who think, and plan, and teach, and love in relationships that are full of meaning and of ends in view should find a natural harmony between the way their minds are made, and the natures which are built up the one upon the other in the processes of evolution?

These natures of evolution, from the atom to the primates, and from these to mankind, have their ‘law’ of being, their constitution. They could be expressed in a ‘formula’ if one wishes to see it that way. The things that control and direct them and govern them have their ‘formulas’ as well, and the more complex forms of being are built up on the natures and laws of these lower ones. Truly, in the universe all things are ‘members one of another’. No matter how complex it may be, through elemental energies and its organisation into cells and organs, the higher being which is so made up has its own unity, its personal meaning. A man is more than a formula of elemental energies. We have to see and admit a unity running through all these relativities of being and its patterns.

A man can only recognise this pattern of meanings and unities through what in him we call ‘mind’. That centre of unity and meaning within himself, through which he focuses everything else. Moreover, only the best and most gifted, with much sweat, toil and concentration, with many a mistake and many a headache are able to do it at all!

Surely it is strange that matter makes ‘sense’ in this way, in man's way of meanings when there is no God, nor any control and direction behind the organisation of these raw energies!

Poor laddie, man in the street and son of God what's more, you have proved your birth lines indeed, but something is lacking in you. You are rich and nobly born, but mean and low of spirit.

Yours, too, is the fatal price which brought Satan falling from heaven, the sad paradox the poet philosophers of ancient Greece have sung, the tragedy of gods and men led on by ‘hubris’, the arrogance of personal pride. At the end of their song the glory that was the Mind of Greece, which men had built so high, crumpled under its own weight, its foundations rotted by pederasty and agnostic pride.

Satan's fate is good enough for you, sonny boy, the fate that dulled the mind of ancient Greece is good enough for you. The intellect of Greece was no mean intelligence. Those men groped in the dark of pioneer ignorance, they had no laboratories and instruments, but yet they groped and divined the very atom itself. It may be your distinction to do more than bring down a civilisation, to disintegrate the planet by the flash within the atom. They did not get that far.

‘There is no God’—of course not, but you are his son. History repeats itself, those ancient masters of culture knew it too—’for we are also his offspring’. Paul of Tarsus flung it back upon their souls when he preached Jesus Christ, and him crucified (Acts c. 17, v. 15, et seq.).

The inheritance

But you are being robbed, sonny—son of Man. There is another entitlement in your birthright you have hardly thought of until today.

To be the son of God does not end with knowing; you have the right to do and to command. If you want, you can read your rights in that ancient creed you threw out with the Ten Commandments: ‘I believe’, it runs, ‘in God the Father Almighty’.

You see what I mean? You are not made in the image of your Father's intellect alone, but also of his power. So do as you like my son, you are of age now. God does as he likes, so why not you?

Take no notice of his silly instructions and prohibitions, the fruit of the Tree of Life is worthwhile is it not? That which hangs on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is just as good for you. In fact, it is the same thing. Believe it, laddie (though all Faith is absurd, of course), believe your chosen serpents when they tell you so, because you want it, crave for it, and are going to have it regardless. Now that's a sensible sort of Faith my son!

Pull from the Tree of Sin known in experience a fruit more dazzling by far than the apple which rotted your parents in the dawn of man's creation!

‘And the serpent said to the Woman—No!

you shall not die the death.

For God does know that in what day soever

You shall eat thereof,

Your eyes shall be opened,

And you shall be as gods, knowing Good from Evil. ‘

Now that you have the fire that lives at the heart of the universe within your hands, what hurt may you do now to the earth, and the trees, and the seas, and the skies ..................... to the families of men spread out like grazing herds before you. What hurt to the planet and its sun and moon, to the galaxy beyond, even to the uttermost bounds of space and time. Who or what shall be safe from you now? Let all Nature know its King and shudder before the terrible, lawless, bloody-minded son of God. It did the same, you remember, on the day Christ died, the man who called himself the Son of Man, and also the Son of God. Strange coincidence!

But I believe you are just a little frightened of yourself? You have your problems. With the power that frames the cosmos and the living cell within your understanding, how are your lewd and careless societies going to endure, —those witless ‘democracies’ that burble along their winding sewage flow? Men to say what they like, do and think what they like, mould the souls of children as they like, —with this almighty power in their hands? .................. children will have to be trained, indoctrinated in social responsibility, conditioned to accept an overriding world authority, etc., etc.

By whose authority are they going to obey? What unanimous principles will you teach them? How far down in man does the root of selfishness and coarseness go?

Can you reach the root tip anyway? Your Science with the capital letter exalts the brain and the standard of living, but what controls the brain, a conditioned organism for sure, like every other brain in nature? You do not know. Many of the young your agnostic humanism has produced are more ruthless and cynical than cavemen. You see, you do not want to know it, but sensuality and lust for its own sweet recreational sake makes a man cowardly, shallow, and very selfish. If it is so, there is nothing you can do about it, because there is nothing that you will do about it.

So the shadow of Big Brother looms paternally over the wild and foolish family of mankind. A Scientific Overlord, who will make, and do, herd and plan and breed the farmyard of intelligent but neurotic apes. He will have power to threaten dissolution of all life on earth (not baton charges and tear gas now!) by pressing a button in his high ivory tower. The churls will not be allowed to move revolt against the Prince Incarnate of Social Consciousness. Gone with the wind the mounting shouts for ‘freedom,’ the childish games of the stone age past.

What shape of an evil god, what AntiChrist showing signs and wonders of science, so as to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect, is coming to term within the womb of Eve who has eaten of the Tree of Sin Experienced, and whose eyes have been opened, not to life but to death, son of man?

Nemesis

Round upon God, man in the street, like the television seers who are the modern priests of Baal for you. Tell Him there can be no God when such dreadful, wicked things are allowed to happen etc., etc.

You crunched the fruit of sin with zest enough son when the earth was solid under your feet, the sun shone in regular course and the rains fell alike on just and unjust. You liked the fruit of sin well enough before the tree was fully mature, when it gave its simple harvest of arrogance and lust. In those days the knowledge of good and evil was still a sapling on the earth.

You liked it, and when God said not to have it, you hustled him out of the City, and hoisted Him upon a tree to die, bawling for freedom, and no King but Caesar.

But now that the heavens and the earth are moved, and stars may fall from heaven... it is all his fault!

Little trees grow bigger sonny, and the fruit gets more mature. Knowledge was with man in his first beginnings on the earth, it would grow with time.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, is the tree of Experienced Evil. It sprang from seed when man first opened his eyes, and knew his conscious self. It would grow as man grew, and man's power to know evil and to choose it. The fruit is more mature today, and the poison is more potent, but bear in mind that if it is lethal now, it killed even in the beginning of creation.

You seem to find the dawn of the brave new world cold and cheerless. Stop and think, you petulant upjumped Ape, that if every man is going to be his own God Almighty, then you must certainly all end up under the dictate of your Bigger Brother. Once you deny God you will make a man to his image and likeness that men may survive at all. You will make him to your own image, selfish, arrogant, cruel, and your god your Satan will prove.

It is not sense to boast one half of the likeness of God in you, (though of course he does not exist) and then curse him for the other portion the inheritance of power. Your Father in heaven is no wispy abstraction, man-in-the-street. He is Being son, all the vibrant power and pride of Life is in Him. He is Mind and Might in one. A Father cannot be dismembered in his offspring. You share both these attributes of God, son of God, whose name is Man.

There is the sorrow of it. First the petulant revolt and then the lost awakening in the wilderness of the child who said he was the only orphan in all creation and ran away from home. You will find no path and no peace until you come to know that you are not just an upjumped Ape, but a fallen Angel also.

Can any man fill them with bread in the wilderness?

If by some flaw of evolution men are irremediably shallow, brutes of manifold lust and primitive moral equipment, a brilliant brain is a menace to them.

It is better to be honest, —’Nature’ whoever that personal abstraction may be, —has made a mistake. To evolve an Ape too clever for the environment to control, can only break up the balance of beings upon each other. It may break up the very environment itself with the dissolution of this planet.

Man must expect to suffer the annihilation by selection which is the end of every form of life out of harmony with its environment.

Still, it is a pity. Will ‘Nature’ do any better next time? Can she evolve an animal without sense of pleasure or of pride? It is hard to see how, it would not survive.

Well now, can Nature link the pleasure and the pride of power to functional laws of being, as a ‘must’.

This can be done, in fact this is the present rule for all forms of life below mankind.

Can she make this animal a free thinking and free willing creature, and at the same time have the pleasure and the pride linked with necessity to functional law and duties?

No: that is a contradiction in terms, and there you have the paradox of man.

Yet unless pleasures and prides are locked with necessity to functions and duties with an intrinsic balance between them, there can always be greed, selfishness, and breakdown in the free-thinking and free-willing animal.

Gentle reader, forgive the use of an uncouth word in polite society, it means there can always be what a primitive priesthood calls ‘Sin’. So man has no right to exist at all. It is a sorry end to the best brain in matter. The paradox of man when he is compared to other life and its natural balance by intrinsic environmental law, deepens into the irresolvable.

No solution will be found unless the last determinant of Matter is Mind, and Mind is not Matter but that which controls and directs Matter.

Improving the race

You can teach a child, that is why they go to school. Observe that they do not learn their lessons from ‘the environment’, a child does not find the wisdom and skills proper to men built into the structure of his brain, as other animals do. ‘Why daddy, why mummy?’ he asks and from mother's knee to Research Centre this principle of enquiry unrestricted to the needs of organism is the same.

Can you give a man inner strength, stature of soul, communicate to him firm standing wisdom? Unfortunately, no. This is what the atheists of our time will not face, because they do not want to know. It would go down to the ‘worm i' the bud’ the lie against life which is deep down in their own hearts.

At birth a man turns upon his mother's breast, and she feeds him, then his father is the ‘breadwinner’ for him, but feed the secret centre of a man's being where his personality is centred, his ideals lie, and his constancy proceeds, no man can do this. Here the probe and the microscope are useless, the professor too, and even the High Scientist who rules the Eugenics Centre.

Yet it is here, where men differ the most from each other irrespective of ‘brains’ or education that we must look to find the determinant of a man, and these categories cannot be assessed mathematically or chemically, and they will never be.

The sciences of matter have proceeded from man, they are less than his personality therefore, and can never provide his control, direction of fulfilment. We do not live by taking in each other's washing.

Science gives increased resources and plenty to mankind, it would give immensely more in a world order which was politically and socially more enlightened. The standard of living goes up, also the standard of scientific ‘awareness’ of other men and the problems of the planet, but at the same time the insistence upon the most primitive drives and pleasures of organism increases. If life becomes one great phallic symbol for the average man, can shallow, egoistic selfishness be avoided? Let a man examine his own conscience on the effects of his way of living, and be honest!

As science waxes, and its wealth, men grow more starved and uncultured in that energy of soul which is the ‘inner’ man, and in that depth and responsible dignity from which he brings up his wisdom and his mercy to his brother. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Whatever the solution to the mystery which is man, it is certain that the evolution of civilisation and scientific power does not achieve pari passu the complementary moral improvement by which evolution matches the achievements of the human brain. This is a sad discovery of the Russians, who are loathe to face the fact, but with all respect to Lysenko—you cannot build the new and saintly Communist Man by environment and indoctrination. Something more than exhortation is needed. It is written in an out-of-date book, ‘I sowed, Apollo watered, but God gave the increase’; the teaching and the example are earth and rain, but in man life is quickened only by the touch of Life.

If man were true to the processes of evolution in the manner that Teilhard de Chardin and Sir Julian Huxley would have it, then the evolution of moral stature must be a concomitant of the process. What other form of life has failed to develop a suitable higher response to environmental law, concomitantly with the enhanced versatility of its being?

If matter and spirit are one and the same, then man's determination and law of life can be found within the one order of the universal environment: God is irrelevant. Therefore it must be within the power of bread and the pressure of other men's personalities to deepen the response of the individual and to create a willing, joyous, socially unselfish new order. Unfortunately this position is absurd, and in his heart every man knows that he is free, and no man on God's earth is his God.

Nevertheless there ought to be a law of life which belongs naturally to man, as there is for every other form of living being. The natural pedigree through a process of evolution has been the same as theirs, subject to the same interplay of organism and selection by environment.

It is not as if the brain of man were not made to be determined by stimulus and to give a fitting response. It is obvious that it is.

Yet at the highest level of seeking for destiny, life-law, niche in creation, that brain of man is not controlled by any necessary law which comes from the harmony of its environment or makes mankind harmonious with the rest of natural environment. This is the real paradox of mankind.

However man is a restless and insatiably ‘seeking’ and ‘asking’ animal, he looks for guidance and fulfilment, and presumably in doing it he uses that brain of his, which is deterministic in nature and origins?

He seeks what he wants, —and often never finds, —from a wisdom and a law which is centred, a unity of knowing and loving which is focused, that is to say, from a personality. He does not even try to seek it from instinctual law built into the structure of his brain and being.

So something in man is strongly free without being vague and indeterminate. That something which is free and asks questions, is free also from the prepatterned behaviour which is the characteristic of material organism, and must be the same in the organism of man as in other physical life.

It may strike panic into the breast of all pious believing Agnostics, but it looks as if there is something in that notion of a ‘soul’ in man... a principle of centred knowing, loving, more desiring, which is not of matter, but the control of matter. If the soul were that which controls and directs in the personality of a man, and matter that which is controlled and directed, then there would be a way out of the paradox, and the tunnel, for mankind. Yahweh, God, ‘He Who Is’ The Holy Spirit, would be the real Environment and Law of the human spirit of man.

The twentieth century has condemned the soul of man to wander parched in a desert. It has lost its way through running wilfully after blind guides and prophets of pettiness. They made man in their own image and likeness, their vision is the hallucination of their own arrogance, and their love the prick of their selfish passion. They are far removed from centred vision which poised in the sweep of one vast equation all the creative laws of evolution.

Mind is that which controls and directs substantially and of its nature: Matter-energy is that which is controlled and directed substantially, and of its nature by Mind.

The seat of man's personality will be found, and found provably to be a control which is not material, and is not derivable from the development of material energy however we imagine that energy to be constituted. This ‘control’ governs the brain of man in its higher functions, and is itself determinable by a Personality, a Unity which is intelligent and centred as itself.

The failure to relate body and soul accurately in the processes of evolution is a cardinal misfortune in the work of the late Père Teilhard de Chardin, a mistake which vitiates indirectly the various other aspects of his synthesis.

There exists a way in which man can be one with the process of evolution and its crowning glory, and at the same time a ‘special creation’ without juggling with words and meanings. Likewise the cosmic equation of energies in movement and meaning which is the universe, becomes intelligible if it is centred upon a Mind which is not identified with the material flux itself.

By means of such a concept working through a theory and a philosophy of evolution, it is possible to turn the tables upon the Dialectic of Marxism, a dialectic which asserts the historic and scientific necessity for the evolution of man and human society, but cannot give any account of the primitive equation itself, or why the enormously complex end product of evolution should be a necessity of the organisation of energies whose primal being cannot possibly infer it in their own actuality.

If the poising of the initial equations of energy from which we ourselves derive contained the future history of man as a necessary potential, then that flux of energies is only intelligible if it is mathematically correlated to an existent Unity which is also Mind.

Both East and West must retrace their steps. The West from the agnosticism which is a denial of life and being itself, and leads always to sensualism without purpose and eventual despair; the East from the sterile self-sufficiency which brings with it hypocrisy and a bitter cynicism, and where the creative wisdom of God is mythologized into the virtues of ‘Big Brother’. Both are lost in different latitudes of the same desert.

Can we get back? Deserts are without tracks, and men so sick of soul are sure to wander into some other false way?

If man is not an orphan in the universe, but has a Father, perhaps He will come seeking and show a path in the desert and water out of the rocks. It is a hope well worth the entertaining.

CHAPTER TWO

The Decline of Christian Belief

Where shall we look for the root cause of our discontents? Must we conclude that the life-springs of that Christian culture which still is the nominal stay and inspiration of the culture of so many peoples have begun to dry up?

However it has come about, perhaps through our own faults, perhaps through some organic ageing of its vital energies, the river of living waters has fallen very low. The stream runs now so shallow that it no longer supports a full life in that ‘City of God’ the commonwealth of Christendom which for two thousand years has enlarged along its banks, drawing the life of the spirit from this water of doctrine and moral precept.

For the community loosely called ‘Christendom’ has not been able to maintain that homogeneity of culture which is the necessary foundation for an enduring civilisation. Cohesion of this sort is not implanted by treaties and acts of conquest. It grows out of certainties of the intellectual and moral order concerning the meaning of life and the destiny of man. These beliefs become organic to the structure of the societies men integrate simply by living together.

Like the measure of yeast in the meal they permeate every aspect of life, and leaven according to their properties the ideals of men, the quality of their living, and their organs of society from the family to the state.

The Agnostic society

The true cultural dominant of the Western world, itself a main province of Christendom in numbers and influence though nominal in its Christianity, is not religion at all, but Agnosticism.

The Agnostic society has been the real cultural dominant of Europe for a century at least, perhaps since the French Revolution. It is rapidly coming to the end of its tether, reacting into one or another of the forms of secular totalitarianism which are the most likely replacement in the modern world. The most formless and futile of all the estates of culture, it is the dead end of the spirit to which an order based on subjectivism and egoistic ‘Rationalism’ must always come.

The Agnostic Society never grows in history straight from its own roots, it would not be viable, it is alien to the whole law of Nature. It can exist only as parasitic upon a society possessed of firm beliefs which underpin the edifice of personal and social living. It takes hold when such a society though standing, is already in poor health.

The authoritative ideals and beliefs which it finds in possession is the ‘Establishment’ so to speak which the Agnostic society breaks down by its own negative intellectual ferment, but it replaces nothing. It is of the essence of Agnosticism as a philosophy of life that ‘you cannot prove it’.

In the words of an eminent critic and writer defending homosexual practices in present controversy, there are for instance ‘many normalcies of love’ and this helpful principle applies elsewhere. There are no certainties of natural reason in the Agnostic culture, because every man is his own arbiter of what is ‘nature’ and what is ‘reason’ and death ends for all and for ever the tiresome debate. The only certitudes are the empirical working expectations of the mathematical sciences of matter.

As a cultural form it is selfish, and unctuously hypocritical, because some idealistic or scientific excuse must always be found for convenient self-indulgence or dereliction of distasteful duty. To the minds and souls of youngsters it is especially cruel. At the end it crumbles to a heap of dust, like the dry rot of the human spirit which it is.

The intolerable vacuum, the feeling of purposelessness in life, the acute demoralisation of the young, the disappearance of personal integrity as the ‘norm’ evaporates, the malady of ‘angst’ which readily infects lives lacking creative purpose.....................all this and more breeds the inevitable social reaction.

Positive reaction

The immediate reaction may be merely pragmatic and positive, without a true philosophic basis. Such a phase is passing. We have had examples in the history of modern Europe, when a dictator thrown up by the armed forces takes over control. This must occur because the armed forces of a state are its last reservoir of law and tradition, it is physically impossible to organise a police or an army without law and tradition. This phase cannot last forever, the pen is greater than the sword, and the sword cannot long be maintained without living authority of which it is the servant not the master.

In our own times we coexist with two more philosophical and enduring aspects of the reaction against anarchy, —Marxism and its racial variant Nazism. These are more than contemporary manifestations of the spirit of AntiChrist which the Christian must anticipate in every age. These are new ‘heresies’ denominations of the heresy of Secular Authoritarianism, religious heresies too for all their atheism, because they claim that all power is given to them in heaven and on earth to mould the souls of men, and to determine the destiny of mankind in all respects.

Heresies of this type may be expected to arise on the dying body of society in its final agnostic phase, for the end of any self-sufficient ‘Rationalism’ of the human mind can only be doubt and despair. Marxism however is something more than an angry reaction, it is an alternative religion to Religion all the more dangerous because powered by a philosophy of science and of evolution which is inspiring and largely true.

The Absolutist who sweeps away the decadent Agnostic has a brother in society. He is the Scientist, he is probably agnostic in his personal philosophy of life, in the West at least, but he too aches for authority. He has sitten in the chair of the theologian, and found it fits him right well.

He aches to turn the whole of human society into a vast animal farm subject to his own messianic experimentation. He will provide any personal infallibility otherwise lacking

He may be dishonest enough to plead for the venture that the most intelligent phase of human evolution is failing from a lack of intelligence adequate to control the powers of man in the world today. This is pseudo-idealistic humbug, and one learns to expect it all too often from gentlemen who profess scientific Humanism. The glaring lack is not scientific intelligence nor its application, but the diminution to near vanishing point of the pre-scientific spiritual qualities of love, wisdom, and personal self-control. In these categories the scientific Messiah can be more lacking than the generality of mankind.

At this extreme of the reaction the power of the state is ‘God’ but the abstraction called ‘State’ means nothing. The reality which the abstract name formalises is real and is incarnate in the decisions and authority of individual men. The authority of the Divine Intellect is arrogated to the dictate of a party line, whether the authority is attributed to ‘science’ to ‘social consciousness’, to ‘Omega-point’ or something else.

At present the fiat rests with politicians and soldiers, but it could just as well pass to an oligarchy of superior scientists of uncommon understanding. In so far as Marxism begins as a reasoned reaction against Liberal-Capitalism it can be traced back directly to the Protestant Reformation and the principles which underlay it. The immediate triggering cause however of the authoritarianism of the age, which is not Marxist in every place, has one principal and entitative reason: the failure of the intellectual leaders of modern society to provide for mankind a truth which is certain and which satisfies fully the spiritual nature of man. This is a satisfaction which has nothing to do with science, for God is the environment of the soul of man, and this is the environment which energizes in a man wisdom, love, and self-control. For this environmental determination mankind is looking always, and is hungry for it even when it does not know what it seeks. For hope of this throughout history men have followed after the false prophet if they did not find the true as a bird may follow a decoy to its death. The need is in the very nature of man, and nature does not make needs which are vain.

Because the Agnostic cannot even begin to fulfil such a need from his own principles of thought we can be sure beyond argument that of all the creeds which compete for the mind and hearts of men his is the most empty and the most hopeless.

1 THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTIANITY:

INERRANCY AND THE INTEGRITY OF THE CHURCH

The decline of Christendom as a culture may be landmarked with convenience from the great Protestant split. There is no call for pretentiousness in saying as much, the seeds of trouble to come can be found ripening in much of the Nominalist philosophy of the late Middle Ages, and in the moral scandals which disfigured so much of the life of the Church.

The Reformation as it is rather sadly miscalled, marks more than a cultural decline, as might be expected it is a landmark of decline in the spiritual belief which underlay the cultural aspects of Christendom. The Divines of the new Protestantism swept away many of the tenets of the Faith as mere human accretions, but the denial of one in particular was to open the door directly to agnosticism in religion and lead finally to religious collapse.

This tenet, the most important for our immediate consideration, is the denial of the place of authentic, authoritative tradition in the life and constitution of the Church. The rejection of the final authority of the hierarchy in the definition of basic matter of faith and morals, is the rejection of the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Church as the voice of Christ teaching through the ages. The defect has become more painfully obvious with time.

This point is crucial and its significance is still not meditated sufficiently in the tentative initiatives of ‘reunion’ of the present time.

An abstract, merely nominal authority in teaching, arising from a vague personal interpretation of ‘the abiding spirit of Jesus etc. etc., ‘ which differs from individual to individual, from one religious community to another, and contradicts in one age the solemn belief or practice of an earlier age, this is an ineptitude in Christianity, however pardonable in other religions. It makes God Incarnate in the image and likeness of human opinion, whereas the reason for the Incarnation of God is to remake the mind and heart of man to the image of God, which is Christ. It renders meaningless, and implicitly denies, the most daring and challenging claim the world has ever known in Religion.

That which distinguishes the Christian Church from other faiths is that its founder and teacher claimed to be God in Person, enfleshed as man for the life of men. The gift of Christ to mankind must include the supreme authority and effectual inerrancy that God alone can give.

If the claim of Christ is true, and the mission of the Church is one and the same as his when he was on earth, then the same divine, not merely human certainty in the truth, the same authority In reply to contradiction before the scribes and pharisees, must be present effectually in the very constitution and characteristics of the Christian Church. It is not enough if it is said in name to be there, but is frustrated in its effectual exercise because it has no organic, constitutional centre.

There was no hesitation in the assumption of authority by Jesus Christ when he was on earth, and a Faith which claims a sanction for its world mission which is uniquely and literally divine because "all power is given to Me in heaven and on earth" must have the honesty to face up to what this claim really implies.

If a man does not believe in the literal Godhead of Jesus Christ, he is not a Christian in the historic meaning of the Christian Faith, excellent man though he may be. Similarly the claim of the Christian Church to fulfil and surpass all the religions through which great souls have done their best to mediate God to mankind, cannot begin to be valid unless God lives and teaches in her with the same characteristics as when he walked in Galilee and Judaea.

He will not be any more vague or less a challenge in his Church than he was to Israel two thousand years ago, when many went back and walked with him no more, because ‘this saying is hard and who can hear it’ (John 6.61 & 67.)?

Inerrancy a consequence of Godhead

Even in the essentials of doctrine, many find the claim of inerrancy revolting. It is dismissed as impossible in the first instance, and arrogant as well. This is the more likely to happen if instead of the principle of inerrancy in the constitution of the Church of Christ, one writes the principle of infallibility.

In the context of the nature of the Church, the word means precisely the same, but it arouses emotional thinking which censors any profound appraisal of the issue. When men dismiss the infallibility of the Church as beyond credence, do they stop to ponder how very glib is their acceptance of Christ as God; are they not giving their basic creeds a notional rather than a real assent?

The issue of inerrancy in the truth until the end of time reduces to the credentials of the Incarnation as credible at all. It centres on the very possibility of an organised brotherhood of men which while human and frail can still be, until the end of the present economy of creation on this planet, an adequate vehicle for the passing on unchanged generation by generation of a divine Revelation. Christianity is not the revelation of a spirit only or an attitude, it is the manifestation in the flesh, in the medium proper to men of a Living Teacher, Lover, and Saviour who is God in person. The apologetics of the subject are not for dwelling on at this stage, but if a man will be a ‘Christian’ in the historic meaning of that confession, he cannot escape the logical involvement of his Faith if he ponders it in its depth.

Arrogant such a claim can never be. This could be the obvious reproach if inerrancy in the truth were claimed from man's wisdom or man's holiness. But who would be so foolish as to make such a claim?

The saints themselves would be too weak and too ignorant to ensure this, and they would be even if God were able to guarantee heroic holiness in every bishop that succeeded the Apostles until the end of the world. History does not bear out any divine guarantee of the inevitable sanctity of either priests or laymen, inerrancy and sinlessness are not the same thing. The first belongs to the office of Christ in the Church teaching as her ever-living Head, the other relates to that intimate and impenetrable relationship of the individual to God by which a man abides in his love, or passes perhaps for ever beyond the outermost orbit of love and obedience centred upon him.

Inerrancy in Faith

The claim to abiding certainty in the truth can be only what it is in fact, —the most magnificent and humble of all public acts of faith in Christ as God, notwithstanding the fallibility and sinfulness of man. The true apostles of Christ carry at all times in their status and character the royal warrant that accompanies their commission: ‘he that hears you, hears me, he that despises you despises me, and he that despises me despises him who sent me’. (St. Luke 10.v.16). The reverence which is attached to the office of a bishop who teaches and rules in the Church Catholic, carries as a counterpoise public witness to an undoubting faith, —and this requires courage. The witness is to a divine guarantee that it is the living word of the Word made Flesh which teaches down the ages through Peter and the twelve, and that once uttered definitively cannot contradict itself or be changed to still the storms of human contradiction.

There is no ‘Christ of Faith’ except the flesh and blood Christ of history. The flesh and blood which was born of a woman and which hung on the Cross was real, and was God's own. So the words and acts of Christ living in the Church are real and are his own. They are acts of faith and acts of history, acts of men, but in the last analysis acts of God.

‘I have many things to tell you,

but you cannot bear them now.’

said Jesus Christ to the handful he had gathered around Himself on earth,

‘but when he who is the Spirit of Truth is

come upon you, he shall teach you all truth,

and bring to your minds whatsoever I have

said to you.................

He shall glorify me, because he shall receive

of mine,

and shall show it to you...............’ (John 16.vv.12-14).

The right to ‘define’ is the right to develop in the understanding of Christ's work and teaching, according to the promise outlined above. It is the right to grow from birth to maturity. Neither in body nor soul, in work or invention do men attain at once to the perfection of the principles contained in their beginnings. Fullness of understanding grows as the Church is consolidated among the nations, she achieves it as she experiences her own articulated being in the life of her members one to another.

New needs and subtle heresies, new progress in the arts and sciences of mankind, the prayer and pondering of great souls in every vocation which members the mystical body of Christ, all these further the organic development of doctrine, and give men a further insight into its rich extension and perfect unity.

The clarification of the truth ‘once committed to the saints’ that is achieved within the Church by the Spirit of Truth in prayer and pain often, and ‘with unutterable groaning’ is not an extraordinary act of God, but part of the daily life of grace by which she grows up ‘into the perfect man, to the measure of the age of the maturity of Christ’ (Ephesians 4.13).

The ‘twelve’ used to come to Christ with their questions and he would answer them, not always with fullness, because as yet they could not fully understand. So today he answers in his Church when men come to him with new perplexities and contradictions. If the subject matter of doubt is basic to belief or right living, then it is not a matter of speculative theology but a challenge to the positive bearing of what is held and lived from Christ. The answer in that case must be one with the same Truth of God that was uttered through the mouth of Christ two thousand years ago. The truth and the authority of good men alone, does not suffice to justify the economy of the Incarnation of God.

Without inerrancy dissolution unavoidable

Deny the power of Christ to maintain throughout history the infallibility of Divine Revelation, and its bearing on new knowledge and new forms of evil, and the way is thrown open to human interpretation, with all the doubt, loss of authentic tradition, sectarianism etc., that human weakness must entail. These have occurred in plenty as the legacy of the much vaunted Reformation of faith and morals. Had it been the economy of God to guide and lead mankind through the private and interior intuitions of the Holy Spirit as the final norm of revealed truth, then sincere men should have found unity and agreement as the fruit of their intuitions. Manifestly they did not.

An organised community which is a working, teaching, ministering society cannot be long maintained without a ‘tradition’ and the Church of Christ is such a community. If the tradition, both as a body of doctrine and as a living spirit in work and ministry is the personal foundation of God, then the tradition must be guided and guaranteed by God, and outlive the inspiration and guidance of any one individual.

It does not take us very far to deny the inerrancy of the Church in the name of humility. If there is anything taught and done at all by an organised community, a Church, in the name of God, then there must be authority de facto even in the most presbyterian of Churches. Very real authority passes to men of dynamic personality who teach with emphasis, deny with emphasis, and disagree emphatically with each other. Irreversible effects follow their decisions, effects which just as certainly commit the Religion of Jesus Christ as if they had claimed from the beginning to possess the authority of a prophet and a personal guarantee against error from Christ himself. What sort of ‘humility’ is this really in the most precious things of God?

After four hundred years it is possible to see how much in this mentality was to the image of man. Vagueness in doctrine, chaos in morals, disunity in confession without hope of redress, because without final authority, this has been the accompaniment of the human ‘reformation’ of the Church not growth in positive doctrine.

This is the natural end product of the initial agnosticism concerning doctrine which in reality is concealed behind the personal dogmatism of this type of reformer. It runs parallel to the agnosticism which is the end product of so-called Rationalist philosophy itself, and at root is one principle with it, —a mendacious self-sufficiency which makes every man his own God.

It can become a crumbling into the very vaguest of Deisms, and where through ignorance of its import and loss of a true tradition of interpretation the Old Testament comes to be found ‘shocking’ or ‘irrelevant’ it ends by leaving men who are ex officio leading Christians with less than Abraham possessed at the attainable beginnings of the era of Messianic hope. Do men really comprehend what it means to be God when they have reduced the consequences of the Incarnation to this nebulosity? —’honest to God’ do they?

Once the basic certitude has gone out of the Faith and the moral practice of the Christian Church, nothing can ever put it back again, Christianity is finished.

The authority on which it is put back as doctrine could not be greater than the authority by which it was taken away; the opinion of men that is to say, or the violence of men.

The credentials of hope

If there is to be any hope of renewal, any new vision, any further synthesis of religion and reason to match the needs of this age, it must arise as a development of theology which is potential in the wholeness of the historic Christian confession. To make this possible at all, the required integrity of Faith must be capable of being found somewhere in the world. We must find the ecclesiastical authority which affirms this integrity, defends it with authority as essential, and requires it or her members in conscience. If there is to be any hope coming forth from Christianity, these requirements belong at all times to the basic, imperishable constitution of the Church.

There is uniquely one place and centre in Christendom where this requirement can be found as a constitutional claim, and where the claim has been exercised effectively in gain and in loss. Beyond saying this much, there is surely no need to labour the matter further.

2 THE DILEMMA OF LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY

A man may exclaim at once that the alternatives before mankind are always unenviable. The libertinism of the human society which has no true law of life and no binding authority in conscience must give way to authoritarianism. Does one only plead then that the authoritarianism of the theologian is better based than that of the scientist or the politician?

This is not a treatise of Church and State. Nevertheless the issue of an overriding authority in human destiny deriving immediately from God and from the nature of Revelation by God must not be burked.

The nature of man, the basic rights of man, the destiny of man, these do not derive from the state, nor may the state interfere with their definition. The destiny of man derives from God directly, and the provision for man's nature and destiny in its highest principles derives from the activity of God directly. This provision is consummated in God personally, in Christ, and it is ministered through the Church of Christ

The authority of Church and State are not one and the same thing, though ideally they are mutually complementary. It is possible to separate them, even to divorce them, but not possible to give to either a sealed-off existence in which the other has no legitimate interest.

A man is one individual being, by nature a social creature. All his thoughts and works are bound up in a unity. His ideals, and the quality of his personality permeates all his social influencing of his fellows, even his very concept of society and of fulfilment in living. Therefore the life of religion and the authority of religion will compenetrate all spheres of human expression sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. This is an intolerable thought to the freethinker, but let him not be a humbug. His own philosophy, its claims, its impact, and its principles are just as all-pervading, and if he is in fact wrong, just as deplorable. It all depends on who is right about the meaning of existence.

If God is the ultimate authority in human living, and if Religion is the expression of his sovereignty, an answer in principle can be suggested to this dilemma of theological authoritarianism.

The unique nature of Divine Providence

There can be no escape from this dilemma, unless there exists a law of life for man which is substantial, proper to his nature that is. It must also be in a broad sense of the word his connatural ‘environment’ in human existence. If such a relationship exists, we would expect that through it all the faculties and attributes of human nature will find their full play and yet be harmoniously balanced. That after all is what the environment of ‘nature’ does for other life.

From the intellectual nature of man, and from his free will, any such ‘life law’ controlling his destiny will need to be final in its goodness and in its norm of truth, a man needs to be certain about these if he is to give an unqualified assent of the mind.

Therefore such a law of life may not be a human system of ideals and sanctions, a myth that is to say, either scientific as in Marxism, or pre-scientific. Neither will a mere working convention of his own suffice for very long, it is from the slipping of pragmatic sanctions that Western society is suffering at this time.

The ‘Law’ and history

Men cannot give their full assent of mind and heart to anything which they know well is lacking in ultimate authority, neither can the unsure organise and energise the power of a man's personality. The more unified the world becomes, the easier communications become, the higher the standard of education, the more apparent this principle becomes. It is even now the reason why the Agnostic society heaves into collapse the more it increases the conditions which led to agnosticism. Men know that the substitutes for religion, and the formulas for ‘Religion without God’ are so much nonsense, because they have no authority beyond the minds of their moral authors. If a man believes that his ‘right to be happy’ calls for conduct which is selfish and anti-social, he is not going to be deflected from his course by the opinion of another mind no better than his own. If throughout history men have been willing to disobey God Almighty, even with mental torture, they are not likely to pay more attention to Sir Julian Huxley.

Throughout history the prescientific myths have always been religious in character, and have been an effort to rationalise a divine sanction. It is the divinity that men want, the ring of absolute authority, not because of the sanction of pain, that is a shallow interpretation of the force of divine authority, but because of intellect, because of knowledge.

God knows what is true and good, because God is the author either of all creation, or in narrowly circumscribed religions, the God invoked is at least the author and father of the local society and civilisation: the divine mind, as mind is the norm of the good and true. This is the approximation to the truth which men have always sought throughout history when they have looked for God and recognised their God.

In the case of religions which were narrow in scope, their authority was saved by the illiteracy and stability of the peasantry, and by a self-contained religious and social system which permitted no real contact with the world outside. In this way the man-in-the-field was preserved from doubt, and the social system found peace and security, often with the addition of offering the king as the incarnation of the divine fatherhood of God. Within its narrow limits it worked, and without it mankind would not have possessed those stable civilisations of antiquity whose treasures are the delight of leisured agnostics. It worked not because it was wholly true in any one of these civilisations, —though the Christian will make a special claim for the lineage of the Sumerian culture which proceeds through Abraham to Jesus Christ, —but because the claim and the answer offered approximated to a basic human need, the need of a good and a true which is assented to without reservation, and so long as the assent was truly given, something of value was achieved, with whatever gross errors and defects.

Part of history

From what has been said above it will follow that if there is a law of life, a way of life for mankind which is proper to his nature and his destiny everywhere on the planet Earth, then this ‘Law’ will operate as part of the individual and social history of mankind, It will run parallel with the nature of man, it will not distort, even less will it contradict, the human nature of man.

Man is a social individual, and such a Law, such a ‘providence’ for mankind, since it is a part of his individual and social destiny, will have its connatural social expression, and also a social tradition in place and in time. It will have its teachers, its rulers, its doctrinal expression, and its tradition of belief and of conduct. If in the last analysis it is of God personally, it is hard to see how this can possibly be denied, for there is no other conceivable way in which it can be the human expression of a divine continuity of spiritual ‘culture’. To deny the social expression of this spiritual ‘Law’ is to make it less natural and human to man than those tendencies of his nature which explain the formation of society at all, and through the formation of society the finding of a fulfilment which men could never attain in splendid isolation.

If we grant the existence of such a social life-law for mankind, —and we may as well call it a ‘Church’ at once, for it will be such, —then there will always exist the possibility of a misuse of power. This possibility exists in the human use of all power, from the primary unit of the family, to the organisation which is the State, and even the Church. Men are still free in all these communal relationships.

There will always exist a danger that divine sanction may be arrogated to human opinion and policies, there will always be possible scandal, when the lives of men do not measure up to the status they possess, when the moral prestige of the priesthood is used to procure evil or to cloak it.

‘It must needs be that scandals come’

There will never be an age in history when the ‘Church’ for such is the common name of this organ of God's provision for men, is free of all blemish and human imperfection. There will be some periods when the dynamism of human sin reaches an explosive climax even in the Church, and much more so in the State, so that men crucify again in the body which is his Church, the Master who lives and teaches within her. It will be done manifestly and publicly as it was on Calvary, it is not possible to deny the full play of evil to the free-will of men, neither can the coarsening effects of the disorientation it causes be eliminated from human nature.

Nevertheless there does exist within the true, but only within the uniquely true Economy of Christ the unique solution of the intolerable dilemma in which truth is lost to vindicate the freedom of the spirit, or the dignity of the free soul is sacrificed to preserve the integrity of truth. The dilemma was solved in the first instance on the Cross, and this manner of solution has been persistent in Christian history.

The solution in Christ

A dispensation of God for the life of the world will be more than a code, it will be a life, a nourishing and fostering of the soul through the living presence and activity of God. This is the Christian ‘state of grace’. Through this inward influence of being from God to the soul, the spirit grows in its own actual powers, just as the seed cast into the ground grows in its own vital powers by the touch of the sun. A man grows through grace in wisdom, chaste love, and integrity of personality.

In brief, the whole man grows in the likeness of Christ, and in this perfect balance is found for any man the fullness of truth and the fullness of freedom together. He learns to be free as a son of God, but not as making liberty a cloak for licence.

Most of us do not make sufficient progress, through meanness and cowardice of soul, to justify in ourselves the point that will follow, but in so far as a man makes a humble and persistent effort to live by the measure of Christ, the heart of the argument applies to him as well.

The operation of this ‘Law’ or ‘divine economy’ by which Christ makes provision for mankind through the Church, raises up of its own dynamism the ‘saint’ and the ‘martyr’ within that organic ‘body of Christ’. One can say that this dynamism of the life of grace is the natural provision within the body of Christ of the antibody against the virus of error and scandal.

Thus the principle of positive reform, or development, or of true and balanced protest when necessary, is always with mankind through the life of the Church herself.

The likeness of Christ in this renewal and healing

It is the ‘saint’ who teaches, witnesses, and lives with a fearless integrity the fullness of Christ according to his measures and office in the Church, in the likeness of Christ. Like Christ he, —or how often has it been she! —will protest, perhaps with indignation, as Jesus Christ reproached the scribes and pharisees of his day. Yet all the time this is done within the unity of the ordered, organic, membered obedience of the Body Spiritual of Christ, who cannot either physically or mystically be divided against Himself.

In the final analysis it is the ‘saint’ who is the true reformer because the true type of Christ, who forbade to strike with the sword of division and was made obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross. The saint, not the loud-mouthed worldlings whose words of pride and defiance lie like dead leaves along the library shelves of mankind, is the lonely guarantor of the rights, the freedoms, and the dignities of man.

The rebel, and in particular the heretic, who receives so much adulation in this irresponsible age, mutilates the truth men had received of God, and rends the seamless garment of Christ's charity besides. He cannot take it, cannot drink of the chalice that his Master drained. The heretic burns with the anger of man which notoriously does not work the justice of God, and brushing aside the lesson taught to Peter, draws the sword and slashes with it. In his own day, and in man's way, he is triumphant.

Then, over slow years of history the bough he has severed from the True Vine withers in its inward life, rots, and decays into the poor dust of religious agnosticism. The wound remains a lasting gash, and also a lasting reproach upon the body of the parent tree.

The saint also knows how to act with decision, but if like his Lord he must deliver himself up to those that judge him unjustly, he will go to his passion, never so much a branch of the Living Vine, nor so fruitful, as when he lives in the likeness of the crucified Christ. Even should it have been priests and churchmen who crucified him in his own day, from the grave he will rise again and prevail. In the case of the greatest, it is the Church who will canonize him, exalting him to her altars as one who filled up in his body what was wanting to the Passion of Christ in every age, as a champion of all that was best and most divine within the Church, through the power and gift of Jesus Christ.

The heedless, sin-soaked world is never so poor, or so much in trouble in its self caused crises as when there is a dearth of saints to love it without cause, redeem it in blood, reclaim it in sweat and tears no matter what the venture cost. This analogy with the Incarnation and with redemption through love and pain is bold and clear. The light it can shed on the meaning of redemptive sacrifice and the place of the suffering in this, cannot be pursued in this chapter.

Christ the norm of ‘Man’

This, the Christlike life of the Church, is the guarantee that neither the libertinism nor the authoritarianism of men will ever destroy the provision God has made in himself for mankind. It is tantamount to saying that from the Divinity which lives and ministers in her all days even to the consummation of the world, the Church must without fail bring forth as need requires a saving truth, a saving good, a saving protest, a saving vision. It is part of one and the same life of grace which covers both personal grace and grace of status, that the rulers of the Church recognise and accept what is truly of God. In the nature of the case, and history is full of examples, it is very largely from the bishops of the Church that there will come forth at any given time the greatest of the saints for the needs of the Church and for mankind that depends upon her.

When we come to the end of the matter, mankind is saved because the Church cannot be either a presbytery or a democracy, nor God a constitutional ruler limited by parliamentary powers. He who is in his Being the norm of truth and good is not subject to human judgement. The majority suffrages of men are admitted to be fallible, but they proceed in their effects, as has been said before, as if they were infallible, for their effects are irreversible in terms of loss and error. On the mount of Calvary the Son of God and of Man did not enjoy a working majority. Because of this, Christianity has been made possible.

When democrats and free-thinkers have run amok in religion or in natural philosophy, when all flesh has erred, and there is no track and no water in the desert of man's own making, then whatever in secular affairs is best safeguarded by ‘democracy’ and whatever is precious in the Faith revealed of God is rescued by men and women who image divinely in their spirit the norm of ‘man’ which was revealed of God and made flesh in him for man's salvation.

So the guarantee of the ‘existential’ integrity of the Church, the balance in her life between truth and human liberty is not different in principle from her ‘essential’ integrity, which is her inerrancy in fundamental teaching. It is God who is the guarantee and the guarantor, we will not find a tangible security on earth, as men give gold against a contract. Our security is faith in Christ from who we possess those ‘most precious promises’ not of this earth: through the ages in every crisis we look for it in hope to Christ, who vindicates his promises in every age against every evil challenge; the life from which comes forth dynamism and new vision for every man in every age is charity, that wisdom and love in one which is the gift of the Holy Spirit revealing to the Church the things that are Christ's own.

If the guarantee of the Church were something more prosaically human, and of this earth, or the claim less unreservedly divine, Christianity would not be the abiding and historic manifestation of the mission among men of God Incarnate.

Nothing less than what we claim for the nature and authority of the Church makes sense of the Incarnation of God as an economy among men that fulfils above all expected measure the working and revealing of God which was from the beginning of our race. Nothing less than this justifies the historic claim of the Christian Church to teach all nations with an overriding spiritual authority, because ‘all power is given to me in heaven and on earth’. If there is to be any reunion of Christians it cannot be on any basis of some ‘agreed syllabus’ which is a common denominator of the varying beliefs of all denominations. It must be a coming home to the Saviour who taught without defect at all times, in the glory of Palm Sunday, and in the lonely disaster of Good Friday. There need be no sense of humiliation, for the truth that has been preserved has not been preserved by human wisdom, human strength or human goodness, but by the grace and power of God alone.

If there is to be any arresting of the decline of Christian belief, and any resurgence through a new vision of creation, in which the Faith will crown both philosophy and science, it can be given only through the same integrity of the gift of Christ, inerrant and sedulously guarded as the Deposit of Faith in every age. It will grow out of the fullness of what men treasure already, it cannot be fashioned from the broken scraps of an agnostic Christianity. This is the meaning and the measure of THE CHURCH.

CHAPTER THREE

The Impact of Science

1 ‘GALILEO’ AS A LANDMARK

If we take the Reformation as the landmark of the division of Western Christendom, and the beginning of the decline of Christian belief in the countries of European culture, somebody is bound to point out that the ‘affair of Galileo’ is the natural landmark of the breach between science and theology which has become a further disintegrating influence within societies still nominally Christian.

The analogy is less accurate than it looks at first sight. The theological dispute rent the whole fabric of the life of the intellectually critical and progressive West, manifesting itself in civil as well as spiritual warfare. Through the various ‘denominations’ of Christianity, these divisions of the spirit were taken over into the societies of the New World in the same fully formed manner as they existed in the Old World which was medieval Western Europe.

The Galileo affair did nothing so dramatic, nor could it. Modern science was in its first infancy and in no condition to be formed into denominations through rival philosophies of science. This has happened since, but the phenomenon dates from about the middle of the last century only, when the true equivalent of a cultural revolution broke out in the wake of the Industrial revolution, first in parts of the West, and then in Russia.

In the theological sphere Catholicism and Protestantism both offered themselves as self-contained syntheses of spiritual salvation, and tended to create their own cultural atmospheres, while influencing each other more than either knew or would allow.

Science did not offer itself as a synthesis of human destiny in the time of Galileo, nor for long afterwards, though it has been so offered since in various guises since the ‘Age of Reason’ and from the middle of the 18th century. In the philosophy of Science with the capital letter, the soul is reduced to an aspect of the properties of matter to make the proposition credible at all.

Nevertheless the trial of Galileo remains a landmark. It is a tombstone over the grave of one synthesis of knowledge of life, it is the true end of the Middle Ages. From that day to this while many men of science would be convinced and devout Christians, there would grow a certain disharmony between the spirit of science and of theology, and it would deepen for want of any synthesis of outlook which related them both. The Galileo affair is the first skirmish in a warfare which has taken on much more serious proportions since the publication of the Communist Manifesto and the Origin of Species.

Christian divisions not primary factor

For the alienation of the modern mind from stable and doctrinal Christianity which increases with every decade of the century does not proceed only, nor mainly from disunity among Christians. If this were the case, how explain the prosperous, self-complacent Churchgoing of the Victorian era? Throughout Europe, even in France, there was a revival of religious practice, and to some degree of religious assent. This was a reversal of the tide of Deist and Rationalist indifference which marked the preceding century.

Of course the scandal of disunity was always felt deeply by the most noble spirits of the age, but among the generality of men it is amazing with what vigour sects proliferated and proselytised one against another. This multiplication of ‘brands’ of Christianity does not appear to have scandalised minds used to unbridled laisser faire in the gaining of their daily bread!

Part of the answer lies close to the surface now, because today there is a very different atmosphere abroad, and a different principle animates the subtle, subconscious philosophy of man in the average. Yesterday was a day of analysis in thought, and of unbridled individualism in action. Today is a day of synthesis in thought, and of membership one of another in action.

The ethos of society has gone against the cardinal principle of the Protestant Reformation, and has returned to a dominant theme of the historic Christian economy. This in itself, apart from other pressures, would make men more conscious of the scandal of divisions and increasingly frustrated in them.

To say this is to indicate much more than a change of economic climate which has brought in its train a heightened sense of mutual and social responsibility. Man is not, pace Marx, an economic animal first and a philosophical afterwards. These divisions among men claiming the Christian name would not be felt to be so scandalous unless there had been a change also of the philosophical climate, and this we will find turns on the recognition of Evolution as a principle of created being, in thought and life as much as in say, biology or physics. The true nature of this change of underlying social philosophy has not yet been here enquired. A clue to what is thought to be its true nature can be found in the remark, often repeated, that divisions among Christians are a great scandal to the missionary credentials of the Christian religion in non-Christian countries, especially in the face of Marxist attack and propaganda. Marxism is getting much more to the heart of the matter, for Marxism is not just a philosophy of economics, Marxism is a certain school of the Philosophy of Science.

‘New ideas’ and the root of apostasy

If the divisions of Christians do not constitute the principal reason for the loss of influence among men of the Christian faith, neither does the pullulation of ‘new ideas’ add up to an adequate explanation.

The theory attracts some minds, especially lazy and timid minds, and in the final stages of an agnostic culture there is bound to be something to it, but no number of contributory factors adds up to a specific cause where one exists.

In the world of today, it is suggested, new theories and criticisms are put out all the time. Modern communications, by press and television, flash thoughts and theories round the world which earlier would have taken years to trickle through just one stratum of society.

Like the ‘random’ mutations which explain the whole organisation of evolution for some well known biologists, these novelties are selected by the press, T.V., and other media, not for their truth value, which ought to be the appropriate equivalent of ‘survival value’ in nature, but for their sensation value and sexual titillation value.

After a while the theories and criticisms may be found to be false or to need drastic qualification, but the damage will be done, especially to sensitive young minds in the process of formation. Even if the theorists were to say ‘I have sinned in betraying innocent blood’ the editors and the journalists would yell back ‘what is that to us? Look thou to it!’

The organs of mass malformation could not care less, and by now every Caliban in Grub St., will be in hot pursuit of some other Pied Piper.

If there were nothing to this analysis, it would be hard to explain the physical and spiritual walls drawn around the Marxist states. Future ages, discovering in detail the wall and towers, wires and weapons which ring this culture wherever it faces upon the contaminated areas of Liberal-Capitalism, and knowing only a little of the ideological crisis of the times, might easily think that this anxious apparatus of defence could not have been erected to defend so vast and mighty an empire from war, but much more likely to keep out a deadly pestilence which ravaged the peoples outside.

It would be true in a sense, ideas are also wholesome or pestilential, and like other infections are most deadly to the young. The Marxist empire takes the menace very seriously and its state censorship subjects to its disinfecting prophylaxis every means of communication, and above all those which are aimed at the child and the adolescent. I would not approve tyranny of the mind, but truth lies between the extremes of licence and totalitarianism.

Liberty itself must have its own organic law, the balance of which is life, the unbalance rampant cancer. To shrug off the mentality of Soviet man with supercilious contempt would be foolish underrating of people who have shown by their achievements that they are no fools.

The prostitution of ideas and ideals is the root cause of that syphilis of the soul which is today bringing destruction upon the society of the venal, venereal West.

Ideas and ethos in modern society

Yet it is the evidence of history that neither alien licence nor the influx of vast new knowledge is sufficient of itself to overthrow the religious foundations of a culture, as long as the Faith retains power to synthesize anew the knowledge of men, and to shape through it a wider vision of the destiny of man.

Christianity lived through a similar crisis in the fourth century of its era when the Roman emperor surrendered to Christ, bringing with his confession of Faith all those riches in the arts and in philosophy which was the heritage of the Romano-Hellenic world.

This inflow did not destroy the Christian gospel, nor make some mongrel thing of the Christian Faith, rather the Christian found in his new endowment tools of thought for the fashioning of a deeper synthesis of faith and human reason. The fabric raised by the later Fathers of the Church has never since been rivalled, and not withstanding the achievement of Aquinas, one can say that the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages did little more than correct it and perfect it.

2 ‘ARTS’ AND ‘SCIENCE’: THE NEED FOR A NEW SYNTHESIS

It is true that a young man or woman may abandon belief in the Christian Faith for a variety of reasons, and these may be not related but haphazard. This is the more likely to occur when it is fashionable to be ‘unorthodox’ in almost every sphere, while having no idea of what orthodoxy would be in any case.

A social environment of disregard for Christian teaching and living makes easy the acceptance of any criticism of faith or morals, especially morals, so that for the young these plausible, sensual critiques of Christian moral living are often the triggering cause of apostasy. Youth too, is rarely very brave, young men and women are rigidly conformist within their own groups, however nonconformist they may be to their parents.

To say that definite factors exist in modern thought which are alone the fundamental cause for the weakness of Christianity before its enemies, is not to deny that age old factors of doubt and denial are still with us. Besides, the factors thought to be specific to this age and to be so all important, have been with us now for two centuries in philosophy and for more than a century in the philosophy of science and of society. They have been at work for a long time in creating within society their own atmosphere of agnosticism. The adolescent breathes this doctored air quite naturally, it is the only one he has ever known, and he is unaware that his thoughts and decisions are subtly slanted from their beginnings.

Elements of new discovery are interpreted in a manner hostile to Christian thought long before the new knowledge itself has crystallised as fact. Thus each generation, while it holds on to something, retains less than its parents, and breeds itself a generation further removed from the values of historic Christianity than it was itself.

The Flaw in the Churchman

This drift from the Church is given impetus by the prevailing philosophic and social outlook of many of the clergy, an outlook which is unattractive to modern youth. There is no need to dramatize this, for reform is taking place all the time, but it is much too soon to cease to point to the very real deficiencies.

The mentality of the priesthood, both Catholic and non-Catholic is formed in a tradition which is still too exclusively that of the arts and the classics. They know very little of science, and what they know tends to be the least important part of it, namely various facts and items of the empirical sciences themselves. What they need is not an inventory of unrelated items of the physical sciences, but a philosophy of science which is also their philosophy of being, through this alone can we hope in these days to evolve a philosophy of being which is going to be a dynamic of modem society.

Any such criticism cannot be a criticism of the theologian alone, it is a criticism also of the intellectual leadership of the ‘Arts’ faculties in the great universities of the Western world. It is a problem long recognised and now much discussed. It is an issue of the philosophy of society itself, of the direction to be given to the educational system in even the most neutralist of cultures. It is important enough to be able occasionally to compete for space with the mammary attractions of pretty little tarts in even the more down to earth newspapers.

Sulky professors of the Arts, and of Philosophy in the more classical sense, do often reply that it is not their burden of conscience if the technical schools and colleges turn out so many young men who are fuzzy primitives in all but their technical know-how. They do turn out a shocking percentage of such people.

They turn out men of undoubted mental power who are incapable of working out the fact that the qualities which make man ‘human’ have first to exist in their own competence and exercise, before ‘science’ can come about in human society at all. As a species, man needs neither science, nor a philosophy of science to survive. Indeed, as a species his survival would be much more assured today without either. But man has never been able to live a social, human life on any level, let alone build up his life into a high culture, without a way, a truth, and life, which governed the top level of his personality.

In other words, man has never been able to be man without an authoritative destiny and law of life, that is to say without a real religion, —and he is not managing at all well without one now. To make a religion of ‘Science’ as Professor Huxley and many others do, is to leave the realms of material fact for those of faith, however reasonable this religion of Science may be thought to be. The ancient civilisations of China, Sumeria, Egypt, etc., with their priest mathematicians and priest-savants were also religions of science according to the knowledge of their day. The Greek civilisation made a firm distinction between the orders of empirical fact and moral authority.

It is an interesting diversion to note that our modern scientific Humanists in advertising their Religion of Science, without God, are in fact reverting to an Oriental tradition in which religion and science were two aspects of one reality and one authority. As has been indicated in the first chapter of this book, that way lies the culture of Scientific Totalitarianism, governed no longer by the ‘Son of Heaven’ but by Big Brother who is the Top Scientist. He will prove to be as much less enlightened a ruler as he will be also less romantic a figure. Such a trend in modern pretensions marks the end of the Mediterranean tradition which has ‘made’ the Western scientific mind for three thousand years, and especially since the Renaissance.

Responsibility of the theologian

If it is true that to have intellect, will, and personality is to have more than a flux of nervous impulses, reducible to a further flux of differential equations of energy, then the responsibility for making a synthesis of the unity and the diversity of man's culture rests on the shoulders of the philosophers and theologians. Some of them may of course be scientists as well.

For the philosopher and the theologian are still the ultimate leaders of society now, as much as in the primordial stages of human civilisation. They are the men who harness and organise the basic, and specifically human attributes of human personality and who focus the significance of human needs. This as we have said must come before science, and in the scientific age must still be first to integrate and direct the works of the scientist. Man is neither more or less human for coming of age in the discoveries of natural science.

Therefore the philosopher and the theologian must go back continually and anew to nature, to discover more fully the nature of being and its organic relationships. From this contemplation there will then proceed a more exact and more fulfilling synthesis of knowledge, which embraces in its unity all the interrelationships of created being, spiritual and material.

To do this is to philosophize really, and from reality, while a philosopher who sees no need to rethink and reapply even his fundamental principles in the context of new natural knowledge, is much too small to measure the significance of the universe. Basic principles if truly basic may be utterly utter, but the human formulations of them, however distinguished are not, and only the mind of God attains the unity which is the last word. In this duty of the thinker to his brethren, —and in thought as in deed every man is his brother's keeper, —the failure of the faculty of the Arts in modern science has been greater than the failure of the faculty of Science.

New energies released in society

For there are released in society today, vivid intellectual energies of which many of the clergy, and other minds educated in the tradition of the ‘Arts’ are still unaware. If they know of them, often they cannot so focus them in their understanding that they really sympathize with them. These new energies of the intellect deriving from the sciences are the raw material of a new culture of all mankind.

They call for formulation within an order and a pattern, that they may be controlled and set in motion towards new final purposes and new constructive visions. These energies today heave in chaos much as the raw energies of the Teutonic tribes who broke the back of the military empire of Rome heaved in chaos, until they were patterned by the vision of the ‘City of God’ that Augustine wrote whilst he wept for the destruction of the beauty that was Rome. Then, in toil and much pain, out of the flux of the Dark Ages was moulded the beginning of what today is the ‘West’ in the culture of the modern world.

So in our own times, through the moral chaos, and the wars and rumours of war, all the anguish of a dying civilisation, these new, raw energies of knowledge are the factors which must be synthesized anew in a new unity of knowledge both human and divine, if any absolute meaning, dignity, or final goal is to be affirmed of man's person, and offered to the man in the street for his striving and his hope.

The joining of a battle

The Marxist understands these issues very well. The Agnostic dominates the West today, but in the battle which is being joined he hardly matters. For him the trumpet gives for ever an uncertain sound, and he can lead nobody into battle. He will be pushed down and trampled in the final struggle for the soul of man in the modern world. The impending world war for the soul of man will be between a synthesis of Christianity and science, and the Marxist synthesis of philosophy and science.

Consequences of the unease between ‘Science’ and ‘Faith’

Because of the gulf between the mentality of the arts and minds trained in the sciences, men turn with more determination towards philosophies of life that whatever their shortcomings think and speak the language of today. The adolescent grows to maturity in an atmosphere of conscious rejection of doctrine, and the Church looks to him to be discredited because she cannot formulate an intellectualism which embodies the proven fundamentals of modern scientific knowledge within orthodox theological speculation in the enthusiastic manner that the Schoolmen embodied the knowledge of their day within the theological and cultural framework of the Middle Ages.

The past hundred years has seen many secondary lines of attack on the Christian Faith, alleged to be drawn from ‘modern’ research and critiques. The interpretation of facts was never necessary, and the evidence itself too little evalued as fact to have proven anything for certain. This has been the case with so much of the higher criticism of the Christian scriptures, and within that happy jungle of ingenious cranks, the study of comparative religion, which like the manna, has turned to every man's own taste. It has not been intrinsic evidences in these spheres which compelled conclusions contrary to Christian teaching, but the prior acceptance of certain postulates of science and of a given philosophy of science. With this went the presumption and often the hope, that there could be no reconciliation between science and historic Christianity.

The task was made more easy for them because the Church has so often needed saving from her friends, especially the theologians who have defined from their own cathedra that the physical life of man could not have been made by a process of evolution. In our own days the Lord has shut up all under sin that he might have mercy on all. The scientist who was responsible for the Piltdown skull manifested a bit of the old Adam too.

Fact and Freud

Deduction thinly clothed with fact can be found in many a ‘scientific’ field. Above all in psychology, the least factual of all sciences surely, theories, judgements, even mythological divinities of the mind, Ids and Super-egos are proffered as fact it were blasphemy to gainsay. They are nothing but the atheistic presumptions of Freud, argued from a false philosophy of nature, of love, and of happiness. In the larger part of the case evidence, the data is sucked up from a sewer of very sick minds in any case.

One of the more unscientific errors of the jungle called ‘psychiatry’ today is the presumption that specialisation in disease entitles a man to pontificate on normality. One must first be sure of the norm of health. It ought to be clear to the most conceited specialist that the orientation and fulfilment of man must be deduced from the most noble and happy of specimens. Taking the ‘Future of an Illusion’ as a guide, one would say that Freud was too shallow a personality, and too subjective a bigot, to have any capacity to assess the real potential of human love. The personality of the most radiant and human of the saints would have been for him an epiphenomenon on the surface of living, the most fragile form of sublimation. He would have been studying the true expression of love as it exists in all men potentially, and as it struggles to get free through a welter of exaggerated sensualism which is not ‘natural’ in man as nature naturally exists.

Main errors of Freud

Freud presumes first that being is monistic, i.e. that matter and spirit are the same thing and the same order of existence, both twin aspects of the same energy, which is an error. Then, the seeking for joy which is natural to the energy of life in its very being, is presumed to be entirely individualistic and egoistic. It is not ordered to others by any principle of law intrinsic to its own nature.

The presumption that the ‘libido’ is not of its own nature ordered to control and direction, and does not seek such of its nature, is a worse error, and the excessive emphasis put upon sexual union as the primal joy of being is yet another. This type of psychologist fails to see that man, with all his stresses and internal contradictions is a special case in nature. The problems posed to the psychologist by man are unique, —but then so is mankind. Unless the psychologist is a Christian it is most unlikely that he will conceive them correctly, let alone solve them well. Freud did not even begin to conceive them correctly.

In nature the sexual expression of this ‘libido’ is ruled by the interplay of environmental law and of organic response to it through the brain. There is a natural order of time, behaviour, and circumstance. The pregnant female does not receive the male. In nature this expression of the libido is not the blind, lawless urge that Freud conceived it to be. If the term ‘libido’ is used in a wider sense to mean seeking for fulfilment, it should not be identified with the sexual faculty. In matter fulfilment of being is a unity integrated within a diversity of functions, and the unity in balance is the fulfilment, which should not be identified with any one of its aspects.

The bandying of presumptions and myths as facts of science, especially in psychology, has done much to weaken the authority of Christian moral law. These atheistic distortions have rotted the lives and loves of millions of fine youngsters, and done much more damage than two world wars. Nevertheless, they are factors which are secondary in the decline in Christian belief. They have a further pedigree, and they would not have been formulated with so much airy arrogance unless they had been based on a preconceived idea of the processes of the universe, and of the relationship of mankind to these processes.

3 ‘EVOLUTION’: SCIENCE DISCOVERS A PHILOSOPHY

Christian theology has itself developed from the potential latent in ‘the grain of mustard seed’ and the diffuse irreligious leaven in so much of modern speculative thought is a ferment of a few basic ideas. If the basic ideas could be brought into concord with orthodox Christianity, and synthesized within its speculative theology, we would find that we were able at once to unravel many a tangle in the sphere of science and religion. For the first time we would be in control of the new creative energies of the times, we would be able to offer the vista of the more majestic culture of Christendom through the perspective of those energies of thought which seemed more likely to corrode it.

The universal idea which is critical for Christian thinking today, is that of Evolution. It is a word that embraces many meanings and many partial analogies. This concept has imposed a unity which is truly universal on the diverse data of the sciences. The average scientist who cares to think beyond the immediate subject-matter of his investigation is usually Kantian in his attitude to knowledge. The things we know are already processed by the categories of our own minds as we become aware of them, and so the ‘thing in itself’, the noumenon, is beyond the power of man's mind to know, indeed it does not exist. The concept of Evolution gave him a noumenon without his being aware, and for many, such as Sir Julian Huxley, it seems to have become what the all-measuring mind of God means for the Christian philosopher.

The evolution of ‘Evolution’

The idea carries the implication of an underlying unity in Nature and of Nature. Time and space are but aspects and developments within this unity. The same oneness embraces all things, all origins, all substances, all movements of energy. The doctrine of a soul which is immaterial and not subject in its own nature to a process of evolution from primal energy strikes the mind of the scientist as abhorrent.

It dares claim an exception for itself unique in the processes of the cosmos, and worse it appears to rupture the unity of a process of development in which every complex Form of being is built up on the foundation of more primitive forms of energy. It is interesting that so sincere a Christian as Père Teilhard de Chardin lapses into positions which are philosophically and theologically untenable (for thus we will try to demonstrate them and offer an alternative) on this very aspect. He found it ‘unthinkable’ to admit any duality of principle in the nature of man.

It was claimed that the mind which meditates the concept of evolution profoundly will find that nothing is left unaccounted for, from the basic oscillations of elementary energies to the personality of man and his unique intelligence. Certainly the crude materialism of the last century must be abandoned, and matter must be invested with the more subtle prerogatives attributed to mind. This can be done, the nervous system organised into the brain, the functions of the glands, the influence of the subconscious mind etc., all this and anything else one cares to add in qualification can take over the role of the so-called ‘spiritual’ in the personality of man. If God cannot be directly disproved, from lack of any service rendered in an exclusive and professional capacity, He can be shown to be at least entirely redundant.

From its beginning as a concept in biology and sociology, ‘Evolution’ came to be a stick in the hands of the unbeliever with which to belabour the Church. Time and again the ignorance and short-sightedness of theologians played into the hands of their adversaries. It is easy now to criticize, and perhaps to forget the hatred of religion which showed through the ‘scientific’ claims of many of the free thinkers. In those beginnings the claims were not proven on the available data of inductive science, but they were very suggestive, and it was easy and reasonable for philosophy to bridge the gaps which remained.

Behind the claims made for evolution of all matter, including life and mankind, was the urgent prescience of a majestic, sweeping concept which one day would be proved to have worked in and through all departments of being. It is most significant that here, as so very often in the discoveries of science, it was not the inductive data which was the real beginning of a breakthrough in knowledge, but a deductive vision glimpsed through scanty data, which thrilled and excited the mind... from then on the hunt is up for the clues and the final proof.

In the later chapters of this work we are going to find most exciting and significant this precedence in research of mind over matter, of deduction by mind over the apparently unrelated empirical data...

In the matter of ‘Evolution’ the factual proof came tumbling in from every science of matter as the years passed. The philosophical hunch has been proven, evolution of being is a universal process throughout creation, whatever mistakes were made in detailed arguments and expectations along the line. Equally wrong-headed have been many of the attacks made on traditional faith and morals at the turn of the century, and repeated in Freudian psychology, but all the world loves a winner, evolution was right, and the errors of the scientist are at once forgotten, while the blunders of the theologians, or their more average representatives are held always before our eyes.

CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART TWO

GOD, CREATOR

THROUGH EVOLUTION

The Book is available from Faith Keyway Trust http://www.faith.org.uk

CHAPTER FOUR

Creation through Evolution

The meaning of ‘cause’

The word ‘cause’ like the word ‘love’ has suffered grievous devaluation in its modern signification. The reason is the same, the general philosophy of men and women at large has become much impoverished. The most profound meaning of ‘cause’ is that which is also the most spontaneous and native to the mind of man, and it can be well expressed by translating a definition traditional in Christian philosophy in a manner which is an impropriety of language but more fully intelligible for all that.

For a ‘cause’ is that which inflows being into something else. A cause does more than influence the being of another, it makes the other to ‘become’, by making being flow into it, it brings it into being as existent. The fact of the interdependence of natures which evolution describes in its very name, manifests the real nature of causality. The cosmos is a ‘garment woven without seam’ throughout, and we have to interpret it through the perspective of a philosophy of science which is sound.

Science and causality

Science has for too long suffered from perspectives upon causality which are deficient. Indeed, the very idea of the intelligibility of the real itself, is poorly assessed. The fault goes back through Kant and the English Empiricists, at least as far as Descartes in the pedigree of ideas. The concept of ‘cause’ means more than an assignable succession of phenomena which can be observed, is observed actually, and has been evalued scientifically. It means more too than the relationships of being as these relationships are processed by the human brain into picturable elements, and assigned to subjective, human categories of relationship for the convenience of our way of understanding things and using things. This last perspective of thought is that of Kant, it is far from foolish but it lacks the completeness and the objectivity which is necessary.

The intelligible for man is not one and the same thing as the picturable. This truth was known to some of us before, but since the rise of Quantum theory in its various expressions it has become an empirical fact to the destruction of empirical philosophies. Whatever the dilemmas presented to philosophy and logic by the microcosmic order and its laws, a great deal has become intelligible, predictable, and usable in technology which never can be picturable to the brain through the eye directly of its own nature. This is not an admission easily compatible with the older philosophies of Materialism, and a thinker as humble and creative as Heisenberg has begun to make a return explicitly to the much older Aristotelean concept of potency, of power to become, and of graded tendency to become. This is a return to the primary meaning of cause.

The ascent of being

Evolution is the synthesis of complex being upon the physical basis of primal energies. The growth and development of this process of coming to be of the complex entity can be initiated and maintained only through inter-action and movement-in-relativity. The frame of this type of existence is space and time. If the reinstatement of the notion of potency, of tendency to become, is proving of help in the philosophy of science, so too the restoration of the concept of the analogy of being will prove to be of service. The concept of analogy means that the existent real is more or less intelligible in its very self, according to the degree of intelligibility in which its existence is actualised. It is presumed that in fact we do find existent real things in such a relationship of greater or less participation of being, and hence of intelligibility.

One consequence of a return to the notion of the analogy of being could be the rise of more frequent and more fertile suggestions upon the problems of intelligibility raised by Quantum Physics in its relations to the classical laws of classical physics and mechanics. If events (i.e. things) exist in different real degrees of intelligibility, then there may be different species of space and time, diverse according to the reality-level of natures themselves, different that is according to the tendency to not-being, the greater intrinsic potentiality, of elements in themselves. This does not seem impossible, for space and time are but aspects of the being of things in themselves.

Analogy implies proportionality

Yet, if entities are related in their composition by a process of evolution, and are not intelligible except in that relationship, there will be a direct link of proportionality and of correspondence between the microcosmic world of Quantum Physics and the macrocosmic entities composed through that basis, which are the subject-matter of the laws of classical dynamics and mechanics. This could make sense of a time and a space and a certainty in Quantum theory which was less fully intelligible and certain in itself, than in the world of large objects. The elemental energies are however proportional to the very being, and to the natural constitution of the things of the world of relatively large objects. Thus, out of the very nature and properties of the elemental energies in large numbers, there might, indeed there should, by an intrinsic proportionality, arise the laws of the classical physics etc., as a limiting case. One would expect some sort of correspondence principle. Because of a difference of degree in their intrinsic potentiality the truly microscopic events would not exist and be intelligible in one and the same univocal continuum of logic as the higher, more actual entity composed through them, but there would be a logical threshold of proportionality and intelligibility between them, a logical threshold based upon their substantial proportionality in being and becoming.

This is not a matter on which to delay, or the ordinary reader may cease to persevere. The suggestions made are given as examples of the fertilising scope of better mental equipment in judgement. Nor is the particular suggestion made towards solving one problem in the philosophy of science fundamental to the basic theme of this chapter. For this manner of solving the problems posed by the Uncertainty Principle, and the so-called Principle of Correspondence in the interpretation of modern physics, presumes the positions taken up by Heisenberg and the Copenhagen school. These positions may be correct or they may not. They are challenged, and the arbiter of facts of matter must be the experiment, if it can be devised. If thinkers like Bohm should be right, then the causality in matter would follow a course more easy to the mind because nearer to its immediate expectations. It remains a fact however that the notion of the analogical nature of being, which can be well defended in its own right on other ground, does, when applied to the dilemmas which arise within Quantum theory, seem capable of offering an elegant and beautiful solution.

The cosmic equation

What is essential to the theme of this chapter, and of much else in this book, is the vision of the perspective of the universe as the unfolding of a cosmic equation of energies, numbers, values, natures, and individual entities. This equation of elements and of existents in mutual play one on another is poised in the beginning of the history of the universe as we know it, in the beginning too of its history as it has made us, much as the pride and prime of life is poised in organisation and potency in that initial equation of energies which is the fertilised seed of any form of life.

Until man is reached, truly and properly such, the processes of evolution must be subject to a determinism of composition and of response. It does not matter whether this process of determinism is individualised and complete in the way that Laplace would have imagined, or the thinkers of the last century. This type of determinism will have its place in the sphere of large objects, while remaining statistical in the interplay of primal energies. In either case the process of development will be subject to the necessity of mathematics, the necessity of the computable, whatever way it may be computed. Let it be remembered too that in the constitution of the organic there is little intelligible place for the intrinsically undetermined, even in the constitution of the human brain. Until one can show a principle at work which is not one order of energy with matter, evolution is a deterministic process.

This ‘equation’ of the universe may be looked at from another point of view. To call the moving mass of cosmic energy an ‘equation’ is to say that the immeasurable sweep of worlds in space, through thousands of millions of years of light-travel, the swirl of gas, galaxies, and radiant power is no chaos or storm of elemental frenzy, but is subject to a Law of Control and Direction which is not a law of matter in the sense that it is the law of the nature and the becoming of this element or of that element, but is a Law in Matter, a Law within which Matter is poised in being, and in becoming, and in intelligibility.

All the laws of all the elements, every nature synthesised upon them, and the scientific expression, or formula, when attainable, of the law of its being, all this and the conjunction that events have to each other in space and in time, are only aspects of this overall Law of Control and Direction within which, and through which all things subsist.

The consummation of this Law in the material order finalises in a unique way in the coming to be of Man. In this respect one will have to part company with Père Teilhard de Chardin, and defend a concept of the soul in man other than his, for in this most important part of his thinking his views are not sound in science or in philosophy. Man, be it remembered, is the truly rational animal, the animal who is not fully determined by, nor fully intelligible through, his material environment. If we find him anywhere else in time and outer space, we will define him as one nature with ourselves, no matter how much the conformation of his body may differ from our own.

In speaking of this equation of material forces in and through which all material things come into being by evolution, and speaking of it as, from another aspect, an overall Law of Control and Direction, the importance of a true appreciation of the role of time and space stands out. It is not important that the physical yardstick in Nature for action of one being upon another across distance must be the speed of light, and that there can be no action nor interaction at vast distances until that measure be travelled etc., etc. The pulsation of time in space through which all things are related causally, that is to say in their coming to be, takes place in the beginning of the history of all things in the One Universe. However far apart they may grow in space, time, and action they are related in a common process and history in the initial poising of the equation of energy through space and time in this Law of Control and Direction the understanding of which is fundamental to the understanding of all matter, and the history of the forms, living and non-living educed in matter. Great masses and small, individuals and natures, complex beings and primal elements, they are all through many an intermediary members one of another. The universe continues to be woven, and is still a garment woven throughout without seam.

The enormous stability

When men have spoken of this or that vital interconnexion as the ‘cause’ of some nature or event, especially when they have been speaking in the simple frame of common-sense judgement, they have been right, but never wholly so. That is to say, they have never exhausted the whole of its causality. Together with the immediate cause of life or death or chemical reaction, they have presumed a tremendous stability which they have taken for granted, and have never bothered to name or evalue as part of the ‘cause’ because it was always there, seemingly static, to be taken for granted. It was the ‘other factors remaining the same’ which was discounted, but actually the causative environment in which we come to be, to live, and effect causatively ourselves, is never static, and is always changing. It is the existence-causing impact of other being upon ourselves, through which we come to be, and in which our history as an individual and as a species is embedded. It is always part of our ‘cause’. However much this seemingly static ambient environment may change, it is always meaningful, always causative. This enduring stability and causative power is the presence within all matter, and through all matter of that again ‘Law of Control and Direction’ of which all natures and partial laws are aspects. It is this fact of existence which many Materialist philosophers, especially those who follow Hume, have failed to grasp when they have debated the principle of causality. The failure to understand the term ‘cause’ in its most important sense has brought much banality and triviality into the scientific outlook, and into discussion between scientists and others.

Analogy, matter, and mind

The real distinction between spirit and matter as orders of the existent, is a key concept to the right understanding of the evolution of forms and of their history. It is also the terminal point of the idea of ‘analogy’. It is a sore point too for many, and some scientists will bristle at the suggestion of a real distinction. Let honesty prevail though the heavens fall; it may not be the defence of science which raises the hackles, the subconscious mind perhaps is sounding the alarm against a different contingency—a scientist may think that faintly down that path he hears the footfalls of God coming back to claim his own. There are some of them—not all— who would feel disgruntled to think that they had been keeping the Chair warm for Somebody else!

Once we distinguish between what is intelligible by some means within the personality of man, and what can be pictured through the senses to the brain, we have already conceded implicitly the distinction between matter and spirit. We have presumed the soul as the unity principle of intelligence truly so called. This may not be at once apparent, and will have to be returned to later. It is a fact that the brain is not made to receive through the senses and react by meaningful judgement to anything but the big, macroscopic world. Nothing else has been, or is specific to the brain in its whole animal pedigree.

It is also a fact that men do succeed in working out the intelligible relationships of energies which will never, in any hypothesis, be taken in and interpreted by their senses in their own formality and passed to the brain for interpretation. It is surely strange that in man, and in man alone, ‘intelligence’ overpasses the whole scope and moulding of the brain in its pedigree throughout evolution ?

At the same time a certain price is paid for this. The inability, even by the shortest of radiant waves, to make a classical picture of the elemental events, remains a handicap to the acquisition of exact knowledge. Some philosophers of science, imbued with Materialism, and the recognition that the brain has been constructed by evolution for the macroscopic needs of the macroscopic world, go on to say that there is probably an absolute limit to what we can meaningfully understand, and to the way in which we can understand it, in the order of the elemental energies.

Man's knowledge universal

There is no need to be pessimistic. Man is more than matter, and his mind more than the subjective categories of sense comprehension. Kant was less than half right. Man will find that he has his intellect personified in a unity. At the heart of the unity is a great simplicity: the simplicity of knowing and judging sense reactions without being determined by them.

He will find that the very ultimate secrets of matter yield themselves up to him because they are based upon intelligibility, meaning, without reference to the sensorium of man's organism. They are based upon mathematical proportionality in causation and in effect, and without much help from the brain phantasm man will discover the underlying laws, or more probably the one law, in and through which all the proportional combinations of matter and energy are synthesised and integrated.

There will be no need of the ‘picture of the thing as phenomenon’ only the establishment and interpretation of meaningful relationships of proportion which are there already to be discovered. For Mind is that which controls and directs, Matter is that which is controlled and directed through Mind: and Man is made in the image and likeness of God.

Man will get to the bottom of all the material riddles in time, for matter is ‘easy’ to man, it is an order of the existent far below his own. He will not get to the bottom of all the spiritual riddles though, not even concerning his own make-up, to hope for that would be too ambitious. Yet there is much man can unravel also in this sphere, if it is possible for him to be taught by a mind more powerful than his own: if there is a law of development and growth for the human spirit in its powers, akin to that by which flesh and blood develops from the moment of its conception; akin indeed to the Law which gathered up in unity the meaningful spawning of the universe in the deployment of its energies so many millions of light-years ago.

Knowledge of this type cannot be an ‘exact’ science, but its content and influence is much more fulfilling to man as man than are the exact sciences. It cannot be an exact science because the mind of man is too weak to encompass the sweep of the spiritual order in its full meaningfulness. Nevertheless, it is not knowledge which a scientist may shrug off, either as a man or as a specialist, for it regards the very nature of man, and the norms of his activity. If it is irritating to be told that the mind of man cannot expect to cope fully with every relationship of the spiritual order, one could offer a very homely example from life below man in his present daily living: to the dog of the wilds, living according to nature, life would seem a pretty exact science, and its skills and routines predictable. Animals have so coped with it, efficiently, and yet non-progressively for millions of years now. To the adored pet on the hearthrug it can never seem quite so. Life is full of mysteries, for man, and his ways, and his orders, and the environment he adds up to for one, makes a whole neither predictable nor fully comprehensible. Mystery will intervene the moment one has got the facts of life comfortably rationalised.

A man would say that it is impossible to make a dog understand, for the reasons why are above him. At the same time, knowing what we do of man, it can be conceded that not all the irrationality is on the side of the animal! It is not unscientific to learn from another mind. When scientists, even the most precocious, go to school as little boys, it is unwise for them to attempt straightaway to demonstrate from data. They must first sit down and listen, learn, and digest.

CHAPTER FIVE

Concerning Teilhard de Chardin

The discussion of evolution in the context of a philosophy of science cannot proceed far without reference to the thought of Père Teilhard de Chardin. Appraisals will be controversial. The vision of creation he offers, his general perspective of the destiny of mankind, in some form at least, is urgently needed by the modern world. The vision is not unique, in fact the convinced acceptance of a theology of creation through evolution will enforce its outlines upon the Christian thinker of depth. It is embarrassing to criticise a man both great and humble of soul, but serious flaws do appear to mar both the philosophy and the theology of Teilhard de Chardin.

It is claimed in some quarters that Teilhard has vindicated afresh for our own age the finalism of natures essential to the philosophy of Aristotle and the mediaeval Schoolmen. One must demur. Teilhard de Chardin is most clearly a monist in his philosophy of being, and the identification of spirit and matter as energies of one same order of reality, even though said to be complementary, must make his system animistic whatever he does. It is impossible to see him as the saviour of the philosophia perennis, much less of Thomism.

It is not to Aristotle that the mind naturally turns when reading him, but to the works and school of H. Bergson, and especially the Evolution Créatrice. However, the social aspects of The Phenomenon of Man especially, seem to have their pedigree more in Hegel, and Teilhard’s intuition of reality is rather Idealist and animist than ‘vitalist’ in a strict sense of that term.

Animism not necessary

The average scientist distrusts animistic philosophies of matter, and with good reason. It is impossible to tell where the empirically attainable causality of matter ends, and where some vaguely defined spiritual factor, possessing a vague form of intellect and free-will, takes over. In vitalist philosophies which postulate in a material being a form of entelechy truly distinct from the physico-chemical order and properties, this form neither matter nor spirit, can appear to have the properties of a convenient resident daemon. An idealist philosophy, since it usually identifies matter and spirit as twin aspects of the same order of energy escapes this criticism directly, but nevertheless the erroneous confusion of matter and mind bring back the same unresolved contradictions in the end. It is not possible to say how much is matter and how much is mind, or, in the case at least of the physical elements how mind can reside in the natural constitution and how manifest itself without denying experimental fact, and wrecking the whole theory of mathematics.

The confusion becomes evident in the conception of the élan vital itself, the meaningful upward urge of evolution to higher complexes of being, and to richer unity in diversity of personal existence. Some sort of orthogenesis has to be postulated here, Bergson is fond of the example of the eye, but that of the brain would be even more significant. It seems necessary to presume some sort of ‘thinking out’, some overall unity of plan, in the mutual evolution of life and its environment, both the living and the azoic environment. How otherwise explain the manner in which an all important organ, on which higher synthesis is seen to depend, is capable always of harmonious mutation through many a species, capable of harmonious upward mutation too in relation to the rest of its body, capable of harmonious parallelism with the environment which conditions it throughout the orthogenetic élan to progress in being?

It becomes impossible to postulate evolution as a history of being and becoming, simply from the bio-chemical properties of entities alone. The Marxist philosopher sees this very well, and ascribes to the Dialectic the qualities of a prescient and Godlike mind, even while it professes to be Atheist. It is a dilemma which Sir Julian Huxley, who strives to be a more genuine Materialist, does not handle very well as a Rationalist. What sort of sense does one make of a mindless universe of matter which culminates in Man, the heir of the ages and the alone free, who is said henceforth to be the trustee and planning mind for the process of evolution, in an environment which is without finalism, and with a brain whose pedigree has consisted in random mutation?

The animist thinker, like the Marxist, does at least try to make sense of the prescience, or dialectical necessity call it what you will, which must be recognised if the universe is one material whole governed by laws of complexification in being which are in continuity. To explain all that has to be explained from mesons to mankind by random mutation and a process of butting and barging of organism upon organism is an insult both to intellect and to organism. Hence the Idealist thinker invokes a principle of intelligence resident partly in the organism, and somehow identified with its material configuration, and partly in the cosmos as a whole as a unity-principle. The diversity must be related as a part to the unity of the evolutionary process, and this unity-principle of the universe becomes in fact the old-fashioned ‘world soul’. It is not necessary strictly that this cosmic unity-principle be identified with God in the pantheistic sense, but unless this leap is made it becomes a demiurge, and justification for the transition is usually found. The contradictions in identifying Creator and creation, matter and spirit are left unresolved. In Hegelianism and in a different manner in Marxism, the contradictions as such become a Mystery of scientific faith, and a mystique of advancement.

Occasions of confusion

There is some reason for this confusion of God and creature, matter and true intelligence, because a principle of unity and meaning, a Mind that is to say, must be found somewhere and in some guise, if cosmic evolution is one process from the spawning of the stars to home sapiens. It is not honest to make the meaningfulness start with man, it must begin with primal energy and its first movements, and the substantial relativity of those first movements to the synthesis of complex being.

Certainly we must look somewhere for a principle of unity and unification, and in the foregoing chapter we have attempted to foreshadow it. It cannot be found by embedding God in the mutual natural relativity of material forms of energy, nor by confusing the manifestations in creation of matter and of mind.

It is difficult to say how far the animism which is explicit in the system of Teilhard de Chardin should, from its inner lining and radial logic, to take advantage of his own expressions, reduce to a cosmic animism and even to a cosmic pantheism. One can be sure that he did not intend a cosmic pantheism. While it is morally certain that he did not intend that his thought should lead this way, his thinking is full of loose ends, and some of them do not appear to admit to being tied up logically except in an animistic way.

Thus, he identifies in one same order of being the nature and properties of the primal and the complex elements, inorganic and organic substance, life, advanced life, and finally man himself. The process of evolution is the ascent of consciousness and intelligence in the same order of entity and energy. Every effort is made to avoid mere mechanicist Materialism by the introduction of the not very happy distinction of tangential against radial energy, the radial is the principle of the ‘élan vital’ in evolution. He is quite explicit that in this relationship of mind and matter, while these energies are somehow ‘distinct’ they are yet complementary in the order of one basic energy and that any duality of principle between matter and mind is unthinkable.1

Christ and ‘Anti-Christ’

It is for this reason that we say that the only logical perspectives open to him are those of Marxism and Hegelianism, and whatever the difference between these, their methodology is the same. He demonstrates this fact in one place of The Phenomenon of Man with artless sincerity when he quotes J. B. S. Haldane with an obviously surprised approval.2 It is the surprise which is surprising, since both men have a similar philosophical outlook. The thought of The Phenomenon of Man where it concerns the evolution of man social and the organisation of man social, comes near to saying that the individual consciousness and intellect is but a cell of a world brain animated by a world soul. We are tempted to identify this world consciousness with Christ, as Teilhard de Chardin appears to do. He does of course use the expression "Christogenesis", and just what does it mean?

The Hegelian philosophy looks towards the messianic age, and the incarnation of the Perfect Man, as Hitler well knew. The Marxist too looks to the continual upsurge among men, thanks to the Dialectic, of the embodiment in man of the advanced social consciousness of mankind. Both can find in Teilhard de Chardin the exhilarating embodiment of their needs expressed with the reverence and elegance of a mind trained in Christian theology.3 There are pages of The Phenomenon of Man which could be a blue-print for a Humanist AntiChrist.4 Marxism will soon need a mythology for some such one, against the day when the people of the Soviets demand a God to worship once again. The time is at hand when the élan of scientific Atheism is exhausted, and its brave new world credentials spurned with the contempt born of experience. In Russia, this point has now been reached.

Sir Julian Huxley has not failed to notice, one suspects with some uneasiness, the ambiguity inhering in the social philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin: (Op. cit. Introduction p.19.) "Here his thought is not fully clear to me. Sometimes he seems to equate this future hyper-personal psychosocial organisation with an emergent Divinity: at one place for instance he speaks of the trend as a Christogenesis etc.". This ambiguity is understandable because from the first perspective of his vision of creation, Teilhard de Chardin has confused the natural and the supernatural, the created, and the Divine in its unparticipated nature. Teilhard de Chardin believed that the Messiah of Mankind had already come, we grant it. It is much less certain either from words or principles whether Christ has come, or whether he has emerged,5 and continues to emerge within history.

In the system of Teilhard de Chardin, ‘Christogenesis’ for the individual or for society corresponds to the incorporation into the ‘Mystical Body’ of Christ, and the growth in divine grace, traditional to the theology of orthodox Catholicism. In Teilhard however, this process is now part of the very order of Nature, and part of the natural process of matter in evolution as matter-mind, or mind-matter climaxes in the emergence of mankind. In the theology of the Church this ‘divinisation’ of man is through the gift of God and power of God, not from a principle resident within creation as such. The communion of God with men, — ‘joint heir with Christ,’—is an exaltation beyond the principles of human nature, for God in the sharing of his intimate Being cannot be contained, defined, or owed within an order common to any creation. The gift and its process too, required the free consent of man‘s will. In The Phenomenon of Man all this becomes the natural, biological effect of the one process of evolution through its various stages.6

In this context it becomes intelligible that so intelligent a man could propose a concept of moral evil so weak and so unorthodox in Christian terms. If ‘Christogenesis’ is part of the natural order, then a man is a ‘Son of God’ in the excelling sense of theology not by ‘water and the Holy Ghost’, but by natural birth. It becomes more understandable so, to identify ‘sin’ with the limitations and natural contingency of the creature. Teilhard de Chardin does it.

True free-will and personal responsibility are weakened, and the contradictions inherent in some Eastern systems appear as soon as evil is identified with a nature, with natural faculties, or with physical pain. By these principles too, a man should be what evolution has made him, it is his karma, but he is not responsibly guilty for the past nor the present. The élan vital, the dialectic, the ‘Prime Mover ahead’, —call it what you will, —should also be a dynamic guaranteeing the inevitable progress in goodness of the human race. This is the first expectation and theological choice of Teilhard de Chardin. It makes little sense of the Crucifixion, even less of its repetition throughout history, and of a climactic revolt at the end of the existing phase of creation. It makes little sense of human fulfilment or damnation. The principles of Teilhard de Chardin lead naturally to a Marxist or Hegelian vision of the natural evolution of the perfect man in the perfect society. He does his valiant best within false principles to save both free-will and its traditional social consequences, but this is neither his first choice nor congenial to this thought.

What think you of Christ?

Sometimes Teilhard de Chardin seems to envisage the Supreme Being as distinct from the creation, working in and through the eduction of higher forms of life to the climax of man, and thence to the climax of climaxes in the Incarnation for mankind of the Logos, the Divine Wisdom in Person. It is this sweeping view which is so needed in our day, and as a general perspective it is both orthodox and the most noble of the presentations of the Christian Faith.

Then however he will go on to speak of God becoming element7 and immersing Himself in matter,8 placing himself thus at the heart of evolution that from this vantage point he may be, as the prime mover ahead9 the focal point, centre of gravitation and ‘draw’ of the whole élan vital of evolution in one integral process of creation. Thence, soaring beyond mind, as organic members of very God at Omegapoint, the personal grains of consciousness seem to become one with the hyperpersonal psychosocial consciousness that is very Christ. This would be true Omega-point, the consummation, in joy of what the Christian would call the mystical body of Christ glorified. The manner of expression of pp. 293-4 of The Phenomenon of Man seems to me to conceal within a burst of poesy the most blatant pantheism. At the finish we do not know whether God does or does not utterly transcend the universe. If he does the manner of his transcendence is not more clear than it is with Hegel. As a Catholic I should be extremely doubtful from the expressions and ethos of the passages quoted, and from many others less explicit only because more prolix, whether in the system of Teilhard de Chardin the Eternal Word of Christian theology were not just a little less than the Eternal Father. His Christ is nearer to a Gnostic emanation of the Godhead, the expression in Creation of God Willing to create, and in status not dissimilar from the Christ of the Arian heresy.

Some people are going to feel very offended at such an evaluation of the principles of Père Teilhard de Chardin. It is not the man nor the priest who is being criticised. The critique is of words and expressed principles. His own deprecating insistence that he outlines a phenomenon, and does not define a system of philosophy or theology, does not penetrate into the further questions men may ask, is not acceptable. When Teilhard de Chardin wishes to delineate an essential principle he does it clearly, crisply, one might say fatally with a rapier flash,... and then passes lyrically on. He was no fool, he knew what he was doing and what he meant. When a man has died it is not his personality nor his moral excellence which is remembered and works on, but his thought, that is to say his philosophy. Those who object to severe criticism of Teilhard de Chardin as a philosopher and theologian in the Christian Catholic Faith, must say why, from the words he uses, and the principles he clearly enunciates, such conclusions should not be drawn, why the young minds of tomorrow reading the works and caring nothing for the man and times of yesterday, should not draw similar conclusions, or many worse.

Like many a genius who felt himself to be a man of prophecy and destiny, Teilhard de Chardin may well have never plumbed the depths of his own thought. He may have regarded the relationship of God to creation as a mystery of both Faith and Science, incapable of exact delineation. This mentality, which covers a multitude of nebulous ideas in modern attitudes, destroys alike both science and religion.

Chapter 5 Footnotes

1 Op. cit. p. 64, section 'B' especially: but in general pp. 60-65.

2 Op. cit. p. 57, lengthy footnote.

3 Op Cit. p. 259.

4 Op. cit. pp. 258-65.

5 Op. cit. pp. 268, 269: see ref. back to quote p. 57.

6 viz. p. 293. 'The prodigious biological operation of the Redeeming Incarnation’

7 Op. cit. p. 294.

8 Op. cit. also p. 294.

9 Op. cit. p. 271.

CHAPTER SIX

Mind and the Universe

1 ANIMISM AND ATHEISM

It is worth repeating that all being is meaningful and all being is finalistic in its manifestations by virtue of being being: that is to say real. Even the most indeterminate and potential forms of existence such as the electron and photon have a certain selfness, a certain unity, or they would not be intelligible at all as ‘this’ and ‘that’.

Unless there were this unity in the diversity of material forms, whether simple or synthetic, the scientist could not speak meaningfully of an ‘element’. He could not describe it through formulae which express its organic nature and many at least of its properties. Materialists tend to overlook that mathematics is a science of meaning, and of interrelated meanings at that, not the science of arbitrariness.

The degree of selfness, we could say the degree of personality in a minimum definition of that word, differs according to the degree in which an entity participates of existence. There are degrees of reality, this is the meaning of the profound concept of the analogy of being when rightly appreciated.

If there is an ascent of being from leptons and baryons to mankind, then there are rungs upon the ladder of substances. There are rungs which are lower and rungs which are higher. In the order of material energy we note that the lowest degrees of being are relative intrinsically i.e. are defined towards, the substance of the higher forms which they integrate. Hence, they enter into the full definition and the full intelligibility of the higher substance. A rabbit as an intelligible unity is a being which includes say, electrons, in its full comprehension. Actually, a rabbit is not fully intelligible except as a fact of history, and if we could really go to the limit of its intelligible content, we would be knowing obliquely the history of all else in the evolved universe. The process of relationship and intelligibility is not reversible. Electrons are also part of the definition of ‘man’ but man is not part of the elemental definition of ‘electron’.

At this stage it is better not to use examples taken from the nature of man, since it will make for ambiguity when considering the relationship later of soul and body. The rabbit aforementioned is itself being in a sense deeper than an electron in as much as it is less potential. It cannot enter into the synthesis of something else whilst still remaining alive in its own nature and properties. It is therefore, compared with the electron, more actual in its being. The rabbit too, is living and it is aware, but this is not to say that it is spiritual and intelligent being in the true connotation of the terms.

Function and freedom

There is no evidence that any of the elements or the atoms composed through them are other than equal, identical, and interchangeable. The evidences are that exchange and capture goes on all the time. There are isotopes, variations within the species of an element so to say, but these are not infinite or indefinite in number. There is no evidence of individualism in properties or in response. It is rather important for the exact sciences of matter that this individualism should not exist.

It is impossible to conceive where one would find a task for the ‘radial’ intellectual energy of an atom, much less the really primal elements, or where in the configuration of these forms it would operate. There is nothing vague about the organic law of composition which defines an atom, nor about its manner of action or reaction and the laws which express these relationships. There is nothing groping, no directed chance as Teilhard de Chardin ambiguously calls it. The elements are specialised mechanisms of dynamic harmony, wonderfully precise in function, and most amenable to description by mathematics, even very abstract mathematics.

If it explained the nature of functional response as something ‘thought out’ or ‘willed’ a principle of primary intelligence resident in primary energies would have to be very highly developed indeed. This is impossible, basic elements just do not think things out, and they have no brains. Their unanimity and specialised precision in response would also be totally unlike the manifestations of thought at a macroscopic level. What function would one ascribe to a vague, barely aware type of elemental consciousness, at variance in its manifestation with every other property of that rung of existence? Granted that such a radial energy existed, how could it serve to explain the larger scale unity, which is the overall cosmic organisation in one direction, i.e. upward to the complexification which is mind, which is the real problem of matter in evolution?

It has been said earlier that an appeal to the still problematical Uncertainty Principle is misguided. Even if the essence of the theory is true, this manner of behaviour is not a manifestation in matter of personal mind and free-will. No such uncertainty applies to the natures of elements in constitution, nor to the specific qualities of response in combination. The apparent uncertainty belongs to the tendency to be and to become in the dynamics of space and time, to the local movement and local energy of particles as relativities to other being, that is to say, as combination and reaction probabilities, and disappears in the statistical law of large numbers. It disappears, and the probabilities are said to cancel out, simply because this sort of uncertainty is not a positive and creative quality of either knowing or of willing, but a lack of determination, a greater potentiality, or tendency to become something else, with no inner determination until taken up by an overall law of dynamics, of which the ‘uncertain particle’ is the natural organisable material, and one which is not fully intelligible except in relation to large numbers of others, and a unity-law operating through them.

The identification of the phenomena of life with true intelligence has as many difficulties, even if they are not so obvious. Yet Teilhard de Chardin is more logical than many ‘Rationalists’ who are willing to go part of the way with him, but only after man has emerged from the process of evolution. If with mankind there is mind, finalism, purpose and planning in the universe, then it is absurd to speak of man as become the trustee of evolution, as Professor Huxley is wont to do, and blandly deny these principles in his pedigree. There will be the same process of meaningful ascent from below, though less developed as a centred manifestation. If we have to make this concession for life below mankind, we must extend it logically to the stuff of which life itself is made, and with which it is coterminous as an evolved and complex form of matter. The first principles of reason and of centred striving to advancement must be put into the primal elements. Then the contradictions begin again. Teilhard de Chardin and the many like him are correct in what they are looking for, but wrong in the manner in which they think to have found it. The Rationalist however is simply not being rational.

The dilemma for Atheism

The Marxists too fail to be reasonable with themselves in this subject-matter, much less reasonable than the Idealists and the cosmic animists. They also declare that evolution to man is a necessary law and process of material energies in evolution. The consummating achievement is implicit in the Dialectic inevitably and mathematically, for in this context mathematics is to be considered as including space and time as dynamics of history. History is the science, not the art, of matter in evolution.

They declare the processes, they expect the revelations of the Dialectic, but it is all a matter of blind, irrational scientific Faith, because they do not admit any governing mind which is the centre and the focus of this inevitable future which does not now exist, and is going to be on a plane of organised unity so much higher than flaring elemental energies and their local movements relative to each other. The principle of contradiction, that you cannot both have your cake and eat it, i.e. simultaneously both exist and not-exist, falls heavily upon them.

If, from the beginning of evolution man is a dialectical necessity, then he exists within the equation of primal energies of which the end product is modern times. The necessity of his brain, of the personality of the individual man, in his unity exists within this balanced relativity of matter and energy in motion. But this equation of raw, brainless energies, barely intelligible as being in its own formality, is utterly beneath either the unity or the complexity of man, whether we mean man as a species or any man as an individual. How can these simple mindless energies whether as elements, or at a totality of similar particles contain within their arrangement as of necessity that of which they are the future organisable raw material? This necessity be it noted is a necessity intelligible only through a future, which now is not, and the necessity abides, both in the beginning and at the intermediate stages. What organises? What, standing in the future, organises the present to a further future. As the Scholastics would have said, what Actuality guarantees the fulfilment of this promise, or potentiality? For the Marxist nothing, nothing at all. There is nothing but the scintilla of basic energies in vast numbers and mindless movement.

The Dialectic is an intelligible process only if the future entities and their higher unity of personality pre-exist in some way, for we are talking of materialist necessity, and a truly materialist necessity is capable of mathematical expression. This pre-existence, and the very conception of space to be, and time to be, asserts the pre-existence of matter in a different state of organisation and unity, relative to, and because of, the movements of energy now, the forms of the energy as organised, and the equational harmony now existing. It works backwards, too, the future implies a given poising of the initial state. Frankly, what is the control and direction up and down, of this synthesis of beings in relativity? It ought to be expressed as a Unity spanning the whole of history and all time. It should be, and could be. It is GOD.

2 FURTHER PERPLEXITIES OF MIND

The ‘How’ of God

Unless there is centred control and direction which embraces the future, which does not exist now, but of necessity will exist, as much as the existing present which is poised the way it is, to bring forth just that future, the concept of Dialectic is invalid.

Teilhard de Chardin and others are correct in perceiving that somehow or other there must be postulated a ‘Prime Mover ahead’, that Mind, more than equal to the centre that is the mind of man himself, must be postulated at the very beginning of the poising of the equation of Evolution. We flatter ourselves that we are very modern in our attitude to space and time; then we must bear in mind that space and time are only aspects of the relationships of energy of beings as they evolve. Time and space are not extrinsic qualities of the universe but aspects of the dynamic relativity of material substance. A synthesis evolved through space and time means that entities like mankind are contained as an emergent necessity in the first values of energy in organisation. The upbuilding of man, determines the mathematical formulation of the equation downwards, from his height, in order that by formal necessity it may be organised upwards from its beginnings with that necessity as its content.

But, where was Man, that fragile, easily dissolved unity of organising intellect, during the swirl and clash of megavolt energies and primal forms? He was there, but he was not present. He was there in potentiality, which is more than present in possibility. He was present as a necessity of the terms now organised, in relativity to space and time to come, and organisation still to come.

You must postulate a Centre of control and direction, a Mind and a Will, not commuting within the process of energy relativity, and of entity-form production itself, or the end meanings cannot be in the first meanings of the universal cosmic equation.

To help bring the point home to the miserably misled mind of modern youngsters, one is repeating the argument in slightly different ways. The conclusion is the same, without an entity-Absolute of centred Mind and Will, it is not possible to explain or conceive correctly of evolution as an intelligible ascent of being. Why use this awkward language? We are saying that without a Personal God as the constant absolute of this substantial relativity in being across space and time, the creation as we know it and can prove it, is inconceivable. Atheism is self-contradictory and absurd.

On the other hand, there is no need to embed God in the universe and its intelligible Dialectic. Such is the Animist solution. This initiates absurdity from a different point of the intellectual compass, and the contradictions inherent in pantheism begin to recur.

An Absolute, i.e. a Personal God, to whom all creation is relative in its being, in its becoming, and in its intelligibility, spans simultaneously the inceptive and the consummative ends of the energy-equation in evolution. He is Alpha and Omega as the Bible knows him. He is not Alpha and Omega by identification with things that are coming to be, but as the Unity-Causality principle of the entire process of the serial existence of the real. In the unsophisticated language of an older school, God is Alpha and Omega to the process as the cause and fulfilment of the beginning and of its related end. He cannot at once exist and pre-exist relative to the consummation of evolution as the serial ascent of being, and yet not be made. He cannot be matter-energy in any of its aspects and events, nor part of its process of becoming-in-relativity. Without qualification of relativity (except Self-Relativity, and that is another story), —God simply IS.

Organic choice and the choice of reason

It is not feasible that ‘intellect’ should evolve, not intellect and will in the true meaning of the spiritual attributes as these are seen in man, and as human intelligence is rightly made the norm of comparison for other and lower forms of life. There is no place at all for intelligence in the natures of azoic elements, and so, in the complexification of natures through elemental synthesis, if ‘mind’ is held to evolve a pari with matter, this cannot be through properties native to the elements themselves. In effect Mind is being introduced as an extraneous principle, from outside of matter, as in philosophies of Vitalism.

Mind however always manifests itself through its unity, and through its detachment from the deterministic reactions of organs, or from the specific reactions of organisms. If we look for less than this, then once more it becomes impossible to say of any material entity how much is matter and how much is mind. If the manifestation of mind is identified with functional response, it is difficult to say how the primitive manifestations of ‘mind’ should show at all in lower forms of being. In these the organic responses show a precision lacking in most human activities, but an independent unity, and the freedom of creative choice is what one looks for as the manifestation of something different, something which is ‘mind’.

One would expect that as the process of evolution gave us the increasingly more complex and more highly synthesized forms of being, that the properties of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ would diverge within them ever more obviously. In fact it happens as little as the ‘gradual’ changeover from monkey to man! You find anthropoid forms on the way to man, and men who are primitive, but not graduation which is neither the one nor the other. In respect of the manifestations of mind, one would look for forms of life which showed, as does man, a clear distinction between organic and instinctual functions, and free psychic activity released from specific determination. One does not find it. If one did, there would be chaos in the environment below mankind, for part of its stability is the exactitude with which every species of life responds to its rhythmic law of life, and finds its niche in Nature. There is no overlap of mind and matter functions in Nature. We make exception of course for the one case in which it does happen without shadow of doubt, the case of mankind. This is the case which because it is the supreme achievement of Nature in its brain, should be the norm of all approximations—and there are some reasonably good brains elsewhere in Nature. It is astounding that far from Nature being rich in approximations from the base to the apex of the pyramid which is man, the Atheist and the Animist are going to be hard put to it to make a case for any approximations at all. The loneliness of Man, this risen ape, is a paradox of evolution.

The ‘mind’ of man is not the sheer summit of a mountain of approximations, yet as far as the brain is concerned, this is a mountain all have climbed together. Mankind wins the prize of having broken through, somehow to ‘intellect’. Amazingly enough, of no other form in Nature can it be said with a note of congratulation , —proxime accessit. Yet, if mind is to be conceived as the true and natural emergence of the physical, i.e. of the real potential of universal matter-energy as such, then of course there ought to be true lines of approximation and of analogy in both intellect and freedom elsewhere, just as brain for brain, from insects up to mammals, up to man, a true line of organic approximation and continuity can be found. Can it be that the brain is not all? We shall see that it can be so, the brain is not the whole answer.

To take up and go further: if such a line of ‘approximation’ to human-type intellect did exist, it would cut across the development of highly complex, environmentally controlled instinctual response in advanced forms of life. The brains of the higher forms of life that are less than mankind are computer-programmed towards specific response to specific stimuli. There are ‘variables’ in the answers that these brains can give, and in the ‘choices’ that they can make, but these variables are neither arbitrary nor indefinite in range. They are themselves specific to the controlling environment, the range of which has a limit of definition beyond which any ‘signal’ is meaningless to that type of brain. In this lies the explanation of both the weak analogy with human ‘freedom’ and the plain non-progressiveness of the species of life below mankind.

There is a certain analogy here with the variables of Quantum theory and of elemental phenomena in general. The ‘uncertainties’ of atomic phenomena cancel out when averaged over large numbers, and the variables of sub-human response cancel out averaged over the whole environment. The analogy with Quantum data is not to be pushed too far, because the type of indefiniteness is not, as far as we can tell from present knowledge of elemental phenomena, in identically the same order. In any species of animal the specific organic functions, which spring from its nature, exercise an overriding determination over local motion and over ‘choice’, at least when this is required. The functions essential to individual survival, and to the survival of the species are the centre of gravitation around which all the apparently ‘free variables’ of higher forms of life below mankind revolve, so that these variables are strictly controlled both in range, type, and subordination to biological urge. There is for the animal form a niche in creation, and a way of life that is a routine of existence, there is no overpass to true initiative and true inventiveness. There was once. There is not now. Do not always say subconsciously that ‘it happened in man, there was a gate, there is still a gate, and gates can be opened’. Man is the unique case, and if we would know why man is unique, we must observe and admit the distance between man and other forms of animal being. Only so can we arrive at the correct assessment both of man and the rest of the material creation. To insist that because man has ‘arrived’ the principle which makes man unique as man is shared in due measure by all other being, is not science, nor fact, but philosophical prejudice, and erroneous prejudice in addition.

The analogical nature of being, itself will make it difficult at first sight to prove the real uniqueness of the human order within matter-energy creation. But there are signs that can be given. In the present context we choose but one: in the animal brain, the development of highly complex response, with seemingly a type of choice and freedom goes with the parallel development of organic instinctual response and sharper functional response. In mankind, the opposite is found. The development of intellect and mind tends to atrophy the organic and instinctual responses by a form of intervention and take-over, so that they become vestigial. In matters of food and behaviour, the principle of ‘mind’ in mankind seems to create its own deleterious environment indeed, to the detriment of nature, and quite against Nature at times. One thinks of man’s dentition, his flabby muscles, civilised diseases, addiction to lethal smoking etc. Equally, where he values an organic pleasure, he seems able to develop it out of all possible functional use or balance, even to the perversion of balance and rational assessment, as with sexual pleasure. It is not negativity, it is an existential drive, a drive that is beingful in man that does this and accounts for this. It is impossible to identify it with the brain, the configuration of the brain, the pedigree of the brain, or the environmental control of the brain of man. Something takes over the directive powers of the environment within the personality of man, and within the brain of man. What can it be we wonder? Whatever it is, it is also natural to the brain of man, so that the mystery deepens.

The difficulties of solution at the critical limit of application for a one principle, i.e. monist theory of matter and mind indicate, as often in history, that an existing synthesis of knowledge is neither adequate nor truly correct. This ought to indicate for us that a further synthesis must be attempted that accounts for data seemingly covered before, but eliminates the contradictions at the limits of theory. In the case of the phenomena of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’, it is this, one suggests, that we need to do.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Ascent of Life

A matter of chance

‘Chance’ properly and philosophically so called, means that anything may happen anywhere, anyhow, anytime, for any reason and for none at all. In the usual way of using words, to say that something happened by chance, or by luck, means only that the course of events was not premeditated or set in motion by oneself. It does not imply that a meaningful explanation of events cannot be given. Strict ‘chance’ would imply that there was no meaningful link, no relationship of necessity or of finalism between one event or series of events, and what follows through them. In the true sense of the term then, the process of Evolution and the serial interdependence of complex natures cannot be ascribed to ‘chance’.

This would make nonsense of experimental science. It would make more obviously nonsense of the exact, mathematical sciences, for chance in such a radical sense is incompatible with the notion of an equation in any sense of that word, quite incompatible with an equation of values in movement, in which the future is latent as ‘progress’ in the constitution and movement of the forces concerned as now organised at any given instant of time.

This must be weighed when there is too, too easy talk of evolution through ‘random’ mutation, because if constructive mutation is as random as mutation through injury etc., one must ask what sort of internal economy it is that guarantees the constructive mutation and its constant superiority in survival?

Natural Selection is invoked too much in the manner of Fairy Godmother at the pantomime. The environment that selects is only other being, living being and non-living being. It is ever in movement and mutation itself, and surely as ‘random’ in its inner principle as the ‘other’ that it selects. If not, why not? There is a danger of treating Nature as an economy that is viable because everybody lives by taking in everybody else’s washing.

The whole concept of the mechanism behind the ‘random mutation’ needs more thinking through and testing for coherence. These constructive mutations at least those which are species causing, appear to be rare, and also to be large scale in their organic effect. That is, they reorganise and redeploy either the entire organism of the life concerned, or major facets of it. Such reorganisation, if the form of life concerned is to be viable, let alone be selected preferably, must have a relationship to the species in its environmental relationships, not simply to the individual. It is a new thing that is evolved, not a stronger individual of the old thing. There has been too narrow an insistence on the selection of the preferred individual as an individual. We have to think and speak of the species preferability of a mutation that involves, to be preferred, a parallel and simultaneous mutation of the total environment… mutation in step, perhaps mutation prompted by previous or parallel change : all just ‘random’?

Then there are mutational series, the development and correlation of highly specific sexual organs, modes of fertilisation extremely specific to environment, etc., that cannot be attributed to some random mechanical instability in the organism. They are not individual, but specific to the nature and the environment, and often orthogenetic in the character of their development. It means that we are back to the evolving equation and equations are not random.

It is difficult, if not impossible to explain the origin and development of the social and colony forming insects, in which the individuals show a marked analogy to the cells and functions of an individual hermaphroditic animal, let us say, by the postulate of random mechanisms of evolution. The mode of evolution here can be only social and specific, the individual has no survival fitness, in the termitary for instance, but resembles nothing so much as a non-reproducing blood cell in the higher forms of life. Much the same can be said of various forms of aphid, that in order to be able to suck, must first fly from the parent plant, and commit mass suicide for the greater part, by coming down mostly on plants that are not acceptable nourishment for them. But some are luckier, and survive, and increase, and spread the species far and wide, as would never be done if they competed all together around a common focus, like rabbits. One can say that the old fashioned view of random mutation and selection by struggle, resembles nothing so much as the early capitalist society in which it was thought out, while later views, especially those deriving from the study of insect life, are highly and exquisitely socialist in their theoretical bias. So though, is the aspect of Nature they consider. Both aspects have had some success in application, so should one say that Nature is a revisionist Mixed Economy? There is something to it, but in fine, both schools of thought need to be combined within a common further synthesis.

‘In the beginning...’

Cosmic Evolution does not begin with life, it includes it, but begins with the development of the atomic elements, the molecule, the aggregations of molecules, the complex organic compounds, amino-acids, carbonates, etc... There is evolution here, this is part of the series as we have seen.

If we wish to find a clue to the basic mechanism of the evolution of the living, let us begin in the beginning, because all the complexity that comes later is built up on those same building bricks... let us look for a common underlying factor, a factor of process that underpins the structure of Nature.

By no stretch of the imagination can one refer to the eduction and synthesis of the heavy atomic nuclei on the basis of the hydrogen nucleus (or whatever concept now refines that knowledge) as the ‘natural selection’ of ‘random mutations’. It is development through equational energy-relationships, the law is mathematical and eternal so to speak, and is reproducible in the laboratories of mankind. The complex elements that precede Life have a very low survival value, most of them are disintegrated by a couple of hundred degrees centigrade of heat: they could only have come into existence upon planets in a cool and stable atmosphere. Yet, they are part of the process of life, and it is very clear that they come into existence not by ‘chance’, but by the necessary environmental interplay of the stage immediately preceding them. We are not dealing with necessary selection, but with necessary eduction, under an equational law.

In order to explain Evolution up to mankind, we do not need to invoke Animism, nor to embrace the contradictory incoherences of Marxist Dialectic. Yet, there is a Dialectic, but it is neither Atheist nor Antithetical. It is the ‘Law of Control and Direction’, and we must ponder the manner in which it works through and through the stages of Evolution, up to the time it ceases to determine the natures that appear on the stage of creation, and the laws of their control, and itself becomes a vehicle for determination. Up to the time when it is itself determined as the vehicle by which the Principle of the Law itself comes into his own as the Heir of the Ages: King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

The ascent of Law

The Law of Control and Direction, as has been stated earlier, is not a law of matter in a specific sense. It is not the law of this event and effect, or of that event and effect, it is a Law in Matter that is cosmic and all-inclusive, so that the entire universe is one equation of meaningful development, in mutual relativity of part on part, at all times and throughout all space.

The Law is sufficient of itself to explain all the phenomena of evolution, and is equational, or if you prefer dialectical in its format. It is not truly distinct from the energies and natural forms of the universe themselves, except in so far as it is the totality of them in their ever universal and causal relationship, in which they are members one of another... and except also in so far as they are centred dynamically on an Absolute not part of the series, an Absolute without whom the necessity of the actuality latent in the series is not intelligible, for that actuality, and the space and time in which it is framed is not an existent now, but to be a potential necessity, must be an existent somehow, somewhere, and in some relationship, It is an existent, that future, in and through its final centre of relativity, the Absolute Being that is outside of the series, outside of space and time, whose Present Now, spans all spaces and all times, because IT IS.

So the Law of Control and Direction is also a Dialectic, because it is the weaving of a progress from present state to next future state, in which the emergent future is indeed a necessity because of present conditions of being and their relationship one to another. The Law is the sum and concatenation of all material energy, and its forms, one to another, ever centred upon God. Thus, as new forms of entity evolve, whether chemical forms that are not yet life, or living forms, and then onwards to advanced living forms, all these have their own law of constitution, their own ‘formula’ of being and becoming, as we know.

The ‘formula’, by which, as when one says ‘H2O’, one expresses a relationship of synthesis, is also the expression of the constitution of a compound being in relationship to its environment, in relation to other material being. It is not the whole of the statement, it takes for granted the vast stability of other laws and statements through which it stands, but which is not apparent to a man attempting to synthesize that element or compound within some experimental connotation. To express the whole causal relationship correctly, especially in the context of here and now, in this particular place etc., would entail the writing of the entire cosmic equation in all its relationships throughout history. We cannot do it, we were not there. Every causal relationship of synthesis of being, in the evolution of the living and the non-living forms of being, all their organic functions within their own constitution, and in relativity to the environment, —and the ‘environment’ embraces all the cosmos,—this is always part of one, ever-meaningful, causal, creative balance of association in being and in becoming. This is causality, the dialectic, the Law of Control and Direction, these names can all mean the same thing, and it makes nonsense of Hume and the schools of philosophy that follow in his steps. Man is not the supercilious norm of his own knowledge: man is the product and ‘son’ of the knowledge which is instinct in the framing of the universe. That is why the Son of God is the norm of the sons of Man.

‘The Law is ever ancient, but ever new’

These individual ‘laws of life’ that are the laws of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, botany, medicine, geology, psychology etc., all these relationships of function and causal impact are in their very selves aspects of this overriding Unity-Law of control and direction. The Unity lives in the parts, but through it the constituent parts consist and hold together. The Totality that is the Unity-Law is ever-changing, and so is reconstituted anew at each moment of history. It is reconstituted always as a unity. It is held in unity through the new natures which are brought forth within it in the process of evolution. It is the new natures, as elements of causal impact, as dynamic relativities one upon another that, as the environment each of another, hold the progressive equation of ascending being in a lasting balance.

There is nothing ‘random’ about this process, there may at a first superficial glance appear to be, but this is because the total relationships of the universal law are not perceived. That which selects is itself selected, that which is select impacts other being as a selecting principle. It is in any case too narrow a concept to speak only of ‘selection’, for the influence of being upon being under the equational law is formative also, and creative, it prompts the coming to be of new forms in evolution. I seem to see concessions being made on this point by Dr. Waddington and other distinguished geneticists to the experiments carried out in recent years by the Russians. The influence of the environment as a prompting influence is coming to be recognised. It will be found one suggests that neither Darwin nor Lamarck, nor Lysenko nor the Huxleys are entirely right, or entirely wrong, a correct perspective will see elements of the theories of all in a total synthesis of equational law.

There is a sort of ‘symbiosis’ in coming to be, not only in the order of the living, but in the order of the compounds and elements themselves. It is obvious in principle within the elemental order, where not random mutation but certain definite environmental conditions are the requisite for new fusion and combination. The order of life will not be found to operate on a principle totally different. Aquinas will be found to have been right, —a cause is that which makes inflow being into some other.

It is important to observe that the new and higher forms of being, life and then the advanced forms of life with large brains, are new functions of determination within the environment not simply as masses of primal energy organised this way and that, but as unities, as substances that act one upon another. The supreme example of this unity within which matter is synthesised with so vast complexity is any man himself, the peasant or the scientific genius. Vast masses of frightfully complicated matter-energy do not, as such, think, yearn and love, nor do they unravel by intricate deduction the secrets of the most distant stars. A man is not simply a quantum equation of energy, but a person, a one thing, and so, in a much lesser sense but truly is every thing that lives. It is the unity of the thing that is brought forth, the higher degree of being and existence bespoken in the twin aspect of personality and complexity in one, that reminds us that this thing, this degree of power in existence was not there at the beginnings of evolutionary history, as we have said before. It could not have been there, nor any high degree of complex unity, and unity in complex. Yet it is higher, and more intelligible and ‘intelligent’ in the order of matter itself. If it were not so, it could not know, use, and bend matter to the will of mankind. The equation could not begin unless it were poised meaningfully to its historic progress, but neither could the higher unity be there as a unity, above all in MAN, the test-case of the universe, unless at all times the Equation and its potential were relative to the NECESSITY whose other name is GOD. To make the universe intelligible and the progression of higher being up to and including man intelligible, GOD IS A NECESSITY NOT ONLY OF METAPHYSICS BUT OF MATHEMATICS.

The orthogenetic brain

Orthogenesis, the birth of successful mutation along a defined and continuous course, has not been a popular concept among empiricist British philosophers of science. The dislike has existed not for reasons of scientific fact, but of philosophic and anti-theological pretension, it has been suspect as the weak French window through which the Deity may enter without knowledge of the proctors. Yet the concept of orthogenesis is justified and is here to stay. Many concessions have been made of late by Materialists and Atheists who have not foreseen the shape of things to come out of them.

In the first place, orthogenesis, under a different name, is part of any Hegelian or Marxist concept of history, for the emergent future is always the natural child of pre-existing conditions, granted the tensions and apparent oppositions of the antithesis postulated by this theory of historic evolution.

Orthogenesis, sometimes recognised as such is equally the doctrine of every Vitalist and Animist theory of creation and evolution. Père Teilhard de Chardin is manifestly in that school, and so therefore is Professor Julian Huxley to the very important extent that he agrees with that writer. Teilhard de Chardin indeed has an interesting theory that may be capable of some sort of experimental test. The suggestion that is, that living things evolve as interrelated ‘whorls’ of being around ‘a point of inflorescence’, and he notes the evolution in the Australasian subcontinent of pseudo-tigers preying upon beasts that graze etc. bearing, short of strict mammalian type, a generic relationship to the pattern of evolution elsewhere, in spite of presumed isolation. In other words, if the equation of life is cut off early enough, it will evolve in a recognisably similar pattern and proportion everywhere. It could be.

We are able however to recognise orthogenesis on less detailed levels. Bergson makes great play with the eye, but why should we bother with the detailed case? The eye itself can well be considered part of the brain, so for that matter can the whole body itself! It is the brain which is the epitome of life, and the key to the riddles of matter and of spirit. It is the brain likewise that is the supreme example of orthogenesis in the entire ascent of the elements to scientific man. From the first organisation of the notochord into a nervous centre, through the massive bulk of the dinosaurs to the upsurge of the anthropoid stem, we have a developing brain, and its level of development decides the versatility and pseudo-intelligence, in human terms, of the living creature. Moreover, the versatility of the brain depends itself upon a parallel change and intensification of the environment, an intensification and ‘enveloping upon itself’ to use a concept of de Chardin, that cannot be by impulsive random mutation with possible catastrophic relapse, —otherwise neither the pattern nor pedigree of the progressive brain can be maintained in evolution. The better brain is passed on from the time that life seeps from the shallow seas to the lands, by a continual ascent of life in an environment which supports it without biological breakdown. In advancing, this dynamic organ of life, the brain, must pass on the pattern it has thus far achieved. The environment must remain stable to support it. This environment remains always stable, but never static, it is ever changing full of mutating life and chemical alteration of pattern. Both keep in step, the equation evolves and involves, the brain builds bigger and bigger on the basis of its own complex history, but balance within the impact of beings upon beings, elements upon complex elements is ever maintained through the production of change in life, —change that is chemical, biochemical, planetary, even cosmic.

Once again, —we cannot be in the presence of overall random mutation, but in the presence of mutually co ordered law. We gave it earlier the name for preference of the cosmic Unity-Law of Control and Direction throughout the evolution of the universe.

The brain ‘comes with power’

It is not an accident that the science of making super-computers, sometimes called ‘mind-machines’ has learnt a very great deal from the constructional engineering of the brain and the nervous system. The brain of any form of life, most obviously of advanced life, is a supercomputer, and is also a mind-machine. The mind-machines of every man-made type proceed in any event from the mind of man himself. They may surpass his powers of computation and mathematical comparison in speed and range, but the principle of ‘know how’ is built into the machine by man himself. They can never therefore surpass the master-brain that has raised them from the slime of the earth, the crude ore of the rocks, and has breathed into their faces the breath of life and meanings so that they have become like living souls. There must be something very special indeed about the mind-machine that makes man, Man! However, let the digression stand upon that for now.

We stress the organic nature of the brain as it evolves upwards. It is the epitome of life itself, made for determination to function, specialised according to the life-cycle of the individual and the species, it is not random and it is not free. While it controls the domestic economy of the individual body, it responds, in order to do so, to a great range of environmental stimuli, not all of them known for any one form of life even today. It is meaningful, but its very meanings are determined by its niche within the total economy of Nature. Lambs have a meaning for wolves, but wolves a very different meaning to lambs. The pigeon that dies eating my cauliflowers found them meaningful, but pigeons have a meaning also for cats, cats are not interested in cauliflowers. It is all a matter of the brain, and its specification. There is the point, all brains have a specification, they do a certain job.

When the brain mutates in evolution, it is still organic, it has a structure and a specification, it cannot have a better survival value, nor a better progress value (which is not necessarily one and the same thing) unless the environment also favours the mutation. The environment remember is not static, it is the rest of impacting entity. The concatenation of ‘accidents’ will not do, meaning is written into the primal elements themselves, it is the same as function and nature, and as elements progress to life, and life through the brain to advanced forms that have ‘intellect’, at every stage there must be tolerance of the stuff of past ages, now woven into the texture of the new mutation. It is the universal equation again, there is nothing really random in Nature.

Reaction and response

So the evolution of the brain is highly analogous to the development of a super-computer. It has also to be programmed for the specific job it has to do. The doctrine of random mutation is even more difficult here in the matter of the social insects and symbiotic forms of life, for even the individual non-reproducing worker ant has a ‘brain’ etc. It is just as difficult however taken over the environment as a whole. The link is so very sensitive and so very specific. How many complex compounds are the chemical signals of food, prey, mates etc., for countless species of fish, moth, fly, insect. How many injected poisons are specific between preyer and preyed, how many wounds are specific upon a certain part of a certain type of living body, how many forms of life respond like a gyro-compass to sun, moon, stars, etc. in the terrestrial habitat in which they have evolved! If there were not this mathematical neatness of co-existence one might indulge the mindless philosophy of sheer empiricism, but the mathematics give away the equation. Evolution is a progress, and the progress is a Dialectic, in the basic sense of the word as a reasoning, but not as a controversy. There comes to mind the occasion the author watched the birth of a litter of pigs. They had hardly gushed from the womb, before they were manifestly, in less than three seconds, searching for the paps. That is meaning and purpose, built into the natures of things, into all being that is, and natures are interdefined, and are dynamic, and the dynamism is upward of ontological necessity... and no man can escape it, even though it lead him into the presence of the Living God.

The brain then advances, but always conditioned, seeking and finding its determination from the environment, which is both other being impacting, competing, preying, —and at one and the same time providing its principle of life-law. Nothing is its own independent determinant. Nothing evolved of itself and for and by itself, everything is interdefined in nature and in existence. Nothing either is an end in itself, or has a lasting value in itself... not until we reach Man. The problem of evil in nature below mankind is a problem of the sentimentalist. The problem rests upon false premises.

The equational balance of Nature, the build of vegetation upon mineral, animal upon vegetation, animal upon animal, ail argues that no unthinking life is an absolute value. Indeed, the very fact of sexual apparatus and multiplication speaks the same story: if nothing died and decayed, nothing could be born.

There is no need to speak of ‘false starts’ and ‘blind alleys’ in Nature, nor of the ‘endless gropings of directed chance’. If it is directed, then it is not chance. It is a manner of speaking that Teilhard de Chardin uses inevitably, from his philosophy, but many Materialist philosophers of science, including Professor Julian Huxley, indulge it as well. It is lyricism, but there is no evidence that it is fact: if it is not fact it is Art possibly, but not Science.

An Animist philosopher is very likely to speak in that idiom particularly if, like de Chardin he equates moral evil and ignorance of good as we know it among mankind, with the processes of evolution in itself. From a quite different angle the Marxist thinker does much the same (but we have already suggested that there is a great deal of Marxist thinking in Teilhard de Chardin) and names it the ‘antithesis’ that is at the heart of being. There is no principle of antithesis in Nature. On his own hypothesis the Marxist ought to revise his fundamental dogma in this respect, he can decide later on how far it may be necessary to change the methodology. Why be afraid to change even fundamental tenets? If there is no God, Lenin cannot be invested with divine attributes.

The Dialectic defines progress as a necessity of the dynamic of being, a dynamism that manifests itself in the movements of matter-energy and its successive forms. In that case the antitheses, as part of the cosmic equation of historic progress are only apparently antitheses. They are tensions, perhaps tensors, of the relativities within matter, but if they are intrinsic to the process of development they are not contradictions but complementaries within the overall equation of movement. An equation that is defined through its contradictions would not make intelligible sense in mathematics, therefore neither in science, and if not in science, then not in metaphysics, which is to say, for a Marxist, in dialectics.

There is no reason to believe in such anthropomorphic concepts as ‘false starts’ and ‘blind alleys’ down Nature’s way. What succeeded well in the then environment was best suited for that period. In its decay, in the very decay of its flesh, it has added to the environment and fitted it for the better brained life that has followed. It occurs to mind that the very excreta of the vast reptilian life that ploughed through the tropical bogs of long ago must have done much to modify that environment in both its chemical and insect life. Who can say to what degree this type of ecological change has been the principle of selection itself to the life, vegetative, bacterial, animal, of the next evolutionary push, especially attendant on the change of climate and atmosphere? Ah! somebody will say, that change of atmospheric condition, glaciation and temperate intermission, yes, this was the lucky accident that supervened upon the new environment created by the debris of the age of the dinosaur and tropical marsh, it was able to use it, but had the former conditions continued progress would have been impossible down the blind alley of armoured bulk and tiny brains etc., etc. It will not do: the changes in the terrestrial and solar environment are part of just one whole, the equation is cosmic. There is no need to invoke Animism, nor ‘the best of British luck’, the Unity-Law of dynamic Relativity, the Law of Control and Direction is the only, and the sufficient principle of answer.

Characteristics of the developing brain

The brain comes with power over the ages and life comes of age through the brain. The brain however is built into its environment, precision built for the environment, and this is the more obvious in the lower forms of life. It is just as true of the brain of the Anthropoids, but not, just as obviously true of the brain, or at least of the personality of Man. It is true of all life else, and it must be true of the brain as brain, leaving mankind aside, because the brain is an organism, and organism is not random but specific to function.

The brain we have argued already has a pedigree, and that pedigree and its constants are built into its structure from humble beginnings up. We are not going to find an advanced brain that belies the pedigree of determinism upon which its radical responses have been erected. In fact, I believe it is true to say that the brains of the anthropoids nearest to mankind today, match that of man convolution for convolution. There is no sign of difference in the cellular structure, nor indeed in any of the matter-energy parallelisms between man and the higher primates. The brain of man is larger, the frontal lobes and perhaps other parts are better developed, but there is no suggestion that the brain of man functions upon a pattern specifically different from the rest of Nature. And, it does not.

This can be all conceded, and once conceded, man is best put to one side for a short time, that we may consider better the nature of the brain on its pathway up to mankind. It may be that by forgetting man for the moment, we may learn more towards the unravelling of the problem that he poses.

The brain then, is built in to the environment, and from this law-full impact of other being it receives a vital principle of its own control and direction. Even the regulation of its domestic organic economy is bound up intimately and of necessity with the times, seasons, promptings, and general relativity (in a philosophic sense of the expression) that it has through the determining environmental law.

The brain of any form of life has then a certain power of energy, and that energy is not only utilised, but specified to a certain cycle of life. We do not know as much about the brain as we could wish, but however the details be conceived, it is true to say that according to its species the brain of a form of life has a given degree of controlling and responding power. For instance, if the brain of the highest known anthropoid on the path to man could have been grafted into the body and nervous system of one of the huge reptilian forms of life that had real brains about the size of a pea, there would be unbalance, in fact death. Of course the similitude given is impossible, for the brain would try to impose on the body the life-cycle of the higher form, for in a real sense the rest of the body seems to be the perimeter only of the brain, the body would not impose its life law on the brain. Yet the point can be taken that this anthropoid brain would be too powerful and high-geared for the life-cycle of a dinosaur, and it would not receive within that environment, the adequate determination for the deployment of its energies. Even if life could persist, breakdown and disease would supervene, for however we think of it, the brain is an organism, and in order to make a valid point it might be said with a certain impropriety of term that it is a ductless organism at that. The energies of the brain and the degree of development reached are proportional to a given degree of versatility in the way of life, though always within the controlled pattern of organic determination from within its own somatic economy, and from without from the law that is the environment. Those energies must be given their outlet and directed into their proportionate channels.

In every form of life an excess or a deficiency either is disease or leads to it, as is clear from the many forms of disease prompted by so-called civilised living among men. The more powerful the brain, the more energy it generates, so much the more, not the less, does it need a determination and life law for its powers: those powers are relative to the environment and have been so throughout evolution.

This has been the path of development in every brain, including man’s, and it is still the demonstrable nature of the brain for the existing primates below mankind when living in their natural conditions. The brain of man cannot and will not be an exception to the law of the organic. This must be demanded in the name of matter, indeed in the name of Materialism within its lawful sphere, in the name of evolution itself and the continuity of mankind with all other material life below him in the process of his passage upwards. The point must be carefully remarked, because it is most important to the solution of the problems of man’s nature.

Variables and determination by Natural Law

There are many variables in the function of the brain of advanced forms of life, and they seem to resemble freedom as we know it in mankind, but in reality there is no true freedom and no escape from the rule of deterministic law. There must be variables in an economy in which contraries are related in a balance of complementarity, and Nature is such a balance. There are natural checks at all levels, most obviously of preyer upon prey, and in this mutual competition there must be room for a play of forces and variations, but it is always within the limits of a rhythm of life-cycle, times, seasons, habits and habitats: it is never arbitrary. The hunted fox should be able to take in the whole sweep of a country-side, the position and sounds of the hunt, and make a strategic move or assessment accordingly. This handling of many variables very fast, in a given way, for a given end is computer-processed into its brain through long ages of development a pari with the environment itself. In a very true sense the environment is part of himself, it is an influence and determinant of its very being, and the lie of the land upon which it has lived, and hunted, and feared, and run is also a fact of information processed into that brain which is analogous to a mechanism of very high order indeed. Yet foxes, and for that matter orang-utans and chimpanzees etc., remain in the non-progressive rut of organisms that for all their power and versatility of brain do not throw up individual initiative, free speech, and free thought. They cannot because they are not free, their brains, though very high, are bound to a meaningful round, meaningful in terms of the functions of a nature, within the limits of controlled organism and equally controlled and organic environment. The variables they display in behaviour, mood, etc., are no more freedoms than the variations within the statistical mass that disappear at the limits of large numbers etc. So too, for all the moods and differentiations in animal personality there is no breakthrough to freedom from environmental control. The variables of nature and behaviour are the effects of many an impress of the past upon the genetic constitution, many a moulding and conditioning from the pressures of life and habitat. These do not need thought to explain them, they have been in existence in forms of life below mankind before man’s emergence and side by side with man as he emerged. These phenomena are not the stuff of intellect, nor do they manifest the specific differentiation of free intelligence. Only one animal uniquely does that, and that is the very reason why Man is more than just an animal.

CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART THREE

THE ADVENT OF MAN

The Book is available from Faith Keyway Trust http://www.faith.org.uk

CHAPTER EIGHT

Brain and Personality:

the Secret of Man

The variables that define the range of animal behaviour within environmental control and the differing temperaments of the individuals within a species, while marked in degree will always remain variables within a closed circuit of life and reaction.

There are certain priorities in the behaviouristic activities of life, —feeding, mating, organisation of the herd or team etc., that follow a definite pattern. They can be deferred for a time by reason of other choices or alarms, in the individual, but they may not be too long deferred, as variables within a pattern, or the individual, and later the species will die out. There can be no adaptation to a radically new pattern, save by the process of evolution itself. The individual and the hierarchic responses of its nature are structurally related to the environment, when the environment turns hostile in its structure, then individuals and species die out. This is still determinism. This was the fate of the great reptiles, and the fate doubtless of many a form of life between glaciations etc., while at the same time the change of environment favoured other forms of being, or prompted mutations by which a form that adapted within the species could cope. The equation of Nature is maintained.

The sign of organic determinism is recognisable in a patterned way of life common to all the individuals of a species, that channels the animal life into a circuit of self-preservation, reproduction, defence, —death. It does not allow of creative individuality or radical steps to control the environment itself. The environment provides a way of life that is specific, and the species of life below mankind, even the highest of the primates, are part of the law of mutual rhythmic inter-determination of one form of being upon another.

There is ‘speech’ only for the specific, structure determined needs of the individual and the herd: there is no developed communication of ideas that exceeds this inbuilt and common inheritance, there would be no ‘public’ for it if there were, it would be ‘meaningless’ in the connotation of behaviouristic life. The subject is important, because the lack of speech free from inbuilt natural meanings shows that the brain in the high primates is still true to its structural and organic character. It is essentially a mechanism, essentially a computer that is programmed according to the equational balance of that brain within its environment. We are not yet in the presence of any exception to the rule, not in the presence of personality truly so called. The individual is still fully subject to the species and the environmental life cycle, it is not an end in itself, nor in any way a law and a personal value unto itself.

The brain that is immediately on the path that ends in man, and is near to journey’s end, will manifest the extreme limit of variability and sensitivity of response in relation to its personal being and the world outside. It will still be receiving from the impress of environmental law an essential part of its life-determination. However it will be approaching the limits of range, the limit of the rest of matter to effect an equational mutual interplay and determination of action and inter-action with this dynamic form of life.

Man: the organic preparation, tools etc.

Let us consider man as a fact of history, and prescind for now from any further judgement, philosophical or theological upon his nature. In the light of what he possesses, if he comes into being by evolution, certain qualities must be postulated in his ancestors. Whatever it is that constitutes the unique personality of man cannot act and be manifest through a brain that does not exist in continuity of use and type with whatever immediately preceded human personality.

We must anticipate from its highly developed brain, that this anthropoid will be able to use natural substances as improvised tools, and to make rudimentary tools in a direct way. Many much more ‘fixed’ forms of life are able to do this in the building of a nest or lair, —nobody who has watched a bird actually building its nest can doubt it, —and if less advanced creatures can do this with precise skill within an instinctual pattern that is very fixed, there is no reason at all why the best brain in Nature should not be able to do the same thing, to exercise a ‘judgement proceeding from the nature’ in a more transient and casual form and in a more ‘human’ manner. The versatility and the variability will remain however within the limits of an environmental control and a specific form of animal initiative. The ‘interest’ and the ‘initiative’ will not go beyond, and does not go beyond a way of living specifically controlled as a closed circuit in relationship to the determining environment.

It seems very unlikely that the controlled use of fire could be a specifically determined variable of instinctual use in the sense in which we have been using the term. The control of fire would seem to require a range of action and reaction too wide and too lacking in harmonics to come within a pattern of behaviour and ‘judgement of the nature’ determined by the interplay of an organic brain with an environment which, in the last analysis, is even more obviously determined by harmonics of structure. The control of fire seems to require rational human personality as we know it, in the philosophic sense, i.e. man with full, free, and personal control of all his faculties in full, unitary self-consciousness. In that case Neanderthal man will be ‘sapiens’ in the strict sense, and it seems Pekin man too, unless the signs of fire connected with the latter should indicate that he was cooked and eaten rather than that he did the cooking. Prescinding from the more accurate philosophic norms of definition for man as distinguished from anthropoids, the concept of ‘fire using’ animal may prove more satisfactory than that of ‘tool using’ because the latter has always been ambiguous.

The range of coordination and cooperation of hand and brain in the species that immediately gave rise to man, would have to be astounding in comparison with any other form of life, and the requirement may include more than is immediately obvious. The requirement would not include free speech, but would include a wide variety of speech-like sounds that possessed a natural meaning to companions from the structure of the brain itself. One would expect much more than the twenty or thirty code sounds attributed to chimpanzees for instance, there might be a couple of hundred modulations of perception and mood, and these would serve as the natural platform for the next jump to speech as the expression of reason. Animal speech of this kind would not, once again, be a natural judgement in the human sense, but a judgement of the nature and still within the closed circuit of environmentally controlled awareness, but nevertheless at the limits of the potential of the environment to determine in a meaningful sequence of actions and reactions.

At the limits of environmental control

From its organic structure, from its fashioning throughout the history of the rise of life, from its relativity of kind and of process with the rest of matter, the influence of the environment is necessary to the brain as a principle of co-determination in its coming to be, and in its active vital functioning. The point has been made before.

Yet the process of orthogenesis in Evolution goes on, it is continued in the development of the brain. The line of life that leads directly to mankind is mutating for an ever bigger and more competent brain, one that demands ever greater sensitivity of animal organism and mood, and an ever more complex life-cycle with an ever more complex environmental control. There must be a natural limit to this process, for the ‘environment’ is not the fairy-godmother some scientists would have it be, but is just ‘other being’ in its dynamic and balanced interplay with that highly developed brain. This environment, which is other being in its law-giving and life fulfilling impact, is not progressing on a par with this unique animal species possessed of so huge an urge to progress through the brain.

There will come a time, if the mutational urge of this brain continues, when an animal will be conceived that is too powerful and too versatile to be provided with an environmental law able to contain its energies within the closed circuit and the organic balance of a specific way of life. That is to say that an essentially determinist environment will not be able to proffer a ‘way of life’ within its equational poise to this brain... although if the brain be all in man, this relationship of control and controlled is essential to its understanding as organism.

A time is about to be born when an anthropoid will deny the Law which has woven matter, given form to its energies and meaning to its history, deny the dialectic of Evolution, and deny the pedigree of the brain and of its fundamental mechanism.

Obviously, such an animal cannot happen, for the brain and the body are not meaningful except in a relationship of harmonic interplay with the material environment. If, for the sake of argument, we concede that it can happen, this mutation will be at any rate a decadent one, as we are told most mutations are. This thing to be born will be a diseased sport of Nature. It will not possess any survival value, for the environment cannot select favourably what it cannot compass meaningfully.

An excess of any organic substance or activity is unbalance, unbalance is disease or leads directly to it. Every organic product is for a function, and the brain needs to find at all times its co-determining principle of direction and of adequate use for the matter-energy of the brain. No brain, not even that of Man, defies the basic laws of biochemistry and of the material order.

Dusk upon the ‘Brave New World?’

It comes to mind that not long before his death there was a pessimistic interview given by Mr. H. G. Wells to the representative of a national newspaper, in which he took just that jaded view of Home Sapiens. Mr. Wells was bitterly disappointed in the brute. The war was barely over, and had taught him nothing at all, and the top priority use of the miracles of nucleonics to make better weapons, was the last straw. Nature had produced a clever little beast who was too much for himself, and for his environment. He was running out of control, and would destroy himself. Nature would need to begin all over again with some other relatively unspecialised form of the living. —Mr. Wells rather thought that rats had developmental possibilities.

Actually, it is impossible for ‘Nature’ to develop any creature up to free intellect and free will, without letting it off the leash of environmental control. Hence, there could never be any guarantee that the rat who became Mankind II would not at once develop into a worse ‘rat’ than the simian form of the rational creature. It is also very likely that Home Sapiens, in disappearing with other non-selected types, will have poisoned the physical atmosphere against any other type of life that might now expect promotion.

‘Nature will have to begin again’, and cognate expressions are semantically fascinating. If the continually recurrent expression has a meaningful content, somebody ought to identify this personality. A certain type of philosopher of science seems to be always laying about and waiting for Godot.

At the sad end of his life Mr. H. G. Wells may have taken too pessimistic a view of mankind. But he had a flair for the scientific insight, the flair of the philosopher rather than of the empiricist as such. Once again he touched the heart of a great truth which is apt to be hushed up on the scientific side of the cultural divide. It is a ‘difficulty’ in the theology of science! Mr. Wells perceived that man is an animal, and that animals are produced and survive in equilibrium with their environment, and the determination they receive from the environment, through their brain, is an essential part of their intelligibility. Mankind is an exception to the rule of all material being. By the laws of the organic and of Materialism Man ought never to have happened. The fact that he did is the first observation of empirical science.

The manner of Man

This is the explanation of Man: In the line of the primates there was a species in which the brain was developing to the limit of the power of the environmental law to control in equilibrium. That limit was reached, but the mutational potential to a yet more competent brain went on. There was a further mutation in which the anthropoid brain overpassed the limits of the Unity-Law within environment to control the life-circuit. This brain is now out of equilibrium with the rest of Nature. Yet this brain is like all other brains as cellular and organic, structural and material, there is nothing special about it in this respect, it is ‘matter’ and calls for environmental control and direction like every structure of life ‘Nature’ has produced through the laws and processes of Evolution.

This brain is like any other brain in physical constituents, except that its potential is in excess of the Unity-Law within Nature to determine after the manner common to everything else that exists. Such a mutation ought to be a diseased sport.

It is not a diseased freak of Nature, because at this point of Evolution matter-energy, from its own material law and nature, becomes directly and substantially proportional to the entitative determination of the spiritual soul. It requires the soul in its own right as this organised, or better organisable material, requires it in its own material definition as this mutation of matter beyond the environmental law to co-determine, requires it in the name of Evolution itself as a creative process, that this brain may be meaningful and may possess, from sheer natural inheritance at least, the supreme survival value of any form of being within the universe.

We are saying that at this point of mutation the highest possible peak of evolution, matter in the organism of the brain of man (and indirectly that means the body of man) becomes organically and substantially relative to spirit as its co-principle of entity and determination. The immediate environment of the body of this anthropoid, at the supreme control point of its life cycle is no longer natural law deployed through the environment, but the principle that makes man a self-conscious person, in that very self-consciousness possessed of a principle of freedom from organic determination: that principle is the soul.

The question may be asked whether one is saying that this new brain is fully formed by a material mutation in its own right, but is then found to be beyond the competence of the environmental law to provide for, —or whether the mutation in the brain, itself requires the ontological activity of the soul as its co-determinant for its development as a meaningful value in Nature, even in its material formality.

In other words: is the determining presence of the soul necessary to make this matter be intelligibly determined, in a way not now possible under purely environmental law?

The issue does not seem to be one of theological principle, the essential issue is that man is not intelligible as this thing in the existent concrete, except as a material value that cannot be meaningfully integrated as one being, without the spiritual soul.

That point safeguarded, it seems more correct to the writer to say that the brain of man cannot be fully formed and integrated in its ultimate material organisation in the individual, except through the ontological activity of its co-relative principle of being, the spiritual soul.

It seems unlikely that the Unity-Law within Evolution in the material order alone, can fully round off the material potential that is in the brain of man, even if that brain is agreed to need the soul as its co-principle of being to constitute an intelligible thing, a fact of ontology. It seems incoherent in philosophy to make the Law of Control and Direction as it exists in mere matter, able to produce in its physical totality and virtuality a brain that is unintelligible in terms of the competence of the Unity-Law as it functions through the material order, —an order that is totally deterministic.

It seems more correct to postulate that there is produced a material mutation, the brain of man, that from the moment of its fertilisation in the womb, is relative intrinsically to spirit, the freely knowing and willing principle, after the manner already stated a few pages back. This relativity of being would require that at the ultimate and final moment of physical determination of the ovum, the body needs the soul as the co-principle of its very material configuration as a rational being. In this view the ontological activity of the soul is required in the very formalisation of the human brain and body, that mankind may be an intelligible species, and also a new species, within the reference frame of Nature.

It is not all at once obvious where that point of final integration of man’s body in its ontological relationship to the soul might be. It must be very early in development, and one suggests that it must be at that point of personal individuation of the material, when the potential to ‘twinning’ is eliminated by a further specialisation. Until that peak is reached, the organised potential of the matter cannot have constituted an integrated equation in the fullest sense of the word, because individuation is part of its concept.1 This is true of the fertilised ovum of higher forms of life below man, as a general principle, in man the individuation cannot be effected within the Unity-Law of the merely material order, the spiritual soul is a vital principle of the individuation itself. The science of cytology, for all the brilliance of recent discoveries concerning the biological coding of genetic material etc., is still in too early a stage to have anything certain to say on this matter.

There is nothing arbitrary about the soul of man, either in Nature or in the process of Evolution. Man is, through the soul both continuous with the evolutionary process, and also a special creation. The manner in which this is possible is unique, as we have seen, but unique only because man himself is demonstrably unique in his being. The soul must be concreated with the forming and organisable matter of this animal which is going to be Man, the matter cannot be intelligible and rational, i.e. harmonic in nature without the personal coexistence in it of the spirit.2 It is through this immediate and intellectual principle which is the ‘better half’ of its being, and gives it self-conscious intellect, and fully reflective self-aware will, that man is defined as a new species within the concatenation of Nature.

The soul cannot be energy-matter, the soul is spiritual, a distinct order of being from matter, made in the image of Absolute Being, i.e. of God. The soul cannot evolve from matter or with matter, it cannot be the ‘radial energy’ of matter, nor reducible to one and the same order of creation with matter. The soul is the defining, controlling, and fulfilling principle within the rational creature, and of the rational creature, when matter, of its own powers and definition, and through the historic dialectic of evolution itself, passes the point of no return in its upward urge to increase in being, the point de départ where it is no longer meaningfully relative to, nor controllable within the ‘law’ ministered through environment. Once again we repeat that the ‘environment’ is the meaning-full and law-full impact of other material being upon any given entity. This equational and harmonic relativity of substances is the Master Law in matter, the unity of law we have called the Law of Control and Direction within the unity of which the Universe is poised, and of which all other laws of matter and of energy in all their forms and relationships are but integral aspects.

Relativity of matter and spirit in Man

The manifestation of the Unity-Law as it is evinced and embodied in the matter-energy equational order alone, the order of all being below mankind, cannot now cater for the life control of this new and higher being, this new and higher species also, —which is the intellectual animal. Man however is not God, he is not his own sufficiency nor his own law of life. The cardinal principle of the Unity-Law that operates in matter must apply to him, even though the manner in which it operates and is effective in purely material forms is now overpassed. This is to say, in traditional language, the principle in itself of the Unity-Law and the operation of the principle is metaphysical, and a metaphysical principle operates at different levels of being in different ways, according to the nature of being itself.

The cardinal principle of the ‘Law of Control and Direction’ as it operates at all levels of created being, is that nothing is self-caused and self-created, nothing is self-ruled and self-fulfilled. One could just as well have said that nothing is ‘self-controlled’, in the strict philosophical meaning of the expression, but the phrase would have been ambiguous. There is a very clear sense in which the spiritual being is self-controlled, because not deterministic in nature.

Nothing then, is its own self-intelligibility, everything that exists, matter and spirit alike, comes into being through prior focus of intelligence and power, i.e. through intellect and will, either directly in a personal relativity unto that ultimate focus, or indirectly through intellect and will embodied in the natures of things, and educed through the frame of space and time. Space and time once again, are only aspects of the very entity of material things. That is why Absolute Being of its nature, spans in its own perfect Unity all times in one, for Absolute Being is the measure of all potential being, and time and space are only aspects of entitative potency.

Man, like all else that is created, comes into existence through intelligibility, through intelligible finalism, and his nature seeks outside itself, but for himself, for its proper vital determination, for its control and its direction, its personal and specific fulfilment. This, incidentally, is the origin of natural law, which pace certain thinkers of the age, both religious and non-religious, is not an ‘abstract concept’ at all, but arises from the natures of things in themselves and in relationship to their total environment. Of this more will have to be said in a later chapter.

In man, the immediate environment that determines his powers at the organising peak where the control and direction of the ‘law of life’ operates, is the spiritual soul. This takes over in the body, and specifically through the brain, the ruling interplay of brain and environment through which operates the harmonic law of both specific and individual life for other forms of being. Far from overwhelming the brain, or destroying its powers, the soul will develop them enormously, directing these energies meaningfully to the whole gamut of matter, yes and of spirit too, in the entirety of the universe and beyond the universe of matter. This the soul will do within that focused unity, and silence of ‘personality’ now for the first time used in its true sense, which is the self-conscious, fully reflective, independent, and spiritual recognition of myself as me.

The soul, as the correlative principle of man’s personality, is made for the brain, it will not diminish it. Within the brain those material energies will be there still in spate, and in increasing spate. They are energies vastly beyond the limits of material determinism, though still, as material deterministic in nature. It is the soul that determines and configures them to meaningful relationships beyond the cycle of eating, mating, fighting, hunting, running away etc., which within the wide but yet strictly limited equation of variable energies, is the round of matter below mankind.

These are the energies that shine in the minds of men who probe the secrets of matter to their uttermost, to the level in fact where every picture is irrelevant, and meaningful relationships of intelligible activity alone can be expressed in symbols. Let the Atheist say what need of organism and structure makes this sort of thing a function of the brain, —and how? The presence of the soul it is, interpreting and correlating the data of matter directly, in the intuition of pure spirit, that explains the flash of genius in which a mind of very great power relates perhaps the entire universe, within the synthesis of a new theory of science. We speak of science and scientists, that the modern mind may reflect upon its own, what it knows of its own glories, and what it accepts as valid and true. The triumphs of philosophy, art, and theology are not less, but greater in order of being and of valid worth, but for the present, it is better to speak of the nature of man as he shines out from the animal in the age of Science.

It is the power of the soul, acting in the unity of the one personality of man, the unity of one being, that gives the scientist both his vast creative wisdom, and also, because it is not merely animal and specific in an animal sense, his secret otherness in relation to his fellows, which puts him so far above ‘the common understanding‘ that he comes to feel within himself a messianic power. Would to God he were always a messiah; the dividing line between the messianic and the diabolic is very finely drawn, and the principle of recognition for the discernment of spirits, is not to be found in the sciences of matter. Let the type of scientist who denies God, but not his own Messianic title, say where he was in the first primitive swirlings of the primal energies of space, time and history, and by what law of any intrinsic necessity? There can be no laws older than matter, as the Marxists so rightly say, for laws are the expression of being and its content,3 and the competence of the laws cannot exceed the entity of the data that is matter, and is primitive. It follows, too, that ‘necessity’, mathematical, evolutional and dialectic ‘necessity’ is a law of matter, because there is nothing other than matter, and nothing that is not reducible to matter. So there can be no ‘necessity’ higher in order than the primal data and primal necessities of elementary energies and forms, otherwise we are forced to say that the complex and intellectual pre-exists the primal which is all there is, and that is absurd because nothing can antedate matter, and before history there is no history and no principle of history. Quite: but in fact things have worked out otherwise have they not? Being is not intelligible unless there is a history, and the history that consummates, in order to come into being by necessity, predetermines the poising and movements of the dialectical equation. The relativity of substance works both ways, from alpha to omega, and back from omega to alpha... the equation is predetermined from both ends, and that is why we said that God was a necessity of Mathematics.

Let the Marxist and the Materialist say too what conceivable structure and arrangement of neutrons and what have you, makes a man conceive within a unity that relates all things, the secrets that framed his being thousands of millions of years ago, and makes him conceive it without any relationship to the organic functions that define a structural life-cycle. It is the soul that does this for man: that is why man is lonely in the whole universe, for only man is the son of God. It is the soul that is the personal principle of Unity-Law within the personality of the rational animal, and has, —the epic tragedy of it, —the power to do with its material inheritance what it will. The soul it is that is like God to the matter that is man’s body, knowing good and evil, for the soul is made to the personal image of God. Yet the soul also, as a creature, does not escape the principle that defines the Unity-Law in matter, and in every creation of high or low degree, the soul of man is not its own self-sufficiency for law or life or for fulfilment, and just as in man evolution through the spiritual soul is lifted into a higher degree of history and of being, so also the principle of control and direction is lifted from the environmental equation of matter, to the dynamic play of Spirit upon spirit. God is the environment of Man.

Chapter 8 Footnotes

1 The conceptual equivalent here in Scholastic philosophy is ‘a potential proximately disposed to its natural act of entity’.

2 In Scholastic terminology, the body and the soul are related as specific potency to specific act.

3 In scholastic philosophy ‘agere sequitur esse ‘, ‘the manifestation is the consequence of the existential’ a principle as valid now as ever, and not improved on by the gimmicks of some Catholic philosophers.

CHAPTER NINE

Spirit, Law. And Life

1 LAW AND FULFILMENT

In the person of the rational animal Man, Evolution regarded as the unfolding of creation through time and its progressive consummation, passes to a new plane of being and to a higher order of existence. The Unity-Law of Control and Direction to fulfilment that works throughout the universe and through all creation whatsoever, is no longer contained principally in the equational interplay of material energies and material entities one upon another.

At the summit of the faculties of human personality God is the environment of man, which is to say that God is the direct principle of determination, of control and direction, of fulfilment for mankind. This relationship of God to man and to human society, is natural and essential. The created spirit is the personal focus of dynamism in the personality of man, and there is nothing arbitrary in its dynamic relativity to God for control, and for fulfilment in joy. There is nothing arbitrary or magic in the play of God’s Being upon the created soul. This relationship is part of Natural Law. God is the principle of fulfilment for the created spirit, and there is no other principle through which the personality of man, or the personality of spirit other than man can be fulfilled in its powers of nature.

Some effects of the soul in man

Material life has its natural potentialities, but these are not sufficient unto themselves except in a dynamic relativity to ‘other being’ in that natural relativity we know as ‘the environment’. The soul in man has also its natural personal powers and potentialities, and these are adequate for the attainment of human fulfilment only in their rightful and dynamic relativity to the Environment of the human spirit. We ought now to ponder some of the more important manifestations of the powers of the created spirit.

As far as the body is concerned the immediate centre of determination, the one which gathers up all qualities and virtualities around a focused point of intelligent awareness, is the spiritual soul. The soul is the immediate principle of the Unity-Law to the flesh and brain in man. Strictly speaking, the soul is not the ‘environment’ of the body however, because body and soul are one being. The soul becomes like a god to the flesh of man, knowing good and evil, and driving the body with its potential and its senses wheresoever the spirit wills. In this overriding relationship in man of spirit to matter lies the possibility, and then the empirical fact of Original Sin and of personal sin in the individual.

Sin is the most disastrous of all the facts of Nature, and one of the best attested, concerning which we must consider more in the proper place. Now, it is enough to say that Original Sin in the nature of Man is not a wound that is purely spiritual in the more restricted meaning of that term in theology, it is a lesion that is physical and biological in the order of matter-energy as well. Sin, both personal and original sin, is more than the infringement of an abstract code, a ‘book of rules’. Sin is a damage to material being in the order of its law, in its ontological conformation to its good and true, and original sin in so far as it involves a tainting of the stock of human nature itself, is a fact in Nature, and not merely the arbitrary imputation of some very distant infringement of a rule.

When the soul takes over the brain in man, it provides the brain with an immediate personal control at the summit of the physical control-room of the body, and begins to develop further the potential of the brain itself as an organ of the body, with the very greatest rapidity.

It is reasonable to presume that whatever the degree of active intelligence in original man, within a few generations there would be a very great advance in the competence of the brain, and probably in its size. The mutation in the brain that made an anthropoid ‘Man’ was a mutation that called for determination and use by a quasi-environment, the soul, that put mankind obviously beyond the power of the rest of the material complex to control environmentally. That mutation itself, the raw material of a new species in Nature, is meant for further rapid development an the now rational and human plane, and the principle, immediately speaking, of that development in brain competence, and of the organisation of the way of life it involves, is the spiritual soul within the personality of man.

It is very, very unlikely that scientists will succeed in unearthing the remains of really prototype Man. They are more likely to find the immediate predecessors and the immediate successors. If they did find the prototype he would in any case be Man, the rational animal, not the hybrid creature thought up by some scientists from their want of understanding of the nature of organic determination, and of the place and effect in Man of the spiritual soul.

The somatic effect of the soul on the body ought also to be borne in mind, for man is a new species philosophically and biologically in Nature. At the moment of writing much discussion is going on concerning the remains labelled ‘homo habilis’, and whatever these lineaments do or do not prove they demonstrate at least how little is certain and how little known in detail of the direct ancestry of mankind. There is some evidence that a new species has, at its inception, a certain instability and is liable to ‘explode’ into varietal types. There is no reason why the same may not be true of early man. He is a new species, and while all the types of true man would be self-consciously intelligent, i.e. ‘sapiens’ philosophically speaking, there could be a ‘whorl’ of genotypes within the species itself after the mutation that was specifically man.

Scientists, like other specialists, tend to be too definite too soon. The writer once wrote to a distinguished scientific journal to suggest that it seemed premature to judge that the ‘red shift’ of light coming from the most distant galaxies was due necessarily to the speed of recession of those galaxies relative to this planet... across so many thousands of millions of light years where we knew nothing of the intervening content, there might be interacting phenomena of which we were not yet in a position even to dream? The equally distinguished editor of that journal replied with magnificent brevity that if there were anything to such a hypothesis, scientists would have thought of it and allowed for it long ago. Apparently some of them are no longer quite so sure!

When we consider the weird and wonderful varieties of the domestic dog bred within the last few hundred years, besides the fact of human selection, we must take into account the high varietal potential upon which the selection of men can operate. Other domestic animals have varied much less. If some of the most widely differing forms of the dog, interfertile and viable in offspring, could be concealed and well disguised among very old fossils, would they be recognised upon rediscovery as variants, I wonder, within one species? I suspect that the scientist who said so would be the fool of the learned conferences, while many an argument from morphology could be adduced to show that such skeletal differences argued not only distinct species of carnivore, but a long ancestry of distinct and parallel evolution etc. The theologians are never allowed to forget Galileo, but the scientist never mentions Piltdown Man!

Sir Julian Huxley and others should draw the moral before being too precipitately sure how often and in how many places true rational mankind has evolved. On this point he and his friend Teilhard de Chardin do not seem to be in agreement, and if the matter were so obvious he would surely have saved the blushes of his colleague by whispering the obvious facts. The fact that Teilhard de Chardin preferred to postulate one point of departure for the rational mind does not constitute scientific proof that it is so, but in the case of so deep and so uninhibited a scholar it does suggest that the present scientific evidence for true human polygenism is not very strong.

In man, the soul in developing the brain in competence will also develop the body which is the extension of the brain, towards any adaptation favourable in a given geographical or climactic environment. Body and soul cannot be fused into one common order of being, but they are made for each other, and in man they are correlatives of nature and being each to the other. Through the soul the body will adapt more, not less perfectly to every impact upon it of the material environment around. The exception will be when for better or worse, the intellect of Man rises superior to matter as such, and insulates itself from the impact of the material environment upon the body, or creates an artificial environment of its own to avoid the necessity of physical adaptation. Civilised life, from central heating to the rotting of the teeth and lungs with deleterious chemicals, is full of examples for better and for worse. Man does not, like other animals, have to follow the pressure of the environment around him. This does not imply any clash between body and soul, but rather marks the fact that in man there is at work a principle of existence not found in any other form of life.

The knowledge of ‘good’ and of ‘evil’

Most men disclaim ability as philosophers, and shrink from philosophy with a joke or a groan. Yet all men are philosophers in the common ability to know, because knowing is an ontological quality in every man. That is to say that knowing proceeds from the essence and quality of human nature as higher than the animals, and that it passes judgement upon facts of being and existence in a man’s self and in the world around. That is the meaning of the seemingly terrible word ‘ontological’. As part of the ability to know the soul in man will recognise in existing beings relationships of harmony, balance, function, and meaning, and recognise these relationships as facts of life, and facts of coming into being, and remaining in existence after coming-to-be. The soul can and must perceive the relationships and rhythms of natural law that define the facts of being. Where there are certain relationships of determination that form a pattern of control and direction around the life-cycle of some thing, these relationships will be recognised as belonging to its truth: where there is a defect or a lesion in the pattern, this lack will be recognised as untrue to the nature and functioning of some given thing.

In so far as certain relationships constitute a pattern of achievement, of possession with joy in and around the nature of some thing, the pattern and its relationships with the environment etc., will be perceived as constituting the good of an entity, while a defect or invasion of that pattern of balance will be recognised and evalued in terms of the not-good, of the evil of the nature concerned.

Man’s basic power to recognise a physical order of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the being of things, and also a moral order of good and evil, is connatural to him. It is the recognition of the harmonic relativity that shapes being itself, in a creation that is mutually interdependent. Law, as the earlier chapters of this work have stressed, is part of the structure of the universe and part of the nature of the created being. Law, both the law of form and the law of function is then a fact of ontology, a facet of the fact of being at all, and inseparable from created being. In the recognition of this fundamental manifestation of the nature of reality every man, however simple, is a philosopher. Every man has the power to recognise the ontological. In matters of philosophy every one of us may lift up his head with self-respect, —we are all born philosophers.

The concept of the ‘libido’ of life that Freud advanced, a blind, greedy lusting after physical joy without intrinsic balance and without intrinsic law, a lusting held in some form of adjustment only by other equally blind pressures of force and fear, —this is totally wrong. This is as meaningless and destructive an interpretation of Evolution as it has been a meaningless and destructive influence in the life, loves, and morals of Western culture. It could never be the outcome of a universe poised in a balance of being that is essentially equational, and from that fact alone, even a Materialist should be able to see that it is totally erroneous.

‘Natural Law’

Natural Law, in the basic sense in which we are considering it, is embedded in the structure and the mutual relativities of all that exists, both living and non-living being. It is most relevant in the life of Man, and in the order that he produces in being. It is a directive to fulfilment in the life of the individual and the life of society. Where the directive is not admitted or lacks authority, individual and social life lapses into chaos. This is the lesson of history for whole civilisations, this chaos is the gift of mere ‘Humanism’ to our own society, and it is seen worked out in the riotous, robbed, and empty youth of our great cities.

Law-from-nature, or ‘Natural Law’ as an aspect of the creation through Evolution of the higher forms of life, is an aspect also of that Unity-Law of Control and Direction in which the creative fact of the universe is poised. The difference is that through the concept of ‘law’ we are considering not the history of relative, emergent entities, but their equally relative and dynamic governance one of another. The scientist invokes this continually under the name of ‘environmental control’ but in most cases without realising that he is talking natural philosophy rather than ‘science’. Life below man manifests these harmonics of natural law, but it cannot judge of them any more than it can judge of any other of the aspects of things in their causality and mutual determination. Nevertheless, it is these harmonics of the Natural Law through which being is integrated in matter-energy, it is these harmonics of many kinds that form the subject-matter of the various branches of knowledge that men name the ‘sciences’ of reality.

The rhythms of function, pleasure, pain, fulfilment, satiety, these are harmonics in Nature in a relay of relationships in the ordering of which there exists time, season, subordination, succession and cessation. This organic relativity is a serial process in a strict relationship to the organism itself and its environment. The relative balance is important, —there is no one total point of fulfilment, identical with the focus of the most intense pleasure, and presumed to be the act of sexual pairing which is the one blind urge to which all else is secondary, and is the one supreme seeking of all living being. In this concept of the libido of life the urge has no intrinsic, no built-in control or disposition to control, but is controlled peripherally merely, by the bumping and barging of other being intent on as much as possible of the same overriding satisfaction. Such an interpretation of Nature could have seemed ‘natural’ only in a very bourgeois circle in which egotism and a full tummy were of divine right. If the upthrust of the basic consciousness of animal life (better labelled by ‘amor’ than the already emotive ‘libido’) has to be identified with any one of its related aspects, then the basic self-love of life should be food and feeding. There is no evidence in animalcules in which reproduction is automatic, for basic phallic ecstasies of any kind.

In fact, it is better to regard the fulfilment of life below the order of man as a unity standing in a relativity of integrated and phased functions, it is not accurate to identify the ‘basic desire’ of Life with any one of them and to make everything else by hook or by crook an aspect of this one libido. For the Freudians the brain is logically an aspect of the genital apparatus, and many of our literary and scenic artists do seem to wear their brains in those parts, but the order natural to Nature is the reverse, the genital apparatus is an aspect of the brain. The ‘joy’ of vibrant life in the purely animal order is experienced as a unity of integrated relationships of function, not as a standing copulation of which everything else is sign or symbol.

In man the subordination of the relative to the full unity is an even more marked fact, because the soul in man is a principle of being and of fulfilment in its own spiritual right, independently of the conformation and energies and experiences of matter-energy. In man the pleasures and the functions of the flesh enter into an harmonic order with the soul, and the soul has its own higher principle of joy, within which experience all physical pleasures must be coordinated in harmony.

The soul has also its own higher, spiritual order of joy and of love from its own proper powers as a spiritual creation, and these powers are not material energies. The impact of the fulfilment of the soul must always be communicated to the body however, in the unity of man’s one being, and they are felt in the body as a sense of joy or sunniness in life and being in a general way. This synergism of body and soul in man admits of degrees, and the physical increase and development of response is consequent upon the possession of joy in the soul, and the order of development within the powers of the soul.

The soul is able to judge concerning the ontological order of ‘right’ and ‘good’ in the prompting or quenching of bodily pleasures and functions, and likewise concerning their right order of integration in the pattern of individual and social life. The natural alignment of the soul in its natural judgements cannot be other than similar to the Mind of God, just as the natural tendency of the body in the control of its organic functions is to maintain the balance we call health, or to repair lesions as they occur. This is because the Natural Law as embodied in Nature below man is neither a code just, nor an arbitrary accident but an aspect of existence in its ontological relationships. The soul in man takes over the role of the Unity-Law as it has worked in creation to embody these ontological elements in the natures of things. The soul then, both interprets Natural Law unto the flesh in man, and provides from its own powers a principle of control and direction for the body, through the brain, in the giving of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, time and season, to the faculties of the body. The soul does not create its own laws of right and wrong, it cannot. The laws of right and wrong, time and season, especially as they derive from material being, are aspects of the ontology of the very nature of such creation. They are not optional, they are not arbitrary, they are not incidental. The soul can no more create its own right and wrong than it can create being out of nothing. The soul is not its own self-sufficiency, it is not its own God that is to say; through its faculties of intellect and will, of knowing and loving, it can recognise the order of good and true inherent in natures through the Act of God, and manifest in the acts and functions that follow the fact of existence.

Sin and concupiscence (in outline)

This is the order of things in themselves, things as they should be. This is the manner in which the soul sees and judges in so far as it is true to itself and to the order of being into which it has entered as an heir into a rich inheritance. Yet, this is manifestly not the order of man’s existence as we find it, men make a ruin of both their personal lives and the societies they build. To attribute this to the created limitations of man is not good enough, for such is not the order of Nature round about him, nor the order of his ancestry through Evolution.

Here must be mentioned at least the fact and the tragedy of Sin. The created spirit is not a deterministic nature, it is not ruled organically and therefore with pre-poised necessity, through a mathematically determined environment. Only God is the Environment of Man.

In the first place, the soul is capable of personal sin. This means a self-centred, self-conceited wisdom and seeking for satisfaction that resists the natural order of relativity to God that defines the balance of good and true within the universe. The created spirit can recognise this order of rightful obedience which is the ‘natural law’ in which created things are framed, and it should rest in that acceptance with reverence and peace. It may fail to do so either through pride, the desire to be its own God, and own law, and own focus of absolute power, or else perhaps through selfishness and sensuality it may will to be possessed of other men’s lives, and all the pleasures of the body without any relationship at all to function and place, which are also essential aspects of the truth and good of things.

When the created spirit makes itself the measure of the universe and its Law, the universe and all in it becomes creature-centred, not God centred. A man becomes a principle of untruth and chaos unto his own being, and that of his brethren. He is a ‘carrier’, contagious of disease to all around him, even though the Order of Merit be blazoned on his breast. Part of the Universal Law of creation itself is that we are still part of the universe, and always members one of another for better or for worse. As God intended it, and as it was in the beginning, the laws of Nature work upon the members for mutual good, but the influence is ontological, i.e. of very being, for both good and bad. When a man asks ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ the answer is ‘you are, and all the more terribly if you are a son of Cain’.

2 DISORDER AND SIN

Original Sin (introduction only)

More important for the understanding of man as he exists today, is the effect of ‘Sin’ as a wounding of both the spiritual and the physical inheritance of human nature, and in a manner that involves the laws of heredity. This is ‘Original Sin’ the flaw and effect derived through the physical origins of mankind, and inherited through generation to the present time.

Briefly, the effect of sin in this sense of the word is to rupture the harmony of the powers of matter and spirit in man, to blunt and coarsen the sensitivity of the body to the Law of its good and true. The result is to lessen the natural obedience of the body through the brain to the wisdom of the soul, so that in the words of St. Paul ‘the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, so that you do not the things that you would’. This could not be the order natural to man, even in a destiny less than supernatural, for body and soul are correlatives of one being, whatever the level of its destiny.

In other being the entitative pressure of the environment provides the interplay that gives the body its ‘law’, for material life is not indifferent to such balance by prompting and checking, and in man this relationship should be provided by the wisdom of the soul. It is natural for the body in man to seek such a directive from the spirit through which man is human, and to obey it. There should not be either reluctance or indifference of the flesh to reason, i.e. to the wisdom and the good for man, mediated by the soul and those theologians who presume that the existence of ‘concupiscence’ is natural to man, or exists in the order of life below man, would do well to study both the sciences of Life and the brilliant exposé of Original Sin contained in the pages of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The response to ‘good’ and ‘true’ in the physical sense of direction of the flesh of man though weakened can never be destroyed, because it is an entitative thing. God put it there from nature, and God’s law can never be effaced from the natures of material things.

No matter how arrogantly a man may sin, his intellect must retain against himself the power to know ‘evil’ and in this to condemn his own self. This recognition of evil can be coarsened intellectually by habitual wrong, and by the false indoctrination of other men but never destroyed. In like manner the flesh of man responds by a sense of ‘dread’ or ‘fear’, which is the only way that matter can respond to ‘guilt’ when forced to cooperate in evil against ‘the conscience’ of the spirit. There can be new ‘laws’ but the reaction cannot be extinguished, and reaches to the depths of the unconscious in man.

Through ‘Sin’, both the inherited imbalance and the personal evil, cravings and addictions are created that are out of relation to the destiny and fulfilment of man, out of proportion to the psychological balance of human nature, out of balance with the order in any context, of man’s personal and social well-being. This does not happen in the order of Nature below mankind. It should not happen if the being of man is explained entirely by ordered, material and natural evolution. It does happen as a fact, it happens because the soul is spiritual and free, and the relationship of the soul and the body is ontological, not incidental.

The detailed consideration of Original Sin in Christian theology, its spiritual effects, and its mode of descent upon the individual, cannot belong to this chapter. We are concerned with the establishment of moral law as a facet of the ontological law of man’s being, just as there exists a Law of Control and Direction which is analogically also ‘moral law’ for the order of life below man. One cannot even introduce this subject without some introduction to the concept of original and personal sin in mankind.

Therefore it is necessary to stress that ‘Natural Law’ is not a human convention, not the ‘existential code’ of society at this or that stage of culture, neither is it the projection forward in the abstract of the Ideal Man, or Ideal Order, without counterpart in the essential structure of nature in man, and below man. Natural Law derives from Nature and from God, not from human sanction.

In the present state of human nature, which is fallen from the full integrity of its definition, it is difficult for the intellect of man to recognise clearly, and will fully the ontological order of the ‘good’ and the ‘true’. This is particularly clear of the passions of the body. This is so from the effects of ‘concupiscence’ in all the passions and reactions of the body, and concupiscence does not mean either desire that is natural to man, nor sexual desire, it means desire and craving of any specification which is not amenable to control or suppression by the wisdom of the soul with a natural and regular obedience. It entails also, in its fuller connotation, the coarsening of the physical sensibility of man to ‘good’ and ‘true’ by which an inordinate valuation is placed on physical satisfactions as such, out of all proportion to balanced meaning in the life and functions of a man. In this respect the cravings that can be introduced for sex or drugs by personal habituation offer an analogy, but only an analogy, to the overall craving for physical satisfactions in a ‘selfish’ way that is induced in human nature by Original Sin.

Nature not ‘corrupt’

There is a risk of confusion in making a digression into specific theology at this juncture, but the point must be made that the nature of Man is wounded by sin, but not corrupted in the old Lutheran sense. A wound admits of healing, or at least of a natural tendency to heal. That is, of a response of nature to resist the lesion and reintegrate its proper order and harmony.

A nature that responds to healing is not intrinsically corrupt. This means that in both body and soul a man is capable of positive good, and of an increase in real holiness, even though in most of us the wound of concupiscence is never healed over, and in even the great saints the degree of holiness reached, as a perfecting in this life of body and soul does not compare with the potential of human nature in cooperation with the grace of God if ‘sin’ had never intervened.

Conscience from the spiritual nature of man

Yet nature retains, in man, the power to strive after the more perfect good in response to the promptings of the soul, because to obey the Law of its proper goodness and truth is of the ontological essence of human nature as of every other nature that exists. Sin can distort and damage, but the man-made law of chaos that the free will of man brings into creation by directing the powers and sensibilities of the body against the known good and the known truth, cannot destroy (though it can weaken) the basic tendency of nature to seek its proper good and true and to obey the soul (albeit with a sense of pain) in a man’s efforts to control and direct his passions with propriety.

Therefore the experience of ‘conscience’ concerning good and evil proceeds from very nature in man. Conscience is not a social convention, nor a Freudian projection of fear of the uncontrollable powers of the physical world. Conscience is the recognition in body and soul, according to the responses proper to matter and proper to spirit, of the propriety of natural and due obedience to the order of harmony in which one’s life is cast. In man, this means that ‘conscience’ is the natural judgement of the soul from its spiritual powers of the good to be done, and the truth to be acknowledged. Nature below man has to obey, deterministically, but man has to consent. The consent gives peace in the spirit, and contentment as a concomitant in the body. The refusal gives guilt in the spirit, and disquiet or fear in the body, for this latter is the material response to being forced to go against the order of one’s good and true.

Conscience is thought of usually as something negative, as marking a sense of guilt and of fear, but conscience is also, and just as importantly a positive experience, and it is known in the positive sense of peace and of ‘sunniness’ within, that marks a personality at one with God and with the order of the good and true that permeates the universe itself... as far, that is, as the light of a man takes him in his present knowledge of the Law that derives from God. May we then talk of a basic, natural love of God, in so far as any man accepts this divine order, the imprint of God’s Law of Good and True in all the aspects of creation, which forms the Introit prayer for the Feast of Pentecost itself ?1

I think we can so speak. We can speak first of a good and a natural love of oneself, of a natural joy within one’s own being when a man accepts this universal relativity of right and good, the ordering of Nature unto the voice of the Holy Spirit, according to his perhaps very limited light to recognise it. This, of man’s nature, sparks a love of God, a love that is a yearning upwards rather than a possession, much as a newly born baby must seek the paps from very nature before it can taste its mother’s milk.

For the nature of man is not neutral at birth, nor even at its conception: it is aligned to God, and so is everything that God has made, or could make. Altogether apart from the supernatural order in the strict sense of the phrase in Catholic theology, to be aligned to God, to love him, is the lawful and natural adoration of the creature to its source and Exemplar. It does not have to evoke it, the response is natural. When a man is able to reason at least intuitively, in the self-conscious recognition of ‘yes and no’, he may refuse and suppress this love. That however is rebellion against God and nature, not the manifestation of the non-alignment of nature unto God. God is loveable because he is very Being, and of very Being the Good with its warmth of love, the True with its thrill of insight, the Beautiful with its Perfection of Form are merely synonyms. Nothing God made can be neutral to him by its nature.2

The natural alignment of the personality of man, body and soul, unto God is not destroyed or corrupted by being wounded, as we have indicated. Yet it is not a possession as yet of him, any more than the first springing of the seed within its husk is bud and blossom. The seed needs the further prompting of its environment, and man needs the inward touch of God, for God is its earth, its sunshine and its shower.

We are talking milk not meat, for the mature understanding of the end of man requires a mature knowledge of the Christian Religion which is the revelation to man of the depth of God in Jesus Christ, and the depth of man himself. Yet it is hard for a man who is sincere according to the truth that is in him, not to love God in a minimum degree from very nature, —the seeking for the paps. Then, that incipient springing is quickened a little more by the inward working grace of God. For He is not far from any one of us: ‘in Him we live, and move and have our being... for we are also his offspring’.3

It is difficult, ladies and gentlemen who kindly read this book, for those of you who are atheists by persuasion but good and humble of heart, to be really atheists in deed and in truth. It is hard to kick against the goad of love. God is not some elderly and obscurantist gentleman figured with long, uncultured beard, a left-over tottering along from the pre-scientific age, and destined very shortly for the grave. He is the source and origin of all the knowledge, power, and beauty in which you exult, of which your own being is the most noble image in his creation. When with a sincere and deep heart you rejoice in his beauty as the creature mirrors it, the spirit swings Godwards as the needle to the Pole. The soul is not neutral, it is polarised towards its God. The sweet irony of God is more humbling upon us all than ever will be his judgements.

Conscience and rightful obedience

There is an element of rightful obedience in the sincere recognition of the balance of values and valuations in which Natural Law consists. The obedience of the mature is not blind, but the obedience of a child must sometimes be so. We do not most of us live habitually in high mystical states very close to God. In the things of God the more we know our imperfections the more we will know that we need to obey under stress, and argue afterwards. The gales of passion themselves obscure wisdom and weaken the will. An humble obedience is not servile, but recognises the truth and the good for what it is, the mirroring of the Mind of God. Religion is a coming to know the full sweep of the relationship of creation to God, and the relation of God to the creature. This knowledge is a synthesis which binds Science, Philosophy, and Theology into one weave of wisdom. There is no truly independent natural philosophy and theology, because there is no rational creature, man or pure spirit, that is from nature its self-sufficient fulfilment.

Natures that are made within the deterministic cycle of matter-energy are fulfilled in each other because they are poised in coming-to-be in a mutual correlation of energy, law, organic being, and fulfilment. The spiritual creature, Man or Angel, even for its minimum fulfilment in nature, however that fulfilment is conceived to be, is directly relative to the Being of God himself. They are not, like material things, made to the image and the functions of each other, but made directly to the image of God.

Sin blinds, distorts, and enslaves. Even when a man can see the good, the effect of sin is to weaken the will so that he does not lay hold: ‘unhappy man that I am, the evil that I would not that I do, the good that I approve I do not perform’. The power to do does not lay so fully within a man’s personality as the power to perceive and to approve. The infant that seeks the paps knows that its ‘rational milk without guile’ belongs to its true, and its good, but it cannot provide its own milk. In similar manner, it is God who provides within the soul strength to lay hold, and to profit from the communion to the creature of the Divine Being through which the created spirit grows in its own powers. All this, and other qualifications that might be made upon a fuller treatment of the theme cannot diminish the central point at issue, —that a man has it from his spiritual nature and its powers to be able to know the true in truth, and with good will to approve the good. Man can know the right order of meanings and values in the things of the spirit, i.e. in the rights and dignities of the human person, and the right use, valuation, and perspective that attaches to the organic pleasures of the body.

This is so because the soul in man takes over that immediate governance of the animal brain which in lower forms of life is exercised by the environment in cooperation with the brain. In life below man the brain is not a passive object of determination by the environment, the two are related as complementary principles of action, and in man the full control of his life and personality consists in an interplay between the brain, the soul, and God himself. The soul however is the immediate principle of knowing, willing, and interpreting in man, but must not be thought of as an extrinsic pilot riding the controls of the brain. In man the body is intrinsically and substantially correlative to the spiritual soul. This means to say that all the actions of Man are a spiritual-physical synthesis, focussed through the unity of the spirit. If, in a properly qualified sense we call the soul the immediate ‘environment’ of the body to stress its determining influence within the human person, we must add that God Alone is the Supreme, the ‘extrinsic’ environment of man, both body and soul alike.

A man knows, from his spiritual powers, that he must not subordinate his living to the seeking of physical pleasure as such without relation to, the meaning it has in terms of function and office in the being of man. Ontologically, in the order of Nature, the pleasure and the function are related within an office of meaning, and both the pleasure and the function are aspects of the total meaning which is the being of a thing. Nature below man cannot know these things, but they are facts of being, and the spiritual soul interprets facts in terms of meaning, and in terms of propriety, i.e. of full truth, of right, and of wrong.

In the personality of man the physical pleasures and the physical functions of his nature are made for the order of the spiritual soul, and for the order both natural and divine, that the spiritual soul integrates in creation. A man can know this from the powers of his soul, for the soul, as spiritual has its fulfilment even naturally in the spiritual order, and of its nature it seeks to focus and carry up the works of the flesh into the order of the spirit and its achievements.

If a man obeys all the ‘Natural Law’ in his living, but refers the order of the spirit and its achievements only to those ends of society that finish for every man at death, only for human values in science, art, philosophy etc., as he sees them in his own soul apart from God, and the growth of the vision of his spirit in God, he will still find within himself a sense of futility and a nameless hunger. It will be much increased when he comes to understand the unconscious selfishness, vacuity and self-deception of the human spirit as it exists wounded by the effects of sin. At the end of his life he will come to understand the mirage-like nature of the vision splendid of the ‘Brave New World’. The sense of bitterness will be increased by the many mistakes he will have made in his own personality, for in fact such men do not observe in its integrity the wholeness and holiness of the Natural Law as that Law emanates from the Mind of God. The spirit in man, to know peace and inward possession must not only organise the flesh to the purposes of the spirit, but those purposes must be in harmony with the purposes of the Supreme Spirit, and a man must live them all with a sense of personal vocation in, and with, the Living God.

It is worse for a man if he subordinates the cravings of his soul for joy and love to the possession and exploitation of physical pleasures for their own sake without regard to tile place and meaning they have in relation to function and vocation in the work of the universe and of creation. This degrades the soul to a level of being, and of experience of being, below its natural potential and craving, it begets a sense of most intense sorrow, together with a nameless anger, and a nameless resentment. The anger and the resentment is really an aspect of pain and deprivation, it comes to be directed at others, especially by ‘angry young men’, but it should be directed at oneself. It may be directed at others only in so far as society has inculcated and produced this way of desolation, at home, at school, and elsewhere, but the root of the pain is in the deeps of the soul.

This living of hedonism it is that produces the boredom and frustration that adolescents know so well in their sexual and physical excesses. It is the same thing, but young and honest, as the more still and bitter wine that is the ‘angst’ of middle age. The soul is made to the image of God, it responds then of its nature, to ontological facts, that is to the meanings that are in things by very nature, from the Mind of God. It cannot divorce pleasure from function, and function from subordination to higher and more spiritual values etc., without a pang of sorrow, pain, disgust, guilt—express it as one may. This it is which from the nature of the soul makes possible for a created being a state of damnation. But, please God, since the Fall men are so stupid and so handicapped that it may not be so very easy to reach it.

Through the powers of his soul a man knows that he should seek the pleasures of his body in a total equation of personal experience in which physical pleasure, merely as pleasure is an expendable. That is to say that however necessary a function of the body may be to life and human society, physical satisfactions are always subordinate to the role they fulfil in the vocation of human living, and to the propriety and spiritual significance of bodily function.

In a spiritual personality the specific pleasures of function are not ends in themselves, though it seems to the writer that a physical glow of love and sweetness must always accompany spiritual love. The sexual act is not a function of human love and human happiness in itself. That is a specific act and pleasure. Love, in man as in God, is as wide and differentiated as the frontiers of existence itself. There are many relativities of love, and that of Jesus Christ as man will not be exceeded, but his did not include specific sexuality. Even in the sacramental state of marriage sex in the narrow connotation is intrinsically subject to the spiritual purposes and valuations by which it is defined in the intellect of God. Today it is made God, even by Churchmen.

Marriage lived any other way passes into hedonism. It bores, loyalty is readily breached in mind and then in deed. There ensues next that nameless sense of futility and irritation that is the shadow over so many millions of bright and pretty homes.

This is the self-condemnation of its standards that modern society passes upon itself in its acts. In man the body can never satisfy with a complete fulfilment as it does in the animal. Man is no more an animal. When that which is physical in human joy is related by the soul to its just proportion and appetite in the total life and vocation of a man, then he experiences that tranquil sense of peace with purpose, in which consists the first basic degree of the ‘sunniness’ of the spirit, the possessed joy of a good conscience, and the first degree of the love of God. This possession of peace derives from the focussing of the powers and faculties of the body, through the soul, back to God. This is much short of the mystic’s union with God, but it is a beginning. Another way of describing it would be to say that it is the very opposite of ‘angst’.

The knowledge of the true

If the soul with its faculty of knowing and loving in a simple unity, could not through its brain assess physical Nature with truth, there could be no sciences at all, and no safe scientific techniques. Man finds that he can trust both his brain, in its data, and his intellect in its interpreting of the data, and the facts of a scientific civilisation prove man’s competence in this regard. In the same way law, as well as relationships of function and combination, energy and movement is a fact of the universe, an ontological facet of the universe, and a fact of life, both spiritual and animal life. Just as he can and does judge of the basic laws by which entities are constituted in their forms, their properties, their ecological relationships, so a man can know the basic laws and valuations of the moral order, for these relationships, as much as the relationships that cast a shadow over the use of chemicals and pesticides etc. in life below man, are relationships of the harmony, health, and good order of the spirit.

He can know from very nature that another being who reasons is identical with himself in nature, whatever the colour of his skin, and has equal rights and dignities as a man. He can know that the basic rights and dignities of man proceed from the reasoning, spiritual nature of man, from the immaterial soul, the same in all rational animals, —even in outer space if they exist there. He can know therefore that racialism is ‘hubris’, the sin of arrogant pride, for man, on this planet or anywhere else, is made to the image of God. It is from the spiritual soul that all the rights and privileges of man as man proceed, and they cannot be defended on any absolute, personal title if this definition of the soul is not believed in. Therefore, the first rights and dignities of a man proceed from himself as a person, from his spiritual nature, from his natural sonship of God, and not from the state, nor from the evolution of matter or the evolution of society. Man is before the state, in fact of existence and in principle of priority; the state is nothing more than the organised social living of men, endowed with that authority that God, and Nature, requires that it should have to be the servant of the servants of God. The state is not Master, and no state is Absolute. With all deference to Hegel, Marx, Nietsche, and perhaps Teilhard de Chardin together with many others, the state is not a super-consciousness composed of the cells that are living men.

Chapter 9 Footnotes

1 Wisdom: 1.7.'The Spirit of God fills the orb of the earth, and that which

contains all things, has knowledge of his voice'.

2 Here the theologian might find a clue to the manner in which 'Baptism

of desire' could be extended to the fetus in the womb? The 'Faith of the

Church' can be found in the salvific will of Christ, who as Head is a member

of the Church, as Son of Man, and presents us all to the Father through

himself ?

3 Acts of the Apostles: c.17.v.28. Not to any sort of audience, but to the

sophisticated, modern audience of Athens.

CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART FOUR

GOD THE ENVIRONER

OF MAN

The Book is available from Faith Keyway Trust http://www.faith.org.uk

CHAPTER TEN

God as ‘Environment’

1 DIALOGUE OF GOD AND MAN

‘God is Love’

‘My little children,’ urges St. John the Apostle, ‘love one another, for God is Love’1. Man, made to the image and likeness of God by the spiritual nature, has God and not another creature as his principal end and fulfilment. This is to say that union with God is the purpose and goal through which all other purposes and joys are brought into focus and made harmonious within the personality of a man.

‘God is Love’: if this be so, then in God Love and Being are synonyms. If we be made to the image of God, then in us to love and to be are also synonymous. Not in us of course as in God, but love must be the fulfilment and perfection of our being in fact, and in experience, and so we find it.

In us, knowing is a seeking, but in God knowing is possession and self-contemplation of all truth. In us, love is a desiring also, but in God self-possession of all joy. These considerations are important, because some men, even theologians at times, speak as if to know towards God, and to adore and love at God were an end in itself. This could not be so. Just as Love defines the Living Essence of God, so love which is possession must define the fulfilment of every spiritual creature.

Our spirit is not found in the full possession of a total wisdom, by that we know that we have an end, that we are only a beginning and a seed, that we, like the seeds of material life, must expect a springing and a maturity. Our knowing is a yearning towards more, more wisdom, and more truth. Whether we know it or not, the end of the search is actually for the Wisdom who is God, in whom as last reason and truth all questions are solely answered.

We yearn to know, and in that knowing more we love the more, for there is no loving except what is known. What is known must be approved in wisdom as the true and right, and desirable for us, and then we wish to possess. The fullness of truth, or knowledge, is proportionate to the fullness of the love.

Our loving too is a yearning for more, even when we think we possess, if it were not so, there could be no hope, no further desiring. Our desiring will end only when the limit of our measure, as God has defined it in our being, shall be filled to the brim.

When we say that God is the fulfilment of man, and the Environment that conditions him to that fulfilment we are saying in a different idiom only that God is both the Life and the Way to the Life. But we are also saying that in any order of the spiritual existence, even one less endowed than the actual economy of God we now have, man must, to be intelligible, rest in God in the possession of God in love. ‘Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee’ is true of any destiny that God accords a spiritual creature, even if the destiny had been less than that which God has given us in Jesus Christ. For there are degrees of the love and possession of God.

Adoration

Sometimes men speak of adoration and of love as if they were separate works of the spirit, but surely not rightly so. To adore is not the act of a faculty, of knowing alone, or willing alone, it is the act of a total person, the act through mind and heart of a man. Adoration may seem to lack love because of the imperfection with which it proceeds within the human spirit, it may be apathetic because of the poverty of the spirit in its deeps, or marked with fear, but perfect adoration is also the perfect loving of God.

To adore God is to speak his supreme perfection, and to align one‘s whole being to that perfection of the Divine. Through this there proceeds in man, and towards God, every propriety of rightness in being, the perfection of intellect and the perfection of desire. God is known as Lord, but also as Father, God is obeyed as Law but loved as Father. It would be blasphemy against the nature of God as Love, if the spiritual creature did not in adoration respond to its Exemplar as the supreme Joy. Concerning the knowledge of God, ‘the devils’, said Christ, ‘know God and fear’, but knowledge such as theirs is not an act of adoration.

In most of us adoration may appear not to involve also an act of love because being the most perfect relationship that we have towards God, it contains within itself, for us, an element of unconscious recognition of sin, of painful self-knowledge, purification, or even fear. Perfect love however casts out fear and is perfect adoration of God.

If God be the Environer of man, then he is to the created spirit what bread is to its body, the staff of life. He is the Bread of life. Through him, as from the paps the soul must draw the food of the spirit: ‘he who eats me, the same also shall live through me’ (John 6.58.).

If God be the Environment of man, — ‘For in him we live, and move, and are, as some also of your own poets have said, for we are his offspring…’ (Acts 17.28.) then God ministers to the soul the means of life, and of life more abundant. The seed that is cast into the ground grows by the sunshine, the earth, and the shower. To the spirit of man God is the sunshine, the earth, and the shower.

When God communicates himself to his seed that he has created in his own likeness, he prompts within it an increase of life and of maturity in its spiritual and intellectual powers. This is what the Christian means when he speaks of ‘the sanctifying grace of God’.

Revelation to be expected

Since man requires his proper nurture and determination unto fulfilment as much as lesser being, the control and direction of man by God is a necessity of the ontological order, a necessity that is of the nature of created being. It must also be the expectation of Science, for everything that exists in the universe is held within the Unity-Law of control and direction within which its being is poised. The being of man comes just as rigidly under the Law of relativity unto finality, but man is not relative only to matter, man is relative unto God. That is why in man, and through man, the Law of Control and Direction that we have considered so much in former chapters, passes to a new order, in the unity of the one principle of finalism, the order in which God in person is the Principle of the Law, the centre of the determination to fulfilment, God takes up the Law into himself, becoming to man the environment, or better the Environer.

How shall we say, in the abstract, what is the ‘natural’ consummation of the spiritual personality, or of the society it integrates? We have no means of measuring it, because man is not defined in his being in a given relationship to other creatures in a cycle that entirely fulfils his entity. The only measure of the meaning of the spiritual seed that is the created spirit, is the Spirit without peer which conceived his measure.

We can hazard guesses, sometimes inspired guesses, at what man is meant to be, what he may attain, what his final destiny be, and this from the beginning of time has been the first preoccupation of great spirits among men. We cannot do very much more than guess, for even when we are right about the essentials from considering the very nature of man, if the end means the laying hold on God in some way or degree, we are powerless. We cannot lift ourselves up to the least degree of real possession, unless the eternal arms reach down. We are like an infant on a cushion, we can hold out our arms and cry, but not reach up. Neither can any man, however gifted, be the final norm of truth and authority to another, nor satisfy in fulfilment the soul of any other. In this the greatest and the least are equal in dignity and equal in poverty.

If God is the beginning of man, and also the fulfilment, in himself he is Law of nature to man, he is Alpha and Omega, to himself and also to us. God must communicate himself within the being of man, according to the nature of man as an individual, and according to the nature of human society. This means that God must reveal himself to the spiritual creature as a necessity of his wisdom, the wisdom that is embodied in the making of man.

What human intellect, could it have been present at the first poising of those energies of matter that have evolved into our present universe, could have said without the imparting of further knowledge what would be the outcome of the movements and integration of these energies, all the way from atoms up to the brain of man? In like manner who can know where the spur of the spirit leads,2 the varied riches of its life, the order in and beyond time of the society of created spiritual beings, —who in fine can say that his eye has seen, or his ear heard, or that it has entered into his heart to conceive what things God has prepared for them that love him?

The Divine never ‘relative’ to the created

Man could not receive from God his adequate determination in the nature of his being unless Revelation were part of the natural scheme of man’s creation, but here a word of warning must be given. So to say does not imply that man, or any part of creation is one Essence or one Order with the Being of God. Nor, when we call God the ‘Environer’ of man does it imply that God and the creature are related in the same order of mutual relationship as an animal to its material environment, or as male and female as complements of one flesh.

In the material order, and even in the created spiritual order, entities that are defined through a mutual interaction are subjected, or ‘relative’ each to the other. God is not so capable of being subject to any creature even when he is its end and its joy. This means that the spiritual creation although its being is not intelligible unless God is its fulfilment, is not capable of having any claim or ‘right‘ upon the Divine Being from its nature. To fail to realise this leads to forms of Pantheism, and it seems that Teilhard de Chardin does not avoid this danger. Because God is the Alone Necessary and the Norm of all other existences, according to his knowledge and will, which makes their entity, all things are totally relative to God for their being and in their being, from the most basic matter to the highest angel, i.e. purely spiritual creature. God however, in His Being and Essence is not made relative, or interdefined unto anything else except Himself. In that respect God is indeed the ‘totally Other’. The self-relativity of God to the Divine Essence is what the Christian calls the ‘Holy Trinity’ but of that no more to be said here. God is not capable of being limited or subject to any other, not even through his own Will: the Divine Being cannot be intrinsically subjected in any degree to any creature.

This means to say that we must avoid the notion that the created spirit, because its only intelligible end is God, has any ‘claims’, ‘rights’ or ‘debts’ to collect upon the nature of God. No, the meaning of man, and the intelligibility of man, which must proceed as a factor from the very fact that man does exist, and must mean something, this intelligibility of man is related not to the Divine Essence as a claim, but only to the Divine Wisdom, as the principle of meaning for the whole of creation. Man must have an end in God, and a joy in God, not because man necessitates God, and thereby logically becomes part of God, but because the Divine Wisdom and Will that is evident in man must be true unto Itself. God cannot, because he is God, act irrationally, or with cruelty. These very words denote a defect of being, and God is Perfect Being. Our surety then upon God for our end and out very intelligibility as spiritual persons does not arise from the claims or debts that our spiritual substance vindicates against the Divine Essence, our surety, which stands forth in all that we have and are is the Divine Wisdom and the Divine Charity. This is good enough. There is no wisdom more substantially true to itself nor love more unchanging than that which proceeds within the substance of God.

The Beatific Vision beyond all categories

Even less could the destiny of man as Christians know it from the Word of God —the transformation of the creature to possess in gift what God has of himself by right of nature, the being made ‘co-sharers of the Divine Nature’ be in any manner of consideration a claim or the actualisation of a truly natural potential. Such a destiny as a fact of the intelligibility of a spiritual creature could not be intelligible at all unless the creature were in fact God. The thoughtful contemplation of the actual destiny accorded the spiritual creature is shattering, quite breathtaking, and unless it were of the Faith Revealed it would be blasphemy to entertain it: to be taken up into the intimate and substantial relativity of God unto Himself, to be transformed thereby to the likeness of that Divine Self-Fulfilment in which God knows and enjoys Himself as the Blessed Trinity, this is a gift, and intelligible only as a gift of God, it transcends all the categories of nature, and claim, and intelligibility that proceed from the necessary meaningfulness of any spiritual creation whatsoever.

It would be within the power of God to communicate a possession of himself much less, within the creature’s way of laying hold on God, and still fulfil to the brim the intelligible destiny of man according to the Divine wisdom and goodness, and it would be a joy in God that ravished the creature in an eternal happiness of being. The destiny that God has accorded the spirit is much more: it is the most that even God could give, the Fullness that is Himself in the Divine and not the creature’s way of possessing God.

2 THE DIVINE ECONOMY

In the Evolution of the forms of life within the material universe, the Unity-Law of Control and Direction brings forth the simple forms and then the more complex. This principle will hold true of the spiritual creation linked with matter within the universe, for both from the nature of matter are subject to a Law of gradual development. The play of God upon the soul of the spiritual animal will be to bring forth first the simple and then the developed perfection.

The kingdom within

The beginnings of Revelation are to be sought in the souls of the very first of mankind. Let us not begin with a secret mental picture of an old man speaking invisible from clouds to this new type of animal, man, down below. That will be the inevitable mental association, with dreamy music, that ‘Revelation’ will have for the minds of many readers, especially the scientific readers. It will not do. Revelation, as it comes from God, is part of the Law of creation in the universe, the higher, but just as ontologically necessary application to man of the Unity-Law of Control and Direction to fulfilment of being, through which all creation is framed. The Revelation of God to man begins then as the determination from within of the dynamic spiritual powers of the spiritual soul. The determining influence of God will be upon ‘the inward man’, increasing the personality in the depths of the spirit in more satisfying values of wisdom and love, and developing within a man the understanding of God, and of human destiny in every aspect. It is very important that Revelation should be understood to have this dynamic and intimate inward aspect, in which consists, if the spirit co-operates, the ‘life of the soul’, for we tend to think too exclusively of the economy of God to man as something ministered from outside, and coming to us extrinsically from priest and prophet. Revelation is one and the same order with the economy of God for man, upon this earth, and Revelation as the environing of man by God, will embrace in a living unity every aspect of man’s being. It will do this in the totality of one undivided order of work, it will be personal and inward, external and social, private and public, for this totality integrates the nature and the life of mankind. We are ‘members one of another’, we are social creatures. Revelation will be personal and social, really it is not an act, nor a series of acts, it is the work of God.

The veils of wisdom

At this juncture we might pause a moment to consider the types of human knowledge and their relationship to the powers of the soul. Knowledge of matter is, actually, easy knowledge to the soul, which in any case is the natural control and determiner of the powers of the material brain. The ‘exact’ sciences are exact because they are the most material, deterministic and mathematical forms of knowledge. One does not need any form of Revelation to understand them. One will need Revelation to understand their ultimate meaning in the total synthesis of creation. For the work of God is one economy from elements to angels and within it there are no insulated compartments.

The degrees of wisdom

There are degrees of knowledge, and they are higher or lower according to the degree of being all the way from elements to angels. There are many veils of wisdom, and the last only the mystic attains to lift and barely, for it covers the face of God. The nearer a field of knowledge to the spiritual nature, the more difficult it will be for the soul of man to comprehend it fully and exactly to express it.

Mathematics and physics will be ‘easy’ on the spirit that in-forms a brain, until the point is reached at which the ‘mental picture’ is no longer relevant, and even so there are ways around that difficulty. The sciences that describe the living being and correlate its laws will be less determinate, for an animal is a unity, not just a statistical energy-mass, and acts as a unity. To understand the psychology of man ‘exactly’ would be to know all history in the universe and the ramifications of evil as well, —and free-will would be a problem to remain. Nevertheless the knowledge that is of spiritual things, that pertains to wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and the awe of God, is far more fulfilling within a man than the knowledge of the energies of matter. The wisdom and knowing that fulfils the soul with peace, assurance, and joy in its own depths, this can be ministered only by inward growth in the sunshine of God.

The beginnings of physical science predate Man himself in a sense, for they depend a great deal upon the nature of the brain. The pre-human anthropoid that could use or fashion the crudest of tools foreshadows the era of technique, while the first man to strike fire and control it was the father of the British Association.

Of course a great scientific discovery has immense majesty, and must give a thrill of joy to the mind that is spiritual in kind. In a great mind it will bring humility in its train, and an awareness of God. This is not because matter as such fulfils the personality of a man, but because truly great discoveries in Nature unveil a further face of the great, unified synthesis that is creation itself. When a man discovers thus in himself a flash of the insight of the Divine Mind, most certainly it is a majestic experience.

Nevertheless such knowledge does not minister wisdom with peace, nor love with possession, unless it lead the soul on to rest in God himself. Most certainly in this age we know the gap that exists between sharing the knowledge of God, as beings imaged in his nature, and possessing the wisdom of God, and the love of God as beings that share his Omnipotence. The point was raised in the meditation that is the first chapter of this book. It is from within the soul at the most dynamic level of its natural powers in the spiritual order, that there proceed the ideals, insights, yearnings, and loves of a man, and of all mankind.

Greater than the discovery of the secrets of life, or the engineering that underlies the universe, so at least it seems to the writer, are those ‘sciences’ i.e. those perspectives of wisdom and plan through which men founded and maintained their first developed cultures. Although man is by nature social and co-operates with his kind, he had no light to show him the way and no fire to heat his resolve except that which sparked in his own heart out of spiritual values.

Religion a fact of Nature

So much had to go into those ‘sciences’ of the spirit by which the first societies and finally great cultures were raised upon earth. There went first the forming of the soul to recognise without envy the authority over human life of virtue and greatness of mind even when frail in body. There went to the recognition of the estates natural within human society, that the wisdom of the scribe comes by his time of contemplation, and that by art, craft, and beauty are the foundations of a city laid: the City of Man and the City of God alike. There went the surrender of arrant brawn to the enlightened spirit in humility, and this is a deeply religious act, far from ‘natural selection of the fittest’. There went the membering of man to man in a mutual vocation of gifts of differing intrinsic excellence, the praise of

‘Men rich in virtue, studying beautifulness,

living at peace in their houses...’ (Sirach 44.6.).

Set this against the faces empty, frenzied, dissolute of so many adolescents in our great wens of cities, and there can be seen what science and education in itself does not give, and cannot give, for science adds no sanction over knowledge: science is no bigger than a man who thinks. The basis on which the culture of man was built up was moral and of the new order that erupts into evolution with the emergence of Man. It was the order of the spirit, of the self conscious order of knowledge and meaning. It looked into Nature and found meaning in the universe it had inherited; it found that ‘all things were ordered in measure, number and weight’ (Wisdom 11.21) and it inferred a Reality of the same order as its own power, but much more mighty, indeed Absolute, as the ground of meaning and being in all that existed. It called this Real ‘God’, Yahweh: He Who Is, and dared to name Him ‘Father’ from kinship with the free and fertile scheming mind of man.

Of God was the power that held the mind of man in allegiance to the values of the spirit, that still so holds the human mind, and without which no power can hold it except the coarse power of force and fear.

What had to precede ‘Science’ in order that science might be born had its sanction as a natural value, and as a human value, in Religion. It is foolish for Freud, or others, to attempt to find the sanction for the religious value in man’s fear of Nature.

The sanction for God consists in man’s recognition of his own unique excellence in Nature, of his power, and of his pride. The sanction for God derives from man’s recognition of the author of a work akin to the purposeful works of man, like in personality to man himself. The invocation of the sanction of God’s truth and God’s will is the drive, and also as needed the rein, by which the excellence of man may begin to establish itself out of the ruck of blood, and sweat, and slime, and fear into the glory of the Kingdom of Mind upon this earth: ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the birds of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth...’

(Genesis 1.28.) The testimony of ancient man recorded here is better than the imaginations of Freud. There was nothing timid about ‘the sons of God’, they knew whose was the Kingdom and who were the heirs !

Religion and Science as natural values

These powers that derive from the peak of human personality, which find expression in the build up of community, society, cultures, that incarnate themselves in priests, prophets and kings, these are supreme values also of Nature and Evolution. They are the manifestation of Man as he is, as much a ‘fact’ of Nature as the wing of a bird, or the snarl of a tiger. They are also the superior values of a higher being that has overpassed the animal kingdom, but is doing still that which comes to it by nature. As manifestations of Man, and of the real, the priest and the king are no less valid than the facts enshrined in the periodic table. They are values of the objective order.

We are saying that the intellect that through all history has been God-dominated, the intellect of man, is the same intellect which is valid enough to probe with truth the secrets of the universe. We are saying that both these natural faculties, the ability to assert the reality of God with truth, and the ability to interpret matter with truth, are from the rightful competence of the one same nature. It is not possible for man to be the crown of creation as a scientist (whether modern or primitive science is in question) and a misguided superstitious ape in the religious values that flow just as readily from his personality. These spiritual, cultural, and moral values of man make it possible for the scientist to bud and blossom at the end of time, and they are just as valid, human, and objective in that they make him possible, as is his own competence in showing the objective reality of his attainments. It seems true to assert that in fact and in evolution, —and what scientist ever wants to be bothered with the airy values of metaphysics? —that the scientist never has appeared except through this background of the sacral human culture, and that if the scientist is a great and true human value, then so also is the womb that formed him, —put it that way.

The scientist may not despise his origins in the primitive human economy nor the priest his forefathers in the more crude of rites. This is the one unity of the intellect of man, which contains within one harmonic order of being both these aspects of the truth, and with equal validity. In the past the priest has been the more influential, and by longer indulgence of the errors that flow from human smugness and complacency has often frustrated the scientist. Today the roles are reversed, the errors of the scientist are even more frequent, since on the whole scientists are even less humble than theologians, and so the scientist often frustrates the priest. This is not the order of Nature, as has been hinted before, this is the consequence of sin in human society, but God has shut both of us up under the bondage of sin that he may have mercy equally upon us all.

God and Science are complementaries in the synthesis of human knowledge, but God was there first, was known first, and was proclaimed first with much more urgency from the natural response of the spiritual personality of man. When the knowledge of God and the savour of religious wisdom is dashed from the minds of men by robbery or by violence, then all the golden hopes of a culture of ‘Science’ drain into the sands of a craving, irresponsible, unsteadfast humanity. The empty desert of the soul shows in the thin, vice-lined, futile faces, while within their jacket pocket there bleats the music of random sensuality, thanks to the latest miracle of electronic science.

Chapter 10 Footnotes

1 1st Epistle S. John. c.4.vv.7 & 8.

2 cf. St. John c.3.v.8.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Evocation of the Word

1 IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

From the painful beginning upwards of human society, the development of social values depends upon increased achievement in personal values. These ‘values’, both the personal and the social, are not conventions nor are they merely ‘social contracts’. They are the drawing out in development of the natural content of human life. They are the manifestation of human need: we are members one of another.

Religion a creative urge

Just as morals are not ‘rules’ but the manifestation of the real in man, so also the forms of human culture, —religion, social authority, art and science, the various forms of power, —contain relationships and values that do not change but only grow. There is an element dated through time, and an element that is eternal because of the nature. The growth of these things of human culture belongs to the Unity-Law of development of being in the universe. These things in the spiritual creation are of Nature and also of God, for in the spiritual nature God takes over the environmental factor in the Unity-Law.

The well-springs of human culture (unless it is but decadence) burst up through the depths of the individual soul and are fed by God within the inner man. They cannot be evoked by the state, nor broached by being ‘busy about much serving’, i.e. by socialisation or nationalisation. This is not to make a political point, for rightly understood, and away from the philosophic primitivism of 19th century Marxism—which in this respect is as palaeotechnic as the industry of that era—the word ‘Socialism’ can have a thoroughly spiritual meaning, and be nothing else than the mutual integration, in lawful obedience, of men’s lives, duties, and vocations. The point at issue is that the origin of culture is a creative process, and creative processes in human values are always individual and spiritual. The seer is always above the commissar, for without him the latter becomes so much surplus weight about the middle of a society which is all matter and no spirit.

The prophetic role of religion

At all times in human history it has been true that ‘never was so much owed by so many to so few’. The vision of the creators of culture is not some form of mescalin-induced sensualism. It is dynamic, it is a Moses who leads his people towards the promised land. His work is both an individual gift and also a social vocation that carries a social duty to the brethren. In this respect the basis of human development is always aristocratic, but of very nature carries a social function, and where relevant also a social obedience. The state cannot produce the mystic, and the modern Soviet State is an example of its failure to do so. At best the state may be the cradle in which the prophet is adequately fostered, a statement that many will think to be true only in Utopia, for in the history of mankind the existing social tradition has been more often a spiritual slum vis-à-vis the nurture of great souls.

It was from the contemplation of God, of creation, and of the works of Nature that men grew up to be kings, judges, counsellors, craftsmen in the unity of a common society. In the case of the spiritual genius, all these facets might be combined in the unity of one single person.

Man is one, and so it is impossible to departmentalise the human personality. The religious value is intellectual and of the spiritual will, and it is so closely connected with all the spiritual perceptions of a man that the religious value in its widest sense, the valuation of moral worth, will openly and covertly influence a man at every level of action. Society is the ‘conspiratio’ the ‘breathing together’ of individual men in all the mutual, organic relationships of human intercourse, and in reality it is not possible to demarcate the religious and the secular sphere in society. God made man just one thing, and made him good. Evil and its divisions come as the work of human sin.

In a sense therefore, all great oppositions of contradiction, even among Atheists, are wars of religion, strife that is to say which centres around supreme human values and joys, their projection forward in society and their defence. The effects of evil, both conscious and unconscious evil, impinge to the injury of the neighbour at every level of human intercourse, —a man’s ignorance or corruption colours his secret thoughts even, and his utterance must damage the soul and the psyche of his neighbour whether he know it or not, whether he will it or not. This gives the meaning of the words of Jesus Christ, ‘I come not to send peace but the sword’. It is not from the will of God that the Prince of Peace sends the sword, but it is the expression of the result of the challenge of the Divine truth in the world of men. The very competition of men who are sowing good and evil to win possession of the minds and lives of their fellows is itself a form of war.

Notwithstanding that in the field of human flesh ‘the cockle is oversown among the wheat’ inextricably, until the end of time, God as the Environer, as the personal principle for man of the Unity-Law of Control and Direction, must from the beginning have acted upon man as the necessary means of the seeking and the attainment of human destiny.

Therefore, with the development of man’s power of reasoning, with the development of that rational, uniquely human memory-cell which is social, cultural tradition, the impact of God under the Unity-Law is to raise up within society the priest and the prophet as much as, from very nature, the craftsman and the king. The development of all religion in all flesh must be seen in this perspective, for God is the Father over all, and all mankind is equally his care.

It is not possible to offer ‘dates’ for the origin of religion. Since the basis of religion is derived from very being, the realist can state that it begins with the first of men. It is a fact of empirical science as well as a fact of theology that religion is manifest in the most primitive of art forms, while even neanderthal man buried his dead with indication of religious belief in the survival of ‘something’ after death. The point is stressed that we are dealing, in this very innocent, very unsophisticated human culture with facts of Nature, —because facts of human nature, as well as with facts of the history of religion. Not even the most advanced of apes has ever shown intimations of immortality to be one of its preoccupations, from its nature, with Nature. In this respect, whatever reservations may be made concerning the details of his interpretation, Jung shows himself to be a more adequate philosopher of the human spirit than Freud. It is perhaps not accidental that he was also a competent anthropologist.

Of soul and psyche

The evocation by God of the conscious ‘word’ of religion in the soul of man is not the drawing forth of a departmentalised value. Religion is not the eduction of some specific intellectual response in much the same manner, analogically, as there is a specific instinctual response in animal life to one specific need. The human personality, body and soul, as one, needs religion because it requires the touch of God upon its inmost substance to fulfil it, and this growing up to fulfilment involves all the faculties of the spiritual being, just as when a child develops, every organ of the body and every faculty of the mind is involved and is correlated in a natural harmony.

One cannot localise the influence of religion. Its role is to form the mind and heart in wisdom and in ordered love, and the results in the human spirit are more easily described in their objective effects than from the a priori content of ‘religion’. So it is that we speak of ‘wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and the awe of God’ and in many another of the lists of the fruits of the spirit, in the basic primers of Christian Doctrine. Religion, as the supreme science of the human spirit, must draw into focus and orientate all the percepts, perspectives, and valuations of a man in every aspect of the ends and purpose of human life. To use the jargon of today, the development of the soul in the values proper to the spiritual being will involve repercussions into every sphere of the psyche1, even in the more humdrum and apparently secular spheres. This synergism of action and reaction, percept and perspective, because it is individual will also be social. The individuality of a man is not intelligibly definable, nor is his personal fulfilment capable of being achieved, except in a co-relation to his brethren. From conception onwards we are members one of the other.

This reasonable deduction from the nature of man is witnessed also by human history. The primitive, basic cultures of mankind know nothing of a society in which there is a dichotomy between the ‘sacral’ and the ‘secular’. Nor could they have sustained it. Even today, the smaller and the more intimate a society, the less it can sustain divisions of the spirit. Political and civic stresses are sensed with more tension in the village than in the great city, religious tensions can be tolerated more easily in a massive, impersonal, very diversified modern society than within the hearth and home.

No man escapes the burden of belief

In this context of religion no man escapes the burdens of belief, even though with conviction he may reject the existence of God. The fulfilling aspect of religion lies with God the Environer, but the potential that God fulfils and the human need to which religion is relevant is a fact of human nature. There remains the natural orientation of the brain of man and the soul of man to a real focus outside the environment of matter, outside the partial environment of other men’s thoughts and of one’s own. There remains in a man, however much he may deny the Living God, energies of matter that require formation beyond the repetitive cycle of animal life, there remain the energies of the spirit that look beyond present possession to creative achievement greater than the present now.

There remain the burning wells of the soul from which the dynamism of the Idealist for ever overflows. These energies of spirit and of matter that mark off the psyche of man from the anthropoid ape, they may be directed into wrongheaded channels, they may be arrogant in their flame, yet burn they will. They will burn with a fury that destroys not creates if they are directed away from synthesis in God in whom alone they may find creative outlet, to flare with an angry, heartaching desire. Come a man as he will, —Atheist, Humanist, Marxist, when he is fired with the flame of his ideal he will find the disinterest or denial of friend or spouse as much a ‘war of Religion’ as when Satan withstands God. Love is a sharing and a communion in the true, whatever a man conceives his truth to be. No man can escape this burden. God can be blamed only if God should have provided the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and God has not done so. Certainly God must be held to make provision for the spiritual creation in the very name of that Unity-Law of creation in which all things are held together in One Economy. Yet we say that God has provided and the wisdom embodied in the Law stands true unto itself. Through the befogged confusions there does shine the steady light of the City set upon a hill. It is for us to go look for it.

Our modern division of the religious value over against the secular value as a distinction of rightful order, is nevertheless no distinction of nature. It is the convenient demarcation of an arbitrary frontier to avoid the worst wars of the spirit. The actual drawing of the line in history is usually the ad hoc battle position at which the last armistice was declared. Because the division is arbitrary, and does not arise from the ontological facts of human nature it is liable to logical confusion and the breakdowns of the contrived ordinance.

In the world of today it does seem to be to the advantage of all to preserve the distinction of the religious and the secular spheres within certain pragmatic limits. For the sake also of purity and sincerity of religious ideal and witness this is the much preferred position of the writer, but one must also face with sincerity the facts of the human situation today. The great and nagging doubt that must ever arise concerns the growing disparity between man’s power over matter and his spiritual and moral wisdom.

Man has come into his inheritance of knowledge of the intelligence embodied in the relativities and structure of material energies and material forms while the great majority of the human race has only just reached the cultural iron age, and has not even yet emerged from the Dark Ages of that era. In addition, even in the most esoteric of scientists the ability to control life and matter is quite irrelevant to his power to control himself and his ideals. This is because the spirit is not matter, and the evolution of a power in one aspect is not balanced, as in matter, by the natural evolution of the whole equation of other being to control it, on the other side. It is also due to the nature of the wound called sin and concupiscence in man, but scientists know little about that, although they often manifest the reality.

It could well happen therefore that in a very few years, by the end of this century, or before, the survival of a world civilisation in peace and sanity may require the totality of the vision and authority of God Incarnate in order to control creatively the energies personal and social of the human personality. The risk of Caesaro-Papism is obvious, though we have seen many an example recently of Caesar usurping the throne of God. In any form of world culture dominated by religion the sacral civilisation would of course have returned in full circle. Given the crisis that Sin, (and the use of the capital is deliberate) brings into the affairs of mankind, a crisis that grows every day in catastrophic potential as man grows in both power and the knowledge of good and evil, like a god, it is possible that we may have to have recourse to the full potential of the Kingship of Christ for Man, with all the risks that this must entail, since ‘Sin’ corrodes the churchman as much as the scientist and the common man in the street. It might be better to risk trusting poor sinners conscious of their own sinfulness with the things of God genuinely entrusted to their keeping, than to have another class of poor sinners making themselves the Mind of God, and lording it over the rest of us in the manner foreseen so presciently by Orwell and others.

If the intolerable tensions beget of the Scientific Society require that the sacral value again control and inform the activities of men in society it will indeed be divine irony. The beginnings and the end of Man Triumphant will have required the same identity of inspiration and of sanction. Whatever happens, to agree a distinction between the religious and the secular sphere will not bring in a peace, in society, that is free from all interior tensions. The very viability of the secular state depends upon a strong substratum (actually the interior, mystical content) of religious belief and sentiment. When this is eroded by Secularism itself, or by a doctrinaire Atheism, then the state either collapses, or a ‘strong’ government rushes in with the national Myth, in the case of Marxism with the international Myth, and assumes the immediate indoctrination of men, especially through the schools. At once men ask: ‘by what authority’, ‘with what certainty’, ‘and through what strength to do that which is asked’? And we are back at the beginning, pondering the basis of creation and the columns of the universe upheld by what eternal arms?... for the intelligence of man cannot dispense with God, and God alone is God.

The line of the Unity-Law

Therefore from the beginning God, acting upon the human spirit as its connatural environment, prompts knowledge and love of himself, and confirms the bonds of power and authority within the relationships of personal life, and the organic ties that bind society so that man may attain the human not the merely animal destiny. For spirit is not an aspect of matter. The incursion of sin into his history complicates the threads of human life beyond the power of man ever to untangle. The only brief summary of the complexity and confusion of the problem of evil, and of its appalling dynamism, is the figure of the Crucified. Let him who ponders have in mind the ‘Father, forgive them, they know not what they do’.

Of necessity the incursion of evil will be found often enough in religion as elements of superstition, diabolism, or gross error. This is not a deformity of religion so much as a deformity of the intellect and the will manifest in the most fundamental energies of the spirit. Similarly the knowledge called ‘Science’ permits the misuse of drugs, and the confection of biochemical and nuclear weapons of world annihilation. This does not prove the idiocy or the bestiality of Scientific Civilisation, but rather the moral lesion in the personality of man, from whose intellect the sciences and their potential proceed.

If the degradation of religion to superstition or magical practices now in this place and now in that proves anything, it seems once again to demonstrate the intellectual poverty of Freud’s assessment of the élan vital of the religious perception. As the writer reads him, religion for Freud seems to be reducible to a form of neurosis, and it is a thinker of very small soul who would found the inspirational basis of all the great world civilisations upon a neurosis or a purely subjective fallacy. It is also a pretty shallow interpretation of the progressive evolution of life on this planet.

Man in the very distant past experienced his own personality in all its powers of body and spirit with as much zest and ‘pride of life’ as today. He was not a wee, timorous beastie nor a neurotic super-ape. It was from his affirmation of his power that he could dream of entering into communication with the beings good or bad, but more powerful than he, whom he took to be the explanation of a world that was meaningfully intelligible in the human categories of making and creation. Whether in primeval jungle or imperial power, top men easily assume the airs of godhead. There is no evidence that the universalism of religion in ancient cultures runs parallel to a quite basic inferiority complex in the human estimation of self.

The more simple, and it would seem in particular the more pastoral a primitive society, the more rational has been its concept of God and the more holy its moral teaching. With the development of culture and settled tradition, the perfecting of agriculture and the consequent emergence of the City-State, religion itself will need to develop, that it may answer with more adequacy the basic problems of human life, offer to man a wider and deeper synthesis of knowledge and unite him in the fact more closely to God in his mind and heart. The providence of God is for all men and all the societies of men, the touch of his grace to raise up greater souls and more adequate teachers will be given.

Together with this work of God there will be the influence of evil, and evil also will grow in scope with the knowledge of man, —it must needs be that scandals come. There will also be that more subtle factor otherwise unweighed in this very partial presentation of creation, —the evil that influences man and human society from personalities of the purely spiritual order, —the Devil that is to say, the connatural power of evil spiritual personalities to influence the thoughts and feelings of men. Then too, the temptation to incarnate God in the ruling hierarchy of the civil power will be too great for many men and many cultures to resist, too great and too convenient, and the idolisation of kings will often occur.

It is as well to add that it is impossible to know how far these pressures from the social tradition of the State Establishment were taken seriously in the smaller communities of the village and the hamlet, within the family circle, and most of all within the individual soul.

Through all the great religions of mankind there runs continuous evidence of the reforming mystic, the Gurus and Buddhas of religious cultures that have grown sin-laden and decadent. They work, at the village level and at a national level as a leaven within society, often suspect by the careerist spiritual hierarchy of the state. Even in the very static religious system of the Pharoahs there is at least one brief effort to establish a monotheism. Comparative religion is not a subject in its own right. To be rightly understood it must be studied as an integrated aspect of the history of cultures, and so frighteningly vast a subject-matter must be put to one side here. It is enough to indicate that the work of God, and the creative blessing of his grace in the supernatural order is not to be denied upon any man who ever sought him sincerely, and when great souls have used the religious structure of systems of belief that are grossly erroneous in order to draw nearer to God, they will of the very effort tend to rethink and reform these structures in their real essentials, just as the nature of man, wounded by original sin, tends to a process of healing by the work and effort of the personal grace of God.

It will not be enough if God work to raise up religious truth now here and now there without any line of sure direction to fulfilment. This would not suffice to implement the basic principle of that Unity Law of Control and Direction to fulfilment through which God has from the beginning worked in the processes of creation. If God is the Environer of the soul of man, then from the very beginning of man there must be, within his personality and within the complex of human society a God-evoked and God directed line of spiritual truth, and good, and spiritual authority.

When we say that God is to man what, and much more than what the natural environment is to any form of material life, then God as the Environer is the principle of life more abundant to man, and must be the active principle of such life more abundant from the first creation of human beings. Be it ever so simple, ever so vague by our standards ever so far removed seemingly, from the very possibility of a world wide consummation in one continuum of knowledge of God and love of him —nevertheless it must be there, and the fullness of its potential be within it, —the creative dialogue of God and Man which is from the first Adam.

This content of knowing, loving, and proclaiming God is not any sort of man-based word concerning God. Such would be lacking in perfect orientation to its Environer, and would be in any case agnostic in principle. Since God is the principle of the human personality and human fulfilment, the human word concerning God for all mankind must from the beginning be a mutual interplay of God and man, the human word of God must from the beginning be the Word of God : i.e. God is the active and direct principle of its evocation. The evolution of the human personality, body and soul both, to fulfilment is evoked by God from inception to consummation, for it begins in God as Person and is fulfilled in God as Person.

Therefore the first evocation of the Word of God, i.e. religion, in man as the individual and in human society is a work of God, a work ever potential, moving on, prompting to the actualisation of the potential contained. That is to say that from the beginning religion in its perfect dialogue between God and mankind is a ‘Revelation’ to mankind in the most strict sense of theology. This it has to be, for the potential is contained not within a purely material equation and closed within the environment of material energies, but the principle of actualisation in the spiritual order is God in Person, and this lends even more point to the expression ‘God the Environer’.

From all that has been said in the last few pages it will be clear that this first poising of a complex of spiritual wisdom in the heart of man at his beginnings is a dynamic relativity between God and man in the order of an economy of all mankind. It is one economy, and it has one potential: this is the Church of God, the first sowing of the mustard seed, tiny beyond compare in content at its beginnings, but sown to burgeon with the ages in Faith, Hope, and Charity until all things be fulfilled. This is the Kingdom of God in the individual Adam at all times, and within the society of the human family over which by right and by title of a work in Nature God the Word is Eternal King.

This is the Kingdom that forever ‘comes’ in degrees more and more manifest until it be consummated in the final transformation of good men in the likeness of God, and of the Earth that has never known sin, nor can know it into a new Heaven and a new Earth, the perfect foil of the perfect spirit, the Acme of Evolution, at that omega-point in which the divine order perfects beyond its state the present order of Nature...‘ the end of the world’.

This is the Kingdom that within the personal heart and throughout the earth within the families of mankind is a sign set for the resurrection and the fall of many, for a sign that shall be contradicted, that in the contradiction the evil in the thoughts of many hearts shall be laid bare. This is the Kingdom that from its sowing to its reaping is also a kingdom embattled, until within its core God triumph finally over the chaos-causing lesions of human sin, the sin that is one’s own within the savage pride of life and of the mind, and the sin that is the damage in the stock from a primal disobedience to the primal Unity-Law of good and true that God mediated to Mankind and forever mediates.

2 THE WORD IN PRIEST AND PROPHET

The significance of ‘the Bible’

This is the Kingdom of God that erupts into human history as the Hebrew Bible, —the ‘Old Testament’. It erupts because when it appears in the early days of the semitic written tradition it appears as a tradition of the ‘living word’ of God fully formed, very mature, and very comprehensive in its vision of man now for a long time.

In passing let it be said with an eye to modern controversy that in these its origins from the beginnings of man the tradition that breaks surface as ‘the Bible’ answers the question concerning the relative place of ‘scripture’ and ‘tradition’. The bible in its origins and development witnesses the essential magistracy of the Word of Tradition over the Word of Scripture: for the scriptures are but the written record of the Word of Life, for long it could not be written, and it must go on till the end of time. The Kingdom is one, from Adam to the last born, from alpha to omega. These twin ‘words’ are aspects of only one Revelation, and one Life. At all times the essential principle of both is the Living Word who is God, and the Word of God that lives mediated through his chosen source, through his ‘priesthood’ whatever its form from cave men to this present day. Without this unity of principle, God and Man in one dialogue, the letter is a dead letter, without sure meaning, and applied in the dead letter it ‘kills’. The spirit that ‘quickens’ the letter is the Living Word of God mediated through the evoked word of man. Men die, but God lives, and the meaning of God lives on, in both the spoken and the written Word of God. Unless the meanings of God live in the inheritance of man, in the living Church, then these meanings of God cannot be attained with certitude nor developed to the fuller understanding of later ages, so long after the demise of the human culture, with all its limitations, in which first they were conceived and spoken. Therefore we call God the author of the scriptures, because the meanings of God are one unity in one economy, they can unfold to us more with time, but from the nature of the case the authoritative interpretation of the meanings of God can belong only to the economy, —the Church, in which He ever lives and ever teaches. This is in essence the import of the ‘inspiration’ of the written Word of God.

One can thrill to the sincere and humble reading of the Old Testament because the bible (and here one is using the term ‘bible’ in the partial sense) is so different from any other early Religious Tradition among men. There are no gods and goddesses scheming, fighting and fornicating in heaven. There are no dynastic lines of royal descent from gods, no special lines of races chosen because of physical descent from deity. It is of one that all flesh comes upon earth, made from the slime, but vivified by the inbreathing of the divine ‘breath’, the spirit of God, the spirit of intelligence and free will, that makes Man a being quite apart from all others, —made to the image and likeness of God.

There is no pantheism nor any polytheism, the name of God is the most accurate possible ‘He Who Is’ and the creation story is a miracle of balanced sincerity in which God creates and makes like a craftsman, but solely by the exercise of will, and makes all things from the void and empty to the finished work, and all the furnishings thereof. Last of all the work of God culminates in Man.

There are many, many unanswered questions, but unlike the other great religious teachings of the world the bible, and the tradition that it represents does not make evil one thing with matter, nor an aspect of material creation. The problem of evil cannot be answered with any detail by the Old Testament, but admits the fact, as in the book of Job for instance, and in the essential truth of the doctrine of the Fall, it gives us the only true answer to the problem of moral evil in man, an answer which can be made and defended with immensely more certainty and insistence in the age of science and the philosophy of science.

There is no magic in the historic natural tradition of the bible. It is not a god that brings down the secret of fire from heaven, nor the use of metals etc., we are told the names of men who were, in the race memory of the tribe of Abraham, the ‘fathers’ of those who worked in metal, who made tents and dwelt in them, who first built cities, who first called upon the name of God with set and distinct invocation, who first made and played upon the lyre etc. This is primitive history, not magic, and one could show traces of a primitive anthropology as well. The bible has all through the ring of sober truth. It is of course deplorable to try to make of the bible a text-book of science or to attempt to deduce from it at what hour of the morning some six thousand years ago God began the work of creation ‘just like the man said’, but the simple and essential truth of the bible as theology and history is breath-taking to any man who reads it in simple honesty, and allows, as honesty must allow, for the limitations of human knowledge at the time, and the limitations therefore of what God himself, acting in the natural way, could do with the spirit of man to reveal, to teach, and to develop in understanding and in love.

One should not leave the theme without an explicit mention also of the ‘ten commandments’ of the Law. These have found favour and acceptance among the common people of most nations, even where neither the Old Testament, nor its fulfilment, the New Testament in Christ have been widely accepted. In so-called Christian lands there are many who will say that they do not accept the organised Christian Church, but they do accept the Sermon of Christ upon the Mount, and the Ten Commandments of the Law of God given by Moses. In most Christian contexts, what they really accept is the development and interpretation of the Ten Commandments given by Christ and the Christian Church, but is it not remarkable that the formulation of this ancient ‘Law of God’ admits, of its very nature of a deeper and nobler interpretation, without contradiction, as man becomes aware of it, and as men are willing to practise it?

The vision of the book of Genesis is as magnificent as anything in the later prophetic writings of the Old Testament. What other creation account anywhere in the world so simply depicts the peaceful awareness and friendship with God that must have existed in the very first of men, however primitive, as the ‘walking with God in the afternoon air’ of the bible, or the distortion and degrading effect of human sin in the simple comparative statement that before they ate of the fruit of the tree not of knowledge (a common mistake among some non-Christians) but of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil in one experience, that ‘they were naked, Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed’?

It may well be that the redaction we possess today of the first chapters of Genesis, especially the beautiful and highly stylised format of the first chapter, dates from a time much later than that of Moses. It would be rash however to presume that all the essential elements were not there at the time of Moses, or to think that the elegant presentation of them, at least in song, would be beyond the skill of one trained in all the wisdom and knowledge of the Egyptians !

One can feel justifiably cross on reading the work of some scriptural scholars, they can be so purblind, and so deadlocked in an ivory tower of the mind. Had they been also parish priests they would have a more realistic appreciation of Moses for example, as a magnificent personality, on the psychological level. Do most of them ever relive the man who led a race of slaves out of bondage against hopeless odds, who trained them up in the desert, sustained them through every hazard and loss of heart, gave them their Law, and the priesthood of Aaron, who made a nation and a Religion of them, fired anew with the ever-existing messianic hope that was not only for Israel, but for all mankind?

Such a man was a genius at every level of personality, and it is very unwise to set limits to what the supreme genius can achieve, especially when his outstanding gifts of nature are confirmed by the dynamic charism of God. The continual vindication of the Old Testament as the most reliable of ancient histories by the archaeologists of today, —and for that matter by the scholars and scientists of modern Israel, —should inculcate an increased wonder at the unique prudence of this Tradition, and, where it is needed, a little more humility in higher critics.

God and the Seer

Another aspect of the place of God in the bible which tends to be overlooked more and more, by scholars, Catholic or otherwise, is the influence of God as a force in fact and in history, in the unfolding of the tradition that culminates in the Incarnation of God. It is a principle of the Unity-Law of creation, as that principle applies to man, that God himself must act and influence directly the psyche of man. This is the meaning, we have said, of ‘primitive revelation’ and it is this work and this tradition that is summed up and repromulgated through history, as for instance in Henoch, in Abraham, in Moses, through the great Prophets of the line of truth that culminates today in the authoritative teaching Christian Church… for this line is but one. This is a big claim indeed, it is not necessary that we should be able to trace it as history over the indefinite ages that intelligent man has lived on earth, and we have said before that the beginnings of this wisdom concerning God and man would be extremely small in distinct content, and could remain so for ages of time. It is necessary however that it be there from the beginning, and be the evocation in the spirits of men of the prompting of God upon human intelligence, and be in the order of the spiritual development of men, as rational beings, to their present and future destiny.

It is necessary also that it admit of development, and that, as culture grows, it should call for and require such further development, and that this evocation should not be the arbitrary work of God, but part of the operation of that Unity-Law that begins with the poising of the universe, and is taken up into God the Environer in the creation of the spiritual creature. The only reliable manifestation of such a continuity of work will be the bursting forth into cultural history of a uniquely sober and true Religion of God and of Man that possesses a long ancestry as a teaching tradition, and is conscious of a continuity of origin and of destiny that goes back to the general beginnings of mankind, and is a tradition of fulfilment for all mankind. This type of test applies to the Hebrew Tradition in a manner which is quite unique.

In the case of the great Seer, for example in the case of Moses, whose work is not to initiate the tradition, but to develop it, without contradiction, in clarity and in doctrinal content, we must have in mind that the vision of creation and of God ‘s economy that grows within him, as he prays and searches for wisdom and understanding, is prompted directly by God, and that while subject to the human limitations of time, culture, and human imperfection, is a vision conformed to the reality of God ‘s wisdom, and therefore true, however naively, to what God did in fact do, and does in fact purpose to fulfil in the future. This seems to the writer essential to the concept of a God-guided Messianism.

The Seer will be conscious therefore of a tremendous insight, the manner in which he ‘sees’ the working of God, and the mind of God will be for him full of wisdom and beauty, his soul will be conscious of a great love of God, and what he sees he will proclaim with great authority, for the intellectual vision within him itself carries the note not only of truth, but of authority.

Since man is made to the image of God, and this formal likeness to God is within the soul as spiritual substance, the vision evoked by God within the created spirit (and evoked is put designedly to avoid a word more passive in connotation) can, and perhaps should bear a formal resemblance to the actual work of God as a process. This principle could not be pressed closely, for when a relationship to God, or some event, is in the moral order the seer must needs find a picture to represent it in an anthropomorphic way, as for example in the depicting of Original Sin and its consequences. It is when the intellectual vision is of the objective nature of creation as a work that builds up by degrees, and is consummated in man, that a direct correspondence to fact seems the more natural manner of the revelation.

There is no need to defend ‘concordist’ positions to defend sound Christian doctrine concerning the bible, and nowadays Catholic theologians recoil from the innuendo in horror. The reaction against the tendency that prevailed as little as half a century ago is sound, but it could become extreme, and be also a little snobbish. A desire to be fashionable is a cause of missing the truth or facets of the truth, in all ages, for if the truth is found on any theological bandwagon, that is only incidental. The truth is vindicated over the ages only by the intrinsic merit of fact and correct argument.

We are taking creation by evolution to be a fact of natural history, and the vision of the seer in Genesis is one in which God proceeds from the void, —dark, and empty, and without life to the ‘day by day’ building up of a successive creation of which man is the unique consummation. This correlation does not seem merely accidental, but the rational evocation in the mind of the seer of what God actually did. Notice the inference of the word ‘evocation’, the determining of the mind of the seer by the Intellect of God is to evoke, actively within the mind of a man a suitable and adequate representation of the Divine intent. Inspiration is not dictation.

The soul of man is a principle of wisdom, and God is subsistent Wisdom. The intellectual understanding that God evokes within a Great Soul is as much a conversation, one might almost say a communing, as is the communication of man with man.

The creation of woman: point of interest

It can be suggested further that when, after the making of Man God sees all his works that they were good, and very good, that this is not to be understood of mere complacence, but is the assertion of good in its ontological meaning: God saw them to be vibrant with truth and good, with being that is, with harmony and natural law, in the distant likeness of his own Being which is the norm of perfection. So understood this assertion marks the point of departure of the bible from other Eastern concepts of material being, which tended to confuse evil with desire itself and with the very nature of the material substance and its ontological relativities to other things. The Oriental mystics were baffled understandably by the problem of evil, as, outside of Christian revelation has every great thinker been baffled. They were quite correct to perceive a link between spiritual dissipation and the concupiscence (in the theological sense) of the spirit and the flesh. No sage in human history, apart from the Judaeo-Christian line of Revelation, seems to have come to a clear concept of the possibility of a Fall in the existing state of human nature, that occurred after the fact of creation. Unless this concept exists there will be an inevitable tendency among great spirits to make matter a principle of limitation at least, and even a principle of spiritual illusion and loss. The path that makes sense of man is marked only by that unique tradition of God and of mankind which was, and still is, the glory of Israel.

The creation story of the making of the woman from ‘the rib’ of Man also needs looking at with an objective eye. There could be here a developmental potential that it were an impoverishment to neglect. Most things which are asserted by scholars are as blandly denied by their peers, but an interesting situation exists if the word rendered ‘rib’, or more generally as ‘curved thing’ in ancient Hebrew really is related to the Sumerian sign of the arum lily, standing for the male member, and signifying ‘principle of life and generation’. Can we be sure, if this derivation is indeed true, that some such meaning, perhaps archaic and uniquely religious in meaning, did not belong to this word and its symbol among the Hebrews at the time of Abraham, and subsist up to the time of Moses?

It would mean that the Prophet sees ‘Adam’, ‘the Man’, (and the capital letter is quite justly used), to contain in his one flesh the total potential of male and female. This is in fact the nuance of the words of Christ in St. Matthew, c.19. He who made them male and female from the beginning, had first made the one in which was the total of all flesh... in making them male and female, that man and woman might have a ‘helpmate’ of their own kind. God had, so to speak ‘re-one’ Adam again, in one flesh, and hence what God had made separate in order to make one again with greater perfection, ‘let not man put asunder’.

That which is taken out of Adam to be ‘bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’ as Eve, the woman, is really a ‘principle of life and generation’, or a sexual principle. It is a remarkable even if humdrum fact that the origins of animal life are unisexual, and that the sexes are separated as mutual complements of specific life fairly well up the line of evolution. The developmental potential which is suggested, at least, by this writer, consists in the fact that the final cause of material creation and material life on this planet is Man, and all flesh is to and for, the emergence of man. Man then is present as a real, but as yet potential element in the first making and moving of life on earth. There is of course no true intellectual life until the actual making of man, the synthesis of spirit and matter, soul and body. Until the moment of actual concreation of the soul into the matter of man’s body, man is in ‘a deep sleep’. There is present life, and life that is vibrant, but it is not awake, because the spiritual soul is not yet actuated into the matter. Man therefore exists as a real potential, but as it were ‘asleep’.

This interpretation can stand remarkably well as a development of the vision contained in the words of Genesis, even without any help from the possible primary meaning of the word rendered in English as ‘rib’, although with the help of a primary meaning that is phallic in nature the correlation does become more remarkable.

The principle of exegesis we have in mind can be expressed as follows: the Incarnation is the summit, on this planet at least, of the creative action of the Word of God. A summit, and a plenitude of operation implies an activity that precedes in order to consummate. Just as St. Paul, commenting it seems on the Jewish legend that the rock which Moses struck, and which gave water, followed the people through the desert, says ‘and they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ...’ so also at all the critical and formative points of the Revelation of God under the Unity-Law of creation, the action of Christ, the Word Eternal is direct upon the mind, thoughts, and evoked word-pictures of the human seer. This, we think, explains the remarkable adequacy of the ‘types’ and ‘symbols’ of Christ, especially in his passion and death, that exists in the Old Testament figures, and is part of what one would expect if the Unity-Law for mankind is both prompted directly of God, worked in God and consummated in God in Person. God is indeed, as well as man, ‘the author of the scriptures’, but also in a perfect analogy of form let us note, the ‘author of the Church’.

Israel the custodian for mankind

This is the line of Revelation under the Unity-Law to which all peoples, tribes, and tongues, all other religious traditions, and the individual man yearning in his soul, are made relative for fulfilment. This line is the magnetic pole of the spirit, the Sun around which all created knowing and loving gravitates, the focus through which all perspectives are rightly realigned to God in peace.

In so far as any religious tradition is true, it will find its journey’s end on earth within this unique Tradition. Before the consummation of the Unity-Law of creation in Christ, in God himself that is, the ontological relativity of all mankind to this line was a fact. What is affirmed in Abraham, that ‘in thy seed shall all the tribes of the earth be blest’ begins long before him. Through the lost ages of mankind the hand of God leading up to Abraham leads back in the same continuity of work to the beginning of the human kind.

Through all the confusion and the sins, through the deviations which God himself had to permit a human nature so grossly wounded, —‘for the hardness of your hearts Moses gave you that law, but from the beginning it was not so...’—the hand of God was leading on a line of knowledge of himself and love of himself that was at all times at least a little better, a little surer, and much more alight with promise than that which was found among the rest of men.

Above all other attributes, this line is a line of developmental potential, not only in its extension over all mankind, but in its intension, in its content that is to say, its potential for growth without loss of identity, its inner coherence, its power to increase by synthesis just as theories of science increase by synthesis, and the new knowledge finds an organic place for the old.

The warranty we have for this statement is its eruption into history, with the rise of the Hebrew people as a line of promise, indeed as the Line of Promise, —a line very sure of itself, sober, truthful and pure. It was never a line of magic, it was a Faith that knew that men and kings descended not from mythological deities, but from the inbreathing of God into ‘the slime of the earth’. Yet, by this participation of the breath, the being of God, Man became not only ‘a living person’, but also the son of God. For which reason whatever life spilt the blood of man, whether the life of man or of beast, it was to be forfeit, to teach a primitive people reverence for the life ‘that was made to the image of God’.2

This Line of Promise, the fulfilment of the Unity-Law within which creation is poised, and therefore the fulfilment of creation and of evolution itself as upon its peak, this Line begins with ‘Adam’, ‘the Man’, and is fulfilled in the birth of the Son of Man, who is the King of the universe. To this purpose was Israel chosen to be ‘the elect portion of God’, when the Almighty made the nations and established the bounds thereof, that in the silence of littleness the line of the Great Law might be conserved more securely, might be meditated by the prophet and treasured by the poor, might be reformed again and again in newness of heart, and not be dissipated in the lusts of world empire, or the hubris of world philosophies of ignorant pride.

The ‘going into the desert...’

Israel was thus the custodian of all mankind, the City seen by the prophet set upon the hill of Sion, to which the strength of the nations would go up to adore: the house to which the prodigal son would make back his way with a heavy heart. Therefore God took him apart like Henoch, into discipline, that God might walk with him in the afternoon air, that Israel might take the vows of a Nazarene, of dedication to Yahweh his most jealous God: the vows of obedience, in worship and unwavering Faith, of poverty in the denial of empire and power, of chastity, that he might not fornicate after any other Lover. Only so could he learn to bend his most still neck, and in a reverent and teachable love conserve the surety of the Covenant for himself and for all the nations that were blest in the seed of Abraham his Father.

Analogy with Christian priesthood

It is the same today in spirit and in principle when a man offers himself to be a priest. It is in silence of spirit, in discipline, in contemplative prayer that he must die that he may live with more abundance. It is necessary that the cautery of Christ’s own training burn deep, searing the luxury of the flesh and the arrogance of a man’s spirit. Without the attainment of reverence and humility of heart the Traditions of Christ cannot be entrusted to men for safe keeping, neither is there inculcated in bishop or in theologian the recognition that since the Incarnation, God has spoken down the ages always, in the essentials of Faith, with the same authority and inerrancy in the truth as ever he may do now, so that the authority of God in the Church through the former ages, becomes the first, and the greatest of the touchstones of the truth in any time that follows.

This is a matter to be underlined without delicacy of hand against many of the lay intellectuals and theologically minded journalists of today:— not unto you, gentlemen, was the word of power committed from the beginning, nor is it now. If God had committed it into your hands, into how lifeless a desert of sand would it have been drained! You have never received the commission, nor have you ever paid the price required, that the treasury of the Faith should be entrusted into your hands. Your lives too, are more selfish and more sensual than you know, the measure you can rise to is not the norm of the perfect truth. In doctrine you do better learning than teaching.

If you had wished to be the mouthpiece of God, a teacher of infants, the eyes of the blind, you should have given more thought to following your Master the whole way as younger men. You ought to have sold all things that you might have more treasure in heaven. The commission of the priesthood, which is a collegiate solidarity with Christ the Priest, is not given to men who turn away sorrowful, retentive of their individualistic wills. Neither is it fittingly offered to him who is too distrustful of the delight that is in Christ to be able to take the word that is given to some, though not to all men, the word that is the vocation of a dedicated chastity.

The common guilt of mankind

This Tradition we love to call ‘the Line of the Unity-Law’, because it is the noblest part of creation itself, the Faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is the inheritance of all mankind in the loins of Adam, their Father. This Tradition proclaimed a consummation, and it was fulfilled, for God is faithful: since that time the voice is stilled that thrilled the heart with the fearless proclamation ‘Hear, O Israel, thus says the Lord thy God...’ and no further line of prophets is marked and treasured in the canonical annals of Israel, But, to the consummation in the Holy One of God of the Unity-Law of the universe and all its building, how many nations have also been unfaithful through heresy, schism, and atheism, and how many, many individual men in the prides of the mind, and the cruelties and lusts of the heart!

No man nor any nation can turn upon one people alone and say ‘you crucified the Son of God’! It is not true. The Son of God was crucified in Adam, from the blindness engendered by sin in the seed of man before the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us, and by the seed of Adam after that event, and to this day they enact the same cruel drama in their national and in their private lives, a million million times through every generation:— ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do’ was not spoken of the Jewish people, nor even of the chief priests and the scribes of the people. It was spoken of all mankind.

When the malice of sin, organised evil directed by malicious intelligence, was worked upon the physical body and the soul of Jesus the Christ, then the Servant of Yahweh was bruised for our iniquities and was wounded for our sins: the wood of the sacrifice was placed upon the shoulders long before typified in Isaac, the Paschal Lamb was extended in the form of a Cross without a bone being broken of him. But the Gentiles were also there. They were there in the soldiery who scourged, spat, diced, and nailed to the Cross. They were there in their worthy representative his Excellency the Governor from Imperial Rome, the epitome of the spirit of the Gentiles, —washing his hands of justice, turning away petulant and agnostic from the supreme question of the meaning of creation (and Pilate said ‘what is truth’? and going out said to the Jews ‘I find no cause in him’) selling his soul, most modern of all in that—to keep his job. If he told the truth in the inscription which he put upon the Cross, he did it despite himself, for God is a better master of irony than man.

We were all there, and would be so again were Christ still to come, and should come without pomp, pride of birth, or external majesty, offering again the testimony of a Faith fulfilled in unalloyed truth and great works. We do not believe in the devil nowadays, but we have our witch-doctors, the psychologists would find a way round the miracles, even round the raising of the dead! Every day in print and in television picture we gouge the true souls of children with violence and lust, our ‘recreation’ is a parade of intellectual sodomists and artistic rotters... for that is the life we live, and the stuff we want, he then that is without sin among ‘Christians’ let him cast the first stone at Israel!

No man who ponders within his heart upon the mystery of sin will dare to condemn a race, unless it were the race of all mankind, and this would be to make a liar of God, who has loved it so much. A man, the individual man, may stand condemned by his own heart, and hence by God also, but none other has knowledge to pass such sentence. Every man shall bear his own burden, only One Man ever bore the burden of a race.

A prayer for Sion

"But Sion said, ‘the Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me’. ‘Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb’? Yes, though such may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have graven you on the palms of my hands, your walls are ever before me. Your builders outstrip your destroyers, and those who laid you waste go forth from you. Lift up your eyes round about and see: they all gather, they come to you. As I live, says the Lord, you shall put them all on like an ornament, you shall wear them as does a bride.

"Surely your waste and your desolate places, and your devastated land, —surely now you will be too small for your inhabitants, and those who devoured you will be far away. The children born in the time of your bereavement will yet say in your hearing ‘The place is too narrow for me, make room for me to dwell in’. Then you will say in your heart: ‘Who has begotten these unto me? I was bereaved and was barren, was exiled and put away, but who has brought up these? Behold, I was left alone, whence then have these come?’

"Thus says the Lord God. ‘I will lift up my hand to the nations, and raise my signal to the peoples; and they shall bring your sons in their bosom, and your daughters shall be carried on their shoulders. Kings shall be your foster fathers, and their queens your nursing mothers. With their faces to the ground they shall reverence before you, and kiss the dust your feet have imprinted. Then you will know that I am the Lord: those who wait for me shall not be put to shame.’ " (Isaiah c.49. vv. 14-23).

Let not the elder son refuse to come home into his Father’s house, because there is music and dancing for the return of the prodigal son; for, ‘Son, thou art always with me, and all my things are thine...’ One day in the sight of God is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day. It is written again: ‘Be angry, and sin not, let not the sun go down upon thy anger’. Israel has been angry for nigh on two days as the shadows lengthen into twilight: —let not the sun go down upon another day of thy anger !

Chapter 11 Footnotes

1 'psyche’ here is taken to mean the human personality, body and soul, as it

acts and reacts with its human environment, and as it is influenced and com-

mitted within an existing social tradition. None of us is born neutral.

2 Genesis 9.5.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Messiah and Unity-Law

1 COMMITMENT AND COVENANT

It is said by some that the religion of the greatest of the sages of the East transcends, in its contemplative vision of God, the tradition of the Hebrews, at least until the writing of the ‘Wisdom’ literature some two hundred years or less before the birth of Christ. There seems no reason to concede this point. Communication by writing was never as developed in Jewish milieu as it was in the more agrarian less nomadic Indo-Himalayan and Chinese civilisations, until at least about the time we find the Wisdom literature, the time that is of the full penetration into the near East of the Romano-Hellenic culture of the West. Yet, there are signs enough that among priest and prophet there did exist a ‘wisdom spoken among the perfect’ which was more than the naked ‘Law’ of the tribal masses.

It is implicit in the promulgation of the creation narrative to the masses themselves, in the relationship for instance between God and Man before the disobedience of sin, —the ‘walking with God in the afternoon air’, a simple, beautiful intimation of affection and mutual communion. The same expression is used also of Henoch, whose name means ‘discipline’ or ‘teaching’ and who was ‘holy, and walked with God, and was seen no more because God took him...’ etc. A very true understanding of mystical experience is contained in the vision of Moses, and his needing the protection of God lest he die, even in the vision of ‘My hinder parts’. It is the reality which so shone out from the face of Moses, transformed from converse with God, that he wears a veil over his face.

There is a contemplative awareness of God as a personality loved in the beauty of the Canticle of Moses, and even more in the balance of firmness and tenderness in the dying exhortation of the great leader to the people of Israel. A man who so spoke loved both God and his people with a love of experience, —it is from the abundance of the heart than any mouth speaks.

Briefly, one may indicate the Psalms of David, as well as those which may indeed be much later. Even in the shorter, lyrical Psalms of one style which are almost certainly those of David, there is the psychological stamp of one man’s experience of God. There is anguish and despair, but through it all hope and strength, and such is not born of agnosticism, but of an inner experience of peace and power, in spite of the storm. We may indicate the majesty of the great prophets of Israel, especially Isaiah, there is a patience, a tenderness, a thrilling vision of God and the future in spite of the loneliness and the rejection and the sin of the people, that can only proceed from souls of great experience, whose pain is tempered by the experienced, inner vision of God.

There is very good reason why the Faith of Israel should appear to be a Faith of the Law, and of Authority, rather than of contemplative possession. It is a reason paralleled in the Catholic Church today. The greatest of the mystical writings of Christendom have been provided by the contemplative Fathers and saints of the Church, and in relatively modern times St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa the Great are outstanding. Yet, there are Catholic training colleges for priests in which nothing at all is taught of mystical theology, and there are very many priests who have no idea at all what the mystics are talking about. It is a defect, a woeful defect that impoverishes the Church, but it derives as a defect, in part at least, from the total commitment of the Church to mankind.

Israel also was a religion of the whole people, not of an élite, it cared for the doings of daily life. It was not an optional Faith that withdrew apart, under the holy tree, on the banks of the sacred river, to contemplate the ‘massa damnata’, the ‘great unleavened’ with an infinite, despairing compassion. It was not a religion that was simply an invitation to him who would come apart, to learn by seeking, together with great masters of the soul. It was a Faith that affirmed a message, and an authority, that taught first, and then sought further: not a Faith that first sought, and then from this tentative and experiential authority offered the fruits of the Great Soul’s achievement to those others willing to rise to the effort.

The Faith of Israel was of a God who cared and intervened in the toils of material daily life, who did not know matter simply as the self-made illusion of fallen spirit creating its own ‘karma’, its own hell of desire. The Covenant was a call to the vocation of every individual, high and humble alike, and hence to the body social of society, and the quality of its works. This we must require of a religion which fulfils the Unity-Law of creation for mankind. It is not optional, it is part of the stuff of creation, it is ontological, functional, of the destiny of man and of the destiny of the universe. It is of right and of might, in the affairs of men, because it is of the fabric of their being. This Faith that fulfils and completes the process of creation is the interaction of man with his Spiritual Environer.

Such a Tradition must be embroiled in the life, loves, and sins of Everyman everywhere. It will be strongly organisational, preceptive, and liturgical in the true sense of that word, —catering in its acts and life of prayer for the mass of the people to whom it addresses itself. It will be as full as Everyman’s household with simple loves and noisy imprecations, obsessed with the waywardness of prodigal sons, and as intent upon their repentance.

It will be a Faith like that of the Catholic Church today, which sends the flower of God’s chivalry not only to the Mayfairs of this world and to the golden cities of the Weald, but without distinction to the squalid, uproarious, extrovert slums of great industrial cities where a man may ‘labour all the night, and have taken nothing’, —or so it would seem. If you care, you will be there, it did not look a very successful Mission that was established when the first Cross of Christendom was raised in sacrifice upon the hill of Golgotha.

All fullness is in God, but all condescension as well. One would hardly know the Church of the great, cultured Benedictine monasteries, of the contemplative peace of Carmel, in the Church porch notices, lurid with their ‘bingo’ and ‘Football Pools’, of the diocesan clergy. Yet the one does not exclude the other, even among the pastoral clergy. Of course, a Church that goes laden to the market place, like a vehicle that goes often to the same, needs more frequent overhauling. The servicing of the Church is the cold douche of critical reappraisal, and the painful wrench of reform.

So it was with the religion of Israel, and so it had to be. The existence of a contemplative love of God can be shown, as also belief in a survival of death which was one of love with God, at least for his ‘saints’ however little the impact of such a wisdom of the perfect upon the earthy mass of the common tribesmen. It is a mistake to expect to see the development of the ‘highest’ aspects of Religion in the beginnings of that Tradition which contained the full potential of the Creative Law of the universe. The confusion and the problems wrought in human life and understanding by sin would mean, and in the systems of the East did mean, that gross philosophical error concerning the very nature of being would be intertwined with any attempt to make incarnational in religion the most profound perceptions of God. It was far better and far wiser in God to be content with a Faith that was quite amazingly right about the basic percepts of God, morals, and creation as good, and of its nature allowed for developmental growth in a straight line as time and culture called it forth. Thus, all aspects of the truth could develop in harmony in the womb of time. A premature birth of the highest concepts would have meant a synthesis marred by deformity.

Messianism a ‘mark of the Church’

With the passing of the ages there grew a ‘furor messianicus’ within the Faith of Israel, and the vision deepens continuously despite baffling contradictions in the characteristics of the King to come which troubled the interpreters. The King would rule over all the earth and all mankind, and while he would reign with the authority of a ‘rod of iron’ it would be also true that ‘a sceptre of peace is the sceptre of thy Kingdom’. All mankind would be the Israel of God, as in the vision of Isaiah (ch.60.) or as depicted in the census psalm 87 (numbering R.S.V. version) which declares that all men and all peoples are known by God as having their birthplace in Sion... and there are countless other indicative passages. At the same time there is the disturbing vision of Isaiah (c.53) of the Servant of God oppressed, his life made a sin-offering reigning over kings only because he has first gone down into the dust of death... there is the anguish of psalm 22 (version op. cit.) with once again its prophecy of a worldwide and a religious dominion over all mankind after and because of the passion of the Witness of God. With all the difficulties of the interpretation of the vision before it was fulfilled in the event, the important fact for us is that Israel was at once a messianic Faith for the whole earth, and that secondly it is Messianism with an all-important difference from the common accompaniment of the messianic religion. For, let it be said, we must look for a Messianic Faith, if it is to be the principle of control and direction from God over human life and destiny. To say that a religion is ‘messianic’ and to say that it is ‘evolutionary’ or ‘developmental’ is one and the same thing. No other Faith the world has ever seen has been of its intrinsic nature, developmental. However great and noble in principle, other religions derived of men. They were of human vision and human experience, they began from the subjective and worked towards the objective. The religion of Israel did the opposite, because it was conscious of its origin in God, conscious of its present insufficiency, constantly expressive of its yearning and its expectation for a greater fulfilment.

The Messianism of the Hebrew tradition was not a fanaticism. This had developed certainly by the time of Jesus Christ, and was terribly evinced in the siege of Jerusalem some thirty years after the Crucifixion. It would be easy to say that this was the after-swell of the Maccabean wars, and of the takeover by Rome, and to deplore the death of Christ as almost an accident of history. It would hardly do, it is the sort of facile objectivity by which historians of the ‘Liberal’ tradition do constantly explain away the stuff of history and miss all the truth of human motivation. It is the philosophical spirit of the times, in the fullest sense of philosophical, which makes the triumphs and the tragedies of mankind. The events are merely the occasions, they arise out of the fullness of the heart, and if they did not exist the motivations of men would find others to serve just as well.

Whatever had happened, given the fact of a fallen nature it is most unlikely that anywhere in the world, in any nation, or under any social conditions, that the Son of God would have escaped death at the hands of men. The challenge of God, the direct impact of the Divine, is too awful for the mass of mankind. They can accept him at several removes, much as the children of Israel said to Moses, ‘speak thou to us, and we will hear, let not the Lord speak to us lest we die’ (Exodus, c.20.v.19). They will presume to live the Lord at their own prosaic level. The impact of Reality in person crushes the heart: either it remakes men as saints in the anguish of interior death, and rebirth, or it makes them resentful, confused, and finally very angry. Most men, faced with the challenge of utter perfection will always react in the latter way.

So it is with Christianity. The saints are a tiny minority, and in every age they come unto their own, and their own crucify them, and in the next generation their children canonise them, while crucifying their successors. But the Church is the Church of the saints, these she acknowledges to be her ideal and the manifestation in the flesh of the Life within her of him who from the rising of the sun until the setting thereof, lives, works, suffers, and loves in her body. So it was with Israel, the Church was the Synagogue of the great prophets and the holiest of the priesthood. It was the Church of the dimissory hymn of Simeon, taking the child into his arms and thanking God that ‘mine eyes have seen thy Saviour, whom thou hast prepared before the face of all the peoples: a Light of Revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Israel thy People’. Here is the true, prophetic and saintly Messianism of the Jew who lived in the likeness of his God. The vision is not a fanatic’s dream of conquest, but of the Prince of Peace. He it was who would teach, enlighten, and pasture his people, whose throne would last for ever as would his personal reign; he it was who would cause the nations to beat their swords into ploughshares, and come in vast pilgrimages to the Holy City set upon Sion. After all, did not the very name of Jerusalem mean the Vision of Peace?

Value of messianism for apologetics

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of this developmental aspect of the religious tradition of Israel, and of its direct continuity in the Christian Church. The passage of time, psychologically speaking, lessens the credibility of written and verbal evidences however holy. These evidences remain very important, but whether we like it or deplore it the older type of argument for Christianity based upon the documents and traditions and heroism of the age of the Apostolic Fathers have no longer the evidential power of former days. It would be just as disastrous to speak as if they did not matter or as if they had in fact been falsified.

The passage of time, especially given the hard facts of human sin and coarseness, brings the constant casting of doubt or throwing up of shoddy criticisms, there is the constant innuendo of ‘the credulous outlook, and the primitive beliefs of those days etc. etc.’, and we can hardly doubt that if the world is still going on in three thousand years time, that the same psychological factors will be even more in evidence. The essence of the argument from motives of credibility is going to reduce more and more, so it seems to the writer, to the inevitable need to postulate a Divine Environing of human destiny, and to the manifest gradual unfolding of this potential, without contradiction of the previous essential doctrinal relationships of God to Man, and of Man to God. The line of the Unity-Law, or in older language, the true Religion, must be able to prove itself by demonstration of the need for its existence, and of its own unique fulfilment of the type of Divine Environing that constitutes its life.

It is a long pull from the early chapters of Genesis to our day, and we cannot hope to answer every plausible misrepresentation from an intimate knowledge of the background of the times. It will be even more difficult to do so in another three thousand years. What we can show is an amazing moral superiority and an amazing truth in the concepts of that early age of the true Faith compared with the doctrines and traditions of men elsewhere. We can also show the developmental potential up to the time of Christ, up to the death of Christ, and beyond to this present time. We can show the fulfilment of prophecy in Jesus Christ in a manner which is quite breathtaking. We can in a word show Messianism in its full sweep, a direction by God not only of the teaching, and the looking forward of prophecy, but also a Messianism of type, and ritual, which is not reasonably explicable as an accident.

We can also show how the Unity-Law continues in the Christian Church in a manner which is a true continuum with Israel lifted and elevated in the Christ of God among all the nations. We can show a Church, an International Synagogue, a Kingdom, which is and which must be Catholic, or Universal. If the Christ of Israel was in very fact the Word who is God in Person, then we must be able to show the continuity in this Church of the life, the action, the authority of very God, ever living to make intercession for us, ever operating with divine efficacy, ever teaching with divine infallibility: otherwise the Incarnation is an irrelevance of human history.

We must be able to show that while human sinfulness, and the unconscious effects of the Fall of human nature have mutilated the image of Christ in history, and have detracted from it in countless ways, that the unique and essential characteristics of the Divine Environing of mankind have never failed. If they have failed, then the Gates of Hell have prevailed against the King of kings. There may be woeful scandals in the Kingdom, — ‘it must needs be that scandals come’—there can be heresies and schisms, but there must remain intact at all times the Church which is the culmination of the Law of creation. She must ever live in full communion with Christ, because she is the spouse of God, for her separation is unthinkable, let alone the divorce of apostasy, she is the body of which the Messiah is the head, and a living body may not be truncated and yet live.

We must be able to show one continuum of work, type, and fulfilment from Abraham to the present time. As the ages pass the lasting ability of the Church to declare her evidences afresh in every age to the men newly born, will spring from her ability to show a continual and a God-evoked development in the theology of Christ. There will be found a power in the full, orthodox doctrine of Christ to evince for every era a new synthesis of divine and human knowledge. The power to evince new levels of synthesis will depend upon the orthodoxy, as a rising cathedral grows naturally so to speak out of the foundation laid to take it. It will not be possible to evoke the synthesis from heretical positions no matter how ancient and traditionally loved.

The developments called forth anew as history goes on will often be seen to depend on orthodox Christian and Catholic doctrine which was unpopular at the time, perhaps which went clean contrary to the mood of the times, and the always ready concessions of well-meaning heresy. Creative development, like the evolution of life, can be based only upon soundly poised structure, otherwise the mutation will be a decadence. It is evoked uniquely within, and from, the constitution of the Church in perfect union and communion with Christ: and there is only One such. Only so can there be fulfilled without loss the words of Christ that ‘I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now, but when he the Spirit of truth is come, he will teach you all truth, and will bring to your minds whatsoever I have said unto you.’ We are saying that the Divinity of God has always dwelt in the ‘true Church’ which we have called the Line, or developing society, of the ‘Unity-Law’ from the beginning, that the mark of truth is truth, the superior true and good, and that the process has been and must be a continuum from the making of mankind. Therefore Israel herself should expect, and did expect a continuum of development, and the development was to include not merely the extension of the Kingdom of the Anointed of God, and the degree of peace and joy within it, but also the intension, the content of doctrine and knowledge of God, and the degree of union with God in love. This is most apparent in the Messianic expectation of old, and is contained simply and truly in the incident of the woman at the well, who said to Jesus of Nazareth ‘I know that when the Messiah comes he will tell us all things’. The process began with Adam, and will go until the end of time. Man progresses, and the new knowledge of man must be regathered through the ages into a greater vista of God and in God. This is an aspect of the Life of Christ in the Church, an aspect which it is impossible to maintain today unless it can be declared in its essential bearings with the authority of God and not merely the enthusiasm of men.

The world setting: an apocalyptic vision

Time does not dim and time will not dim the apologetic value of the evidences for Christian truth if each age is seen to be fulfilled in the succeeding era, as the types and figures of the Covenant are seen to be fulfilled with breathtaking accuracy in the Person and the life events of Jesus Christ. This is an ‘equational’ fulfilment one may say, in the spiritual order, as much as the emergence and development of the higher forms of life is built upon the structure of the preceding, and is evoked by the interplay of the environmental law and the potential of the animal life. Just so is the development of the doctrine and the spiritual and liturgical life of the Church prompted by Christ the Environer to whom, as the Soul of the Church, the Holy Spirit responds. (‘He shall receive of mine and shall manifest it unto you’) evoking within the living organism of the Church that new development or ‘mutation’ that now is ripe to actuation within the potential of her body.

Thus the vision of the Religion of God must be a world vision, ranging from the first of men to embrace all men, for God is the common Father, and all are made to his image. It will be a continuum, and will grow on its own plane according to the common law of evolution. It must, from the nature of man, and the gradual manner of increase in knowledge and depth of love natural to the social nature of man, expect a gradual growth to a climax. It must fit the nature of the spiritual being, which is always conscious in four, not three dimensions, whereas merely animal life may be said to exist in but three.

The fourth dimension of the rational being is its personal consciousness of its space-time continuum, in which the present includes an awareness of the past, through which its present has been fashioned, and is aware of, and looks towards the future. If the Religion of God is to be fully adequate to the individual and social nature of man, it must be apocalyptic, that is to say that it must anticipate vaguely and in outline the shape of things to come, and the promise of future destiny, but be equally unable to delineate more than in the merest outline. To do more would be unnatural to the state of man’s present being, for the spirit as yet neither lives that experience nor is mature enough to comprehend the existential reality which is now merely potential fulfilment. Yet, because it is made in essence to the image of God it belongs to the spiritual nature to show some sort of analogy with the unity that defines its creator. This could be found in that ‘unity’ by which our consciousness, while ever living in the existential present, finds that present of consciousness bound by two fringes of its being: fringes that attenuate always more and more towards the potential, towards ‘not-being’. These extremes are that distant past which is the twilight of our being, and that distant future which is the brightness of God’s sunrising and of which the present is the foreglow and the dawn.

2 APOCALYPSE, THE WOMB, AND THE WORD

Religion, it has been argued already, is not an incidental and an optional aspect of human living, religion is ontological, part of creation itself, a facet of those processes of evolution which are fundamental to the upbuilding of creation. Religion is part of the Unity-Law of finalism which has constructed the universe, and which more emphatically has built up this planet with its life-supporting environment. Religion is this same Unity-Law of control and direction to fulfilment within which, from the beginning, the universe was poised. Religion is this natural Law of Being taken up into the immediate, direct and personal lire-influence of God upon the spiritual creature, whether pure spirit or human being, in nature. For this reason God was named ‘the Environer’.

The creative activity of God directly upon the person of a man in body and soul alike is not an interference, but part of the continuum of the process of creating, and is as proper to the ‘laws of Nature’, and as consequential to the laws of the human environment, as is the soul of man to the material mutation which demands its creation, and is co-defined towards it. The material body is unintelligible without the step beyond matter which is the soul, and the laws of Nature fulfilled in man are unintelligible without the Law which is God the Environer, unto man. Just as the body of the animal has reached a peak where the potential of matter has overpassed the laws of determinism, and is both unintelligible and incapable of further development, even in its own material order, without the ontological influence of the soul, so also with man, constituted in his natural being. He is unintelligible and incapable of fulfilment as a person without the quickening touch within him of the Living God. Religion therefore is a part and aspect of the Law of Creation.

The fulfilment in God

But, what is this potential, and what is the peak of the development or fulfilment of man? There is no ‘natural’ answer to this, for however we conceive it, the fulfilment of man, since it is in God, is not in any truly ‘natural’ and commensurate order. God is, by definition, the Supernatural End par excellence. This difficulty has been touched upon earlier. Life which is simply animal has its perfect fulfilment in the natural order of the universe. Moreover, the living thing which is fulfilled in its environment is co-defined as a relative part of that environment: the creature and the environment which fulfils it are tailor-made each to the other, and they interact upon each other. Even the very body of man, in as much as it is the peak achievement of material evolution, is within the natural potential of the universe, though to produce the soul, the essential co-principle of the actualisation of that material mutation, is not within the potential of the material universe. We cannot inter-relate God and the created spirit as body and soul are mutually co-defined to each other: how can the Absolute Being be co-defined in any mutual subjection to the created spirit? This cannot be done. The Nature of man must be able to comprehend God by a knowing that imparts wisdom, and by a possessing that fulfils in love, and that is about as far, from naked human intellect, we can go in affirmation from man ‘s nature alone. Whether there be degrees in such possession, whether there be a distinction of kinds in such a fulfilment, whether there would be any objective enhancement of being involved for the creature in the comprehension of God as known and loved, of all this the created spirit has no natural measure of comparison. It is not related to God in one common order of correlation and necessity as material things are, which exist in a common order of mutual inter-definition on the same level of reality.

It belongs to God to declare to man the measure of a man’s own self, for if, in the order of the spirit, the Environer and the environed cannot be related within a common order of mutual influence one on the other, as animal life is co-related to the heavens above, the earth beneath, the woods around, then the fulfilment of man in God, while fully necessary that man be intelligible at all as a spiritual nature, remains in the order of charity, of the gift, and not in the order of a natural potential fulfilled by a connatural end in the one same order of the real.

If God should give to the spiritual creature the most that even God can give, then this will be a uique and an ontological jump in the order of being, even within the order of the spiritual being. This is to say, that if God should give to man one certain kind of destiny, it would be equivalent to saying that even within the order of spiritual being there is, by analogy, a further possible ‘mutation’ in the spiritual order, one which is not contained within the potential of the spiritual creation in the same way as the potential to the soul is contained within the body of man, but contained as a possible actualisation in the order of the freely given love of God, should God so act towards the spiritual creation. A true natural potential always places within a nature a definite kind of actualisation, in relation to a definite kind of environment. The unique destiny which the Christian calls the ‘beatific vision’ in God is not of this kind, for there cannot be a correlated interdependence of nature between God and the created entity. The potential towards the highest possible destiny which God can give to the created spirit is not really the making actual of a potential towards which the nature is framed, but the filling out of the nature through love in an order of possibility which can never be contained within the limits of a natural potential.

This is the destiny that God has in fact given to man, and this constitutes the real and accurate meaning of the expression ‘supernatural destiny’ for mankind. The significance of it we must ponder, even though its full import overwhelms the created intellect. This destiny means that God knows and loves the creature in, and by, the same immanent Act of knowing and loving in fulfilment by which He Himself IS: so that we become by charity what God is by nature. This is an appalling thought, the being made co-sharers of the ‘Divine Nature’ the adoption into the Immanent Life by which God experiences his Reality as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Such a destiny could never be found within the intelligible necessity of the created spirit, and while if it is given it will transform the intelligible purpose of both the material and the spiritual universe, it must be the initiative of God to declare to the spiritual creature the consummation contained in the ‘poising’ of the initial energies of the created spirit unto God.

‘The cloud of unknowing’

The relationship between God and the soul at the beginning of its existence, and the relationship between primal energy in the beginning of the history of the material universe, offers a further analogy through which to urge the point. Some primal elements are integral parts of higher animals, even parts of men, but not all primal elements are so organised. It would not have been possible for a primal element within the constitution of planet Earth to know, some five thousand million years ago or more what, if anything, might be the outcome of its endless and apparently random interactions, To know the future would have required that the evolutionary sweep of the Law of Control and Direction should be revealed to it, and if there had been no such Law, then there would be no ordered development, because there would be no equational symmetry in Nature. The integration of molecules might be as far as any combination of elements could get, in the constant asymmetry of the kingdom of Chaos and Old Night.

Naturally, it is absurd to speak in this way, because primal elements are incapable of revelations, even of mathematical revelations, but the point stands. Even a primal element by reason of its relativity within a Law that defines its motions, its potentialities and its actualisations, is subject to valencies and affinities it could not otherwise exist unto, even though it has no conscious principle of understanding what it does.

The spiritual being at the beginning of its creative course may be called a ‘primal thinking element’. As intellectual it can understand and reflect consciously upon itself and within itself, and it is capable of growth in the actuality of its powers of intellect and will. It can increase in real stature of being, and is meant to so increase. But, by reason of its natural orientation to God for increase and for fulfilment it cannot, any more than the primal material element in its proper environment, know the measure of its destiny or that of the social complex of which it is part. This can be declared to it, for this is the future, the potential to be actualised through time and change relative to the universe, and still more, relative to God the Environer. To know the future as future is one of the marks of the spiritual as distinct from the merely material being.

Further to ‘Apocalypse’

The gratuitous love of God and the majesty of his gift in the creation of the spiritual order is not arbitrary or without an intrinsic wisdom because it is without created exigency. God does not act by ‘waving a wand’. What proceeds from the charity of God as love, proceeds from the same Being of God as intellect, in wisdom, because both Wisdom and Love are synonyms in God for very Actuality. The gift of God in creation will proceed according to a plan which will be most consummate wisdom, and there will be no aspect of it which is not a facet of one weaving of co-ordinate wisdom and consequential plan, from the symmetries of the elements to the Incarnation of the Word, and from the Incantation of the Word to the consummation of the Kingdom of God in Heaven.

To understand all creation as the Kingdom of God, —and it is nothing less, —one must see it through the mind of God. To see it through the eyes of the scientist merely, is to see absurdity, for the entity which is the raw material of the sciences of matter, say of physics, is taken up into the entity of higher and more complex being, into man, and therefore into psychology at least, and into philosophy beyond that. It is not an accident that the ‘scientists’ who in our own immediate time have made great achievements in synthesis, men like Einstein and Heisenberg, have been also philosophers. The scientist alone discovers no more of the very nature of matter as relative, or of being as meaningful than did the three blind sages of the nature of the elephant. What scientist can foretell the future state of the Evolution of matter within this universe, or in any forms of its being upon this planet in the millions of years to come? There is simply no principle of certainty upon which to proceed, for the principle of certainty of the potential is in the principle of Intellect ,which defines also its actualisation, which is simply to say once again that if Evolution has a symmetry, an equational nature, a history, then it is not intelligible to speak of the processes of creation without the postulate of God.

Once we know from the principle of Mind, of self-conscious power to determine the potential towards its final meaning what may be the measure of creation in its relativity to God, then we can and we should begin to make a synthesis of theology and science, because all the levels, meanings, and aspects of being are one unity in the Intellect of God: they are correlatives of a common work.

The Incarnation independent of sin

When we know that the ultimate end of man is the most that even God could give intelligibly to being other than himself, then we can view the entire universe and all its laws, from the symmetry of the elements to the Incarnation of Christ, as part of one evolutionary Providence. It is to note that the word ‘evolutionary’ here has its theological and philosophical significance, not merely the biological. We can see in perspective and can state the subordination of the whole creative process, in all its relativities material and spiritual to the Person of Christ the King. All things are for, look towards, and are shaped unto the Incarnation of God in Christ the King.

When we view all things in the perspective of the destiny to become ‘co-sharers of the Divine Nature, according to the great and precious promises of God’, as this destiny is given to the spiritual creature (and if it is given to angels and men, it would be gratuitous to presume that similar natures elsewhere in the universe might be excluded from this order of blessing) then we can say that it is a ‘necessity’ of the Divine Wisdom that the Incarnation of God should consummate the making of the universe, for it is merely the unfolding and manifestation in the creature of the destiny we have in God, to be begun as ‘some beginning of his creature’ to the image of God, and to be consummated as the mirror-image by charity of what God is by right and by nature. The Incarnation is then the lynchpin of the universe, and of every manifold aspect of the Unity-Law of creation, natural and supernatural, scientific, philosophic, and theological, material, human, and purely spiritual. It is the taking up to God and to his Throne of the material together with the spiritual creature. If the spiritual creature is given the destiny to become without qualification ‘the son of God’, then this is the supernatural destiny in the proper sense of that word, and for both angels and for men, it must be given first in the Being and in the Person of God: therefore, it is given before all ages in the Word of God. It is given before the Incarnation.

This giving is also a work, a work of filling out and perfecting, a form of evolution, even in the most spiritual of creatures, because it is a progress from the potential, as God has willed that potential, to the final meaning, the actualisation. Of the angels, the Word of God laid not hold, because as Pure Spirit he is their King by very nature, and he can work upon them and fulfil them by the contact of Pure Spirit upon pure spirits. The influence of the material would be irrelevant and absurd.

It is not so with man, nor with the gradually growing, slowly perfecting society of human life and human being. We know, and love, and live through the word that is part flesh and part spirit. We cannot fully grasp, and know, and learn and love except both matter and spirit work in a perfect harmony in our one being, with its one unity of finalism, of meaning, in the dual order of matter and spirit. If we are called as beings to the sharing of the Divine Nature, why did God make matter, which seems to be a blind and dumb partner to such intercourse, unless matter can be also, —stupendous thought—in some way a real and living partner to the glory of living as does the Living God?

It is written, — ‘how then, in giving us Christ, has he not given us all things’? It is most true, and it is the pledge that God has given the creature all things, but in reverse we can say with equal truth, —how then, in giving us all things, has he not also given us Christ? For Christ is the first-fruits of the taking up to God and to his Throne of the entire order of Creation, Angel, Man, and Matter, so that the entire created Cosmos is centred upon the Person of God, and becomes the Heaven of God.

Therefore, to this apocalyptic vision of the majesty of Christ the King, we quote without comment, for it would be so superfluous, the corroboration of him who ‘was caught up into heaven and heard secret words which it is not given to man to utter’:

‘Who is the Image of the invisible God,

The Firstborn of every creature:

For in Him were all things created in

Heaven and on Earth, visible and invisible,

Whether thrones, dominations, principalities,

Or powers.

All things were created by Him, and in Him.

And He is before all, and through Him all things do cohere.

And He is the Head of the Body, —the Church,

Who is the Beginning, the Firstborn from out

The dead, that in all things He may hold the Primacy

Because in Him it has well pleased the Father that

All fullness should dwell’. (Colossians c.1.vv.15-19.)

Christ the King, the Word of Wisdom who is God in very Being without shadow of subtle qualification: not simply ‘Omega-point’ because not the creature, nor of creation, until he assume the creature, that through love and omnipotent will the creature be transformed in living union with God into that which it can never be by right of nature or of intellect.

Not then ‘Omega-point’ but say rather ‘Alpha and Omega’ the uncreated Beginning and the uncreated End, in whom all things are fulfilled and are transformed, who exists for none of them, but for whom, and in whom, and unto whom all things exist in joy. Through his slowly consummating wisdom all things do cohere and grow together in one economy, from the poising of the elements until the Son of Man be coming upon the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty, and the ear and the blade be passed into the full corn, and the sickle be in, for the harvest is now come, and God say to Creation within the depth of His Holy Trinity ‘it is finished: behold I make all things new’.

The meaning of the Virgin Birth

We have stated that the laws of Nature and the structure of the universe are relative, even in their own entity as ‘science’ to the fulfilment of creation in the spiritual creature in God Incarnate, in Christ the King. The Christian doctrine, and fact, of the Virgin Birth of Christ has a special relevance to this orientation of matter to God. It is a doctrine which causes a snigger to many a scientist, and which sometimes looks even to the orthodox Christian to be an unfortunate ‘interference’ with the laws of Nature, to pertain to the arbitrary and ‘wand-waving’ attitude to God.

This is very wrong. Even in the scheme of Nature in general the male is a bit of a problem. Males are not really necessary. In many of the lower forms of life they can be done without, and even in the higher mammals it has been shown that the ovum may be rendered fertile without the concourse of the male. Of course, in the works of God there will be found wisdom at every level, it will be impossible to separate entity from the wisdom through which it is framed, and there will be an obvious utility in the division of functions between male and female. It is not that we males are all obviously drones.

Nevertheless, there is no obvious functional necessity from the nature of life for the existence of two sexes, no sure reason appears why even higher life could not have been unisexual in pattern, and the ultimate reason for the division of life sexually might consist in the subordination of its framework to the Unity-Law of creation, for the bringing about the Incarnation of God. If the consummation of the material creation is man, and the consummation of man is to be found in the adoption of the sons of God in Him, then the expectation of the Incarnation should be fundamental to the developmental plan of the universe. The natural means by which the creation may co-operate with God in the consummation of the Unity-Law should exist in physical Nature as the vehicle at once natural and supernaturally aligned through which the Heir of all the Ages may come into His own. The means is there, and the means is the womb of woman. The Catholic at least will not be surprised if we write at once that the means is the Womb of the Woman.

It is not possible that God should take flesh through the mutual work and vocation of man and woman, —for this, even when sacrilegiously exercised outside the holy sacrament, is an office of nature and an office of grace. It is the determination of coming into being of a new and a created personality through the human will. God however cannot be determined to exist through the will of the creature, nor in becoming a man does the Word of God become a human person, a human being. He is always God.

What is required for the Incarnation is that the vehicle of human nature should exist to be determined directly by the Will of God, and that the individual concerned should have the office of nature and of grace to co-operate with God in a unique manner for the doing of that work. We cannot separate the womb from the womanhood, from the personal dignity and the freewill of the spiritual creature. It is required that God should act through the freely given love and obedience of the creature, that Mary should say ‘behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word’. Once said, the vocation of this woman is to work directly with God to be determined to the divine work that is her unique vocation and her unique dignity in the universe. For that reason she is alone the ‘spouse of the Holy Ghost’ and no man has created claim upon her body or her soul. The Holy which is born of her is the Son of God, and the Son of Man. He is in the nature of God, and the nature of Man, but in Person and in Being, not a creature, but only God. It is not either a ‘miracle’ in the true sense of the word when God determines the seed of Mary that she may be the Mother of God made Man. It is all a matter of law. When the ovum is determined by the seed of man it is a matter of equational, natural law. If the ovum of beast or man may be determined to develop harmoniously by chemical or other means in or out of the womb, it will still be a matter of the sufficient actualisation of a natural potential, and if the development is adequate, it will call for the creation of the soul as well. It is all a matter of law. So also with the seed of Mary, and the fruit of her womb. This woman is the crown and peak of the Unity-Law of the universe, this is her natural and supernatural vocation, part of the law, intention, and movement of the universe. By the Law of Nature and of Grace she offers her womanhood to God for his natural and supernatural determination, and in her case it is ‘natural’ that the all sufficient means of determining her seed should be—The Word of God, through the Holy Spirit of God. That is the Law.

It is not really even a ‘special’ provision of God that this Woman is preserved from the guilt and stain of Original Sin, as it must descend by generation from a damaged stock. She is by divine right the Queen of Heaven and of Earth, indeed the Universal Queen. Her vocation is defined and decreed before the world was, before sin was, before Satan was. She has it by right of her awe-full vocation to be the ‘Tabernacle of the Most High’, and it is by right of vocation that she is necessarily preserved for God, at the summit of the working of Evolution to be the crown of Nature, in bringing into creation the Crown of Heaven and of Earth. She is ‘redeemed’ only because she receives salvation of God, but this ‘salvation’ is the gift of God which is the inheritance by man of the Divine Nature, and is the order of creation antecedent to the event of Sin. This is the original gift of God to angels and to men which preceded the fact of Original Sin. It is Christian doctrine not that Christ came to give some other gift than that which was lost in Adam, but, as the second Adam, to restore it. Sin is not part of the plan of God, the providence of God, nor the will and the decree of God: sin derives from the malice of the creature’s free-will, and in no way determined the mind or the operation of God. God is not subjected to sin. The effect of sin can be indeed to thwart the full majesty of the Unity-Law, to damage the creature, and to bring tragedy into the work of God, a tragedy which is consummated in the Crucifixion of the King of Kings. Sin can and does require the ‘forgiveness’ of God, and its effects must be expiated and removed within the works of God, but sin does not ever determine the order established by God in the Purity which is Himself.

Mary is indeed ‘saved’ and ‘redeemed’ but in reality, so it seems to this writer, because she is elected in Christ and for Christ ‘with the glory that I had with thee, before the world was’, for the purposes of the Incarnation. Christ determines the degree of creation for all things, in all the orders of entity. They are willed in God, for God, and through the glory of the Divine Being for himself and for themselves, in charity.

To the purposes of the Incarnation and the fulfilment of that Unity Law of creation within which all things are fulfilled in their order and their natural laws and in which all things look forward to their ultimate consummation in Christ the King, we refer and interpret the following vision from the Revelation of St. John the Apostle ch.12. vv.1-2, and 5:

‘And a great sign appeared in heaven:

A Woman clothed with the sun, and the

moon under her feet, and on her head a

crown of twelve stars.

And being with child she cried travailing

in birth,

And was in pain to be delivered.

And she brought forth a man-child

Who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron,

And her Son was taken up to God, and to his Throne’.

For the Earth is the Woman, seen here in the vision of prophecy, teeming with life and fruitfulness and ultimately with mankind. It is indeed clothed with the sun, its principle of life and of increase over long ages of evolution, and has the moon ‘under its feet’, the lesser satellite that is for times and for seasons, for days and for years, and this Earth which is the cradle of Man is crowned with the stars, the fullness of the economy of the universe which has here reached its perfection, for the number twelve in Hebrew signifies a perfect complement.

And ‘She’, this Earth, is with child, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, because Christ is decreed within the fabric of the laws of the universe and of this Earth, and the world is impatient through the travails and the sorrows of men, to be delivered of Him, and the Earth, and in it the whole order of matter has brought forth the man-child, the ‘Son of Man’ in the womb of Mary, He who was to rule all nations with divine right and unchallengeable title, the iron rod of Divine authority, and not without war, because the Prince of Peace is a sign set to be contradicted: and the Son of the Woman, as the Son of God is taken up to God and to his Throne in recognition and acceptance, for he is in the nature of God, being the very Son of God.

Certainly we may see further in the ‘Woman’ the Church of Christ, the personal dignity of Mary, the fullness of the Old Testament and of the New, in Jesus Christ, etc., as the Fathers of the Church have seen before us. Whether we say that this belongs to the fuller sense, or to the mystical sense of the vision seems of small importance, if indeed it is a sense willed by God and inherent in the words of the vision, for these things are not distinct from, but one continuity of fullness and consequence in the one work of God. What is of importance is that we see the first and primary sense of the vision of the seer of Christ, —the Incarnation of Christ as the lynchpin of the material Universe, and the raison d’ être of man and of his planet. When we see the first things first, then of course all the consequences must follow through, for in God all his wisdom is one Economy.

In summary

If, under the same one Law of Control and Direction which operates with a unity of principle in the different orders and degrees of being, from the movements of the elements to the creation and determination of man within the spiritual order, —if under this Universal Law of the one economy of creation in the FIAT which made heaven and earth and the destiny of man, the Word of God, the Personal expression of the Divine Wisdom was to be manifest in the nature of a man for mankind, then that fulfilment must be foreshadowed from dim beginnings, in one continuous economy of divine revelation which looked forward to, and was consummated in Christ.

We have this foreshadowing in the Christian bible: an account of God’s relations towards men which, however crude and partial, however hard to follow with exactitude from its primitive character, its vast scope and its antiquity, yet gives us the following outline which must be expected under the Law of Finalism, and which gives it without ambiguity:

A claim to be the authoritative and developmental manifestation of God to man from the beginning of human history until now.

A pure, true conception of the nature of God, and also of the nature of man; a true conception also, quite unique in history, of the distinction between God and his creation.

The realisation of insufficiency at all levels, and furthermore of sin, and the expectation of a unique Saviour King, who will fulfil, purge, and bring to perfection all that anticipates him.

The rise of priests and prophets who are teachers and guides for their generations, who foreshadow in type and in symbol the coming of the Anointed of God, He who will have the plenary authority.

These spiritual masters in Israel who speak inspired with the Word whom they foreshadow are pointers towards the future: they are ambassadors and heralds of ‘the Orient’, the ‘Day-Star’, the sign upon the Eastern sky whom they anticipate, and their words, their works, and their very lives are fulfilled in Him the Son of Man, the Holy One of Israel.

Ever more strongly must grow the expectation of Advent, the coming of the Messiah, ever more distinct the prophecies that concern him, and as human wisdom, even aided by God fails to meet the increasing hunger of men, more intense must grow the yearning in the souls of men, who sigh ‘I know that when the Messiah comes he will tell us all things’. (St. John c.4.v.25.)

It matters not that they did not know him when He came, all of this devolves upon the immense burden and issue of sin and its effects. We must anticipate a primitive revelation of God to men just as we speak of the first human beings as primitive men, they were truly human however simple, and the primitive revelation is truly revealed, though very simple. We must expect this revelation to be permeated with a law of growth and development under the guidance of God, and to be conscious that it is so. It has a future and must be forward looking to the future, until its plenitude shall be fulfilled uniquely in him from whom it all derives and to whom it all goes back in fulfilment: Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. We find all that we must expect once, and uniquely once in the line of continuity that is found to be ancient in Abraham and continues today fully conscious and unbroken in the Christian Revelation.

We find a Man who spoke with authority and ‘not as the scribes and the pharisees’. We find a Man of prophecy, in whose person the prophecies, especially of pain and crucifixion are astoundingly precise, and intelligible only after the fact of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We find a Man of truth who founded a line of truth, disciples hounded to death and misery, who had no motive for lies, and they record that this Man worked great miracles by his power, and in evidence of the dreadful claim he made for himself, that he was the Son of God, One with God, in the depths of the Father, and ever-living through and with the Father: a Man whose claim was Divinity, and whose personality and character draws the souls of good men as their true magnet in a love that is tender, but strong, and all-surrendering.

We find in him every nobility of character for which the souls of men long. We find him calling himself ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life’, stating that ‘before Abraham was made, I AM’.1 With this stupendous claim, fully understood by his disciples, and at the heart of Christian Doctrine at all time, there goes also a sweetness, a wisdom, a merciful love and a most balanced sanity which was, and which today still is the confusion of his enemies and the glory of his disciples. Shall we not say then: ‘Art thou He that is to come, or look we for another’?

Chapter 12 Footnotes

1 St. John c.10.v.30.

CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART FIVE

THE DISASTER OF SIN

The Book is available from Faith Keyway Trust http://www.faith.org.uk

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Original Sin and Moral Evil

1 EVIL AS FACT: SCHOOLS OF MISINTERPRETATION

If there is one phenomenon of man which more than another is a well documented empirical fact, it is the contradiction in the nature of man as we find him, a contradiction which argues to some sort of lesion, some sort of ‘Fall’ in the status of his being. Man is a contradiction to the orderly balance of Evolution not merely in his faculty of initiative unlimited by conformity to the material environment, which we must expect in him as Man, but much more startlingly and unexpectedly in his inability to co-ordinate his wisdom in proper balance and due proportion to the intelligent good. This we must not expect.

Man: the contradiction

There is a self-contradiction here which is without parallel in anything else that lives, in that man can say with Pilate, —who certainly was not jesting at the time, — ‘What is truth?’ and, just as disconcertingly ‘What is good?’ Because this is not progress, this agnosticism towards the good and the true underlines the biological scandal of this animal within the streamlined ascent of progressive developments. It is from the lack of any focal point of control to which man can be ‘locked on’ that there proceeds the wilful aberration, the waste of his powers, the damage he does to his culture and even to his very planet by savagery and futility of spirit. From the same environmental indeterminism proceeds his day in and day out preoccupation with meaningless waste, gluttony, and addictive sensualism to make a ribald joke of the life cycle of the most progressive form of life possible in the universe.

It is as if the artist, having achieved a slow and priceless masterpiece in the son of Adam, should have stepped back to drink in the full perspective, and then had solemnly dashed ink across the canvas to launch the work. That ‘Nature’, whoever the convenient and faceless goddess may be, should have brought progress to its peak in mankind only to have brought to parturition a moral imbecile does not make sense and is out of keeping with the rest of her work in Evolution.

The disciples of ‘Religion without God’ are so right to be shocked at the gap in man between potential and actual achievement, but for the most part they are not as honest as more professional theologians in the analysis of the issue. The failure in man is not superficial, it is not a matter of behaviourism and a better atheistic education. Man is not a jolly good little animal who is superficially maladjusted. The failure proceeds from the deeps of his being, from the oldfashioned inner man whether he lives in squalor or in princely parks. It is in those depths that he stifles before birth the vision of the true or of the good that he would not wish to see, where he distorts and brings to abortion the truth of judgement in the first flash of percept, before he has allowed the mature fruit of consciousness to become published to his plenary mind. This is a lesion which is more than a little matter to be got over in the whole tragic history of mankind, more than a small flaw in the psyche of man.

The tap-root of sin must always be in the personal failure, for the soul alone is free, but its freedom for good or evil affects indelibly the material which is integral to man’s one nature, for ‘Original Sin’ does not mean first in number, but the lesion from the origins as it affects the stock through inheritance. There are also the personal trespasses of the individual which reinforce in every generation the lesion which is perpetuated in the line, for the power of sin is in the free faculty of Man, and the body is more sinned against than sinning. Out of the heart of a man proceed the things that defile a man, and they defile alike his philosophy, including his philosophy of science, his theology, his social edifice and his personal and social traditions. They defile his love, his sex, his marriage, and the hearth and home in which the youngsters of every generation must ‘seek their natural milk without guile’ drinking in the values of mother and father as naturally as they breathe the atmosphere through which their bodies live. Sin, as the expression of an atmosphere is as much a lesion-causing poison as any radioactive contamination. The ‘progressive’ minds who are so clamant about the material poisons are very tolerant indeed of the poisoning of the atmosphere of the noosphere. They might well be, they contribute so many nuclear discharges to the environment of the spirit in their decadent books and plays and films. This sort of progressivism is not an objective science, but merely a religion-substitute that drains off into a desert of arrogant futility the destiny-drive in man, without the creative focus or the creative restraints that must mark the Religion which is genesis, with God.

An old, old story

The first lie to be uttered in the soul of man, will we can be sure of it, be also the last to be uttered. If God is ‘Alpha and Omega’ the beginning and the end, also the ultimate challenge to God as the author of being and of its Law will be the same defiance as that which said in the beginning to a most simple peasantry: ‘not so, for God does know that in whatsoever day you shall eat of the fruit of the tree, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be like gods, knowing good and evil …’

It becomes tiresome to be told again and yet again the old, old story of the brave new world which is for ever just round the Humanist corner. No prophet who comes later will ever declare its hope with more passion than Voltaire, or foretell its scientific aspects with more prescience than Mr. H. G. Wells. The bright vision of this New Jerusalem had faded upon him as he died, for he was indeed a very prescient man. Such a story could be told in the dawn of the new sciences some three generations ago, but it is not so easy now when the fruits are already definitive upon the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Those old gladiators, the Huxleys, the Shaws, the Wells, the Bertrand Russells, they achieved very much and had some good clean fun into the bargain to lighten the toil. There was glee was there not, in singeing the beards of ignorant and imperious bishops who were simply asking for it? But of course more important ends were to be obtained.

For these pioneers set out, mostly without hate, to withdraw men from the reactionary, superstitious Churches, and they succeeded so well, especially when the first World War underlined the problem of evil, that the happy warriors of Secularism could scarce carry in all the sheaves... They left behind them in the state schools an inactivated Religion more like a virus to immunise against specific doctrinal infection, than potent to bring on any fever of Faith. It could serve as an introduction to any cult of East or West, or even the Evolutionary Ideal without God, but it was not calculated to indoctrinate men into any organisational form of Christianity, and over decades has been shown in fact not to do so.

State School Religion may have played its part in the national preference for the teaching of Religion as Deism, but it could not have done anything to hinder the advancement of a Rationalist’s Religion without God, if this had been more rational and creative. It is less than honest to cry that we must take ‘Christianity’ out of the schools, in order to give Humanism its new, fair chance. There is only a vague Deism left there. Christians do not excuse their failures on the ground that the infidels are still being taught Infidelity. It is a poor birth, and a poor heir to the Christian inheritance that cannot survive Agreed Syllabus Christianity. The evolutionary test of the survival of the fittest could be invoked in a way that would be most humiliating.

The Religion called variously ‘Humanism’, or ‘Evolutionary Secularism’ etc., has had its many chances, and its fruits are ripe all around us. It is simply that its teachers refuse to recognise their doctrine in its fruits among the common people, and like children disappointed in their efforts, call continually and with petulance for ‘another go’, because the last one ‘didn’t count’. The élan of the modern world is theirs already. It is not, most certainly it is not ours! The milling youth of the great cities is, in large measure, knowingly with them. They have made these children, they should take them to their bosom, love them and build with them. Irrespective of the social order, they have begotten them in philosophy of science as certainly in Russia (China is a different proposition, and the final despair would be more terrible) as in Europe and America. All these youngsters pay service with their liberated lips to ‘reason’ to ‘the modern outlook’ and to ‘don’t believe in God.’ They have gone over to ‘common-sense and science’, and they will tell the old-fashioned man of God as much to his face. They love to tell their parents the same over the television screen.

It is hard to see what some people look for or expect. All these children are liberated from the inhibition of ‘sin’, they believe in the goodness of pleasure, made as ‘ecstatic’ as possible, heightened maybe by drugs... and could not these be regarded as the sacramentals of a scientific age of liberation, for this Youth is not chained by any regard for the thoughts or feelings of other people? A cynic might regard all this as the natural liturgy of the worship of man without God. Epicurus was a Humanist as well, but he made a swine of the common man.

If these children, the second generation at least of paperback popular Humanism lack integrity, beauty of soul, ability to hold to high purpose, perhaps something has gone wrong with the New Religion. Maybe it lacks real truth and good, real authority, and real power to generate inner commitment? Humanism has misdefined man, and made its experiments upon men in conditions that exclude the real Environment of man. Our opponents once of the intellectual but now also of the most glossy magazines, portray the same frivolous immaturity in the deep things of man, and the same petulance towards the Reality which governs all being, as do the sillier youngsters themselves.

When leading apostles of the new ‘Religion without God’ contribute their sermons to magazines which specialise in natty erotica, do they really think that they are measuring up to the great souls of the past, forming minds which are strong and free, and able with lonely integrity to withstand disillusionments and betrayals, the incursion of weak moments, the temptation to sell out to careerism from within the inner man? The good Marxist takes his alternative to God much more seriously in this respect, for no one can intend seriously to build men for the Great Society on the basis of schoolboy smuttiness, or in the small moments of youthful lustfulness. It could be that the real motive is to seek to disabuse the minds of the young of the idea of God and moral obligation, at the very times when they are most likely to be in rebellion against him, or suffering from a few hangover inhibitions from the motivation of their glossy reading. In this sort of thing, on both sides, the young and weak, and the old and hypocritical, we have as good an example as any of the essential ‘hubris’, the disobedient pride which is the root of sin in the mind, and especially the ‘modern’ mind.

The Law of ‘good’

If the Marxist is mistaken when he views the evolutionary Progression as a struggle of contradictories, Freud is more wrong, and many Western thinkers with him, when he views it as a laissez-faire contest of ‘libidines’ according to a classical 19th century perspective. What the Marxist defines in Nature as the struggle of contradictories, putting war at the core of being, is the interplay of complementaries held in a balance by the Unity-Law of control and direction. To be sure, Nature, and the Law, does not preserve the individual as an absolute value within the flow of times and seasons, births and deaths, but there is no reason why it should be so preserved. The individual life in Nature is not an end in itself, but subordinated to the Progression itself. If nothing died, nothing could be born, if mutual competition were not a law of beings which have no true intelligence, then nothing could be held within the equational balance, and nothing could be brought out of the potential into a higher actuality, for the stability of environment could not be maintained. This is not the law of contradictory struggle, as the Dialectic sees it, but the recognition of Relativity of being, a relativity of value which goes to the essence of material substance.

Nothing in matter is an end in itself, nothing except man, and a man, the individual, not simply the collective idea of the species, he is an end in himself, both body and soul, but only through that principle of being in him which is not material nor evolvable, the spiritual soul which is made to the likeness of the Absolute Value who is God. Below mankind the law of birth and death defines the limits of the good and the true within which the finite and relative material entity is framed, but the constant and progressive equation remains, always in movement and always in symmetry, always in evolution and never in revolution. Even within its essential subordination to the good of the progression of evolution as an economy of being, the material entity has at all times its own proper ‘good’ and the law of proportion within which, as part of the very being of the material life-principle, that law of proportion is framed. It has its connatural and rhythmic response to times and seasons, to prompting and damping down, to the cycle of diverse function and work in which pleasures, pain, and functions are a cycle of relativity proportional to the nature within its environment, as a meaningful entity. The living form is not neutral to the balance of its proportional true and proportional good, there is no upsurge of non-relative ‘libido’ in Nature, no laissez-faire, but no law of the dialectic of antithesis to the environment either. Within the environment, and as part of the definition of ‘environment’ every living thing has its intelligibility, through this relationship alone it moves, and is, and has its being. The notion of a substantial antithesis at the heart of reality is actually a contradiction also in terms of being and intelligibility. The living form is neither framed in contradiction to the environment, nor is it neutral towards it as a principle of control: in this fact consists the very essence of the Law of control and direction within which all things are framed and then orientated. It is a Law of Relativity in the philosophical sense, a Law of complementarity to fullness of being, not an Antithesis.

Man: the occasion of error

There does exist in man that which has given occasion to Marx, to Hegel before him, and to many others to fall into error. There is in man, and in the social life which exteriorizes the mind and heart of man, evidence of true contradiction, but it is the very pride of Atheism, born itself originally of sin and contradiction to God, which has blinded philosophers so that they should not see the truth. For in this respect man is not part of the pattern of Nature: man is unique in Nature and is untrue to the course of all other being. Once God is denied and the spiritual soul, then of course man must be viewed as the perfect and fully natural product of the evolutionary process in a straight line development of one order of being, in which spirit and matter are aspects of one and the same energy and are of the same essential form. There will be no reason and no right to make man distinct in essentials from the pedigree which has begotten him, so that if a ‘contradiction’ is perceived in man, —and the Marxist has seen something here which is correct, —then we will need to generalise the principle of antithesis and contradiction over all matter as a metaphysical, or if preferred, as a dialectical principle of being, notwithstanding that to do so is in blatant contradiction to the observable empirical facts.

Co-relation the opposite of contradiction

Nature, and the progression of Evolution as an economy of being in ascent is so rational that the popular mind makes a natural distinction, and one which is quite just between ‘revolution‘ and ‘evolution’. What the common-sense man in the street has perceived in this distinction is the reality of law and proportion in Nature, and that action and interaction produces change by the gradual co-relationship of apparent opposites which are worked together as complements in a total economy. Change is gradual, and always proportional in Nature, it is not catastrophic in the Marxist sense of the word. This is to perceive correctly the equational and symmetrical balance of matter in evolution from its beginnings as a history onward. What science of matter could make sense if its subject-matter were intelligible only through a law of intrinsic contradiction as the basis between its state of thesis, and the manner in which it formed, through synthesis, the next science up the ladder of being?

The nature of Evolution as a system of beings held within the symmetry of law, is seen with less possibility of quibble in the synthesis of the elements themselves, the first stage of the evolutionary progression of being. There is no law of synthesis through contradiction here, but the education of the more complex synthesis through the complementary interaction of energies which are correlatives. Let the mathematician, the physicist, the chemist, even the biologist say whether from their principles and their evidences the concept of the equation, of symmetry, of organic and harmonic balance etc., makes any factual sense in terms of the immanent self-contradiction, in terms of a ‘class war’ within Nature?

This distinction of principle in the interpretation of the meaning of Nature is important. The Christian puts love, or ‘thesis’ in the Hegelian terminology, as the first principle of being. Indeed, in the strict theological sense, Love, as the name of God, is a synonym for ‘being’ in any of its manifold and analogical manifestations. In the creature this ‘love’ is ‘potential being’ which is complementarily, equationally, symmetrically, or correlatively orientated towards synthesis, to the more perfect state of being, the more perfect love etc., in a direct line of relativity from the potential to the fulfilment, from the thesis to the synthesis, —there is no principle of evil immanent in being.

In the Marxist system Love, or ‘thesis’ is made to be in refusal of the more perfect love, the synthesis, through antithesis, through a principle of ontological war at the core of being. Immanent antithesis cannot make any sense of the natural sciences at all, but something of the same misinterpretation is found in the Hindu and Buddhist systems of being, and for that reason alone Marxism may be expected to become a very acceptable philosophy of society in the East. Something of the same mistake is found, it seems to the writer in the psychology of Jung, who also seems to have admitted evil, or antithesis, as a real force of being immanent in the existent order.

These errors are not without grave justification, but the most subtle errors are always the most deadly in their consequences. In fact, the principle of dialectical contradiction does exist to be found, but it is found in man alone in the universe. It is a true contradiction, and it is immanent in man, and in a derived sense it is immanent too in human society, at all levels. It is possible only because of the spiritual soul in man, and most importantly of all, it is a principle of lesion and not of progress. In a philosophy of materialist Atheism the reality of evil has a certain irony.

The confusion involved in the reality of the situation is the greater, without the help of Christian Revelation concerning Original Sin, and the general nature of ‘sin’, from the fact that ‘sin’ as a contradiction embedded in social and economic human relationships, does often present a face deadlocked in sheer antithesis to the truth and to the good. This is a contradiction which despite the exhortations of moral leaders, has had often to be broken by sheer force, by civil or by foreign war. But, such war is a regrettable necessity of incidental sin, a necessity of the human society as fallen, not a law of Nature nor the witness of immanent hatred as the price of progress in the Universe. The end of the ‘just war’ is the reintegration of peace, and its excuse is not necessary evil, but the deviation of others from the norm of the true and urgent synthesis, a synthesis which was always directly potential in the nature of things to the state of progressive thesis.

That this is the true perspective and the true interpretation of the Unity-Law of creative progress in both material and spiritual development, is evinced in the progress of certain ethnic groups, say the ‘Northern’ nations, including the United States of America, to a structure of society which is more free and quite as advanced technically as any Marxist dominated area. Indeed, the social synthesis achieved in some of the Scandinavian countries can only be refined, it cannot be improved upon in kind. All this has happened by a process of peaceful ‘revisionism’ or one would prefer to say ‘intelligent and willing evolution’ and the possibility arises from the basically Christian philosophy of these peoples, which many of them who profess Atheism have retained, and the naturally co-operative and equable temperament of the races concerned.

It would be a gross exaggeration to speak as if this social evolution had been achieved without tensions, but it has been achieved in a straight line, from thesis to synthesis, without civil war. This is not to deny that there exist countries where such a mode of development seems to be little likely given the social structure and the intransigent temperament of the peoples, neither does it imply that Nordic man is somewhat less fallen than more passionate peoples, —there are many forms of sin—it is outlined simply to illustrate a fact, —that if such is possible in the state of man as we have him, then the Law of growth in perfection through creative love, from thesis to its potential vision, the synthesis, is the real Law of being, and would much more obviously be the way and the law but for the moral lesion in the nature of man in the present state of man.

Freud: the unrelated universe

The Freudian error concerning man is more gross than the Marxist, and in philosophical terms more shallow. The mistake in the system of Hegel and through him of Marx is paralleled in the age-old religious speculation of the East, it is based on a riddle which is real, evil is one of the most empirical of facts in human affairs. The libido of Freud has little such justification. It is indeed the libido of Man fallen, possibly the very libidinous libido of the smart set of the Vienna which Freud knew, but whereas the true nature of the Law of Complementarity which does work through many checks and local contradictions i.e. of preyer and prey etc., to hold all things within a proportional balance is easy to misread in the context of the human contradiction, there is no place in Nature for the libido of Freud.

The libido of Freud is totally egoistic, and the ‘id-drive’ shall we call it, in the cult terms of modern Freudians is a blind, greedy and intrinsically lawless, or non-related urge for self-satisfaction. In fact such ‘egoes’ and the ‘ids’ which drive them do not exist in the equation of Nature, they never could. In such an economy the environment would not be able to mediate any intrinsic organic law within the kingdom of the living form either in the play of species upon species, the notion of ecological balance, symbiosis, or the times and seasons of pleasure in relation to function, which itself is ordered as an intrinsic process of stop and go. The universe of Freud is in total opposition to the notion of the equational, the proportional, or the symmetrical, and when one has said thus, one has also said implicitly also, to the organic, and makes nonsense of what is scientifically certain about the universe and its processes. Once again, Natural Law, at root, is synonymous with ordered ascent of being, and there is no such intrinsic relativity in Freud. The universe is moral, or ethical, because the moral is the correct order of proportion in the constitution of being and its functions, in every order from elements to angels. The true and the good, the moral that is, according to its order, is part of the concept of being. A universe of id-drives lacks intrinsic relativity, and makes the notion of environment unintelligible. It could no more explain Evolution as an economy from the elements to man than liberal-capitalist economics could, without correction, avoid slumps and bring in the best of all possible orders.

The universe of Freud is a congeries of selfish lusts in which pleasure not function, and moreover just one pleasure, not the unity in relativity of the whole way of life, is the norm of being. Once again the same principle applied to the order of being below the living makes nonsense of physics before we get to biophysics and biology. In the kingdom of the living it may appear that the animal lives only for the pleasure, and is indifferent to the function which in any event it cannot appreciate in the intelligent manner of home sapiens, but again in fact the pleasure is retained in proportion to function through the interplay of environment that mediates an intrinsic law of life. Of course it would be futile to look in Nature for an ethical norm of activity, known as such, in an order of life which lacks the wherewithal to understand ethics... but the norms are maintained as ontological facts of the Unity-Law of control and direction itself, in the proportionality of the ascending equation, in which, as new forms of life evolve through the Law, they themselves become principles of new law, new environment, and new evocation of further evolution within the total progression. The universe is moral.

It is interesting to see the close analogy between the mentality of the classical ‘Liberalism’ anti-social, anti-God, and anti-traditionalist, of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the basic concept of life which we find in Freud as a personal pleasure-drive ruled only by personal desire, and the pressures, incidental and extrinsic of the demands of other ‘libidines’. If one pushes the Freudian concept of man to the limit, one will come to the notion of society itself as something incidental and conventional to man, a ‘social contract’ of extrinsic ‘adjustment’ which does not, of itself, arise from the nature and being of man. Once again we would be in the presence of the philosophy of unbalance and chaos, in direct contravention of the Law of ascent in symbiosis as we know it. The very cycle in man and in all animals of an organic harmony of bodily and mental functions shows how intrinsic to being this law-ruled relativity is. It is impossible to make a special exception for the genitalia as the real expression of the nature of life. One law must bind in synthesis all the interrelated works of life, and if harmony or proportion rules in one part, it must bind the whole to allow of synthesis. Law and egoism are true contradictories, they cannot be terms bound together in a common synthesis as mutual complements.

Jung was so right to perceive that the unwillingness, or better the inability of Freud to proffer moral judgements to his patients in terms of duty was a cause of failure. The incidental ‘adjustment’ was not good enough. He was also right to find in cases examined mutually by himself and by Freud a longing for a focus of control and direction, and most probably therefore right to interpret some of the symbols from the depths of the ‘inner man’ as religious symbols of the stock. It is interesting also to observe that once he descended to a deeper level of real human analysis than Freud, he also seems to have conceded the necessity to accept evil as a positive force or principle in the reality of being itself. But at least he had got as far as the great sages of the East before him, he lost his way much further on than Freud, who takes man over the precipice a very short distance after beginning the journey. If the theologian has erred in history because he ignored the data of the natural sciences and their natural wisdom, the dominant culture forms of our day, Marxism and Atheistic Liberalism have made much worse errors through the same refusal to weigh with humility all the evidences. But then, mankind crucified Christ for the same reasons, nothing distorts wisdom so much as hubris, as egoistic pride.

2 THE VISION OF ‘THE LAW’

Seeking the ‘good’ and the ‘true’

The ‘Natural Law’ of good, of true, and of morality which rules the living from below the human order, is not a law distinct from that Unity-Law of control and direction to fulfilment in which, and through which the entire universe itself is framed and ruled. When we speak of the ‘good’ and ‘true’ in terms of proportion and balance, we are speaking of just one aspect of the manifold Law of being through which material entities exist as member unto member, function unto function in the evolutionary economy of the creation of being. No living form below Man can disobey this Law, for in it it moves, and is, and has its being, indeed has the shape of its entirety. No form of life below man can commit a ‘sin’. However high it may seem to be, however variable in response, life below man is framed within an intrinsic subjection to environmental law which is derived from the determinism or behaviourism of matter: it is programmed, it is not free.

The Unity-Law has permeated every aspect of the living form in its relation to environment. It determines the physical mutation which brings it into being as a species, determines its proportional and ecological balance in relation to other existents, its overall function in the economy of Nature, its personal fitness to survive, the harmonics of its life cycle in terms of pleasure, pain, and function. All these things are one unity, substantially interrelated aspects of the proportional and symmetrical nature of beings in union and in communion of being. These aspects, including that balance of harmonic proportion which is the moral order, are aspects of entity itself, and of the Unity Law within which creation is poised.

Of course, we must not look for ‘the ethical’ in life below man in the manner in which we can, or at least ought to be able to look for it among men. The right order of the animal life is not within self-conscious reflective intelligence. Take away the environment, and the essentially behaviouristic nature of animal response is evident in the ensuing disorganisation. Take away the environment, including those environmental controls which work by mutual competition of one form of life upon another, and there can be evoked by misplacement the same exaggerations of response to pleasure out of balance with function, as can be found in man. Equally, man when he replaces the Law of God embodied in the environment within which the higher forms of life came into being, can provide for them another environment of man’s making, and in so doing can change the emphasis and interplay of animal response. Matter is made for man, and there is nothing immoral in this, but it is to be expected that where man ‘demoralises’ an animal by overfeeding, underworking, breeding simply for the table etc., that such individuals and man-made races, will not be equally viable and competitive in the natural order and within the natural ‘morality’ of Nature in the wild. Only for the spiritual creature can there be an absolute and personal moral value: ‘sin’ is the refusal to admit or to live this value, and for animal life there can be unbalance and damage, but not sin.

Seek their natural law and determinant they must, whether they find it in the basic environment in which their being was poised by God, or in the artificial environment in which they serve as the chattels of man. This is not to say that everything that men do to animals is morally indifferent. They are not values in their own right in the natural order, but everything that God made, however relative and subordinate its role, has the ‘wellbeing’ the ‘gladness of being alive’ which goes with the integrity of its being. It is not obvious therefore to the writer that man has the right, as happens in some forms of factory-farming, to rear animals intensively under conditions in which they are unhappy or better ill at ease, all the days of their limited being. Besides a sin against the nature of being, it seems also that animals reared under conditions which make them sick and neurotic must have deficiencies and unbalances which make them unfit as food for men. The usual motive for such unbalanced, therefore immoral, human conduct is lust for easy money.

Natural Law and the body of man

Thus, the animal form must of its nature seek within Nature ontological control and direction in due proportionality. This is the moral order, in life that cannot reflect. By natural accident, by adverse conditions and so forth, the animal form may be misdirected, that is incidental to the order of being, but it can never sin, nor can it ever be indifferent to the essential seeking of its being for the true and the good proportional unto it. This is the meaning of Genesis, when we are told that God looked upon all things that he had made, and saw that they were good, the fullness of being implies also the moral order, and for that reason the holy man only is also wholly a man.

Now the same Law, one and the same with the Law which frames all substance and all creatures in the evolutionary progression, has also built up the body and the brain of man. His pedigree is one with theirs, one with the order of good and true, and therefore in perfect harmony according to the limited measure of material being, with the Mind and Good of God himself. While the animal form destined to become one day ‘Man’ was on its way in the ‘deep sleep’ of abundant but unreflecting life, that body responded, through its brain, to the Law of Good as it was mediated to it through the environment, and as its whole personal and specific being was charged and impregnated to do from its own powers. It sought aright, and it found aright, and fulfilled its relative function, lived its span and died. If it died at the mouth of the predator, that was no moral evil, the individual below Man is subordinated to the universal good of the progression. The time is reached when a primate is at the utmost stretch of a meaningful life-cycle which can be held within the control and direction of material environmental law and the co-operation of the organic brain. That this happened is not of course a theological claim but an empirical fact: we are here. Now this is where Dr. Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, and many other philosophers of science go astray. If that were all, Evolution would have to stop at that point, for the brain is an organ, and is as much a programmed circuit as any other organ, or any of the human ‘thinking machines’ which are modelled on the brain. There may be many variables, but the brain, like the machine which is made to its image, is programmed. It needs a determinate environment, and is made for being determined. This is a mark of the essential distinction between spirit and matter, which cannot be products of one and the same fundamental energy, as Teilhard de Chardin thinks. The machine is like the brain, because the machine is made to the image of the brain, not the image of Man: Man can make such a thing because the spiritual soul is the ‘environment’ which determines both the brain, and the machines man makes in the image and likeness of his brain. Man’s spirit however is made uniquely to the image of God, and is free from the type of determinism which characterises matter-energy in the essential nature of the material form. The determiner and the Environer of the spirit of man, according to its nature, and its connatural development is only the Spirit of God, to whose image man is made, and nothing in Evolution can account for the nature of man in its totality, and nothing in Evolution is the peer of man.

Man: the principle of reflection

When this point is reached, —the point of the ultimate mutation which can be held within the control of a more limited environment, and the urge to mutate is about to progress further, the animal form to be produced proximately, now lacks a natural, material environment, which under a philosophy of Materialism, or any form of Monism, will be a denial of the nature of organism, of the pedigree of the brain, and even of the structural concept of matter itself. Matter, of its nature is co-relative, both living and non-living matter, and is not intelligible except as co-relative and co-operative. There comes the moment of further mutation to which this animal form, under the wisdom of God embodied in the Unity-Law is relative, and at that moment matter becomes now co-relative ontologically, or to please some people, dialectically, to the spiritual soul in order to be intelligible within the evolutionary Economy even as matter. This cannot come about from any unity of ontological principle in the energies of the spirit and of matter. They are ontological co-relatives, in man they are ontological co-ordinates, but a fundamental monism of being whether conceived in vitalist or in animist terms, makes nonsense of the data of science, and of the empirical data concerning man. Teilhard de Chardin is totally in error on this point, and the error is the cardinal error in his entire philosophy and vision of the universe.

At this juncture, that of the mutation which requires determination of material necessity, and which yet oversteps the competence of the material environment, God, the ever active and present Principle from whom all reality derives, and through whom all things according to their orders are fulfilled, God must create the entelechy which is the spiritual soul unto this its active, ontological potential.

God is always active in creation. He is not part of the creature nor the creature part of him: He is not Pan-Theos not immersed in the creation from the beginning, neither is he the Omega-Point which, from the vantage point of such immersion at the heart of the creature draws through time all things out and on in form... He is none of these contradictions postulated by Teilhard de Chardin and by others at various times in history from the Gnostics onwards. He cannot be made an immanent contradiction because without element, subordination, change, or coming to fulfilment, simply GOD IS without shadow of alteration.

God is not merely an observer in creation. He is ever present actively and causatively unto that which comes into being through Absolute Will, begins to develop through him, and in co-operation with God through the immanent Law of being in which it is poised is taken up through him into a higher state of existence and a higher formality of the Unity-Law of creation, in the spiritual principle. Of this principle God alone is the direct, immediate origin, as also the Environmental Law and Life.

In the FIAT in which God makes and gives the spirit into the organised matter which makes Man, the spiritual soul, man’s immanent principle of self-conscious knowing and willing, becomes the immediate determinant and ruling principle of the organic in man with which it is synthesised. In one sense, as has been stressed, God is the Environment of man, the complete person, body and soul equally in the one being who is ‘you’ and ‘me’. In another sense, not hard to distinguish, the soul as the principle of control and direction within the human personality can be called the immediate environment, because the immediate determinant of the organic powers of man.

The soul ‘takes over’ the determination of the material brain and body unto its ‘good’ and ‘true’ and it takes over let us remember, a material principle which from its pedigree, and the ontological requirements of being, has a positive bias to seek and to obey its good and its true. The soul in man does not inherit organised material life which is neutral to its order of truth and goodness through the soul, much less is it hostile to it. Were things otherwise there would exist in Nature an entity in which one constituent ontological principle of being, —living matter, was not co-related substantially to its connatural finality, (i.e. fulfilment) as this finality was mediated to the total person by the soul. Whatever the type and degree of fulfilment given to man this would make God the author of ontological contradiction, and is a metaphysical impossibility.

Soul and body, a theological deviation

In this subject-matter many theologians since the Council of Trent have gone much awry, and without the slightest excuse from that Council indeed, for doing so. Neither is there anything in the very reasonable and well-argued pages of St. Thomas Aquinas to encourage them. They were misdirected by the errors of those who proposed the unacceptable tenet of the total corruption by sin of human nature, to offer a reply that seemed so easy and so convenient but was in reality shallow. Exactly the same type of error is being perpetrated in this age in the matter of the relationship of sex and love in marriage. It was easy, too easy, to reply that the integrity of response to good between body and soul, the physical ‘freedom from disordered concupiscence’ of the theologians and the traditional doctrine of the Christian Church, was merely an incidental gift of the state of Original Justice, and once lost by sin, this incidental or accidental extrinsic gift fell away, and could not be passed on with the stock by generation. In the first place the solution has the defect of making the immunity from physical concupiscence in its theological meaning, a ‘supernatural’ incidental property, inhering in the soul. On both counts it could not be a property of the specific stock, the merely material inheritance of generation, for the soul in each case comes directly from God, without stain of sin in the act of its creation. This property of the supernatural order could only have been connected with generation on this view, ‘as if’ it were a physical property, which in fact it was not, so that the actual incurring of Original Sin, through a privative state, was something in the nature of a curse by God... and why it should remain after the Redemption and after the font of Baptism, does not appear.

This new solution of the early 17th century onwards was well meant, it seemed to imply that once the accidental, non-essential ‘gift’ of perfect harmony between physical and spiritual powers in man fell away, human nature merely fell back to its natural level, it remained good in all its essentials, and in all its natural tendencies, as a work of God it was not corrupted. In this ‘state of pure nature’ it was presumed that physical desires and passions, were, from nature, indifferent to any tendency to obey reason, to obey the ‘law’ mediated by the soul. In this appreciation of man the passions of the flesh are reductively hostile to the soul and to its fulfilment, for they may, and they do indeed surge fiercely against the wisdom and the rule of the spirit. The dilemma proposed so powerfully concerning poor human nature by St. Paul in the epistle to the Romans, is made the basic inheritance of natural good !

The mistake, apart from the failure to observe natures accurately and the sheer evidence for natural law as fact, of which Aquinas was well aware many hundreds of years earlier, lies in treating the physical senses and passions of an organism as things in themselves or as ends in themselves. They are not thus, they are faculties which are focused, organised, and controlled through the brain, and as such clearly subordinated to natural law, law which is both immanent to the organism and environmental from other being. The view of human nature we are criticising is not the order of ‘pure nature’ nor ever could be from the nature of being. If such were the order of Nature and natures there would be chaos in the animal kingdom, and few broods would ever be raised to maturity. The error made is actually quite close to the error of Freud, though not identical, because it was thought by these theologicans that the physical passions of the flesh should be ordered by reason, and that it was a man’s duty to do so, it was not however a logical position, since God had not established any basic natural tendency in the flesh to obey its ontological principle of control and direction.

It is not without significance that this type of philosophy of nature enters the speculative theology of the Church at the beginning of the ‘Age of Reason’, an era of exaggerated Liberalism in European culture, with all the disguised Nominalism in philosophy which this outlook tends to bring in its train. It is to be expected that a deficient theory of Nature has so linked up with sexual theories which derive in essence from Freud, that it is now running in direct opposition to the traditional sexual morality of the Church. The Church has not been wrong in matter which is intimately human, and therefore of her basic doctrine and need to teach, without respect to sophisticated scientific understanding. It is some theologians who have erred, from undue reliance upon themselves, and too little respect for the authority of the Council of Trent.

When there is intellectual difficulty and the synthesis of reason and revelation does not appear to come to hand, then it is reverence for the Magisterium of the Church, which is that of Christ, which saves the theologian from error, not his personal genius. Humble recognition of this, with persevering prayer will, the Holy Ghost working withal as promised, evoke from the treasury of the Faith the required synthesis with reason. It is self-conceit that causes men to panic, and to demand revisions of defined or Catholic doctrine to accommodate some apparent difficulty or excitement of the day. The good Lord never needs to be saved from himself, and he is over busy all too often saving himself, in the Church, from his friends.

Morality: the ‘Law’ as reflected by the soul

The soul then, at the creation of man, takes over a body which has a positive bias to seek from the spirit its good and true, and this involves a positive tendency to obey that control. This is the natural order, the order in which God made man as Man whatever the degree of man’s destiny in God. Through the intellect, through wise judgement and good will the soul, of its natural function should have mediated to the flesh, via the brain, the norm of what to do, what to seek, when to enjoy, when to cease, and in what proportion of balance and meaningfulness to value all things. This is not the function of the soul in the personality of a man as some deus ex machina, but as the ontological principle of wisdom and good, into which the organic is integrated by its own substantial relativity. The organic body represented a functioning inheritance of being in which the works, offices, and joys of being as true and as good were now in-formed entire into a higher and a strongly developmental order of the spirit.

The relationship of the soul to God was also dynamic not abstract, there would always be a measure of personal awareness and communion, even as the material life is always in communion with its natural environment. This is in fact the order of human life in the present time, save in the state of the refusal of God, though in what the experiential nature of such communion may be, many of us are too crude to be aware. Yet it is a fact, and it is there. Man is one person, one being, and there are no physical pleasures without some spiritual concomitant, and no spiritual joys without their correlative physical concomitant. There are joys elicited in the flesh and through the spirit, and there are joys which are elicited primarily and with dynamism through the soul which cause a correlative peace, exultation, or accompanying happiness in the body. But all the acts of a man are acts of one being, not of two parts, they are human acts. They are all caught up and focused, or should be, in the love of God, which is the communion a man has and enjoys in peace of spirit with the Living God. This peace is the first fruits and also the initial pledge, of the final and abiding communion with God. It is also the promise of Christ, and the gift he left with his own as a sign of his presence. In the saints, even in the present state of man it reaches the level of a constant personal awareness. This union of the soul with its God in peace is to be distinguished from other manifestations of God, however exalted they may be. We are speaking of the basic things.

The soul has it from its natural powers to know good from evil, the more clearly in the simple, basic relationships of human life. It can for instance, from its own natural powers know that no physical pleasure or function is an end in itself, neither in man, nor in the kingdom of Life that is below man. It can know this because the relativity of pleasure, function, office, balance, is a relationship deriving from the nature of being. This order of proportionality proceeds from the wisdom of God in creating, it is part of the definition of being, and the soul, as a spiritual principle made to the likeness of God must know, and does know this basic harmony as the order of the good and the true as these attributes are synonymous with being itself. In fallen man the distortion and warping of judgement brought in with sin causes an impairment, but even in man today the order persists, and is known in whatever is for the individual according to his lights, a major infringement of the Natural Law. It is not always known as ‘sin’ or as ‘offence’ but always as a certain confusion of mind, passing with deeper commitment to evil into a nameless disquiet, and then to a settled sadness with satiety when a man however ‘unconsciously’, misindulges the purely physical or the purely passionate in the name of love and fulfilment. In our days, this, and not ‘lingering vestiges of Puritanism etc., etc.’, is the cause of the cloud of confusion and unease which envelops sexual relationships in so many lives, the lives of Christians and of those who emphasise that they are not Christians. Do what a man will, listen to what reassuring falsehoods he may, there is but one path to fulfilment, and no man treads the path of error without the experience of loss and a conscious inner sadness.

The soul therefore, coming sinless from the will of God, takes over the control and direction of sinless flesh: flesh with a bias to obey its proportionate law, flesh which in the whole course of Evolution up to now, has never disobeyed the Natural Law of God. This is the ‘minimal’ the natural condition of Man as God must make him, and thus far we are not necessarily in the presence of the unique order of destiny that Christian doctrine accords Man from the revealing of God.

The soul would not be able to develop in its appropriate balance of good and true, and avoid moral evil, without living and growing in the inner man in the sunshine of its spiritual Environer. The body needs its daily bread, the birds of the air are fed within the natural economy of ‘your Heavenly Father’, and so also must Man live through a constant, direct energising by God of the created spirit. In the actually given order of Man‘s destiny from God this is the life which is called the ‘state of habitual grace’ within the created spirit and person. But some sort of energising through and by God would have had to exist in any order of destiny in which God was truly known and truly loved as the fulfilment of the spiritual being, and in which the spiritual creature would grow and develop with the faculties of the spirit. Only through this drawing of life from the source of the Life of the whole spiritual order can the spirit grow in that stature of being of which the ‘virtues’ are the expression and the fruits. The relation of the spiritual creature to God, like that of the material life within its environment, is a dynamic relationship, and the spirit, like the flesh has its measure of growth to fruition. In the order of the spirit a ‘Fall’ would always be a possibility, at least until the individual and the society had passed beyond a certain level of development and ‘fixity’ in the conformation of the spiritual powers to God.

Physical integrity and the bearing of the present order

The order actually accorded the spiritual creature from Christian Revelation is the most exalted possible degree of fulfilment, and though, given the majesty of God and the Love which defines his Being we may expect that he would in any event give such a call to transformation in the total likeness of himself to the spiritual creation, it seems to the writer to be called truly a vocation of an ontologically unique kind, because nothing, absolutely nothing, can have within its minimum intelligibility to share with plenitude in the domestic life of the Trinity within the Unity of the Godhead. The giving of such a vocation will, in the writer’s opinion, change the whole alignment of the Laws of Nature, so that while the material remains material, it is what it is, and has the alignment of the laws of being that it has, because of the creation of man, and the vocation of men, in and through Christ, to be ‘the adopted sons of God’ having by gift, what Christ has by right of nature in the Godhead. In this view, the whole cosmos indeed is in the ‘supernatural order’ in the fullest sense, and as the footstool of God, it provides now, and will provide more fully in its ultimate consummation, the material aspect of the doctrine of ‘Heaven’. In this view also, Christ the King is intrinsic to the plan of the universe, coming into his own at the appointed time as ‘the Heir of the Ages’, and the creation of woman, the separation of the incidental attributes of the flesh into ‘male ‘ and ‘female ‘ is given by God that Nature, and the Earth, may be able of its own to co-operate with God directly, and not by the will of man, in the bringing into Nature of the Principle of the Unity-Law in Person, Christ the King, the Wisdom of the universe. When we consider the terrible nature and reality of sin, it is quite inevitable, that as a rebellion, ‘sin’ in the personality of man would deny its King, and crucify him. They would have done it in any race, at any age in history. The enfleshment of God is the most terrible challenge, and the most intolerable embarrassment that could befall creatures and a society living in permanent compromise with evil.

It is this fullness of destiny in the person of man to God, and in the universe to the spiritual creature, which is the order of grace which the Christian calls the ‘supernatural order’ in the strict sense of theology, and around which so many tiresome controversies have raged. It is much more than the relationship of harmony in the attainment of the good and the true which exists or should exist between body and soul in man, that he be intelligible as the worthy and coherent work of God. What we have been saying about the relationship of spirit and matter in man, belongs to the basic understanding of his nature. ‘Original Sin’ is more than a lesion in the flesh as a result of the disobedience to Divine Law of the free spirit, Original Sin is the privation of the whole order of heirdom to the Sonship of God in the supreme conceivable meaning of that title. The unworthiness, the ‘Fall’ of the nature means that the whole integrated economy of God could never be, from that moment, attainable now as the sweep of one economy. In a very real sense all being in the universe, matter and man, ‘falls’ in the sin of man, for the economy cannot now develop in a straight line, and in the majesty of its sweep. The very alignment of the laws of Nature will be damaged, even though ‘Nature’ in its own order, and in itself, can never sin, It can however be damaged extrinsically: it is man who is damaged intrinsically. The wonder is that given the fact of sin, the order can be restored at all, that man can be ‘forgiven’ can be ‘redeemed’ in the Person of him whose sufferings through sin are indeed the vicarious burden of the whole weight of created aberration. This view of the impact of sin is very different from that of Teilhard de Chardin, for the true Fall comes after the creation of man, there is no trace of it and no place for it in the upward surge of Evolution. True sin can only come after the moment of conscious reflection, for not before that time is the soul within the economy of the universe, and not before that time does the possibility exist of the denial of the ontological good and the ontological true which is due, proper and of symmetry within Nature.

Long, long ago St. Augustine the Great pointed out that if the flesh has its pleasures the spirit must have its connatural joys within its own order, and must seek after God. One can go further and add that the spirit cannot be conceived as a ‘dry’ abstract entity. It has its yearnings, it looks to God as its source of wisdom, its source of love, and its food, its ‘Bread from Heaven’ which gives life to the world of the spirit. This is what is meant in saying that the relationship of the soul to God is a dynamic relationship.

The order of the co-operation of the spiritual creature with God involves a mystery which can be partly, but never fully unravelled by the human mind, the mystery of free-will. It is an order of free co-operation, the very hallmark of the existence and the presence of the spiritual principle in creation: it is not an order of organic determinism nor of programmed behaviourism. We must not make a melodrama of the work of God. There is a sense, and it must be a most important sense, in which God cannot help the phenomenon of sin as it follows the phenomenon of the refusal of God of the spiritual creature. True, God’s power is almighty, but true also that God’s knowledge and wisdom are the source principles of wisdom, harmony and love in creation. The wisdom cannot contradict the power. The contemplation of the Crucifix is to contemplate the effects of sin upon the Person of God Incarnate. It is a most appalling thought, we have got used to giving it the notional rather than the real assent, it does not come home to us. This is no melodrama: no enactment of something that ‘God could have done some other way, but we do not know why...’ Likewise when Jesus Christ asked what more he could have done for his Vineyard and he had not done it, when he wept over Jerusalem because it had resisted his call, and he foresaw its ruin, this sorrow at refusal is God’s sorrow, it follows an order of necessity in the order of being as it is established under the wisdom and love of God, it is not a melodrama, something that was a little hollow, because ‘He could have done it all otherwise, but we do not know why not... etc., etc.’ We must take the sorrow of Christ, like the love of Christ, the very being of Christ, as a manifestation of the truth of God, and of the care of God. God did care what sort of creation he made. The problem of sin rests ultimately in the power of man to refuse; from the nature of man, he can refuse. Without God he can achieve no increase of spiritual stature, that we can agree, but even with God, and the play of the divine appeal within his spirit, still he can refuse. The tragedy of sin is the refusal of man, a personal tragedy, a social tragedy, a tragedy of the stock, a tragedy too of the whole cosmos... we must turn now to see what, if man should sin, the effects will be upon, and within, a spiritual being animated with matter, —with the flesh.

3 THE FALL AND THE FLESH

Material life cannot know and acknowledge the ‘good’ and the ‘true’ as principles of being in a conceptual manner. That requires the presence of the soul. However, material life can, does, and must acknowledge the reality of these entitative principles of governance in being, and this recognition is the embodiment in the organic structure of its being of a seeking for control and direction to fulfilment in a proportionate manner.

Good and true as attributes in matter

It belongs to the ontological essence of material life to seek for its control and direction within an harmonic balance of being. This balance, the definition and relative place of functions, and of the pleasures which prompt them, is of the entitative order of the ‘good’ and ‘the true’ for animal life This harmonic unity is guaranteed because the organism of an animal is structurally made for it, and it is administered through the intercourse of the environment with the brain. The organism is not constructed simply for pleasures, or simply for functions, but for an harmonic order of both in a unity of being which is a relativity of functions. The material lie principle is made to respond to prompting, and to respond to the inhibition of desire and function, it looks for that cycle of determination, and it obeys its proper determinant.

It would be better to say that all the senses of the animal form within its natural environment are aspects and extensions of the one sense of governance, of the ‘good’ and the ‘true’ proper to its being. All stimuli are interpreted in terms of seeking and experiencing within the unity-in-harmony of its life cycle, in response to the outside world.

Therefore we can put it that all the animal senses are aspects of its sense of being, and this again may be called its sense of control and direction, to natural fulfilment. This sense of being is organised on symmetry and to seek its good within a symmetry is the essence of that sense of control and direction, and explains the make-up of the organs and their hormones in very nature. This is why the animal obeys, first in the acceptance of the brain, and then in the organic follow through, its times of cessation from pleasurable function as well as its times of desire. For the sense of good and true in the animal entity is a seeking for determination to fulfilment, not simply for pleasurable act. It is directed necessarily, ontologically, to the finding of its ‘law’ in the environment. Because of this definition to a total integration the seeking of the life principle of any form of material being is a seeking for the good and the true, for the proper definition of its being: the proportionality is inbuilt into the entity which is seeking, and embodied as something to be found in the environment which is its co-principle of operation.

Similar inheritance of the body of man

The body that became the flesh of man developed under the same Law, and when there occurred the mutation which swept this majestic brain beyond the common cycle of matter so that it could not longer live meaningfully within material environment nor be controlled by the impactual Law within that limited environment, this living flesh of man was swept up to union of being with a stronger principle of law, of knowledge, and of determination. It offered nevertheless from its very being and structure the same ontological obedience of living matter to its finalism; that is to say, to the principle of its orientation to its connatural ‘good’ and ‘true’. The principle to which it offered this allegiance was the spiritual soul.

This is why we have suggested that a common line of speculative theology which has developed since the Reformation concerning the orientation of nature to its natural law is defective, and represents a regression in doctrine since the Council of Trent.

The phenomena of ‘sin’

We must consider now what must be the impact upon the flesh of the determining power of the soul, if this spiritual and free principle of intellect, which makes the human personality to be ‘man’, should deliberately choose to act contrary to its perception of the known good and the known true. For the first time in the history of the universe and of Evolution, there will be brought into being, into its very nature as being, a principle of contradiction to the Universal Law of the ‘good’ and the ‘true’. For the first time the equational balance of propriety and good order will have been breached within material creation by the superimposed ‘law’ of a creature whose principle of knowing and willing is made to the image of God in its own nature. This is to say that the Law of God upon which and through which all organic material life has been framed hitherto, will be overruled by the personal ‘law’ of a creature. This will be possible, because the soul is the entitative principle of form and of determination in the flesh of Man, and because of this ontological union of being with the flesh, it is able to act ‘like a god’ unto its organic constituent. This could happen only because the spirit and the flesh are correlated as twin ontological principles of being and of action in man. Man is not an accidental (i.e. incidental) union of the spirit and the flesh.

The first effect of the impact of the sinful will of the spirit upon the sense of being of the material life principle which it, the spirit, has inherited, will be an appalling fear. The reason for that we shall consider a little further on. In the beginning of revolt from the universal Will of God embodied in Natural Law, and in material structure, the unfallen flesh of man will react with a fear which will not be paralleled again, and is not paralleled now, but which nevertheless remains in a clear if less dramatic form. To this matter we must return again.

After the sense of dread, the effect of direction to the personal un-Godly will of the spirit, out of due proportion to the symmetry of natural law, and of entitative obedience to God as he lives and rules in the embodiments of Nature, will be to confuse and to blunt the sense of good and true, the sense of obedience to harmonic order, of the material principle itself. It will mean that now the sense of control and direction of the material life principle in man will no longer connaturally obey the wisdom of the spirit in the immediate cessation from pleasure, because the harmonics of the subjection of pleasure to function, and of function to proportion, have been ruptured through the spiritual lust of the soul.

In the very fact of choosing out of due order and out of due proportion the soul has introduced through its ill-will an unbalance of valuation into the material constituent of man’s being, and has ruined the nicety of response, the ‘forgetfulness’ after pleasurable function, in which the balance of innocence rests. To desire for itself out of the cycle of harmony and place, to ‘look forward’ consciously or unconsciously to ‘the next possible time’ again with a fixation on pleasure for itself, as the end in itself, this is lust, or craving, and the fierce power of the spirit, an entitative, an ontological power in the being of Man, has now superimposed its own personal law, as a law of selfishness and pride, into the material organism as well. This is the essential fact of the Fall of Man.

There seems no reason to make the beginnings of sin a ‘mystery’ on the ground that where there is no foregoing concupiscence (i.e. disordered desire) there can be no temptation. The first disordered desire arises in the spiritual not the material nature, and without temptation, in as much as the contemplation of the power and excellence of one’s own being can, from the powers of the soul, be an occasion of self-worship, and the denial of one’s intrinsic relativity to the wisdom, and will, and being of God. The spiritual soul, in man as in Satan, can make its own temptation by one act of will. The moment the spirit misuses its own joy in its own power and excellence, it acts already with a spiritual lust, for all disordered desire and seeking, whether in spirit, in the flesh, or in the common union of both orders in one ‘mixed’ act, is all an act of lust in the generic sense.

Before the Fall of Man, man would know the physical pleasures of his body as pleasures, they are proper to the order of his being, they are good and true, but to be holy, good and true in proper proportion that means, they must be valued and enjoyed in their meaningful relationship to function, in the totality of the meaning of man, —not as selfish ends in themselves. It would be perfectly possible to choose, or to evoke a physical pleasure out of time and rational order, without physical concupiscence going before, but only possible through the concupiscence of the spirit, which would have gone before in the moment of the sin of pride. The power to sin in the beginning is bound up with the nature of free-will, and the non-necessary, in the sense of non-deterministic nature of its relationship to God as the principle of the fulfilment of the spiritual creature. It does not require concupiscence in any other sense. There is here an important realm of undeveloped theological discussion, which one ought to recognise in passing, but the subject must not further detain us.

The first sin then, will always be a sin of disobedience through pride, the classical ‘hubris’ in the classical sense. Even the ‘occasion’ of the first human sin could not, in the strict sense, be a physical occasion, a misuse of physical pleasure out of due order and valuation, because this would be only the consequential manifestation of the arrogation to oneself, and to the excellence of one’s own being, of the laws of being which rule one’s destiny. This is most perfectly manifested in the account of Genesis, in which the Serpent, the spiritual tempter, says to Adam and Eve that the reason they have been told that they must not eat of the fruit of the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and of evil’, which is to say the experience of sin, the doing as one likes, etc., is not that they will ‘die the death’ as God pretends, but that God knows that in whatsoever day man does this thing, he will be independent, will be like God, able to ‘do as he likes’, and will achieve a new and glorious status of which God himself is jealous. This is so accurate to the psychological nature and analysis of sin, and in particular the sin of pride, that for the writer the divine inspiration of this vision of sin is sufficiently proven in the very fact. How true also, it is to the Scientific Atheism, the Nazism, the Religion without God-ism of our own days! The essential lie against God in the mouth of Satan, and in the heart of man is ever the same.

The overdevelopment of physical desire

When, through this sense of pride and power the spirit abuses the flesh, and links the physical pleasure with the self-excellence of the spirit in one act of self enjoyment out of God, and therefore out of truth and good, then indeed lust as a physical aberration, almost as a physical principle within nature, is introduced into the material living reality in its own material order. It will remain afterwards, in its own right, and in its own material laws, for the flesh is not one thing and one order with the spirit, and the power of the spirit has broken the harmonic sense of good and true in the material life principle, and has confused it further by selfish craving. Even if the soul could be restored in one act to full spiritual perfection by penance, —which actually is not possible while in ontological union with the organic matter it has damaged, —the body could not be restored by a simple act of will, though it can be damaged by such an act of will. In a moment of silly show a youth may burn his arm with a cigarette, and if disaster should follow, and amputation be judged necessary, no amount of regret, change of will, or conversion of mind and heart will undo the organic damage prompted by the act of will.

From its deterministic structure, matter has been framed organically to conform to the Law of the good and true, proper to the order of its limited meaning, by the unchanging good and true of God embodied in the Unity-Law from the beginnings. In being damaged by the spirit it has suffered an organic lesion, and organic lesions are not healed in the flesh by a change of mind in the spirit. The good inheritance of the flesh is passed on by the laws of genetic inheritance, in an order which knows not evil, until Man is created. The damage to the ‘moral order’ of the flesh will follow the same laws of deterministic inheritance also, —as an organic and a specific lesion.

The sense of harmonic proportion and valuation in physical pleasure, and in the occasion of the evocation of physical pleasure, has now been blunted and coarsened by the act of sin. This is the first great damage, for in this fact ‘immunity from concupiscence’ has ceased to be possible any more. There is more to follow. The soul as the principle of determination in man, develops the brain, and develops also, and specifies, the acts and the seekings of the body. Just as exercise develops muscles, so the constant seeking of given pleasures, as ends in themselves, will develop, and does develop an undue craving for these things as ends in themselves in the individual. If a man seeks sex for instance as an end in itself, it becomes an overwhelming passion, an irresistible urge, not because it cannot be resisted, but because it has not been resisted.

The very valuations of the body can, through the brain, be trained to make this pleasure, and not necessarily in its natural object or use, the one desired end of existence: ‘I must have it.’ This also happened in the beginning of sin, and has happened constantly ever since. The warning given here, is the power of the soul to overdevelop the physical desires of a man in the same way that exercise develops any other sense, say the eyes, or may develop, and sometimes indeed overdevelop the musculature etc. We will later show reason to think that the mere happening of this, in the beginnings of man, is enough to cause the generation of a fallen nature, a nature with a lesion in its orientation to its true good. It is as well to remember the personal and individual power the soul has in the span of the individual life to do the same thing to an exceeding degree, —to make monsters of men. We have, through the Atheism and sensuality of our own times, done much to make sexual monsters of our children. It is the pornographers, the leaders of thought and pictorial representation of every kind, who should get the life sentences when little girls and boys are outraged in a bestial manner. They have made these monsters, and their own lives are no better in any essentials.

The further question of whether there can be inheritance, as an acquired characteristic, of a more than averagely insensate craving of one type or another, through ancestors, does not affect the essential theme of Original Sin. To this writer it seems that there is every likelihood of such an inheritance, and a good deal of evidence will be found for it, if it is objectively sought. Certainly this is the presumption of the common people through the ages, and features in the folklore of nations.

Any such special inheritance of the lusts of the flesh, or of the spirit, through the inheritance of the brain, would show itself more as a tendency very quickly actuated, and very quickly out of control, than as an actual desire or impulse. The essential elements in a rational defence of the doctrine of Original Sin do not require so much. The Christian witness to this doctrine requires that it be shown that the soul can introduce an ontological lesion into the physical constitution of man, and that the lesion be in the sense of control and direction within matter to the proportionate good and true. Then one must be able to point to the empirical fact of disorder and weakness in the moral constitution of man, and the paradox this represents against his powers of intellect and will. One must be able to show that in this respect man is a contradiction to the laws of all else in living Nature, and in the material universe. The argument that this lesion descends upon all mankind not through the quite arbitrary curse of God, nor through our wills being in some vague way ‘contained’ in the wills of the first men etc., etc., but through the natural and genetic laws of inheritance, then becomes most reasonable truth.

Here again, the vision of Sin in Genesis has a plaintive sincerity which is without doubt the immediate teaching of God in the soul of the original seer.

The effect of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, i.e. the experience of sin, and its consequence, is not glorious emancipation, but at once lust in the powers of the flesh, and guilt and shame with the experience. Adam and Eve perceive themselves ‘to be naked’ as the immediate consequence of their disobedience. Until that time they were indeed naked, but ‘were not ashamed’. They did not before know that they were naked, in the sense of self-conscious lust, and unbalanced desire and valuation, and could not know ‘nakedness’ in this sense of evidence of a Fall in state, with all its confusion; — ‘And who has told thee that thou was naked, but that thou hast eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat’? (Genesis chapter 3, various). The simplicity and the depth of the vision is quite magnificent. In the same way, because they are ‘naked’, i.e. fallen in the harmony and innocence of their nature, they hide themselves from God, and do not wish any more to walk with him as familiar friends in the cool of the evening. The peace of God and the joy of full possession of him in grace, according to their initial degree, this also has gone with the guilt and shame of deliberate sin.

Why nature is not ‘corrupt’

Does the foregoing explanation of the advent of sin and its effects, mean therefore that Man’s nature is now ‘corrupt’? It depends upon the sense in which the word is used. Nature is not corrupt in the sense taught by the Reformers of four hundred years ago. They posed a dilemma certainly, but the answers of Aquinas are still the best, and in perfect conformity also with the Council of Trent. Yet here many theologians of the Counter-Reformation went badly astray, in answering the dilemma. The possibility of a corruption in some true sense derives from the fact that, contrary to Teilhard de Chardin, body and soul are not twin, correlative manifestations of one fundamental created energy. If they were, good and evil would have to be intertwined from the beginning in the natures of things. On the contrary, the flesh has always obeyed and has known by its responses, the Law of ‘good’ in the universe and within its own entity. Those ‘discarded lines’ too, in the economy of Evolution, those so-called ‘blind alleys’ of life, are nothing of the sort. They are not analogous to human blunders or human ignorance. This is always the result of injecting Animism into the sciences, and it reproduces in the sciences the phenomena of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in the arts. These primitive lines are discarded functions within a total equation, they played their proper and necessary part in their time, and helped on in their own being and its works the ascent of Man. They were part of the scaffolding during the building of the consummated work, this has been indicated in earlier chapters.

There is a sense in which all existents are ‘good’ in as much as they owe their being to God, and in that sense of course nothing can be ‘corrupt’, not even the Devil himself. This is not a meaning of the word relevant to the present subject-matter. There is a sense in which a nature can be said to be ‘corrupt’ because by reason of the act of its will, or its state of being, it is incapable of the orientation of its powers towards God, for fulfilment in obedience to the law of God which emanates from God for that being. In that sense the acts of the truly and finally ‘damned’ are said to be corrupt, because they will never be in harmony of order and striving with the will of God. Can we say that the acts of the body, or better the acts of a man are ‘corrupt’ in this sense, because the nature of man is now ‘fallen’? In fact we cannot, the Reformers made a major error in this subject-matter, but the reason why the nature of man is not ‘corrupt’ in the stricter sense of the word, is a reason of the nature of the flesh more than the nature of the spirit. At the same time, because of the nature of the flesh, so long as a man is in the flesh, because of that reason of state alone, —let it pass whether there may be others, —he cannot be in a state of damnation which is beyond all possible recall or change.

Because the spirit in man is a principle of entity distinct from matter, but ontologically in a relationship correlative to matter, the soul can impose its own personal ‘law’ upon the organic being of man. The body is constructed for determination through its soul. But note, in the case of the material element, the spirit inherits a principle of being already made and determined by God, through the pedigree of evolution, to respond to the law of its nature, and constructed to respond rightly to its proportionate good and true. The soul is only the steward of its material inheritance, and it did not and does not make for the flesh a law of nature at first hand.

It is more true to say that the soul can overlay the law of God, weaken it, and confuse its responses, and exaggerate physical responses out of any harmony pattern proper to human nature, than to say that it can destroy or corrupt the law of God within the flesh of man. In this very true sense there are two laws in the nature of man since sin—as St. Paul sees very clearly—the basic law of response to the good and true in a whole and a proportionate way, and the ‘law of sin’ of particularised and exaggerated cravings, introduced as the work of the personal spiritual control of human nature. The law of sin introduced by the power of the soul, cannot take away from the body of man all natural tendency or all natural potentiality to seek its good and its true, from God and the personal soul, in the manner proper to man’s nature. It cannot do this, because the tendency and the potentiality is inbuilt into the structure of living matter, as we have said before perhaps to the point of weariness. There can never again be a perfect response, indeed the response in the flesh of man, overlain with hundreds of thousands of weary years of sin and abuse, is very, very imperfect and fluctuating indeed, but the tendency is there, and in as much as it is there it is a tendency to heal and to reintegrate the broken balance of the obedience of the flesh to God, through its soul, that soul which has been the principle of its ruin, but should have been the principle of its further glorification, and must always be the only entitative principle through which it can reach up to the wisdom of God proper to the order and the powers of the flesh.

If matter and spirit were twin products of a fundamental monism of being, there could never have been any evil in creation, but there could not have been any ‘mind’ either. It is the advent of the spirit to the Universal order, which makes moral evil, the truly evil, possible. Yet the creature spirit cannot totally undo or obliterate the Law of God embodied in the material nature. It can, and this is all important, —it can introduce a lesion into its being, but not a total corruption. The entity of matter is organic, is determinist, and thus the soul can, working directly upon the physical powers which are its natural inheritance, impose its own proper, in the sense of personal, determination to evil. From the very same determinism of the organic it cannot obliterate from the flesh the tendency to respond to its good and its true in a manner which is always the actuation of a harmony-seeking principle, a principle of being which seeks its good in an implicit context of integration whensoever the flesh is actuated by the spirit in a good and a sincere manner, either in the natural or in the supernatural powers of the personality of man.

There will have been introduced into the flesh, and into the spirit as well, through the mutual interaction of matter and spirit in Man, a terrible confusion and a terrible stress. In any given individual of us, the soul maybe will seek for God, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, for it has been taught through the ages to respond to any object of immediate pleasure with an instant, an exaggerated, and an unregulated desire. It will do so, and the soul, together with the flesh through the brain will say ‘no’, and the soul can prevail, and its body will obey, but we have all known the bitter self-division and ‘civil war’ that this lusting of the spirit against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit has brought into the personality of man. Yet from the very fact that neither Original Sin, nor sin through the ages, nor the personal sins of a man can ever obliterate from the flesh its fundamental, organic configuration to the whole good, nor its tendency to respond however faintly to the promptings of the spirit to a wholeness in the good and the true, from this fact, in the nature of man, a redemption is possible, possible from the entitative orientation of matter to whatever is its God-given embodiment of goodness and of truth. From this entitative orientation to God, from the framing of its nature in spite of sin and the fall, the organic must always retain a potentiality towards healing and reintegration, and when it is prompted aright, according to such light as the soul possesses, that response of the flesh, so slow, so painful, so pitifully given to breakdown, must always be towards the reintegration of the harmony of its being towards the wisdom of God. This makes a man redeemable. This potential of the flesh in human nature, so much damaged and torn with a sort of chronic moral ulceration by the work of the spirit, must be helped on and refocused, and dragged up in its weakness by the wisdom, the will, and the might of that same superior spiritual faculty in man, the soul, which has been, and is, the principle in human nature of loss and lesion. To this end the grace of God is given, and while it is not to be dwelt on here, the entire majesty of the work of Christ, and the heroic pilgrimage of the Christian soul, and the healing work of habitual grace will be seen to stand out from afar in letters of fire from this adumbration of the good that the Fall could not destroy, the seed of hope that is left in Adam’s sin, the adumbration of a final victory within a most terrible war.

Matter and pure spirit

It seems to be otherwise in the order of the being of the pure, immaterial spirit, and this seems to be the reason that there is no Redemption of the fallen angels. The purely spiritual creation, from the immediacy of its vision, and the sheer power of its manner of knowing and willing, commits itself towards God or away from God with an entirety which does not admit of a going back. A change of state is effected in the first acts of intellectual intuition and of will. To this human nature can only approximate, but a man can approximate to it, the saint deepens substantially in likeness to God in grace, and the loss of God by grave sin becomes intrinsically less likely, if humility remains at all times. In like manner a man can commit grave sin, and can deepen in it, and to such a degree that a miracle of the moral order would be required to effect a change of intellect and of will. Just as the saint may fall from grace however, so the sinner may always return to God, until the final link with the flesh is dissolved. While the spirit is involved in existential union with matter, by the same principle of mutual interaction, of ‘feedback’ so to say, the soul cannot commit itself beyond recall to evil, neither, from the ontological determination of the living flesh to God, which we have considered already, can it remove from itself all pull and attraction towards the order of God within its own being. This again, is a precious seed of grace that remains even in mortal sin, even when grace is directly resisted.

While it is true that only through the line of continuity, through the wounded flesh and its genetic laws a man can suffer the effects of somebody else’s sin, can suffer the effects of ‘Original Sin’ of somebody else’s will that is, upon the common inheritance and stock of all mankind, yet from the determinism to God of all material nature, we cannot, by the same token, be totally corrupt at birth, or removed from God beyond recall while life lasts in the body. The simply spiritual creation must, it seems, go one way or the other with finality, and that probably from its first act of knowing and willing, but the very limitations of the flesh are to us a principle of salvation as well as a principle of vulnerability. We have then every reason to be patient with brother ass, in his weakness and the temptations he causes us, for while he brings us down to the depths in the Fall of Man, he also saves us from totally drowning once and for all in evil, through the sheer power of the proud spirit. We have kicked him and wounded him as brutally as we did the body of Christ, but we can never remove from the flesh its first and substantial loyalty to God. The soul comes pure from God in direct creation into the flesh, and the fallen flesh retains its entitative loyalty to its Maker: the nature of man then, from the very womb cries with the Psalmist ‘Out of the depths I have cried unto Thee O Lord, Lord hear my voice’: And the Lord did hear.

Guilt: a twofold experience

Human experience must always be sensed as a unity of sense and spirit, for reasons that St. Thomas Aquinas gave very adequately centuries ago. Nevertheless, the distinction in man of the two orders of matter and spirit gives a certain psychological dichotomy to the experience of ‘conscience’ which underlines the reality in matter, as matter, of a ‘sense of good’ which is God-orientated, in as much as its obedience is unto the Universal Law embodied through creation in the deterministic nature of matter.

The sense of guilt can be a fear evoked equally in soul and in body, but where there is a sense of guilt evoked in the soul, it is guilty knowledge not far from repentance, often it is the act of contrition in itself in an entitative sense. There is also possible in the spiritual order a hard, haughty defiance of God, a ‘satanic’ resistance which does not admit of guilt as an experience in some way coloured by the love of God. This latter state can never be enforced fully by the soul upon the body in the personality of Man.

The material principle of being cannot react with total aversion to God, nor to the Law of God by which the material seeks its proper good and true in an integrated order, according to the divine wisdom. As material the flesh lacks the capacity to hate God, it is formed for obedience, and primarily for obedience to the Law of God, and is always more sinned against than sinning in the act of evil. The flesh, reacting to the defiance of God communicated to the brain through the influence of the soul, can only respond through what has been called its sense of being, with a profound physical fear. This occurred in the beginning, when the first parents of mankind are made to ‘hide themselves in paradise’ from the voice of God calling ‘Adam where art thou’? It also occurs in the present state of man.

This is the hated experience of the ‘guilt complex’ which the proud sinner tries his hardest to root out in himself as the last silly remnant of ‘religious inhibition’. He cannot do it, not if the spirit knows intuititively within its intellectual awareness that it is resisting God, for then this knowledge must, in the ontological act of perception, be communicated by the spirit to the body, according to the manner of the brain of knowing, and to any resistance to God the material life principle can only react with dread, with ‘guilt’. This reaction, in the natural intercommunication and sympathy of body and soul, creates a corresponding awareness in the spirit, of ‘guilt’ so that the whole man is aware of a ‘guilt’ which cannot be eradicated, but which as a fear of evil done, originates in this case through the sensitive element in man’s nature. A man may hate this sting of the flesh, defy it and deny its existence, but he will never be able to exorcise it, so that even in the most arrogant and the most depraved there will remain the active reproach of a sense of guilt, —of conscience.

The inheritance of a lesion in the stock

The division in the nature of man caused by sin is empirical enough, and is exemplified in a dramatic manner by St. Paul (Romans c.7), and his subject matter is basically the same as that which we are considering now. Original Sin in the technical sense of theology, is not the lesion itself in the nature of man, but the deprivation of the total order of integration to God in holiness, of which the material lesion is the physical and material cause at the moment of man in the womb. In the popular sense, Original Sin is the inheritance of a damaged nature, and it is this root of loss in man that we must ponder in order to understand the doctrine of Original Sin. With the advent of sin, for the first time in history material nature will have been forced against the focus to good which is part of its specific inherited structure, and if this happened in the very beginning of the species, when the newly organised material mutation was seeking its new and its specific orientation to its Environer through the soul, which is its co-principle of specific nature, then the Christian teaching that this would effect a lesion which damaged the stock is reasonable truth, even if, in the present state of scientific knowledge this cannot be proven from experiment as a fact.

There is evidence enough for the inheritance of damage factors and lesion factors through the natural laws of heredity, and this would be a lesion factor in depth, in the orientation of a new species seeking for the first time its full natural alignment to God, its Environment. The damage would arise in the specific alignment of the organism, it seems to the writer, because it would proceed within the depths of the organism from that ontological principle of its being through which the specific alignment of the moral nature of Man to God would have to be effected. The writer is not one of those who think that there is no evidence at all for the inheritance of at least acquired tendencies, but this would be much more than an acquired tendency, for these are really superficial to the nature of a species, and if they may effect any change of specific reaction it could only be through frequent repetition in an environment which favoured the repetition. We are thinking here rather of a lesion in depth in the organic ‘sense of good’ within an equational proportion; and this seems as likely to be passed on by physical inheritance as any of the many defect conditions in the flesh which are known to be inheritable.

Relationship of grace with nature

It is as well to remark at this juncture the relationship between the soul and the body within the specific nature of man, for the specific nature marks also the orientation of the species to its environment, points that is to say, its natural law. When speaking of man, Environment with the capital, or Environer, has been written to signify that God is the natural environmental control of the powers of the spiritual soul of man, —the principle which mediates to this species, Man, the natural law of its fulfilment. This relationship of man to God is an active, dynamic relationship, just as the influence of its material environment on any other form of life is an active principle of the determination of its being.

In the existential order of daily life and fact, this is what the Christian calls the life of the ‘sanctifying grace’ of the soul, and in the social order it is comprised by such doctrines as the mystical body of Christ, the communion of saints, the headship of Christ ever living within the Church as the head of the body… And because the head, the centre of life, control, and direction, Christ is also a member of that body eternally, in its organic configuration, let us notice. The concept of the provident Fatherhood of God, fulfilled in his ‘Word’ and brought to perfection through a process of development by the Holy Spirit, the ‘Soul’ of the Church etc., etc. all these aspects and titles delineate a total work of God upon man, and upon the universe, which not even the Church of men herself understands except partially, and in a growing measure through time. This is all the manifold description of the work upon men of God the Environer, and it is not an abstract work, nor the mere giving of a code, a tablet of laws from the lofty mountain of God... it is the participation by the creature of God’s own way of living and being, and the directing and increasing of that life. The magnificence of this vision of creation, so fully the consummation of the meaning of Evolution, and of the true philosophy of science, is the clear and necessary actualisation also of the potential of Christianity. It is the development though only of true, stable and orthodox doctrine, the vindication in a unique way, and yet once more in human history, of all that ‘Rome’ has stood for, and does still represent. The coherent, harmonic development of the potential power and vision within Christ’s doctrine, is the chief sign for our times that Christ is the ‘True Religion’ the summit of God for all men, and for all Faiths too, through which sincere men have tried to lay hold upon the living God. In this relationship to God as every man’s Environer, Science and Revelation meet in their intrinsic common denominator. The making of a dichotomy between Reason and Revelation, Religion and Science, is untrue to the mutual ordering of both wisdoms, and is regrettable among theologians.

In the original order of God’s intention for man, he would have been an integrated and harmoniously balanced personality. Immunity from concupiscence which is to say peace of faculties in the wisdom of the spirit, freedom from unbalanced desires, cravings, and distorted values, would have been mediated within his personality through the intellect. The soul, the intellectual principle of man would have communicated to the body its truth, its wisdom, and its good, and the powers of the body would have rendered in the unity of one experience, the same obedience as in Nature animal life gives to its times and seasons. Indeed, the harmony and joy of the balanced human personality would have been very much greater than that of the rest of Nature, because held more strongly and meaningfully to the order of spiritual wisdom.

Such a relationship of natural obedience, without passion, to the wisdom of the spirit in man’s personality—and without passion does not mean without natural pleasures—could not be integrated except through the soul, because the spirit is the principle of finalism within the human nature. Neither could the soul long maintain such a harmony, nor begin to develop it further at all, in knowledge and fruition, without a direct relationship to God of feeding, nourishing, enlightening, and fulfilling in love for that is the natural relationship of the human person to its Environment: ‘in Him we live, and move, and are... for we are of His kind’ (Acts. 17.28.). That is the entitative order of things.

It is the perception of this order which makes it a truth of theology that the orientation of mankind to God was, from the beginning, in the ‘supernatural order’. The order given to the created spirits by God, to both men and angels, is always a gift in its definition, because it is the adoption of the creature by love to possess what God is, by nature and by definition. As we have seen earlier, this does not withdraw the sweep of creation and its consummation from the order of the ontological, the order of the fulfilment of being in terms of measured wisdom and relationships, for the Being of God which we are called to possess is very Intellect and very Joy by essence. The path to the highest possible order of being for the creature will show a greater intrinsic necessity of wisdom, and a greater harmony of consummation by ever growing degrees than the lower order of natural evolution of being itself. Yet we must not lose sight of the perfection of God in the works of Nature at the beginning of their path to fulfilment in himself. God can never be the author of an indifference to the good, and the true, natural to the order of one’s being, much less the author of a contradiction within nature between appetite and natural law. The dignity of natural integrity in this minimum sense belongs to the concept of the rational animal as such. Man as we find him is not fully rational as a nature, but rather a paradox of Nature, for his being is not harmoniously integrated to fulfilment in its appetites and in its actions. Failure to appreciate and concede the natural dignity of Nature in its own order, does not exalt the supernatural destiny, but rather derogates from the wisdom of God, the Exemplar of every spiritual nature. Such failure has led to ambiguity, and now to further direct errors in both the philosophy and the theology of Man.

The incursion of sin, by wounding nature in its moral perfection, makes it impossible for man to co-operate with God in the perfection of any natural order of fulfilment, and much more does it make it impossible for nature to co-operate with grace to bring forth the step by step perfection of the individual and of society, and of the universe itself maybe, in the order of grace even to the consummation of heaven, in the manner in which sinless creation must be intended in the creative wisdom of God. The wonder of the Fall of Man is not the fact, which in its natural aspects is visible enough as an event in the visible order, but that such a disaster and sickness within creation, is capable of being repaired at all. It is the fuller consideration of the damage, which concerns the next section of this theme, the manner of its repair escapes the human mind to grasp in its entirety, but in such measure as we can, it is the Salvation and Redemption of God in Jesus Christ.

4 THE DAMAGE TO THE ECONOMY OF GOD

The fateful beginnings

It was the function of the soul in man to take over and enormously to develop the potential of the brain, sweeping matter in man beyond the bounds of the competence of the merely material economy. With an economy of matter alone the preoccupation of material life can be only with the work of self-conservation and reproduction attuned to the interplay of an environment similarly orientated. Every other brain in Nature is made in that way. What are we to think of an animal brain, truly animal, and truly a brain, which is preoccupied with the conquest of an environment totally hostile to its structure and to its orientation, and preoccupied with knowledge which can have no constructive relationship to its natural organic survival, but rather by defect of human assessment may involve its sudden destruction? Can this be explained without the true distinction of spirit from matter? I think not. The reference is of course to the conquest of space, and of worlds which will be hostile to the natural life of man, so that to live in them man must construct his own personal environment, not in co-operation with, but against the influence of the matter outside. In the same way the soul in man took over, and was to have developed enormously and beyond the range of purely material categories of good and true, the sense of the material life principle in man. This development would have been in perfect harmony with the laws of matter and with the functions of life, but would have developed the sense of good and true as a function of being in the material, beyond the merely material order of environment into the values of the good and the true which define the spiritual order. This happens even in the present state of man, through grace, both soul and body may thrill in one common ecstasy to the communication of the love of God. How much more so, if nature in man had never become fallen.

Therefore it is impossible to say, if man had never sinned, and if human society had stabilised in seeking the good, how greatly perfect might have become his nature, and with what perfection of control and nobility in the powers of the soul. There would have been a harmony, prompted and maintained through the power of the intellect upon the flesh, quite incredible to us, a control and a propriety of valuation in a man’s desires and joys beyond any compare with the present condition of man. One can be sure only that the present state of man would seem, by comparison to be an unmitigated disaster, but it is to be borne in mind that in fact the disaster is mitigated, and that from the nature of matter in itself.

Men would have developed the power and the facility of love with great spiritual depth, with human warmth and tenderness, and with great freedom of persons, without the constant intrusion of the specifically sexual relationship and the overstimulation and overdevelopment of its specific pleasure. They would have loved, in or out of the state of marriage, without that intense craving for sex which indeed is a factor distinct from the very pleasure, in much the same measure as the intense craving for alcohol and drugs is distinct from the actual pleasure afforded by them.

Even in the present state of things, the slavery of men to one aspect of sensual pleasure is not found among the animals in their natural environment. There can be read scientific reports concerning the ‘low sexual drive’ of gorilla communities, in which the young scientists concerned show a rather naive wonder at the phenomenon. They do not seem to notice that in the wild male and female lie down together without sexual excitement or mutual stimulation except in season, or that the female does not receive the male when pregnant, and the male takes ‘no’ for a natural answer.

Much more so in man the warmth of mutual joy, the sweetness of possession with comfort should be the constant and always to be expected concomitant of married love, not the specifically sexual drive at all times, states, and seasons. In this subject-matter Freud and his disciples make a crashing error, and so do some modern theologians, whose failure to distinguish nature from the overdevelopment caused by sin, and whose contempt for the age-old traditions of the Church, redound into a disaster of Western life and culture.

Similarly the degree of union with God attainable in a contemplation of him perfectly compatible with the active life, would have reached a level beyond our present understanding. Even the great saint and mystic, embarrassed as he is with a nature all too fallen, barely indicates the natural and supernatural achievement of mankind in the state of original wholeness. In Christ indeed, and the human nature of Christ was human, we find the perfection of the contemplative life joined to the most active of works. The society of mankind likewise would have ‘fixed’ itself in the good and the true of the human order towards God their Environer in the early beginnings of social development, so that evil would have been avoided with horror as the most disruptive of incursions. The scientific and the theological achievements of man, with all petty arrogance removed of scientist or theologian, and with human priorities formed by sincere love not commercial exploitation, would have reached a much higher peak of human civilisation very much earlier in the history of man.

Neither can we say to what degree a much more intimate knowledge of Nature and of God would have protected men even from natural disasters. Neither do we know in what manner, or upon how fine a balance the laws of Nature are related to the state of man’s inner being and his interaction upon Nature as a principal factor in its environment. We do not know whether perhaps the relationship of God to men, which is a dynamic relationship, the order of spiritual life and grace, is a principle also of natural harmonic law in the environment of the planet, even of the universe itself. We cannot say how far the unbalance introduced by sin is a principle of disorder even in Nature itself. To point the sort of issue at question, —if Jesus Christ was the Heir of the Ages, and the consummation upon which even the natural laws of man’s environment were poised, can we be sure that the ‘darkness over the earth’ and the earthquake recorded at the time of his crucifixion were an incidental coincidence, or rather a result of the ‘natural disaster’ of his death? The sort of scientist who would snicker at the mere suggestion of such a thing is being too small-minded. There was a time when nothing existed higher in order of reality than molecules, and if we presume that there is no God, and no centred intelligent consciousness within the universe that can poise forward an equational history up to man... then there is no future either. The concept of ‘Man’ would seem very metaphysical and non-empirical to the consciousness of a molecule. However, things went on happening, even up to man, and it could be that they will go on happening, even up to and beyond the grave, for the measure of the mind of God (for actually He does exist) is almost as far beyond the mind of man as that of man beyond the molecule.

To the writer it seems very likely that the relationship of man to matter and of matter to God through man, is a principle of harmonic law in Nature. Man and his works should form part of the harmonic environmental interplay of Nature one would have thought? In this case a great deal of the ‘problem of evil’ may well arise from this loss of harmonic proportion through the Fall of Mankind. What is said in this respect is not suggested as theological fact or Christian truth, but as a speculation which does not lack some intrinsic probability from analogy. Even as speculation though, it is put with the proviso that any unbalance of the material environment of man that derives from the effects of sin in man, can be only an extrinsic lesion factor. Matter is incapable of sin, except in man. In him alone can there exist an intrinsic lesion of his personality, and even in him it must fall short of an intrinsic corruption of his personality.

The ‘massa damnata’

The effects of the Fall, inherited by the natural laws of human inheritance, and reinforced by the infection of the social tradition and environment of mankind, will cause that neither individually nor socially can man attain the perfection of his destiny in that harmonious and proportionate growth towards God which should be part of the evolution of creation itself. Neither the beatification of the individual, nor the transformation of human society and the created economy of Nature can progress in the proportionate step by step manner which should be the response of creation to the mind of God. The lesion in the flesh caused originally by the spirit, and reacting with the created spirit at the moment of Man within the womb to become again a lesion of the person, this is not only opposed to the perfection of God as ‘displeasing’ but is something more. As a lesion in the nature of Man, it is a lesion in the order of his entity, it makes it impossible for this spiritual creation to co-operate fully with God, from his natural potential, in the ontological perfecting of creation as a process.

Creation itself can no longer proceed from harmony to harmony, from state to state, according to the symmetry of the mind of God in bringing to consummation his perfect work. It is this which makes of mankind the ‘massa damnata’, the condemned leaven of St. Augustine and the Fathers of the Church: the lesion in man is specific upon his nature. This doctrine makes sense of man as the paradox of creation and sense of the environmental harmony of Evolution as a process. The Unity-Law caters for all else, even for the most advanced of the primates below the human order. How then in man, the crown of this progression, is there no ‘Unity-Law’ of wisdom which caters for and compels the wisdom and the love of men? Because God is the Unity-Law for man in Person, and man, having fallen in state and in status, can no longer co-operate adequately with the life he draws from God to establish and to maintain the ‘Kingdom of God’ in the individual life or in the social life of mankind.

The reality of sin is one with the empirical reality of man in the history of Nature. The doctrine of Teilhard de Chardin is a denial of the facts of man as well as a denial of the doctrine of Original Sin. It is impossible to postulate an inevitable growth of man towards an apocalyptic excellence, unless we can show a principle of harmonious co-operation with God in man the individual, and in human society from the beginning, deepening through time. One submits that this is not possible. The Crucifixion would be a better symbol for the history of man through time up to now than the Second Coming in great power and majesty. No:— all the coming of the Kingdom of God through history has been the far off foreshadowing of the Second Coming of Alpha and Omega. If there had been no sin as the Church understands it and teaches it, there had been no crucifixion and no ‘second coming’ in victory: whatever the details of the Economy, victory would have been from the beginning.

The deepening power of man’s intellect within a more stable and more universal environment, must bring in amenities and add a degree of beauty to life which did not exist so generally before. The root of sin remains as powerfully as before, and the fear of a catastrophe greater than anything which has existed before is always suspended over us as a sword of Damocles.

The Orwellian nightmare

Apart from the sins of bestiality in the broadest sense of the word, and the crass sensualism and cynicism which increases rather than decreases in the culture of the West in particular, there looms the consummating sin of pride, pride of the intelligence of men, anxious to use the power of Science within a philosophy of human self-sufficiency to remake man, not in the image of God in Christ, but in the image of self-adoration, of AntiChrist. The Orwellian nightmare haunts us uneasily because we know it could happen, perhaps even anticipate that it must happen. If Teilhard de Chardin were right the vision ahead of society should always be a little more high and noble and free intrinsically, it should not be possible for the more intellectual embodiment of power to embody a more intellectual and subtle evil. We adumbrate however that it is so. It is the deliberate orientation of mankind within the achieved World Society, and towards the Orwellian nightmare of a human machine Society which points the reality of the root of sin that remains in man at all times and ages, for it makes possible the supreme sin against the nature of man, a sin which would outweigh the betrayals, the cruelties, the primitive degradation of more innocent ages, the subjection that is to say of the apex of the human spirit not directly to God, but directly to man.

It is the well-meaning intellectual, blind with the arrogance of his personal ‘philosophy of Science’ who is the real prophet of AntiChrist, and who would bring in again a society more rigidly hierarchical and servile than the Egypt of the Pharaohs. This would be a highly privileged aristocracy of talent, self-perpetuating through its own scientific myths, in which from the cradle all men would be indoctrinated, and self-perpetuating too through a selective election into the oligarchy that rules, and that controls the breeding beneath.

The gelded serfs who watched the computers and ministered the services to their overlords of superior intrinsic intelligence would not differ in any spiritual respect from the semitic slaves who ran before the chariots of the Lords of ancient Egypt and Assyria. Not by bread alone does man live, nor by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of man, but by the words that proceed out of the mouth of God. The stultification of the intrinsic spiritual personality of a man, in the name of wisdom and intelligence, of the ‘Philosophy of Science’, this would be a greater sin against the nature of man than the submerging of men as slaves in the vast labouring class of the civilisations of two thousand years and more ago. The root of sin is that it could happen with the increase in man of intellectual potential. We saw an adumbration in the philosophy of Nazism that it had begun to happen. If the future of Man were apocalyptic, with the opening of new horizons of human power, the danger should get less not greater, we should become ‘confirmed in the good’. The doctrines of both Original Sin, and of the Redemption, are much more realistic and much more genuinely hopeful for mankind in the end.

If the work and labouring of Christ is the leavening of the ‘massa damnata’ of mankind which is redeemed in God’s abiding love of them and draw upon them, we may expect some improvement in human life and quality. To draw out from men what we can of the life-principle of God given them by grace is both the meaning of life, and the first striving of the soul that loves his fellows. Given the incursion of sin, we will never have on earth ‘Thy Kingdom come’ with any lasting fullness and yet we pray for it, and are in duty bound so to do. Why is this? Because it is the law of life and being, God wills it eternally, and the seed of his grace buds for it, grows to it, and would blossom into it, —there is no other end to the yearnings of the human heart, except, ‘Thy Kingdom come’ even when we crucify it, not knowing what it is. The victories which are achieved in this present time and present wounded state are precious to God and the sweetest of all joys to the individual man. Then, there is the lasting order of the Kingdom in his Church at least, the brotherhood, the consolation, and the loyalty each unto the other, and if the fullness of the nations does not enter in, or entering in in the body yet fails in the spirit... the final victory is beyond the present order, and the scanty triumphs of this present time mark the seeding to one hundred-fold of their final fruitfulness and leavening through time and beyond time. Even if Heaven on Earth will never be ushered in without the apocalyptic coming of God again in the same flesh, even if history will know only Palm Sundays followed so fast by Good Fridays, even so the fruit is precious and the prize is great. Good Friday is followed by Easter Sunday is it not? The final Good Friday of the life-principle of God in Man, the final crucifixion of the seed of grace on earth, will be followed by the final Easter Resurrection…. The Christian has been told it already, and the prophecies of Christ do not bear out the world order of Teilhard de Chardin, but they fit very well the expected order of the struggle in the heart of man and the society of man that follows from the facts of sin.

Unless the environment of human society becomes intrinsically good, less arrogant and less sensual, and less careless of the neighbour and the poor, we cannot expect an increase in the perfection of Man’s spiritual personality in proportion to the perfection of his conquest over disease. He is not totally corrupt, his wounded flesh must acknowledge and does acknowledge first the Law of God. Then his spirit, wounded and slanted by its union of being with the flesh, comes pure from the creating fiat of God, and thus is only consequentially involved in the same natural imperfection. The whole being of man invokes, and should provoke love and compassion, and God is faithful. The touch and the creative play of the grace of God within the spirit becomes now no longer a principle of ontological prompting from a whole good to a further expansion of perfection in the good, but a work of healing and striving, which prompts onwards indeed, but with much pain and sorrow, and with great imperfection within the attainments of its own sphere, for it is the work of God, yes, but also the work of man, and man is wounded by sin.

The vineyard of the unjust husbandmen

The order which God has established in himself from the beginning remains the same, quite unchanged, for the Wisdom of God and the Will of God proceeds within Being which is immutable. If the power of sin could condition the work of God within the primary intention of God, then evil would be able to condition the Divine Being, and this is impossible. God does not change His mind because of evil, but by applying the Divine Wisdom and Love to the order and condition of the damaged creation, brings forth the same substantial order and providence as before, but with a difference indeed of conditioning upon and within the creature, as it strives towards him, and co-operates with him.

This work must now, in the creaturely nature, be wrought through contradiction, pain and much sorrow. There is the contradiction to God within the nature of the fallen spiritual creature, and the contradiction also from the wills of those who will not co-operate with God nor be fulfilled in him. Very briefly, let one facet of the meaning of Christ be illustrated. When we say that Sin as a total convergence of creaturely power against the transforming work of God, cannot effect any change or modification upon the Being of God, the statement is true. Very different is the case with the human nature of God in person, when the King comes to claim his inheritance, and finds it in the jealous hold of the ‘unjust husbandmen’. They will say ‘this is the heir, let us kill him, and then the inheritance will be ours’. If the human nature in him, the King of Kings is to rise to the measure of the original work of God in creation, to fulfil the divine will, it will be a work of re-creation against the loss and the damage of sin. This is the ‘will of my Father’ in the statements of Christ. The shock of contradiction, and the pain of the experience of sin as an ontological resistance1 to the creative work and will of God, will be appalling upon him in a manner no other created nature can understand or share...‘surely he has borne our infirmities and has carried our sorrows,... and the Lord has lain upon him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah. c. 53. vv.3-7).

The work that Christ effects in himself, in the Divine and the human natures, for us, and unto ‘my Father’ is, once again, a work in the real order, an ontological achievement in the order of being, a creating anew, a bringing of life out of loss, and even out of death of the soul. It is not a work in the order of a legal title, or a notional acceptance of what He did as ‘satisfying’. The satisfaction is an eduction of new values of being that heal and restore, and for reasons that must appear in a later chapter, they can be educed only through stress and pain. All achievement against resistance is painful, and the supreme achievement against the supreme resistance is supremely painful.

This is the meaning of Christ, as it is shown us in the parable of the ‘unjust husbandmen’. The King owned the Vineyard by right, and it was the inheritance of the Son by right of providence and intention, not because of sin. The King’s Son comes into his own, as St. John the Evangelist also indicates, because it is his own, not because of sin. He comes as the Heir of the Ages, the Crown of a perfect work, the consummation in man’s sphere of the wisdom, the power, and the love of God... the first fruits of the final consummation of creation, which is what the Christian calls ‘Heaven’ the fullness of the Kingdom of God sown in the poising of the elements in a meaningful wisdom. But, because of sin, the tenants of the Vineyard will say ‘this is the heir, let us kill him, and then the inheritance will be ours’... illogical, and quite foolish, but this is precisely what all sin says against the sovereignty of God.

Thus the Son of God and Son of Man, the heir of creation, came into his damaged inheritance to vindicate and to redeem. This effects a war, a contradiction from the force of the will of created evil, from the evil worked by the wills of men upon matter and upon spirit, and from the evil influence within the order of the purely spiritual nature as well, the forces of Satan. This is said in the orthodox and personal sense, and as no metaphor. All creation is a communion and an interaction of dynamic forces, within their proper order, and their proper order is measured by the rights, powers, and functions of their natures in the original creative intention of the Divine Will. Evil damages and robs a nature, but it does not take away from it its nature, or its natural rights of action and of influence, and here lies the struggle of Good and Evil throughout all creation until the consummation of the present order and plan. The Communion of Saints is so, only because the communion of natures exists first as a prior fact of influence and power.

He whose right was to be enthroned above all nations, tribes, and tongues, and in his recognition to have swept man and man s sphere towards the final transfiguration of all things in God, was bound to hear the voices of men crying out ‘Away with him, crucify him’. They did it because the same reality of evil and the lesion it causes, had already crucified the image of God within their own being. Therefore we said that mankind did it, and no one race, and no one age of history, and in case there should be doubt, we can point how men, and mankind, and nations have done it again and again throughout history, in the history of his church and his Kingdom. The glory which is the Divine Being, when it impacts the fallen in creation in the full spoken word of Truth, brings a most intolerable crisis into human affairs. The Son of God cannot be ignored. He must subdue all things unto himself, or be taken away from amongst men. There is no compromise whatever in the Living Word of God, and the impact of that Person upon a world grown gray in compromise with lies and evil, must be total conversion through a total pain of purification, or a fury of irritation at the impossible presence of Eternal Truth. The great mass of mankind and the leaders of the people would never, in the majority, go all the way with the unqualified Good and the uniqualified True. In this very fact they exemplify what it means to speak of men as the ‘massa damnata’. Christ convicts the world of sin because they ‘knew him not’ when he came.

The crisis of Christ in the individual mind and heart is relived in the crisis of Christ in the social, national, and international spheres. The world impact of the Incarnation has not been as it ought to have been if the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin were true. If the ascent of man were an ascent in which pain and evil were simply the limitations in being of the imperfections of the creature, then both human perfection should increase in a steady and specific manner with time, and the natural consummation of man should have been at the manifestation of Omega Point. He who, according to Teilhard de Chardin, had from the beginning immersed himself in matter, that he should be the focal point of mind, ever drawing on ahead and upwards, at his manifestation as man should have perfected and consummated mankind, and man’s planet with the creature in a new point and moment of ‘boiling’ in which apex there appeared the stabilisation of a new creature, and a new order in harmony and in kind. Certainly we would have expected it, for the King of Kings, upon whom the bases of the universe do rest, having now emerged centred and personified as Divine and Human, should as a very power of Being, have effected in this Incarnation the moment of perfection for mankind. It did not happen: they crucified him. Because first, the Divine Essence is not the physical principle of the creature’s being, and God was never immersed in matter as a principle of the evolution of living forms, and secondly because evil is not creaturely contingency, but the defect of natural good and natural truth where it ought to be found.

The ‘World’ not the ‘Kingdom’

Without the incursion of sin, the individual man, human society and the cosmic order would have developed and been transformed in a mutual interaction which would have been a continuous ascent of perfection in the order of being. The Incarnation would be, and should have been the supreme moment of Ascent in the supernatural order, for mankind. That one may concede. That it was not so, is perfectly explained by the incursion of sin. The perfect co-operation of man with God, and the measured ascent of man’s social order has not, and could not be given. The manner of the coming of the King of Kings, and the manner of his work was that of a Redemption, and a Redemption first of all in the spiritual order, and the order of grace, a Redemption which begins in this Age, but cannot be completed in this Age, because the lesion of sin remains in the organic matter of man, by the laws of creation, and because the freewill of man remains at all times. The perfect restoration will need a new configuration of matter to the perfect spirit, and that requires like the victory of Christ, a resurrection from the dead, it cannot take place in a straight line ascent of being.

The doctrine of Redemption in any authentic sense has no place in The Phenomenon of Man, because the doctrine of Original Sin has no place either. The ‘World’ of Teilhard de Chardin should ascend by steps to meet Omega Incarnate in perfect peace, in Heaven on Earth, very much as in the Marxist dream of the natural ascent of mankind to a state of earthly paradise. The ‘World’ should have known Omega Point when the Enfleshment was manifested, because its pains and tears were only the natural result of created limitation, and this is the liberation, the ‘boiling point’ of a new order, and the transformation beyond the pains of contingency, of all things in and through God... It did not happen that way.

Very different is ‘the ‘World’ in the usage of Christ, who should be allowed to speak for himself, and whose doctrine in the pages of the New Testament is all too clear, as is that of the apostles he trained. This ‘World’ is the convergence of views, actions, lusts, and powers of spirit and matter that oppose the Truth and the Good of God, that work against the convergence of all things and all men in the Good and the Truth of God for human society. And of this conspiracy to evil rather than to good, Christ asks ‘when the Son of Man shall come again, think you that he will find Faith on Earth...?’2 No: it will be the heedless lust and pride and selfishness of the days of Noah that stand for a figure of the same process and lack of orientation to God.

The words of Christ make sense of Man, and sense of historic Christianity, in its own failures as well as the failures of the direct enemies of God. There is no pessimism in Christianity, only a great realism, and in the realism there must be sorrow, for sin and its lesion in every man is very real indeed. There is no pessimism because the final victory is assured in Christ, and in this present time, to light in the hearts of men the love of God, to tend, foster, heal, and help the growth of the spirit in knowledge of God, love, joy, and peace, this is the one great joy beyond all others, no matter if the work be less than perfect, as we well know it is less than perfect, in the conscience of every one of us. Yet there will never be an identity between the Kingdom of God, and the social order of mankind, as twin aspects of one convergence of human thought and action. Not while the Son of God remains a sign set to be contradicted. The ‘World’ is not the world of Nature, nor the world of human society as a natural result of human culture and intercourse, but the ‘World’ which is formed by the interplay, action, and convergence of every opposition to God, and the society, loosely speaking, incarnate often in whole systems of state and of law, which the entire concatenation of rational evil forms against the Good and the Truth of God. The children of this ‘World’ find their affinities and their natural attraction towards each other, and against the order of Christ, as much as the brethren of Christ find and love each other in the Church which is the ‘Kingdom’ of God.

When an age comes in which it is declared that the Kingdom of God and of the World are one thing, and of one mind and heart, and there is no longer any room for distinction between them, we shall suspect not that Heaven on earth has been ushered in, but the great and final lie of AntiChrist is at hand. The Christian victory is upon this earth in every work of God, in every spark of grace in the minds and hearts of men, in the renewal given by Christ, and the new birthday of the Font of Baptism. The Christian victory is on earth in all good joy, and noble friendship, in the sweetness of human life, even damaged by sin, in nature and in supernature, despite the tears... but the perfect victory is not upon this earth, because the root of sin remains in the organic laws of the flesh, and passes upon the spirit. This cannot be undone in any straightline ascent, but requires that the flesh, like Christ, rise again from the dead, and be newly conformed in perfection to the perfect spirit. Therefore, — ‘we know that every creature groans and travails in pain, even till now, and not only it, but even we ourselves who have the first-fruit of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body’ (Romans. 8.vv.22,23). Even in the order of Redemption and the restoration of the birthright of man, the redemption of our body is not possible in the full sense, even after baptism and grace. The wound of concupiscence remains, because it is organic, but even so there is sanctification, healing, hallowing of both body and soul, intrinsically, through grace. It is worth remarking in this passage that the obvious meaning of ‘creature’ here, as in Mark 16.v.15 is ‘man’, the ‘rational nature’ and not ‘all creation’ etc., as one can find in so many modern translations, which seem to ignore context and other usage in the New Testament.

Evil works and also wrecks, by a true causality, the causality of being which is defective;—defective in order, in proportion, in balance, in orientation. It seems true to say that the good and the true, and especially the more perfect wisdom and the more perfect charity, also works, and heals, by a true causality. This is to say that the effect and the merit of good works is not ‘arbitrary’, given by God without any intrinsic proportion to the end achieved, but that just as an evil man effects evil, and this work is a causal effect in the order of the real, is ‘ontological’ to use the only word available, so also the effect of good and true, the effect of the grace of God both directly, and through those who participate with him his Life and his Love, is also ontological, is really causal and proportionate in the order of being. This means to say that the ‘victory’ of God which ‘overcomes the world’ is truly the application to the creature of the dynamism and power of the superior, more holy, and more perfect Being of God, and that from its own intrinsic power as superior in the order of reality, it draws forth re-creation, healing, and intrinsic improvement in our sin damaged personalities.

If this were basically true, it would be true also of our own co-operation with God, in the same way as the causality of the creature, which it has from its natural being, does not deny the overall causality of God, but is part of its manifestation and bringing into actual existence. It would give so much more meaning also to the ‘vicarious’ offering, and to interior prayer as a power in the order of reality, conjoined to, and prompted by the work, the sacrifice, and the resurrection of Christ... It does not derogate from the meaning of the Cross in any way, to say that the victory of Christ, and that of the Church, his People, through the ages, is not a reward of faith, hope, and charity which is simply arbitrary as the ‘good pleasure’ of the Father, but that it should be seen as the ontological achievement in the order of the real of the power and Life of Christ in the Church and in the world. Just as when armies crash one against the other, the victory is that of superior power, so also the victory of love and grace against the very real force of evil, is a victory of superior real force, the true overcoming of evil, in the bringing forth of superior good against it.

Perhaps in Christian theology the content of the word ‘supernatural’ has not been thought out by us deeply enough. We tend to think of its content as meaning something that God does or gives without the intrinsic, causal measure of natural law and natural causality. But is this true? The supernatural order, while it is ‘gratuitous’ in its relation to what we may expect or claim, is not the arbitrary’. The supernatural is the communication to nature of the Being of God in the supreme degree that God can begin, and then finish in the created nature the image of God. The Being of God is wisdom, is truth, is beauty, is good, is proportion by very definition. The communication of the supernatural then to nature, will perfect nature in a continuous order of truth, wisdom, law and ordered measure... for the communication to created nature of what we call the ‘supernatural’ is the communication of the supreme in ontology, in the order of real being.

The Fall is a terrible reality. In its effects it is an empirical disharmony at the peak of the process of Evolution, which is to say of creation. The triumph of God, in Christ, is also an empirical reality, the fact not of science but of theology, because the fact of the greater and not the lesser order of real being. This is the fact which, as a dynamic influence redeems the mind and heart of a man, and also the culture of human society, and the arts, and crafts, and sciences of mankind, by true perspective, orientation, and inspiration, if men will have it. When men will not accept this way, but their own arrogant, foolish and sensual knowledge, then the Crucifixion works itself out upon the temporal creature, upon mankind itself, and in a special sense upon the Church of Christ, as once upon his personal flesh. But through it all, even through the worst, there remains in us the seed of the Life of Christ, and the certainty of the final consummation of the creation in joy with him, as God intended from the poising of the universe, before man was. This end includes every spiritual creature which will accept the invitation of God which is first within the substance of its spirit, and in fullness in the individual and social manifestation of God in Christ. And through every pain and disaster of the contradiction, there remains as an experience the first-fruits, which is also a pledge, ‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world gives, do I give unto you: let not your heart be troubled nor let it be afraid’. (John.14.27.).

Chapter 13 Footnotes

1 This means a resistance from the very depths of the creature’s being, which

affects the very development to fruition, of the creation.

2 Luke c.18.v.8.

CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART SIX

JESUS CHRIST, SAVIOUR AND REDEEMER

The Book is available from Faith Keyway Trust http://www.faith.org.uk

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Word Incarnate

‘God, who at sundry times and in diverse manners, spoke in times past to the Fathers through the prophets, last of all in these days has spoken to us by his Son: whom he appointed Heir of all things, by whom also he made the world: who being the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, making a purgation of sins, sits on the right hand of the Majesty on high.’ (Hebrews. c.1 v1.)

Recapitulation in Christ

This chapter must necessarily pause and recapitulate to some degree the thought of the previous chapters, —the sweep of the creative economy of God from matter to man, from man to God, and hence from the beginnings to Christ, who is the means, and the end, of man’s consummation in God. The Greek Fathers of the Christian Church, and none more than St. Irenaeus (adver. Haereses. Book 5. passim) who is important for his early testimony to the Christology derived from the Apostolic age, mean ‘recapitulate’ in a sense beyond that of the modern ‘summarise’. They use the word to denote that all the force and meaning of the material universe, and the spiritual personality of Man, works up to a climax in Christ, the King and the Heir of the Ages, who as God in Person, brings all things to a head, and to a consummation of fulfilment in his own Being, in the Incarnation of God.

In the beginning... God

So in the first instance there is God, Alpha and Omega, for in the one instant of Being he spans all times and seasons and creations. There is God, without the necessity to create. We let pass consideration of the creation of the pure spirit uncomplexed with matter-energy, in order to stay more closely within the limits of our theme. There comes to be: Matter. It is not God, nor of the Divine Nature, nor in any manner of understanding is it to be identified with the Divine Being. Neither does the Divine immerse itself at the heart of matter-energies in order to be the principle of the eduction of ascending forms of being, through the progression of evolution in creation. . .

Matter does not come into being in time. Time begins with matter energy. Space and time are aspects of the type of potentiality to growth, development, and relative form, proper to that order of being we call ‘Matter’. Time is the ordered movement of energies upwards and onwards into forms, and ever more complex forms, of unitary beings. The recognition of the order of relativity, and of the succession of this eduction of the actual from the potential, is time as an instrument of local measurement, but time of itself is the ordered relativity of becoming according to an intrinsic succession. In God there is no potential, only total possession of Total Life and so in God there is no ‘time’. God is ‘The Present’ and that Present is the dynamic content of the Consciousness of God, a content which spans in its Eternal Momentum of knowledge and will, all the intervals and successions of created times: spans, without being numbered in or within such series.

Matter also makes ‘Space’. Space, like time, is an aspect and a function of matter-energies as they are poised within the Unity-Law and are in development. There would be no time and no space, without the permeation of matter by this law of control and direction. Time and space are meaningful categories of the ontological history of being, and history is the path taken by meaning, and by intelligibility, in the progression upwards of creation.

The universe is ‘nowhere’

As a collectivity, the universe is nowhere, it is present only unto God. Space is a function of matter as universe-making, it proceeds from the nature of matter. . . . One could put it this way: the urge of the potential of creation to realise successive forms of being in an ordered relation of cause and effect, an urge from the ‘knowledge’ embodied in the universe of matter through the Unity-Law, that urge and potential is ‘Time’.

The urge and potential of the same creation to make real the content of successive forms in their developmental relationships, and their potential to successive higher phases, that is an urge proceeding from the ‘will’ embodied in the universe of matter through the Unity-Law, and that aspect of urge and of potential is ‘Space’. These two properties of matter in development, which have an intrinsic analogy to intellect and will in the personality of the spiritual creature, are so much correlative functions of matter in evolution, that they are well described by the unitary expression ‘Space-Time’ rather than thought of as separate aspects of reality.

There is no ‘Space’ in God, for all his Will and his Possession is his perfect Being. . . the ‘Immensity’ of God spans all development, and all created space, but it is not measured by them, nor with them….

The Unity-Law, which is what the Marxist names the ‘Dialectic’, but named without the characteristic of immanent contradiction, necessitates through time and space the eduction of higher forms of entity, through motions of matter-energy which could be expressed as ‘mathematics’. This we have called the ‘equational’ constitution of the Evolution of creation from primal elements to the brain of man.

If the necessity is not ‘mathematical’ in the sense of deterministic, then there is no ascent of the sciences from physics to the outskirts of psychology, since without a mathematical necessity there can be no meaningful organisation through time and space of basic elements.

But there was such an ascent, there is meaning in the laws of the sciences, and exact meaning in the laws of the exact sciences, determinate meaning in the laws of the determinate sciences. . . . Animism is a pestilence in the philosophy of Science. There is but one God, not a god in every element that pulsates with being: consciousness is not diffused over the entire cosmos. If it were how would it cogitate as one focus?

Evolution unintelligible without God

Hence it is argued that cause and effect in the universe redounds into a demonstration that matter is unintelligible in its own order without God. These higher natures which the Marxist ascribes to the Dialectic, or the Rationalist to ‘Creative Evolution’ etc., as forms and substances are demonstrably of a higher order of being than elemental forms, whence then are they contained on any title of necessity within the forms, the motions, the limits of the ‘psyche’ if you will, of elemental energies?

The concept of ‘Evolution’ as history must mean an equal degree of necessity at both ends of the equation. Man was there at the beginning, and yet in what sense? The beginning could only have been that precise formulation of energies in motion, but relative to what, what is the ‘environment’ that can determine a meaning beyond the nature of the elemental energy? The appeal to ‘Evolution’ is meaningless, for if there is no God, there is just the here and now, and the level of energies that are found. Can the Cosmos think, and if so can it think beyond itself? Can a baby formulate the Relativity equations of an Einstein? We must face the fact that a potential which is in something as real, but not yet-existent, implies another Environer that bridges the gap between potency and act in time and in space. . . There must be a centred Intellect which poises the elements to bring forth man, and explains man in terms of such entitatively impotent forms of reality. In any other way, appealing to ‘Dialectics’ to ‘Nature’ to ‘Life Force’ one is simply making up ‘God’ in small pieces, as one goes along, and making him foolishly in one’s own image and likeness, and then with ingratitude abandoning him when man feels able to ‘take over’. Better to face sheer facts.

The ‘Law’ in life

So with time and space, there is history and evolution. Growth in depth of being, and co-operation of the creature unto God, from its own content. By this we mean that what is developed forms in a necessary dependence upon the past, but the emergence of the higher forms of beings, both as kinds and as individuals, requires in addition that they be brought forth in and through the dynamic Will of God, which is ever present to the creation.

The individual as ‘me’ as a one thing, or a substance cannot be brought into reality by lesser entities with a lower degree of what, in the broad sense of the word, will be best understood in English as personality’. What we are saying in this context the Catholic philosopher would know as the ‘divine concourse’ or co-operation of God with secondary causes in the act of creation. The creature must give of its own, and what it gives is intrinsically part of what is brought forth. There would be no ‘Unity-Law’ and no ‘history’ if this were not so …To make God draw out all things and all meanings without this intrinsic relativity of the past upon the present, what is known as ‘Occasionalism’ in philosophy, denies the real causality of natures in Evolution, and reduces to another form of Animism. Yet the ‘fiat’ of God in creating is a dynamic fiat, and to be intelligible to our human mind means that God is always present and always causative in and through the actions of creatures.

With the emergence of ‘Life’, the ‘Law’ within which all material being is poised, continues through the higher actualities of this new order of being. The species of living things are interdefined one to another. They form a system of harmonic control and of development one to another, part of which is implied in the deeper modern recognition of ‘ecological’ balance and relationship. The ‘equation’ continues, and thus far, determinism also continues, determinism in the sense of that which is ‘programmed’ within a set context of variables, and a finite range of instinctive reaction. This is true even when the centralisation of the nervous system passes over to the brain, and the brain begins to mount with power. . . . The brain soars to a peak of versatility in one line among the primates, it presses against the limits of the law of Control and Direction to handle through the merely material environment, and yet the next mutation is the most disastrously progressive of all…

The ‘Law’ knows and wills, in Man

The most disastrously progressive, because all organic progress is of necessity relative to environmental determination and now the environment has been sloughed off like a larval jacket, and what has emerged, —is it tragedy or just a monstrous birth? It is neither, it would be the one or the other except that at this ultimate value in the equation of matter-energies and material forms, — a value absolute in any part of the universe, — the supreme event of matter, in the brain of all animal, becomes intrinsically co-relative to spirit, and the soul must be created unto matter at the moment of Man, or this matter thus organised is unintelligible as substance, and as life.

This is a value, the soul, which cannot emerge and evolve, a principle which is dependent and ‘relative’ in the sense that it is created and developmental, a principle without which the material organisation of Life at the peak value of this type of brain is unintelligible, but a value which is absolute because not material, not dissoluble, and made in the likeness of the Essence of God.

There now exists within the universe a being in whom the principle of the Unity-Law is centred in a conscious personality, a creature which 'knows’ and ‘thinks’ and ‘wills’ and ‘loves’ in focused terms of 'right’ and of ‘wrong’. There is a being which understands the notion of future and of past, as well as its living in the ever existential present.

There is a certain analogy here, in the mind of Man, with that Eternity which is the ‘Present’ of the All-Conscious God. To be able to comprehend the past as the potential of one’s own being, back to the beginnings of the universe, and from the present ‘now’ to anticipate the future as the existential continuation of one’s own experienced present, in, it is hoped and prayed, an increasing depth of fulfilment, is to possess one’s being in a certain 'unity’ which spans the totality of the creation of God. In God there is no 'potential’ back through the past, in which one was not, and yet in a sense one was, nor any anticipation of the future without limit from a larval present here and now, in which one is, but is not fully consummated. In God there is total possession of total fulfilment, and this fulfilment is the self-measure of all created ages and entities, and the certainty of their coming-to-be. This is the Consciousness of God which is his Eternity. Yet the created analogy seems to the writer to be real enough, and to demarcate in a psychological manner the difference between mere matter, and its order of the existential present, till death dissolves its 'person', and the spiritual entity which is not dissolved by death.

Environment and Environer

The ‘Law’ becomes personal in man as the realised order of the personal knowledge of the good and the evil, and the power to choose. At this juncture the principle that actuates the Unity-Law in mere matter, the principle which thus far has framed the structures of all being within the universe, becomes impotent, and the Unity-Law passes over from the principles contained within matter, into the Principle of all law and of all matter, the Law passes over into the direct influence of God in Person, upon the spiritual nature of man.

God is for man the sunshine and the shower, the time and the season, the bread of the spirit by which a man does live, for no more than any other created thing, does a man live by and in himself alone. The principle of creative evolution continues indeed, but now through the direct energising of God in Person upon the created spiritual personality of man: God is the Environment, which is to say the Environer, of man the individual person, and of mankind, the family into which all men are born.

Science has passed into philosophy, and from philosophy inevitably into theology—for the relationship of God to man as the principle of law-to-fulfilment is an ontological relationship—by the natural transition of order and of continuity in evolution, when the soul is caused to be into the matter of man. If Science has passed into the order of theology with man, it has passed also from the determinism of the exact sciences, which are meaningless in man, to the order of Revelation by the same ‘scientific’ necessity of the ascent of being. Theology is meant to include both the full deployment of the economy of God even unto the beatific vision, and also the first and every influence of God upon the individual from the womb onwards. All of this is but one integrated order of Salvation (and now, we think, from the first quickening of God within the womb, also of Redemption) from which no man escapes or is excluded. The consummation is a new Heaven and a new Earth’ in the fullness of created time. In much the same way the transition from the merest elements to the fullness of man is a continuous creation by Evolution which reaches a peak. So also, in the making of the soul, the process is taken up into God, as in an ‘atomic’ beginning, to be consummated in that plenitude of consummation which is the condition known as ‘Heaven’.

Science to Revelation

If Science in mankind, passes over the order of the computable into the order of philosophy and theology, then it has of necessity passed into the order of Revelation. Revelation is the communication of God to the human spirit according to knowledge and love, and God must communicate, for otherwise man cannot either know his destiny or the means to it. Revelation is natural to men. There is revelation between a baby and its parents, for who will dare to say that somehow a mother and a father do not ‘get through’ by dint of sheer personal ‘mana’ of mind that expresses through the flesh, in the gurgles and blandishments of baby speech from parents to child? Certainly, we have all watched a highly intelligent infant with much pointing and gesticulation try with a torrent of as yet unintelligible words to communicate an idea and an experience. If you know where he has been, perhaps naughtily, or what he has just done, you may know what he is trying to communicate in the way that elder children do, —through words— in that torrent of infantile gibberish. Nevertheless it is not gibberish, though not intelligible as meaningful sound, something is communicated, if only the excitement of the world to a very small boy, for it is Man that makes speech, not speech that makes Man.

There is ‘revelation’ in all teaching, from mother’s knee to the seminar of the university, there is ‘revelation’ in all forms of art, though not every man can use every key in this context. There is ‘revelation’ on the television screen at the push of a button, across time and space, and the differentiation of cultures. All communication that we experience, whether from spirit directly through the soul, from spirit through the medium of matter without words, the impact of personality through the flesh, or with the fullness of intelligibility, from the soul, through the flesh, in the fullness of both orders in cooperation, —all this is ‘revelation’.

Man does not begin to exist and to fulfil himself without communication in the flesh and in the spirit, and it is but common sense that an order of ‘dialogue’ between God and men will have to be an order of Revelation. This follows from the nature of Man, once he has emerged into creation as a fact of the ascent of being. The order of being passes from the order of the exact sciences, to the order of the deterministically ‘programmed’ with life, and then with the soul, to the level of philosophy and theology. Those are the levels at which man as a person is fulfilled, not by the sciences of the organisation of being lower than mankind. Therefore philosophy, passing as it must into theology, and all its cultural appanage, is found in the beginnings with man, before ‘Science’ was or could be, and without these, as without the spiritual soul, there would be no sciences, and no cultural ascent of mankind. For a theology, God must reveal his personality to man, communicate, love, and teach, as much as does any father who is a scientist to his gurgling offspring.

The City of God

Revelation from God will take place first in the mind and heart of man, through ‘grace’ to which presence of God in the communication of light and love, man will be more sensitive in the beginning of the stock, and before the Fall. This is the ‘walking with them in the afternoon air’ so beautifully and so adequately expressed in the first chapters of the book of Genesis in the bible. The communication of God will follow the nature of man, and so the revealing of God will be more explicit and more certain in the ‘spiritual genius’ than in all men. Just as human society needs the patriarch first, then the king, the counsellor, the assembly, so also human nature, independently of sin, needs the priest, the prophet, and the church. This natural order of human nature, which adumbrates the sacramental and the incarnational economy, is much emphasised and underlined by the incursion of sin, but of itself it is not dependent upon the incidence of sin.

The City of God begins to rise, as human cities did, from the merest simplicities, from the bower and bivouac to the planned square and the towering edifice. The spiritual manifestation of the City of God will be distorted grievously and defiled by the manifestations of human sin: the cockle is now oversown among the wheat. Lust and devilry, superstition and crassness of mind and heart will be built upon that foundation of the human spirit upon which finally the Christ of God is to be raised at the culmination of the ages.

It cannot be avoided, the Crucifixion is not simply some symbol, but the reality of sin as an incursion, and in an indirect sense God’s judgement upon the ‘Kingdom of this World’. To crucify is what the power of evil in the spiritual creature has done to the ‘sons of God’ and to their divine image of the Father, from the beginning of human history until this present time. The story of man is the sorrow of sorrows, —but it is not unrelieved tragedy. There was redemption from the beginning, the salvaging of much that is good and fine, which looked for its true light and its true reorientation. There was redemption on the Cross, for there was love, truth, forgiveness work and resistance to evil in that death of martyrdom, and in the Resurrection of Christ, we also rise. As has been remarked in passing in the chapter on original sin, the Redemption through pain, the ‘draw’ on men, is an active ontological work, Christ is not a sacrifice for sin like a passive animal.

There will be Redemption which passes over into a lasting joy, the restoration of all things for those who love him, according to the original mind and intention of God. This rather is ‘Salvation’ the end and the consummation of creation for man, at least in so far as concerns this planet. Redemption begins with the poor fruits of wounded men, God’s blessing and acceptance of these first-fruits; through all the tears and the shame there is joy and peace of heart as well, the beginnings of the conformation of sin-wounded mankind to Christ. There are also the traitors and the destroyers who have no part with God, and many a slum too, within the City itself, but for all its faults the City rises, and it is of God, and is beautiful.

The difficulties of continuity

The higher the degree of human achievement the more, until the coming of Christ, will the questions and the errors of men tend to distort the truth of Religion. While it is our thesis that the Incarnation is predestined independently of sin, yet the incursion of evil does greatly emphasise the need mankind has for an authority more than the merely human. The effects of the doubts and the confusions of sin underline the rescuing effect of the Incarnation as a real ‘Redemption’ even while they need not be the motivation of the Incarnation as the original cause : the concept of ‘Salvation’ of course includes that of Redemption and goes beyond it, or at least it may do so. Human culture, especially when it is held in small pockets of mankind, grows in upon itself, becomes highly authoritarian, and intensely preoccupied with the affairs of state. It tends to bring ‘heresy’, human deviations of false teaching or of expediency into the vision of the things of God. If, in the Providence of God a line of Revelation more true than other lines which have diverged from the same basic inheritance is to be preserved, it must surely be preserved throughout a long childhood in a very simple, very traditionalist, and very rigid format of national life and culture. This cannot be for ever, for the vocation held within it is held for all mankind, but especially in the beginnings will it be true that ‘Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones’. (Luke. c.10.vv.21-24.)

God is no snob, He will communicate as much as he is able to get through, given the prejudices and misapprehensions of men, to all who seek him in prayer and in contemplation. He will communicate his grace to the sages, to the enlightened ones, and to the gurus of the great cultures of mankind. By the inevitable urge of human intercourse and charity what they have glimpsed with joy they will communicate to their brethren. Such lines of teaching may not be ‘true’ as the direct Way, Truth, and Life for men, but they will, even though obliquely bring to many an increased knowledge and love of God. They will give also a hope of the future, even while they lack certain authority, and a moral law, and are enmeshed with many and with woeful defects.

If good is greater than evil, God greater than Satan or the wickedness of evil men, then the line of the Unity-Law must be there, amidst all the flux and all the errors. God must have led, and have always led onwards, from the beginning. The ascent of being is now subject to contradiction, but in the Name of God the seed of his ‘Redemption’ which is consummated in his own Person, must survive the overwhelming waters of lies and perversion that gush from the mouth of the Dragon: the ‘Woman and her man child’—the Church, and the promise of Christ which she carries in her womb until the fullness of the time, —will have to be given the wings of an eagle, and be nourished as it were privately and in a contemptible condition according to human status, in the desert, until the Son be born, and be ‘taken up to God and to His throne’ for acknowledgement as Heir, and endowment with power. . . (See Revelations c.12 for allusions.)

This line of continuity can be found, and burst into human history very sure of itself, and very well focused in its doctrine and in its surety of special authority in the Christian bible, from the time of Abraham until now. Unlike the religions of the East there is a perfect continuity, and a coherent development of doctrine. There is hope for all mankind, for this is a religion of Messianism, and the line of the Unity-Law must above all things, and at all costs be that. There is no other possible rival to the Old Testament for its purity of doctrine and perception of God, when all the necessary allowances have been made. There is no other Faith of prophecy so well and even minutely fulfilled, and the sweep continues not only to the Messiah, and his hopeless débacle, as it must seem, but there is the resurrection of his message, parallel to the physical Resurrection of his body, and the resurrection ‘from the dead’ of his power and work, which work continues to the present time. When evidences are adduced for God, the line of the Unity-Law, and the Church of God, there must be included without fear, what is fact: that time and again it has been the way of God to snatch the victory out of the jaws of death.

The Church of God must be seen as the City of God whose King is the Heir of the universal ages. She is founded upon his life and power, draws her nourishment from his very being, the Godhead and the Manhood in one. She must teach with his authority, which is unique, for not a man’s authority, and in the essentials of her life she must dare to claim inerrancy upon basic doctrine, or else forfeit her claim to be the Teaching Church of God Incarnate in very Person. There is but one claimant for all of this, in a continuous and coherent line of succession from before Abraham to this present day. Even in these ecumenical days, indeed in the name of any true Ecumenism, which is the finding of reconciliation in the fullness of Christ, we must state openly that the line on earth of the Unity-Law of God, from the moving of elements to the consummation in Jesus Christ, abides in the Church that is One People, that is Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and of Rome through the succession of Peter. There alone, with the emphasis frankly upon Rome, is found the ever living and developing economy of God upon earth for mankind. What God may have wrought elsewhere in the universe is not yet known to us.

Union and communion; The womb of Mary

With the straddling of so much of the earth by the Roman Empire, and its inheritance by conquest of the unity imposed by lesser conquerors, the world begins to be united in that continuity of basic civilisation which has never since completely broken down. The Empire of Rome is said to have collapsed. In the military sense indeed, but never totally in its administrative genius, and as a cultural aspiration it simply survived. In Western Europe the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ of Western culture were at least a twilight. This survival is the civic aspect of the survival of the Christian Church, and the survival, so largely through the monks, of the Latin basis of its liturgy and its intercourse. From survival the Church led on first, to revival, one local aspect of which is the evangelisation and gradual civilisation of Saxon England.

The spiritual universalism, the ‘Catholicism’ essential to the doctrine and the messianism of the Church, readily led in train however much barbarised and germanicised, the civic sense of universal citizenship, the ‘envelopment’ of human spirit in the sense of Teilhard de Chardin, which the Romano-Hellenic Empire infused through its provinces. Not for nothing was Paul called to be the apostle of the nations, who did not hesitate to claim with pride full citizenship of the Roman Empire.

Into this continuation and deepening of the Commonwealth of Man, which Pope Paul VI has nobly seen to culminate of right in a United Nations which is possessed of genuine rights of jurisdiction within mankind, the civilisation of science has entered as an heir. This heir is unconscious, often arrogantly so in many individuals, of the complexity of this estate of man, and of the continuing sanction of Religion as the supporting value of the structure built upon the nations. In Britain at least, this is not necessarily the fault of the individual when a boy may be forced to ‘drop history' at the age of thirteen years in favour of the most narrowly utilitarian specialisation.

When the Empire of Rome straddles the world from the lowlands Scotland to the frontiers of India, the time is at hand also for the consummation of the economy of God. This is a culture critical in philosophy, developmental in theology, and pregnant with the first principles of the sciences themselves. These characteristics are displayed as much by the Greek and Latin Fathers of the Christian Church as by the great minds of classical Greece. The spirit lives on in the disputations of the Schoolmen, the same psychological characteristics are behind the surge of the Renaissance, the beginnings of the modern sciences proper, the adventurings in thought and in colonial and merchant expansion. This is the focus through which, in the scientific civilisation of today, mankind itself will be brought to a head in one Commonwealth.

It is to be expected in the wisdom of God that the Heir of the Ages shall be born within the times and the influence of this culture of men. It is also perhaps equally from the wisdom of God that according to the flesh he shall be a citizen of a race which is not of the Romano-Hellenic world, however much within its ambit, but which very perfectly unites in its culture as much of the East as of the West. For the Son of Man is without commitment to East or West, he is the Universal Man.

Hence we refer again to the world-place of the womb of Mary in the sweep of creation to its fruition within the City of God. We insist upon the plain, orthodox meaning of the Virgin Birth, we insist upon the perfect sense the doctrine makes in the economy of God. There must exist within the womb of matter the means by which the King of Creation comes into his own, for matter is shaped to his Coming and to fulfilment in his Being. The Economy of God is one work within the mind of God, and therefore one intention also. The structure and the laws of the universe are poised from the beginning towards its future consummation. The final end of that history through matter to man, and man for God, and the disposer and the means to that end in God is God alone himself, who made Incarnate is the principle of the glorification of all the orders of reality in his own Person. From God all things came, and unto God all things go back, and every man, and every science of matter and of spirit finds its wisdom and its meaning fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Therefore the means by which God consummates his own work for men among men, is within the laws and the organisation of material being. This is the supreme co-operation and the supreme gift of the material order to its Lord.

The vehicle by which Gold can consummate the Unity-Law as the order of creation, and so determine his own creature without being intrinsically determined in the order of the Divine Person, which for God is impossible, must be found naturally within the laws and the functions of material nature. For in the creative will of God the consummation of the material order is found to be in the fullest possession of the Divine Being, and the Being of God is the supernatural order, by definition. The means by which God unites in the one economy of Salvation the orders of nature and of grace, is the womb of woman: which is to say the womb of the woman of the vision of St. John, which again, is the womb of the Virgin Mary: “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”. This is the purpose of the “Virgin Birth” within the Unity-Law through which the entire material order has been framed—to consummate the natural order, in a natural way, from the power proper to matter, with the Consummator of Nature himself.

Once again, from such a position and such a statement it will be clear that the thesis of creation here presented does not admit of a dichotomy between the sciences and religion, they dovetail in man. It is necessary that the Heir to the Ages come into his own through the womb of woman, so that the human nature of man may be the perfect means of the action and hallowing of God in Person upon ‘his own’ and upon the material order itself, through mankind. Since the incursion of sin it is also necessary that through the same human nature of God in his Divine Person, there should be given the perfect vehicle too of reconciliation and restoration, not only as a fact, but as an ontological work in the real order, in the living order, in its own right. In this magnificent consummation of the created order by God in himself, it cannot happen that the Divine Being be subjected to the intrinsic relativism of a coming to be, also in personality, which is involved in the co-operation with God of human beings in sexual intercourse. This is impossible in God, although of its own, and in its own order of true co-operation with God for the peopling of both time and eternity, this work is the principal glory and the most noble office in the Church, of the sacrament of holy matrimony.

And so the Word is made flesh

Therefore at a time well chosen, not from within the halls of princes or of nobles, that God might show that every peasant is a prince, and every serving maid a princess, for they are born into the family of God—-the Word of God, the Divine Wisdom who is a Person, was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, the glory of the Only-Begotten Son of God, full of grace and of truth...

Epilogue

“He who is the Image of the Invisible God, The Firstborn of every creature, For in him were all things created, In heaven and upon earth:

Visible and invisible, thrones or Dominations, or principalities and powers, All things were created by him and in him

And he is before all, and through him all things do hold together.

And he is the head of the body, of the Church, he who is the beginning: the firstborn from out of the dead, in order that in all things he may hold the primacy.

Because in him it has well pleased the Father That all fullness should dwell: And through him to reconcile all things unto himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on Earth and the things that are in Heaven...” (Colossians: c.1. v. 15-20)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Father, Son and Holy Ghost

It is not possible to have any introduction at all to the Christian doctrine of the Redemption of mankind in Christ, without some understanding, however inadequate, of the central Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. For the Trinity is the fact of God, and the fact of One God. It is the most difficult of themes to present to a non-Christian, at least initially, but as it is the manifestation of the nature and the existential reality of God, it must dominate the life and liturgy of the Christian Church. This it does, and almost every invocation of God in the historic liturgies of the Church begins and ends ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’. . . . The theme and the very language too, of the Redemption of men in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and also the Son of Man, is incapable of description without some background of reference to this doctrine, because just as creation itself is a fact which proceeds in a special relationship of the Son to the Father, through the Holy Ghost, so also the Redemption shares this vital relationship of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity each to the other in the One Nature of God.

The analogy in man

In the attempt to explain the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in a popular way, it is sometimes said that the Being or Essence of God is Unity, and common to all three persons of the Trinity, but that the Trinity is a profound and wonderful consequence of the Divine Activity. Even if this may in some sort be understood within orthodoxy, it is a type of approach which is of little intelligible help. In God, Immanent Act and Essence are one and the same reality. There do not exist in God integrating faculties or integrating relationships, nor is there any immanent action which is distinct from the simple essence of God. What we call the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, are each and all wholly and entirely God.

If the doctrine of the Trinity conforms to the real description within the limits of human understanding, and the narrower limits of human expression, of the real nature of God, we must expect to find the best analogy—but only of course an analogy, not a strict similarity— in the nature of man, for man alone of the entities of which we have direct knowledge and experience, is made to the image and likeness of God. And we can give some such likeness and analogy.

Let a man, any man, the reader in particular, put himself or herself in the presence of their own self-consciousness. Let a man enter alone and deeply into the contemplated content of his own being as a conscious act and a consciously possessed reality. He will find first of all, that he exists and lives permanently and always unto himself in the relationship of ‘knowing myself’. This may not be expressed in words, but it is there: if you stop and possess your own reality, and say to yourself ‘I know myself’ you are but expressing now explicitly in the spoken word, a ‘word’ or a content of interior knowledge and possession which always proceeds and permanently is within your own reality that you may experience your being, in order that, in the deepest sense of sheer consciousness, you may be. Observe that in this act or relationship of yourself as realised, as possessed, as known, you cannot avoid the reflexive pronoun. You must express that ‘I know myself’. This self-relationship is an inescapable fact of conscious being. It is there, even when a man is unconscious, but when we say ‘conscious’ in this context, we mean simply the full act of self-possession and self-realisation in any man.

We can say therefore, that any man, in the possession of his spiritual and rational being, possesses within himself his immanent word, the content of himself as known : ‘I know myself’, and only through that content and relationship indeed, can he proceed to know any other thing. But this is not all. It is impossible for the act of self-reflexion according to knowledge to proceed within a man alone, it must of its very nature be completed in that to which it is of itself relative, it must cause within a man the self-assertion and self-procession of ‘I love myself’. Once again we cannot avoid the reflexive pronoun, even if we do not use words. Even if we did not know any words, the fact would have proceeded within our spiritual being, for the word which is ‘expressed’ does but manifest the prior word which is ‘impressed’ which proceeds first within our conscious being, as the act and manner in which we are.

Therefore, always, whilst we are but the one being, the one ‘you’ or ‘I’ we do habitually possess our being within a self-relativity in which ‘I know myself, and knowing love myself’, within which there are three self-relationships which are expressed by the reflexive, or self-relative pronoun, and two immanent processions, or emanations within our being, the one according to knowledge, and the other according to willing or to loving. Moreover, in the nature of the case, there is an essential order to be kept: there must first be ‘I’ through which knowing proceeds, for the ‘loving’ cannot be expressed unless the ‘knowing’ has first preceded. Then from the ‘I’ which knows, there proceeds ‘myself’ as the content known, through which immanent self-relationship there proceeds my loving of ‘myself’.

This correlation, which is not an order of subordination but the detailed description of the manner in which I find myself to be, is the real and necessary ordering of the psychological manner in which a man finds himself possessed of his existential reality. It is useful for those who have had no religious training, and who have perhaps been accustomed to restrain a motion of annoyance or contempt at the mere mention of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity which is God, to recognise that according to the essentials they do exist unto and within their one person in the manner in which we have described. It is a psychological fact to which perhaps they have never before adverted, it leaves them still one entity, but it is impossible to miss the twofold ‘procession’ to use Trinitarian language, within themselves, the ‘knowing’ first, and of necessity first, and then the ‘loving’ which completes and ends the process of self-possession. It involves also ‘I’, ‘myself’ and again ‘myself’ in a threefold and different relativity, and in doing this it realises ‘me’ as me, it does not disintegrate but manifests the unity of my person. It would not perhaps be too much to ask for a hearing, if one said that the same sort of process was real also of the being of God—but very much more so, in a much more dynamic and existential way.

Limits of the created analogy

Before we go on any further to discuss the manner in which we do not mean that the Persons of the Blessed Trinity are faculties of God in the same way as intellect and will are integrating faculties of a man, it would be as well to consider how far this process of self-reflexion, of self-relativity through knowing and willing is a consequence of the degrees of being according to greater and lesser. Are we willing to posit the same process in the same degree of the merest elements of being? Doubtless we might find and assert some type of process which offered some sort of resemblance, a Christian would expect this from the fact that all being in all orders, must show some sort of analogy with the origin and source of all reality, but would it be the same sort of reflective self-consciousness? It could not be, for what relevance would this have to the life and being of elementary energy? How could it be used, and if it is not relevant to the order of being concerned, then it is a phenomenon either above or below that order of reality. It must he a phenomenon above the order of the elemental, and in the philosophical context of the word, the merely ‘reactionary’ form of being.

In the animal being too, capable of the most wonderful sensitivity, it is this incapability of the full ‘reflection upon oneself’ which marks, in a psychological manner, the lack of the spiritual and free intellectual principle. In man there exists not the highest manifestation of one and the same, but a distinct and a higher principle of energy, the spiritual soul, which is indeed, and of substance, in the image of God. Only man is capable of using and understanding the ‘reflexive pronoun’ because only man can experience the reflecting process, and this is a degree of existential perfection which marks him off as in a different order of reality from the life and being of the merely animal. And as high as man is above the merely animal, so is the being of God above the merely created, even the created which is spiritual. There must be a strict limit to the analogy of man with God in nature of being, and hence it is not ever possible for us to comprehend the mystery of the Blessed Trinity as it is in Itself, and as It is the existential reality of the Living God.

Outline of the doctrine: Procession according to Knowledge

God is his own happiness and perfect joy without the accession of any other to the unapproachable source of all being. From the being which is God all other being derives as an act of largesse, from this uncreated joy derives all other joy. God is fulfilled in the source of all fulfilment—in himself. The Being of God is dynamic and existential Activity. It is strange that some should think that Religion is abstract and desiccated, when Religion is the bond between creature and Creator, and the Immanent Vigour of God transcends all created power and all created joy. God knows and possesses himself in knowledge not according to any faculty, but through the essence of his Being. In God, intellect is identical with uncircumscribed Reality. God knows himself in the Eternal Self-Consciousness of necessary being. This Knowledge of God which proceeds within the Divine Essence, without subordination or contingency of time and creation, this is Immanent Act, proceeding within, and defined through the simple, indivisible, spiritual being of God. This is a self-reflexive Immanence within the Divine Being, a subsistent relativity, in which God possesses himself as known with joy. An Immanent Act within God is timeless, eternal, and necessary. There is no intelligible place in God for the transient nor for the mutually subordinate. The term of God’s self-reflexive knowledge of himself is also Real, Real and Necessary with a reality and a necessity as far above the necessity of you and of me, as the infinite is above the finite. This term which proceeds eternally with the Divine Existential, in the Essence, of God, is the subsistent Relativity which we call the ‘Logos’, the Eternal Word of the Father, the Content of the Divine Truth, the Mirror Image of the Wisdom which is the exemplar of all created things, because it is the fullness of the Divine Intelligibility.

Does this mean, then, that when I analyse my own psyche, and affirm the content of my own being, my own spiritual nature and its innate wisdom or content of being, that ‘I know myself’ as two persons in one being? No: because what proceeds in us as creatures, is not the Act of Self-Subsistent and necessary Being. We exist through the good-will of God, and that which proceeds in us, is relative always to the Will of God, not to its own reality as self-explanatory cause and ground of being. If it were otherwise, well, then yes, —whatever proceeded within us as immanent act, as the manifestation of the content of our substantial being, that would be a subsistent relativity, and it would be in correlation with the first term, with the ‘I knowing’ term of the ‘knowing in possession’ as we named it. But in the creature the nature and substance which one possesses is not Necessary Existence, necessary that is to say without qualification of any sort, and without dependence upon anything outside of one’s own being. In us therefore, the self-reflexion of the spiritual substance does not effect the Trinity, even as in the animal form the self-reflexion fails to achieve a truly independent ‘I’ which is consciously free of the environment around it.

To effect the Trinity there must be a subsistent Relativity which is Necessary and Real with the Existence of Being which simply IS, which is Uncreated Act in its totality unto itself, which is Being truly and necessarily Self-Relative to Itself. Only God can BE in this manner, and this is TO LIVE, in its fullness.

This does not preclude the possibility that a more close consideration of the meaning of the Holy Trinity from the existential and psychological aspects of the Divine Being might not help us towards a better understanding and expression in philosophy of what are called the ‘faculties’ of the created spirit. We are inclined to call them faculties, and to speak as if they were separable in some way from the definition of the created spiritual substance. They seem rather to be terms which define the very nature of the spiritual substance as spirit. But however fruitful such pondering might be, the analogy with the nature of God will remain a very partial knowledge, only in the One Necessary Being can the Trinity proceed as the immanent manifestation of what it is to be Necessary Being. Only in Self-Relative Act can there be Self-Reflexive Terms which are Necessary and Subsistent Relativities, which are best named as ‘Persons’ in human language, and which again are much better reflected than in the language of technical theology, by the titles of ‘the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit’.

The Immanent Procession according to Love

There is a cliché from the schools of Scholastic theology which is true, and could save a lot of fruitless theorising in modern experimental psychology if it were acted upon, —namely that nothing can be willed unless first it is foreknown. This is true, for even in our conscious and existential awareness of ourselves, and in our ‘will to live’, the possession in joy of what we are, always implies that first we know that we are, and in a general way know the content of our reality. So also in God the Divine Possession of the Godhead as Joy, or Fulfilment, is an Immanent Procession within the Being of God according to Love. In the creature, the immanent act of my loving myself, proceeds through myself known, which is very near as an analogy to the Greek manner of saying that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father, through the Son, which is a perfectly satisfactory and orthodox way of expressing the ‘procession’ of the Holy Ghost according to Love, as the third Immanence of the Divine Being, so long as the procession through the Son, is an active and dynamic predication. This it must be, for nothing can be Immanent within God which is not Act. There is no room for the passive or for the subordinated in the Supreme Existential. Equivalent, though perhaps more involved for the non-Christian reader, is the so-called ‘Latin’ manner of expressing the same doctrine: —that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and from the Son according to the procession of Love, as through one principle of ‘breathing forth’ or spiration. More simple to say ‘from the Father, through the Son, as the Immanence of them both’. For the whole Essence of God is in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost. For which reason theology speaks of the ‘circumincession’ or mutual compenetration of the Three Divine Persons in the Unity which is the Essence of God.

It is not desirable within the scope of this work to enter too deeply, and for the non-Christian reader too confusingly into the realm of Trinitarian theology. Suffice it to say that within a man also, there proceeds as the immanence of his substance, that basic self-contemplation and basic self-love which is essential to his nature and to its existential definition. Even though a man commit suicide, and even if in the legal sense he be found to be of sound mind, he still does this thing as a way of escape from some pain of mind or body, even if it is only the very great pain of a sense of futility in being, and of desperation concerning the end and the purpose of his being. Even in a case like this, he is acting however perversely, in the name of his basic substantial ‘love’ of himself. When however the creature expresses formally this inner ‘word’ of knowing and this inner immanent love which expresses very existence, which affirms, without conscious expression in words, ‘I, knowing myself, loving myself, am’: there does not proceed the self-relative term of that immanence as a separate and subsistent Person, defined as a Reality through this intrinsic relativity to the other two terms which proceed within the immanence. With the immanence that proceeds through knowing and known, so also with that which proceeds through self-possession in love, these things in myself, in the creature, do not define a substance, a nature, a thing, which is Existence Absolute, or ‘Ipsum Esse’ in the language of the Christian schools of philosophy.

Within God however, the Immanence which proceeds within the Divine Being is simply Existence Absolute, and if that Existential is manifest in and through Three mutually correlative and Subsistent Relativities (Persons) then that is the fact and the manner of the Divine Being. We will not be surprised that the procession of the Immanence of spiritual reality proceeds within God in a manner which is very Existence, and is the Trinity. The manner of being of God must be above the manner of being of the created spiritual thing.

We will not be surprised either, if in spite of the analogy between the Uncreated and the created spirit, the Being of God is not wholly comprehensible to us. Nobody could comprehend God without the experience of being God, and even in the beatific vision and possession of God there will always be left something above the comprehension of the creature. If God reveals himself to men in the fullest manner of which they are capable. then God must reveal himself in his Blessed Trinity, for this is the full fact of himself, and of God’s plenitude given to mankind. This is the more necessary if the economy of God for man begins from the mystery of the Divine Being, and terminates in a personal union with God in his own Essence. The fulfilment of that economy may, and in fact does, involve the Personal Relationships of the Trinity within the Being of God. The Incarnation in particular cannot be grasped as a personal work of God unless we know something of the Persons through and in whose Being the work is accomplished. We cannot understand the ‘Son’ of God, without some understanding of the Father and the Holy Ghost. It is for this reason that some brief introduction had to be given to the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity.

The Trinity as ‘Mystery’

It is not suggested that we can ‘prove’ the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, though it is very interesting that the human mind, in the persons of some of its greatest geniuses in thought should have come to some significant beginning of the doctrine, —and here the reference is to the ‘Logos’ of Plato, and of development by the genius of other minds after him. There is no reason why we should be embarrassed at an inability to ‘prove’ the doctrine of the Trinity in the manner that a scientist might expect to ‘prove’ rival theories of the nature of the universe one way or the other. Actually, in the very name of that progressive upsurge of creation to its consummation in wisdom, which the scientist himself acknowledges under the name, the almost religious name of Evolution, with the capital letter and without qualification, we can expect that it be not provable to the natural human intelligence. We can demand this in the name of ‘Evolution’ in the same manner as we can demand that mice, —-especially the mice of a distant palaeontology, —shall not be able to ‘prove’ the coherence of the concept ‘Man’ still less delineate the nature. For mice are not big enough in being to take in the intelligibility of ‘Man’, and as yet Man is not existing, for progress has to go on. So also, men are not big enough in being to take in all that is meant by ‘God’, not with entire clarity, for progress has to go on, and we will, please God, enter into a state in which we know him and love him as he is. Even so there will always be, even in the beatific vision and possession of God something more for the creature to know and to possess.

The wisdom of the Greeks

There do exist men, especially some scientists who are less than really first class minds, who despise any knowledge which cannot be demonstrated through a physical experiment, although as was suggested in an earlier chapter, they do in fact assert many natures which they can never see or directly attain, but which they infer from their effects. Such a mentality involves a grave loss, for they are denying the possibility of growth for themselves, binding themselves below the level of their total potential of personality. They are themselves children who are growing up to a fuller understanding, and if they require that nothing shall be real knowledge or real joy that cannot be contained within the pictures on the nursery wall, they will make morons of themselves, and in time of human society as well. It is worth remarking and not least in the hearing of that ‘English’ school of philosophy which insists upon limiting itself to the strait-jacket of a priori semantics, that the Greeks attained to a humanism superior in insight to ours, though as much steeped in hubris, because they did concentrate so much upon reason as the measure of the cosmos, and not as its byproduct. They were right. Before ‘Science’ was, man found himself, and in full possession of his faculties and his yearnings, and he looked for the measure of his destiny. In this he showed that Science was not the measure of his destiny, for Science was not. Man found too that his mind was the measure of the intelligibility of the cosmos around him, so much so that at the end of ages man founded ‘Science’ from the naked powers of his mind. First, man had to perceive the relationship between this principle of intelligibility within himself, and the entelechies or principles of ‘form’ in other things, through which he could know them, and later analyse their relatives in detail. Rightly the greatest among the Greeks construed that if man is the measure, in a unity of person, of the embodied truths of things, then the logical, the rational, is the origin-principle of all things, of man, and of creation less than the lord of the Earth. It was logic to postulate the ‘Logos’ the Wisdom emanate of God, which drew forth all these meanings from the common denominator of matter-energy potentials.

We can say that it is logic as such which is expressed through the related structures and environments of events of evolution. It is the perception of the relationships of organised matter —energies in terms of integration in a unity of intelligibility which is the creative percept of the genius. As the genius perceives, the perception is in him a priori, in as much as it is recognition and assertion in phenomena of a meaning which is new, and which embraces many facets of phenomena or of disconnected knowledge, in a higher synthesis. Often enough the genius admits that he saw first, and proved later on. The data available was enough for insight, but not for apodictic proof. But, if the proof be elaborated later on, we have to explain the insight which as a percept of meaning, as a total ‘theory’ was a priori in as much as it jumped the gap of evidence from significant data, because it saw a unitary meaning, a higher intelligibility, in the synthesis perceived. If at any time the genius has jumped his data in this way, it is more than obvious that the percept was not a mere deduction from empirical evidence. The genius has sometimes admitted in his works and his conversation that he did see this intelligible and greater meaning, and knew that in time ‘the rest would come’. It is precisely this which could never be explained by the tenets of the logical positivists’, it also explains their intellectual and cultural sterility, the brilliant little books are mules of the mind, —no pride of ancestry and no hope of posterity.

It is granted that what the genius perceives is embodied in the natures of things, and that the unity of intelligible meaning is an a posteriori fact as well. It is the a priori superimposition of the mental insight upon inadequate facts, for the first time, and when many another competent mind has passed that way and drawn no order from the data, which reflects the non-material and unitary nature of the mental percept as intellectual recognition. The mind can and does supply the affirmation of the necessary relationships from incomplete data, because the meaning requires that the remainder be made significant that way to give intelligible unity. This is what we meant by saying that logic as such is inherent in the laws and structures of the universe. The intellect can and does ‘reflect’ the ‘unity’ of meaning integrated in phenomena, because there is in fact a Unity-Law of wisdom embodied in the progression of Evolution, if we regard Evolution as the continuance of the meaningful act of creation. Neither can this be explained unless across the whole of time, God is the ‘Relativity-principle’ of the Unity-Law itself. But this, of course, is the whole theme of this book.

The ‘mysterious’ nevertheless fulfils

We do not claim that man can know and possess God in love with the ease that he can penetrate into the natures of material forms of being. It has already been insisted elsewhere that this cannot be, because God is above man, and is ‘hard’ to the soul, although the natural principle of the growth and the fulfilment of the spirit, while matter is below man, and man has passed beyond the limits of matter, so that material knowledge needs no co-operation whatever between the spirit and God, for the mind of man to know it. Nevertheless man will not interpret the relationship of the universe to its destiny and of matter to mind, without an harmonious relationship of his person to God. Before God the soul of man is a baby, but babies are born growing and made to grow, so is the spirit of man at the moment of its inception through God. The baby is fulfilled through its mother’s breast, and the love and care of both parents. So the whole personality of a man is fulfilled through God. God can ‘reveal’ himself to man: we say again that he must, for this is natural to man, his meaning is in God. The word ‘reveal’ has a unique truth in so much as it stresses that God is beyond the creaturely, and that God is not matter-energy, but it has its limits too. It is better, in order to delineate the formation of God of the personality of a man, the formation in fulfilment, to say that God must communicate himself to the individual and to the family-social of mankind. The word communicate must then be understood to bear in this context, the full weight of the word reveal. The revelation of God is a nourishment of all the powers, bodily and spiritual of a man, as these are focused to their acme in and through God. This is a communication of life, wisdom, and love in fulfilment, and it is precisely what is summed up for the Catholic in the function of the Blessed Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ. If the Sacrament is taken in its whole meaning as Christ, then indeed it gives us the plenary expression as a fact, in God made Man of the meaning of both ‘Revelation’ and ‘Communication’.

In this order of communication as ‘communion’ the knowledge of God ‘as he is’ must be communicated to men, and that to the limits of human understanding. Since the term ‘mystery’ does not mean incomprehensible, but ‘comprehensible till lost in the distance’ the communication to mankind of God both in a general way and in the individual union with God through grace, must leave many a problem not fully answered and many an horizon misty and unexplored. So too, the horizon of a child is misty with many a mystery of adult saying and doing, but only so can they begin to learn, and by degrees to lay hold. For all that we did not grasp when we were children, what we did know and lay hold upon was enough for present happiness upon the breast of mother or father. This incomplete knowing and incomplete loving was a necessity of our present happiness and of our future growth. It fulfilled us as smaller things did not. We had toys, and pets, and friends of our own age, a ‘world’ we understood well enough, and in some ways better than our parents could hope to understand. Never for a moment though, did we love them like ‘mum’ and ‘dad’. They did not fulfil us as did those mysterious adults who were the principals of our life and our being.

So also with God, if he is to communicate, to commune, there must be adult mysteries in him. This is to say that creation is a continuity, and that we and with us the entire economy of God is still growing up and developing: ‘Amen, I say unto you unless you become as little children, you shall not enter into the Kingdom of God’ (Matt. 18.3.).

God’s ‘personal involvement’ in creation

We might suspect, meditating upon the destiny given to man in God, that the making of man to the most intimate likeness of God, and the fulfilment of man to the fullest measure that even God can give, implies that the ‘Self-Relativity’ of God to himself is deployed, or rather manifested as Act, in the fulfilment of man. Man is not merely made like God, but is fulfilled like God, a terrifying thought, against which our present state of being is like a knowing and willing state of not-being in comparison. What such an ‘enhancement of personality’ as the beatific vision should imply, cannot be truly understood without its experience, but the distinguished professor under whom the writer once sat thought it could be described as a ‘lessening in the creature of the gap between essence and existence’. Now there is a sense in which this is not sense, for the creature never can be God, and between the finite and the infinite the ‘gap’ can never truly be lessened, for they are not in one common order of measurement. Yet the point has been made, to become ‘like unto God’ by charity in a substantial sense, to be ‘co-sharers of the Divine Nature’ is to possess by charity that which God is by nature, to grow like to God in the fuller production within ourselves of his very Immanence. Are we not called openly as Christians, to renew within our being the very image of Christ, and do we not from this image in baptism proceed to be confirmed in the Holy Spirit of God? We know not what it is that God is working and preparing within us, but we do know that the act by which we live unto him in grace, and will be transformed to his likeness, if he have mercy, in glory, is the very Life of God within us. The very Life of God, the full Immanence of God, is One and Triune, it is the dynamic Unity and Trinity of God.

We are saying then that for the spiritual creation, called to the truly supernatural order, the activity of God which is applied as his creating ‘FIAT’ is the deployment of the active Trinity, Father, Word, and Holy Ghost. There must be the full manifestation of God, or we shall not be ‘co-sharers of the Divine Nature’. The work of God upon the spiritual order would not be truly intelligible, except as the work of the One and the Triune. This revelation, this communication to men of the full manifestation of God, as the Blessed Trinity, could not reasonably be given to mankind until the communication to the world of God Incarnate. It must then be given, for already God Incarnate manifests himself to be the Immanent Word of the Divine Self-Contemplation, —God, through whom all things are made, and in whom as Examplar all things are made. If this is the reality of the creation to God in God, then we cannot know the Word, unless we know the Original of the Word, ‘the Father’ and we do not understand yet God in God until we know the Holy Spirit, Immanent through them both. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it’. (John c.1. v.1-5.).

If God creates the spiritual being, angel or man fully for himself in the totality of God’s Being, this is to communicate entity to the creature through the total content of himself, to know the creature as ‘Son’ in God knowing God, and to create all spiritual things through the Divine Word. We would say that if God loves with the love of possession which is his very self, this ‘created son’ adopted in his abiding and Eternal Word, then this is to love the spiritual creature, and to will the spiritual creature, in the Holy Ghost, in God’s love of God known of God. Therefore the ‘Only-Begotten Son’ of God, the term by intellectual generation of God’s self-contemplation is necessarily the vehicle of Life and Light for the spiritual creature, because the nature and the destiny of the creature proceeds through the Eternal Word. This is the Exemplar through which all things visible and invisible are made, hence all spiritual creations angels and men are ‘sons’ of the Father, taken up, or adopted, in the brotherhood of the Son of God by nature. If then, the Eternal Word lay hold of flesh and blood for the ontological fulfilment of man and man’s material universe, in the total economy of God in creating, then in both the divine and the human sense he is the ‘Son of Man’. He is the root of our being, the source of our stock by nature, and by gift our Mediator with the Divine Father, and by right of Divine and human natures in the one Person of God, he is Christ Our King. For, as says the Canon of the Mass, we are ‘through him and with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, to the glory of the Father.’

In the Revelation which is the communication of God in the consummation of his work, we look up to God, ‘Our Father’, the source of all being and all reality, for our meaning, and our joy. He fulfils our hunger for joy by revealing himself in his Son, the Word he utters Eternally when God says ‘Me’, through whom all things are framed and known not in the passive but in the dynamic sense. And the Father fulfils us, his sons, in his Son, when there is breathed out through them, and in us, the Holy Spirit, the joy of possession in the Perfect, the Immanent Love, Personal and Subsistent, who is ‘breathed’ between the Father and the Son in the Being of God. This is the Spirit of consummation, God who is Love, who is the soul of the Church, because breathed by the Father and the Son, ‘He shall receive of mine and shall show it to you’ for the Holy Ghost brings to perfection with power the creative decree and its content, even to consummation in the final possession of God. The work of God is then always a common work of the Trinity, but the work proceeds from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Ghost, and this relationship, in the works of God, can never be separated from the external work which is wrought. So is the Being of God, and so is the manner in which God creates the spiritual being and draws it into himself in perfection.

The ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ in the New Testament

The scope of this study is very limited, and the reader must not expect to exhaust the depth of the doctrine of the Church of God in all its rich implications. Yet one could not begin to introduce the doctrine of the Incarnation and of the Atonement of Christ, without some introduction to the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. In the next section too, we outline only the manner in which Christ redeems mankind, but not the total relationship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to that work. To attempt so much would exceed the limits of the theme, and much more would it exceed the abilities of the writer. There is no scope therefore here for a comprehensive Christology, some things are left stated rather than explained or defended. Such for instance is the union in Christ of the Divine with the human, and the consequences of this union. We state only the essential Christian doctrine as follows : — in Christ there is, as the Word who is God, the fullness of the Divine Nature and Will, with no diminution or subordination whatever in comparison with the Father. When God the Word assumes human nature as the vehicle of his more perfect working to consummation, —and since sin of his working to redemption, —he assumes also, without change or ‘interaction’1 between the Divine and the created, a human nature. This implies that God assumes a human intellect and a human will through a human soul

Christ is not a mixture of God and man. In the full sense of the messianic title Christ is the ‘Son of Man’ only from the time of the Incarnation, but he is not, not ever a human person, a human thing, there is only the Divine Person who is both God and man, perfect in the nature of both. When God wills into being an angel or a man, he wills that some other thing shall subsist besides the Divine Necessary, and that this substance be fulfilled through himself. This is to make the created personality with its created subsistence. When God wills that, for the perfection of the work of creation and the salvation of mankind he should take upon himself a created nature, he wills that ‘I’ shall be a man, so that the human nature of God lives through that Divine ‘I’, through the Divine Person of the Word, who subsists in the Essence of God. There does not proceed therefore, a created human personality, because this is, in God, simply ‘Me’, it is not ‘the other’ created through the will of God.

From the perfection of the two natures in Christ there proceeds, and it is manifest in the pages of the New Testament, a double relationship of Christ to ‘my Father’. On the one hand an equality and always an assertion of Unity, when the emphasis is upon the Divine Person in the Divine Nature, as in phrases like ‘I and the Father are One’, ‘he that sees me, sees the Father’, ‘before Abraham was made, I AM’, and with significance, also in the Eucharistic context ‘as the living Father has sent me and I live through the Father, so he that eats me shall live through me’. . .

On the other hand, when the Person of the Son speaks from the content and requirements of his nature as man there is all the longing of the ‘Son of Man’ for release from his travail, and for the total repossession of the Father. There is a certain dependence, even subordination of tone which does not deny his Godhead, but marks his mediatorial role, his Kingship over men, and his priesthood through his human nature. Unless Christ be the ‘Son of Man’ as well, he cannot offer priestly sacrifice for us, in his Person, for a priest is essentially a mediator, and as the Eternal Word, Christ is ‘One’ in God. As Jesus Christ, God and man, he is the One from whom we spring, and One with the Father in being. Yet it is right when he speaks in the nature of man, that we should see that the ‘Father’ is still his fruition, in the Divine Person, and that we should see in his human nature also, as the Son of Man, and the High Priest of mankind, the reverence, the subordination, and the joy with which we should be swept up in and through him, to the Father. As Christ himself said, ‘it becomes us to fulfil all justice’, which is to say, every order of rightness and of proportionality. We see the truly human in Christ in the words spoken in the olive grove, and in the reminder to the apostles that if they loved him, they would put selfishness to one side, and would be glad that he was going to the Father, 'for the Father is greater than I’ . . . which is but to say that the Father is the source of my origin and my joy. The word used for ‘greater’ also regularly means ‘forbear’ in Latin, and the common Greek of the street in the times of Christ allowed the same meaning to its Greek equivalent, from analogy with the tongue that dominated the world through the Empire of Rome. That Christ always spoke of God the First Person of the Trinity as ‘my Father’ in a special and proper sense, and regarded him as the source of his joy, and the goal of his homecoming is evident from the incident when as a boy of twelve, Christ shows a grave surprise that Mary and Joseph should have looked for him as lost when they should have realised that ‘I would be at my Father’s House’, the temple that is to say, at Jerusalem.

The work of man’s redemption is a work accomplished by Christ unto the Father, in the love of the Holy Spirit, and this mutual relationship is to be found in all the works of God ‘ad extra’ which is to say works upon being which is other than the Being of God. Theologians state that the works of God upon creatures are to be considered as ‘common’ to all three persons of the Blessed Trinity, but they do not speak with one and the same voice when they discuss to what degree a work which is appropriated to one Person of the Trinity in particular, bespeaks an office or a vocation upon the creature which is not proper in the same manner to the other Persons in the Essence of God.

The ‘Mission’ of the Persons of the Holy Trinity

To the writer it seems that one must not unduly diminish the roles of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in the works of God, for it is certain beyond dispute in Christian theology that God became man, but yet that only the second Person of the Holy Trinity became man, not the Father nor the Holy Ghost. This is beyond all doubt then a special ‘propriety’ or office of the Word, the Son of God in his own distinct Personality within the Essence of God. In like manner the Church directs all her prayers 'through Our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with God the Father, in the Unity of the Holy Ghost, forever and ever.’ When the Prophets of Israel yearned for the Messiah and prayed God to send him, they prayed for nothing else than that the ‘Father’ should send his Son, and that which prompted their prayer was the Person-Spirit of the Love of God who prompts beginnings in the Son, through the sending of the Father, and consummates them in his Love, again in the Son, to the glory of the Father. For the Church does obviously appropriate a special ‘work’ to the Father as the Creator, and the ‘sender’ of the Only-Begotten Son, and Christ, and his Mission and his work would be unintelligible, even in his own prayers on earth as God made man, without this special propriety and relationship of the Father to him, and hence also to us. In the language and the feast of Pentecost, the Church most clearly attributes a special work and office to the Holy Spirit, which is special unto him, and all the more so when in her common doctrine, —and more than common doctrine, —she refers to the Holy Ghost as the ‘soul’ of the church.

It will always be true that the works of God, outside the Essence of God are common to the Persons of the Blessed Trinity as a whole, because the temporal ‘Mission’ or work of the Persons of the Trinity upon and within creation, follow exactly upon the relationships that define their Eternal Mission or sending, by which the Son proceeds from the Father, and the Holy Ghost from the Father, through the Son. Always the Son is ‘sent’ by the Father, for that Eternal Relativity which the Son IS as the Word of the Father, is the reason for the necessity that the ‘word’ of God uttered to men, and made at the end of the ages Incarnate among men, should be the living word of the Father. And the WORD who is sent by the Father is made fact and consummation through the Holy Spirit, for the gift of the Word is the effect of the Personal Love who proceeds from Father and Son, to wit the Holy Ghost.

Perhaps what we want to say can best be summed up, if it is necessary to be extremely brief, in the first fourteen verses of the epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians: ‘Blessed be the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed upon us in the beloved. In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon us. For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in himself, things in heaven and things on earth. In him according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things by the counsel of his will, we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory. In him you also who have heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and have believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, which is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.’

1. In the sense of ‘fusion’ – the substantial emergence of some new thing, of mixed entity and personality

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Saviour and Redeemer

1. THE MANNER OF SAVIOUR

God always a ‘Saviour’

God is always the Saviour of the spiritual nature. Many are the nuances of the word in the Old Testament and in the New, but even in their fullest variety, we are not tied down to the culture and thought of any one people.

For the word ‘Saviour’ is a positive word, and of itself it does not bespeak sin, nor any of the relationships between God and men that are existent because of human sin. God would always be the Saviour of mankind, in any order of destiny, certainly in that relationship of fullest conceivable love which we call the destiny to the beatific vision. He would be the Saviour in the same sense as a mother is the saviour of her infant child. There is no other nature to which the babe is relative to be ‘saved’, it looks for, and is dependant upon, the breasts of its mother. She is by nature the saviour of the body made through her own; she is, that is to say, the principle of its origin, of its life and safety, and of its increase. St. Peter takes the same point, when he urges his first disciples to Christ, ‘beloved, like new born babes, yearn after your rightful milk with all sincerity’. . . (1. Peter c.2.v.2.).

So also the rulers of that middle east from which most of the allusion and imagery of the bible comes, were ‘saviours’ of the territories they administered and protected. Even while in the manner of potentates since the advent of sin, they did in fact ‘lord it over them,’ they were, as Christ testifies, called ‘beneficent’ (Luke c.22.v.25.). God, since he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as also the Bread of Heaven that gives life to men, is in our order of creation the ‘Saviour’ of mankind. To be the principle of life, and of life more abundantly, is the quintessence of the title of ‘Saviour’ as it is applied to God, and hence to Jesus Christ, God made man.

This is especially so in the order of the fullest Sonship of God. God alone is the means, as well as the end, when the completion of the creature is the transformation by charity in fellowship to that which God is by nature. There is no created means adequate or conceivable to effect the perfect consummation of the spiritual creation to be made ‘co-sharers of the Divine Nature’ (2 Peter c.1.v.4.). We argue from the natural dependence of the contingent spirit upon God for its fulfilment in God, that God is the Saviour of its being. We argue, too, though the first point stands alone, that as long as the very possibility of sin remained to any rational creature, even without its occurrence, that God, whose communication of life and life more abundantly is the principle of its defence from disease of the spirit, is on that title also the Saviour of every spiritual creation.

The Incarnation the culmination of ‘Salvation’

There seems little likelihood that God should create the material order, unless its end and purpose is the spiritual being. There is little likelihood that given the spiritual being, God would make man, who lives in both orders, unless the material co-relative of man’s nature can be swept up, even given its nature as material, into the communication of the Divine Nature. Otherwise, the creation of matter-energy is an anachronism of wisdom; irrelevant to the Being of God, it is of its own order, unless it can enter into participation even with the Divine, a principle of handicap upon the purely spiritual nature of man. To the scientist, the vast universe of matter-energy has its majesty and fulfilment. This fulfilment is really in the mind of the man who knows and understands. In itself the content of exact science fulfils nobody. A man is fulfilled by that which is in his own image and likeness by wisdom, love, peace, nobility of personality, the contemplative depth of the spiritual order, —man looked and sought for that before he had a glimmering of what ‘Science’ might be.

The fulfilment of the scientist in his science, is really the fulfilment of the human mind itself in the majesty of integrated wisdom, the awe of the embodiment of mind manifest in the slow rising history of being through the ages . . . the fulfilment is of mind in the wisdom of Mind. Hence, if the universe of matter is mindless, the excitement and fulfilment of a man’s mind in the progression of Evolution is meaningless, and it is hard indeed to explain the sense of awe and joy that great minds do in fact discover within themselves in their mastery of the secrets of Nature. The scientist is being introduced to the integrated mastery of an overruling and working Mind that rises manifest in the leavening of matter into countless forms of energy and being: he finds joy in the personality of God, without recognition perhaps of what it is, or whom he is that fulfils him. For God is not simply a theologian and a philosopher, but also supremely a scientist and a mathematician. Let the theologian be aware that the same precise wisdom and integrated reason for things is to be found in the theological works of God as in his mathematics. There is no arbitrary wand-waving in the economy of God. Every man finds his wisdom fulfilled in God, and thus at the end of the ages every man finds his wisdom fulfilled in Christ, fulfilled in the crowned head which is the natural seat of wisdom, fulfilled in the face of Christ the King of Ages, through which is manifest through the veil of flesh all the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge.

There seems little likelihood that God would have made matter-energy, except that through man it could be swept up into a joy and an asset in the spiritual creation. That is why we have suggested that if it is the gift of God in the creation of the spiritual creature, to bring that creature into the highest union with God that even God can give, then the gift of Christ seems to be the inevitable corollary of the decree for man of the total Sonship of God. The hypostatic union as it is called of God with human nature, is the perfect means by which ontologically, as a work of being upon being, according to the laws which derive through being, not by ‘wand-waving’, the Divine can effect the transformation into the likeness of God of a form of being which, from its involvement with matter, would seem to be precluded from that perfect assimilation to God which is possible from its very nature to the ‘angelic’ creation.

The Incarnation would be the perfect culmination of that Salvation of God which extends from the building up of the universe to the mind of man, so that the vocation of man to equal fellowship with the pure spirit in the beatific possession of God, is made manifest through, and anticipated in the patterning of the laws of matter. These pivot around the King of Kings and Heir of the Ages, as the supreme consummation of the Unity-Law of the universe. No other vision of Christ seems to us to be worthy of God or of the creation into which Christ enters. For Christ, without shadow of qualification, is God.

The Incarnation perhaps the manifestation of the fully ‘supernatural order’

We do not say of this economy of Salvation that ‘God could not have done otherwise,’ but let it be borne in mind that this manner of speaking is often meaningless when applied to God. We dare not speak as if we knew with confidence what was or was not needful that the Divine Wisdom and Love should be fully and perfectly consonant with itself: not when we state that the very order of the destiny of man is the gratuitous gift of God. In God, if not in us, the gratuitous does not imply the arbitrary. No increase of love can be given by God which is not an increase of being, if he is the object of the love, and the gratuitous gifts of God are instinct with wisdom, law, and love, because that is of the essence of the Being of God. Indeed, wisdom and love are not of the essence of God, they define God in the Divine Reality. There will be no loose ends therefore, in the works that proceed from the Living God, and no wand-waving either.

It may be true to say, —to the writer it does seem true to say, —that the Incarnation of God in the universe of matter for the salvation of mankind, is not so much to fulfil the decree of the Divine Sonship given to mankind, but is rather the manifestation of the immense meaning and majesty contained in the call to be ‘co-sharers in the Divine Nature.’ It could be that the best analogy we have of the stupendous meaning of the destiny of man, is to see it manifest as the beginning and the first-fruits, in the Incarnation of God as the Heir of the Ages. This surely is to be ‘elect in Christ’ in the most magnificent of ways, and a worthy conception of the Kingship of the Word of God made Flesh.

The Christ of the Scriptures

We ask what is the role attributed to the Messiah in the Old Testament or even to Christ in the New Testament? What manner of Saviour do we envisage, is the emphasis entirely on the remission of sins in that negative and legalistic manner to which much of Evangelical theology had for too long accustomed us? The answer will be far from it! The Christ of the Old Testament is primarily Priest and King, and the Priest-Kings of the ancient cultures of the middle east were figures of positive majesty. They were the creative manifestation of the power and being of God. The emphasis upon the Messiah of the Old Testament is not one of victimhood in any exclusive sense of the word. The Son of David will be King over the whole earth, and will initiate a new era among mankind, in which he will reign gloriously for ever. The nations and the Kings of the earth will come up to Jerusalem in tribute, sacrifice, and unity of citizenship, it will be written of every man in the earth, that his lineage and parentage is in Sion, (Psalm 87. R.S.V.). The King will be the Prince of Peace, and will sit at the right hand of God, once God has made his enemies his footstool. Certainly, in the sins and sorrows of mankind the prophets foretold that the King would cleanse, purify and hallow his people, for the Hebrew vision of man and of the Messiah is nothing if not existential and empirical. It deals with the historical Adam, not the philosophic and speculative one. But it is a vision of victory, kingship, and consummation of the glory of God in all the earth. It is so much this, that unless it be extended to cover the final victory of the Christ of Yahweh at the ‘end of the world’ it is not fulfilled as prophecy in the present state of things at all, not even after the Incarnation. The first-fruits of the actual victory of Christ must be taken up to the ‘New Jerusalem’ to make sense of the promise and of the prophecy itself. The consolidation in this earth of the Kingdom of the Prince of Peace is unlikely, even if the nations were universally to turn their swords into ploughshares. It is more likely that the ‘establishment’ of the Kingdom will be the brief joy of Palm Sunday before the betrayal from within or without. It can never be, in the fallen condition of mankind, the majestic peace of the Everlasting Kingdom. Yet such is the constant vision.

It makes far more sense if the vision of the great seers, —-of Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel and the rest, is the vision of a King coming into his own kingdom to claim and to reclaim against enemies who should not be there. Such a king will indeed be hailed with the joy of rapture by his enslaved people as a Saviour and as a Redeemer. If the vision is comprehensive, is of a kingship which is the manifestation in the world of the gift of the beatific vision and of the sonship of God, and if it includes also the Redemption from the enslavement of sin and anarchy, then there is nothing in the Old Testament or the New which we cannot round off in the most perfect sense.

There will be reconciled as well those apparent contradictions of statement and of outlook in the Fathers of the Church, concerning the role of the Messiah, which are fairly obvious: at one moment the ‘Universal Man’ the Crown and the King of Creation, by right of expectance the Heir of the Ages, at another the Redeemer whose only reason for journey in this vale of tears is to rescue his own. These are not contradictions, they are the partial pondering of a vast theme, the loose ends inevitable from the deep pondering of the vast data of the Old Testament and the New Testament. All these attributes are clearly spoken of the Messiah, and until they are synthesized in some such vision of Christ as the one we suggest, they do and they must leave an area of developmental untidiness in the theology of the Church.

The unconscious trauma of the Fall

The Hebrews rejected their Messiah, and from the words and the works of the Nazarene, such as no other man had proffered or performed, they were in their leaders ‘inexcusable’, as he said himself. Yet, had they any less excuse than the men of all nations who faced this crisis after them? The word of God did not run and be glorified in any very lasting or very total sense. It was long, and after the most cruel crucifixion of the Church, that the Roman Empire became officially Christian, and when it became safe and advantageous even in this world to be a ‘Christian’, from that time we mark the decline of the standards of the primitive Christians, and the breach in the unity of the Church in the name of secular privilege and importance. We should be amazed if it has taken the initiatives of the Second Vatican Council to make some men realise that the Hebrews of the time of Jesus Christ were simply no exceptions to the rule which includes themselves and their own forefathers.

There is a certain ‘excuse’ in this, —that we all who bear in our minds and in our flesh the traumatic lesions of Original Sin, do not realise the neurosis of the spirit, and the schizophrenia of the will in which we live as our habitual way of life. We are quite naturally shocked to the depths at the spectacle of a Messiah who claims to be God, and who does not conquer, who does not transform the world by his direct might. We fail to see within ourselves the contradictions and lusts which make our natural expectations impossible of realisation ‘in a straight line’ through the natural co-operation of man with the Divine grace and influence.

It is right to be shocked at the scandal of the Cross, but the scandal is within ourselves, and its viciousness and appalling measure is witnessed by what has been indeed our ‘natural’ response to God in his fullest influence. When St. Paul teaches the need of a Christian to crucify the ‘old man’ exactly as the old man crucified Christ, and to rise from the dead, through baptism, in the likeness of the life and the Resurrection of Christ. he is making one of the most significant points about the work of Christ Incarnate (Romans. ch.6; Coloss. ch.2, et alibi). We did not see, and we do not see the beam that is within the eye of all of us; inevitably we need to be redeemed, and the work will go hard with us in the doing of it, and much more hard with the human nature of the Principal of our operation within the family of mankind. We are no rapturous and welcoming committee that goes to greet the Lord and King. His ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts, we are so crestfallen, so disappointed in him! . . . Afterwards we beat our breasts, but it is only in the contemplation, most sadly of what we have done, that we know what we are, and why we are: there is a law within our members contradicting the law of our mind, and leading us to chaos in many things. Is there nobody who reads these words, who will not know the truth of this in the sins and tragedies of his own life, in the tragedies he has inflicted upon the lives of others? And if, by the grace of God or by sheer ignorance of ‘the law’ a man has been kept from lethal sin, who is there who understands himself, and still feels any desire to reach for the stone to throw at any other?

The vision positive

In the apostles and evangelists of Christ, the vision of the mission of the Lord they had known and loved is positive rather than speculated upon in any detailed manner. There are so many passages in the gospels, in the epistles to the Churches, especially in Paul, which are inexplicable if the Incarnation is motivated simply by the incidence of sin. The positive content of the New Testament concerning Christ is not in any way a confusion or a contradiction, if we allow it to be summarised in one of the best and the most perfect representations of Christ of the very subtle and very deep Greek mind. The representation of the Christ they favour, robed in the majesty of Kingship, crowned, and yet nailed to the Cross, says all things with perfection and with adequacy. The contradiction is not in him that hangs ‘in majesty’ upon the Cross, the contradiction is in us and in all mankind. That is what happened, that is what they did and we did, and still do, but the crucified is the most majestic and uniquely crowned of the sons of men.

Today we ponder and we reflect the total work of God with a sense of the sweep of integrated wisdom through history, and we look for an integrated wisdom and synthesis in the theological work of God as much as in the upbuilding of the universe and the emergence of the kingdom of life. It is no scandal that this urge and this need was not sensed in the same manner in ages which had little or no understanding of creation as an economy of Evolution. An understanding of creation as an economy of Evolution underlines the fact of synthesis in unity, and the mind responds with a thrill. It expects to find the rest of the upsurge of being, as it culminates in man, and the love of God unto man, to be likewise a synthesis of wisdom and of majesty. The expectation is not in vain.

We ask of past ages only that the positive content of all that we can synthesise today should be in their vision of Christ, and we find it so. We do not ask that it should be deployed with confidence in a manner of which mankind is capable of appreciating only in these days. It is however after the manner of great truth that earlier minds should, now one and now another have a glimpse of the truth, and from the eleventh century at least, of the Christian era, indeed in the case of St. Irenaeus the writer would suspect from the beginning of the age of written theological speculation, there are great souls and great saints who have taught what is now called the ‘Scotist’ perspective of the Incarnation of God.

Some indicative texts

Is it true to say with St. Thomas Aquinas and many others, that while the appeal to reason and wisdom of the view we take is very attractive, the authority of holy writ is wanting to this perspective? Even if, for reasons of scope we leave to one side altogether the Old Testament, a most unfortunate thing to have to do, in view of the vision of the Messiah in the great prophets (see for instance the Advent and Christmas offices of the Church) and in the psalms of David, there is evidence enough in the New Testament, and from these key references the general texts which state the work and the majesty of Christ should be gauged.

There is the entrance of the King into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and against the insolence of the Pharisees, Christ quotes Psalm 8. This is significant, because the meaning he gives to it, is that just as the majestic God has made man ‘a little less than the angels’ and set him as ruler over all the earth, so God is, against what we might expect from the majesty of his works, so mindful of the ‘son of man’ that in his own self he comes as the Son of Man, ruler over the whole universe, and King of Kings. This messianic meaning is clearly possible from the psalm, and this is the meaning Christ gives to it (Matt. c.21. v.16. . .).

In the same event as recorded by Luke c.19. v.37- 40, Christ replies when told to rebuke his disciples, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out’. This reinforces the interpretation of Psalm 8 above, for by what right do we interpret the most solemn words of the Messiah as melodrama, mere poetic allusion? He means that if men, for whom the Son of Man is made manifest, did not acknowledge him at least in the hearts and tongues of ‘little ones’, then, because his being and his coming is expected within the laws and fabric of the universe, the very stones would acknowledge him, and cry out the allegiance they owe to him, for from the beginning he is before them in the intention and fabric of the universe. This makes sense of what Christ says. It is on the same occasion, (Mark c.12.) that Christ teaches the parable of the unjust husbandmen, directly against the leaders of the Jews of his time, but in its comprehensive sense against the power of sin in men in general, the principle of their contradiction to the Father and to himself. It is clear that the estate or inheritance belongs to God by right of creation, and that the Son who is sent in hope of an improvement in his subjects is heir to this inheritance, —the field of the earth and of mankind, in any event.

In St. John too, there are many nuances which are not readily explained unless the vocation of the Messiah is to come as King into his own inheritance by decree of creation and the destiny of that creation. In the prologue we are told that all men are made in and through the Word, who is with God and who is God, and whose being is the light of men . . . he came into his own things, his own inheritance, and his own received him not. The Greek makes it clear from the use of the neuter case, that it is his own inheritance or estate, that he came into, the unjust husbandmen are echoed here also, and in that inheritance, his own, who should have expected him and welcomed him, neither knew him nor rallied to him. This makes no sense unless the Christ is by right of coming, not by fact of sin the Heir of the Ages.

There is the constant use too of the title ‘Son of Man’ which Christ uses in preference to any other. While messianic and found in Daniel for instance, it is not the most commonly used of the titles of the Messiah. It makes sense, especially in the idiom of those days, if it means the King of the very stock of mankind: the man in whom and for whom all other men are found and become wanted. In this sense it echoes the very first of the messianic promises of the bible, the curse upon the Serpent who has deceived the race of man, ‘I will place enmities between thee and the woman between thy seed and her seed, he shall crush thy head, and thou shalt strike against his heel’. (Genesis. ch.3.) This passage has always been considered a messianic text by orthodox Christian tradition. Directly, it refers to the seed of the woman, the race of man, which is there in any event, and now, with the help of God, in mortal warfare with the enemy which has inflicted such loss upon mankind. If it refers to the ‘seed’ in a messianic context, then this seed is present from the beginning with Adam, with ‘Man’ and therefore he is par excellence the Son of Man. This, the seed of Salvation, will now, given the cunning ambush and ruin of man, become against the serpent the principle of a war to the death, to the crushing of the head, but we observe that from the very text, the seed is there from the beginning, and is the ‘seed of the woman’, the Son of Man, in a sense which includes all other men, so that they are stock of his stock, they are created in him, not he because of them.

In the 17th chapter of St. John too, Christ sends his disciples as the Father has sent him, with the same power, and for the same work, and asks that they be loved in him, as his right of inheritance in the world. In praying also that ‘Father I will that where I am, the men that thou hast given me shall be with me, that they may see my glory, the glory that I had with thee before the world was . . . ‘ he is praying as Christ, God made man, not simply as the ‘Word of God, who could not ‘pray’ to the Father anyway. Thus the obvious implication is that the glory is the glory specifically of Christ, the Word made Flesh, the motive force for all creation, in whose Person, but Incarnate Person, are all things and all natures created, that in all things whatever, in the decree of creation, the Word communicated should hold the primacy.

Many such passages could be given, those given are only indications. From the gospels an end can be made with the dramatic exchange between Pilate and Jesus Christ, in which Christ states explicitly that he is a King, and that to be a King he was born and came into the world, to give witness in himself to the truth. Truth, in this hebrew context means more than the word implies in the West: it means knowledge of destiny and good, the true path lain hold of and walked in, it is an existentialist not a simply essentialist expression. He does not state any other reason, and are we to think that to witness to the full truth and glory of God was in any way helped by sin? Sin did not give the Christ the Kingship of ‘truth’ but strove and still strives to mutilate it when it is given. Yet this is the Kingship of God from the beginning, in the human spirit, independently of the Incarnation, and thus Christ is saying that he has come to fulfil what from the beginning is the unique work of God upon and within the human spirit. ‘Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice’ . . . So that the Incarnation culminates the work of man’s creation as an order, not because of the Fall. For the same reason, a few lines before, (John c.18. v.28-40.) he has said but now 1 my Kingdom is not of this world. If it had not been for sin, his Kingdom would have been fully of this world and the world to come, for there would have been nothing but a continuity of truth, love, and obedience to the will of God among all men in all of the various jurisdictions of life in Church and in State. As it is, the Kingdom of God cannot be the direct rule of Christ through all the spheres of human authority under God. That perfection of human communion and co-operation must await the restoration of all things in God and the second coming of the Son of Man.

The vision of St. Paul

The Pauline vision of Christ is so much that of the Universal King, all the greater for victory over ‘sin and death’ that it seems surprising that so many theologians have been able to say that the evidence for the Incarnation as part of the plan of the creation of matter and of man is very slight from the scriptures. There is the concept of men become heirs and joint heirs with Christ, (Romans c.8.v.17) which is repeated in several places, and not only because of sin do we need and look for a redemption, suffering with him that we may be glorified with him, but the passible state of creation itself, the being subject to death and vanity of every creature, is made a ‘groan’ that looks for its fulfilment in the transforming life of the Son of God who is the Son of Man. As Son of Man, he is the principle of the transformation in blessedness of all creation.

In Galatians c.4.v.1-8. St. Paul admits that the Jews, through Abraham, are ‘heirs’ to the promises of God, but the heir when a child, and under a pedagogue is little more than a servant, as were the Gentiles . . . now in the fullness of time God had removed the pedagogue, the law of Moses, and called us all in Abraham to the adoption of sons, in the Son of God. It makes a far more significant sense if we presume that the giving of the right to the beatific vision, the adoption of sons, was always in Christ, and that Christ restores, under one and the same economy of salvation, not a different one, what Adam had lost. One of the difficulties of the view which sees the Incarnation as decreed only in view of the Fall, is that it makes two economies of creation, not ineptly summed up in the theological distinction of the grace of God’ as against the ‘grace of Christ’. This distinction of two orders conflicts with Catholic Tradition, which states clearly that Christ restores, in one order and economy, what man had lost through the Fall.

‘Before the foundation of the world’

This insistence of Paul and the Pauline school of the disciples upon the concept of Christ as the Heir of the Ages, and upon all men as ‘adopted’ in him, not only makes so much more perfect a sense of the sacerdotal prayer of Christ, in St. John’s gospel, on the occasion of the Last Supper, but is set off with surely an undeniable definitiveness in the first chapter of Paul to the Ephesians, vv.1-6. We are told that ‘God, the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, chose us in him before the foundation of the world’, and then, lest any of us should say ‘not in the Word Incarnate did God predestine us, but in the Word Eternal, the Second Person of the Trinity, not, sin apart, in the Word become a man’ . . . St. Paul adds ‘who has predestined us into the adoption of children through Jesus Christ, unto himself, according to the purpose of his will.’ Can anything be clearer? We are told that in Jesus Christ, God made man, we are predestined before the foundation of the world.

This same vision of Christ occurs again, with even more devastating clarity, in the epistle to the Colossians, the first chapter, where again, in Christ, God Incarnate, not simply in God without qualification of the flesh, we are told that in him all things were created, visible and invisible, and that he is before all, and through him ‘all things do hold together’. Is there any more sincere or more adequate exegesis of this passage, than to see the whole economy of Evolution to and with man, focused upon and around the Incarnation of the principle of the Unity-Law of creation in very Person? It is pointless to look for descriptions of the work of Christ which ignore or play down the Redemption, —how could that be, and where would we be without it? Yet the Redemption is not adequately appreciated, nor the whole meaning of ‘Salvation’ in its comprehensive sense, which includes also our Redemption, unless the total sweep of the mind and meaning of God in Christ is viewed in its integrated perspective : ‘In him it has well pleased the Father that all fullness should dwell,’ let us repeat all fullness, and then the text makes full sense in all parts.

The same theme is taken up in the first epistle of St. Peter, ch.1.v.20. where we are clearly told not that the Word, the Logos Eternal, but the Word made Flesh, the Lamb of God, was foreknown before the foundation of the world, and manifested in these last times, the Greek word used makes the sense quite clear. The amazement must be that these words can be read, and their obvious meaning ignored. If Christ, God made man is ‘foreknown’ before the foundation of the world, it is not because of sin, which cannot enter into the ‘plan’ or decree of creation that issues from God: sin is incidental, and derives only and totally from the defect of the spiritual creature, not from God and not from matter.

In the epistle to the Hebrews, Christ is the Heir of all things, through whom God has made the world . . . not because of sin can he be the ‘Heir’ of all things, but because all things were made by him and in him, and he is before all, and through him all things do hold together. Whoever is the technical author of the epistle to the Hebrews, the thought here is thoroughly Pauline in its detailed expression, and echoes the first chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians, where the expression ‘re-establish’ all things in Christ is of very doubtful adequacy. The word in Greek means to bring to a head, to recapitulate, to summarise etc. This is the sense of the same word again and again in the thought of St. Irenaeus and the Greek Fathers in general, that all things are recapitulated, or find themselves and their order made perfected and brought to a climax in the Person of God made through incarnation the Son of Man . . . In the third chapter to the Ephesians too, we must note that Paul is commissioned to preach among the Gentiles ‘the economy of that sacrament (mysterium) hidden from eternity in God who created all things . . . that the manifold wisdom of God may be known and declared in Jesus Christ’. This again asserts the vocation of Christ’s Kingship as the corner stone of creation itself, intrinsic therefore to the order of the creation itself. It is significant that this doctrine, which Paul asserts he received by revelation from Christ, for his mission to the Gentiles, is exactly the same vision of Christ we find in the synoptics, in Peter and in John. It must be therefore the very vision of Christ which he himself impressed upon the minds of his most intimate and best loved disciples. We note also that in the book of Revelations of St. John the Apostle, Christ is both Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end as God, and in different words, also ‘the first and the last’ of the works of God as God made man and King of Kings. All these indications of the total work and total inheritance of Christ from the Old Testament and the New, indicate that the Incarnation is the plenary manifestation to men and to pure spirits, of the nature of their destiny, the adoption of the ‘sons of God’, and the plenary manifestation too of the actual ontological working in creation of that same ‘oikonomia’ or integrated economy. Given the terrible reality of sin this is a work which is also a warfare and a victory over the contradiction to God, and this certainly is more the theme of the Apocalypse of St. John than any other element in the work.

No claim is made that these brief indications are comprehensive, or that nothing important has been omitted. These are simply indications from the synoptics, from the ‘Hebrew’ tradition in Peter and in John, and from that Paul to whom they gave the ‘right hand of fellowship’ in the acknowledgement of his special call to evangelise the Gentiles also, of one same vision of Christ, whether learned by word of mouth from himself, or by revelation, as to one born out of due time, in the case of Paul. This then is the full and the authentic perspective of the Incarnation : — man is chosen and willed by God in Christ, the King of the Ages, God in Person, before the foundation of the world and of the universe, and that because of sin we are chosen, willed, and redeemed in him despite the gaping wound of evil in our natures, paralleled and made manifest fully only in the crucified body of Our Lord Jesus Christ upon the Cross. To redeem such, and to remake man again to the likeness of God in the original image of Christ, which shone first with hope in the face of Adam, is not beyond the power, the wisdom, and the unsearchable love of God in Jesus Christ Our Lord.

2. THE MANNER OF REDEEMER

The coming of the King

So the King came into his inheritance, and found it squalid. He did not withdraw with regrets, he was not born to deplore, but to work, not his to detach himself from the commitment of his human soul and body, but to manifest his total engagement. Necessarily then he came to suffer greatly, to sweat the sweat of labour, and to sweat the blood of pure horror. The expression to redeem in hebrew has the sense also of vindicating one’s inheritance out of alien hands, and though from the beginning the Word of God had begun this vindication through the order of grace, at the climax of the struggle the alien and the Prince of this World would dispute the Estate with the Heir in a war that is total. To love much is to suffer much given the realities of evil, the suffering is the reverse side of the coinage of love, the consequence of the created nature. To give all, to understand all, and to enter as one committed, upon all, —that is to strive, and to love to the limits of created power to suffer. This, the incomprehensible price of working the work of God made flesh among sinners, this is the measure of the gift of Jesus Christ to mankind, the gift we call our Redemption.

And if the King, to the appearances before men was born the son of a peasant woman, it was not only because evil had entered so deeply and so corruptly within the cares of the kingdoms of this world, nor was it simply in order to console the meek, the poor, the ‘little ones’ of this world in their trials under the heels of the mighty. It was also to express in the metaphysical truth of God’s own action the tremendous fact that each and every man, the most ignorant, the most afflicted, the most mentally handicapped, is made individually, and by the first call which is creation, to the image of God and is called thus to sonship. The first grace of God is not ‘common’ as a vocation in the Church, but individual in the personal sonship of God. Through this sonship of so many taken up in the will of the Word of God, all things do ‘hold together’ with and in Christ, and so the Church exists in the brethren, and the community in their mutual communion. Every man, ‘every creature’ in the ancient gospel sense, of whatever tribe, colour, and culture, is through Christ a prince by divine right. It was fitting that the human birth of the Son of God as also through his Godhead the Son of Man, should dignify the basic status of all human birth. He was born to the poor, but to the holy, in the dignity of a condition of sacred union.

The birth of Christ was the application to mankind of the dynamism of God upon Nature, and the consummation in God of the Unity-Law of determination of being to fulfilment. It is not that the Divine Nature admits of greater and lesser, but men do, and so does the entire creation of God. ‘I gave you first milk, not meat,’ said the apostle St. Paul, but he was taking up into the order of the creative work of God what first of all any human mother could say in the flesh of her child as she gave him the breast. God also must apply the dynamism of his power according to the limited human measure, and the birth of Christ is the measure of the work which God had prepared from the beginning.

The Divine Nature is not capable of loss, or pain, or sorrow, but the touch of the divine life within the human personalities of men and women must create pain and suffering. The seed of divine life, the interior grace of the soul, as it forms men and women in the likeness of the holiness of God and the love of God, will also become in the present condition of man, a principle of pain. For we are born to commune, by nature as well as by grace, and to commune here means to work, and form, and give, and receive one upon another in the order of very being. So when the ordinary man or woman, and much more so the ‘great soul’ of priestly and prophetic power is brought into direct contact with the mind and heart and deeds of sin, then suffering must enter within the holy created nature, and the pain and the loss will be in proportion to the creature’s degree of likeness to the truth of God, the good of God, and the doing of the works of God.

Over the Crib the shadow of the Cross

Sometimes when we speak of the Redemption of Christ we seem to have forgotten this being born into a community, and being born to commune. From the time of his conception a man is acting and interacting giving and receiving, in the physical and the spiritual life of his own fulfilment and that of the brethren. For all of us must receive in order to live and be fulfilled as individuals, and all of us must give and receive and build up for others in the work social of creation, in order to fulfil ourselves in our personal individuality. All of this, which is the depth of ordinary human life, and gives meaning and joy to our human loves, is framed under the Law, under the Unity-Law within which God has framed all things. It has a measure and a focus as a total work, it is consummated in God. Against this order and this consummation evil, whether personal or social is always, in countless aspects personal and social, conscious and unconscious, a principle of contradiction. A principle of contradiction is a principle of war, and a principle of degradation.

Therefore, when any human being, especially the ‘great soul’ enters into dialogue of being, according to giving and receiving, loving and communing with his brethren, he enters upon resistance from that which is opposite to the truth, namely the lie and the liar. He enters upon the opposite of love and communion, which is to say, hatred and the enemy. Some will love him, and some will hate him. Some will give and receive up to a certain level, and beyond that measure of communion in the truth they will not go, and if they should recognise that they ought to go further and higher, they will begin now to dislike where earlier they had loved. ‘If they have received me,’ said the greatest of great souls, ‘they will receive you, if they have hated me, they will hate you also, for the disciple is not above his master’. (Matt. c.10.v.24.) The reaction to that which opposes and resists the proper good is manifold. Among natures lower than man, there is fear, flight, stress, and so forth, and the body responds to organic lesion with the unwelcome sensation we call pain. The soul as well, when it comes into contact with that which denies the order of spiritual good, and fights against that good, responds with a much deeper and a more inward sense of pain. A man, since he belongs to both orders of reality, feels the pain of the contradiction of evil in the manner natural to both his soul and his body.

This happened long before the birth in the flesh of Jesus Christ, to all the servants of God according to their measure. If we understand why it happened to them, we begin to understand the nature of the suffering of Christ, and why they are perfect types of the supreme ‘Servant of Yahweh’. If we are to set a norm, a standard of measure to their suffering with love as martyrs of the truth and of the good, with great patience and with enduring care, then the norm will have to be the One who comes later, the Son of Man, who lived the most holily, loved the most nobly, and suffered by necessity of the perfection of his being and his status, the most cruelly. In a sense the servants of God before Christ suffered vicariously for God, they suffered through the germ of God’s life, the seed of divine grace that was within them. This which enobled them in their very being, prompted them higher in the wisdom of God and the love of God, and of men their brethren. The more like to God they became by substantial deepening of the spirit, the more they loved and gave, fulfilling and healing their brethren, and meeting the full viciousness of that which hated the light, and came not to the light that its own work might not be made plain.

The servants of Yahweh could do these creative things because of the life of God within them, and they suffered in the same proportion as they understood and loved, for they were committed souls. God cannot suffer in the Divine Nature, but the godly creature in the likeness of God, —yes, and in proportion to that likeness. In a true sense the servant of God suffers ‘vicariously’ for God, because it is the life of God within him which is the measure both of his achievement and his pain. The great types of Christ in the Old Testament, Moses, Isaiah the ‘Servant of Yahweh’, Jeremiah, and many another, suffered not only because of the perfection of their being in their knowledge and love of God, but also they suffered because of their love of their brethren. Their very pain was wrung of their love of God, and the dishonouring of God in his image, and they were for ever apologising, praying, and asking for mercy for the brethren, for they were of one flesh with them, one spirit with them, and they were committed to them in love, and care, and wanting them. Does not the meaning of the Redemption of Christ, and the manner in which it is worked already even now begin to shine through the clouds of the types and figures on earth of the men who had preceded him?

Once we have understood the Incarnation as a work of divine justice and divine love among men, the fulfilment of one and the same work begun from the beginning of sin, and its forgiveness in the Heir of the Ages, then it becomes inevitable that the Son of Man must suffer ‘vicariously’ for the brethren created in him and for him. He loves them, and wants them, and is ‘committed’ to them more than any woman to the son of her womb. The word ‘vicarious’ has had too ignoble a meaning, largely from the crudities of unorthodox theology, indeed much of what it has meant in the punitive theories of the work of Christ, is simply intolerable. God made us in his image, it is not for us to make God in the very crude image of man, and man fallen.

The Son of God and of Man is the root and stock of the brethren, the cause of their being, and the reason for it. They are created ‘in him, and with him and for him’ and he draws them into himself that they may live through him even as he lives through the Father. Not less than the priests and prophets who were before him, but much more, for these received only partially of his full measure, Christ comes to effect a work and a communing for every man, and with every man, who is born into this world. He will also love with apology to his Father for them, more than ever mother and father loved with apology for a son or a daughter who had brought ruin into the lives of others, whom these parents also had come to love. For we cannot escape the links of our organic, family committal one to another, these are ontological, of the order of being, and they embrace wisdom and love, not simply begetting and being begotten. So also with the Son of God and Son of Man, whose very title so written speaks his necessary and unique role, as Mediator is ontologically linked with us and with the Father. In that relationship the fullness of his Redemption stands, and is a Redemption, and not simply a straight forgiveness, a writing off of what cannot be redeemed, for redemption implies a change, interior and substantial, a work achieved through Christ in every man who is ‘saved’ through him.

His contradiction, like his work, will be unique and supreme. As a Redemption of the condition of man, and of the life and works of the individual man, we must call it ‘vicarious’ because man is helpless without him. Sin has destroyed that spiritual ‘equational’ harmony from God to the creature, and from the creature back again unto God through grace, in which the connatural and ordered development of the economy of God upon man, —man individual and man social—was to work. Sin, and the impact of sin upon the very species man, has made the connatural co-operation of man, and perhaps too of man’s very environment, impossible in a direct line of ascent to the ultimate and supernatural perfection of man and of man’s society and earth. A ‘parousia’ which is a straight line ascent of being into ‘heaven’ is impossible given the impact of sin, and the inheritance of the effects of sin. The crucifixion of Christ, of ‘Omega-Point’, makes the reason clear enough, and the meaning of man’s Redemption does not include any such exaggerated optimism. Till the end of time, the Cross will always symbolise and manifest the painful working out of the Redemption of man. The root of sin must be destroyed before the total restoration is possible, and for that ‘the body of sin’ the body infected with the lusts and confusions of sin, must die and be reformed through the power of the Spirit, for the original plan of God required and would require the perfect natural and supernatural co-operation of nature with grace. Through the life, death, and physical resurrection of Christ, the essential work remains and is done, but not according to the original manner, that would make nonsense of ‘redemption’ and cloud over the gift of Christ in the salvation of mankind.

The shadow of the Cross therefore, falls across the Crib at Christmas time, and the Church is aware of it, for where the martyrology for Christmas is sung with the full liturgy of the Church, the cantor, when he comes to the phrase ‘in Bethlehem of Juda, the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh’, switches from the festal tone to the tone for Passiontide.

Deepening the content of ‘vicarious’

The work of Christ will be the supreme work in the destiny of all men, because his life and his work undoes again in the created economy of God the effects of sin in human nature. The first effect of the Fall was the loss in man of the divine destiny of ‘sonship of God’ with the loss of the original holiness of man. In the train of this loss there followed the physical and psychological effects of sin, and those which are inheritable in the stock become in turn the material conditioning which makes original sin in every man, through the loss of perfect goodness and perfect focusing to goodness, in human nature itself. There is through sin, whether personal or original, an alienation from God which is positive, though it cannot effect the true and total corruption of man’s nature, as has been explained in the chapters on original sin, but nevertheless the incursion of sin corrupts the original plan of spiritual and social development of mankind to God, and as far as man is concerned, this is a total ruin, for there is nothing that created power can do to restore it to its former balance.

In the original plan of God, apart from the question of the Incarnation, God must always be the ‘draw’ upon the individual and upon human society, by which the development of man and human society increases in the depth of being and of holiness in the likeness of God. If one presumes the Incarnation irrespective of the incursion of sin, then the enfleshing of God is the summit of this work. Christ, as we have considered in an earlier chapter, is always the ‘Saviour’ of the individual and of human society. If the theological position is granted which sees the Incarnation as the motive of the creation of man and of the universe, —-all these for God, and Christ the plenitude of expression through the creaturely nature of the divine reality, then there is nothing arbitrary at all about the Incarnation as the perfect means of man’s Redemption.

The means of the fulfilment of the individual and of the created order was to have been God : — ‘no man comes to me, except the Father who sent me draw him . . .’2 and the ‘draw’ by which the spiritual creature is transformed to the fullness of its created perfection is always God. Is he less powerful because the creature is fallen, and will he be able to reintegrate and restore the final order of things in the divine will and the divine gift? We must state that God can, and is able, but nothing less than God is so able, for the effect of sin is to destroy the birthright of man, and to ruin the economy by which that birthright was to have been achieved. The draw of God will be sufficient to pull again the tangled threads of human life and love back into focus, and restore the perspective of the work of creation. The personality of the Son of Man, in whom we are loved and wanted in any order, sin or no sin, will be surety enough again that in him we should be loved and wanted. But it will be a work, a true reparation, the fullness of the wisdom and love of God as before, not a ‘letting off’ in any sense, and the cost of it, even before in more detail we ponder its measure, surely we can begin to see and understand it all . . . the cost of such a work of perfect being in all the measure of the Manhood of the Universal Man, of loving and of apologising in one’s very being for the brethren, of knowing and experiencing what they are, the whole terrible, confused, desperate struggle with Satan and with men . . . this, if it is to be the perfect victory, which at the end of the Economy is the perfect work, and all given back to the Father, through the Son, in the love of the Holy Spirit, with the stains gone, and the tears wiped from the eyes of men, and from the eyes of the Son of Man . . .the measure of the pain and the sorrow is beyond all created power to as much as stammer with nearness of truth. The gift of it is always, and in a new manner because of the ‘novelty’ of sin, which has no place in the intrinsic will of God, the gift of Jesus Christ, true God and true Man: a divine gift and a human gift, because willed by the same Person in the fullness of both those natures and those orders of being.

The restoration of the creation to its original glory in God is possible, through the active and working power of God, by the purgative way, which as we know is a way of joy, but of pain as well, it cannot now be from thesis to synthesis, to illuminative perfection, and final communion in a direct line. The encounter of the Son of Man with sin will involve the encounter of war. This the Prince of Peace prophesied when he said that he was come to send not peace on earth, but the sword of division of man against man. It is entirely incidental to his work, and no fault of his, but it expresses the encounter of God with evil as the principle of contradiction which dogs the work of God and the happiness of men, since the Fall of man. In this, and this alone, is the Marxist right about the ontological nature of the contradiction at the heart of being. The Marxist himself exemplifies its most hideous manifestation in the militant Atheism upon which he erects his promise of heaven on earth, which enslaves men more hopelessly than before to servility, to passion, and to meaninglessness in being. Yet this ontological contradiction to the true and the good is not at the heart of being, and of its nature it destroys being, and the proper development of being. Once assumed however into the nature of man, through evil free-will, it does act as if it were an ontological principle, and it is inherited, so that it appears in all generations, and even manifests a certain unity and continuity of principle in its works. It remains however incidental and accidental to the nature of man and the society of man, and it is a principle, indeed the principle of AntiChrist, a principle of progress to hell on earth, not heaven on earth. The mature and intellectual Marxist, though he may not yet be a Christian, should have learned this much by now.

We should not be troubled by the word ‘vicarious’ but only by that distortion by which mentally we imagine a ‘whipping-boy’ or think of the work of Christ as truly and properly expressed by the scriptural symbolism of the scape-goat. We, or at any rate Roman Catholics that is to say, find the expression ‘Vicar of Christ’ very different in content, and to have its own majesty. When villagers speak of ‘the vicar’ they do not, it is true, have a truly vicarious idea at all, but he is called ‘vicar’ only because originally he was a sort of curate, he was there in place of somebody else who could not do the work. It is certainly a ‘vicarious’ redemption from death if a man give an organ of his body to save a twin brother, because in the present state of knowledge there is more hope of such identically related material being accepted by the body of the sick man. It is a ‘vicarious’ redemption from death if a man stay behind and fight off the wolves, so that his friends or his flock escape, while he himself succumbs finally under the attack. Christ himself used these last two examples, —that greater love than this has no man, than that he lay down his life for his friends, and that the Good Shepherd, who was himself, has a love and care for the sheep, even to laying down his life for them, while the hireling flees because he is a hireling, and has no such feeling for them. In the understanding and appreciation of the work of Christ we should take his similes at his own word, and see the full meaning of his sacrifice in the very close parallel it has with the lesser hut still total sacrifices of heroic men. In both cases it is the clash with evil which is the cause of death, not a punitive theory of satisfaction for sin.

In many ways the best analogy we can offer of the significance of vicarious satisfaction for mankind’s sins in the work of Christ, is the use of the word ‘vicar’ and ‘vicarious’ as a title of Peter and his successors in the government upon earth of the Church of Christ. It means that the supreme bishop of the Church speaks, acts, and works, at the summit of his office and its powers ‘for Christ’, and also in the crises of faith and morals, for us, if the matter require a final judgement concerning right and wrong, good and evil. This he may do either in Council with the apostolic college, or directly if need be, from the prerogative of his own office in the Church, which office is itself the organic head on earth of the Magisterium which is one body in the bishops of the Catholic Church. In acting as the living voice of Christ teaching down the ages as ‘one having authority’ his voice is ‘vicarious’ for that of Christ, and the truth taught in Peter is guaranteed by Christ, alone the real and eternal Head of his Church and of the body which is his Church. Very much more closely related to each and every one of us and our destiny in the truth is Jesus Christ, from whom proceeds all power in heaven and upon earth. Much more organically and ontologically is he related to us in office and in being who is the root of all our being, and the reason for our existence and our destiny. Into him we are so inserted as branches and made one thing with the Living Vine that we who ‘live by him’ are taken up with him organically, so that together with him we ‘live by the Father’ and share his sonship and his glory.

Excesses of punitive theologies of the Redemption

We need to consider what the Redemption of Jesus Christ does not mean in order to appreciate that which it does mean. The Redemption of Christ does not mean that the ‘angry Father’ contemplating the disobedience of man in human sin, decrees to condemn to eternal death all those born of woman, so that, in the most literal sense the whole of mankind becomes one ‘massa damnata’ one ‘damnéd leaven’ of flesh and spirit. Against which sentence of the divine justice the Son interposes himself, offering to be incarnate as man, and in his body and spirit to endure from the hands of sinners a most cruel death, so that in his total sacrifice ‘the Father is appeased’ and there is wiped out upon the Cross the totality of ‘the handwriting which was against us’. This interpretation, containing of course some elements of distorted truth, is the fundamentalist conception of the Redemption and Satisfaction of Christ which most people in these islands, however lapsed and agnostic their Christianity, will find that they have had from their childhood. It derives from the punitive and imputative theology of early Protestantism, and as late as the early 1950’s one heard a street preacher call through a loud-hailer during a ‘Christian Commando Week’: —‘people of London, I am warning you: this is your last chance. Insure against the wrath of the Father in the blood of the Son. . .’

This ghastly theology, which reduces the meaning of the Incarnation to the level of an insurance policy drawn against hell-fire, by the signature of ‘belief on Jesus’ without any change or enhancement of the status of a man’s being, is of course heretical. It equates the infinite Majesty and Love which is God to the level of a feuding tribal chieftain, and one degraded at that by the unconscious categories of human sin, requiring a bloody sacrifice of the highest dignity before the wrath of the King may cease. It has its unpleasant echoes in some Catholic theology as well, especially among mission preachers of the last century, but it has never been the vision of the satisfaction for sin rendered by Christ taught by the best and greatest of the doctors of the Church, from St. Irenaeus, through to St. Thomas Aquinas, down to modern times.

There are so many flaws in theories of the Redemption which are truly punitive. In the first place the ‘restoration of due order’ which is seen as the meaning of ‘vindicative justice’ is put in the suffering of pain, whereas it can only be in the obedience of mind and heart, in the recognition of the evil done, and in that natural grief which is the human consequence of true love, when one has caused loss or pain. It does not of itself consist in vengeance, and the infliction of punishment in human justice, apart from its use as a deterrent, in so much as it belongs to the vindication of the order of justice, works on the presumption that this is the only way to bring home the reality of evil to the sinner, and to inculcate a respect for the norm of the law, and a mind ‘not to sin again’. If the sinner fully and perfectly repented of his sin, if it were obvious and we could be sure it was so, if he also manifested the greatest grief for the evil done and the indignity inflicted, and was doing all that lay in human power to repair that injury in all its aspects . . . we would never dare to lay the lash upon him. How could we or why, unless perhaps he asked it as a symbol merely of the humiliation of arrogance?

It is the arrogance which is the disorder in sin, and where the arrogance is fully repented and reparation made and sought, the dignity of the order of justice is restored. Something very similar is behind the theory of the ‘plenary indulgence’ of the temporal punishment due to sin in Catholic theology. It is the perfect love which remits the debt that remains, for perfect justice and perfect love assimilates to the perfect image of God, and is the final reparation. Only that can ‘make satisfaction’ to God which is in his image, for God is very being, and beyond the restoration of the image of God in the creature, and the right order of love and justice, there is simply no further one can go, for no more can be added. The restoration is a work however, and not so very easy a work at that. In the achievement lies the pain and the suffering.

God cannot be interested in pain and suffering for its own sake. Pain and suffering of themselves are lesions in a being, not positive qualities, of themselves they destroy the work of God and the image of God, they do not increase it. Pain and suffering has value only when it is the inevitable concomitant in the creature either of reformation in the image of God, or of achievement for oneself and for the brethren, in the order of the things of God: then it is a measure of the ontological power of the love which tears the achievement through an ocean of resistance, the resistance of sin outwardly, and the resistance of nature to pain in the inner man. In saying this we have come very close indeed to the heart of the Redemption wrought by Christ.

It is the majesty of holiness and of love which can bring forth the perfect work through so terrible a parturition which as a work achieved is reparation and equivalent to the loss incurred in the incursion of sin. Since in the human nature of Christ this cannot be attained without passion of sorrow beyond all human comprehension, we have some measure here of the ontological power of the work of Christ against the influence of evil, in the restoration within the Trinity of the birthright of man, and the order of the economy of creation itself. We dare not say that the Passion of Christ is incidental or accidental to his work of Redemption. Among ourselves, it is the measure of the pain and the renunciations which cause nature to shy away, and to refuse the greatest achievements in the good and in the mastery of evil. The parable of the ‘rich young man’ can be brought to mind. Christ did not refuse : his pain measures his love, his justice, his total obedience to ‘the will of my Father’, which as he said was that of ‘those which he has given me, I should not lose any one’. His Passion, —and if we do not say his sacrifice, it is because as yet we have not considered the essential core of what sacrifice is, —measures also in us the reality of sin, both original and actual personal sin, and is its own terrible judgement upon moral evil. Suffering like this is not incidental or only accidentally related to the achievement, it is the sweat that pours from the fully flexed labour of an achievement in the order of being and of creation itself.

There are many other distasteful inadequacies in punitive theologies of the Redemption of Christ, and there is no space to dwell on them here. One last one may be mentioned. It would be unjust in God to allow men to be created, in order to be damned for the incurring of original sin through the factor of physical inheritance. The man created by generation had no part in the original transgression, and the soul, the spiritual co-relative of being which his material nature demands, is not inherited at all, but is the direct and individual creation of God. This injustice is obvious from the fact that theology has to face this very position in the problem of the baby that dies without baptism. From the beginning theologians have demurred from the imputation to them of a true damnation. They have offered the ‘mitissima poena’—most mild of penalties—of St. Augustine, until that became for Dante, following the schoolmen, nothing but a sigh for the unobtainable, and in later theologians the postulation of a ‘state of purely natural happiness’ less than the beatific vision. To the writer it does not seem beyond hope that a direct and logical development of the principles of sacramental theology, using the ‘baptism of desire’ admitted from the beginnings of Christianity it would seem, may show us a solution of this problem which does not make nonsense of the sacrament of baptism, but the discussion of so detailed a matter should not be here.

We can agree that without Christ there would be no Redemption, but the total annihilation of the human economy would seem to be in that case the just alternative, not total, reprobation. Of course it is very doubtful whether we can talk about what God ‘would have done’ without talking nonsense, for the knowledge and the will of God is One with his Being, and there are no surprises for God. The Divine Will never changes, and if we consider that the Incarnation is part of the very decree of creation itself, then Redemption has a greater majesty, for it is the perseverance and achievement of the original Will of God, through even the circumstances of human sin, which is the Redemption. In so far as the knowledge and the will of God includes the knowledge of the Fall of angels and of men, that will, as it is specified in ourselves, must be said to include a forgiveness in Christ which is more and beyond the fact of creation in itself. As this relationship to the creation through man is expressed in the human will of the divine Person of Christ, it remains his free gift to mankind.

The essence of sacrifice

We should not hope, much less try to interpret the sacrifice of Christ from the primitive types and figures of the Old Testament in which it is prefigured. This prefiguring must be there, the prophetic doom that is to befall the Messiah must be shown to be foretold, but in the mentality of an age impoverished because as yet Christ is not, we must not expect to find an exact commentary on the work which is accomplished in the literal Son of God. We must not attempt to make the scapegoat the perfect figure of the satisfaction of Christ, though every type of the conflict of the Lord of the universe with the energies of sin carries its own partial message and significance. So also St. Paul, when he states that ‘he who knew not sin he made sin for us’ must not be taken in the narrow sense, but include the being made reprobate and accursed by the princes of the Synagogue, and the Gentile power, the being cast outside the gate as a criminal, and the total pain and humiliation of the death of Jesus Christ, and understood in that juxtaposition never far away in Pauline doctrine, by which the crucifixion of Christ and his resurrection, is the principle of the crucifixion in us of the ‘old man’ and the rising of a man to a new life, in water and the Holy Ghost, in the Sonship of God. Much more is contained in these similes than looks at a casual glance.

In fact only the narrower and the more shocking figures of the Old Testament can be expected to typify something that should never have happened, the bestial cruelty of the death of the Lord of creation when he came into ‘his own things’. The glory of the Messiah, the majesty of him over all the earth, the calling of the nations, the pilgrimage of all the peoples to mount Sion . . . these magnificent visions must also be taken into account. They are magnificent because they portray not merely what should have happened, but that which in substance is happening, and will yet happen to a final achievement. The glory of the Word made flesh is in the fullness of his Person and his Work, the glory of his Salvation and Redemption is very full and many-sided in aspect and in majesty.

We can overlook too easily the parable of the unjust husbandman, of whom the king said ‘they will reverence my Son’, the king did not send him to be crucified, or the pathos which rings in the first chapter of the gospel of St. John, at the fate that befell the Word made flesh would be nullified. We overlook the words of Christ to Pilate that ‘he who has delivered me to thee, has the greater sin’, and the cry from the Cross as the nails were driven, ‘Father, forgive them, they know not what they are doing’. Intrinsically it was the greatest of sins and the greatest of blasphemies, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, not something which, in its own formality, the Father could possibly view with satisfaction.

To understand to the full the sacrifice of Christ and the satisfaction of Christ, the whole literature of the Old and the New Testaments, and the whole sweep of the apostolic tradition of the Christian Church through the ages must be invoked. Even so, the understanding will not be full to the full. If there are any places where, more than another we might look for its significance, it will be to passages like the prologue of St. John’s gospel, the prayers before the betrayal, and the magnificent Epistle to the Hebrews. In this last the splendour of the figures and the types of Christ in the Old Law are clearly seen as the foil in which is inset the Majesty of Christ which shines out through them. The fullness must be contemplated in himself, and conveyed by those who had ‘palpably known and felt the Son of God’. Then too, in every age the image of Christ lives, sometimes with the emphasis more on the glory, but mostly with the emphasis more upon the Cross, in his Church, and in the wisdom of the Holy Spirit by which she is animated.

“Then he said to them : ‘O foolish and slow of heart to believe in all the things of which the prophets have spoken, —ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into his glory?’ And beginning at Moses, and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures, the things that were concerning him.” (St. Luke c.24.vv.26-8.) On the road to Emmaus, the wonderfully theological stranger whom they knew later ‘in the breaking of bread’ showed them something of the total meaning of the Christ of God, through the focusing into one bright beam of many a partial figure. That is the right order. All the figures and the types and prophecies are meaningful, but they illuminate from afar and with a dimmer ray, the point from which, upon the Eastern horizon, the Day-Star of God is to rise upon mankind. We judge the lesser from the greater, and not the greater from the limits of the lesser reality—the type.

There are many definitions of a sacrifice, and one of the most meaningful in understanding the Sacrifice of Christ, because one of the most potentially developmental of definitions, is that of St. Augustine ‘every good work by which we inhere to God’. Oblation, consecration, and some sort of communion are essential characteristics of sacrifice, of itself immolation is not one of the essential characteristics. This last point is made with a mind to the fact that sin is not essential to the order of God’s creation, and hence there would be no immolation in an order of sacrifice to God in which sin did not intervene. This is the more important upon any thesis in which Christ is predestined before creation, and in which he is the meaning of the creation made in him and through him.

He would still, very clearly, be Mediator, Priest, and King, and in this relationship to the Father and to mankind, he would still have been in himself, ‘the Sacrifice of Praise’, —the Eucharist, which means the Thank-offering, of all mankind to the Father, and of all creation besides. The entry of sin into creation through the rational creature, brings immolation into the concept of sacrifice as a quasi-essential characteristic, with a connotation of acknowledgement of guilt, and act of atonement, much as the same incursion into creation of moral evil brings a ‘principle of contradiction’ into the nature of man, a principle which adheres through generation.

As the pain of Christ is the reverse side of the coin of his holiness and his love, so also the immolation is the essential consequence, given sin, of his full oblation.

Therefore the immolation of Christ ought not to be regarded as ‘accidental’ to his sacrifice, as non-essential that is, because in the historic order of the ontological reality, this is the inevitable price of the redemption of being which is wrought in him, and the achievement both for us, and in our very selves, which is torn through the ranks of embattled wickedness. Nevertheless, the positive content of the meaning of sacrifice must be most in mind, and often it is not, for the sacrifice of Christ, and the achievement of Christ is substantially the same now, as in the order of the divine destiny of man had the Fall never occurred. The final achievement is the same, God may seem to lose his battles, but does not lose the last one.

In our own lives too, in which we strive to conform our bodies, our souls, and our works, to the Exemplar which is Christ, we make ourselves ‘a living sacrifice’ in the likeness of Christ. What we achieve is not a life of misery nobly endured, but a positive increase in being, and in joy, love, and possession of all things in Christ. The pain and the persecutions are there too, and they are only incidental to the work and to the joy of the work in one sense, but in the fact of experienced reality we would never, without ‘the crosses’ come to the fullness of the work done in ourselves, or done for Christ in our brethren. Sacrifice should not be a term first and foremost of grim connotation, as it is for most people, but one with a connotation always of joy, but joy through a laborious victory: that is what it was for Jesus Christ, a most laborious victory.

Sacrifice derives from the gathering up of the brethren in a common relationship to God. So in the most significant forms of sacrifice in primitive societies, it is a public act of the living body of the community, who are taken up to God in this supreme relationship through the Patriarch, the head and origin in fact, or in monarchic derivation, of the ‘life’ of the people. So we find Melchisedech in the Old Testament, is both king and priest. There is a mediatorial aspect to this most perfect form of sacrificial relationship, it is through their ‘Father’ that men are brought into individual and social union and communion with God. This union and communion of the common sacrifice will include all the aspects of full human communion with God. There will be adoration, love, (though the highest adoration includes love) thanksgiving and petition. Since the incursion of sin there will be also reparation, sorrow, and atonement. All these are characteristics of that enacted, social prayer, the ‘sacrifice’ by which the individual and the ‘family’ adhere unto God. To enact this act and this relationship is to ‘do a sacred deed’ and the doing of a sacred deed, is the literal translation of the word ‘sacrifice’.

Full human communion with God was of course not possible before the Incarnation. In the sacred meals of the mystery cults, and of many a primitive sacrificial ceremony, we may see either a yearning for full communion, and the increase of divine life, or in some circumstances rather a diabolical mimicry. For the Jew, anything which could debase the glory of Yahweh to the level of the local idolatrous rites was forbidden. When figures pass away into the reality of the Son of God and of Man, then it is otherwise, and the fullest of full communion with God, the origin and the increase of the spiritual principle in being, is possible to the Christian, and the communion is the integral consummation of the Christian Sacrifice. This includes both the Supper and the Cross, and hence through history, we mean the Eucharist, the ‘Mass’ which is consummated with the communion of the priest at least, and for plenitude with the ‘holy communion’ for all of the body and blood, the soul and the divinity of the Son of God made Son of Man.

There are many instances in early cultures, of the manner in which the principle of sacrifice, the ‘pleasing of God’, is consummated for all in the mediatorial role of the head of the community. There is often, perhaps mostly, a desire to make that role one of direct origin and mediation between God and man. So, the Pharaoh of Egypt was also the physical and incarnational son of God, and the origin of his people, the emperors of China and Japan were both the ‘sons of heaven’ and hence the origin of their peoples and the chief priests of the community. In perhaps a majority, especially of the great cultures of early civilisation, the kings held the status of ‘divinities’ to the people, and the life of the people was bound up with them. Even the emperors of Rome found it convenient, and a useful synthesizing force, to be ‘divinities’ to whose ‘genius’ the tributary nations must sacrifice. The stress we are seeking here, is the sense of ‘mediation’ in sacrifice, that the lowly is wanted, because he is one with the higher in origins, and is ‘taken up’ with the priest-king into the bosom of God, or of the gods. This is very important, because even in our very sophisticated age, men who may have no obvious sense of religion as ordinarily accepted, do the self-same thing. There are those who regard themselves as ‘dedicated’ to achieve a political or social ideal, those who strive to bring a sense of ‘art and beauty’ into the lives of the general run of men, there are philosophers also, one thinks of Lord Bertrand Russell, who take it upon themselves to ‘mediate’ with commissars and kings for the safety of the brethren and the globe. I wonder, —did they ever stop to realise that they were presuming to offer sacrifice, to perform, by right of status, and of relationship to the brethren, a mediatorial role through which some blessing or some salvation might be given unto men? Better to be much more humble about these things, and these relationships, in our primitive forefathers.

While the offering of gifts to God is the common expression of adoration, subjection, and love, and the immolation of the gifts either a symbol of their true alienation from human greed, and giving to God, or else a symbol of the destruction due to sin, transferred to the lesser vehicle of being and life, the offering of gifts etc., in the Old Testament, is clearly not the chief of the elements in sacrifice, —not in the supreme offices of mediation at any rate, in the times of supreme crisis. No, it is clear beyond any doubt that the reconciliation and the mediation is the person who stands between the community and the anger of God. There is a very good list of these in the Wisdom of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) of the Old Testament, in chapters 44 to 49 inc. So, Noah is made a type of mediation for all flesh, otherwise to be destroyed in the Flood, Abraham mediates for all mankind, and is given a sign ‘in his flesh’ (the rite of circumcision) that of his line will come the Messiah who will bring in all cleanness and health for men, Moses most clearly ‘mediates’ for his fallen people, and will not accept that Yahweh should destroy them, and ‘make of thyself a great nation’, Simon and Phinees are types of great high priests whose very lives and being are a reconciliation for the people etc., there are so many examples. It is well summed up in the lesson from the book of wisdom of Sirach in the Mass for a saint who is a bishop: ‘behold a great priest, who in his days was pleasing unto God, and in the time of wrath was made a reconciliation: there was not found another like unto him, who kept the law of the Most High’ (Wis. Sir. c.44.v.16-27: c.45.v.3-20.) and perhaps even more clearly, in the book of the wisdom of Solomon, ch.18.v.20,21. ‘For a blameless man made haste to pray for the people, bringing forth the shield of his ministry, —prayer, and by incense making supplication he withstood the wrath, and put an end to the calamity, shewing thereby that he was thy servant.’ It is this, the mediation, through holiness and consecration which is significant above all, in understanding the Redemption of Christ prefigured in the Fathers of the Old Testament. Let us observe that these figures are never whipping-boys and scapegoats, they are the beloved of God, it is their justice which is the reparation, and their brethren are loved in the holy flesh, and their work is in pain and in anguish, because of the sin of their nation.

1 Thus the Greek text, whatever the modern translations!

2 John c.6.v.44.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“The Chalice which my Father has given me”

Perspectives of the work of the Redemption

The Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ must be seen as integral to the decree of creation as an economy. The Incarnation manifests the elevation of the spiritual creature to the fullest participation in the Divine Life compatible with being a creature. In such a perspective of the meaning of ‘the Word made Flesh’ the Incarnation manifests what manner of gift God has made in creating, it is the means by which man and the creature below man is transformed in fulfilment, and matches also, in the sheer wisdom and love of the divine economy, the measure of the supreme destiny given to men as the gift of God.

With such a vision of Christ, we do not need to ask ourselves why he did so much, or endured so much from men. We do not need to say that of course the smallest work of God made a man, having infinite merit in the Person of the Word, would have sufficed, but that the Son of God wished to show the measure of his love, the enormity of sin, or to defeat the Devil in equal battle, so to speak, etc. Some of the Fathers are rather fond of the last thought, but in fact nobody is ever on ‘equal terms’ with the Living God, and Jesus Christ is the Living God. These statements can make the Redemption appear arbitrary in form, or to lack the sweep of a work begun and completed in the Unity-Law of wisdom and truth. The element of truth these thoughts contain stands in the coherence of the divine operation. The birth of the Word as flesh is the continuance of a work which was to have been from the beginning, which was to have been unto consummation, and which is in no wise prevented by the incursion of sin into the economy of God.

The Son of God should have been proclaimed and accepted as the Son of Man, and the King of Kings: we might expect this climax to have been either the point of the confirmation of human society in the good, or even of the final transformation of creation itself, as the foil of ‘the New Jerusalem’, of the order of achievement we now call ‘Heaven’. We are not able to know what would have been, because the full potential of creation cannot now be realised in the present condition of man, through the infection of sin within the spiritual creature, and within the works of the spiritual creature.

The work which is the destiny of the Son of Man will be now a work of liberation, of renewal, of reconciliation, and of reparation. It will follow the course of the work predestined from all eternity, in that it will be ‘natural’ in its course, for it is integral to creation. It will be substantially the same work, but conditioned now in another alignment caused by the creature, it will be by way of a Redemption, and its climax in the Resurrection of Christ will not be the immediate transformation of all things in God through Jesus Christ. It will be first the evangelisation of all men and all nations in the gift of Christ, and when the world is sufficiently one, and all nations have received the gift in fullness of what in part was always their salvation before God, then when all have heard and have accepted in part and rejected in part, the final defection and the final revolt must begin. In days which shall be shortened, against ‘nature’ for the vehemence of the evil, the King shall come again in finality and in consummation of a perfect work.

Since finality is the ultimate reason for the Incarnation of God, there is small wonder that the ‘Parousia’ should have been so much in the minds of the first apostles and first Christians. It must have been a dominant theme of the vision of Christ himself, as he presented the sweep of creation to his disciples, it was the final wiping away of tears, the consummation of his vocation and his creative FIAT. That it ‘comes quickly’ if the intervening time is measured against the eternity of the creation fulfilled, the state of Heaven, is certain, for what we call the ‘eschatological’ is the delayed effect of that Salvation of God which is the full decree of creation. In the present condition of man it is the Victory of which our present being redeemed is only the first fruits.

If we portend that the ‘end of the world’ will be cataclysmic however it come, we have good reason, for despite the minimising tendencies of some moderns who are more afraid of the world than strong in Faith, such is the clear teaching of Christ, and the clear teaching too of the apostles in the New Testament. We must expect it, the final struggle will be a struggle, the mystery of iniquity works even now, and it must have its climacteric. For man as a whole and for his world, it will be in a sense analogous to the state of purgatory which most of us hope for after death. We are not perfect. Or again, the entrance into transformation of the Kingdom of God on earth may be likened to that ‘dark night of the soul’ through which the great spirit enters into the illuminative and then the unitive possession of his joy.

The life of the Son of Man will run a full and a ‘natural course’. He has come to live a given vocation to its natural measure in human life, running a span, co-operating with the brethren in giving and in receiving again from them. It will be as natural and as commensurate to a work which was made to be part of creation itself as was its beginnings, the natural birth as man in and from the womb of Mary. It should end with enthronement, the giving back to faithful men of the full gift of God, the crowning of their own oblation and adoration. It should end with the Divine Eucharist, with himself in plenitude of human communion. In fact, it will run that same full course to its crisis, until the ‘acceptance’ be refused by men in violent rejection. The enthronement will be there, and the title displayed in the tongues of the nations, —but upon the Cross. Men will bring his kingship indeed to a consummation, ‘lest the whole world go after him...The Eucharist will be there too, the giving back to men of the gifts of God, following upon their sacrifice, their oblation, —which is made his immolation.

His Eucharist is given with the Resurrection physically from the dead, and our rising from death to life with him, through water and the Holy Ghost, by which the seed of his Life lives, abides, and grows within us. But it is little wonder that when he left us the Eucharist on earth which is his total Being for our food, that he linked it to the oblation and the immolation through which he consummated the work and restored it: ‘as often as you shall do it, you shall do it for the commemoration of me’. The gift is himself, not a mere commemoration, but what is commemorated is the way and the manner through which he completed the work of restoring our birthright. Because the Church and ‘his own’ must walk in these same paths of thorns and of scourgings, until the fullness of time be come, she fittingly offers him and lives by him according to a sacrificial and sacramental expression which seems not quite finished, although the Lord has entered into his glory. She offers him, through the ‘Mystery of Faith’ by which she is redeemed and she lives, ever with St. Paul ‘filling up in her Body what is wanting to the sufferings of Christ’.

The sacrifice and the satisfaction of Jesus Christ inheres in the perfection of his Person as the Son of God and the Son of Man. Because he is a man, this work is not completed in the very fact of his nature. The personality of a man, created as it is in time, and for time, has to be deployed, its full potential is not made actual all at once. So in the case of Christ. He is not a human person in the strict sense of the word, but in the wider and more ordinary sense of the term, he has a human personality which is the deployment through and with his human nature, of the work and intention of the Person of the Word, the work and intention of the second Person of the Holy Trinity. His human personality therefore must be deployed through time and begin, manifest, and bring to consummation a work in time and through time. It is the completion of this work which is the consummation of his sacrifice and his redemption.

Essentials of the oblation

That is why we should not dwell on such points as ‘any work of Christ’ being in itself sufficient to redeem mankind, and so forth. The work as human, as the work of the Son of Man, must have a natural rhythm and a natural function in time. Like all human nature, it is not finished at birth, but is deployed to a maturity. The essential of the redemption and the satisfaction of Christ is to be found in the total holiness and charity of his being in the nature of God and in the nature of man. This most surely is the principle of that ‘perfect good’ that perfect ‘image’ of the goodness by which God is good, and which alone can be acceptable to the Father as a ‘reparation’ and as an ‘amends’. Yet this essential, to be true to the Incarnation and the wisdom of God, must be perfect as a work deployed, as a vocation fulfilled, as a contacting and a quickening of the brethren, as a work of atonement for them too, in terms of the economy of God in creation, in terms of a work in space and time. This is what Christ was to perfect in time and in the creature from the beginning. He was to unite and to commune, and through himself transform us also into perfect sons of the Father.

So the oblation of Christ works through the whole of his life as man. It contains par excellence all the characteristics we have seen in the lesser types of Christ, the priests and the kings, and above all the priest-kings of the Old Testament. It is the work of perfect teaching, perfect loving, perfect intercession, perfect mediation in the nature of God, through the nature of a man. It is more than a ‘moral’ Redemption, it is an ontological work. Yet it is also a moral Redemption of men, in as much as the ‘faithful witness’ of God, Jesus Christ, is the model, and not merely the model, but the heart-spring of all the faithful witness, the teaching and the exhorting in season and out of season, of the apostles and the disciples who are ‘sent’ by him until the end of the time to complete his work and widen his Kingdom which is the Church.

What is done is always ‘redeeming’ from the moment of the conception in the womb of Mary, but it is a work of God and of man mediated as a vocation through space and through time. Because of the true humanity of Christ it does not stand finished in the first moment of the human activity of Christ, it must quicken to a fulfilment, and it must in turn wait for the response of men. From the circumstances of the birth of Jesus Christ, until his death upon the Cross, the faithful witness of God made man does not lack the note of pain. There is more than the natural pains and fatigues of human labour, there is also the pain of human failure to understand, to co-operate fully, to love justice, and to hate iniquity. It is the perfection of the being of Jesus Christ in his divine and in his human natures that is the principle of reconciliation, —yes, but the Redemption as a work is full only through time, as that sanctity of being is conjoined to a vocation between the Father, and the brethren, a vocation which is a personal work in Christ and a personal work on and for ourselves.

Oblation passes into immolation

The oblation of Christ is the gathering back to God the Father in joy of all the fullness and beauty of the creation, and most of all of the fullness and the beauty which is man, the spiritual creature. Through the Son, and in the Son the Father desired it all, and back to the Father, fulfilled in the likeness of the Son, should it be offered again through the Holy Ghost. This is the fullness of the oblation, of the Sacrifice of Praise, upon which the fundaments of the universe itself are placed. Of itself it does not mean immolation as well, but in the circumstances of the contradiction to God of sin, it will and it does require immolation that it be brought to pass. We see it in ourselves, the sacrifice we should offer to God from our own being, is to be in the perfect likeness of his own, ‘be you perfect as your heavenly Father also is perfect’. Of itself it is joy, and the increase of joy, for there is no happiness like the love and service of God, to serve whom is to reign. So Paul writes to the Romans (c.12.vv.1-5 et seq.) ‘I appeal to you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. . .’ This he calls our ‘sacrifice’, this growing in body and in soul in the increase of being, in the likeness of Christ. It is the perfection of wisdom, love, holiness in all things and through all things which is the perfect and acceptable ‘sacrifice’ of the Christian man. ‘That also is the perfect and acceptable sacrifice of Christ, the nobility of his being, and the noble fullness of its deployment, for the bringing to perfection of the works of God in creation.

In ourselves, as also we know from many a text of St. Paul, this perfect sacrifice of joy and perfection cannot be brought to fulfilment without the crucifixion of that ‘old man’ within us which is born of original sin and of our personal actual sins. While the sacrifice we offer, the conformation of our being to God through Christ is fulfilment and joy, we cannot escape the characteristic also of immolation, for as a result of the Fall, and of personal sin, ‘the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, for these two are become contrary one to another’ (Galat c.5.v.17.) This is true of course even more of the lusts of the mind, —pride, greed of power, arrogance, and disobedience, by which the spirit of a man within the spiritual order can resist and crucify within himself the life of grace, and the promptings of the grace of God.

To tear a way through this resistance needs great generosity of soul, and in tearing a way through the thorns and briars of natural resistance, of reluctance, of stress and pain a man brings forth within his own self an increase of spiritual depth, an increase of life, a man grows that is to say better developed in the faculties of the spirit, even as with the years by study or by exercise he can develop his natural powers of soul and of body. A man does not attain this spiritual increase without the grace of God, this powers his efforts, and through growth in the order of grace and likeness to God, he becomes able to accept more from God, to eat of meat not milk, and so he poises himself for yet a further increase in the powers of the spirit in the likeness of God. This has been called an ontological increase in the fullness of being, because it is a reality, and a reality generated through the cooperation of the created spirit and the direct action of God upon that spirit. The deepening of the soul in wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, and so forth is not an imputation merely, but a real increase in life, and in life more abundantly.

So also in Jesus Christ, the measuring of the Divine and the human in him to the work of the sanctification of men, and the restoration in himself of the order of the Father in all creation, is the calling forth of a work in the ontological order, an increase in justice and in love to match the needs of the burden which opposes him, an emission of power in the order of very being by which not only are we loved and accepted in the perfection of his being and his work as the Son of Man, but also we receive from the Lord now and at all times the grace and the love and the power within, and the example and leadership without, from his life and works, and the comradeship of his saints, to co-operate with him against the evil that is within ourselves, and the evil which is the pressure of persecution and temptation from outside.

Let us pass now without further delay to glimpse in the consummation of the work of Jesus Christ, the manner of the consummation in him of our Redemption. From the supreme moments of the oblation and the immolation of Christ, we can gauge the nature and some of the aspects of that Salvation and Redemption which begins before his birth, which indeed is operative in him and through him as the Word to come and the Word redeeming, from the beginning of man, and from the repentance of Adam and the intimation of a salvation.

Gethsemane

So much of the heart-core of the redemptive relationship of Christ to the Father is contained in the 14th to the 17th Chapters of the gospel of St. John. It is well worth reading the discourse of Christ at the Last Supper and the sacerdotal prayer, as a whole. The anguish of Christ for the storms to come upon those whom he must leave in the world, whose crucifixion is going to be so very much like his own in its loneliness and its desolation stands out : ‘Father keep them in thy name, whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we also are’. . . but observe the context a few verses earlier. It is the context of a work achieved, and a homecoming, a kingdom given in justice for a work which has been achieved: 'I have glorified thee on earth, I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do: and now glorify thou me, O Father, with the glory which I had, before the world was with thee . . .’ This is not the language or the relationship of the Son to the Father, which could make sense in a ‘punitive’ theology of Redemption. Christ himself lists the attributes of the work: manifesting thy name, witnessing, forming the mind and heart, confirming and restoring in the image of the Father, through forming and restoring in the likeness of himself by the direct labour of the Son . . . the end is to come home, and to receive the glory that I had with thee, before the world was. It is as Christ, God and Man this is said, and it is very doubtful that we can, in the context of Christ’s humanity, restrict this glory before the world was, to the nature of the Logos alone. Much more properly do we understand it of the Person of God the Son and the Son of Man in one, of the decree of creation itself, in which the glory of the Word Incarnate is the meaning of the material creation, the meaning of man, and the principle of the beatific vision for the spirit that is enfleshed.

Yet all is not yet finished, the cup is not drunk to the dregs, the prayer is said on the eve of the Passion, and it must needs include the totality of the work of Christ to the ‘consummatum est’ upon the Cross, to be true of ‘I have finished the work thou gavest me to do’. It is in the contemplation of Gethsemane that we can see the plenitude of the inner amends, and the total reconciliation of mankind with God, through Jesus Christ, who was God. We read in Luke of his entering into a prayer upon which there supervenes a sudden, awful shock and horror: almost a despair, ‘and his sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground’ (c.22.v.44). At this some exegetes, the shallower sort, will murmur ‘midrash’ no doubt, as they always do at anything plainly divine and supernatural in the works or surrounding events of the life of Jesus Christ. They will be wrong, as usual, but they need not have worried, for the sweat of blood is known to medical science. It is a human phenomenon. Indeed said of the Son of Man in the moment of his supreme clash with evil, it is the Human Phenomenon, it is the committal of the Son of Man.

The sweat of blood is rare, and occurs when appalling tragedy occurs with awful shock. It is usually linked with horror. The horror in one incident recorded, is that of a mother whose infant wriggled from her arms at a bus stop, and fell, fell just as the vehicle swept in, so that she saw, and heard, the passing of the wheel over the infant’s head. When they picked up the unconscious mother, her skin was moist with a sweat of blood. . .

What was the shock, the grief, the horror, the pain of Jesus Christ which could wring from him in gasps ‘Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me . . . nevertheless, not my will but thine be done . . .?‘ There was first the agony of the total, world vision and experience of the reality of sin. It is the common teaching of theologians that at all times the Christ of God enjoyed the beatific vision of the Father, in his human soul. It seems the reasonable truth, for he was, in his one Person, the beatific vision in himself. He was God. It seems inconceivable that the being of God which communicated being and existence in the real order to his human individuality, should not communicate to his human spirit the joy and the possession of what and whom he was. He and the Father are one: always. To many there is here an insuperable difficulty: —the beatific possession of God is joy, sheer joy, without principle of pain or possibility of pain, how then could Christ in the Garden and on the Cross still enjoy the beatific vision, and truly suffer? So they presume the kenotic theory, that of this too, ‘he emptied himself out.’

It does not seem thus to the writer. In the case of the creature the beatific vision is a principle of joy unalloyed, because it is the end of the journey, and the completion of an order of being. It is the fulfilment in God which puts beyond the reach of created evil. It was quite otherwise for Jesus Christ, because he was God in essential being, also because in the Incarnation he was the Son of Man. Christ then, in the quite unique function of his human nature in the Person of God, was not ‘under the law’ by which the beatific vision is the end and the term of nature’s pilgrimage to its appointed fulfilment. Alone and uniquely the Son of God and Son of Man was at one and the same time both ‘viator’ and ‘comprehensor’ both ‘pilgrim’ and ‘possessor’ in the things of God.

His unique vocation as the Son of Man meant that he belonged to the scene of Nature, and fulfilled a vocation that while supernatural indeed, was of the order of Nature and of the very laws of Nature, because he was from the beginning the Heir of the Ages, for whom the very stones would have cried out, if men had not cried ‘Hosannah’ . . . He belonged by intrinsic right to the decree of creation, for through him it was framed and called. His then it is to love and to suffer as a man among men, for men, his the committal to the act of Salvation, now made the act of Redemption: he was engaged then in the fullness of his powers, divine and human, the work is a work of being and becoming, a work ontological in kind within the natural and the supernatural orders.

It was an appalling struggle, manifold in kind and aspect. Because he belonged to the world of men, was the principle of their root and being, the desire of the Father for them at all, because he was, as the Son of Man at the root of Nature itself, his work though supernatural in the very Person of God the Word, was also of creation, and of man. He had this through his human nature, mediated by the creature unto God in the womb of Mary, and through the fruit of that womb ‘all things do hold together . . .’ Therefore he could love and experience as ‘viator’ in the human way, in all things. He could toil, hunger, be weary in the human way, —though never know the sting of inordinate physical desire, —he could above all suffer in the spirit and the mind in the human way, despite the possession always of the beatific vision of the Father in the fullness of the Holy Spirit of them both. There was no contradiction, for to be the Son of Man was the vocation of his flesh.

We can say more: the possession of the beatific vision of the Father in the Holy Ghost would increase the pain of Christ the Son of Man, beyond all human telling and all human understanding. If a man, say a priest, because of his weak and imperfect knowing and loving of God can experience an untellable pain at the experience of a sweet and deep hearted child, full of promise and of generous goodness, being slowly corrupted and degraded before his eyes by subtle pressures of temptation and by the flattery of companions or by the general pressure of the devil, the world, and the flesh, . . . and this is human experience for a good parent sometimes, for a priest often, how much more so the Son of Man, whose knowledge and love of God as Man flowed from his substantial union with the Person of God! His soul was flooded with the possession of the Father by which he lived both as God and as Man, and can any man dare to imagine the reality of this to the human soul and heart of Jesus Christ? Better to note the observation, ‘and his sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground. . .’

And if a man, a devout parent, or a priest maybe, has known what it is to fight back against this fungoid growth of sensual temptation and the arrogance of life, to throw against it all the weight of his own love, and power with that soul, and then to know rejection and the loss of the battle (one speaks of time, not of eternal loss) then that man has known sorrow indeed, and the more he loves God and his brethren, the more like an overwhelming ocean is his pain. Yet he has entered only from afar upon the pain of Christ, and sipped but a taste of the cup of which the Master drank to the very dregs. Nevertheless, it suffices to begin to understand the order and kind of the love which redeems, to know the force and power of spirits in struggle, and what is the pain which is the reverse side of the coinage of human and divine love. This cup Jesus Christ offered to the two ‘sons of thunder’ James and John, as the ambition of their true vocation as his disciples, and they did drink of it. So has many a deep soul drunk of a little of that chalice, while every deep priest will enter by the blood of his soul, into the Holy of Holies with Jesus Christ, in the participation of the Priesthood of God’s Redemption, both as to the surpassing joy, and also the battle-burden of the pain.

The vision of SIN

Upon the soul and the poor human body of Jesus Christ through his soul, there descended the vision of sin through the ages, not a vision merely as a panorama, but the experience, as when you live and communicate with those you love, flesh of your flesh, and hone of your bones. The grief and the horror of this reality can be indicated, but hardly entered, unless God give it to the mystic to enter with Christ into that reality. There would be every characteristic of pain in that experience and that recognition. The perfection of the human nature of Christ and his perfect adoration and love of the Father would be the first principle of horror and sadness even unto death. There would be also the sickness and horror of the experience of the blasting of the persons of men through sin, original, personal, deliberate, and imposed by the many sided seduction of man by man. There would be a grieving love for his own, because they were his brethren, and his love. There would be a grieving love to the Father in apology, the apology which is wrung from the depths of one's being, not in words or in an assent, but in the very reaction of anguish at such blasphemy of the image of God in the deeds and consequences of sin. All this was the anguish wrung from the body and soul of Jesus Christ.

It means little to most men to say that among the worst of the sorrows inflicted by sin, is the anguish at the loss of being sin entails in the beautiful soul and personality of the good and true who are corrupted. But being is the most general word for all the power, joy, and dynamism of life, and God is that in the supreme degree. So also increase in grace is increase in being, in the likeness of God, but it can be lost, since it abides by charity and not by essence save in God alone, and to see and feel its loss is the sorrow of sorrows. Christ alone could know all this, men can but stammer like children who are infants, still at school.

There would be also for Christ in the experience of being conjoined in the vocation of his very being and Headship unto mankind and unto every man the individual, the grief and the pain of his rejected personal love, of the ruin of his splendid Kingship, upon which the foundations of the universe were based. There must be also the horror and the sorrow for those who rejected unto the most bitter of ends, their final, fully wilful and totally culpable refusal of his comradeship in love. Those for whom his pain-weary pilgrimage of love upon this earth was indeed, in vain.

And whatsoever love there was we have not mentioned, whatsoever justice, it was there in the agony of Jesus Christ. The agony that is from his birth, growing as a tiny seed, as the love and justice grew in wisdom, age, and grace, burgeoning throughout the years of the public ministry, till the bitter fruit is ripened in the Garden of Olives, and consummated next day upon the Cross which is the final enactment outwardly of the total impact of evil, the impact upon the spirit, and the impact upon the flesh of the Son of Man. In all that he was, and gave in perfection, in all that he knew and loved, with horror and pain, in all in him which asked for pardon, in the love, and in the pain, in all that he strove for, and tore with bloody hands from the mouth of hell, in all that we know not and have not spoken, perfect before the perfect Father, in the love of the Spirit, in all of this he wrought, and he was our Redemption:

‘Who did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him: ‘thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee’; as he also says in another place. ‘thou art a priest forever, after the order of Melehisedech’. Jesus, who in the days of his flesh, with a strong cry and tears, offering up prayers and supplications to him that was able to save him from death, was heard for his piety: and whereas indeed he was the son of God, he learned obedience by the things which he suffered, and being made perfect, he became to all that obey him, the cause of eternal salvation. . . .’ (Hebrews c.5v.5-9.)

Meditation on the Passion of Jesus Christ

Is it possible for us to go further concerning the intimate relationship of the Son of God and the Son of Man to us in his redemptive work, and to state that the love of Christ, and the grief of Christ in his Passion followed each and every individual man, from the beginning to the end of the days of man in his present state? It does not seem impossible. The vocation of the soul of Christ, linked in the hypostatic union of his being to the Word of God, was to consummate in a climax the work of Redemption that was from the beginning. It seems that his most blessed soul must, in that union, and in the very possession of the beatific vision of the Creating Father, have known us all in the eternity of God, and been aware of us all. In that case indeed he would have been the living apology for us all, and in that case indeed the yearning of his soul, and the power of his Divinity through his humanity was the active principle of intercession for us, and the principle of merit and power, which through the sacraments, in time and the order of created potentiality, is applied to us, as we say ‘through the merit of his passion and death. . . .’

It would mean that the work was indeed ‘ontological’ in each and every one of us, that the principle of the human meriting of Christ was the individual and not the collective Redemption of mankind. It would imply that our own work together with Christ, by which we complete his work with him, and through him in the world, is also individual and personal through Jesus, not merely generalised. It would mean that the steadfast consummation of his natural vocation as the Son of Man, the confirmation of the World Order and the renewal of creation in both natures of the Son of God and of Man, —was also the principle of our personal, individual creation into being through him. Otherwise the economy of creation, in respect at least of our corner of the universe, would not have been ratified in the abiding will of the Father, in the vocation of the Son, and we would not have come into being for time, and for eternity.

To fulfil this human and cosmic vocation as a total whole, to pursue it to its natural consummation, the obeisance of man, or else the ultimate rejection by man, which can only be death at their hands, Jesus Christ must go through with the natural order of man’s power and man’s human wickedness, to the limits of the creature’s ‘giving and receiving’ upon the human body and soul of the Son of Man. This means to endure to the limit of his own human power to sustain. Truly then:

‘He has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him as stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our sins, upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him, he has put him to griefs: When thou makest his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand: he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the Righteous One, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.’ Isaiah c.53.v.4-12.)

We can say that the power of Christ played upon our own spirit in that knowledge of the sweep of creation, and in that application of his divine and human dynamism upon us we received the grace to rise from sins, to resist temptation, to be generous, to go on further into the justice and the love of God with him. So doing, through him, in his perfect holiness, love, and obedience to the Father, we are wanted with him, gladly taken up with him as ‘sons’ by the Father, for the sake of the Son of his eternal Love, who is perfect in the things of God, perfect and mighty through Iaborious love, in the things of man, and of the creation that supports man.

This would seem to make the most perfect sense of the mediation which stands between these two titles : Son of God, and Son of Man. It would make perfect sense also of the manner in which, through the Eucharist which is the constant offering of the oblation through immolation that ever abides in his triumphant Person, the whole Unity which is the true Church and the People of God, is summed up and manifested as One, in the unity of the Sacred Host.

But not in the abstract or in the generality did he live for us and die for us, each of us was known and precious in his sight, and each of us in countless ways, the ways we know, and the ways we never will know, laid upon his human soul the burden of unspeakable pain. Though his love and justice in the apology that wracked his being, we were saved, and to be thus saved is to be loved and wanted of the Father, in Christ our Brother, as we must dare to name him, with reverent awe.

Then beyond the pain of confrontation, and the love of sorrow that apologises, he applied himself as well, in the dynamic of the Son of God and Son of Man in one, in the unity of his one self, or Person, to power our weak efforts, to prompt, reproach, and plead, within the secret soul, and within the Church, to plead in the communication of eternity with all the power of his divine and human reality, upon our created waywardness and meanness of heart. His Redemption is not an imputation, but a work. For his sake we are wanted, and imputed without works the ‘sons of God’, but the likeness to the Son of God must be substantial, ontological, of very being, as is his own. Therefore he applied himself to work upon us, and to work within us, and bore the pain of knowledge and the stress of desperate battle.

If we have indeed ‘obeyed him’ and persevered in his love, then it is with his hand ever in ours that we have been torn through the thorns and briars of iniquities, snatched with bloodied power from the ravening lions, that in peace together with him we might through patience work out ‘some beginning of his creature’. This is the power which is ‘applied’ through history, this is the dynamism of Jesus the Christ, which lives in the Church, in the Mass, and the Holy Communion of the Body and Blood of the Lord, which brings forth the fruits of his sacrifice, his conjoining of God to man, in the Body of his Church. Strengthened from his chalice she bears the Cross, and her sons go to crucifixion in his likeness. She bears his character, lives his life, and therefore the wounds of his rejection are upon her body, for the world that hated him, hates her also, and in both the good and the evil, the joys and the betrayals, history will repeat itself, until the times of the nations be fulfilled.

If the Church bears the marks of his wounds, it is hers also to throw over men not cursing but a blessing, the cry of his explanation to the Father: ‘forgive them, they know not what they do’. She reaps his harvest for her Master, and brings to him also, through his Life within her, the Spirit of God who proceeds eternally through the Father and through the Son, many who have not been born to him fully and incarnationally, through ‘water and the Holy Ghost’. They come not to full birth, but before God they are not aborted, because from their vague desire of him, prompted by the Holy Spirit, the soul of the Church, and the vital principle of the Christian baptism, they were quickened to life, conceived therefore within her womb, born imperfect yet living to the spiritual state, but they shall be born to the full, even incarnationally, in the flesh and in the spirit in the moment of supreme triumph, that ‘Parousia’ which is not an arbitrary intervention, not really in itself a cataclysm, though it must take some such outward form, but is the total fulfilment of all creation in the Son of God, and the total victory over every created power of evil, and every consequence of that power of evil. The victory of Christ must be the perfect victory or the scriptures shall not be fulfilled.

It does not seem far-fetched to say that the Son of Man offered his living self before the Father, in his spirit, in the Garden and upon the Cross, as for individual persons known, loved, sorrowed over, and fashioned to fulfilment through purgation. In the realm of matter-energy the scientist tells us that there are effects which are due to the total gravitational interplay of all the matter-energy in the universe. If in the order of the merely material each and every distant scintillation of matter-being is a member the one of another, not without its effect on the whole body which is the material universe, should not the centre and focus of the being of man, the Sun of Justice, have known for us and loved for us, and should we not have been in the communication of the presentiality of God unto Jesus Christ, an active influence upon his human nature, both for sorrow, and please God, for joy?

Such an hypothesis would be one with that doctrine of the Church by which we know that we work and pray and obtain grace for all the Church, and in a special way for those who are our more immediate vocation and care. In the same way the sun and the solar system are a special influence in our life and being, but if every scintillation of energy affects the gravitational influence of the whole universe, and its ‘expansion’ etc., etc., so also should we exert an influence and a ‘pull’ upon every soul in the creation of God, living and dead, if being dead it is not yet perfected in God. We teach the people that prayers, and good works, and in particular the participation with Christ of his oblation to the Father which everlastingly makes intercession for us, works for the spiritual good of all in the Church, and they in turn for us. The feast of All Saints, and the feast of All Souls reminds us of this mystic communion of the ‘saints’ the people of God the one upon another. We know this, so it is a fact of Catholic doctrine. We can only do it meaningfully if it is vivified in the grace and likeness of Christ, who lives in us by grace and by the order of the Redemption. We offer our prayers and our joys, our sufferings and our loves for the redemption of many, and we offer it all in the likeness of the will, the love, the yearning, and the patience of Christ.

If we do this it is not the pain as such which gains anything or which helps, but the increase of being, of grace that is to say, in the supernatural order, the linking of that which persecutes and by its nature drags down and disheartens, to the infinite energy of the power of Christ in his Passion, so that conforming to his likeness, to his motives, and to his cares, we may be taken up by him in greatness of spirit, and our power and our merit be added unto his own for the more effectual outcome of his work among men. To them that love God, all things, and even the evils work unto good, for in Jesus Christ, God has conquered every evil power, also through his flesh and his human spirit, and is potent to bring out of our griefs of body and soul in the likeness of his own (refer Isaiah c.53 before quoted) the majesty of his victorious spirit, which triumphs over all that is not in the likeness of very being, in the likeness that is of God, and of fulfilment. Through the very lesions we endure he works in us a greater measure still of fullness in his grace than if we had never known the weakness of temptation and the pain of crucifixion of spirit, for ‘my power is made perfect in thy infirmity’ (2 Cor. c.12.v.9).

Of one thing we may be sure. Whatever the order of Redemption requires, whatever perfection, fullness of being in justice and in love is required to vindicate to the full the notion of true reparation human and divine, —all this is contained in the work of Christ. It is contained because the work is not a moral nor a token deliverance, but a work in the dynamic order of being itself, between the Father and between mankind in the Son of God. The total committal and total engagement in Christ of the dynamism of the Word of God, which itself elevates and intensifies the energies of grace and of nature in the humanity of Jesus Christ leaves nothing undone, but through the ages, only more still to discover. This vindicates the meaning of ‘mystery’ we have discussed before, a mystery can be understood yes, and the understanding is most rewarding and fulfilling, but a mystery that is truly such cannot ever be plumbed to the depths, because it is a fact or an act conceived in the divine intellect, and can never be totally exhausted by the finite mind. In that sense indeed, the Redemption of Christ is a mystery, its richness admits always of a deeper penetration and a more intimate synthesis of expression.

And we know that Redemption is an offering of joy, for we whom are Christians and are called to his life in re-formation of spirit, we as sons of God and brethren of Christ, suffer with him and love together with him. We do it in the unity and the glory of that sacrifice which he offered to the Father, which stands eternally in his Person and the acts of his Person, and which therefore ever stands to intercede for us. When we offer it again through the character of the priesthood of Christ in the minister of his altar, not in vain do we call the sacrifice the ‘Eucharist’, the giving of thanks, for it is always an act of joy for a work achieved. Neither when we bear the Cross with Christ, from the wrestling with our own spirit, or with the flesh, or with men, or with the ‘spirits of wickedness in the high places’ . . . are we the punished ones, or made as it were ‘hateful unto the Father’.

The sacrifice we offer can only be a participation in that of Christ, it is the ‘reasonable service’ we offer in newness of mind, when we make our bodies ‘a living sacrifice’ according to the invitation of St. Paul. We have known in experience the joy, love, and peace in communion with Christ which stems from this work and this experience. In this we know that ‘we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren’, and the pain is to be counted as nothing, against the glory which is to come, which shall be revealed within us. This is ‘Redemption’, and it is joy despite the tears, increase of very being, despite the Cross, the substance of life, and life more abundant, the first-fruits and promise of an eternal fulfilment. We pray that every man may come to know this, and to experience the knowledge and love of the gift of God which is in Jesus Christ. May every man taste and see that the Lord is sweet, and his burden is light. The Christian soul who has come thus to understand and love the Saviour of mankind, knows quite well by very experience, with St. John the Apostle, in whose gospel no trace of any punitive theory of the work of Christ is to be found, that to be conformed to the sacrifice of Christ is to be conformed to the holiness, the love, and the ardent desire of God himself, and well we understand therefore, the sigh of the same John in the book of Revelations, which forces from his lips the yearning ‘Come quickly, Lord Jesus’!

CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART SEVEN

THE KINGDOM IN THE WORLD

The Book is available from Faith Keyway Trust http://www.faith.org.uk

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Church of Christ

1. THE DIVINE IMMANENCE

Christ and the Church: the living link

Some of the subject-matter of this chapter overlaps with the second of this book. The context is so different however, that it does not seem mere repetition to develop the theme in an organic manner from that office of Christ to the People of God which brings into being the Church of God.

The Church of Christ is also the People of God and the brethren of Jesus Christ. This people and these brethren are not so named emotively from simply their love for Christ or their personal devotion to his gospel. The relationship between Christ and men which brings into being the Church of Christ, is a living link with Christ and his disciples which engages the whole Personality of the Son of God and of Man, which permeates the life and vocation of the individual Christian, and the whole life and vocation of the Church as membered one man to another in Jesus Christ. The Church is an existential phenomenon not an abstraction, it is a Body which lives through Christ, and the relationship of Christ to the brethren which is synonymous with ‘the Church’ is always an existential relationship. It is not a once and for all legal act. From this heart-spring of the Life of God mediated to men, there will be effected in the power and in the prayer of Christ, both the unity which is orientated to the authority of the Godhead, and the universality which follows upon the equality of men, and the identity of the salvific will of God towards every rational creature. In brief, it must bring to pass, this living link, this inflowing of a Life, both unity and universality, the one Church Catholic among the nations of the earth.

When we say that Christ is the ‘Head’ of his Church, we forget all too often that if he is ‘the Head’ he is also a member of the Church, for the head is the chief member of any body, and the body we call the Church is compacted and membered unto her living head, who is always Christ Our Lord. It is his life that flows through the body of the Church, his truth which enlightens her, and his authority living within her which proclaims the truth to mankind. It is the same truth with the same authority which teaches the faithful with a deeper fullness of insight into the bearing of Christ's Revelation, when men come, as did the disciples of old, to the Master, bringing new doubts and difficulties of men and of new knowledge discovered by men.

There can be no doubt that such is the existential relationship of Christ to his Church. It stands in the prayer of Christ before his Passion, the prayer to the Father which cannot go unfulfilled. It is a prayer for unity and charity and knowledge of the truth, and a prayer too for those who over the ages, shall come to believe through these first chosen ones. It lives in the statement that ‘he that hears you, hears me, and he that despises you despises me, and he that despises me despises him who sent me’. Or again, what are we to look for and expect, if we give the real and not merely the notional assent of the mind to that command ‘all power is given to me, in heaven and on earth, go therefore teach all nations, baptising them etc.,… and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world?’1 This is solemn enough commission, and more so in conjunction with the assertion that ‘as the Father has sent me, so also I send you’… 2

It is a continuity of work and operation which is stressed here, and the unique authority behind the Christian gospel to the peoples is so clearly the divinity of Jesus Christ. There is no other title on which power can be given to any person in heaven and on earth, and that until the end of time. The Church of Christ over the ages is always the same work of the Master, a work which continues with the same essential characteristics and habitude to men, as when Jesus Christ walked among Israel before his crucifixion, his physical resurrection from the dead, and his ascension from the present order and relationships of human time.

He still works and lives in his Church and among his people, who are also the Kingdom given him by the Father, and from the epistle to the Hebrews we have it that as Priest and as Mediator he is ever living to make intercession for us. The Church is a life in Jesus Christ, not a static imputation, she extends his personality and his salvific work through time, and he himself when he prayed for her in the persons of the apostles and the disciples at the Last Supper, did not forget to pray for them also who though not yet born, were to believe through the continuing mission upon earth of these first apostles and disciples.

If the plenitude of the work of Christ passes over to the apostles with the same characteristics as the Saviour himself has it from the Father, then the communication to men from the Church of Christ, is the fullness of the intellect of God in Jesus Christ, which is to say, the fullness and the certainty of the infallible truth, and this is the characteristic of Christ which is most stressed in his eternal name of the Logos, the immanent Word of God. There must be the fullness also of the authority of the Incarnate Word of God, who did not hesitate to take upon himself with authority the correction of the law of Moses and to revoke the permission of divorce, given ‘for the hardness of your hearts’. On earth it was said of Christ that ‘never did man speak like this man’, for authority was of the essence of his teaching. It had to be, he was God in Person. If his work continues unchanged in essentials in his Church, then the same authority is there the authority of God, which is final, and which once said cannot be unsaid or gainsaid.

If the plenitude of the work of Christ passes over to the mission and work of his Church, then the plenitude of divine charity will also be there. It will be present first of all in the life which binds the Christian to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and then beyond, it will animate the relationship of the brethren one to another membered as they are, as Paul reminds us, in a common body of service and of love. It will spread out to the spiritual needs of all men, and their temporal needs as well, and this dedication in the likeness of Christ will urge and spur the Church, even when her members flag, and dishonour the Christian name, for the charity of Christ presses us, it is hard to kick against that goad. These things, divine truth, divine authority, divine love are of the essence and of the constitution of the Church of Christ: they permeate her social vocation and also the individual vocation of every man who is born again of water and the Holy Ghost.

Truth, Love, Authority: an indivisible trinity

The reader is asked to weigh well what is now being said and will be developed. The argument is not to the nature of the Church of Christ from every aspect and under every consideration of history. We are drawing out the essential nature of the Church organically, as a consequence from the nature and work of the Incarnation, and the sequence of the ascension of the Word of God while remaining with the brethren in presence and in power. We look to see what must be expected in this Church which is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, what new and divine characteristic must be required in order to mark a new order in the providence of God, when the Kingdom of Heaven becomes no more the narrow Israel of the flesh, but the broad Israel of God promised in the seed of Abraham, the inheritor of the promise of the Law and of the Prophets, the Son of Man who is the literal King of the People of God throughout all the earth, who lives and reigns with his People for ever, even as the psalmist foresaw and foretold.

If we were to say that the charity of Christ the Living God lives on in the Church and the brethren, lives also in the personal spiritual life of the individual Christian, but that divinity in the truth, and in the authority of that doctrine of the truth does not survive, to what sort of pass do we bring the Incarnation of God? To what folly as well have we reduced the prayer which Christ made for unity in the truth and in charity alike, before he went to the Cross. He must have known that he had made no intrinsic provision for such a hard saying, —unity in the truth, —in the constitution itself of the People of God, of his Church. Once we separate the life of Christ's charity in the Church, the charity we profess, from the life of his truth and his divine authority over the minds of men, we have uttered blasphemy against the unity in him of the Divine Being. We will of course be unaware that we have done such a thing.

It is not possible to divide God against himself in his own being and person, nor in the life which he communicates to men, in the Church and through the Church, from that union which he establishes with all mankind as Son of God and Son of Man. If we seem anxious to claim that the life of Christ lives in his Church and animates Christian men, and that thus the essentials of his claims remain true, despite the obvious lesions of unity which are against his will, —what in fact are we trying to do? Are we not claiming the divinity of his charity because love of itself is blind, it lives by feeling rather than by seeing, by experience which is subjective though manifest in good works, rather than by doctrine which is objective and manifests a form? The cynic would say of such a principle of spiritual life, this charity, that it is prudently claimed to be the one thing necessary, since it can neither be proved to be the fullness of Christ, nor disproved.

It would be vain in any event to take refuge in the plea that love alone suffices. Charity of itself is indeed blind unless it is enlightened and set firm upon the right path by wisdom, which is proportionate truth. By truth is love controlled and directed. In fact, nothing can be desired and willed except first it be known. If the truth is blurred or formless, to the same degree the love will be dissipated and confused. Will and intellect, charity and truth, these are not entities in themselves in God or in the sons of men, but, the proper order of analogy being held between God and the creature, these are the complementary relativities of spiritual being, and of its immanence. As a spiritual being one cannot love aright unless the love manifest and express existentially the fullness of the truth in its meaning, its intelligibility, and its power to command the assent of the will.

Truth is to love what, in the order of matter-energy below life, structure and ‘formula’ of being is to energy. The energies of matter can only be expressed meaningfully and constructively through balanced form. Otherwise they are vast, anarchic power. A charity which does not energise a truth through which it is meaningfully directed is confused and dissipated power, oppressed with confusion and contradiction. In the order of life above the inorganic but below man, the order and the intrinsic analogy is the same, the dynamism of life, the meaning of its energies cannot be realised in the event except through the form, the specific intelligibility of life in which the dynamism is organised. If the principle of meaning is broken down, the form dissolved, then the anarchy of disease enters the living form. Moreover, it is also through the environment, that which surrounds and is membered unto the existent life, that too which explains its type and its history, that the living form of any life is fully meaningful, fully ‘true’ to human understanding. Would we then try to separate out the charity of God in Christ, from the truth of God in Christ, or the authority of God in Christ? Or, by requiring charity and suppressing truth will we dissolve the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, forgetting that the Logos is the immanent Truth who proceeds within the Being of God, and which is revealed to us? So to do is to make a triviality of the Christian name and the Christian claim.

We have no right to say that we do not know and cannot know the form and the figure, the measure of the intelligibility of the divine truth. This is the Logos: the Person of the Word of God, who is made as fully intelligible in the making flesh of the Word of God, as is possible within the limits of his creature's finitude. This Truth was mediated to men in the words of the Word made flesh, and he claimed as much. The doctrine of Jesus Christ sought no refuge in ambiguities. It was committed to doctrines and precepts nobler and higher than those of Moses, some of them sayings ‘hard to hear’ except upon the authority of the Eternal Truth, and some of them hard to live, except by the living grace which flows from the same Person of the Son of God and Man.

This was true in the Church from the beginning, the insistence on the truth and the unicity of the truth is marked. The Church grappled to understand, and from the beginning there were heresies, were errors, and the counter-attack which is the explanation and the development too, the further insight into the truth. This is of the nature of man and the nature of the truth, and God must be able through the Holy Spirit to provide a deepening in the truth without loss, as much as a deepening in charity without loss.

Nobody can say that from the very pages of the New Testament, let alone the more developed writing of the early Fathers of the Christian Church that there is any ready tolerance for ‘it is, and it is not’,3 for the double truth, or for heresy. Rather, —‘even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so I now say again, if any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be excommunicate’.4 It is very, very definite, and it must still be possible for doctrine to be just as definite if the Church of Paul lives in the world today.

If we deny that God has made intrinsic provision in Christ for the continuance upon earth of the living truth of Christ, or for the continuance of that living authority which he himself exercised before the scribes, the pharisees, the sadducees, the people, then men are bound to wander again like sheep going astray. It must happen from the sheer weakness of the human mind, and it would happen the more speedily and necessarily because, as the apostle foresaw, the wolf was bound to come down on the fold, and to ravage the people of God: men of heresy, proud and bitter minds, battening like vultures on the rotten flesh of scandals and mistakes in the Church, not reforming but rending and distorting, with the arrogance of the sin which is the greatest of all the sins, the sin against the Holy Ghost, the Principle of life and wisdom in the Church, and in the souls of little ones. It was bound to happen, ‘woe to the world because of scandals,’ said Jesus Christ, ‘it must needs be that the scandals come, but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal does come’...5

If, in addition to the sinful pride of men the shepherd was unable or unwilling to make any provision to safeguard the flock, his people, it would make poor sense of his all-wise work, his alleged care, and his astounding claims. The scandal which is greatest is not that perplexity or heresy ravages the Church, or that the occasion of the greater sin exists beforehand, but that some men who claim and who love the Christian name, can say that the Church does not at all times, in her Palm Sundays, or upon her Cross, live the full life of Christ in mind as well as in heart, and does not possess the full and certain truth of Christ, and the authority to assert and to define it when the crisis comes.

These are men who claim for Christ in his People the plenitude of the Godhead in corporeal form, in the relation of charity, but not the plenitude of the Godhead in corporeal form for his truth and for his authority, notwithstanding that all power is given to him, in heaven and in earth, and in that power and in the promise of his abiding help and presence he sent his apostles out to the ends of the earth and to every spiritual creature. If this could be true, then in fact the only existential measure of the mind and the meaning of Christ today, is the mind of man. The minds of men, it would be said more correctly, for there are as many Christs, as many degrees of denial and of acceptance, as levels of depth in human personality, as levels of laxity or reluctance in moral issues. So the Christian man, who lives to be regenerated in the perfection of the Risen Christ, to be lifted higher through sweat, tears, and all the pain of the crucifixion of ‘the old man that is of Original Sin’ ends with remaking the Mind of God to the norms of human immediacy. He remakes the Son of God to the image and likeness of himself, and when beyond doctrine Christian morality has also to be rethought and proclaimed according to the norms of obvious comfort, ends with the proclamation of his personal Christian Agnosticism. It is a poor, sad, ghostly thing.

If there were no Christian Church and Community across the world which taught and acted otherwise, which could show a pedigree for such constant teaching and acting otherwise, and which had the faith and the humility to demand much, much more for the meaning of Christ in the Church and in the world, then from the scandal of this explicit or virtual Christian Agnosticism the keen and honest young mind would judge beyond appeal that Christianity had reached the end of its tether, that the claims of Christ were proven false beyond further useful discussion. The Son of God may not hedge concerning truth or concerning authority.

The manner of the Church's being

We require first, in the name of intelligibility and honesty, that the life of God live in the People of God, his Church, with the full flow of the Undivided Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It is demanded then, that the Church live by the fullness of the divine or supernatural order, —the fullness of the truth of God in corporeal form, the fullness of the charity of God in corporeal form, and the fullness of the authority of God in corporeal form.

At times it is said, often more by way of minimising the characteristics that must be demanded of the Church of Christ than by making an important point, that the truth possesses the Church rather than the Church possesses the truth. Yet the statement is important and rich in significance. There will of course be always a great gap between the total vision of the truth, and the fullness of the potential charity of God, and the present human realisation of that ideal and that potential. The gap existed in the beginning, in the twelve gathered about Christ, one lapsed to become the total traitor, but even for the others, the patience of Jesus Christ, but also his grief at their ambition, quarrels, and blindness of heart is clear to read. Nevertheless, the Master did achieve something in them, they came through their novitiate with him still very imperfect human beings, but much deepened, and after Pentecost wiser and braver yet. It will always be true of the People of God, and their spiritual leaders that ‘I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now...’ it will also be true unto the end that ‘when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will teach you all truth, and will bring to your minds whatsoever things I have said to you’6... The growth and the development must continue, growth not only in depth of the doctrine but also a growth in moral understanding and achievement. As the standard of life and education grows, through a more intellectual spirituality, through the power of the spirit in the image of God over matter, not by the discovery of the saving pill that will be less than sin, must the Christian man and the Church herself develop in spiritual perfection. The ideal is the perfect reintegration in the life of man of the original vision and intention of God, and this assertion of the ideal which burst and flowered so finely in the heroic standards and uncompromising vision of the early Christians needs more than anything else to be reaffirmed without fear today. This is the charter of the really ‘progressive’ Christian, the greater part of the waffle which passes in the popular press for progressive thought is simply the teaching of the convenient and the imperfect, concerning which Christ himself has given the warning that he who shall detract from the most perfect ideals and the most perfect way of life in the Church, and shall so teach men, shall himself to be the least in the Kingdom of God.7

It would be slick and shallow error to say that ‘the truth possesses the Church, rather than the Church the truth’, as if this meant that there was a truth greater and more universal than that which the Church possesses, or a truth greater than that which even by development, is within her sole custodianship. Even less can there be a vision beyond her own by which she is forced, over the ages, to correct her doctrines and her principles. Christ is the Heir of all the ages, and the Church is his one and only Bride: there is no other mother and teacher for the souls of men.

In reality there is no such thing as an abstract ‘truth’ which possesses the Church, or which the Church herself possesses. Abstractions do not exist, only existentials exist. The truth which possesses the Church is the Living Logos himself, Jesus Christ, Our Lord. He it is of whose fullness and sceptre the Holy Spirit that proceeds from the Father through the Son declares and deepens throughout the generations of men, from Abel the Just, even to the last Peter who shall confirm the college of the apostles. Of this vision the realisation in the Church is always deficient in the sense that there lies beyond a greater fullness yet, a greater development, when the People of God, and mankind in general is able to take it in. There are many other times in history of scandal, revolt, breakdown of one kind or another, which is the crucifixion by men, and often by the disciples themselves, of the body of Christ which is the Church. At the time that these things happen, the vision of the sin is great and deliberate, though of course not so in those born into a state of deprivation by heresy or by schism. Nevertheless, woe to the man by whom such scandal comes, for it is impossible that Christ, whom he lacerates in his beloved children, should not have communicated to him deep in his secret heart the scandal, and the fear for his own responsibility. Woe to the man who lies to the Holy Ghost: it is possible for him to be damned into an eternal present of bitter rejection of the Living God in whom alone is any fulfilment, natural or supernatural for the spiritual creature.

The truth which possesses the Church is God Incarnate, and the truth which the Church possesses is the existential communication to men of the life of Christ which lives in her, and in all men who seek and love the Living God. She alone has the fullness, because the Fullness indeed possesses her. She mediates him through her life and liturgy, through the sacraments, especially the sacrifice and sacrament of the Eucharist, these are acts of Christ living in his body, the Church, they are not acts of men or of ministers. She mediates the Life of God by teaching his word, she is the voice, in her bishops and her priesthood commissioned to echo the voice of the Word of God down the ages. She mediates him in her corporate life of truth and charity, in the individual and in the congregation that is gathered around the Tabernacle of God with men, in the towns and villages of the world. She mediates him, in the way of life of the Christian man and woman, in the love and faithfulness of Christian marriage and the home, and in the more perfect dedication of human vocation in the likeness of Christ which is in the Religious life of evangelical perfection; and in the personal assimilation to the character of Christ which is borne by the bishop, and, lest it be forgotten, by every priest as well.

Now this Truth which is the indwelling and quickening of Christ unto his own body, which is the Truth that possesses the Church and the Truth which the Church possesses, (for a man and his bride are two in one flesh, are they not?) is part and parcel of an Incarnational economy. It was organised from the beginning in the flesh and through teachers, and no man took it upon himself to make himself a priest, but the priesthood was gathered not from the will of the people, but from the election of God, in Aaron. The priesthood that taught and ministered the truth of God, when the word possessed his Church, the Assembly of Israel, but was not yet enfleshed for the blessing of all mankind in mercy, that priesthood was taken out from the people, and had no inheritance among the people or in the goods of the land, for God alone, Yahweh was their inheritance. It was not presbyterian that priesthood of Aaron, it was the gift and election of God, and they were made familiars of the Lord.

The economy of God is more intimately incarnational when the priesthood and the rabbinate are transferred from the authority of the seed of Aaron to that seed of Abraham and of David in whom all the nations of the earth are to be blessed. He it is who is high priest according to the order of Melchisedech, whose priesthood is the anointing from eternity as Son in the Father, and through creation Son of Man: ‘Thou art my Son, this day I have begotten thee, ask of me and I will give thee the gentiles for thy inheritance, the ends of the earth for thy possession.’8

Thus we look to see what the Living Vine has grafted into himself in the life of the Church and in her constitution. The wisdom of God has never ignored nature in the divine provision for mankind, and what we are seeking should include the natural means by which the social nature of man is deployed. We will expect to find in the New Law not less than in the Old, priests and teachers having authority over men by the natural organisation of the supernatural life of the Church, for she is the Assembly out of the nations of the People of God. We find it thus in the societies of men at every level, internationally, and in the state, in the family, in civics, education, commerce, in any relationship in which men are gathered to pursue in unity a common aim and are directed with the relevant degree of authority. This ordering follows the nature of man, and God even in his most perfect gifts perfects the nature of man. The economy of God does not ignore or cause to wither away what is truly good and natural in the order of human life. In the case of the Church, the order of the society formed through the nature of man, will be more deep and more momentous than the order of the highest authority in the state. In the case of the Church the order of competence in authority goes to the final purposes of human life and destiny, for the individual and for the community of man. In the case of the Church, this body has always the same head, and is therefore organic, and not elective, neither does its authority derive, as does authority in every other aspect of human power, from the equality of personality, and of spiritual soul, in all men. Since the Son of God, in the Living Person of God, is her head and the existential principle of her life, the Church and the constitution of the Church cannot possibly be democratic in the philosophical and theological meanings of that word.

If God had willed that the truth and the authority of God in Jesus Christ should be maintained adequately by personal insight, infused of the Holy Ghost and coming with the reading or the hearing of the Word in ministry and the scriptures, then every man would have found unanimity with his brother, just as every human stomach digests its daily bread by the same metabolism. There would be no disunity in the Christian fold in faith and in morals, and in the very interpretation of what Christianity might be. The facts of ‘ecumenism’ bring to light so cruelly that such could not have been Christ's way because it so sadly has not been the way. The scandal is patent: the scandal is also admitted. But there is worse, and this worse is not as a rule admitted. There is nothing left that is Divine in these poor remnants that seek reunion in the name of Christ. From door to door men will tell the preachers and the missioners as much. It is not the scandal of disunity, but of disproven Divinity, which empties the Churches who neither claim nor exercise the magistracy of the Son of God. You cannot reunite a shattered egg; according to the ancient nursery rhyme ‘all the king's horses and all the king's men, could not put Humpty-Dumpty together again’. You cannot put together again, nor reconstitute, the once shattered truth and authority of God Incarnate. Either it lives, has always lived, and may be found, or else in the loss of truth and authority, his Godhead is disproven. Jesus Christ saw the issue quite plainly, when he indicated the manner in which in his Church he had made provision from her constitution, and added ‘and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it…’ for if they do so once with finality, and change the content of the Church through history, every Pilate can ask ‘what is the truth?’… and unless Christ come again Incarnate, no man can answer him.

So we look elsewhere. The evidence in history will be found to be what is expected from the nature of man. There ought to be an hierarchic priesthood, and an hierarchic tradition, both to be expected as continuities of the supernatural life among men of the Eternal High Priest. For whatever the truth, the charity, the authority of Christ lives by, it must be through something tangible, evidential, enfleshed, or it is not of the Incarnation, is not the plenitude of the Godhead in corporeal form. The order of God among men does not, either before Christ or since, stand in the naked communing of the Holy Spirit to the human spirit; this would leave the flesh an orphan. The Event we name Christ, causes all things to consist and to hold together in himself, in the perfection that is to say of both orders, of matter and of spirit in mutual communion in the One.

We look for the plenitude of the gifts of God: we look for the communing of the Spirit indeed with the human spirit. We look for it in that total and organic plenitude of the Unity-Law in which all things began and were poised. Jesus Christ is the perfection of the same law, expressed for man in Alpha and Omega, the Holy Wisdom. We look for the perfection of the individual man, he is the son of God through Christ, but we look for it harmonised in and with the mutual vocation one to another of the brethren with Christ, and never without Christ. We look for it in the Congregation, the People of God dwelling with their God, which is to say we look for it in the Church: Jesus Christ is both head and member of that Church.

We look for it from the beginning, from Adam to this present day, a continuity of truth, love, and authority which grows in wisdom, age, and grace, as the physical body of the child Jesus grew, but which keeps its type, and is ever true to the nature of man and of matter. We look for that which, once consummated in Christ, never lives by less than the gift Christ gives to men and leaves among men: we look for a divine truth and a divine authority which is one single trinity with the divine charity of God in Christ, and in the brethren of Christ, his Church. We look for something which is from the beginning, is enfleshed among men, and is manifest in word, work, and social tradition even as men are. This something is potential as larval forms are potential, as seeds are potential but not in the beginning the perfect manifestation.

The potential is fulfilled in order once, and uniquely in the Living God. As an economy among men this ‘thing’ must begin no later than Adam, nor, when at the apex of the Unity-Law it is fulfilled in Christ can it begin again with a new formulation. It can suffer reforms, for existing through men it is encompassed with infirmity, and subject also to the law of development. It cannot be altered in its equational balance within its content, nor be detracted from by any human ‘Protest’ in the matter of its essential synthesis. The sanction against such a happening, is that Christ, dying to sin a second time, now rises no more.

That for which we look, living in one continuum from ancient days will have vestigial accretions too, which are the witness of a long and evolutionary history. Like Nature around, there will be, with the impetus to continued development, primeval forms well suited even to the present needs… one thinks for instance of the incense and the holy water of the Church, older by far than Abraham, but yet a link of witness and of wonder with him who went out from Ur of the Chaldees, and in whose seed the nations are blest. Where on earth shall we look for this ‘Thing’ which fulfils in God Incarnate the Unity-Law in which the atoms of the universe were aligned to the womb of Mary? They who seek it will find it, the Ark Unique, the Pearl of great price. From wheresoever out of the ends of the earth they set out to look for it, they will find all their roads converging upon the City which is Rome.

2. PRIESTHOOD AND HIERARCHY

The ever present Sacrifice and Sacrament

Our Lord Jesus Christ is not only the chief member of the body which is his Church, but also its most active and essential member in work upon earth. I think it true to say that the body of Christ in glory, as something human and created, is together with his human soul subject to change of phase in time and in history. The human nature of Jesus Christ is both part of history and is itself the apex point of that Unity-Law of control and direction through which all history is framed. Thus, Christ is not only with his people by power even to the consummation of the world, but is present ontologically and physically as the principal member, the Head, of his Church in the Holy Eucharist. If we wished to push the analogy of the body a little further we might say Christ is the head as sacrifice and the heart by sacrament. In this essential relationship of Christ to the Church, or to savour more forcibly the existential presence of Christ which we imply, in this relationship of Christ to the People of God membered one unto another in himself, Christ is by office in the Church on earth always the eternal High Priest, who is everliving to make intercession for us, and the Bread of Heaven that gives life to the world.

The office of Christ abides in this twofold relativity to men and to the Church, because the Sacrifice of Christ is no mere action. The Sacrifice of Christ is a living relationship of his divine Person to divine Persons in the Unity of the Godhead. This relationship, identical in the divine nature with the Person of the Son, can only be consummated in creation in the human nature of the Word. This is the meaning of ‘Mediator’, and also of Christ as Sacrifice and Sacrament of Life.

The human nature of the Word made Flesh is now made perfect in glory in the person of God; the Son of God has consummated his Salvation and Redemption through the Cross, and through this consummation passes into victor and obtainer as the Son of Man. Of this victory over sin and death his glorified body is at once the manifestation and the first-fruits. This is what was in mind when speaking of the human nature of Christ as created being subject to change of phase in the consummation of the work of creation and the Redemption of that creation. The Sacrifice of Christ is eternal because it stands not in an act in time once done, and now over, but as a relationship to the Father, in the Holy Spirit, by which the Word recapitulates and consummates in himself the creation made in him and through him, the Exemplar of all that is made.

Should Christ, the principal living member because the Head of the People of God, always remain to offer himself upon the altars of men, in that one and eternal relationship to the Father, consecrated through the Holy Ghost in which he confects the work of mankind's deliverance and transformation? He should, for as Sacrament he must, and his office and role as Sacrament cannot stand except through the Everliving Priesthood in which he makes Personal intercession in the Divine Being for the sons of men membered unto himself. Unless he is first our Salvation, he cannot be the Bread of our life and our immortality. It is not possible to separate out in Christ his office in creation as Sacrifice and Sacrament: these are twin aspects of Christ's work, specified as two in the natural needs of man, but only one unity in the Person of Christ and the most simple essence of God.

Christ could not have remained on earth for ever in the normal figure and senses of a man to fulfil a work which must be true to human nature and its natural conditions, as well as a work divine. To so remain would not be true to human nature, unless we presume that except for the incursion of sin, the Incarnation of Christ would have been the moment of transformation of earth into the state we call ‘Heaven’. Perhaps it is not impossible to think this much, but the consummation of the divine communication of God with men, in the Word of God, seems more likely to have been the confirmation of mankind in the good, to be the bringing in of the highest human social achievement before the total transformation of the material economy in the God of the Unity-Law. Had it been otherwise, one would have expected the ‘Second Coming’ of Christ to have been indeed very imminent after his Resurrection from the dead.

The vision of St. John in the book of Revelations does seem to be the vision of the economy of the Incarnation as it is in the mind of God, and therefore still is in essentials now, for sin does not in any way alter the counsels of God. The reign of Christ with the saints seems to be the period of the Church of God Incarnate, in what we call the communion of saints, in which John sees the beatific vision after death of the blessed, but not yet the final consummation, and therefore no vision is given of damnation, although the fact that the ‘second death’ does not touch the saints of Christ, seems to infer that the possibility of it is still in the economy somewhere. That this vision of the glorious reign of Christ is not the final Kingdom of God brought in by the Incarnation, is deduced from the fact that towards the end of the period Satan has power to intervene with great fury and power, and also we notice that the order of physical generation still goes on…, they are not as ‘the angels of God’. Satan comes upon man as with a Parousia of his own, the ‘saints’ are defeated and hard-pressed, and one may well compare the relevant passage of the book of Revelations with a parallel passage in the prophet Daniel: Revelations:

‘And Satan will come out to deceive the nations

c.20.vv.7-9 which are at the four corners of the earth, to gather

them for battle: their number is like the sand of

the sea. And they marched up over the broad earth

and surrounded the camp of the saints and the

beloved City, but fire came down from heaven

and destroyed them…’

with Daniel: ‘But the court shall sit in judgement, and his

c.7.v.26 dominion shall be taken away to be consumed and

destroyed to the end. And the Kingdom and the

dominion, and the greatness of the kingdoms under

the whole heaven shall be given to the people of

the Saints of the Most High…’

The magnificent image seems to be that of the People elect, the Israel of God, hard pressed beyond the hopes of man. Appeal is made to Christ their King, the alliance and the covenant is invoked. The senate of God is convened, the prayer is answered, the war ends with the Second Coming of the King, the ‘Fiat’ of God is the final victory immanent in the risen flesh of Christ. If the essentials of the vision of John are true, then the first fruit of the Incarnation in the intention of God, apart from sin, would be the perfection of the natural economy in the supernatural order, and the final stage would be the total transformation.

However this may be, once given the invasion of sin in the order of God's creation, the mission of Christ as a man walking among men must have one advent, one impact, and a consummation. The Lord cannot rise in the flesh of victory, his resurrection, and then be straightway at hand again to be betrayed into the hands of sinners and suffer again in passible flesh. In that he died, he died the once, but in that he is risen, he dies no more, death has no more dominion over him, either in his flesh, or in his Life in the Church which is membered unto him.

The function which cannot be shared

To be the food and life of the soul, and through that soul the principle of the eternal life of even the flesh of man is the work proper and unique of God: no creature can share it. If it is a work of God to men, it is a work personal to Christ and fulfilled to consummation in him. This is to say that it is an office and a function in the life of the People of God which is fulfilled in the plenitude of the Godhead in corporeal form. Such an office implies that the human nature of Christ shares intrinsically from its own human order, and this is impossible unless the material substance of Christ play an intrinsic part.

The Gift of God given to men at the Supper Table on the eve of the crucifixion of Christ is an intrinsic and integral part of the Incarnation. It is impossible to separate Christ's nurture of the personality of man to the beatific possession of the Essence of God, from that work of union and mediation through which Christ has made it a possibility. This work of union and communion to which we refer is the Sacrifice of Christ. Even without the incursion of sin, this Sacrifice would have been the Eucharist indeed, the Sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, for the perfect work of the Incarnation is the communion of God with man through the Son of God and of Man. This perfection of ministry to salvation would have been the means to the beatific vision of God in even a sinless order: in the perfect sacrifice, men inhere unto God. That is to say, the Exemplar of the flesh is the flesh of the Word of God.

The office of preaching and teaching can be delegated when Christ has formed the minds and hearts of apostles to savour the content aright. The Lord is there all days, working withal, and confirming his word with the signs that follow. To develop the Church rightly in the understanding and savouring of the fullness of Christ's treasury is the office in the Church and in Christ of the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son.

Only God alone, God the Word, is the food and the life of the spirits of angels and of men. All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing that was made: in him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men… The purely spiritual nature is made through the Exemplar of the Divine Word, without the mediation of matter, and the nature which is spirit enwrapped with flesh in the unity of one being, is made through the same Exemplar, but through and in the mediatorial flesh of the Son of Man. Thus Jesus Christ is all things in all, for in him it has well pleased the Father that all fullness should dwell.

This is the significance in the Church of the Holy Eucharist. We could not have thought of a way in which God could be the Bread of the personality of a man in such manner that the physical humanity of the Incarnate Word could be participated of its own substantial reality. God however can always find a way. This is the heart of the liturgy, the gathering of the sons and daughters of God around the Table of their Daily Bread, the Life that ever intercedes for them and begets new sons and daughters of the Father, the Bread also of life and immortality. This is so important to the existential reality of the Church as the People of God that it is necessary to present this office of Christ in the Church as Priest, King, and Sacrifice, and also Bread of Life, as integral not merely to the concept of the sacraments, but to the very concept of the Church as the Mystical Body of the Living God. It is a pity that the word ‘mystical’ has so poor a connotation in the English language, and does little justice to the tremendous meaning of the ‘Mystical Body’ of Jesus Christ. Historically the nature of the Eucharist as we find it in the Roman and Catholic Church of the West, and also in the confession of the Greek Orthodox Church, is common even to the Nestorian and other unorthodox splinters of early Christianity. This unanimity of confession is a living witness to the meaning of the Christian Sacrifice, and it is not challenged until the breakdown in the West in the 16th century. Once this objective, living Eucharist in the reality of matter goes out of the Church, the life goes out of her liturgy, and of her people. First there goes mystical theology, which properly understood is the highest form of theological wisdom, since it is the existential reality of dogma. Then spiritual insight goes, as the content slips away from Christian Faith. Religion is reduced to sentiment and a code of values only, and consummates in a sigh for a Redeemer akin to the looking forward of the prophet ‘Drop down the dew, you heavens from above, let the earth bud forth the Just one’9… but the prayer has been heard, and cannot be answered a second time until the final coming.

The liturgy of the Church is an intimacy of earth to heaven through the altar of God in which Christ, the Divine Sacrifice gathers all men unto himself, according to their office membered one to another in the Body which is his people. He gives this membering unto himself through the sacramental characters of baptism, confirmation, and holy order, gathering all unto himself in these dynamic relationships, and consummating their regeneration in the likeness of God through his own oblation as Son of God and of Man. Of this dynamic life in Christ through his literal Divinity which infuses the incarnational economy of the Christian Faith, the stripped table and the merely human conventicle is an orphan left tragically derelict.

The face of the bride

The presence of God since the Incarnation is most intimate to his People, but this does not make the Church a democracy. Over this we need not worry, for what most people desire to save when they emphasise the concept of the democratic is the right to be loved, respected, and listened to with a proper regard. Upon this we must insist in the Church, for ‘democracy’ in that sense is simply the content of truth and charity, from our membering one to another in Christ, we all have such a function and such a right in the Church of God, but none of us forgets that he who teaches, lives, and rules in the Church is the Living God. This is the real sanction for the authority of the Church.

Upon the right to be taken seriously one must insist, since from very baptism every man or woman is a son or daughter of God by divine right. Christ has given us too many reminders of his identification with the least of his brethren, and of his being among men as ‘he that ministers’ for the Church to be allowed to forget that truth and charity demand the full development in the Church of the human person in all the vocations of the Body of Christ. It is not without significance too, that the reminders of Christ are addressed with a special emphasis to the bishops of his Church. There is no place for triumphalism in the Church except in her liturgy where it is the proper and necessary expression of our adoration, our faith, our charity, and our hope, —the enactment of the triumph over sin and death of Christ himself. Other triumphalism may well wait until the Lord bring it with him in train, and then we shall be sure that it is not premature.

There are or there may be modes of address, proclamation, and so forth surrounding especially the person of a bishop, which sound unpleasantly in the ears of some, especially in ears schooled to the tradition of evangelical Protestantism. Let it be granted that these non-essentials derive from the feudal manners and the social hierarchy of the Middle Ages, if not of Byzantium, and emphasise rather much the ancient parity of bishops with barons, archbishops with dukes etc. Whether these things go or stay, and they are of no substance in the Church, all grant that the most honourable title of a bishop is the one which he carries into a Council of the Church, that of ‘Father’ of all his people and his clergy. Much else that is questioned may be, and should be, as sharply defended. The use of symbolism in dress, especially in liturgical dress, the use of pageantry in and out of the liturgy of the Church is a precious thing. It emphasises continuity with the past, and manifests the dignity of the vocation for all which resides in the office of a pope or of a bishop. History has shown all too often how the drab blacks and greys and the liturgical monotony of the Puritan tradition empties the churches and repels the young.

There is no benefit to be obtained by wishing to incorporate in the life of the Church the mistakes of sectarian heresies in the name of ecumenism. There are Catholic theologians who speak and write as if the Council of Trent had been a disaster for mankind, instead of the saving grace it undoubtedly was; as if everything in the life and practice of the Church of Christ were in decay, and everything outside an example to be followed. Shallow theology of this sort ought to be asked why it is that ninety per cent of the people of the industrialised nations of the Protestant tradition fail to practise their religion, and why so many of them criticise its ritual manifestation when giving their reasons for not practising it? Of course, it is true that the real reasons for not going to Church are often different from those which are alleged. The basic reasons are agnosticism and the lack of certain teaching in those Churches. There are nations in the Catholic tradition too whose percentage of practising Christians must be as low, but overall the picture is if anything better for the Catholic than for the Protestant Churches. While there is no way back to a reunion of Christendom except through a vindication anew of revealed Religion in the context of a scientific perspective of the creation of God, and a recognition that the ‘true church’ must always have existed, and does now exist, and has not failed, the non-Catholic Churches have even more reason to examine their liturgies and practices, for all their ‘vernacular’ than has the Church of Rome. So many of the mentalities of inadequate faith are bound to be in error, error which will have a cumulative effect as the ages pass, that one must expect even greater failures of ‘communication’ in those Churches which have abolished the real Communication of God to men, the Holy Eucharist, than in the Church of Rome and in the Greek Orthodox Church where the essential Life of Christ in the Church has never ceased to flow.

It is worth pondering how far, in some countries of the Catholic tradition, the very rigidity with which the cassock has been worn in the streets is not a very large part of the reason, in the modern world, for a low rate of recruitment to the priesthood. From his own knowledge and reaction as a youth, the writer would be sure that it is a factor. In any case it does not help in any part of the modern world to give the impression that a priest may never with reason be seen about in anything but his black clericals. Youth has to be won for God at an age when generosity and the fire of a holy love is matched by intolerance and the exaggeration of small annoyances. Useless to say they will mellow later, by that time they are well settled with marriage and career in the world. In all of these things it is to be hoped that the New Puritanism which begins to be manifest in some quarters in the name of ecumenism, allied often enough to hedonism and laxity in the deepest values of Christian life and vocation, will be kept quite firmly in check.

Whatever may be done with profit to increase in the Church the charity and the truth of Christ, the marks by which the Church must be known can never change. These are the lineaments of God in her, Christ is more than another Moses. This is the basic principle of the monarchy of God Incarnate among men, and it could not be otherwise. It is the life of the Blessed Trinity we are called to share, and in which we grow in the Church of Christ. Only God can reach down from so great a height: the Church must always be visible as One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic by succession and derivation, in the unity natural to a living organism and not merely a vague ideal. It will not do to say that the Church of Christ should be this, and is not, and that it is the task of all Christians to restore this living unity. This position has been pondered already, —the divine lineaments may not even for a period cease from out the Church and her Founder remain divine. To the traditional characteristics of One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic we would add the fifth mark as demonstrably necessary and the consequence of the foregoing, —that the Church of Christ to prove her credentials must be, and must claim to be infallible in doctrine of faith and morals which is solemnly asserted through her appointed Magisterium. There should be no desire to avoid the mark of infallibility of the Church in basic doctrine of faith and of morals: in ordinary commonsense recognition this is the one unique sign of true Divinity. To the hard-headed man in the street it is the only real sign that when Christians claim Divinity for Jesus Christ, they really mean what they say.

To claim as much is the supreme act of faith in Christ and of humility in his disciples, for it is so demonstrably not a claim that any human ability can maintain. In the uniqueness of the claim and in the constancy with which this claim is made through history, lies the certain pedigree of the Church which claims to be true in a sense which no other Church does claim or could claim. In these days of the dissolution of authority in Christian faith and morals outside of the Catholic and Roman Church and of new schism within her, the evidence of history is that the Living Faith is no blind fideism, and without its uncompromising Divinity there is no unambiguous Christian Faith of any sort left to men.

The priesthood of Christ

The character of the priesthood of Christ among men must derive from the priestly character of Christ himself, to whose Person it assimilates a man, in whose work it is but a ministerial participation. It cannot therefore, derive from the People of God as a congregation, it descends as a best and most perfect gift from the Father of Light, through the Son, of whose character it is the reflection and the image. It configures a man, does this character of priesthood in Christ, to the personality of Christ the Priest as saviour and as redeemer. It is most true that the priesthood of Christ as a ministry of man for men in the Church, is a social office not a personal charism, and that it is defined as a function in the Church and in the Living Christ through the necessities of the People of God, without which it would not be meaningful. This after all is just as true of the Incarnation of God itself: He is made Man for us, for the ministry of our necessities, in the gift of his own charity. We are not made to fulfil him, the Word of God is Fulfilment, his advent is the fulfilment in himself of the gift of being, and of being even into the bosom of the Holy Trinity which is God.

So also with the human participation in the Priesthood of Christ, because this office is a social office in the Church it does not make the priest merely a social functionary, as the whisper of neo-modernist trends in theology would have us think. The priesthood in Christ is no such heretical shadow. Christ does not invite men to share by charity what he is to mankind by right, without calling to an intimate share in his own personal relationship to the Father in the Holy Ghost, and to the mass of mankind. This is a call, through the character of Christ, who is a priest by essence, not merely accidentally, to an intimate participation with him in his words and works, his loves and cares.

If we are going to view the reality of the priesthood with the desiccated mentality of neo-modernist theology, we may as well admit a merely legal or moral Redemption in the Person of Christ, and teach that the vocation in history and in the order of matter of the womb of Mary is merely a biological ‘social function’ in the work of the Incarnation. God does not call to ‘social functions’ which are not existential participations of his life, works, and cares in the economy of the Incarnation. God does not give functions to the flesh which are not paralleled in the relationship to himself of the soul: man is one person, and the soul is his nobler part. Christ is more than a legal functionary, and the woman who is the Mother of God, and of the Church of God, is more than a sort of biological midwife between matter and its God. If the priesthood of the New Law conforms a man through its character to the work and office of Christ the Eternal Priest, then it confers an organic share in the ministry through time to redemption, salvation, reparation and conservation. Like creation to the beatific vision, which gives in charity what God is by nature, the priesthood calls to a participation in love through the altar of all aspects of that mediation which Christ alone has by right of his Person as God and as man. Of his fullness have we all received, and grace upon grace.

As with very existence itself, there are degrees of participation in the vocation of Christ among men, degrees then of participation according to the sacrament, whether baptism or holy order, in the ministry of Christ which belongs to the definition of the Christian man. There is no creature who participates the Priesthood of Christ as Christ has it in himself, just as there is no creature who is real in the manner and sense that God is real. Yet the Priesthood of Christ gives more in holy order than does the sacrament of baptism, and as the very gift of baptism is from the Monarch, from God downwards to men, so that essential increase and distinction of higher function in the ministry of Christ comes also from the Monarch, from Christ downwards unto men, not upwards from the congregation. So true is this, that as we will see a little later in the consideration of this matter, the fulfilment of the character of baptism is not intelligible except through the character and the human hands of him who shares in a higher relationship the ‘Holy Order’ of Jesus Christ.

The salvific work of Jesus Christ consists in all the relationships of his human nature to the world of men. It does not stand in the act of suffering alone, not even in the act of suffering through love and holiness alone. It consists in all the relativity of the Incarnate Word to the sons of men, under the Unity-Law of creation, upon at least this planet. It consists then in the teaching and fulfilling in divine truth and divine love with a divine authority, and in the feeding and nourishing unto Eternal Life of the whole personality of a man, in body and in soul. It is essential that Jesus Christ should use the persons of men to maintain this work through history, and to call men to a share in this work of Divinity is to call them all, in varying degrees, to a share in his Priesthood. Yet the degrees, because they are intrinsically and functionally related one to another in the supreme Priest, are necessarily different in essential depth, they are not degrees which are different as prince and pauper differ in wealth but are one and equal in the essential gift of human nature.

The very ministry of men to each other requires, if it is to be true to human nature, that the Priesthood of Christ which lives and ministers within the church, should admit degrees of participation. Only Christ has, or should have, the total fullness, as Head or as Member. Through the Priesthood of Christ participated to men, the Eucharistic office of Christ is maintained as something organic to the nature of the Church. There is no social differentiation if all members have the same office in the Body of Christ, nor can we speak of any office being ‘organic’ to the Church if all the members do not integrate the Body, and fulfil each other mutually, in diversity of essential functions.

It is for instance integral to the very ministry of Christ through his Priesthood, that the divine magistracy, and the divine jurisdiction should be maintained among the People of God. ‘Feed my lambs, feed my sheep’ is not said idly: in Christ this function is a priestly work, it is not merely a Rabbinate. Yet very nature shows us that in a truly human society there cannot exist a social authority which ministers magistracy and jurisdiction, without it being, as that sort of function, the rule of the few for the needs of the many. In the state the power of nomination and election to an office by nature in the body social of men does come from below, because the root of power is the equality of personality in every rational creature. In the Church, in the sphere of magistracy and jurisdiction the order of mutual vocation must still be of the few for the many, as social power requires, but the root of the gift does not come from below. The root is not of human nature, but of the mediatorial and priestly office, from before the world was, of the Son of God and of Man.

It is no accident that the degrees of the fullness of Christ in his Priesthood are found to descend, from the very institution of Christ, through Peter and the bishops, then through their hands upon the priesthood of the second degree who are the intimate assistants of the bishops, and then upon the deacons who minister the more temporal needs of the People of God. From thence it descends again by steps to the community of the People of God, born again in the likeness of Christ by water and the Holy Ghost, who have themselves a vocation in Christ that is priestly, first to the sons and daughters born of their own bodies through Christ, in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and then to all men both baptised and unbaptised, through the Holy Eucharist, but especially those with whom they have the intercourse of daily life and friendship. It is not accident that the descent of power shall be thus a real and membered descent by steps, of offices which differ in real degree and possibility. The fullness of Christ is for the blessedness of men, and this descent of power, of power which is real but essentially distinct and related in content, is required by the manner in which the wisdom of God has fashioned human nature itself.

The participation which is Holy Order

The Priesthood of the altar, to which a man is called by power over the Eucharistic body and blood of the Lord, confers through its ‘character’ a deeper share in the consecration of a man to the salvation and redemption of the brethren than does the character of baptism. The character of the Priesthood of the altar is not an extrinsic deputation to a function in the Church, not the application among the People of God of a spiritual ‘rubber stamp’. It is the participation of an office and a work which is personal and existential in the company of Christ. The special relationship it confers stands through and in the power over the Body and Blood of the Lord.

We would say that all the degrees of the Priesthood of Christ in the Church are participations of the one plenitude, but that the character of baptism gives such a priesthood as takes the Christian man only up to the Offertory of the Mass. There of its own formality it stops. It would go unfulfilled, and the blessing of a man in the Sacrifice of Christ, and the feeding of his soul in the Sacrament of Christ as well, would go unfulfilled, unless at that point it were gathered up through the priestly character and hands of him who is called ‘a priest’ in ordinary parlance, whose intrinsic and complementary power of Holy Order sweeps the Offertory of the People, and their very selves, on to the consecration. From there, in the physical Person of Christ the Eternal Priest, through this consecrated man, the priest of Holy Order, it is ‘carried up on high, through the hands of thy Holy Angel (Christ) unto thy sublime altar, into the very sight of thy Divine Majesty… through him, and with him, and in him’. (Euch. Prayer 1). Rightly the Canon of the Mass members unto the Sacrifice of the altar the person of the local bishop, and of the reigning pope, ‘together with all those who rightly believe and practise the Catholic and Apostolic Faith’… for the entire Unity of the Church is summed up and recapitulated in the personal presence of Christ our Sacrifice, and the Sacrament of our life.

The priestly order which is of the second degree cannot be commissioned in good order unless through the hands of the episcopate, in which there resides directly the fullness of the power of Christ to ordain to the Eucharist and to rule and teach with personal authority of office. The apostles of Christ had no more power of order than this. This is the next intrinsic degree of the plenitude of Christ. Yet, among the bishops themselves there must be the voice which has authority to clarify the truth, or resolve the disputed doctrine. These disputes may, and have arisen within the apostolic college itself, they do in this very day. This same supreme personality must have power of authority and jurisdiction over all the Church, without limit or territorial or personal claim. For bishops may lapse through error or malice, even as Judas lapsed. The supreme relationship to Christ in the Church, a relationship paralleled very well by the relationship of the supreme commander of an army, under the King, can only belong to one bishop in the Church at any one historic time. It is human nature again, which requires this, and the constitution of Christ is always true to human nature, or he would not have become man.

This prerogative is that of Peter among the bishops till the end of the ages. It is unique in degree, or it could not stand. This is the supreme giving to thee of the power of the keys in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, to thee, the rock on which the Church is built in stability. It is the giving to thee of the grace to know and to assert without fail the Faith of Christ, and to confirm the brethren of the apostolic college in that Faith when Satan would sift you all like wheat… If it is the duty of Peter to so confirm the brethren in the Faith, it is the duty also of the brethren to allow themselves to be confirmed.

The office of Peter and his successors in the college of the Apostles is not a special ‘charism’, a gift which belongs to the category of prophecy, he has this power from the natural jurisdiction of his office, whether he exercises it in the ordinary or the extraordinary manner. The power and the authority does not come to him upwards from below, nor from the consent of the Church. It devolves upon him through his office from above, and is the apex of the priestly office at its point of first adhesion into the personal Priesthood of Jesus Christ, before the descent of power through Order throughout the Body social which is the Church. Through the fullness of Peter there descends within the People of God the fullness of the magisterium of Our Lord: the body of the apostolic college is a body indeed, but like every body it is integrated as through a head, and this head of the visible and corporate Body of the Church, in the normal person and natural manner of men, is the successor of Peter.

All the properties and functions of the living body are ruled and controlled through the brain, through the head, and there is no power and function integrated in the apostolic college of the bishops, which is not controlled and coordinated through the seat of principal natural power in the Church, through the office of Peter that is to say. This is the order in which through steps which are intrinsically distinct, but intrinsically co-relative in office and function, the priestly power of Jesus Christ descends by the participation of men in the constitution of the Church, through the characters of holy order and of baptism. Likewise by the same ascent of degree of fullness and potential it ascends from the font of baptism, through deacon, priest, bishop, and pope, to him from whom it issued at the font, and is gathered up again from the People of God into the physical Person of the Living Christ: ‘I am Alpha and Omega, I am the beginning and the end.’

To the writer it seems less perfect to regard the office of Peter in the Church of God as the supreme degree ‘on earth’ of the Priesthood which is in the Church, and to think of the Priesthood of Christ as something in some way apart and distinct, something ‘in Heaven’ which works and guarantees the Life of the Church as it were ‘ab exstrinseco’. Better by far to regard the office of the supreme bishop of the Church on earth as possessed himself of a degree of the Priesthood which is itself relative and integrated into the next degree of power higher than himself. At that next degree the ascent by steps stops, for the office of Peter is integrated directly into the office of the Personal Priesthood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Without irreverence one might make the point that the successor of Peter is called the ‘Vicar’ of Jesus Christ, and in the most common usage of curial life in the Church, a ‘vicarius’ is a curate, who is under the parish priest. He has no direct power by connatural jurisdiction, ordinary jurisdiction as it is called, his office is integrated into that of the parish priest, who alone has the abiding and total rule within the confines of a parish. Curates too come and go, but the parish priest abides for ever. So also in the Church of God, there are many ‘Vicars’ of the Church of God, but only the One Eternal Priest who is Bishop over all the flock, everywhere and at all times. This function of Christ is actual and physical in the Church at all times, from the reality of the Holy Eucharist. A pope can resign his office, and if he does so there is no papal ‘character’ which remains as such, beyond his character as a bishop. The office of Peter, in the Church, under Jesus Christ, should then, one suggests, be looked upon as the final power of actualisation of the priestly character at its final apex of adhesion into Christ of the power of Order in the Church. Yet the Lord endures for ever as the Living Head of the Church on earth, and of his Priesthood there is no equal participation on earth or in heaven.

The tradition of the living Word

We have required already under the Unity-Law of creation that the principle of control and direction to fulfilment through development should be, once man is created under that Law, God himself in person, the Environer of man. From this principle there must be, from the beginning of man, a personal line of communication and of revelation of God to men. We require it in the name of the Unity-Law of creation itself, as the patent necessity even from reason, of an order of fulfilment of the spiritual creature in the Supreme Spirit. Its manner we can no more divine without the communication of God, than at the first beginnings of the elemental equation a created spirit could have known the outcome of those primal motions of galactic gas to be modern man in his works and his ways, without the communication of the Mind and Will of God in the poising of that equation. Much less could the mind of an hypothetical man present at such a beginning of the universe as it affects this planet —for we dare not say that we know with surety the total sweep through space and time of the works of God in spiritual creatures —have dreamed the vocation of the flesh of Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary, without the manifestation of the final end of the poised beginnings in wisdom of the work of God.

We have required that God himself shall be the principle to man of his spiritual life, which is the main life of man even naturally considered, and there is in fact just one line of religious tradition upon earth which fulfils the expectation and has the Evolutionary, i.e. the Messianic content which is required to fulfil the concept of the Unity Law. This is the line of the Faith of the people of Israel, the line of the Bible. When we say that such a messianic content is ‘Evolutionary’ we do not mean that the Messiah is an evolutionary phenomenon or product in the sense that derives or is at least suspected from the perspective of Teilhard de Chardin. It is not the Messiah who is evolutionary, or ‘immersed in matter’ for the Living God communicates without change or alteration of the Divine, but the line of manifestation of God and of the destiny of men, that is, and must be ‘Evolutionary’ in the religious and theological sense.

It will be found that the constitution of the Church Catholic in communion with Peter, continues exactly the same type of theological development in a manner which is so true to the need of a divine action with authority ever existing among men, that it provides of itself the most powerful of persuasions for the unique truth of that Church and of its Religion concerning God and the destinies of men. Long before the Incarnation there needed to descend from God a Religion claiming the direct truth and the direct authority of God to men, in order to justify the very concept of the Unity-Law as a continuance of creation through a process of evolution. This line is found in the priesthood of the Old Law and in the prophetic function, which in the end needs to be viewed as subject to the priesthood of that day as the ultimate court of decision in the Old Law. The prophecies of the prophets would not have come to be part of the bible, unless they had been written down and ratified as canonical and promulgated as the ‘word of God’ by the ultimate authority of God existing under the Mosaic dispensation.

It does not put an exclusive barrier between prophet and priest in the Old Testament, to be able to say that it was precisely by the priesthood that so many of them were persecuted. That has happened under the New Law also, even though the prophets often were priests as well. There were also false prophets in plenty under the Old Law, and there have been many in the New Law too. Nor did there lack saintly priests of the line of Aaron, and saintly priests have not lacked in the episcopate of the New Law either. We are making the point only that prophecy and priesthood were aspects of one ‘Church’ in the Old Testament, but that the prophecy of its nature was subject not to private judgement but to fulfilment and promulgation in the name of the ‘Church’ of that period and that stage of development. There was always a divinely sanctioned authority among the People of God.

In this matter of priesthood there is an important issue best not overlooked entirely when so much talk is heard, some true and some false, of the ‘priesthood of the layman’. The text of 1 Peter c.2.v.9 is quoted to weariness, but very rarely is it said that the words of St. Peter, ‘a chosen generation, a kingly priesthood, a holy nation’ are only echoing to the letter the phrases of Exodus c.19.vv.5 and 6. The occasion in Exodus is the solemn striking of the Covenant between God and the People of Israel through the mediation of Moses. The passage of Peter, addressed as it is to the Gentile converts of Christ, marks the striking of the New Covenant through the mediation of Jesus Christ, for all mankind that believe in him. The passage then cannot be interpreted to mean that the rights, powers, or character of the Priesthood of the altar of Christ, derives upwards from the powers of the baptised community.

It has merely to be asked whether the words quoted by Peter from the book of Exodus, whatever dignity they conferred upon the People of the Old Law, implied that the priesthood of their altar derived from the election of the people, or the rights of the people, or was unnecessary in view of their universal and kingly priesthood? The answer is too obvious. The priesthood of the Old Law was the priesthood of Aaron, and this not by the election of Moses, nor that of the people, but by the nomination and gift of God. To the seed of Aaron was the priesthood of the altar given, until the Messiah should come. Moreover, to mark their exclusive relationship to God, not to the people, the priests and the levites had no inheritance of tribal land among the people, for the Lord God of all Israel was their inheritance, and the portion that fell to their lot. So much then for brash perspectives which owe everything to vainglorious theological error and nothing to sincere theology.

In the New Law of Christ, the Unity-Law of control and direction to fulfilment will come to its supreme peak. It must still be the direct communication, or say better communion, of God with mankind through those that believe in him and who live through him. It will be direct in the most personal sense, for the Law which is the Law of Life has consummated in the source, exemplar, and consummator of Life, in God himself, in Jesus Christ.

It will be, even more than was the Church of the Old Testament, an economy in which the personal, interior, and individual spiritual life of a man is taken up into, and forms part of the social economy, and the social spiritual life and work of the brotherhood of men in God. The great mistake of all forms of Protestantism in theology has been, in the denial of the authority of the Church, to deny the communion of God with men directly, as the Environer of mankind. For such a communication must be both personal and interior and social and exterior: the life of man is one totality, and no man is an island in the sea of God's wisdom, God's charity, and God's call to mutual membering in a common vocation. There is no way in which God can exercise a communion with man that embraces truth, love, and authority, which perseveres down the ages, and which develops in content and depth with the ages, without loss, except through a tradition both individual and social, divine and human. This requires an office of magistracy, of decision, and of custody in the Church of God, in which God himself is the first active principle and principal at all times. If we think otherwise of the Church, then there is nothing stable and canonical in her teaching, there simply is nothing certain beyond the certainty of bare natural reason, and that lowered by the effects of sin. It did not need the Incarnation of God in Christ to leave men with the certainty that something exists, and is most probably personal, that creation is inconceivable without some ‘reason’ for it, and that very probably we may hope to survive death in some way or the other, and that the safest rule of life and immortality, is to do as you would be done by. Without the concept of the Church which lives and teaches in historic Catholic Christianity this is literally the sum total of ‘revealed’ Religion as it exists in the minds of many who call themselves Christians, and for that matter who wear the clerical collar to signify that they are ‘witnesses and ministers’ of Christ.

It is inconceivable, since men differ in gifts and in powers, that all men would, even in a sinless economy know and love God with equal vision and with equal power. The very differentiation of way of life would raise the contemplative understanding of some, and leave on a lower level rather than diminish, that of others: for sin apart, since a man is spirit and matter in one personality, the wisdom of the scribe comes partly by his time of study. Those who had more to give would communicate it and teach it: in religion as in art, science, and all good knowledge, men are members one of another, and announcers of the gospel, of the ‘good news’. The best of all news is the news of God. That is why we must expect the interior gifts of God to be combined in an economy of Faith in which the social power and the social instruction and the social authority is part of the religious economy of God. Since the incursion of sin, this order, and the careful choice of men to exercise such a vocation is even more essential. The point made by Teilhard de Chardin concerning the manner in which the social traditions of men in a highly developed and stable environment become more important for the spiritual and intellectual development of mankind than the exchange of genetic material is important in this respect.

The incorporation of social authority with divine sanction is the only way in which a tradition of inerrant truth can be passed down the ages by Jesus Christ through his Person unto persons. In every age there is a divine content to be passed on from God's authority not that of man's subjective opinion, and a demand made upon the consciences of men to recognise and to obey which follows from divine truth and the absolute authority which such must carry. Unless this something is immutable and divine, it cannot be the Deposit of Faith which is to be passed on undiminished in all ages, defended with conviction against all attacks, believed in under all stresses, safe in the knowledge that from its own authentic content there can and there will be found the needed development and further vision that succeeding ages require of God and of his People.

This relationship of the People of God to Christ, and of the Church to the world, requires an hierarchical and magisterial, but also a prophetic function in the Church: for where there is an evolution in the understanding of the Revelation of God in Christ, there resides the spirit and the function of prophecy. When the Church defines a doctrine of faith and morals with a definitiveness which did not exist in earlier ages, or when through her common doctrine she blesses elements of thought and conduct which were in earlier ages simply less general speculations of schools or of individual theologians, she is both manifesting the life of prophecy which exists within her constitution and defining through the ages the bearing of the plenitude which is God in corporeal form for the greater needs or possibility of men. The spirit of prophecy in the Church is prompted and ruled by him who is the Spirit of the prophets of the Old Law, the Holy Ghost, and what the Holy Spirit prompts is not a new economy, nor the personal charism and property of any individual. For it is written that ‘He shall receive of mine, and shall show it to you, —he shall not speak of himself.’10 This does not imply any subordinationism in the Blessed Trinity, but marks the submission to the Incarnational Church, to the apostles gathered with Peter, of all the words, works, and signs in the Church of God.

It is this magnificent vindication in the Church Catholic of the type of the action of God which we must expect to justify the concept of God environing Man, the vindication and the continuation in much greater perfection in the Priesthood of Christ than in the Old Law of what we do in fact find, from the time of Moses onwards, which effects in the Church the divine authority of both Scripture and Tradition. Also it explains the power of the Church over the authentic sense of both. For the authentic sense is that intended by God, who as the Environment and Life of Man has been an active influence from the beginning, and has consummated that living influence in his Person, in Jesus Christ.

Scripture and Tradition are in effect the one same source of authority and of wisdom in the Church, for there can be no written tradition until first it is spoken, and then taught with divine authority. It is the divine authority which makes it ‘the word of God’, not the ink it is written with or the words themselves. As St. Peter indicates to us, at no time in the Old Testament or the New in Christ, has the scripture been subject to merely ‘human interpretation’. There have at all times and human ages been those who, trusting to their own personal charismata have wrested the word of God to error and destruction.

The genuine gold of the inspired word of God depends on its proceeding from the breath of the Holy Spirit, and the ultimate test that this is so, has lain not in the fulfilment of prophecy, or in the personal sanctity of priest or prophet, but in the declaration that these things and these signs are so, by the rulers and governors, by the God appointed among the People of God. Only from such an hierarchic constitution can the concept of the canonical authority be derived at all in the Old Law or in the New. Otherwise it is every man for himself, and that not merely from the 16th century, but long long before, so that without this presumption of a visible power to declare and bless ‘the Canon of the Scriptures’ there do not exist any divinely inspired scriptures at all, —unless the individual thinks them so for him. The tradition of Protestantism was unconsciously living on the ‘capital’ of the hierarchic tradition of the Old and the New Testaments, when it accepted ‘the Book’ and denied the oracle which made the Book canonical and thereby guaranteed its message and its authenticity.

At no time can an objective ‘word of God’ be subject as to its final arbiter to the norms of private judgement in an individualistic way. The individual may be right in his interpretation, but the sense of the scripture is not subject to his interpretation because of that. On the contrary, he is right because his personal viewpoint happens to coincide with the sense objectively intended by God, and manifest with certainty to all men only by the Judgement of Christ through the magistracy of his Church. Just as much, the individual may be wrong in his interpretation because he lacks background, lacks mystical insight, or lacks the authentic tradition in which the word of God of so long ago was framed, and through which only can it now be understood with relevance. That is the whole point of a continuing "Tradition" of God among men. Individuals live and die, but if God is the principal author of a Divine Tradition, living among men in a way natural to man, it is only through a social tradition which survives the individual death that he can act in continuity, and through his Holy Spirit guarantee constant and correct understanding, in a developmental economy of Salvation.

The ‘words’ are the words of God the Environer of man at all times, and who now is become the Communion and the Possessor of man through the Christ, and thus the words of the sacred writ are now the Living Word down all the ages of the Incarnate God. The sense of the Incarnate Economy needs a voice and it is only through the hierarchic and canonical power of the Priesthood of Christ in the Church (for in the fullness of Christ the priesthood and the rabbinate are united in the Divine Person) that this message can be clarified and defined, and can develop in balance over the ages despite the corroding power of sin and of human contradiction.

If then we wish to vindicate in the People of God the full life of God the Christ in the Church, we must look first for an economy of liturgy, government, and priesthood at once monarchic in Divinity, but fully incarnational and social. We look for a constitution in time in which the mystic and the true charismatic is fulfilled within the most stable form of social human government. The constitution of the Church in Christ must be as the Master is, one unity of wisdom, truth, and love, and grow through the ages with increase of organic configuration and plenitude, as the child Jesus waxed in wisdom, age, and grace, but be at all times just one and the same identical thing.

The wisdom, the love, and the authority of Christ in his Apostolate requires a voice that rings down the ages as much as his own rang out in Palestine. All this is found uniquely and in the one only place, and being fulfilled it consummates to this very day the Law first required in Adam: —that when God becomes as a Person the Way, and the Truth, and the Life of men, before the Incarnation and much more so from that its time, then the final Religious guidance of man must be, and must claim to be Divine. This is found quite magnificently fulfilled in type, expectation, and prophetic power in the Apostle who, when solemnly declaring the truth of Christ for the Life of the nations, uses for the most part the magnificent formula:

"By the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and Our Own, we declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which teaches… has been Revealed by Our Lord Jesus Christ etc."

Just one chain of authority here, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Peter the Prince and the bearer of the keys, Paul the apostle of the Gentiles, of all the nations, and Our Own… for it is the one power and the one authority of Christ, who is All in all, Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, God most Blessed for ever and ever.

1 Matthew c.28.v.18.

2 John c.20.v.21.

3 2 Cor. c.1.v.18.

4 Galat. c.1.v.8.

5 Matthew c.18.v.7.

6 Matthew c.16.v.12-15.

7 John c.5.v.19.

8 Hebrews c.1.v.5.

9 Isaiah c.43.v.8.

10 John c.16.v.13.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Sacraments

of the Christian Church

1. THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE

The Sacraments an inevitable corollary of the Incarnation

The use of the picture, the symbol, the rite, is essential to Man because Man is a spirit enwrapped with the flesh. Both elements find their mutual harmony and fulfilment in cooperation, neither is meant to be, in the original plan of God, a handicap upon the other. In the unity of his being, a man can only learn perfectly and love perfectly, and be fulfilled with perfection when both orders of his being co-operate of their own in a composite reality which like man himself is spirit and matter in the unity of one thing. The life of a man is well summed up in the human word itself, because this has no connatural meaning, but is an arbitrary and conventional sign, differing so much from nation to nation in the one interfertile species ‘Man’ that we do not understand each other without toil and translation. Yet, when we do translate, we find that there is a common denominator of meaning and significance in all languages, that we do in fact have the power to ‘understand’ mutually, even though these sounds for meanings are not similar organic and specific sounds programmed into our being through the brain, as in the case of the animals, who live on the deterministic level of reality. We are not computers. Therefore we have souls.

It is inevitable therefore that Religion will be expressed through the sign and the symbol, as inevitable as that Religion will be social and organised, for Religion is the expression of the deepest natural power, orientation, need, and expression of a man's human being. When we say that the human word is a conventional sign it does not mean that to use words of some sort is arbitrary or conventional, no, the existence of the word is a necessary consequence of the reality of the flesh and of the brain. No doubt at all, from the very nature of the highest simian that precedes man, the developed brain contained many organic and specific sounds for basic animal relationships interpersonal, social, environmental, and so forth; these will be and must be overpassed when the soul takes over in man the controlling function of the environment. No doubt at all that the co-operation of the soul with the brain will be natural, so that the human intelligence will find a ‘language’ ready at hand and easy to develop. But, because man is not dust a super-brain, this means of communication will develop, and without relationship to either environmental control, or even organic and inherited sounds.

As time goes on, and as human perception develops, new sounds and new pictures will have to be, and will be developed, which have no direct relevance to organic and inherited sounds. There is no other way in which we can make sense of human language, and the forms of human writing and signalling. These are not determined in a programmed way by the environment acting upon a brain which in fact, is the same organically in us all. If matter were all in man, there should be this sort of programmed similarity throughout the species. The obviously arbitrary nature of human language, by which a completely new and ideal language such as Esperanto can be formulated, is direct proof, if the argument is fully developed, of this thesis of the necessary distinction in man of soul and matter as principles of being in the unity of man's one nature.

Yet we agree that man cannot do without the intimate co-operation of matter with the spirit. Indeed, there is no immanent action in man, nor outward expression, which is not co-related to a material impression in his physical make-up as well. In the very wisdom of God that physical reality must participate, and participate at a noble level, in the religious knowing, loving, and adoration of mankind. It is quite rarely that this writer disagrees with St. Thomas Aquinas, but in this subject matter it cannot be helped. Aquinas presumes that except for the effects of sin, man would not have needed a sacramental economy, but could have gone perfectly to God through the way of contemplation. From his own philosophy of man as a composite being of matter and of spirit, of his doctrine of the soul as the entelechy or ‘form’ in man, and his recognition that all the immanent acts of human nature are ‘mixed’ in their order, St. Thomas ought to have known just a little better in this context. He should have seen that sin or no sin, the perfect expression unto God of a mixed nature will be an activity which expresses fully for both soul and body the reality of the spiritual order. Once he had seen this, he would have recognised that the Incarnation follows naturally, in the wisdom of God, as the one and only plenary communication and communion of God with men. Apart from the Incarnation, only the angel who is pure spirit, could lay hold on God and be lain hold on, in perfection of ontological order: the sons of men would be left orphaned, because the flesh without the Incarnation is a nuisance, and an irrelevance in the spiritual order. The Hindu and Buddhist traditions, without an insight into the ‘contradiction’ introduced into the material order by Original Sin, are quite justified in seeing the flesh in this light, and in thinking that at the peak of perfection of being the spirit does not reincarnate but passes into identity with the Living Flame of the spiritual Absolute. The truth however is even more beautiful and subtle than this, for the doctrine of the East redounds into a universal pessimism and rejection of the universal order of matter. It reduces the material in its essence to a defection from God, and this is not an explanation of creation. It is the very fact of the crowning of the material order by the direct enfleshing of God in Person which manifests the beauty and dignity of the material order, in the supreme destiny of the possession of God in his intimate Being. If the destiny of man is to the beatific vision of God, then the Incarnation is a necessity of the divine wisdom and love, in the order of charity, because more than the strictly supernatural order, even God cannot give, and the only means to the fruition of the most perfect gift of God is the most perfect wisdom and love of God, given in his very Self. Just as sanctifying grace is the seed and germ of eternal life so also the Incarnation is the germ and seed of the very possession of God in the beatific vision itself, for the spirit enfleshed.

The institution of the symbol and the rite is inevitable from the nature of man, in any order of destiny, and is as natural to man in basic family and civic life as it is in religion. This, like the word, a spiritual content wrapped up first in a sound and then in a graphic symbol, follows on the dualism of order through which ‘Man’ is integrated as a co-related entity in his being. Before the event we call the Incarnation, religious rites, even those which possessed the direct authority of God through the line of the Unity-Law, are still subjective and incidental means by which men cohere more fully unto God. They are not relationships from God to men, which are objective on the part of God himself, this has to await the Incarnation. This is why the living relationship of Christ to his Church at all times has been stressed so much, but especially in the Eucharist. For, of the Body and the People which is at all times integrated into his being, Jesus Christ is at all times the objective minister, and the objective nourishment.

The concept of ‘ex opere operato’

Here is the essential nature of the Christian Sacrament, that it is, whatever the sacrament concerned, an act of Christ, not just as God, but as God made man, and always as the principle of mediation and perfection for men, to the Father, in the Holy Spirit. This explains the action claimed for a sacrament in the theology of the Catholic Church, that a sacrament confers its grace or status ‘ex opere operato’ from the very reception of the sacrament as an objective work, not from the subjective activity of the recipient. Even in these days one can read an article or comments which dismiss such a mode of action for the Christian sacrament, as a belief in magic, but this total inability to understand is less common than it used to be. What is meant is that since the Incarnation the life of the People of God is a divine life in and through Christ, ‘I live now not I but Christ lives in me…’1 as Paul cries out, and that in the sacraments instituted by himself and in himself, Christ takes on a personal and existential relationship to the men whom he quickens by his Divinity, through his flesh. The act of conferring a sacrament is not simply the use of a rite approved by God through which the activity of the Divine Word is communicated more easily to the recipient, a sacrament is an act in which Christ as God acts co-relatively with this member of his Mystical Body, to confer in the spirit the gift or status or increase of spiritual life signified in the sacramental rite, at the same time as the mutual operation of the recipient and the minister of the sacrament. A sacrament of the Christian Church is always a case of ‘where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’ because in every sacrament of the Christian Church, Christ is the chief minister.

The co-operation of a man is only a co-operation in which the human personality extends through its own, and in the case of some of the sacraments, through its own priestly status and character participated with Christ, the Personality of the Lord who is, through the Cross and his Resurrection the sole and Almighty giver of the gifts of God: all power is given to him, in heaven and on earth. A sacrament therefore is well defined in the terms of Trent, following upon St. Augustine, ‘the sign of a sacred reality, (res) and the visible form of an invisible grace’.2 It is the enfleshing that is to say, of an objective gift of God, given objectively by God in Christ, enwrapped in matter as befits the nature of Man, and as befits the economy of God who became enwrapt with a human soul and body for the perfection and the beatification of his creature.

The Sacraments in the Early Church

Just as Jesus Christ is always the fullness of the Godhead in the form and figure of a man, so likewise the active and operative power of a Christian Sacrament consists in the actual divine gift of God in Christ. The Divinity of Christ is always the first formal principle of the power and efficacy of any of the sacraments of the Church which lives in and through him. In the Early Christian Church we do not find the exact delineation of precisely seven rites which stand out from the others as ‘sacraments’ having a special sanctity and an objective mode of operation, and so forth. This organic delineation of the content of the life of the Church was not fully formed in so to speak, her embryonic period : yet the reality of it was there, and the later delineation is only the making actual of a potential waiting to be fully understood and clarified. Always in the ‘mysteries’ of the Faith, there was the recognition of certain rites of the Church effected by Christ directly, or with his authority by the first apostles whom he commissioned, which had a special consecrating force and configured a man more perfectly to Christ in his likeness. It would have been unheard of that a man could live fully as a ‘Christian’ unless he had first been baptised, and then prayed over and anointed with the chrism of strengthening in the Holy Ghost. This latter was the perfecting and finishing off so to speak, of the son of God, new born of water and the Holy Ghost, in the character of the Holy Spirit, as he receives of the things of God, and shows them within his soul as a Christian man in an already developing measure of truth, zeal, and fortitude against temptation, to which may be added if the Spirit sees fit, incidental charismatic gifts as a testimony to men.

The early Christians indeed thought to have little need of the power to confer the sacrament of Penance: they reckoned to keep their baptismal grace without grave sin, in their new life in Christ, so great was their sense of actual identification with him an existential reality. Yet from the words of Christ, and from the letters of St. Paul, we know that the power to absolve from sin was a reality in the Christian economy, and that if a man did sin gravely, he reckoned on penance which was long lasting and severe. The sacrament once more, is clearly there as a potential from the beginning, the development of later centuries would be meaningless in form except on the basis of the less detailed formulation which was there and developmental, like life within the womb in the months of parturition, and which grew into the later discipline. Certainly the early Christian Church knew and offered the Eucharist, so much is this of the Church that it is the very central theme of all her worship, from the years of the Didache onwards. As has been remarked earlier, from the shores of Ireland to the shores of India, by the end of the 4th century after Christ, the Christian Church, in whatever language and liturgy, is recognisable by three elements which are everywhere the same —holy order, the bishop, the priest, and the deacon; the baptised People of God, and both united round the altar in the Eucharist, the divine and human reality of the Lord. So central is this Eucharist to the sense of corporate and individual life in Christ, that it is one of the very last things to be challenged by heresy in the life and doctrine of the Christian Church.

The restoration of marriage to its first status, the total prohibition of divorce, the parallel between Christ and the Church and between man and wife, in the doctrine of St. Paul, and other passages as well from both Peter and Paul, indicate well enough the valuation we should place upon marriage between Christians in the early Church. This basic human relationship could hardly not be a sacrament, for it is so obviously an office in the Church of God, being the co-operation of man and woman as one principle in the flesh, with Christ, in the bringing into being of the Church in time, and her further sanctification and nurture towards eternal life. This basic vocation of human life to God in Christ is of the very nature of a ‘sacrament’ in him. It is a relationship knit to the meaning and the purpose of the Incarnation itself, for Christ is for the spirit enfleshed, not for the angelic nature, and in this vocation both man and woman need great grace and protection from Christ to fulfil worthily in him the image of its primitive and unfallen sanctity before God. The anointing of the sick seems well to belong to those basic skeletal relationships of ministry of Christ in his Church, personally unto his People, for it repairs and perfects in the crisis of sickness and dreaded death, the work and hope of the baptismal robe itself. It must not be forgotten that it is also a sacrament of recovery, but one may doubt whether it would ever have been instituted in Christ as a full sacrament of the Church, except for the premonition of death, and the terror and stupor of heart which can surround death in the present state of fallen man. The experienced pastoral priest knows very well the reality of this condition, and the peace and happiness of soul which supervenes after the holy anointing of the sick. We have all to die, there can be no indefinite recovery, and the solemn pledge of peace and mercy, notwithstanding the handwriting, be it never so terrible, which is against us, that stands in the personal Unction of Christ in the Church through the hands of his priest, is a fitting and solemn mercy from him who having loved his own who were in the world, loved them unto the end.

Holy Order may be gauged in the early Church from so many passages of the New Testament, and we notice that Paul, who sends Timothy as a bishop under himself, notwithstanding his youth, sends him to lay hands, and by laying on of hands to commission in the office of a presbyter. Likewise the same Paul urges him to stir up the grace which is within him by the imposition of the hands of himself, Paul. The indication in all the passages is in fact of a monarchical priesthood, the priesthood of Christ, which descends by the hands of the apostles alone, and not by the mere nomination of the community. It descends too with the commission of authority in a relationship of subordination, so that Timothy is subject to Paul, who when he comes has things ‘to set in order’, while Timothy himself will both ordain others subject to himself, and is exhorted to show them honour and preference in the Church according to their personal labours and example. Let us remember too, that the priesthood of Aaron was not derived from the people, but given by God. The Jew would not expect a presbyterian mode of priesthood, if only because the type and operation of the Christian priesthood can only be the fulfilment of the ministry of Christ, and Christ is not merely man: ‘as the Father has sent me, so I send you’. If, in the Pauline phrase, ‘anyone should wish to be contentious’ then the only appeal may be to the emergence of the actual pattern of the Christian Church, in the third and fourth centuries, as the fury of persecution eased. Of this appeal there can be little doubt, the episcopal nature of the Christian Church is so solidly manifested, and is found to be, and is claimed to be, the centre of the unity of faith, charity, and authority in the Church. It is a priesthood most like in type to that of the Old Law, in that it is conferred as the gift of Christ and not of the people. The special characteristics of this monarchic and hierarchic priesthood are not called into doubt until the rise of Protestantism, and even to this day the smaller remnants of the Communions which are outside the broad stream in the East of either Latin or Orthodox Communions, are yet episcopal, they give little authority to either a presbyterian or a congregationalist principle of Holy Order. The solid manifestation of an essentially similar priesthood, in spite of the loss of real mutual influence between the East and the West in the later Roman Empire, cannot be explained unless we accept that such is the univocal structure of the Christian Church from her apostolic and traditional constitution.

The Early Sacramental Liturgies

We should not expect to find in the early years of the Church, anything approaching a clear cut ‘theology of the sacraments’. The law of development for doctrine is similar to that of the development of the limbs and organs of life in the womb. The point is underlined by Cardinal Newman in the ‘Essay on the Development of Doctrine’, but one prefers the more biological simile not only from the whole ethos of this perspective of theology, but also because the development of the organs and limbs of the human body is now known to depend on the very exact and balanced interplay of hormones etc., in exactly the right amounts at exactly the right time: it is a developing equation. The same is true of the development of theology, we can only explain the clarification of an earlier century by the developments we find in the next century on the same supposition that we are in the presence of a way of Life in God which is a balanced and organic whole, and in which successive developments are ‘true’ only because they are in balance and in equational harmony so to speak, with what has been believed earlier and done earlier.

We should look to find in the life of the early Church, special marks of the formation by Christ in Person of the first bishops of that Church, and of their own immediate formation of the next generation, of the Timothys and the Tituses who were their immediate successors. A parallel phenomenon can be traced, though much less significant of course in degree, in the foundation of the great Religious Orders. The first successors of the founders of the great Orders were either saints, like the founders, or men and women of quite outstanding spiritual vision and depth. As time goes on, the impetus of the first Fathers diminishes, and is very rarely ever regained again. In the case of God Incarnate one would expect to find the same phenomenon, but much more markedly so.3 One does find it, but to trace it in all its forms, and very importantly just at the moment, in the insistence upon chastity as a holy way of life in the Church, and a fitting concomitant of the Priesthood of Christ, is beyond the scope of this book. One can however indicate something of this formative influence as it is manifested in the liturgical life of the Church in the very earliest documents which have come down to us outside of the New Testament canon itself.

The language of the first liturgies of the Christian Church, even when due allowance is made for the temperament of mediterranean rather than nordic man, is highly dynamic and anthropomorphic. So intimate is the co-operation of the Holy Spirit with the waters of baptism, with the oil of unction, and so forth that it appears that a positive spiritual power is given to the physical elements themselves, a ‘magical’ power so to speak. Whatever such language does or does not prove, it serves to manifest that for the Christians of the early centuries, the sacred mysteries, the ‘sacraments’ of the Church, conferred an objective gift or status. It does not seem necessary to interpret these early liturgies as giving to material agents a supernatural power of vivifying the soul of man in some magical way. Always at the back of such language, as St. Justin remarks to the emperor Antoninus Pius, concerning the Holy Eucharist, there is the parallel of the Divinity of God entering upon the physical elements in a manner analogous to the Incarnation itself: it is the sense of the Living Christ, the Living Holy Spirit as the principle of life and being in the mysteries of the People of God, which is the raison d'être of the language and the imagery, the recognition of an incarnational economy, which follows through the gift to men of ‘the fullness of the Godhead’ in corporeal form. In such a manner should one interpret the ‘descent of the Holy Ghost’ or of ‘the Holy Trinity’ in to the Font of Baptism, to render the waters fruitful with power to bring to birth the sons and daughters of God. The conscious imagery here is the ‘breath of God’ moving over the void of creation and the black, empty waters, and bringing forth life…

The Jews did not take this to mean that God was immersed in matter, or that the being of God became commingled with matter in the work of creation. There is no evidence that the early Christian Church, other than heretical segments, ever thought the waters of baptism to have taken on a magical power above their material potential, or that they became another Incarnation of the Holy Ghost, and so forth. The development of the centuries immediately following the primal beginnings moves just the other way. What the language of the early, and mostly Eastern liturgies does manifest, in the stark pedestrian language of modern Western man, is that through the blessing and dedication of the water, of the salt, of the oils of unction, and so forth, the matter of the sacraments took on a special relationship to Christ himself through the Holy Ghost, for the immediate and direct accomplishment of a divine action or status which was also symbolised in type by the very physical nature of the elements used. This relationship to Christ in his Church was analogous too, but not strictly comparable with the manner in which God, taking to himself flesh in Jesus Christ, operates directly and dynamically through the medium of matter, to effect the most perfect life, the ‘life and life more abundant’ which he said himself it was his office in creation to give to men. If men had really thought that the elements of the sacraments took on a magical power, either they would have adored them as the Incarnation of God, or would have embodied the mentality in the later theological development of the Church. This does not occur. Traces of superstition we do find, particularly in the use of the oil of the sick as a physical medicine, but abuses of this sort are recognised as such, constantly reproved, and finally die out. They do not develop organically in the life and the thinking of the Church.

The thought of the early Christians, as a thought formed by Christ and the immediate successors of the apostles, shows a total unwillingness to compromise in standards with the weakness induced in human nature by sin, or with the standards of the pagan world outside. It is significant that one of the calumnies alleged against the early Christians is their ‘hatred of the human race’. The abhorrence of the early Christians for the sensuality, cynicism and want of integrity of the pagan ‘Humanism’ of ancient Rome must have evoked in the unconverted mind and heart the same sense of contradiction and fury which caused the leaders of the Jews to howl ‘crucify him’ against Christ himself. The pagan of the first century of Christianity would have found himself very much at home with the intellectual smart set of Western civilisation, and above all with their novelists and other cultural leaders, but not with a Christianity that was really ‘progressive’ in terms of the mind and heart formed in men by the very Christ himself.

The insistence of the early Christian is upon a real and objective changing of mind and heart, a conversion indeed, both effected by and manifested in the new birth of water and the Holy Ghost. Those who shrank from it, and from the demands upon a man's life and conduct this new birth required, could remain long years as catechumens, as ‘you of little faith’ for they doubted the power of God within them to enable them to abandon their sins. ‘I can do all things in him who strengthens me’ was the certainty of the first Christians, there is an insistence in the early liturgies not only on divine grace, but on a divine union personally with Christ through the mysteries of the Church. The ethos of the early Church is a mentality of direct and living union with God, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, who operates with a transforming power through ministers and through matter, through sacramental signs which are causative outwardly of the gift they effect inwardly, and especially through the Eucharist, in which the matter becomes Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, literally and without qualification. In this the testimony of the Roman Catholic and the Greek Churches both Uniate and Orthodox is identical, and historically speaking, this is the one voice of truly historic, authentic, Christianity. The ‘mysteries’ of Christ are the direct acts of God in Christ in the Mystical Body, of the same Jesus through whom we live, and unto whom we are membered. Given this sense of a sacred identification with Christ, and of a constant nurture through the objective ministry of Christ in the ‘mysteries’ which were most sacred and fundamental to the relationship of Christ to his People, the detailed theology of the sacramental system could wait, for the facts of life through God in Christ were already there and operative.

The formal principle of every sacrament

It is the objectivity of the Christian sacrament as an act of God in Christ which gives us hope that we can show a rationale upon which to justify the salvation of the unbaptised child, indeed of the fetus which never came to birth, without emptying out the efficacy and meaning of baptism. For the formal principle, the principle that is which brings to pass the gift, grace, or status of a Christian sacrament, is the direct act of God; that the act is clothed in the fullness we name the matter and form of the rite itself, follows the perfection of God in Christ, follows that is the fullness which is the incarnational economy, the plenitude of the Godhead in the corporeal form. Yet the power and the dynamism is the Divinity, without which the flesh profits nothing. If a Christian catechumen dies without baptism, he is presumed to have baptism ‘in desire of the Sacrament’ and he is buried with the rites and the blessings of the Church. Already then the formal principle of the sacrament, the contact of God upon his mind and his heart is operative, and this is enough to ‘justify’. Does such a justification, ‘not indeed by the sacrament of Faith, but by faith in the Sacrament’ empty out the validity of the sacrament?4 No, for the sacrament is the same act of God in its plenitude of power and of operation, and of status. The sacrament gives the same gift, but gives it much more fully and abundantly. The sacrament is the fullness of God's action in Christ upon a man, which must give more, which gives so perfect a laver from sin that all is forgiven, even the present wound of concupiscence, which must give a greater increase too of positive love before God and ‘of glory’ as the theologians say, if that child die almost at once, than if the sacrament had never been received in its fullness in the objective act of Christ in the Church. A child that receives the sacrament receives the fullness of Christ's own love for it, its presentation to God in the human and divine natures of the Son of God and of Man, in that fullness it is more fully loved and acceptable, it must be so: of this infant it is said expressly and individually —‘Father, I will that where I am, this man whom thou hast given to me, should be with me, that he may see my glory, the glory I had with thee, before the world was…’5 That certainly is more, in that fullness is the character of a son of God, in the likeness of Christ, in the full formality of the express divine and human will of Christ through the ministry of men.

The child that dies without baptism, the fetus that is aborted by accident or the sacrilege of man, is that human personality then, excluded from the saving power and will of Jesus Christ, and from the ‘baptism of desire’? In the first place we ask, who has made it, —undoubtedly Jesus Christ, or better say the Father, in his Son Jesus Christ, that it may be perfected to the image of God, in the Holy Ghost. So God has made this man. Into what sort of order of being? Into the supernatural order of being, there has never in fact been any other, and we do ill to invent a purely natural order and destiny, of which we have no warrant whatever in scripture or in tradition. All we know from these, is the supernatural order, the same order, only of man fallen and helpless, and then the same supernatural order of man Redeemed and restored in the very Person of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. Let us observe that if we cannot justify the eventual salvation into Heaven strictly so called, of these human persons, then the victory of Jesus Christ over sin and death, is certainly not complete. Through no personal fault of their own, these innocent souls, we speak of their personal inculpability for their state, are robbed from God by the malice, the original malice of Satan. How then, is the victory of Jesus Christ, over ‘sin and death’ complete?

So they are made by God through the Word Incarnate, their Exemplar: and with what sort of love? With the Redemptive love of Jesus Christ, for that is the will in which we are all conceived in him and through him, this it is which makes of Christian wedlock a great sacrament, in Christ and in the Church. We are made through Jesus Christ with the Redemptive love of God and willed through the salvific will which we know from Faith to be ‘for all men’. This is the creative and redemptive will which formed the fetus in the womb, and now we ask, of what manner is the first entitative act of that soul which is created and co-created into matter as its necessary organising and energising principle of meaning and of individuality? Can the body and brain of a man begin to develop from the point of individuation as this man, as a person that is, without the presence and entitative act of the soul? We say not. This entitative act of the spirit, is it an animal, a vegetative or a spiritual act? This act of the spiritual power, we say, whatever its effect in co-operation with the material is a spiritual and intellectual act: the soul is a simple principle of being, it does not admit of compartments which are animal, vegetable, or mineral, it is a spiritual principle in the likeness of the Essence of God.

This we suggest means that the entitative act of the spiritual principle of the soul, from the first beginnings of its substantial making of a man, is focused and orientated unto God: that is its desire, its natural desire. The spirit is not neutral unto God, nothing is, the spirit does not, any more than the material, refuse its entitative obedience to God from its first movements. Sin can be imposed upon the flesh as an alien law, and sin can be brought into the spirit to its own frustration by the free will of the soul, but this is an act against God and against nature, and it has to be fully and deliberately against the orientation to God of all things which are made by God. This process cannot take place in the womb, because the soul is not capable of acting through and with the powers of the flesh to do such a thing. Yet it is capable of acting, from its own entitative powers, and this action is virtually and actually a desire of God, for that is the termination in the intention of God and the proper course of nature for a man, of this beginning of being and action, which terminates finally in the beatific vision itself.

At the same time as this process within the womb, God desires and seeks the human personality he has made. This desire is not abstract or ideal, but a dynamic presence of the Divine to his creature. The draw of the action of God upon the soul, is through the co-operation of many another cause, to bring a man to full birth, then to baptism, then to the fullness of the spiritual life, and finally to the beatific vision. The full achievement of all these steps in relative perfection is often frustrated by sin, that is the sweat, blood, and sorrow of human life, and lives in the persecution of the Church and of the plain good man by human sin. In this frustration, which admits of many a degree, lies the denial to the vast majority of mankind of the fulfilment on earth of their spiritual potential. Yet this is not total loss. The wounds of sin can be made up, and will be made up in the final victory of Christ, in the Parousia. Can we not then extend the same principle back to the very beginnings of human life in the womb? Why not?

This soul and body is seeking God in its natural movements, but in the supernatural order which is the only destiny God has given mankind. Christ is seeking this person, made through him in his image, and the seeking of Christ is not a vague benevolence but a dynamic influence, a grace aimed at the transformation of a man in the perfection of the image of God, and this seems enough to the writer to prompt within the human personality, in the gift of God, and the desire of nature, through the prayer and presence of Christ in the world through his Church, the minimum form of the ‘baptisma flaminis’ which means after all baptism in that spark of love prompted by the Holy Spirit of God: the first formal principle of every Christian sacrament, the stirring of God objectively upon and within the personality of a man.

Would this imply that such a soul could come to the beatific vision before the ‘end of the world’ and the restoration of all flesh in the flesh of Christ Triumphant? There seems no principle by which to exclude such a thing, for the unborn fetus any more than for the adult who is justified by the baptism of desire for God, and therefore implicitly desires the sacrament which is the act of God. Nevertheless the writer would not be too sure. It is for the Church to judge of all developments of doctrine, sacramental or otherwise, they are hers, not the individual's, and she is Christ's.

It might be possible to argue that all who come to the birth of daylight and full development of body and soul in the flesh, though not more fully persons than the fetus which dies in the womb, are by birth itself, introduced into the initial catechumenate of Christ, and possess in that very fact, a deeper degree of grace. It might be possible to argue that the soul and body which separated by accident or human malice in the most dim beginnings, receives a grace that cannot come to fruition until the restoration of all mankind fully in the economy of God. In which case ‘Limbo’ would be a valid concept until the end of the world, but not for all eternity. The writer however admits his frank dislike for such a theory, for ‘Limbo’ is wrongly thought of as an alternative natural state of man. It began as the gentlest degree of Hell, and developed by progressive softening to a state of ‘purely natural happiness’ not by true theological development, but as a presumption of theologians, who saw rightly that anything less in type could not justify the justice and the mercy of God to such souls. If ‘Limbo’ is a true category in theology, it is to Purgatory surely, that it should be approximated, and not to Hell: that is the point really of the development humbly proposed above. There would be no scandal in the long coming of such a vision of the ways of God to men. It is human sin and the crassness it induces in us, which delays so many developments, makes it impossible for God to teach us so many things. For example, until a deeper insight is obtained into the meaning and the working of the sacramental economy, a knowledge that the unbaptised child could be saved, would argue against the objective gift, and the necessity for salvation of baptism. It would be the will of God and the need of the Church to maintain above all things the ‘ex opere operato’ nature of the sacramental economy and the necessity of baptism in the Church.

The necessity of baptism is not diminished if the baptism of desire is only the imperfect degree of the full and perfect action of God upon the persons of men in the sacraments of Christ. Until that perfection of action is attained by the perfect manner of Christ's operation in this life, or the perfect manner of his operation in the next state of being, by purgation that is to say, and increase of sanctifying grace, or by the perfect manner of the operation of Christ, by which he subdues all things unto himself, at the end of time, until the perfect manner brings forth the perfect work, the person of a man does not enjoy the full gift of God, nor enter fully into its birthright. Certainly the sincere person who dies at baptism child or adult, enters fully into the joy of his Lord, into the beatific vision that is to say. The one who is justified by any baptism of desire, does not. This seems enough to justify the ‘necessity’, for the full wisdom and will of God is always a necessity upon us, and the status of baptism is necessary in a man on earth, for the further building up into Christ of the Church, because without this birthright, no other sacramental grace is valid and fruitful. One can see what happens, as in the Anglican Church at this moment, when an increasing number of men begin to say openly that the exclusion of the unbaptised child from heaven is an unacceptable doctrine, and a denial of the victory of Christ and the restoration of all things in him. Because they do not possess the principles of a true sacramental development, they begin to refuse to baptise infant children, and then to deny the necessity for baptism. Before long they have denied the objective grace and objective manner of operation of Christ in each and in every sacrament, and reduced the sacrament in general to the level of a subjective symbol. In the name of goodness, —the need to justify the unbaptised child, —they end by destroying the very basis of the sacramental, incarnational working of grace in the economy of God made Man.

That is why we said that the blindness and coarseness induced in all of us by sin, makes it impossible for God to give us all the answers, we have to wait until a time has come when a wider perspective of the design of God in Science and in Religion makes it possible at long last for men to see the lines of a true solution. Until that time we must insist and Christ must insist through the teaching authority of the Church, on an obedience to what is certain and certainly true in the Deposit of the Faith. It is certainly not clear that Augustine in his arguments with the Pelagians on the need for infant baptism always had the better of the argument from reason. He did however prove beyond doubt that the doctrine of Original Sin in its authentic sense, applied equally and in an hereditary sense to the new born child. It was this that the Church accepted with firmness from his pen. In the matter of baptism what has had to be saved with certainty is the ‘ex opere operato’ nature of the sacramental gift, its plenitude of grace, character, restoration and reconciliation in the ‘washing’ of Original Sin from a man, and this is the necessity for a man both as a son of God and as a member of the Church to be baptised as soon as possible. The term ‘necessity’ has had also another sense in the new born child of its being the ‘only means’ by which the infant can be justified from Original Sin, since it is presumed incapable of any saving act of the intellect or will of itself at that stage of life. This however is a presumption of theologians, not a solemn judgement of the Church. In the strict theological sense of the word, the sacrament of baptism is just as much a necessity for the devout adult catechumen, who may be, and is presumed to have in his very apprenticeship to the Church, baptism of desire for that which he is being prepared to receive.

In discussing the accepted principle of the baptism of desire, reaffirmed in greater fullness by the Second Council of the Vatican, we remark two further issues. Unless the baptism of desire is seen in theology as the dawn-light of the one same work of God which in Christ and the sacrament is the noon-day sun overhead in fullness, then it is just as difficult for us to find any principle of salvation for the vast majority of the human race in all the ages prior to Christ. This would indeed negative the meaning of the Incarnation, and dim the lustre of the restoration in Christ of all things. The Jews were but a tiny fraction of the race of man. Akin to the perspective of the sacraments as the plenitude in the incarnational economy of the formal act of God which moves creatively in every human person from the womb onwards, it is well to remark that neither God nor for that matter men, deal in negative acts. When we speak of ‘washing away’ sin or of ‘forgiving’ somebody, we are not really making a negative release from something, but we are loving again or loving in greater abundance.

God forgives, whether in the sacrament of baptism or in those of penance and the anointing of the sick, by loving again or loving with a greater plenitude. This is the remission of sins, and the remission of the vestiges of sin as well. In the case of the infant child, whether born, unborn, or barely conceived, we do not doubt that Christ loves it, and works upon it in the inner man with as much communication of himself to its spiritual powers as is possible in that state of being.

Whatever knowledge or love Christ communicates, and in whatever rudimentary a degree, it is a creative and a redemptive love, and it must be a principle of his desire for the soul, which prompts from the very ontological obedience of nature to its formation and its development, a desire for him who is the meaning of its first movements in the womb of woman. In this creative and redemptive love, we would say the Church shares with Christ, so that the unborn does not lack a visible connection here below with the Church our Mother. For the Church in all that she does, and is, and suffers, and in the daily offering of himself upon her altar, prays and intercedes for every creature of God, old and young, born and unborn,6 and what she prays for is prompted within her with unutterable groaning by the Holy Ghost, from the fullness of the things of Christ, which in the Holy Spirit, explicitly and implicitly our Mother the Church prays and longs for. The child which is brought to the font is fully brought forth and born to God in the prayer and work of the Church, but we will not have it that the one which is not so brought or dies before it sees the light of day, has not been conceived to Christ in the womb of Our Mother the Church. In the redemptive love of Christ it was created of flesh and of spirit, and in the womb of the Church it stirred, in the communion of care and prayer which the Church has with her Lord, and being conceived in the womb of the Church, though it see never the light of day, it is covered by the baptism of desire, and the Lord will raise it up again, in the triumph of his own flesh at the last day. For He is the exemplar and the origin of all flesh, and that which was wronged in Adam does not call to him in vain, or otherwise his victory over sin would not be the total and complete victory of the Second Adam who restores in greater abundance that which the first Adam lost.

2: THE HOLY EUCHARIST

The drama of St. John

A man who accepts the Christian name, but does not accept the Holy Eucharist as the literal and personal Christ, God and man in the fullness of both natures, has emptied out the life from his Faith, and left himself with many a puzzling paradox to explain. There is first of all the historic evidence of nascent Christianity itself, the unbroken witness of the oldest and most authentic forms in East and in West, Rome and Constantinople, and the nearly submerged fragments that lie scattered as deep as Ethiopia in the South, or the northern approaches of the European subcontinent to the West. In all of these there remains the monarchical priesthood, and the literal Eucharist, which centres around the transubstantiation of the being of bread into the being of the human nature of Christ, everliving conjoined to his Divinity.

The writer thinks of the days of youth in Rome, and the sense of awe and wonder from the Catacombs, witnesses so pathetic, and yet so powerful, to the meaning and the reality of the Eucharist, as Sacrifice and as Sacrament. The platters upon the table and upon them the scone marked with the sign of the Cross, and the fish lying by its side, the fish, which from its Greek letters read in anagram ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Saviour’… the testimony of St. Justin to the emperor Antoninus Pius, and many another, all growing into a coherent pattern with the passing of the ages, in which development of knowledge and appreciation is organic from a central, realistic theme.

There is, equally, the drama of that sixth chapter of St. John's gospel, the feeding of the five thousand, that was real enough, the warning from Christ not to trek after him for the bread that perishes, but to seek that which endures to everlasting life. There was the challenge to give a special and great sign ‘our fathers ate the manna in the desert…’ the taking up of that challenge, again from something real, ‘the bread of angels’ which sustained the wandering People of God, the promise of a Bread which will give life for ever. All so far, on a very realistic level. Then there is the announcement that the Bread that I will give is my flesh, for the Life of the world, and in the explanation of why this should be so, no word or suggestion of any metaphor, allegory, symbolism or parable. On the contrary, with much insistence that my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed, there comes the startling though utterly logical statement that ‘as the Living Father has sent Me, and I live through the Father, so he that eats Me, the same also shall live through Me’. This is clearly a statement of the function of Christ's Divinity unto man. As the Son lives through and in the Father, with whom he is One Being, so also the man that draws Life from God after the manner of food or nourishment, that man shall live by God. But the statement about the flesh and the blood is conjoined with it, no suggestion of any hidden, typical sense. Neither did the crowds take it in any hidden, and mystical sense. This above all things else created a major scandal. They were shocked and revolted: ‘this saying is hard, and who can hear it… but Jesus knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at this, said to them: does this scandalise you? What then if you shall see the Son of Man ascend up where he was before?’

This is a startling testimony indeed, for the appeal is directly to the Ascension of Christ to ‘where he was before’ not as a man, that dated only from his conception in the womb of Mary, but to where in the Divine Nature he was before, before he came into the world.

Any interpretation of this chapter which is less than strictly realist does not explain so great a crisis caused, does not explain the lack of all explanation on the part of Christ, given willingly enough on other occasions when obscure parables and difficult sayings have been in question. Neither does an interpretation which is less than strictly realist explain the fact that Christ does take some action to offset the scandal of his disciples, there is the appeal to direct Godhead, and the visible ascent ‘to where he was before’ to justify so very hard a saying, that this man will give his ‘flesh and blood’ for the Life of the world as a real and tangible manna which will be the food of immortality. Despite this, and the further explanation which follows the appeal to his future Ascension, to which we will recur later, ‘after this many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him…’. It was a supreme crisis, not the misunderstanding of a beautiful parable, and from the linking of the crisis with the future betrayal of Judas in Christ's own appeal to his apostles ‘will you also go away’? it is hard to resist the surmise that Judas's own apostasy dated from his loss of faith on that unique occasion. This incident does not have the manner of the mystical parable or admit of such explanation. It is the realism and the insistence which is not explained away, which culminates, during the great defection, with an appeal to the Twelve which is answered loyally, as usual by Peter, but with the manner of a man driven to the bedrock of his Faith, and which marks the crisis of the promise of Jesus Christ… "And Simon Peter answered him: ‘Lord to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have known that thou art the Christ, the Son of God'." It is the realism of Christ which created a crisis of defection among the disciples also in the sixteenth century. Perhaps it did in the early centuries too, for the catechumen had to undergo a long training in the Faith and in loyalty before he was admitted, with baptism, among the initiates of Christ, and into the ‘Mass of the Faithful’ as distinct from the Liturgy of the Word. The same realism it is which apparently creates a further crisis of Faith, among many other such crises, for some Catholic theologians even in the twentieth century.

Metaphor not conceivable

There are other grounds too, on which any meaning less than realist must be rejected for the words of Christ. Perhaps in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of four hundred years of the arrogance and superiority-complex of Western man, the point could be overlooked, but not in the one world of today. It is possible perhaps for Western man to consider the words of Christ as a beautiful parable, illustrative of the Divine action, even more perfectly fulfilled in the Incarnation, of God the Life-giver upon the nature of man. It is totally impossible for the semitic mind, and if the words of Jesus Christ were a parable of any sort, expressed as they were, left unrepentantly literal as they were, they could only be blasphemous and unclean, the very epitome of gaucherie, in no way flattering to the divine wisdom of him for whom Christianity claims Godhead enfleshed. Because the Jew was forbidden either to eat meat with the blood, or to drink of blood by itself, such was for him an abomination, and to this day the devout Jew tries to observe the precept and to obtain meat that is ‘kosher’. This most ancient precept, repeated several times in the Old Law goes back for the Hebrew tradition as far as the days of Noah, it signified that God alone was Lord of life and death, ‘for the life is in the blood, and I have given you it that with it you may make atonement upon the altar for your souls…’7 but also with significance it seems that the principle of the life belongs to the sovereignty of God, and for man to assume it was a form of blasphemy. Looked at across the ages as a prophecy in type of the expiation of Christ upon the Cross, it has also a unique significance, as the author of the epistle to the Hebrews is not slow to appreciate. But there it was, and because of this strict precept, the violation of which under the law of Leviticus at least, carried sentence of both excommunication and death, such a figure of speech, no matter how sacred its reference, could not be beautiful or meaningful for the Jew at all. Why then did Christ use it at all? Because he meant it, and it was no figure. Quite different will be the case when indeed ‘the Life is in the blood’ and the Life which is in the blood is the Divinity itself, the principle of the beginning, of the development, and of the fulfilment of men.

This too Christ explained to his disciples, not by way of explaining away, but by insistence and emphasis, again from their own manner, however unscientific, of understanding the phenomena of life and being. This is where he says to them ‘it is the spirit that quickens, the flesh does not profit anything, the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.’

The nuance of this to a Jew is deeper than to a Western man. In Hebrew the words for wind, breath, spirit, are one same word. Certainly by the time of Christ the more sophisticated meaning of ‘soul’ or ‘spiritual being’ had entered into Jewish theology and philosophy, from the broadcast infiltration of Hellenic culture. It is likely that even so, there was no clear idea upon the peasant hillsides of Palestine of the relationship between soul and body. There is not now, in the cities and cultures of Western civilisation. It is worth noticing, however, that Christ expected the woman at the well to understand what he meant when he said that ‘God is a Spirit’ (John c.4.v.24). St. Paul also, speaking to the Athenians (Acts c.17) is aware of the spiritual nature of God in the sophisticated sense of Greek philosophy. There was something special, and in the likeness of God, even about the configuration and nature of the body of man, since it was traced out of the primordial slime by the finger of God. Not that the tradition of the Jews thought of Yahweh as in the form of a man, on the contrary, there is the strictest prohibition against putting the form of a creature at all upon the incomprehensible majesty of the form of God. Moses is told that 'thou canst not look upon my face and live’ (Exod. c.33), but protected by God from the glory that annihilates, Moses may see in a fleeting manner ‘the hinder parts of the Lord’ although no attempt is made to imply that such an experience, explained to the crude race of slaves come from Egypt in the only type of picture simile a mystical experience would admit, is capable of any sort of portrayal. The result of Moses's colloquy with God is that his own face becomes ‘horned’ or bears a supernatural power and majesty, so that he wears the veil over his face from that time forth, when he speaks publicly to the people…

So something in God is like to man, even physically, and something in man is like to God, even in a physical manner, but this is never clearly delineated, and the Jew allowed himself no clear concept of the physical appearance of God, except that it was incapable of portrayal, and was majesty awe-full beyond mention, and he makes no place for the physical configuration, the celestial dinings, the begettings, and warrings of the base deities of the Gentiles. That which above all things made a man ‘like to God’ was not the possession of flesh, not even the possession of a body of distinct configuration from the beasts of the field, it was above all the ‘breath of God’ which animated man. For the rest of living things God had formed by his ‘fiat’ alone, but man was deliberately shaped, and shaped to be animated by a special act of life, the breathing into his clay of the ‘breath of life’ which proceeds from the very Being of God himself, and this unique breath, quickening principle, soul, was the sonship of man to God, and the reason for the intelligence and free-will of man, which made of a man something ‘a little less than the angels’ of God, which caused man to rule over the earth and subdue it, and to have all things under his feet. Thus, the Jew knew full well, it was ‘the spirit that quickens, the flesh profits nothing’, for life and physical flesh and blood, hunger, procreational urge, fatigue, and all the properties of matter, the hardheaded pragmatic Jew could see were common to man and to the beasts.

Christ does not intend anything metaphorical when he says ‘the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life…’ If he had done, there would be little sense in the reproach of the next line ‘but there are some of you that believe not’. He means that of itself his physical body does not profit man anything as food and drink, it is the Spirit, the principle of life and intelligence and of will that quickens, even as in lower flesh it is the spirit, the principle of the spiritual intelligence, which differentiates the material order of life. In Christ it is the Spirit of God which quickens, which is the principle of being and existence by which his very body subsists unto God in the unity of his Divine Person… this is the Spirit which quickens in him and of that spirit the words which proceed are words of power, spirit, and life. God has power to achieve that which he promises. In the unique, and in a sense appalling, case of God being ‘sent into the world’, the Son by the Father, for the Life of man, there would be neither blasphemy nor uncleanness in the partaking of the flesh with the blood, for ‘the life of all flesh is in the blood’ and in this case the Life by which the body and blood of the Son of Man does live, is the very Life of God, which is the principle of life eternal, and of an everlasting quickening to the personality of man. This God is, God alone is, and God also must be, to fulfil the meaning of man: ‘For my Flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed, he that eats my flesh and drinks my blood has everlasting life; and I will raise him up in the last day: he that eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him: as the Living Father has sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eats me, the same also shall live by me. This is the Bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat the manna, and are dead. He that eats this Bread shall live for ever...’ (John c.6.vv.54-9). It is precisely following upon this starkly emphatic passage that ‘the Jews murmured at him’.

The manner in which Christ is ‘Food’

Concerning this passage the realism of the Jews was matched once to the author by a very nice, straight-spoken undergraduate, who commented ‘but surely this is just cannibalism, and rather revolting’?8 It would be, if the flesh profited anything. In the case of cannibalism it is not the spirit which quickens, nor is the spirit wanted in any way, but the flesh alone without the spirit. In cannibalism a man subordinates the life and rights of his fellows to his own physical needs or delectation. To use a man as meat, is most evil. It is not cannibalism if the Being of God, the only principle of the Life and fulfilment of the created spiritual personality, be received into a man's own created personality, in body and in soul, as his vital principle of increase, and of power, that a man may grow in the likeness of God. God cannot be destroyed, nor diminished, nor broken into pieces, nor does the Divine Nature admit of becoming subordinated to the necessities of its creature. In the gift of his nourishing, God increases and fulfils in love, without diminution: that is not cannibalism. Is it cannibalism when a babe turns upon its mother's breast to draw its natural milk? This much God is to the soul, and in its highest powers also to the very body of man.

This is the meaning of the teaching of Jesus Christ. It is not a man in the human person who speaks, acts, loves, and exercises power upon mankind: it is very God in the Person of God, active for the greater fullness and total assimilation of his creature through the nature of a man. Rightly the word assimilation may be used in this subject-matter, for it is a word which pertains to nourishing and cherishing. Whether he play upon the created spirit to teach, to love, to redeem, or to fulfil, in all the relativities of the creature to God the creature must, in its own way and according to its own nature assimilate the Divine, in order that it may be itself assimilated unto the Divine. In the case of God alone can there be an assimilation, that is to say a creative influence of being which increases the stature of that which assimilates it, and which yet does not diminish anything of the One assimilated. Only the Being of God is very creative power without the slightest loss.

It is true, and willingly conceded, that in a degree we all eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and do all drink his blood, through all that we receive from him in union and communion, through the ministry of the Incarnation in all its aspects: the Word of ministry and sacrament, the touch of grace and the inspiration that moves the inner man with power. It is and must be so, for all the work and influence of God the Word made flesh is a word that gives Life, and gives it more abundantly. All the work of God in Jesus Christ, is the giving of milk to the spirit of a man. Yet this is not the complete perfection of our Holy Communion with Jesus Christ. The increase of a man in the likeness of God has many aspects and many relativities. In physical life as well, we speak of eating and drinking, but this is not the entire food and life of a man. We need to breathe, and is not the play of the sun, the light, the air upon our bodies also a part of our daily nourishment? We know that it is. So also with God. The increase of a man in the growth towards God, is not most of all from action, word, or work, but rather from the inner man, an increase working outwards from the centre of the personality. The increase of a man in the likeness of God, being an increase in spiritual greatness, is rather a transforming contemplation. This contemplation, and contemplation whatever the technical language of theology is essentially the most active of processes, fulfils not only the soul but also the body. It gives a peace which is real, existential, and the quiet, all-suffusing love of God, who is possessed by a person as a Person.

From this centre of union, love and power, there derives communion in Life with God, and this is the source from which there flows, as from a battery always ready and charged, the wisdom, the charity, the counsel, and all the virtues of the spiritual character of a man. At this centre of the spirit is God, and all the manifestations of his works and his image in the life of a man draw their power from the dynamism which wells up from this inner focus of life and power in the human spirit and in the human flesh. This is the central union and communion of a man in body and in soul with Jesus Christ, which is the ‘better part’ chosen with Mary, whilst Martha was so busy about much serving. But in its essentials, this relationship of God to the spirit is the same in all of us, whether we think ourselves to be ‘active’, ‘contemplative’ or ‘mixed’ in the vocation of life, the degree of this inwardness of the soul to God admits of an infinity of degrees, and even given the degrees, the works are more according to the will of God for the soul than the consequence of a way of life. There was no contemplative more active on earth in his public life than Our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the unrecognised office and function of God within us as the principle of Life by a contemplative activism which fires our ideals, our words, our loves, and our works, which is the central focus of the growth in sanctifying grace in the souls of men. In this minimum sense, every man whatsoever is called to be a contemplative soul, just as every man on earth lives with the same sun in the heavens above him in the sky, though the degree to which the sun is available to him as the principle of light and warmth, as we know all too sadly in northern latitudes, is a matter that varies very greatly from place to place. The Sun who is present to the souls of men, also gets through in very greatly different degrees from soul to soul, according to the human circumstances. In this minimum sense, every soul which lives to God by grace, is a contemplative soul, and the process of pull from the Sun of Justice, is to draw onwards growth to the measure of fulfilment in the beatific vision of God.

The unique vocation of the Body of Christ

It is here, to the central communication and communion of God with men that Jesus Christ, to be fully and perfectly true to the work of his Incarnation, must bring to his Divine action his very physical, human body, now and for eternity conjoined in the unity of the One Person of God the Son. He must bring it to the perfection of his creative and transforming influence upon men where he acts directly upon the spirit of man as the transforming principle of Life, and of Life more abundant, for mankind. As Man, Jesus Christ is not any the less God for men, but much more God: that is to say, the fullest possible availability of the Godhead, in the perfection of his work to transform a man into the full image of God. Whether we speak of his ‘Salvation’, ‘Redemption’, ‘Grace’, ‘Increase of being’, ‘Enhancement of personality’ etc., in man's regard, we are always speaking of aspects of the one total work of the perfect configuration of the spiritual creature through its Exemplar, the Word of God, to its Creator. When the Word made flesh acts upon the total human person, upon the soul, and upon the body too, in order to refine and heal, and through wisdom, and love to discipline the wounds of concupiscence within that very flesh, there the total manifestation of the Divine for man, must be found. The total and supreme manifestation of the active power of God upon man of the Divine, is the Word made flesh, the flesh of the Son of God, conjoined as Christ, the Son of Man, in the One Person of God the Word, this is the full nourishment of life and immortality. This is part, from the economy of the Incarnation itself, of the vocation of the flesh of the Word who is God, in the sweep of the vocation to men of Jesus Christ, Our Lord. The vocation of the flesh in Jesus Christ has, we must expect, a much wider sweep than has our own flesh as informed by the created spirit in the purely human person.

The vocation of Teacher, Saviour, Redeemer, Priest, Lover of men, all this belongs to the normal shape, form, and figure of the human body of Christ. As the Living Bread, Jesus Christ did not need, indeed, could not use, any such form or configuration. Yet, as the principle of Life, and the Manna of Heaven, Jesus Christ does need, as much as for the formality of Saviour King, and Priest, and Redeemer, the natural co-operation of his human nature with the total sweep of the work of his Divine Person in the Divine Nature. We could not have thought of a way, but to God nothing is impossible or difficult, the more so when it is a necessity of the economy of the Divine Wisdom and the Divine Charity in the measure of man's being and destiny. For a true human nature what is required is the equation of matter for human life, conjoined to its intrinsically necessary spiritual correlative, the spiritual soul. The equation of matter for human life, is in any case determined and effected by God's knowledge of what it is, means, and achieves, for the Intellect of God is the measure of all form, formality, equation, unity, and meaning.

The equation for life, fulfilled to its mature perfection of manhood, human in nature through the spiritual soul, and existent in Christ through the Person of God, was there in any event at the supper table. This humanity needed a further, and incidental extension in the case of Jesus Christ, which is not relevant in our case, —to be also the food and life of the human personality at the peak of its spiritual relativity to God. Thus, when Jesus Christ took bread, and blessed, and broke, and said ‘Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my Body…’ then the matter concerned, conjoined in the Divine Will to the physical reality of the man who sat at table, animated by his human soul, and conjoined to the Divinity in what is termed the ‘hypostatic union’ in theology, this was all the one and the same substantial unity: Jesus Christ, and the man at table, and the bread he broke and gave to his disciples, were one and the same man, and all of that matter was informed and vivified by the one soul of Jesus Christ. In effect, when Jesus Christ said ‘this is my Body’ and ‘this is my Blood’ he meant ‘this is Me’: and it was himself. It still is ‘He’ when in the Mass the priest says the self-same words. It is the Intellect of God and the Will of God which creates the natures of all things that exist, and when as the material extension of the vocation which is ‘natural’ to the life in God of mankind of the physical body of the Son of God and of Man, Christ says ‘this is Me’ then the matter concerned is conjoined to the organic unity of the body of Christ, vivified by the same human soul, in the unity of the Person of God the Son. It is now Him and we mean no qualification whatever of that literalness. This is Jesus Christ, God and Man, really and physically present upon the altar, under the appearances of bread and wine. The ontological reality is changed, this is not bread nor wine, this is Jesus Christ, God to be adored, in the Sacrifice, after the Sacrifice, and within the Tabernacles of His People, and it is nothing else.

Transubstantiation

There exists a fair measure of confusion in current controversies among Catholic theologians concerning this doctrine. Not only was the Encyclical letter of Pope Paul VI justified, but there is no possible ground upon which new terminologies to replace the term transubstantiation can be justified. There may be offered a better or a more perfect concept of the philosophical situation involved, but there can be no better title for the ontological reality that the doctrine defends. Any theology which wishes to drop the terminology is suspected with justice of wishing to qualify the ontological mutation of reality which is involved in the orthodox doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Some theologians have been teaching old-fashioned ‘consubstantiation’ in a newer terminology. While the bread and the wine remain such amalgams of matter as they were before the consecration in the Mass, by the mental ‘intention’ and by the intention of will of God, this bread and this wine becomes ‘transfinalised’, they say, in the order of the work of Christ, so that the ‘ecclesial reality’, the gift given and its significance in the Church, is ‘Jesus Christ’. For some of them this transfinalisation can last only as long as the ‘presence in the mysteries’ of Christ to his people. So that the ‘real presence’ ceases to be except in the Mass, and in Holy Communion. Some admit a ‘reactivisation’ of the material elements for the necessities of the Faithful in receiving the Viaticum etc. Some admit a continuance of this ambiguous ‘real presence’ which justifies the adoration of the Sacred Host in the public worship of the Blessed Sacrament. Others, patently in heresy, do not so allow. There exists a multiplicity of possible qualifications, some of them already named and condemned in the Council of Trent four hundred years ago.

There are other theologians who wish to remain fully orthodox, and who accept the entire teaching and public practice of the Church, but who seem to be teaching from a false perspective nevertheless. They seem to explain the doctrine of transubstantiation somewhat after this manner: There is in my room let us say, an amalgam of ferrous metals, wood, and other elements which is called a ‘television receiver’. Now, as a T.V. set this amalgam has a new and quite different finality from its basic nature as an amalgam of metals, woods, etc. This finalism is not part of basic nature at all, it is something imposed intentionally which is to say in philosophy, something made real in the real order, by the imprint of the intellect of man, and the act of the will of man. As a new finalism in the human ontological and intentional order, this ‘substance’ is fully intelligible. It is made for a new finalism, and it performs a new function, a function relative in the order of the intellectually real, to the mind and will of man. There is after all a unity and an intelligibility about a television set, just as there is about an automobile… these are new formalities in being, new entelechies in matter, and as unities, not as amalgams, they function in the human sphere. Remove the human mind, the human will, and above all the human environment from them, in which alone they are fully intelligible, and they are just so much metal and wood, already undergoing degradation of state as amalgams to basic elements once more. It is in the human sphere and order that they have their entity as meaningful unities. In the same way they say, in the Eucharist, the intellect and will of Christ takes up this amalgam of bread and of wine, and by act of intellect and will imposes upon it a new entity, real and intelligible in the sacramental order of the Church, the ‘ecclesial reality’ in and among the People of God, of ‘Jesus Christ’.

There is one fatal flaw in this position, which if it may be removed may allow us to form an even better philosophical concept of transubstantiation, whilst retaining both the old terminology and the orthodoxy of doctrine which it expresses. As taught by very many modern theologians the concept of ‘transfinalism’ may mean anything at all, and even when it means the most that it can within the limits of the thinking of these doubtful streams of thought, it has, it can be urged, one fatal flaw.

In the finalisms given by man and impressed by the mind and will of man upon material elements, the basic ontological substance, the natural finalism or finality that is to say, does still remain. Not only so, everything that man works and informs anew is built up upon that natural basic finalism, and uses the very properties of that basic, ontological finalism. The finalism of form or entelechy which man educes from the material substance or from the amalgam of substances, does not effect any new basic change of nature in the ontological order, it superimposes another, and an incidental finality upon basic natural finalisms which are not changed. In the concept of transubstantiation, in order to remain within the true meaning of transubstantiation, there must be effected a change of the natural ontological reality of the bread and the wine into the humanity of Jesus Christ. It is precisely this ambiguity in the order of philosophy which brings into suspicion the introduction of new terms. Whatever beautiful terms and lyrical expressions may be used, does or does not the material reality of bread and of wine cease to exist, to be replaced by the reality of the human nature of God the Son?

It is not relevant to the question that neither ‘bread’ nor ‘wine’ are true natural substances in a metaphysical sense, but denatured amalgams of natural elements. Even as mixtures the bread and the wine are ‘things’ in a given order of material reality, and transubstantiation means that after the consecration in the Mass, these things are a different reality, namely Jesus Christ, God made Man. There is nothing else besides, in the order of substantial finalism.

Transubstantiation takes place in a sense in some manner analogous through the ordinary process of eating and drinking. Material chemical amalgams become part of the one organic unity which is oneself. Transubstantiation too, means more than annihilation and replacement, something common remains in the process, the ‘materia prima’ for St. Thomas, together with some sort of natural affinity between the form which disappears, and the new form which supervenes upon the material potential. In the case of the Eucharist, besides the fact of being material, the only possible affinity can be the natural suitability of the form of bread, as the incidental reality, or amalgam which is the basic food of so large a part of mankind, to signify in its own entity and manifestation the Bread of Heaven which gives Life to the world.

Much nearer to a true expression of transubstantiation in the theological sense, is the de facto transubstantiation of elements by modern nuclear techniques which is increasingly effected today. Here, basic organic natures, by the manipulation of the formula of their structures, are changed from one natural value into another. This is a truly physical and metaphysical transubstantiation, metaphysical that is, in as much as a true change of basic ontological nature between one formality of matter and another. The manner of explanation of transubstantiation given by St. Thomas Aquinas, relies not only upon a real distinction of matter and of form as principles of intelligible reality, but also upon a manner of understanding these co-principles which becomes increasingly difficult since the more perfect understanding of the physical structure of material being. The abandonment of the philosophical basis of matter according to Aquinas and the Schoolmen is one main cause of errors in theology concerning transubstantiation. It is natural to look for substitute theories, and if these are badly conceived, then the explanation of transubstantiation may well go into heresy. It may though be possible to realign the general perspective of the thought of Aquinas without such radical changes as seem inevitable at first sight.

Suggested re-alignment of Thomist teaching

It seems unsatisfactory to envisage ‘prime matter’ as the principle of potentiality common to and underlying all forms of material being, but yet as a principle of reality that lacks its own proper principle of intelligibility, its own ‘form’ in a minimum sense of the word ‘form’. A thing even a ‘thing’ in the sense of a co-principle of the coming to be of the fully constituted event in the existential order, cannot be real and distinct in its own right as a co-principle of being, unless it possesses some principle of intelligibility with which to be distinct from its co-relative principle.

The discovery of the atomic nature of matter, possessed of elements which in truth are basic to the eduction of the composite synthesis at all levels of the composite material unity, or individual entity, would have solved the problem for Aquinas, would have vindicated the essential percept of his vision, and that of the Greeks before him, and have resolved in the same concept a certain metaphysical incoherence latent in the definition of prime matter. For ‘prime matter’ was stated to be intelligible only through the forms which were educed through it, and in no proper form of its own… while at the same time it was asserted that this principle of passive potential was both in the real order and in the intellectual order truly distinct from the co-principle of ‘act’ by which material existentials are actualised.

Likewise it may be possible to correct to advantage the Thomist and Aristotelean concept of matter and form as distinct principles of material entity. The origin of the concepts themselves is suspect because it derives from the pre-scientific age, takes no account of an evolutionary process of creation, and thus appears to be deduced too neatly from the categorising processes of the human mind. The essentials that the human mind establishes, even in its categories, will be true, but the detailed manner of analysing and breaking down the processes of metaphysics may be a little different. There is always more for the mind of man to learn about the nature of reality, even in metaphysics.

It would seem possible, and better, to replace the concept of the dualism in material being of a principle of coming to be, or an ‘ens quo’ which means literally an ‘entity by which the real comes into being’ in the order of act, or form, or intelligible perfection of some sort, and a co-relative and ontologically distinct principle, or ‘ens quo’ of passive potency. It would seem to be possible to combine both notions into the one notion of the ‘relative substance’. The entelechy of Aristotle and hence of St. Thomas, seems to redound into Vitalism in philosophy, and this system makes nonsense of the exact sciences and of the partial properties of chemical and biochemical agents in the natures of material things. Exactly the same holds when a more radical confusion of matter and mind occurs as Animism in Teilhard de Chardin. In the case of life below man the usual presentation of Thomist philosophy requires an entelechy, or form, that ‘transcends’ physico-chemical forces in order. This is clearly the postulation of a principle of being in the order of act, or intelligible nature, which is distinct metaphysically from the potency which it informs. Here we have an ‘entelechy’ which is not material in the ordinary sense of that word, which partakes of the properties of the soul in order of being, because it transcends the order of physico-chemical forces, but which is neither a principle of conscious intellect, nor immortal by its properties. Is such an entity, even as a principle of coming-to-be, really intelligible, and even if so, is it really necessary?

The concept of the co-relative substance

Is it not better to envisage the ‘form’ or ‘act’ through which any material entity other than man exists, as educed through the informed potential of the entity which precedes the higher synthesis, through the total equation of Nature, within and under the Unity-Law of control and direction? So conceived, of course, the ‘form’ is not an ‘ens quo’ a principle of coming to be distinct in order and in its own propriety from the potency, whether prime or secondary which it informs. The form here is simply the intelligible aspect of the potential-existential, the relative substance, the substance that is to say which in its definition and in its intelligible perfections bespeaks its own intrinsic limitations, limitations defined by its function in an equational and interdefined universe.

A ‘principle of intelligibility’ defined in its own formality as ‘purely act’ but limited in the existential by a principle of ‘passive potency’ to which the act or formal perfection is co-relative was a very reasonable solution of the intelligibility and unity of real events, which nevertheless change and are contingent. It was the more reasonable and natural before our knowledge of the evolution of species themselves. It is though a purely rationalising, static, non-evolutionary concept of the process of creation, which fits poorly on the world of modern science.

The co-relative substance, co-relative in very intelligibility to the mind, in the first percept of judgement, offers instead a formal unity which at one and the same time includes the potency as an aspect of formal definition, intrinsically. Matter and form when so conceived are not, in the material order as such, ontologically distinct principles of the unity which is the individual existent. The higher synthesis, with its higher degree of being is synthesised both as act and as potency by the eduction of the entire being upon the basis of the lower, through the Unity-Law which spans all creation as a Law of being, and within which every species is defined as an intelligible function co-relative to other reality. The ultimate reason and sufficient cause of the intelligibility of specific forms, and the unity of individual existents, is the Mind and Will of God, through which the whole equation of Nature in all its functions and values, does hold together. This is altogether possible, and does not require the existence even as co-principles, of ‘pure ideas’ in the Platonic sense, for the Being of God spans all times, and God possesses all his knowledge and all his will in the One Act of the Divine Being.

It is in fact an error to think that any degree of abstraction in the Aristotelean system ever disengages, even in the purest of pure concepts, from the conditions of ‘matter’ as pure potency. It is not possible to separate the ‘essence’ from its principle of limitation in the real order, even logically and ideally. The concept for instance of ‘apeness’ or even of ‘humanity’ cannot, in its intelligibility, do other than bespeak a perfection of being which exists in matter. Indeed, to be really intelligible the notions of ‘ape’ and of ‘human nature’ bespeak the entire gamut of complex cosmic evolution in which they are functions both as realities, and as intelligible ideas. There is no true escape, one suggests, from the involvement of the principle of limitation in the principle of intelligibility in any material form, even in the most abstract conceivable presentation to the mind of the ‘act’ of that form of reality. It is much more correct then, to think and speak only of the actual-potential, the relative act, in both the existential and in the conceptual orders. In the absence of firm and serial evidence for the evolution of beings and of forms in the days of either Aristotle or of Aquinas, one could not expect these facts to be apparent as they are now. No sight is so clear and so obvious as hindsight.

Only in Man do we possess a ‘material’ being in which there exists a true and a metaphysical distinction of principles of being as ‘act’ and as ‘potency’. The case of Man does, and must stand, and can be proven from the nature of the brain, as has been the thesis of this work much earlier. In Man the principle of physical potency is his material organisation in its totality, and the principle of form, or entelechy, is the spiritual and immortal soul. This unique case in Nature requires for its intelligibility the highest peak of material and formal perfection of which matter, under the Unity-Law as it exists in the merely material creation, is capable. When this acme of matter is reached, the organised and living matter concerned ceases to be a principle of form and of potential in one ‘relative substance’ because for this the living matter must be defined within, intelligible within, and controlled by the environmental interplay of the Unity-Law within the cosmic equation. This is the ‘meaning’ given to the intelligibility of material forms by the Divine Intellect.

When this supreme point of material actualisation is reached, what is produced is in its very form and organisation a new potential, in all its parts, not a material form or actuality in its own right, but a potency intelligible only in relation to, through and informed by, the spiritual soul, which truly is its ontological co-principle of existential being. Apart from the souls of men, there are no other ‘souls’ mineral, vegetable, or animal, to be admitted in creation. There are just three possible orders of creation which exhaust the intelligibility of reality: the purely spiritual, made totally in the likeness of the Essence of God, the entity of mixed order, spiritual and material in the unity of one being and person, namely Man, in whatever form he might be found in the universe, and the purely material order, which has no formal likeness to God at all, and cannot find in him its personal principle of final fulfilment. Such is the low order of the being of matter that the very intelligibility of its principle of formal perfection contains in its intelligibility a total relativity to becoming and to change, giving us the ‘relative substance’ whose very intelligibility is not pure or unmixed in the formal order because it has no principle of absolute value and meaning in its own right. Only the entity which is made in the likeness of God, the angelic or the human nature, may possess such a principle of ‘absolute’ intelligibility.

Progress in metaphysics?

Is this to state that there can be progress even in metaphysics? Yes, there is no reason why not, so long as no radically new principle of human understanding is alleged, for this would invalidate the ability of the human mind to know truth, and would make nonsense of history itself as a continuity of progress and of continuing perfection in human understanding at all levels of the knowable. The human mind can improve and deepen even in its grasp of the metaphysical truth, for until the mind of man knows and grasps all things in the unity and simplicity, the analysis and the synthesis with which they do all hold together in the Person of Christ, the Universal King, there is always a refinement of understanding and of unity left to be appreciated by the created intellect. Something of this, for the writer at least, stands in the difficulty in the Thomist concept of prime matter which worried the mind even when a student in the first months of philosophy at the Gregorian University of Rome: that to be truly passive potency, ‘prime matter’ must lack all principle of form, for through the principle of form, came basic intelligibility. Yet, without some differentiating principle of intelligibility there could not be the ‘real distinction’ claimed between the principle of form in the material entity, and the principle of its passive potentiality in the ontological order. The discovery of basic elements, co-relative to the synthesis of a higher substance, which even in its higher intelligibility is not understood in its idea except through this potential which it informs, would have solved the difficulty, and does indeed vindicate for the Thomist synthesis that superiority to other philosophies of being which the present writer would entirely concede. Even if in this time and age there should be a further synthesis of philosophical understanding which goes beyond St. Thomas even as he went beyond Augustine and the age of the Fathers, it is only from the Thomist synthesis that such a ‘point de départ’ can be made. All the Thomist synthesis requires is a developmental correction, for it is far nearer the truth than syntheses like those of Hegel or Teilhard de Chardin, which muddle mind and matter, God and the creation in a common order of the real, or the systems of analytic Materialism which deny the obvious unity and intelligibility of formal being, and reduce all things to mere and sheer flux.

The concept of substance and accident

The difficulty made for the Aristotelean metaphysic of substance by the establishment of the atomic theory of matter, the difficulty that is for a static principle of ‘form’ which supervenes upon another and a different static principle of ‘prime matter’ occurs again in the metaphysic of the separability of the ‘substance’ the basic principle of formal intelligibility by which an entity is constituted as real, and its ‘accidents’ or variable properties and manifestations.

It is of course true that never, in physical nature can the ‘accidental’ or in modern language more intelligibly one might say the ‘incidental’ properties be found distinct from the substance, because it is in and through the substance that they find their principle of existence and of manifestation as properties of the existent, in the real order. The difficulty consists however in the statement that such accidents are distinct metaphysically, and in the order of being, from the substance in which they inhere, separable as distinct principles of definition and reality. However much this may be impossible in the physical order, if it is possible in the order of basic intelligibility, in the sphere of the metaphysical, then by Divine Power, it could be done. It is precisely this Divine Power which is invoked to explain, in the Thomist synthesis of philosophy, the substantial reality in the ontological order of the substance of the human nature of Christ, while the accidents of bread and wine remain in their own physical and ontological reality as the accidents of ‘bread’ and of ‘wine’ no longer inhering in the ‘substance’ of bread and wine connatural to these incidental perfections and manifestations of such substances, but upheld or maintained in being by the Divine Intellect and Will.

There arises here a number of unhappy situations. In the first place, neither bread nor wine is a natural and ontological substance, but a mixture of substances in an amalgam, and how far one can talk of these things as possessing ‘natural accidents’ in a metaphysical sense is not clear. The difficulty can probably be got round, but one is not in fact talking of the connatural accidents of a natural substance. Since St. Thomas would have thought of ‘breadness’ as a natural form supervening upon man's treatment of wheat-germ, and acceding to the passive potency of common prime matter, there would be less sense of difficulty than when one knows that once the living germ had died, there was in fact no unity of formal nature here at all in the sense of metaphysics. It would be possible to speak instead of all the incidental manifestations of the material event we call ‘bread’ or ‘wine’ as being maintained by the power of God, whilst the underlying ontological reality is the human nature of Jesus Christ. Yet the concept is not as neat as it looked in the Middle Ages, for more than one real substance must be transubstantiated in each case, since both material events are amalgams of substances.

Indeed, in the Aristotelean synthesis all the physical manifestations of matter become incidental, only an intelligible kernel, which is not perceivable by the senses, and usually is incapable of clear-cut definition, belongs to the order of substance. Even the property of quantity is only the first formal accidental quality which accedes to the material substance already constituted through its essential ‘form’. In fact all the empirical manifestations of material being reduce on this reasoning to be ‘accidental’ so that the principle of substance must be something like a ‘soul’. A principle of material reality which is not perceptible through empirical reaction at all, does not seem to be intelligible as what we mean by ‘matter’ but rather to be ‘soul’ in order. In what manner we can say the ‘Body’ of Jesus Christ is present, when we prescind from all empirical properties that define matter, or through which matter is manifested, is indeed difficult to say.

In the existing Thomist synthesis too, in the real order of Nature around us, all the phenomenal manifestations of Nature and of being, all that which is of the beauty, power, joy, and strength of the real is accidental, or non-essential in character. This seems an intolerable as well as an unintelligible metaphysic to accept. That which manifests, whether formally in man or by vestige and derivation only in the creature, the Majesty which is God, must derive from the very core and essence of being, not from its separable and incidental characteristics. In fact, it seems to the writer at least, that the Kantian concept of the distinction between the ‘phenomenon’ and the ‘noumenon’ is already latent in the Thomist metaphysic, but it is just impossible to put any meaningful definition upon what the noumenon might be, since everything that the senses can perceive, and from which once perceived the mind might judge, is ‘nonessential’.

There are however aspects of physical reality which do fit in some manner the Thomist perspective as Thomism is at the moment conceived to be. The modern scientist does often talk of ‘knocking out’ say an electron from the ‘outer orbital’ of an element, and so forth, and thereby he changes in an incidental manner, the properties of the element, without transmuting the element itself. In a general way, the justification of the conception of the ‘accidental’ manifestation of one and the same substance is seen from such things as the change of state from the initial conception of a man, to the state of physical perfection. What could be greater in terms of change than the transformation from a blob of fertilised jelly, in any form of life, even below mankind, to the state of mature adult perfection? Thus, it is argued , since the ontological real keeps its identity through all these changes , to be say ‘this man’ or ‘this ape’ all that which does change or can change must belong to the non-essential, to the ‘accidental’ qualities.

Inadequacy of a static conception of reality

It is the same fault of the static definition of a substance from the categories of the mind without reference to the manner in which the idea and the possibility of the species has evolved in Nature. The reason so many Thomists for so long opposed the concept of Evolution has been the presumption that the ontological content of ‘species’ was as clear and simple as the mental abstract ‘horsiness’ from horse. Where does one draw the line, for in my mind the idea of ‘donkey-ness’ is formed in the same way and is just as clear. Yet most people would admit that the donkey was not a distinct philosophical species from a horse! It is the manner of conceiving the relationship of philosophy to Nature which is at fault, there is some truth in the ‘a priori’ concept, but it needs careful correction from later and more carefully analysed evidence from reality.

Here again the essential of the Thomist percept can be saved by the concept of the ‘relative substance’. The animal substance, or the human in its relation to the soul, is defined as an idea in an equational limit of variability, that variability defines its function and its formal manifestation in Nature, and all of this, the perfection-limit of the form and the relationship to environment, is ultimately relative to the Mind of God in the poising of the Unity-Law of control and direction in Evolution. All the manifestations of being in the material order are manifestations of its substance and from its substance, it is the substance which intrinsically, from its intelligible concept, is co-relative. For the sake of an easier, but less accurate simile, we could say that the material substance is elastic in its real and in its conceptual order, for even as an abstract idea it is intelligible only in an environmental relativity. Within limits then, a substance may vary both as to perfective maximum, and essential minimum. There are limits to the variability at both ends, there is a point at which the substance is no longer an intelligible function within itself or in relationship to its environment, and at that point the disintegration of the compositum supervenes. While the new unity of being, the intellectual perception of which is called the ‘form’ is educed as the manifestation of the existent event through the material potency and the Unity-Law in relationship to God, one does not admit a distinction here of matter and form which is that of distinct principles in the ontological order, but only a distinction of logical apprehension. The one exception again, is the nature of Man, where the real distinction of body and soul redounds into a metaphysical distinction of co-principles of potency and of act.

It has been said that the relativity theory of Einstein corrects in a larger synthesis what was right in Newton, without the ‘special laws’ invoked to correct the inadequacies of Newton's theories. This does not imply that the writer states that relativity theory is all correct or an ultimate in physics: far from it. Yet the analogy is useful. The concept of the ‘relative’ or ‘elastic’ substance can correct the excessive formalism within the best philosophy of matter available to the Church. It is not a question of going from nonsense to the truth, but from the imperfect to the more perfect truth. As for the perfect truth, that must await the clear eye of eternity, given the effects on Man of the Fall, even in philosophy, one does suspect.

Some of the errors at the root of controversies concerning transubstantiation are due to a misconceived approach to ‘Ecumenism’ in which whenever possible concessions and human adjustments are looked for, whereas the only possible approach to the things of God should be the truth of the reality of things in Jesus Christ Our Lord. The other prime factor is the difficulties raised for older philosophical concepts by the real and discovered facts of material substance. In the matter of the doctrine of transubstantiation it is necessary to bear in mind that the explanations of schools in the Church are only explanations, they are not the doctrine. The doctrine has existed since the Last Supper, long before the subtler insights of human wisdom had ceased to be suspect to many in the early Christian community.

Important difference of perspective

What difference of perspective will there be, between the existing explanation of Thomist philosophy, and the formulation which is suggested? The difference can be best exemplified in two straight statements, —that of the present manner of conceiving the effect of transubstantiation in the West, and the substitute offered. In the holding viewpoint, the substance of the human nature of Christ is ontologically present as the reality behind the accidents of bread and wine, which persist physically in their own ‘accidental’ reality, unaffected by the words of consecration. The notion we are to have of ‘substance’ in this sense, since it does not belong to any of the empirical properties of the consecrated Host, not even the attribute of quantity, is hard to make intelligible.

It is suggested that the entire reality of the material amalgam of ‘bread’ and of ‘wine’ becomes the Body and the Blood of Christ, i.e. the human nature of the Word made flesh, in the same substantial sense as in the existing theory, but that there do not remain the physical accidents of the bread and the wine. There remain only the ‘appearances’ of bread and wine, the external reality attained by the senses is as much the Body and the Blood of the Lord as the substance in the theory of St. Thomas, the appearances of bread and wine are the sacramental manifestation and expression of the human nature of Jesus Christ, and as much the ‘accidents’ of his human nature as were the manifestations of his form and figure when he walked on earth as a man. This is written for the sake of unambiguous clarity, it must be borne in mind that the real distinction of the substance from the accident is not admitted. The species of bread and of wine do of course have, in their material appearances, a typical and very suitable propriety in as much as they manifest in their material expression the role of Christ to the soul and body of man as the author of Life and the Bread of Immortality. Yet we repeat, there are not present the really distinct accidents of bread and wine, all that is seen is of the Body of the Lord in his sacramental presence among men. This perspective of transubstantiation is of course completely true to orthodoxy in its basic principle, for the mutation of matter to the human nature of Christ is an ontological mutation, indeed more so than in the explanation which proceeds from the present conception of Thomist philosophy.

It is fair to ask —did the Apostles around the table of the Last Supper, when they heard the Master say, ‘this is my Body’ and ‘this is the chalice of my Blood’ think that what they saw were the accidents of bread and of wine, held by miraculous power in metaphysical real existence, and upheld by the underlying substance of the Body and Blood of the Lord? Did they not think rather that in all simplicity, they saw what the Master named and promised, —Himself, in all that they saw and touched, and took? This is not a captious point, for the development of the notion of a doctrine of Faith, should not belie the first simple apprehension of its generalised meaning before development of the content of the doctrine. It seems that if we have to allow the continued real existence of the accidental properties of the substance of bread, that we have here an imperfection of development which is to some degree an embarrassment and that could be a sign that the concept needs further refinement. For the rest of the issue which occurs in theology concerning the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the ‘Body and the Blood’ of God made Man, we know that it is not to be thought that anything less than the entirety of Jesus Christ is received substantially under either form alone. What the words mean in effect, is ‘This is Myself, God made Man’ and they mean it in the real ontological sense, not in any symbolism whatsoever. For the rest, the Church in the Council of Trent, as also in her common theological doctrine, uses the notion of ‘concomitance’.

In the perspective suggested, the notion of ‘concomitance’ would be used in exactly the same way, not only in respect of that which is present under either of the species alone, but also in respect of the spatial and numerical distinction of the hosts themselves. Two simple analogies are offered to demonstrate what is meant: if I address myself to a large body of people, do they all see ‘myself’ or only a piece of myself, and do I attain to all of them individually, or only as a collective mass? I am certainly ‘attained’ by them all as an individual, and if I know and love them all at least, I attain them as individuals, and not just as an anonymous mass. Likewise, if I shake hands with two people, with different hands, do they both, attain to ‘me’ as a person or only an integral part of me? It is clear that their action, like my own, terminates in two distinct relativities, at the same person as one person. So also in the Blessed Sacrament, it is the whole Christ who is attained in the consecrated host, and the whole Christ as a Person who comes into the body and soul of a man, as a person. The notion of concomitance covers all the rest, even as it does when several people touch the body of one human being. Does this mean that when one receives the Sacred Host, that there is this concomitant natural relationship to every other host in every tabernacle, as well as to the form and figure of Christ ascended? Yes, one thinks so. That is the unique vocation of the human nature of the Son of God and of Man, all this consecrated matter is the One Jesus who acts as One Person through every particle.

The causality of the sacraments

This long and untidy digression into sacramental theory can be justified only by its relevance. There remains one further question to be asked and to be answered with all brevity, in order that the basic issues of the sacramental economy of the Church shall have been touched upon, —the manner of causality effective in the sacraments of Christ. Briefly, the essentials of the causality should be thought of, it is held, as a ‘physical and perfective’ causality. Unless a causality is exercised by material agents, ministers that is, and by material substances, the matter and the form, in their own virtuality, there is no true causality, but only the conferring of a gift upon a decreed and concomitant occasion. The virtuality, or real ontological co-operation of men and of matter with God, should not be looked upon as in any sense magical, or as conferring ‘transient’ powers to matter beyond the natural powers of matter. The sacrament is a cause of grace and of gift or status because it is a personal act of Christ through men and through matter. It follows the whole economy of the Incarnation, the perfect and direct action of God enfleshed upon his spiritual creatures and sons, also enfleshed. The use of matter is an ontological necessity to the perfection of this gift and of this order, the order of the Incarnation of God. Only through the sacrament, the material manifestation of a grace and power in the spiritual order, can the fullness of the gift be manifested, and work causally in the fullness and perfection of man's own nature and power to receive in intellect and in love. Likewise, the act of Christ through men and through matter, means that the perfect gift of God is received and co-operated unto by men with the total perfection of their own nature in which spirit and matter, distinct principles of ontological reality, are composed in the unity of one being and one personality. In the sacraments, men co-operate with God with the total perfection of both integrants of their being and nature, and receive of God more fully and fruitfully because of this. For this reason, the most perfect communication to men of the personal acts of God in Christ, should be called a causality which is real, physical therefore, and perfective: perfective because it is the acme in the fullness of both orders of that work which begins in lesser perfection in the beginning of time, and of which the first motive principle is operative from God in the very formation of being within the womb.

1 Galat. c.2.v.20.

2 Denzinger-Schönmetzer 1639. cf. St. Augustine, Quaestionum in Heptateuchum, III, c.84.

3 This is an analogy only. It is the Life of Christ which vivifies the Church, so that the original impetus and standards can, by reform, always blossom again.

4 Cf. Denzinger-Schönmetzer, 788.

5 John c.17.v.24.

6 And of course, her blessings include one for the expectant mother.

7 Levit. c.17.v.14-19.

8 The student concerned described himself, actually, as a Humanist

CATHOLICISM: a new synthesis by Edward Holloway S.T.L

PART EIGHT

CHRIST AND MAN TODAY

The Book is available from Faith Keyway Trust http://www.faith.org.uk

CHAPTER TWENTY

Man: The Individual, and in Society

1. TOWARDS THE TRUE HUMANISM

The vision splendid

The Son of Man came from the Father as the Heir to the Ages, came to ‘his own’ at the end of times, the beginning of the scientific consummation of history. Men did not understand or recognise him, but broke his body upon a tree. All through the years of history they do much the same to those who strive to live fully by him, and so the wisdom of the glory of God that shines through the flesh of Christ, reigns always from a Cross.

Nevetheless, the vision of his prophets, seeing him ‘coming upon the clouds of heaven, with power and majesty’ is no lie. The eye of the prophet fined to the sweep of God's eternity, sees all things consummated in the Unity of Alpha and Omega, the Son of God through whom all things proceed and in whose eternity again they find their consummation.

Men shall see him again in physical reality coming in majesty as they wish and as they anticipate, but not for all of them will it be ‘the Great Day of the Lord’. The fulfilment of man is measured by the same yardstick as the beginnings of man, before man was. The beginnings of man are in the beginnings of the universe and those were beginnings poised under Law to fulfilment as is the living matter poised under law within the womb. Upon us, the sons of man have the ends of the same One Law descended, and the last things. We are the sons of God, the end and meaning of the Law which is not code, but creative wisdom. We are the measure of the Law and of its purpose, and in our being it is supremely embodied.

The ends of the universe which consummate in us are under law and under The Law. The Marxist is right concerning this, wrong about the immanent principle of hatred, of contradiction, which is war, that he puts at the heart of the Law and the progressive evolution of being. Teilhard de Chardin is right about the cosmic perspective and the sweep of the Law, wrong in his explicit confusion of mind and matter, wrong in his apparent confusion of God and creature, wrong in his scattering of the principle of unity over every particle in the universe, wrong in his total failure to understand the meaning of sin, especially Original Sin, and wrong in his implicit subordination of Christ to the purposes of creation and to the innermost essence of the Godhead. Teilhard de Chardin has measured Revelation by the scope of his own mind, and made God in the image of Man through this error, rather than Man in the image of God. He would not have done this, perhaps, except for too human a contempt for the rulers on earth of the Inheritance of Christ: with all their faults these men carry a treasure in the earthen vessels of their human frailty which God has pledged himself to conserve so much the more carefully against mortal loss: God has given no such guarantee to other clay, no matter how high its genius.

Men do not escape the sovereignty of the Unity-Law, for whom that Unity-equation of creative wisdom by related steps, the fashioner of natures and of their fulfilments, is itself fulfilled in the flesh of the Son of Man and of God. The fulfilment of man stands in the plenitude of Christ: what was a wisdom poised in measure, number and weight1 in the building up of natures through space and time, is a Law relative also to due obedience of being within ourselves. All that is of the cosmos, and beyond the concept of cosmos, all that is of any creation given, is held under the Law.

We do not escape the Law and its proper obedience of true and of good, upon whom the ends of the universe are come. Of the stuff of matter and the power of spirit, we consummate in the pattern of our being that line of creative wisdom upon which the long history of the Unity-Law is woven until its climax, when the seamless garment of creation is crowned in the focus point of the Unity-Law, in the Holy Head of Christ the King. In his love and his gift we are the sons of God, and our being is not made to any other rhythm than that which defines the whole sweep of creative being, which passes over with man to the Law and the Prophets, until the fullness of time be come, and it is fulfilled for every son of Adam in the Messiah of the Ages. This is no Law of force, fear, or cold sanctions of legalism. This is the Law which is the poising of every nature according to the immanent wisdom which defines its good and its true: to disobey this Law brings in, even in innocent ignorance, its own recoil of grief, to flaunt it is distortion, loss, and disease of spirit.

We are the sons of God in Christ in the beginning of the world and of the universe. He is the measure of our wholeness who is the measure of our holiness, through him we become the heirs to the Ages, and in this day and hour ask of God the title deeds of man's majority. Heirs indeed, we are not prodigals, we inherit an Economy, and we do not escape the Law through which in balance and proportion the ménage is poised of which we are an intrinsic part and also the inheritors through the unique intellectual consciousness and power to love of spiritual man. Come fully to age we are still ‘under the Law’ not the law of shadow given in Moses until the Heir should come, but in the Law of substance, of union and of life in God, through Jesus Christ, for the Personal Being of God is the Way, the Truth, the Life, and the environmental Law of the nature of Man.

This is the Law which must be rightly understood, studied, and lived by the philosopher of Science before he can with truth and good organise the use of the law of matter, living and non-living, around the destinies of man, and the world in which man lives. If the material and its laws is not organised in correct relationship to this ultimate Law, —the nature of man in its relationship to the nature of God, then the upward surge of that higher Evolution of man, which is the perfection of the individual and of human society through the fullness of God, and the fullness of man's earthly inheritance, is not possible. Anything else subordinates men, and the community of men, and the environment of men, to the merely animal level, or to the warped vision of human arrogance. This is the scientific crucifixion of man, in the individual, and in the community.

It is right in us, most right of all in the young, to see forward the vision splendid of the world which lies within our power; to see the end of ignorance and of disease, the making the desert to bloom again, the conversion of the enormous resources of scientific wealth away from static, and by analogy we may say lustful engines of war, to the conquest of the natural environment of man, and towards the integration of mankind into one People of all the Earth. This was the vision of God in the beginning, in the origins of man in the one flesh, in Adam, and in the consummation of mankind and of every individual man in the Person of Christ. This oneness of the People of the Earth is the consummation of the Scientific Civilisation, to which the petty nationalisms and racialisms which divide and frustrate are a sickening and most miserable heresy. To this fulfilment let us bend our minds, our wills, and our backs, —but count the cost, and cost the work true.

We have had the music-makers, the seers of visions and the dreamers of dreams always down the years of history. The burden of Homer, of the myths of the heroes of primitive peoples, the distant legends of the ‘golden age’, and the scientific dreams of men as diverse as Voltaire and H. G. Wells, are all of one pedigree, variants only of one species of human hope. Youth must, and youth ought to frame visions of a Brave New World of its own undertaking, but for Man's sake, if God is not believed in, seek and know where the dream has failed, for the Myth, pre-scientific or scientific, is the dashed hope of the dreamer, and not all of them are nightmares from the moment of their formulation, some of the dreams ought to have come true.

Vision and will o’ the wisp

The failure derives from the same abyss as does the vision itself, from the minds and hearts of men. The reason for the failure of the ideal hope is always the same, a failure in personal human quality: failure first within a man's own self, and failure in the quality of his fellows in general.

The reason for the failure, even when the vision is worthy of the nature of a man and of his strivings is quite simple, but those who have visions and dreams for mankind out of the perspective of the truth of God are not willing to recognise it. It is because not by bread alone does a man live, because his soul in its own order like the body within its order, must draw nourishment from its proper environment. We are carried by interior union of prayer and goodwill at the breasts of God, and over the years must draw power and life from that source increasingly. Only so are the ideals of a man correctly conceived, and only so does his personality grow in the depth and sincerity required of it that ideals may be lived, and not merely conceived, for the living of the true and the good involves sacrifice and renunciation as well as joy. In the very desire of the truth, and of the real good which gives joy to human life we are in prayer, in living union with God, this is the beginning of every insight which serves the brethren, and the source through which errors are rectified and maturity of achievement is attained.

This is to say that never so much before as in this modern world, we need holiness. We need it individually and we need it socially and in the community. It is the price of the right and fruitful deployment of our enormous powers, the pledge of our patience with each other, and with the manifold human failures we must encounter, the failures in quality and vision which occur, mostly unnoticed in a man's own self, to the exasperation and suffering of his neighbour. To rise to the attainable measure of the beauty and happiness with peace upon earth which in truth is within our scope, we must be more intellectual in our very natures, more spiritual that is, savouring the rectitude of truth in wisdom, less greedily sensual. The age of ungoverned animalism in men and among nations needs to have passed with the conquest of the dynamics of matter.

To create a culture which is more intellectual in its essentials is not all, —the animal in the jungle knows no sin, it is good and right within the humble limits of its being. The animalism of man, whether it proceeds from crude lack of intelligence, or from his personal selfish exploitation of his animal senses, knows not law, or better, flaunts and defies the Law. Only the intellectual in man can guide a culture of man's intellectual coming of age, but the power of the spirit, unless it is bound by the bond of a common wisdom and truth in its judgements and seekings with the being of God, will bring upon earth the hell of the spiritual nature and not its heaven, a self-defeating distortion of human nature and a false focus of the values of reality itself. None is more intellectual or more spiritual in being than Satan: and none more evil. To become more spiritual in the manifestation of his nature is indeed the vocation of man in the age of the scientific civilisation, the ape receding and the angel increasing, but war is not the only evil for mankind, and the gravest of sins can be found only in the spiritual nature, for the gravest of sins is hubris, the arrogance of pride.

The cost of true Humanism

It is for modern man come now with scientific wisdom nearer to the intellect of God in creating, nearer to the awful power of God in doing, to know in a new depth and a new certainty the need for Christ: —God's wisdom in the world, God's love in the world, God's patient redeeming of the damaged in the world. Man, growing ever more terribly powerful with each decade of time, so obviously beyond all natural environment to control, must conform himself to the wisdom of Christ that his own personal wisdom and power may be deployed in beautiful and creative proportion, not in destruction, nor in the distortion of human nature. Let man seek for and recognise his own personal Law of Life, for man is not his own God, and without God he is the tragic fool of all Nature.

With God, despite the lesion of sin man is brought into that perfect Law of liberty which does not make the freedom of the sons of God a cloak for wantonness of flesh or of spirit. This integration of our personal lives with the Environment in which we live, and move, and find our being is the holy communion of God and men of which the Blessed Eucharist is not the symbol but the factual expression in the ontological reality of God and Man. From communion with God there flows peace, and peace of soul is the conscious experience of the love of God. Peace deepens into knowing, the love which is the love of presence, of person unto Person, which indeed is more than the pledge of peace, though the peace itself is more than the world gives unto men in any of its delights.

The love of the brethren flows naturally from a man's own peace of soul. It is more than abstraction; it is not the love of humanity, nor of Humanism, it is the humble love of people as they are. The love of abstractions and of 'isms’ withdraws to lovely places and ordered quiet, it pontificates from ivory towers set among dreaming spires upon the freedoms and fulfilments of men, while in fact with sophistry as old as sin it hands them captive to the conceits and cravings which are their pains, and forge the chains of human bondage.

The love of men which is begotten in God lives with men in fair and in foul, perseveres with them through all their follies, crudities, and lack of love in return. If such a love is fully human, it will rise even to the highest measure of the humanism of Christ; it will leave aside wife and children, becoming fully identified in Fatherhood and in brotherhood, with the ‘men that thou gavest me’ as did Christ himself. This is the deeper love of Christ which transcends the organs of generation that their very vocation in human nature may be the better forwarded in God for time and for eternity. Thus devoted, at the very highest level of human love in the likeness of the humanism of God in Christ, men and women enter more freely upon human lives to transform and to cherish. In a belonging that is unique they enter upon lives more privately than within the marriage bed, not only to love and to foster, but to struggle also and to resist… for our wrestling is not with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers, with spirits of wickedness in high and intellectual places. A man who will identify himself with Jesus Christ in the struggle to defend and to hold the wounded souls of men, and to form them in the image of God, should not encumber himself with lesser loves, the more so since these will often cry out against the price that the dedicated must pay in any age and generation for such a ransoming.

So men do not go, they are sent, they should be sent, the committal under obedience and its commission from above argues a greater love and a more generous dedication than that which depends upon a will that chooses always individually and may withdraw its service at notice. Sent, men must be —to the great wens of industrial man as well as to the lovely cities of mountain and plain. They should go as Christ went, with one consuming vocation, of their own will, but urgently sent of the Father for the one work which defines their vocation and fulfils their urge for love. This is that men may be fulfilled in the joy of Christ, that sons and daughters may be brought forth of their own souls in Christ more fruitfully than of their flesh.

Such a love and such a yearning towards men is true Humanism, very realistic, paying the bloody price of human guile, rejection, and hatred of the whole truth, persevering with the flesh and with the spirit of man in season and out of season. This is the Religion of Christ, so it is that the Church survives the persecutions, whatever may have been in any age the follies of spirit and flesh which aided the evil and the arrogant to arraign and to discredit her.

The Bride who knows not divorce

The Church does not fail in the first requirement of love. The first requirement is not to write books on wisdom or to address men over the television screen. Until the end of time men will be nourished and fostered in personality only in the attention of a truly individual love. Only the family and the parish altar can do this: these two are not replaceable. Nothing can transcend the family home and the faithful married love of two personalities enduring ‘for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health till death do us part…’ In Religion likewise the first principle of fostering wisdom and truth with love is the organic contact which abides and is ‘home’ in Christ: that is to say the parish and the parish priest, the common altar and the tabernacle of God with men which transcends all diversities of class, colour, and culture and commands that at the least, once in the week men be gathered through the organic district in the unity of faith, love and worship in their common brotherhood in Christ, in their common sonship unto God. From her very organic constitution then, the Church does not fail in the first requirement of love, but lives in the family home of man wherever mankind is to be found. The only test of the truth of love and of its substantial goodness, is works, works of this kind which endure the vicious in fallen man as fully as they accept delightful virtues.

Over the years the pride of life, the emptiness of Atheism, the insincere luxuriating, the selfishness of power betrays the real nature of the persecuting power… of the Revolutionaries against God whose heaven was all on earth, was all of ‘reason’ whose reason was all the shallow crackle of the faggots under the pot,2 —all selfishness and all easy way out.

Then men revolt, and the young lead the revolt, they revolt not so much against their elders as against the image of Man that these others have made not unto God, but to their own mean selves. The shallowness of the intellectuals, their personal smallness and vanity, the cannibalism of sensuality run riot, all brings in its heavy slavery and quick decadence. Men recoil with nausea from an evil tree that is known in its poisonous fruit.

The Church rises again from her ashes much more humble, few in numbers but more pure through her pain, aware again until the clinging worldliness of complacent days and easy honours brings back small men and small achievements, of the first priority of her being upon earth. She is able to rise because she has not failed in the one thing necessary: to live in the House of Man, to bring forth his children in her womb through Christ, to dedicate them as sons and daughters acceptable at the Font and at the Altar, to foster through the years their thoughts and desires with all a mother's concern and with total dedication. This is to be grateful for the least, thankful for the good, and overjoyed at the rare giving of the total best.

The Church, as the Mother of men, must be firm with truth and with authority like any good parent against greed and pride, against the pulling down by her children in insolence of will of those values and perspectives which refine and redeem a man: these she has from God in Christ, no man would have given them, nor without Christ's authority would men long retain them. Fire is good, but all fire must be garnered. The forest fire, whether of insolence or of lust feeds the maw of hell among mankind.

This means for the Church to be reviled and bruised in the noblest of her manhood and her womanhood like the poor wife of a dour husband, but never to leave him. It means to be embroiled in crudities and quarrels, to be never above the tumult but never in spirit to yield oneself into it. Through all of this with perseverance to minister, —to teach and to form, and never to give in to the bitter loneliness of disillusion. This is to save much, although to bring in even on the deathbed, much that is damaged and diseased to the harvesting hand of God. This means to bring out too from the reign of concupiscence and chaos of mind and body, some unbelievable gold of rare achievement in the few, from those masses of mankind who, in the streets and fields of every nation leave so much to be desired in what they are. This is genuine Humanism, the very heartblood of pragmatic realism about men; by the same token it is both Crucifixion and Redemption obtained. It is the price God paid, in the same coin. The ‘Humanist’ of self-styled type, who challenges the Church more noisily because he thinks she cannot show any synthesis of ancient truth and modern wisdom should weigh the matter again with more care. If his Religion of Man is to be so very good, it will be perfect when he goes steadfast in Faith to this crucifixion. Sophisticated ladies, and bohemian gentleman, —he that can take it, let him take it!

2. THE HEART OF COMMUNITY

The heart of community is the heart of love, and the eyes of love are focused through truth, otherwise love is blind. The subtle sense of security, the joy of belonging which is social community, has its roots first in a sense of belonging and in a sense of a man's own worth. There is no sense of belonging unless behind it there is a certainty of being loved and being wanted. A man is loved and wanted if he has a stake among his brethren. There is no sense of worth unless there exists overall among the brethren who are the ‘society’ a frame of values concerning life which men share and which make life meaningful. There is not a child in the world who doubts that he is worth loving and that he should be loved: to mother and father he is a value beyond all doubt. Why? —well, just by being of course!

The core of this sense of social belonging is an extension of the relationship of the family group, an extension of the love which defines hearth and home, and it is ontological, it is of being in its ultimate nature. Because the relationship of social intercourse is an extension in its essentials of family relationship, it takes for granted a worth-value which is based upon the love which defines the human personality as it grows and matures. These values which energise and fulfil human love, whether in the family or in friendship are of the one same nature, and they all focus through God and in God they are developed. The values of truth and love which derive from the nature of human love in marriage and which fulfil the home, are values derived from the nature of being in man not in apes, they are not conventions of human usage and they are certainly not neutral in their relationship to God. Above the merely animal and the merely physical, from God they derive in nature, through union with God in the spirit of a man they are fulfilled, and in one same order of value and of type they extend to the friend in every order of human life. In its essence, which is spiritual and companionate and not sexual, love is of one common order and type in all human relationships, it differs in degree and in application to vocation, in one vocation uniquely it binds up the sexual with the spiritual unto God, but in its essential nature that spiritual which informs and powers the love of men is the same from the community of contemplatives, through the degrees of true and honourable friendship, to the basic love arising out of man and woman through which human life comes again unto being. God is the same, and human nature is the same, and so true love is the same, but infinite in variety and in degrees of depth, wherever man is found. Now the heart of belonging and the surety of being loved and wanted has gone out of human society increasingly while the world has grown more crowded, even though through many forms of communication the world of men should have grown a less lonely and a more comfortable place. The fundamental answer to this paradox redounds once more into the loss of God as the principle of a man's truth, his love, and his certainty of worth in existence. To extend the analogy with family belonging, in the modern secular society men live in a family home founded upon deep agnosticism, non-communication of certainties and love, and divorce of mutual belonging. No child can be brought up to be happy and normal in a home in which there is no communication of certainties and of leadership in love, in which the routine answer of mummy or daddy to the constant ‘why?’ of childhood is ‘I really don't know dear’. The parallel extends also to the adult level, and often enough today it has long before begun in the home.

A man who believes in God can never truly despair. It is well possible to commit suicide to escape from life and its pain, and yet not truly to despair. At the back of their minds such men and women have the idea that ‘God will understand’. A man who attains to any degree of peace in the knowledge and love of God will not go even that far, much less despair. Despair enters when love finally goes. Hope is only love that looks for greater fulfilment, it is desire yearning higher. If every sense of being loved should go there can be no hope, and that is the state of despair.

These basic values which make for the social happiness of men can co-exist with many another denial of the proper status and rights which belong to him. Racialism did not exist as a scourge as widespread even sixty years ago, though racial subordination was in fact much more absolute. Men who did not entertain the slightest hope of being able to vindicate such rights, who had not the slightest hope of being able to enter the world of literacy and the powered machine, let even oppression go by without begetting those psychological factors of mind which breed hatred. In letting these go by they still clung to their own social life and loves with happiness, and God was still the common Father over all. Even the white man could be loved in some measure as a brother, when it was not thought thinkable to resist him or to govern one's own destiny in the white man's world. Once however the power to understand and enter within the power factors of industrial scientific civilisation become even distantly possible, then this status of an inferior type of existence breeds the most bitter brooding hate. It cannot be stilled except by total liberty or by genocide.

There was a grain of truth in the sneer that ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ and we should have taken it up rather than have taken offence at the lie. Religion was never the opium of the common people, it asked too much of a man personally for that, but Religion did have and does have a tranquillising and healing property similar to that which comforting sleep upon its mother's breast has for a sick child. Many have known in the great sorrows and the chronic burdens of life that the peace of God, which possesses the soul from within is an oasis of peace with joy which mitigates pain and prevents the onset of neurosis. Something very similar happens within society when communities live deeply by Religion. This it was which ‘knit up the ravelled sleeve of care’ whether the cares followed from racial or from social injustice. The opium of the people is something very different. It was prescribed lavishly in ancient Rome, sensual addiction and sadistic excitements, the ‘bread and circuses’ of history. The same essential opium is doled out today to the people, in the West in the commercialised sensuality of a society which in fact is ruled by the actual interplay of the values labelled as ‘Humanism’. To add to the parallel, the slaves of the modern opium-taking do often add to their escapism chemical drugs of addiction. This is the opium of the people, and like the addiction to opium it rots the personality out of a man and it never fulfils the mind and the heart. Even when it makes a man lost in sensuous ecstasy it brings him back from within to a nameless nausea and a nameless self-contempt.

The tap-root of social peace and social love within that wider family group which is the community, draws life from a basic union with God and a minimum centering of the personality of a man in God. The social values which derive from this extension of the family relationships of men, institutions of civil rule, of service, of recreation, must embody implicitly something of this underlying relationship to God through which alone human relationships of love enjoy security and normality.

From the physical nature of man it is connatural to him to sacramentalise Religion, and to develop its tenets in depth and in their organic relations. The institutions of men in community are by analogy the sacramentalisation of society in the natural relations of men one to another, and thus even the civic institutions of men to be truly focused must embody something of this underlying relationship to God as the source of human truth and the dynamism of natural human happiness. If this is not so in fact, such institutions will become impersonal and mechanical in ethos, they will fail to inspire good work or satisfaction in the work done.

Loss of Religion and social neurosis

This is to state implicity that the secular society and the dichotomy between religion and the inspiration of the state which is imposed by the secular state will constitute a condition of neurotic tension within human society which must lead to cultural disintegration. This statement is intended; it is the obvious lesson of Western philosophic Liberalism. We find it not only in the amorphous city culture of Western man, but in every tribal society which has been disintegrated by modern Western civilization without the replacement of its ancient tribal values of communal love. The West has nothing with which to replace them. The writer then must admit the deduction that the secular state is unnatural to man, with all the consequences that follow upon unnatural tensions, while still insisting that unity and love in society cannot be enforced by the sword, not even by the sword of fear. Yet the denial to men of God in their social living as a principle of orientation and of the growth of human personality is a fundamental disorientation. There is a threshold of frustration which, once overpassed, gives us the individual who is neurotic and wretched in a clinical sense. There exists also in society a threshold of disorientation which, if overpassed gives us the miserable and neurotic society in a clinically recognisable sense. In the West, men in society are visibly ill.

Since God is the Environer of Man as an individual, in his family life, and in his social relationships, the thoroughgoing assumption of Religion into the social life and culture of mankind throughout history is understandable. The history of mankind is rather a creative tragedy and a Redemption than a pageant of the triumph of the progress of the spirit. As easily as the assumption of Religion into their social institutions we can understand also the distortion and falsities which men have taken up into Religious systems themselves. To write off the Religions of man because of their errors is to write off man himself, and to abandon any hope of progress or improvement in human society. All social folly wheresoever we find it, is the embodiment of the folly which proceeds from the minds and hearts of men. It is again not hard to see why, in spite of the natural place of Religion in society, and therefore of his Kingship among men, the Christ of God must say to mankind personified in its rulers ‘but now, my Kingdom is not of this world’.

Men have always killed their prophets and canonised them when they were safely out of the way, but despite the dross taken up together with it Religion has been the home of the mind and the heart: around this seat of belonging, the gravitational axis of his personality, all other things in man have found their true orbits.

When this orientation, the natural environment of man in all his relationships of life is disrupted, social neurosis and social moral chaos follows upon the widespread individual decadence of personalities. The social life of men is the manifestation of the interacting influence of men one upon another as individuals, families, other groups. The simple sayings of Christ which can read like truisms, are bluntly expressive of terribly real laws of human life. For it is out of the fundamental love of God within the personality of a man that the love of his neighbour derives. The slow, continuous erosion of the personality by arrogance, sensualism, real and practical atheism, or all of these together, makes infallibly for a decline in the truth, generosity, and care which men manifest one to the other. God is not mocked, —‘the things a man does sow, those also shall he reap’ —the organism of social care withers in the sap of meaning and of love which man imparts to man. The institutions of education and of welfare remain, they grow more complex in mechanical function, but the fabric ossifies in the grace of human love.

Law as the norm of social decline

The laws of the society will show that decline in real human values which is the average impact in the society of the interacting lives of men. There will be an equivalent drop in the laws by which the rights and the sanctity of human life is defined. The laws of marriage will manifest a similar drop in the general level of idealism and responsibility through which married love and vocation is defined. There will be an increasing impatience with the ‘useless’ task of caring for the incurably sick and the mentally ill: with all the proliferation of benefits, it will become increasingly difficult to get children to accept any responsibility for their aged parents, or to recruit men and women in sufficient numbers to care for the elderly. As charity grows cold because iniquity has abounded, euthanasia will be the more mooted and the more encouraged; the incinerators will smoke with the holocausts of children torn from the womb. Welfare can be purchased, and so can sex, but love is a man's gift to his neighbour, which first is God's gift to man.

Among the nations the priest and the prophet have been the focus of Fatherhood through whom was sacramentalised the social relationship of all the brethren, i.e. of the community that is, to God. In the lands of Christendom this has been the ‘Church’ organised around its local altar, of which the external structure of the church as building is only the shell protecting the inner kernel. Within the concept of ‘the Church’ is included the city or village hall, and the school which was so often first the initiative of the Church, and all those activities religious, social, and neighbourly which were, and which still are organised around the boundaries of the parish and its life. What the parish priest has been through the broad meander of the countryside, that the bishop was among the civil leaders of the community. All human culture has been sacral, and to the degree to which our own has abandoned its orientation in the sacral it has become lewd, trivial, even neurotic in theme and artistic content.

In the West the decline of community, of responsibility, and of mutual affection is more advanced than in the areas taken over by the sword for Marxist philosophy. The West does not even try to put a noble facade upon its works. The destruction of the principles and values that ennoble the personality of a man, of his hearth and his home, and beyond these the character of the people and its nationhood, is pursued through drama which is a lie about life and love, through the weighted play, through commercialised solicitation both visual and verbal. The philosophy of Science even has been allowed to become a factor of practical atheism from the mutual irrelevance of scientific and religious thought, as both are usually presented. All of this destroys community because it destroys Man, there is nothing in this manner of being and of living which feeds the human soul with an intrinsic truth and an intrinsic good, nothing which gathers up every faculty of soul and body in focus to the source and increase of the spirit of man; a man is scattered abroad and poured out into the sands. It is the intrinsic love and the intrinsic truth which from the inner fulfilment they give and the likeness to God which they confer, causes a man to care for and to love his fellows in reality.

"By their fruits you shall know them"

There is no hypocrisy so naive or so self-righteous as that of the godless soul who does not have a conscience to examine, but whose life and works are one constant effort to justify his own life and his own values. Through such as these, the Impuritans of history, it comes about that there ferments and festers in the vast beehives of our great cities the actual results of the dominant influence in modern social philosophy, the trend which delights to be known as Humanism. The walls and the pavements are open museums of phallic art which in their lack of inhibition would gladden the heart of Freud, the play of the children and the dalliance of the teenagers is a matching piece to the set. It does not seem to some of us to be worthy of the name ‘human’ in any context. Below the serried flats where the lights twinkle and die as on some gloomy rank of obsolete computers there teem those sad, unbelievable youngsters who at times are handed back to us from other frontiers between finger and thumb, as something unclean, something sacrilegious to the name of mankind.

They come white of face and hideous of speech, these serfs of the Freudian overlords, their countenances are wide in that curious illusion of width that derives from utter dissipation matched to moronic mentality. They are barbarians these, poor sinned against savages of captive mothers and fathers, as truly barbarians as any that roamed primeval forests. Their hair styles prove nothing, and the musical crudities little more, they can only buy the wares their commercial slave masters lay out for them. It is the personalities marked in the features which so appal: the way of life so meaningless, the sensualism so without love, the pathless drift, the degradation of the image of God so without hope. Over it all is the aura of their own angry scorn for their very selves. This last is virtue, it is God's own ironic triumph upon their seducers. This is an act of contrition wrung from outraged nature for its own detestable corruption, and God will accept it unto a state of grace. But for the sadistic intelligentsia by whose detestation of God and of good these little ones have been corrupted, it were better that millstones had been hanged about their necks and they were drowned in the depths of the sea. Men and women like these teemed, sweated, copulated and were crucified in the streets of ancient Greece and Rome. That also was a civilisation run by ‘Humanists’ of delightful elegance and fun. History repeats itself, men repeat themselves, holiness and evil repeat themselves. There is no love of the brother, no holy and responsible care except that which proceeds from the deep roots in a man of the love of God and of his rightful obedience to the creative Unity-Law.

The failure to focus the dynamism of the philosophy of Science in a manner spiritually relevant to men is in a different case. Here the Church has herself mostly to blame. She has been so tardy in recognising the emergence of new dominants of thought and their necessity in modern culture. Her spiritual and intellectual leaders have been wretchedly incompetent in the mounting of a constructive reply to a destructive atheism. It is not that the Church has lacked warning but that her strategists have lacked intelligence, and lacked it largely through the too frequent elevation to high places of petty and ignorant minds. In excuse there can be pleaded the sheer arrogance and errors of the unbelievers, so many of whose theories and constructions have piled on the scrap heap of history in the last one hundred years. That may be, but from them she should not expect anything better, —responsibility, truth, cleanness of heart, care for the minds and hearts of children, none of these can be expected from shouters and bawlers of genius whose main concern in society will ever be to exhibit their superlative egos, and justify the selfish pattern of their own lives. It is the duty of the intellectuals and spiritual leaders of the Church to separate the chaff from the wheat, not ignore, with nearly equal arrogance at times, the entire growth. In philosophy as in economics, gold is not often found in its pure state. Mining the ore is toil enough, and then it has to be refined from a great deal of dross.

It is of interest that a thinker of genius sounded the alarm to the Church nearly one hundred years ago, but to no purpose. He was ahead of his time. Cardinal Newman would not rank as a scientist, nor as a philosopher of Science, —though at the time of writing there has been no complete evaluation of his philosophical principles and insights, —but in common with the best minds of his day he had an appreciation of Evolution as a philosophy of history, and not merely as a biological theory seeking definitive corroboration from the rocks. In the last two paragraphs of the introduction to his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine he has:

‘. . .facts have been discarded or modified which were once first principles in argument: new facts, and new principles have been brought to light; philosophical views and polemical discussions of various tendencies have been maintained with more or less success. Not only has the relative situation of controversies and theologies altered, but infidelity itself is in a different, —I am obliged to say in a more hopeful position as regards Christianity. The facts of revealed Religion, though in their substance unaltered, present a less compact and orderly front to the attacks of its enemies now than formerly, and allow of the introduction of new inquiries and theories concerning its sources and its rise. The state of things is not as it was, when an appeal lay to the supposed works of the Areopagite, or to the primitive decretals, or to St. Dionysius's answers to Paul, or to the Cena Domini of St. Cyprian. The assailants of dogmatic truth have got the start of its adherents of whatever creed: philosophy is completing what criticism has begun; and apprehensions are not unreasonably excited lest we should have a new world to conquer before we have weapons for the warfare. Already infidelity has its views and conjectures, on which it arranges the facts of ecclesiastical history; and it is sure to consider the absence of any antagonist theory as an evidence for the reality of its own’

These words have been proved prophetic, not only in the context of the ‘higher criticism’ of religious sources, and, in the manipulation of the study of comparative religions, but in the relationship of the philosophy of Science to theology as a whole. Even now we look for a synthesis of thought to interrelate the basic certainties of both the natural sciences and of revealed Religion. The only immediate contender in the field to now has been the recently published initiatives of Père Teilhard de Chardin, and these, with all respect, are more likely to serve as a source of confusion and subtle error than as a groundwork of a new Christian synthesis.

3. TWO STREAMS OF AUTHORITY IN SOCIETY

Motivation and "The Mystery of Iniquity’

Minds of depth and power always philosophise about the subjectmatter of their knowledge and interest. From the exact sciences to theology itself, they are not satisfied with a pragmatic eclecticism, they look for a principle or principles of synthesis which will interrelate the diversity of events and happenings around a common factor of unity. History is no exception to this tendency, and once again some of the best minds and most readable authors are writing history that proceeds from a preconceived principle of development or of synthesis. Since they often deny stoutly that they do any such thing, and deny that philosophy rather than pragmatic fact is the reason for the extraordinary unity of principle they find in the development of culture, it is better not to name names. Other people can see quite clearly that the facts are arranged around a theory or a philosophy of being.

This method of approach makes the history very much more readable, coherent, and exciting. The only difficulty is that it may be a sublime historical novel which is being offered to us, rather than the delineation of what did in fact occur. There are and there must be however lines of development in history which are ontological, developments that is to say which are truly evolutionary in principle, because they proceed from the rhythm and order of a nature in which matter and spirit are commingled. Principles of thought show development, the very nature of industrial and technical innovation shows a constant improvement upon a potential which is only gradually realised. This parallel runs the more close to Nature as evolution in creation, in that the potential of the scientific invention is not itself realisable in the order of events except through the simultaneous development and relationships of the environment in which an invention begins. For example, the evolutionary development of the motor car can be shown as a succession of models very similar to the derivation of the horse from eohippus. It would be as big an error to attribute the evolution of the motor car to random mutations of bright ideas plus the pressure of the market as natural selection, as it is to attribute the development of the horse to the same complex in nature. The technical improvement is itself a relationship made possible through the simultaneous development of many techniques of science which are not exclusively relevant to the automobile, but are part of the environment of scientific technique in which the automobile lives, moves, and has its being. Progress, even when it is in an apparently straight line, is still a function in a total equation of meaningful impacts, as is the universe itself. There will be a similar logical progress of the idea embodied in events and in institutions within human society, in almost every aspect of human life.

Motivation however is in a rather different category. It cannot be presumed that human motives follow the same logical order of evolutionary improvement, unless it is presumed that we live in the best of all possible man-made worlds, and that human motives and desires are always balanced in an adequate parity with the powers of the intellect of man. He would be a brave man who would defend this thesis, such braves exist, the writer is not one of them.

History as the story of man is not the behaviouristic upthrust of mankind, but a mixture of events of which some follow inevitable lines of development because they are intellectual, not of the will, or because they are concerned with the deterministic in its natural environment, such as the laws of the sciences and technology. Motives follow from human free-will, they are value judgements not ideas as such, and there is no intrinsic necessity for human motives to be more and more noble in series throughout the individual life, nor throughout successive societies within human history.

If we had preserved every relevant document passed among the makers of social history, including the most secret and cabalistic of notes or of directives, would we know most of the important motives which had concurred towards human decisions upon which hung the joy and the woe of nations? I doubt whether we would know forty per cent of them. If we knew also and could resurrect every conversational exchange, including the most secretly whispered? This would take us a very long way, and would clear up many a mystery, for men have usually friends or cronies who share their intimate motivations. We would receive some almighty shocks concerning the sheer power lust to shape the characters of men, and concerning the utter hypocrisy by which the ‘free’ and ‘liberal’ thinker has often concealed his real ends and purposes. Even so, we would not know all the motivations through which great, and often tragic events have been shaped for mankind. So many of the thoughts of men are not allowed to intrude into the area of self-conscious, explicit recognition. They are immediate insights of knowledge and of the challenge of knowledge, which are thrust down to the threshold of the subconscious, from which they energise great waves of volition, volitions which are clothed in many a frame of words and thoughts, but remain in themselves motives informed by a secret, naked act of intellectual intuition in which something is known, and being known is accepted or refused. Nearly always this ‘something’ is the psychological and ontological presence of God to the created spirit, in which He is known with invitation or with challenge, is loved or is thrust away. The magnificent presentation by St Augustine of the climacteric of his own stormy conversion makes the point without further need for explanation.

The return of indoctrination

If, in addition to the secret motivations of men a man is willing to add the influence by suggestion both for good and for ill, especially where there is a common sympathy of mind and of desire, of an order of invisible and purely spiritual beings, then the course of human history becomes complex indeed, and the possibility of a ‘Mystery of Iniquity’ becomes fully understandable. It means a grand strategy of evil through history in direct contradiction to the economy of God in man's regard. It would be possible to show a coherent pattern of policy in the breakdown of the work of Christ in the world from the period of papal and general ecclesiastical decadence, through to the Reformation, to the latest developments in Scientism. Unfortunately, so major a digression cannot be tolerated within the limits of theme of the present work.

The fury of the assault upon the Church from the age of the Deists, culminating in Voltaire, through to our own times, has not been the noble urge to freedom. It has been the subconscious, and at times conscious detestation of the God who makes claims upon the personal intellect and free-will of a man. This hatred is directed of necessity most forcibly against the personal and authoritative manifestation of God in human society in Jesus the Christ. The strategy of the champions of ‘human freedom’ is to gain control at every level of the edged weapons of state cultural power. Once they are in possession of it, their first immediate preoccupation is to break the back of the Church in the schools and her priesthood, as the ‘liberals’ of less than a century ago showed in France and in Germany. They know the facts of life really, they know that men must grow up under influence and formation, that nothing in the realm of being is neutral to its nature and its purposes, and as soon as they have the power to be despotic, they become so.

The same tendencies precisely are appearing once more under the ‘Humanist’ label. The libertinism and the obsession with sex they require to break in the young the understructure of the Christian character which still persists in some measure in the West, requires for a time the fierce defence of ‘freedom from censorship’ for the propagation of pornography of every kind. In other fields, especially that of education, quite other music is being played.

There it is deplorable and deplored that schools should exist which propagate religious viewpoints that divide the cultural unity of modern society. Indeed, the teaching of Religion at all, other than as the loaded study of comparative Religion as the history of Myth, is entirely deprecated. A far cry this from the extolling of cultural richness and diversity, and the necessity of the minority movement as the principle of new perspective in society, which was the philosophy of that type of progressive some fifty years ago. It was of course the Inquisition which also, and very sincerely, and from weighty arguments, deplored the division of the unity of human society through the propagation of minority philosophies which were considered to be obviously wrong.

In fact the principle of censorship has already re-entered modern Western society, and some people have begun to awaken to it with a sense of panic. For instance a law is passed which makes it an offence to incite racial, religious, or colour hatreds: so far so good, for it is in no way censorship of thought or action to vindicate for any man the common, basic, and natural rights of a man anywhere in the world. Then this is found to be ‘not enough’ because a great deal of the offence given derives from ‘the written word’ which is presented in a clever way. Legislation is then prepared to ‘strengthen’ the law by banning the expression of certain types of thought. Over and above, voices are heard in the legislature calling for the banning of all ‘detestable, Nazi-type literature’. The voices are sometimes those of philosophical Marxists, and Marxists are notorious for their own intolerance of alien thought in the areas of the world which they control for their own variety of Religion without God.

They are not all Marxists by any means who advocate the new authoritarianism. It is surprising that there can exist intelligent people who are so naive that they do not know that it is the content, the philosophical content of thought which can arouse the most bitter passions and resentments, not merely its crudest and most insulting expression. Thought which subordinates races of men to a lower level of being can be expressed with clinical abstraction as an exercise in philosophy and biology, but it will still be just as insulting to the races which are outraged by it in their human dignity. It was precisely the same thing, the presentation and propagation of outrageous error which explained the fierce passions of the Religious wars of the end of the Middle Ages, when men still had a keen sense of the meaning of a philosophy and its impact upon environment. Perhaps some of the flabbier critics of ancient intolerance will begin to understand, now that they themselves are reacting in exactly the same way. If a ban is to be put upon thinking which inspires racialist tendencies, it will have to go a long way back and include some very genteel figures of the world of philosophy. Hegel ought to go out for one, for his is the real motive power behind both Nazism and Marxism. Many might qualify for the new Index of forbidden books, including Luther himself, some of whose comments on the destiny to rule of the Germanic race are prophetic of Hitler yet to come. Where do you stop once you begin to censor thought? Only where it is believed that no danger exists to the society informed by the ideas by which you live yourself. We are all honourable men, we all desire to suppress only the obviously harmful, the obviously perverse… but all this is to beg the question of the norm of authority invoked and the absolute right of that authority to suppress an alien challenge. The Religions without God can have no more right in principle to claim more authority, and more right to enforce their tenets upon men than did the Religions with God.

Authoritarianism innate in a civilisation of Science

It is from the nature of Science as the applied philosophy of matter that the new authoritarianism derives and the new urge to impose a social conformity upon mankind in a new civilisation of Science.3 The first great modern philosophy of Science has been Marxism, and not since the ages of the oriental despots has the world known such a social philosophy of total authoritarianism according to a preconceived pattern of the ideal human type in the ideal society. In the West the application of the sciences together with the disintegration of society caused by moral chaos and agnostic individualism, must tend to cause a similar reaction, though perhaps with a less rigid application, at least at first, of dialectic logic. The reason for the regimentation which will lie at the base of a civilisation of Science is to be found in the nature of the sciences themselves, and in the scientific method. The sciences below the order of man are exact sciences, they admit of general laws, and mass, statistical applications. There is a constant hankering among scientists to interpret the sciences of man, say psychology and economics for instance, in exactly the same neat way. There is a constant seeking for behaviourist explanations of man and of human society which will justify the neat reduction of man to the general determinism of matter, and the subjection of the individual too, to the role of a function in the species. Since all moral laws are considered by the materialist to be conventional, existential expressions of needs and pressures in a given condition of man in a given state of society, there will be framed norms which men ought to accept and live by today, and the minds who feel themselves thus qualified by their intellectual eminence so to define concerning human life, will pass, and do pass, very quickly to the determination of what must be expected of men in modern society, and what, in the name of the general good must be enforced upon the reluctant, the vestigial obscurantists of society. They do already when they discuss population policies in the years to come: parenthood is to be a tube-tested privilege for the few, though sex will remain as a consolation to the many.

Science, the handmaid, not the mistress of man

It is the very nature of a civilisation of Science to bring in the regimented order, governed by an intellectual elite of Bigger Brethren, unless the philosophy of Science itself ought to be subjected to a norm of man which transcends the physico-chemical order. If there is a soul in man, then the sciences and their laws which are embodied in his physical nature, will be capable of harmonious and equational deployment about his personal and his social destiny. Science in that hypothesis, as order and truth, is defined through the spiritual nature of man, and through the relationship of that human nature to its spiritual Environment. If this is not the vision of man, then men are going to be defined as social animals in an hierarchical structure of determinism which will be defined through the minds and perspectives of their more powerful brethren who know what is good for them. In the first alternative, man is an absolute value, and Science and the sciences are subject to him as servants: in the second man is not an absolute value, but a relative unit in a cosmic or at least a planetary function, and the individual man, and even the human species is subject to ‘Science’ as the impersonal wisdom of the ascent of being. The first concern of Science, as it will now be identified with Nature progressive in Evolution, is not the individual, but the species. It is the species alone which can be perfected. It is only logical to subordinate the individual, however reassuringly we may speak about him, to the perfection of the species and indeed of being in ascent.

Man today is in fact on, the horns of a dramatic dilemma, though not many people realise exactly what the nature of the dilemma is. Either the definition of man, and the ordering of man in relation to the sciences is subject to God through the Church in the spiritual order, and in the defining of the nature, needs, rights, and freedoms basic to man, or else the Church is an illegitimate institution, even an illegitimate concept, in the modern age, in human society. In the latter case, the role and function of the Church from the beginning of history has passed elsewhere, evolved higher to the heirs, now come of age, to whom she has been the pedagogue until the fullness of time. In the context of today, the heir could only be the philosopher of Science in the context of Materialism, and the statesmen who rule under his guidance.

Thus, the State will become the Church, as is the ideal of Marxism in any event, the priest be replaced by the commissar, and the prophet by the leading scientist who has the ear of Government. Human society will be seen as a pulsating organism composed of many millions of cells, which seek their focus of unitary consciousness in some great master mind whose personal consciousness mirrors the total body-social of mankind. A Mind which is the superconsciousness of the body social, the soul, so to speak of the individual cell which is the individual man. Teilhard de Chardin has in fact given an excellent blue-print for the concept, in his Phenomenon of Man.

Such an organic configuration of the noosphere awaits the determining, ordering hand of a superior and a scientific wisdom. Indeed, in China at the moment of writing such a messianic role in every conceivable aspect of human life, thought, and activity, is being attributed to one certain man. The inheritance of the rights and privileges of the Church will bring the aura of ‘Mana’, of sacred reverence, to the realm of state policy. Just as much, it will be the sacred duty of the scientific state to see that overall policies of planning, and of mind-formation, especially upon the young, are carried right through. Thus also did ‘Our Holy Mother the Church’ know her rights and duties, and challenge the allegiance of her children. There will be a difference: Holy Mother Church did really believe what she preached concerning the exalted nature, dignity, the eternal destiny of every individual man. She effected her very sanctions upon him through the knowledge which informed his personal conscience, and the powers of his personal free-will. Beyond that, except for recourse to the secular power at some periods of her history, and in certain aspects only of human denial, she could not go. She did really believe her faith; her very sanctions against sin, which indirectly do so much exalt the sacred power and responsibility of the human person, seemed to her to be enough. The Church-State of Scientism without God knows of no soul other than the powers which emanate from the configuration of living bodies, and which must cease to be at death with the same configuration. The State of such a nature may use the language of sacred and noble exhortation, but it will back its authoritative demands with the power to kill, however painlessly.

There could be brought in, in both the East and the West, by the end of this century, the most narrowly authoritarian and caste dependent society that mankind has seen since the age of the Pharaohs. It would have denied over human life, and the deployment of the laws of the sciences, the authority of God and the rights of man as these proceed from the definition of man through God, but it would not have sacrificed one jot or one tittle of the power of God over mankind.

The Church the ultimate defence of the rights of man

Therefore the ultimate tyranny of human littleness over the destiny of the great mass of mankind can be avoided at this juncture in history only if the social power of the sciences, quite enormous as this will be in a matter of two decades, is subordinated of set purpose and proportion to the spiritual nature of man, and to the overriding values and qualities which proceed from the defining of man through his relation to the Being of God. Man is an absolute value, in time and for eternity: to man then, the potential of the sciences is naturally subject, and only in this proportionate subjection to the formality of his spiritual nature and its laws can there be anything approaching the utopian deployment of the potential of the sciences in the life of mankind. This is not simply a matter of the proper assertion of the spiritual priorities of man's nature, it is also a matter of the natural, and alone equationally right order of the utilisation of the sciences in their application to man. This, in other words, is a requirement of the creative law of Evolution, of the Unity-Law through which all things are created, and come to be in their mutual interdefinition, until they be fulfilled in the wisdom and love of Christ the King.

At once there proceeds within human society that fateful setting forth of the choice between good and evil, life and death, which echoes the fateful sense that Moses had of the choice that lies before men, in the book of Deuteronomy,4 for the Church is the covenant of God with men, she is the embodiment of God recognised in the society of men.

If man is to be defined through God, then there follow those attributes of human life and dignity which the Church vindicates for men. The rights of man, natural and supernatural, do not derive from the State nor through the State: the State may not abrogate nor change in their substance their basic dignities. Some of the natural and supernatural rights and duties of a man pertain directly to God and to the Church, for they are a vocation shared with God, such as the vocation of creating with God human persons for time and for eternity. This will entail the existence and the authority of the sacramental relationship, as in marriage for example, and relationships in the sacrament to God and to each other over which the State has not valid power, howsoever much it may arrogate it. The right of a man to live is not derived from the State, nor from the community, but directly from his being made to the image of God and his natural sonship unto God. The State likewise has no direct power over human life, and may not slay the innocent born or unborn. The State has no direct power over the manner in which a man fulfils himself in society, but only in the ordering of that manner, hence the right to order and to dispose of the earth and its fruits, the right to own, in its most general sense, does not proceed from the State, but from the individual and family dignity of a man.

If there is no God, or if God is the mighty mind thrown up in social evolution, whose right to rule is proven by his grasp of power, then "Man" is defined through the species and the community, and not through any absolute right of individualism in his own self. If God is distinct from the universe, and the soul is distinct in order of being from the flesh, then while man is a social being of very nature and membering, to his brethren and to the world of which he is part, his individual and absolute right to be, and to be fulfilled, proceeds from his individual and personal creation to the image of God: and God is One.

Grace not always ‘common’

Therefore, those theologians cannot be correct who have said, by excess of zeal for the liturgical and the social in the life of man, that all grace is "common". Not all grace is common, for a man is not defined in being through the community of which he is a part but uniquely as a son of God, through the Eternal Word, who is the Eternal Son of God. This is not common, for God is One. There is no individual grace which has not also a social vocation, for we are brethren, and God is also Love: yet, because each man is made uniquely to the image of God, the first grace, the grace of being, is individual, but with a social reference of mutual love, so that society springs from the individual and the social nature of man, but it is a dangerous exaggeration to say that every grace is ‘common’, as if through society, whether temporal or spiritual, natural or supernatural, a man derived his right to be, and his sonship of God in Christ.

If there is a God, the State must take its shape, its definition, and its powers in its natural subordination to the divine rights and dignities which are in a man. In the social order the consequences must not be bilked, —the doctrine and law of the State is subordinate to that of the Church, where the doctrine of the Church in society is the authority of God directly over the nature or vocation of a man. It can never be just or right in the State to usurp rights and powers which it does not possess, however much in fact it may do so. The very fury that this proposition rouses in the secularist breast, is a measure of the sheer arrogance of such men: they echo the bawl of ‘away with him crucify him’ which roared up against the Christ of God by the hall of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor. The Church has no more actual power to constrain in society than she receives from the willingness of men to obey her in the name of God, and enact their civil laws accordingly. When she has a majority following her, she does no wrong to exercise such rightful power of influence. On the other hand, when evil leaders persuade the people against her, she must not invoke the sword, but be willing to let cathedrals burn and treasures be looted, and go naked to be crucified. This may mollify the feelings of the secularists, they love doing the latter thing. For themselves, while they are too few or lack occasion to undermine the Church's influence upon the State, they are much, much too sorry. They arrogate to themselves the right to do exactly what they like only when they lack power; otherwise they are well capable of demanding the obedience of men, to form and fashion them and their children just as they will.

According to whether there is or is not a God, many a difference of viewpoint must follow within society, and in the legislation of the State. Among such will be the right of the deformed, the mentally ill, the chronic sick, the unborn fetus, to survive. If God alone is the Lord of life and death, and if man is an absolute value in his individual nature, the State may not put away these innocent lives by death. They are not aggressors against society because they are either sick or a nuisance. The entire order of human society is full of burden from human sickness, —sickness of mind and of body, sickness of heart and of soul, the scandal and ruin of little ones, the burden of neuroses, hatred, wars. The burdens of original sin and of personal sin must be borne. Where the suffering is derived from the wound within human nature and in human society, the remedy is not death, but the constant effort to heal and to reintegrate. The body of man has its natural tendency towards healing which proceeds from the self-love by which our very natures are framed. So also in the society of men and in the Church the order of love prompts healing and not dissociation. The existence of the State follows from the nature of Man, but of Man in relationship to God, and Man already defined in his basic rights and dignities. The duty of the State is also to fulfil Man in his nature and his needs, and to bend itself to this necessity of healing in the order of the spirit and in the body. The State may not arrogate to itself, which means to men, the rights and powers of God, nor does its concept embody within itself the Church and her relationship to individual men and to human society itself.

The Church connatural to Man as is the State

The term ‘society’ or the term ‘community’, for in the present context they are being used as synonyms, expresses much more in its content than does the meaning of the word ‘state’. The term ‘society’ denotes the natural evolution of men living in association as members one of another, influencing, interacting upon, and inter-changing one with another. The term must express those natural institutions which grow out of the nature of man in this condition of communal co-relativity, and the basic institutions which derive from the nature of man so regarded in the full context of human life, will be the Family, the Church, and the State. Concerning the family one does not try to treat here. What is important for the present study is that the relationships a man has by nature and also by destiny, unto God, and the relationships he incurs from God to his family and to his brethren, must be embodied in an incarnational way in terms of power, influence, authority, etc., within human society. This centre of focus from God to man, manifest in an organic way according to the nature of man as both spirit and matter, this is the Church. The Church then is connatural to man, for God is the Environment of man, and man is made to be fulfilled in God. The true and just powers of the Church, and her authority over men, derive from God, and are an integral part of the creative order of God.

Such an assertion is hateful to the secularist, and comes to him also as something of a shock. This is the measure of the sheer arrogance by which Secularism in modern life has arrogated to itself the prerogatives of God in human society. The Church is often accused of arrogance, she has but to raise her voice in any matter whatever to be accused of it, but the Secularist thinks it nothing but the inheritance of his rights whatever he may remove from the sphere of the Church into the sphere of the State. This however begs the essential question.

Rights of the Church derive from Christ as a "phenomenon"

If there is a God then he is organic to the concept of human society, to its configuration, and to its life. By ‘organic’ here it is not meant that God is an organ of creation, or that creation partakes of the ontological Being of God in himself. What is meant is the direct and ontological influence of God upon mankind according to intellect, according to will, and according to the prompting of life, and that life more abundant, in the essence of a man's person, both in body and in soul. By the nature of creation and of being, the Church has a natural right to exist and a necessity to exist. The ultimate reason is because God exists as the reason and the ground of the being of man, and the ultimate fulfilment of man. This fact throws light upon the true meaning of secularism as a philosophy of society: it is the denial of God, and of the nature and rights of man. There can be, and in parts of the West there has existed now for some time an agnostic form of secularism which attempts to be neutral to the rights and place of God within the human family, but this creates, as in fact is all too obvious, a vacuum within the life of man. This condition cannot last for long, it passes over into the usurpation by the State of the authority and the powers of God in the Church. It is little wonder that the Son of God and of Man was ‘set for a sign which shall be contradicted’. Before Pilate he must confess: ‘you say it: I am a King, for this was I born, for this I came into the world, that I might give testimony to the truth: everyone that is of the truth hears my voice.’5 Not everyone is of the truth.

The ultimate argument among men must be whether God exists, and whether man is subject to God for his fulfilment or only to his own self. Since there are stronger and weaker in human society, and men must interact upon each other, this redounds into the query whether in the highest powers and attributes of their being men are subject unto God in his social manifestation which is the Church, or only to other fellow men, in the name of the scientific qualifications, intellectual prowess, and social vocation of these bigger brethren.

On the complete vision of man as he is, as God made him, both Church and State derive by natural right from the nature of man as a process of creation. The manner of this derivation is of interest. The right of the State derives upwards, growing out of the very nature of man as creature. The State is not a mere human convention, nor an incidental adjustment, nor are its basic laws at least, conventions of human behaviour. The State derives from the nature of man, and the ordinances according to reason of the State derive from the Natural Law, and they co-order towards greater personal and social fulfilment the lives of men. That at least is the ideal. The rulers of the State derive their basic authority from God, but simply because their relativity is to their fellows, their right to obedience, loyalty, and co-operation is from the very nature of man, and God is the Author and Lord of nature as much as of grace.

The Church however does not derive upwards, growing out of the very nature of man as creature. God is the Environer of man, the Principle of Life and life more abundant unto man, therefore the social nature and principle of the Church derives downwards from God upon the human personality. This is true in the mind and heart of the first human beings, this is still the operation of the principle of ‘the Church’, through Revelation, when through priest, prophet, and great soul, the same God works more powerfully through the spiritual genius for the development of men in spiritual society.

For the organisation of civil society, for the jurisdiction which coordinates rights and duties, apportions social responsibilities, and in doing so actually gives new fields for personal and individual development of personality, mankind needs the superior genius of men and women of gifts higher than the average. There is need too, of that superior degree of intellect which can look ahead and formulate the development of natural human society to a greater level of civilisation and of happy, cultural achievement. The ideal is not always realised, but that is what all statesmen purport to do; from the nature of man and of human society, this should be done, and this can be done. Yet, all this presupposes in every man and woman a basic degree of reasoned order, an understanding and acceptance of personal and social ‘law’ in the home, in the neighbourhood, and in the community. Upon this the rulers build. They expect co-operation, active and intelligent co-operation towards ends which not all men can foresee unaided, and very few men would have the natural gifts to execute adequately in practice.

The Kingdom of God natural to this earth

The same principle operates in Religion. Apart from the phenomenon called ‘sin’ there is no reason to think that from grace any more than from nature all men would participate the same spiritual gifts in exactly the same degree. We would still be members one of another, and it is inconceivable that those to whom God had given more would not have the urge to impart it to their brethren. Indeed, such imparting would be of the nature of the development of the knowledge and love of God among human beings through society. This is saying that the impact of God upon men as individuals and as brethren membered to himself and to each other, brings into being not from man upwards, but from God downwards the social phenomenon which is ‘the Church’. This relationship, the action of God upon men and the interaction of men with each other, makes the Church connatural to the human order, whatever degree of fulfilment in himself God has given to man, whatever the depth of the joy a man is to find in the creation of which he is a member. It is therefore simply the consummation of creation and the development of being when this dynamic relationship of God to men, —and let it be stressed that it is a dynamic relationship, and not an intervention, —consummates for men's medium, —matter, of the Word made flesh. This is the social fullness in the Church, for mankind, of the connatural Heir of the Ages, upon whose advent and Kingship the bases of the universe are poised from the beginning of the ascent of matter to the fulfilment of man through the Son of God. From the beginning to the end the principle of divine action upon man in society is monarchical not democratic. It has to be so, only God is Necessary Being, and to his wisdom and his love all creation is due. This process does not contravene those rights and attributes of human nature which depend for personal and for social fulfilment upon the mature development of intellect and free-will. Something of this has been said in earlier chapters and must be left at that. As with all the themes touched upon in this work, a sketch is offered merely in outline of a synthesis which possesses enormous potential for development in detail. Nothing is finished, and little is begun beyond the beginning of a beginning.

It ought to be, since both Church and State are of divine right in human society, the Church from God through Man, and the State, through Man, from God, that these two are co-related for the perfection of human achievement as mutually complementary powers of the social order. Unhappily, it is just as sure that the advent of sin upon human nature, a principle of disobedience and rebellion against God, is going to bring the fatal disharmony into the relationship of Church and State which is paralleled in the disordered person of fallen man, and the disorderly society and civil life of fallen man. This is how the ‘Kingdom of God’ and the ‘Kingdom of this world’ or ‘Kingdom of Satan’, can come to be an existing phenomenon of human reality. The contradiction of Cain and Abel goes on to the end of human time. Yet, even so, the connatural relationship of the Church to the State, even in the society of fallen man, is a relationship by right, and by nature which is complementary, and to the discord of their perfect harmony the grace of God urges and must attempt to effect a healing, just as much as grace does in the disordered and wounded personality of man the individual. The relationship of Church and State is one of natural partnership broken, which ought to be repaired, and which both grace and nature strive to reintegrate. The civil order is not, most emphatically is not, of its own power and nature ‘the Kingdom of Satan’ or ‘the Kingdom of this world’ in a sense synonymous with evil. The latter is the actual or incidental conspiration of the forces of evil, spiritual and physical, against the order of Christ the King. This conspiracy works so often through the power and the organs of State, because concerned as they are largely with material goods and gain, these faculties of state become the eager rendezvous of every greedy, gifted, power lusting, human being. At no time is the State itself of evil, or of its own formality for evil. It derives from human nature, and is good, in the image of God, as all things are good which proceed from the creative wisdom of Him Who Is.

Church and State: the reproach of usurpation

The Church is so often accused of usurping the social powers of the State, and of thwarting the personal rights of the individual, that a little plain speaking is in order concerning the issues which are raised. The accusations are often untrue, but they are made sincerely because the agnostic or the secularist, and often the humble, anxious-to-atone type of Christian, habitually think as if the Church had no connatural place or connatural authority within human society. They regard her as a purely voluntary association whose duty it is to mind her own business, for at best she is a source of latent friction, and to keep out of the path of the State in the real things that matter in this world, in the real running of the interests and passions of men. Once again there is a ‘petitio principii’ at the heart of many of the reproaches. On much the same ground Jesus Christ was himself crucified; he would not mind his own business, and his voice and power, together with his hopelessly impractical and narrow morality, was a source of danger within the civil relationships of the local state power and the overlord state of the Roman military Empire.

It will be true that on the rare occasions when the Church has exercised great social power and authority, that there will be a likelihood of direct abuse even by usurpation of the functions of the State. A much more frequent evil has been the arrogant and narrow-minded abuse of the spiritual penalty in situations of great social complexity and stress, or even in circumstances of opportunism and injustice. This will happen, men are still fallen men, even in the Church, there is always some sabotage done to the work of God in society through the spiritual defects of those who claim to be his special friends and collaborators. It is the pain-loaded vocation of others within the body of the Church, clerics and laymen, priests and prophets, to reproach these same defects and to withstand their continuance.

Much more often, what is reproached against the Church is her ability to hold the loyalty of sufficient numbers of her own, in such manner that the secularisation of society, and the de-moralisation of civil law is thwarted to a greater degree than the deniers of God can endure with gladness. For this we do not apologise. Witness and the appeal to the people is of the essence of the Church. The issues reduce once more to the essential attitudes of men to God: that he exists or does not exist: that he is or is not a personal moral authority in the life of the individual man: that God is or is not an active social authority within human society: that there is or there is not a Law of Life for mankind which is objective and unique: that there is or there is not objective evil, the scandal of little ones, the ruin and devastation by objective social evil of the potential and personalities of children born into the environment of any given community: ‘All power is given to me in Heaven and on Earth’ said the Christ, ‘go therefore teach all nations’. There can be no teaching without social impact, for the teaching of the renewal of the life of a man ‘created anew according to God in justice and in truth,’ is also a social impact, for as members the one of another we are part of the environment within which all men live and form the guiding lines of their minds and desires. If there exists also denial of God, contradiction to and hatred of God, this also is a social impact, and brings the principle of contradiction into the social and the individual life of man. This is the explicit meaning of Christ, when he states that his coming will bring not automatic peace among men, but the sword of division, for it will set men at variance one with another, in the family, in the home, and in society. The only way to complete peace will be if there exists a Law of Life for man as adequate for his own personality, and as fulfilling of his spiritual needs and potential over the years of his life, as that which the animals find between their own being and the environment in which they live and move and are, and have their own limited round of life. This is provided, it can be found, the principle of contradiction is not the fault of God, nor therefore in essentials of the Church, —it exists in the mind and heart of the rebel and the liar, who in saying ‘I will not serve’ denies the law operative over the whole sweep of social creation, and wreaks havoc upon the persons of his brother men. Let such look well to it, it is no small responsibility for which to answer.

Much more often over the pages of history has the usurpation of the social power of God, enfleshed in the Church, been usurped by men, enfleshed in the rulers of the State. This usurpation begins from the moment when denying God and his own relationship to God, the individual man centres his being arrogantly upon himself, ‘does as he likes’ and influences others to do likewise. The rest is the playing out upon the large stage of history of the Mystery of Iniquity which works through history in opposition to the Mystery of the Kingdom of God. This latter begins with the world as Eden, and Man as unfallen: the Mystery of Iniquity also begins with this first act of the drama of Man, and is the end of Eden. The history and the struggle sweeps on even to the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection of the Son of God and of Man. The Resurrection is the essential pledge that the evolution of the economy of creation through the rational creature, Man, goes on through the present larval-like stage to the final transformation of the human being, and the creation which is his background, into the glory of the sons of God. The process is not thwarted either as a destiny or as a process by the powers of the creature in the events of sin.

Significantly enough, the scientific art of Anthropology (and any science of Man which claims to be an exact science has already lost all hope of objectivity) has shown the primitive pastoral community to have been the best custodian of a true and pure tradition of God and of moral law. With the development of the agricultural community there begins the most thoroughgoing remaking of God to the image of man fallen. Then it is that the gods are born, and their ladies too, and Heaven is made a bawdy Pantheon that re-echoes to the routs and loves of the despot kings of the rising City-States. It is no surprise that as man advances both for good and for evil he advances; there is no social order so pregnant with possibility for the total usurpation of the place of God and the enslavement of man, as the scientific civilisation which is already upon the threshold of history. The need for man to enflesh the spiritual reality, from the spoken word of his consciousness, to the sacramentalisation of Church and State makes it easy to explain, and even to forgive, the incarnation of the Godhead in the empires and cults of the ancient civilisations. Always the rulers are either the very ‘sons of God’ or at least gods in their own right, containing within the imperial will the entire validity of Church and of State. Not so of course in Israel: but the very exception is most marked. When the king becomes the incarnation of the manifestation of God to the society, it becomes impossible to separate out the natural validity of the word of the king as civil power from the supernatural validity of the word of God as Lord of man. This separation of function and mode of derivation is the essential distinction between Church and State. It is not necessary to pursue in detail such questions as whether the primacy of office in the Church and the primacy of office in the State can be combined in a single person. The example of Christ to us is that they should certainly not be so combined. It is essential to show that these two streams of authority in human society are indeed two distinct streams, and that they cannot be defined through one and the same formality. The one, the power of State, is a right from the creaturely nature, deriving upwards over men from below. The other is not a creaturely but a divine power, deriving from God as the Lord of Life and Way, descending from the Father of Light downwards upon the creature, and through men operative for the more abundant fulfilment of their fellows. It is the illegitimate fusing of these two powers into one principle of power, the de facto subordination of divine power to human beings, so that the word of God is debased into the word of man, and God is interpreted to the image and likeness of man fallen, which brings the worst and the most subtle errors into Religion with God, and also incidentally, into Religion without God.

Usurpation of divine prerogative by the State

In the more sophisticated stage of human history, the usurpation of the role of the Church by the State will most often take the form of a seizure of effective control over the doctrine and jurisdiction of the Church by the civil power. Thus, the Church becomes a department of State, by law a national Establishment. There have been and there are many such forms of usurpation of the divine authority, from the Caesaro-Papism of Byzantium to the National Churches of the Reformation period in Western Europe. It is a most interesting anachronism that in so highly secularised a civil society as that of modern Britain, Parliament should still retain rights of sanction over the prayerbooks, canons, and liturgical usages of the established Church, and that the control should still be pursued with fair zeal by men and women who show no interest otherwise in the life or works of the National Church.

The usurpation of the authority of God in society by the power of state is essentially the transfer of the divine Life-giving environment to the creature. It is worth remarking without arguing the subject-matter in detail, that in fact the principle of presbyterianism in the constitution of the Church does the very same thing in principle. Any form of organisation of the Church which denies the divine authority living in the Word of scripture and apostolic tradition, denies the possibility of the definition of the bearing of that truth upon new faces of error, denies the possibility too, of coherent, organic development of doctrine. Once the authority of God, which infers inerrancy in basic teaching, and infallibility of the basic proclamation, is denied to the Church, then the nature of God as the lasting Divine Environer of man, especially since the Incarnation, has been taken away from the concept of Religion.

The most complete form of usurpation of the power of God in society, is the usurpation of the Church by the Atheist secularist State. The most extreme and most logical form of such power transfer over the personalities of men is to be seen in Marxist communities. In them man is reductively only a function in the State, subordinate to the State, from the State he derives his right to live, and the destiny allotted him in creation. It is in vain that the State officially decrees to him rights and claims which are 'sacrosanct’: for the same State determines also what sort of actions of his are anti-social, and criminal, for which he may forfeit to the labour camp, or even to death, the sacred rights attributed to him. The Marxist philosophy, by its very dialectic cannot admit any absolute values in man over which the State has no direct control. The State also, in these communities, denies to a man the full development of his personality in the direct persecution of Religion, and the formal propaganda against God in which it indulges. The point has been made already, the omnipotence of God becomes the nimbus of a man. In philosophy, through every technique of science, to the emergency rescuing of comrades from flooded sewers, and the playing of international tennis matches, the thoughts of the Leader are the one guide to right action. This is a panacea more universal than the grace of God has ever claimed to be! Nobody can fail to know that the manipulation of the young in such movements as the ‘Red Guard’ and earlier the ‘Hitler Youth’ arrogates to a man the total formation of the human personality.

Western secularism does not lack the same species of usurpation, but until very lately it has been less logical and more agnostic in principle, for its own good reasons. Apart from reasons given already, complete State totalitarianism in the economic life and initiatives of advanced societies has not been a palatable doctrine in the West, even to the great majority of the working class. If there is repetition here, it is justified because the subject matter is not simply the tendency of men through the State to assume the rights of God when God is denied, but the positive aspect of the natural right of the Church to exist and to have spiritual power in society which the State may not contravene. Through this realisation, the issue of the alleged usurpation by the Church of human rights, can be shown to be, for the most part, a begging of the eternal question.

It is not possible for Western secularists who have inculcated certain habits of mind, to change them at the shortest notice in their public image, even though the winds of change seem to call for an immediate change of tack. Some of them have shown the totalitarian edge behind their ‘Humanism’ so blatantly in recent moral and social debates in the legislature and in the press that they have done their cause more harm than good, —the wolf in sheep's clothing must never let flurry disarrange his lambswool.

Movements which aim to teach, to form, and to influence men, even though more a medley of jousting free-lances, than an organised army of militant atheists, are not for that reason indifferent or neutral in matters of good and evil. They cannot be, not if God has rights in human society. In so far as men destroy in others their belief in God, their love and their peace in God, they are not just private persons exercising their God-given right to be a law unto themselves. They are in fact the enemies of God and the murderers of men, as Cain was. Their actions are not more indifferent and free, in the sense of being neutral for good or evil, than the actions of those who pushed the Son of Man bloodied along the way of the Cross. Because no man is his island, because we are members one of the other, because we are every man, his brother's keeper.

The secularist presumes too naively that the Church has no intrinsic right to exist. At times he is unaware that she even claims it. He thinks of the Church as being, in her own way, a free-lance like himself who started out in different social conditions, has become an institution, and showing no willingness to resign in senile old-age, must be got out. He regards her every action as an interference, and an outrage, because he does not know that from the fact of God the Church is, has claims, and makes them.

He knows that Marxist ruling cliques do make such claims in the name of the Dialectic and the new World Society and while he may strongly disapprove of the system, he is forgiving, because the claims proceed from principle, and to that extent one understands. Besides, the Marxist system infers Atheism and persecutes Religion, and is therefore progressive. Even many Christians do not really understand the right of the Church to exist in society, or the nature of her claim to exercise jurisdiction over the consciences of men. The Church is more than a Benevolent Society, that is why we stress that her nature is from God and because there is a God: she is intrinsic, given man, to the very nature of the universe, anywhere in time and space.

The secularist on the other hand, who believes himself intrinsic to the nature of nothing, an accident of random dynamisms, time and history, an up-jumped ape whose ontological motto must be ‘wiv' a little bit o' luck’ presumes that he has every right to do as he likes, influence as he likes, tempt and seduce as he likes. He does not accept the same principle in the matter of infectious and contagious material influence. Everything that comes forth from his magnificent and oh so special libido is good for the children also, —everywhere. He begs that eternal question; —the existence of God, and the meaning of man. God does exist, and man is spiritual and personally immortal, and for man there is a law of fulfilment, not any sort of way. Therefore God exists throughout all time, and the Church, and her rights, exist until the end of time, and beyond time she will exist, in a different state of perfection, for GOD IS. Nothing will be then more dead than Humanism, for the up-jumped ape will be lying flat down. There will be the fulfilment of humanism without the proprietary capital, because all that is of man will be fulfilled in the Son of God who is the Son of Man. From the death of Abel the Just to the final crisis of time, the Church, as was the Christ, must be a sign set to be contradicted, for freedom from determinism is the mark of the spiritual creature, and as God creates without intrinsic necessity, so men accept God or reject him freely, not without grace, but without intrinsic necessity. If there is the lie and the phenomenon of sin, there will be war. It is as well, especially today, to underline the title to exist and to be authoritative which the Church possesses from the economy of the creation, and to meditate upon the fact that when the embodiment of the power of God over man is banished from human society, the vacuum does not go for long unfilled. Men exercise upon the bodies and the souls of their fellows the prerogatives of God Almighty without the divine wisdom, divine love, or divine mercy. It is better to be the servants of God than the slaves of other men.

1Wisdom, c.11.v.20.

2Sirach c.7.v.6.

3See for instance the ‘New Scientist’ of 26 June 1969, Professor Hans Eysenck on the ‘technology of consent’, and on children as ‘the ideal building ground’ of the principles outlined. It makes interesting reading!

4Deut. c.30.v.15.

5John c.18.v.37.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Love: The Quest of the Holy Gail

1. THE CHAOS OVER LOVE

The post-Christian crisis

Since it will be expected, let us write it crisis, since the Christian situation seems to be one of eclipse, let us write the post-Christian crisis. The crisis is not new, nor is it modern, and as for us Christians, well, they have taken us down from the Cross more than once in history. A like fever of diffuse sensuality marks the Renaissance period also, during which time it corrupted the higher echelons of the Church itself. The phenomenon did not last long, it was swept away in the long and thunderous flood of the Reformation, which in part it precipitated.

Such comparison with modern libidinism is only partial, lust and licentiousness is always with us, the hordes that swept over Europe in the Dark Ages were not models for the Knights Templar. The justification for the partial comparison between modern mores and the Renaissance, is sensuality as a philosophy of life. During the Renaissance sexual libidinism as a philosophy of living did not extend to every class of society, today it does. The parallel exists at all only because of the late medieval discovery of the pagan humanism of Imperial Rome and classic Greece. It was a case though of aristocrats only, rediscovering a society for aristocrats. The philosophy and moral values of the period were also rediscovered, and restored for use as patterns to live by, though with a degree of affectation which was gimmick-ridden and insincere at heart. The atmosphere thus condensed evoked a fair copy of the Humanism, written in capitals, of the last days of the pre-Christian Roman world. Of that world, behind the façade of its elegance and liberalism the facts were arrogance and cruelty. It lived on the backs of slaves and on human tears, it neither knew nor cared to know who or what might be broken upon the wheel of its arrogant pride of life. An age brittle, elegant, very rich at the top, it lived without economy on the values of its past, and it went crashing through decline into collapse.

The crunch of the fall of Rome sickened the heart of Augustine across the Africa sea. The vision of the City of God which he penned was to inspire the Church through her long, slow pilgrimage from the Dark Ages to the Schoolmen. In his own mind he had written it to rally the Catholic Church to endure the final assault of Anti-Christ, as the Arian hordes took possession of the last, and heresy riddled, provinces which remained to the Catholic Christian tradition of the Faith.

There lies the real parallel with modern times, not in the Renaissance, but in the Age portrayed so vividly, and with so many scintillating facets from economics and daily life, in the works and letters of St. Basil, and most brilliantly of all as a human story in the Confessions of St. Augustine the Great. The germanic tribes out of which the Middle-Ages were formed, with their gravity of temperament, their strict tribal ‘pietas’ and codes, little resembled the Roman world they had overwhelmed for all that they had lived so long within its frontiers, and had sold their blood in the service of the eagles. Their psychological status vis-à-vis the imperial culture cannot have been so very different from that of the average African or Pakistani working in Britain today. The law and a common citizenship proclaimed one thing, and the voice of government echoed it, but the silent barrier of cultural and social non-acceptance was quite another world, —the world of the largely other.

The peoples who were forged anew by the Church into the Europe of the Middle-Ages, and reforged in part to another mould by Protestant Christianity, cannot be considered as the immediate cultural descendants of that post-Pagan Roman civilisation. The enthusiasm for example of the nordic Protestant for the Old Testament in Moses did not rest so much on theology, as on the simple practical piety and dogmatic approach of the Law and the prophets. The image of God, the wisdom literature apart, is that of a God loving and faithful, but stern in judgement, a Lord who well knew not to relinquish the lash even through pleas and tears of repentance, until through pain the lesson had burned right home. This echoed their own experience of stiff necks and stubborn hearts, nordic not semitic, it commanded the assent of their own down to earth and virile characters. Their Lord knew what was in the hearts of his men. Apart from France, and of course the growing influence of revolutionary thought through France, there is nothing in Europe until the middle of the nineteenth century which affords a popular parallel with the later Roman Empire.

The apostolate of Voltaire and its consummation in the French Revolution does offer a parallel, this fury of philosophic Liberalism swept with it all classes, in the towns at least if not across the peasant countryside. If France is recognised as the real forge for the culture of Western secularism, then the rise of that stream as a dominant trend in society may be pushed back well into the eighteenth century. What is now ‘Humanism’ has long been in existence as a force responsible for the main cultural and intellectual features of the urbanised West. This philosophy has worn other names, —natural religion, worship of the goddess of Reason, Rationalism, Materialism, Secularism, and others besides, they are all labels for the mixture repeated substantially as before. Humanism is not the fresh young thing she is imaged to be, as she prances into the recording studio to demand her inheritance of mankind. Underneath the aggressively youthful make-up and the miniform skirt is a lady of doubtful age and too much experience. The blessing on her loves, —and those were always free and without obligation, —is around us everywhere, she may be judged in them.

The relevance of St. Augustine

All the essentials of the modern crisis of life and of morals unfold before us in the reading of the Confessions of St. Augustine, it is the modern world which wafts up to us. The one outstanding difference is the sense in Augustine of the leisured independence of the wealthier classes; this departed the modern scene with the first world war. Otherwise there is the same medley of the old and the new, of dominant and recessive trends in social philosophy, of the garnered treasures in thought and feeling of ages of tradition, of aesthetic elegance and sadistic libertinism. The teenage gang fights in football stadia are more than matched by the gladiatorial brutalities of the arena. The youth of Christianity itself is plagued with endless confusing heresies. It is a world of multiple disunities, loveliness of dress, gay dash, and apparently of grim chariot jams. It is so like home. It is not blood or race which engenders this sort of culture, it is never the outcome of a ‘pure line’ of civilisation however great. Very different indeed, though just as great and exquisite was the long achievement of ancient China which is marked by a continuity of national type not found in the Romano-Hellenic world. The world of ancient Rome was, like the modern world of the West, bred out of many a mongrel pedigree of blood and brain, race and culture.

The world of Augustine would be even more reassuringly like home were it not that the grim shadow of Marxist culture hangs over it with so close an analogy to the world of the restless tribes which submerged Rome. It too, whether Russian or Chinese, is utterly distinct in social norm and social ‘pietas’; it is orderly and very grave, dogmatic too and down to earth. It is utterly contemptuous of the decadent West, and is very numerous, hardy, and militarily competent. It stands poised over the spiritual heirs of ancient Rome in exactly the same places geographically as those from which the hordes broke out so long ago. The unpleasant parallel wants only the element of tactical surprise in the manner of the actual onslaught through which the old West crumbled before the new East.

The parallel between our world and the world of Augustine deepens even to the mental attitudes of the young, and the tortured tensions between child and parent. Let us take for example one or two passages from the Confessions, and then the reader may be the judge of whether the modern equivalent is not uncannily similar in category of thought: ‘When in my sixteenth year I grew idle at home with my parents, and through certain domestic needs was detained from going to the schools, the brambles of unclean desire grew up even over my head, and there was no hand to root them up. My father, observing my budding manhood when I was at the baths, and finding youth to be lively stirring in me, —as if thereby he had been put into a desire to have grandchildren of me —did gladly relate it to my mother: rejoicing in that intoxicating wine whereby the world is made to forget Thee, by an extreme perversion and abasement of the will. But my mother in whose heart Thou hadst already begun to build a Temple and a holy habitation for Thyself… did advise me, —and I remember that she did it with extreme solicitude —that I should keep myself pure from all women, and especially from any man's wife. This seemed to me to be but old wives' counsels, the which I should be ashamed to follow... I went on headlong with so much blindness among my companions, that I would be ashamed to be less vicious than, by their bragging I understood that they were; for so much the more was their bragging as they were the more beastly. We delighted in doing ill, not only for the pleasure of the act, but even for a desire of praise. What indeed is worthy to be blamed, except only vice? Yet I, lest I should be ashamed, became the more vicious; and when I wanted the means of growing as wicked as the rest, would falsely affirm myself to have done that which in deed I had not done, lest I might seem to be so much the more abject as I was more innocent, so much the more poor spirited as I was more chaste… behold in what company I went up and down those streets of Babylon, and weltered in the mire thereof as if I had been regaled in a bed of spices and precious odours.’ (Book 2: sect. 3.)

In effect he paid not the slightest notice to the silly old square, nor to the played out myths of Religion with its repressive taboos upon joyous human nature. His sexual drive was the fastest thing through legal limits, and when he made a pass it was a joyous thing to see. He wore his pussy pelts next the skin.

When he went up to the university he met another very modern lot. The most ‘with it’ crowd you ever saw: ‘By that time I was grown to be a great man in the Rhetoric school, and I took pleasure in it with pride, and I did even swell with the puff of vanity. Yet was I much more modest than some others, as Thou knowest Lord, and far from the destructions that were wrought by the Destroyers, for that cruel and devilish name was adopted as the badge of their fine manners, —amongst whom I lived with a kind of shameless bashfulness, because I was not of like humour to them. I conversed with them, and I delighted sometimes in their familiar friendship, though I did ever abhor their actions, that is their 'destructions’ by which they did set on to corrupt the decency of men who had just come up, making fools of them, and feeding their malicious gibes upon them.’ (Book 3: section 3.)

It looks as if university life in the latter days of the post-Pagan period had its groups of militant young wearing a ‘Humanist’ label as well. Limitations upon technique and the lack of girls doing higher studies would no doubt have ruled out meeting freshmen on Campus with a nice box of rubber goods, and a petition to be signed for suitable emporia in Hall, but the spirit was just as willing, and the flesh no less weak.

The soul and the body of love

If the modern world does not present men and women with a problem greater in kind than that which beset St. Augustine in his generation, the stresses of the problem are greater in degree. Greater in degree because the power over matter and human life increases the temptation to yield to urgent desire, greater in degree too because of the greater freedoms of movement, and the easy, familiar social mixing of men and women in work and in leisure. Add to that the ever present sensual titillation of the modern world, the bombardment from every form of attention catching whether commercial or cultural, the sheer physical beauty of the pornographic in book, magazine, and over the air. The cinema too makes a special profit line in the production for the young of the X-cert trash film, an ushering in to darkness and hush for a long dirty dream of sexual libidinism, often with violence and perversion added for good seasoning.

The heart of the problem is one of understanding, the confusions over sex and love in the modern world are an intellectual more than a moral problem. The statement may raise a smile against a mental picture of the uninhibited youngsters who drift up and down the streets of the cities, and the more restrained, more completely cynical immorality of their elders. Nevertheless, the issue is first one of the perspective of Man, and only then of moral decision. No amount of knowing will make any difference to the man or woman determined to live a lie. A first major difference between the intellectual problems of the days of St. Augustine, and those of today, is the pressure derived now from erroneous philosophies of human behaviour which claim to be modern and scientific analyses of the depths of human nature. This provides infirm morality with the intellectual justification which makes false living respectable. The philosophies which justified lust in the days of St. Augustine from paganism to Manichaeism are dead with the age that begot them. The first strong root of modern confusion is the psychology of Freud.

The Freudians above all have rotted the minds of the men of this age, and it is they who have, often unwittingly, corrupted the teeming millions of the great cities who have neither the intellect to read Freud and the Freudians, nor the patience. Yet their lives have been moulded through the searing obscenity of the press and the plays of intellectuals who bear the stamp of Freudian Man. That is why we blame the Humanists for the increasing irresponsibility of modern youth.

For Freud the dynamism of life is the ‘libido’, the yearning for the gratifying possession of love. The first error of Freud lies in the choice of words, a choice of words which portrays quite faithfully his fundamental concept. The primary sense of the word ‘libido’ in the latin language, not its primary meaning as derived, but in regular usage is pejorative, it means urgent craving, lust, the desire which is greedy.

For Freud too, the desire for fulfilment of the living being, of every living being, is a pleasure principle which is blind surging, which knows no intrinsic law, and is not related, in its intrinsic nature, to any principle of connatural law. In addition, the goal and the consummation of the yearning for fulfilment is the experience of sexual union. The existence of the spiritual soul in man is denied of course, and so for men as for other animals, sex is the supreme seeking and consummation of the urge to love and to be loved. There is no distinction between sexual feeling and love, the sexual experience is only the ultimate polarisation of the one same urge to find love, fulfilment, happiness, for these are the same thing.

The first error of Freud is to confound matter and spirit, for these are not one common order, and do not obey one common norm of fulfilment. In man these are complementary and harmonised principles of being, but disastrous error arises from the identification of man with mere matter, for thus it is impossible to give to him a law of life and of fulfilment. The fulfilment of man lies in the Person of God, and God is a spirit.

The next error of Freud is to identify fulfilment with the sexual urge, and to fasten moreover upon that element in it which is urgent craving and unbridled aggression. This it is which underlies the choice of the word ‘libido’. It is an emotive word is ‘libido’ and the emotive content it carries for the ordinary man, whether in Latin or in English, is the surge of egoistic sensual desire without respect to intrinsic law, to control, or to proportion.1 It meant the same for Freud. The ‘libido’ can be thrust back by fear or by a counter force, but it does not look for nor owe obedience to any intrinsic law.

This theory of sex is first of all untrue to organic life below the human order. There is nothing in Nature below man which parallels the unbalanced ‘sexual drive’ which is presumed to be normal in so many men. What is found in man is an aberration and an overdevelopment of sensual response which derives from the impact of the spiritual will upon the sensitive principle in man's nature. This is the impact of Original Sin, of actual personal sin, and of poor, ignorant misuse. In the animal kingdom the sexual cycle is a true cycle, it has its on and off, its times and its seasons, when the pregnant female does not receive the male. Many species mate for life, but male and female couch together without sexual intercourse except at the proper mating season and in suitable conditions of environment. Many things affect the desire of sexual intercourse in the merely animal world, —if the external environment is not correct it is difficult to persuade many of the higher animals to mate at all, as the experience at zoos testifies very well, and even when they do mate their fertility or else their parental instincts are often badly affected. In Nature below man sex itself cannot be viewed as the pleasure which is the acme or the polarization of a life-urge to pleasure. On the contrary, if there is a life urge, and there is, this urge is to seek and to find one's connatural ‘good’ and ‘true’ according to a law of control and direction. To this control and direction the very pattern of the brain is programmed according to the species, and the perspective of Freud is totally wrong.

In an animal nature, in its natural environment there is first, however unlike man's in conscious content, the permanent and basic joy of existence, and of well-being in that existence. This is the joy of very being, which reflects the unity of a living being as a conscious individual. The instinct most near to the conscious joy of sheer being is the instinct of self-preservation, which under the spur of fear or hunger will suppress even the most pleasurable of activities. Within this unity, subsisting as integral parts much as the organs of the body make up one co-ordinate unity or whole, are those other functions triggered by pleasure or by pain which define the meaningfulness of an organic nature. The pleasures of food, sexual intercourse, social grouping, companionate mating, and so forth, these are all aspects of an integrated unity, and no one of them may be called the ‘libido’ by itself alone, any more than any one organ of the body may be called the body. In the animal body the supreme organ is the brain, of which the generative organs are themselves an integral extension among other extensions. In the Freudian system it is hard to say whether the brain is an extension of the phallus, or the phallus of the brain, but anyway there is only one function, the brain-phallic function. It just will not bear criticism.

There have come to hand recently in the pages of a well-known scientific magazine, some reviews of studies upon animals in their natural environments.2 Among these are studies of the ‘familial’ life of the gorilla. The writer remarks on the unobtrusive nature of the sexual life of these creatures, and their apparently ‘low sexual drive’. There seems some surprise, an implicit comparison presumably between them and us. The ‘low level of sexual drive’ is the manifestation of what is deducible as an observation from the philosophy of the science of the living —that in the animal kingdom, especially among the top mammals who have few if any natural predators, sexual drive is not fulfilment as such, but is a relatively infrequent and low-geared function in fulfilment. It is not ‘joy’ three times underlined.

In the Freudian concept of the ‘ego’ and the ‘id’ there is no connatural law of life, and no Natural Law in the theological sense into which the physical urges of man, and especially the sexual urge, are to be integrated. There cannot then be any sexual morality which is intrinsic to human nature, nor any which is absolute in value. Morality of any kind, but more so the ethics of sexual life, will be a system of conventional values, these values will represent an adjustment, a compromise system between competing ‘libidines’ that men may live in some sort of peace. In consequence there will be drastic changes of morality from age to age, and many exceptions to the existing social code among the rich, the mighty, or the unusually poised individual who does not fear the conventional sanctions. In private life there will be inevitable heartbreaks, betrayals, and frustrations, and in fact the enormous incidence of neurosis in modern society goes to confirm that this frustration does not diminish with the further sophistication of society. At root the ‘ego’ is built upon the ‘id’ with many a check and countercheck, but the libido, the blind urge for fulfilment proceeds through the ‘id’ the principle of primitive desire, barely personalised in terms of diversified claims, the obligations owed to others, and so forth. Out of this biological pure Capitalism of Nature, this sheer, primordial ‘laissez-faire’ of the successful and aggressive life-force, the uneasy conventions of societies and of individual personalities are built. There is no sin, no binding duty, no true free-will. Aim then for the best adjustment you may get, and do not ask too much of yourself, or of your partner and friends in the way of loyalty, or of life as your span of the experience we call being. This is the true message of the Freudian philosophy.

Deductions from an erroneous perspective of sex

The libido then is desire, and desire is to love, and love is the pleroma of the sexual force; an emanation that is to say, which proceeds from and gravitates around the central fact of sexual seeking. The real symbol of love is the phallic symbol, and not the heart, as is the Christian symbolism. It is said that Freudian philosophy, by admitting the possibility of sublimation, does in fact avoid subordinating all things in man to the sexual orgasm. In point of fact, the principle of sublimation does not proceed very logically within the thought of Freud. It is a concession to facts, and a reasonable interpretation of them on Freudian principles, but in reality the successful sublimations follow from quite a different principle, from the spiritual principle through which man is really defined, and from the actual fact that the fulfilment of the spiritual nature of man is not through the sexual release or function.

In the system of Freud the ‘id’, the savage dynamism of desire is at the root of the personality, and what is built over it by the ‘ego’ is like the thin crust of the earth itself, a precarious threshold constantly liable to violent upheavals from the vulcanism which is below. The ‘sublimation’ which channels sexuality away from its physical consummation is incidental and superficial, even artificial, upon the nature of man. The writer at least has never met a Freudian psychologist who regarded ‘sublimation’ as more than a subjective, usually very partial, adjustment-substitute. It could not be the general rule for human nature, because there is no Natural Law presiding over this surge of the ‘libido’ of life, and the court of appeal is what we perceive in the world of men. What we see in the vast majority of human beings is the upthrust of sexual dynamism. They may want and may need companionship, idealism, loyalty, and so forth, but part and parcel of the bargain is the sexual exchange, and they must find that satisfying in their case, or there will be trouble. The real norm of man's nature is what does happen, and what should be expected to happen on the Freudian principle, indeed the principles of Freud have defined the very expectation of modern men as to what ought to happen, —and that is no sublimation. Sublimation is in no way a substitute for the sexual drive of the ‘libido’ and the proof is that most men would reject the thought with a laugh, much as Dr. Johnson disproved philosophic Idealism by kicking away a stone! Even where sublimation is alleged or admitted, one has yet to meet the practical Freudian who does not presume that there is a physical outlet somewhere, even if it is only masturbation or narcissism.

The philosophy which makes love a surging and blind appetite of body and soul passes over into a false philosophy of the human experience in love, and it admits too of a mixed marriage between the Freudian psychology of man's nature, and of erroneous Christian attitudes to the doctrine of Original Sin.

If there does not exist a state of Natural Law into which the sexual urge is intrinsically integrated, —or should be, —nor a real distinction in man of matter and of spirit, even less a state of damaged nature, corresponding to the Christian doctrine of the Fall, then it follows that whatever occurs in a man's actual physical psyche is ‘natural’ and in that sense ‘good’ also. I do not mean that anything whatsoever, such as sadistic murder, is good and natural, but that the spontaneous urges of physical sexuality in a man, if they do not lead to obvious harm, as he sees it, are to be judged natural and human as facts of existence, not as lesions in an abstract ‘good’ through which human nature is hypothetically defined. There will be states of sexual excitement in man which do not correspond to organic function, but are the consequence of jumping the evolutionary barrier between the merely animal, and the unique, and admittedly paradoxical animal who is man.

Thus, it is a fact of human experience that loving someone evokes a certain warmth of joy, and usually, especially in the young, evokes sexual excitement and pleasure as well. Not only for the Freudian, but for any materialist, as also for the Monist thinker of say Teilhard de Chardin's type, and for the Christian theologian who regards the damage to man's nature by Original Sin as ‘purely extrinsic’, as the de facto loss of a purely incidental, gratuitous and extrinsic control over physical nature, the same thesis should follow. It should follow that the evocation of sexual desire, and its continuance whether a man will it or not, is the completely ‘natural’ response of the flesh to its object of delectation, natural indeed, and by that token ontologically good, and if ontologically good, acceptable morally by the individual man.

We can only know what is ‘natural’ by seeing what nature does, for it is presumed in this argument that there is no question of any intrinsic warping or damaging of the inherited nature of man. It is a fact that spontaneous sexual desire rises on the occasion of loving somebody deeply, and therefore we must presume that this is a natural reaction to the state of loving another. In fact the writer is not going to concede this position, but simply to argue to the reasonable consequences of the position. There is no doubt that in the present condition of Man the evocation of such physical concupiscence is indeed ‘natural’ in the sense of spontaneous and unavoidable, and we can all grant that short of consent to its pleasure out of true context, or following out the urge to the sexual act, a man can disregard such concupiscence with complete impunity, neither should it be a hindrance to his good and honourable friendships. This is an issue quite distinct from making the upsurge and continuance of venereal desire part of the general existential relationship of human love as God originally intended human nature to react.

If the elicitation of sexual venereal desire is ‘natural’ as the spontaneous flowering of human love, then there can be no fault in accepting the naturally arising excitement and its delectation, no fault either in indulging it thus far. It is certainly natural to men and women to love, and if this excitement is of the very nature and of true nature, then nobody can be expected to endure the tensions of self-refusal unless there is a special and outside reason for doing so. There have been even Catholic theologians ready to concede this position in the thirties, and with the growth of heresy there must be many more who are willing to go a lot further by now.

It will follow too, that masturbation to relieve tension cannot be wrong: the tensions arise from nature, and are relieved by discharge. It is not a sin to blow the nose, to massage a cramp, and so forth is it? It is all the inevitable result of the nature of man having jumped the deterministic routine of animal life, but without determinist interrelation of urge and function, or any other principle of law given to the flesh to determine it otherwise. Sexual intercourse out of marriage will be justifiable in the long-standing or committed relationship of love between man and woman, especially where family-type relationships are engaged upon, as with housekeepers who are also companions, or who bring up children for widowers, and deserted husbands. The same applies in reverse of course to the desolate woman. Indeed, sexual communion must be conceded to any serious affection between man and woman, for this emotion of desire is the natural concomitance of love. The proof is the fact of occurrence. Further, now that we can prevent the birth of the unwanted child, by what right can we forbid the exchange of sexual joy between the young, who are in love? As the natural concomitant of love, will it not be a useful means of proving maturity, and allowing of trial unions, even marriages, as the necessary apprenticeship for some temperaments to a lasting union?

As the natural side-effect of human affection in the adult, it cannot be called unethical or sinful in the sense of the old Morality, even when it is indulged as part of a passing attraction which is not intended to be a permanent, or a committed love. It is not suggested that sex may be indulged like a drug, but so long as it is taken in simplicity, and not made too much of, enjoyed with a laugh and a parting kiss, who is to say it is absolutely wrong, when the very urge to do so arises from the natures of men and women? That is to be presumed unnatural which damages nature, but when men and women find these affairs fulfilling, and produce no babies to the embarrassment of their fellow citizens, who is to lay down the law when Nature has laid down no Law?

It is scarcely necessary to add that such use of sex should be condoned between men and women living frustrated married lives, here years of habitual sexual exchange will have added to their stresses. The same indulgence may be extended even within marriages which have not broken up, when for one reason or another a partner does not find sexual fulfilment in the other, especially where it will help to keep a home together for the children of a marriage that is limping. In such cases we can even preach the duty of a spouse accepting an ‘affair’, in charity to the difficulties of the other partner and the needs of the children. Indeed, the Churches should stress the matter, —a duty in charity!

The Freudian situation continued

Pressing on from here with the liberty of the sons of Freud, we must ask ourselves in all seriousness what of the homosexual situation? Does it not call for reappraisal? Are we to be so absurd that we pretend that a youth must not feel a deep and companionate love, except for a girl? We just cannot constrain the liberty of the spirit and the liberty of friendship in this way. Between friendship and love there is no intrinsic difference, it is a matter of degree and of committal, not of kind and of species. Among the artistic and deeply sensitive it is a fact of sheer human experience that there can exist the deepest and most tender love between two young men or two young women. If the sexual yearning arises profoundly and passionately, can we really say that this is ‘unnatural’, when it is a fact that there are no truly natural limits within which we may define the emotions of man and the meaning of the emotions of man? Is it natural for animals, mankind or others, to go into orbit, and to land in the alien, nature destroying environment of the lunar landscape? In a sense nothing could be more unnatural than this. Yet, men have achieved this and it is not a sin. There may be some who think it is, but the rest of us say ‘not so’, —this is the result of being man, and not just monkey. In a manner exactly parallel the emotions of man cannot be constrained within the sexual strait-jacket of procreation only, any more than his intellect can be constrained within the limits of the environment which fashioned his body over eons of Evolution.

We will grant surely that the function of sex in human loving transcends the significance of procreation merely, it has ends in human fulfilment which are not necessarily subordinate to the ends of procreation. It has, the sexual act, a validity in its own right, so that we cannot forbid the use of sex in marriage, together with any form of contraception preferred, because the companionate and sympathetic love requires the sexual expression in its own formality as love, without necessary regard, in the human context, to the physical consequence of procreation, which indeed is already too well fulfilled in an overpopulated world. In the name of the same human need, we dare not rule out the sexual expression in committed love between men and women who cannot marry, or whose loves are one long frustration. Is sexual intercourse then a shameful thing that we should exclude it from human affection in its own right? Is it noble in the marriage bed for twenty years with careful contraception, as true love, but immoral among people perhaps more unselfish, more true of heart to other ties, but not linked in this sacramental or legal tie? The psychological situation is just the same, in or out of legal or sacramental unions. Reasonable men and women will see the point: the determination of the goodness or badness of sex, is not, in the present stage of Evolution in man, the begetting of children not in an exclusive way that is, for in the present stage of the Evolution of man the determination of the sexual urge can only be as the expression of human love.

Where love exists, the creativity in man evolved higher must be judged on the level of the psyche, not that of the production of babies. It can follow, quite frankly, that in the words of a well known author, ‘between man and man, woman and woman, as well as between man and woman, there can co-exist many normalcies of human love’ and hence, of the sexual expression of that love which is the visible concomitant of physical nature. Part of what one may call Secularist ecumenism, a part to which the Christian must be held, if he wishes to be thought sincere, will be the outlawing of words which are dirty words, such as ‘buggar’, ‘queer’, ‘lesbian’, and others which though of four letters only, are better not in print. These unfair and emotive expressions should be renounced like the concept of responsibility in crime, and other barbarities of the old Morality. These relationships, especially where there exists a free-ranging and ambivalent sexual life, are not reprehensible, but often creative and beautiful. The Reformer, brings about change by being a law unto himself. The artist likewise is the executioner of the old order that changes, yielding place to new, he is the author of morals, not the slave of the contemporary conventions.

All this, and very much more follows from the perspective of man's nature in which sexual passion is the natural physical concomitant of adult human love. You may do anything you like. You may be stopped in the name of the needs or rights of another, but that too is very tricky, very complicated ground. It follows from the very principles of Freudianism that the individual libido must come to terms with other libidines, but in the absence of any intrinsic Natural Law it is very much a matter of what can be got away with. It was put well some time back when a member of parliament was defending the extension of the grounds for the dissolution of marriage. We all knew, he admitted, that the broken home damaged the personalities of children involved in the breakup of the marriage, but it was a question of the price we were prepared to pay in modern society for the stability of the home. The price, that is to say, in adult frustration. One could put it another way, and say ‘all of us have needs and rights, we yearning mums and dads, as well as you kids… it is not a matter of being selfish, heavens no! All we ask is fulfilment, we are grown-up, we know what is good for us. It is you children who are being selfish, wanting mummy and daddy to go on living together just for your own sakes… You must not do it, dears!’

‘New Theology’ an approximation to Freud

In Christian love, love must often suffer and be unselfish in order to be love, but on Freudian principles all love is selfish, for suffering and self-denial are the very antithesis of the word and the concept of libido: there is no intrinsic law of love of any kind, you claw yourself a place in the jungle of human thoughts and desires, and you trust to be happy. ‘Devil take the hindmost,’ can be rendered to mean every man and woman to make such adjustments as they may.

The pseudo-Christian apologists of the ‘new theology’ which turns out to be the old heresies in modern packaging, are also unable to offer any law of life for man which is an intrinsic law of fulfilment in goodness and in joy. They have agreed among themselves that there are two formalities to sexual intercourse, namely procreation, and human fulfilment in love. The second is separable from the first, and may be an independent end in its own right. The non-Catholic Churches have all accepted this position, in order to justify their blessing upon contraception without intrinsic moral control. They try of course to delimit this use of sex as an expression of love, to married love, but the very changes they have made in this matter, and in many another subject-matter, to the witness of historic Christianity, rob their words of all absolute authority. Anyway, they do not admit in the Church any absolute authority or absolute certainties.

The theologians proceed more boldly than bishops or moderators. Once it has been conceded that sexual intercourse may be used in marriage as the expression of married love, and directly divorced from family, they recognise, as they must in logic, that the psychological situation of human love is the same in marriage and in many situations which are close to that of marriage. Hence the furore when some of them grant the morality of sexual intercourse in other unions or loves which are ‘committals’ of personality. Next, it must be asked what constitutes a ‘committal’, where do you draw the line, and on what intrinsic authority do you draw a line of refusal? The moralists of this sort approach nearer and nearer to the Freudian errors concerning love.

If human nature as we find it, with its actual urges, passions, and cravings is the ontologically good, ‘nature’ as God made it, or at least could make it, then it is not clear what sort of ‘law’ the spirit in man should impose upon the flesh, nor what the intrinsic principle of the law should be.

In the first place, there is no intrinsic tendency of the concupiscence of the flesh to obey the spirit, the flesh just lusts after its intrinsic libido, after its ‘natural object of delectation’ as the older moralists would have put it. This, by itself, is a close agreement with Freud, for whom the libido does just the same thing. The older moralists, even those who denied that there was any intrinsic wound or trauma, in human nature, who regarded concupiscence as the de facto loss of an incidental perfection of control by the spirit over the flesh, did retain the concept of a Natural Law. They considered that it was the duty of the soul to rein in the body in this matter. In so doing they took for granted the positive authority of God, manifest in Christian and in Mosaic doctrine, clearly limiting the use of sexual intercourse to the married state. They did not consider the formality of mutual love to be independent of either the potential of procreation, or of the state of marriage itself. Implicitly at least, they did define the sexual function through its formality, as procreative by nature. It was not in those days possible to separate the procreative potentiality from the expression of love, and in fact it did not occur to them that it could be so in theory either. They had therefore a basis from which to assert that even if it was not natural to the flesh to obey the law of the spirit without reluctance, it was the duty of the spirit to impose the law of God upon its bodily members. The formal meaning of married love was fulfilment with children, and the fact that nature could not be engaged on other terms, was evidence enough that in theory too, the twin purposes were inseparably intertwined.

Nevertheless, Catholic or Protestant, they had left a weakness in their argument. The surge of desire does accompany the development of love between human persons, and if this response is natural, since nature is ontologically good, in what it gives, does, and prompts, it is not at all clear why we should be expected to deny ourselves that which is good, and is proven to be good because it is of nature. Leaving the supernatural order to one side, God as the author of human nature in even its minimum definition, is still the author of that which is good by definition.

The position was left wide open. In fact, any position which derogates from that of Augustine, of Aquinas, and of the first sixteen hundred years of the Christian tradition in this matter, must end by collapsing first into theological incoherence, and then retreat to the abandonment of the entire Christian position upon sexual morals.

Modern theologians have, some of them, pushed much too eagerly on. They began to admit that the psychological situation of human persons could not be measured merely by the mechanics of a state of life, by legal and sacramental ties. They begin now to admit that matter and spirit are aspects of one order and one energy of being. Once they are persuaded to grant that the modern technical power to separate the procreative function of the sexual act from its function as expressive of love is an argument that God intended the same disjunction to exist, —but presumably only from the age of the scientific ability to do so, —then it is impossible for them to draw the line anywhere in the human use of sexual intercourse, and in logic, it is impossible for Christian apologists of this sort to draw the line anywhere.

The Freudians, and the theologians of the New Theology find themselves moving along lines which have almost converged. It becomes easy for them to arrange a merger of doctrines. These apologists have reduced Christianity to water, what then forbids that they be baptised in the name of Freud?

2. THE TRUE PERSPECTIVE OF LOVE

‘In the beginning it was not so...’

‘The Pharisees came to him, tempting him and saying, "Why then did Moses command that she be given a bill of divorce, and allow to put away"? He said to them: "Moses, by reason of the hardness of your hearts permitted you to put away your wives, but from the beginning it was not so..."’ (Matt. c.19,v.7).

Many things ‘were not so from the beginning’ in human nature, but have suffered distortion since the wound of sin, and principal among the phenomena of distortion is the sexual faculty in man, whether in the sacrament of marriage in which alone sex is honourably consummated, or out of the sacrament. The theology of marriage is not here our concern, that would be a considerable project. It suffices to make a few points briefly. First, Christian marriage is not primarily speaking a state of romantic love. It is the union through complementary flesh of two persons, in direct co-operation with Christ and through him, for the making of men in time and for eternity. This is why it is a work in Christ and in the Church, ‘till death us do part’. It is an office both of nature and of grace, for to God as well as to a spouse a man and a woman say ‘I will’. When God accepts those words and conjoins himself to their sacred compact, the bond abides for ever in the spirit through the flesh, until ‘death us do part’ for it takes three to make a marriage, and God does not ever change his mind.

Christian marriage, it goes without saying, can never be entered into worthily except as a compact sealed by a holy and spiritual love. This is most certain, because marriage is not a merely biological matter, much less an expression of libidinal urge. It is for the creation and the growing in grace of the sons and daughters of God, and to God these belong by token of creation, especially by token of the immediate creation of each individual human soul, more properly and more intimately than they belong to the men and the women through whom they are begotten. Christ makes it clear that the philosophy and the theology of his teaching concerning marriage, is the unity of human nature in its spiritual and biological vocation to create new life, as this relationship subsists through two individuals, a man and a woman. In the narrative of Genesis, the essential theme of which is timeless, Adam is created as ‘one’ and then for greater perfection and good Adam is undone. God however is no fool, and has made no mistake, when the woman is created and brought to Adam, he knows her and loves her as ‘bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…’ God has ‘undone’ Adam only to remake him ‘one’ again as before in a more perfect way. There was no mistake from the beginning, and God does not need to change his mind. Adam the individual, in whom the vocation of creation with God and through God was ‘one flesh’ in one person, is just as perfectly the one flesh and one unity in the two persons, but in a nobler way: ‘What then God has joined together,’ has ‘re-oned’, ‘let not man put asunder’ (Matt. c.19.v.6). Because marriage in human life is not a biological convenience, but the consecration of the flesh through the spirit, to the fulfilment of the work of creation in the Person of Jesus Christ, this relation which is an office of nature and of supernature, and an office in the Church for the peopling of the Kingdom of God, is an indissoluble sacrament. This is the true dignity of the sexual faculty in mankind, sex is not an act of cannibalism as for the egoists, but an act which is honourable in the flesh through the sweep to eternity of a spiritual communion of being. For in man sexuality is a spiritual vocation and a holy relationship, it is not an ecstatic physical enslavement.

In the beginning, it was so…

In the animal nature which precedes directly the emergence of man, the sexual impulse is attuned, as in all other life, to the proportion, times, and seasons ministered to the body through the brain, in the controlling interplay of that brain and its environment. This is the good, the ontologically good and the balanced perspective of the sexual sense in the animal life. In this condition the sexual faculty as pleasure of sense sought, plays a less urgent role than it does in the lives of most men. This is so notwithstanding that the place of sex in the animal life is more immediate to the end of the animal being, than it is to the end and destiny of a man as an individual. The animal life does not rise to ever higher degrees of love and communion through the spiritual soul, as a man can. For the merely animal, the expression of its instinct marks a defined perfection and a unique fulfilment beyond which it cannot go: to wax, beget, wane, and die is the entire life of the individual within the cosmic function of the species. The animal life does not have within its natural potential the opening out to endless vistas of understanding, love, and joy which belongs to the personality of a man. In a man the vocation of the flesh is swept up to share in God the vocation of the spiritual being. Nevertheless, within that small and deterministically programmed rhythm of life, the animal appears to be less sexually conscious, certainly less sexually addicted, than the mass of mankind in the modern world.

The creative infusing of the soul into flesh, as the ontological co-principle of the meaningful being of that flesh, at the apex of material evolution, —that is the making of a man, in the beginning, and just as much today in the beginning of life within the womb. This is the order of the knowing, free, and spiritual entity. Man is created beyond the environment of Nature and beyond the Law of control and direction as Nature administers this Law within the universal equation of material Evolution. Yet man is not created beyond control as such, he cannot be, not even for a moment is his being created as if neutral, and without a connatural end in view. He is created into the order of God, in whom man lives, and moves, and is, and has his being. This is to be created into the order of love and of grace, the Life which is beyond the gift of beginnings, the prompting forward towards the possession of God through trans-formation in the likeness of God, the full assimilation to Christ of a human being.

The first natural orientation of man towards God his fulfilment takes place in the womb, in the first instant of true individual conception. It begins in the first instant of entelechy of the spiritual soul as it informs matter to human fulfilment in body and in soul. That is why it was proposed that baptism of desire takes place in the womb, in the first moment of Man, through the formal principle of all the sacraments. This principle is the Holy Ghost, proceeding in love from the Father, through the Son. The Font consummates in the economy of the Incarnation what was begun in the Holy Spirit, but it is in the womb that the Holy Spirit overshadows a man, as the same Spirit did the Virgin in Galilee, so that every man is a catechumen at conception, and being born again of water and the Holy Ghost is the consummation of one Act of God, by which a man is sealed in body and soul in the kinship of Christ, the fullness of the sonship of God.

So in the beginning man inherited a body in which the sexual urge looked with obedience and without that remembrance in craving in which lust consists, to its wise times and wise seasons. The body had taken its good and its pleasure in all simplicity, that is good, in that there is nothing which is evil. In man the wisdom which administered the cycle of sex, as of all the other physical powers of the body, was now the spiritual soul. The soul is the principle of knowing, of recognising relations, perspectives, and the balance of proportion. Because the soul has this nature, there derives within great men the intuitive discoveries of creative genius. It is in the ability to interrelate items in terms of unity, of that 'equational’ which gives higher meaning, which imposes a new and more beautiful unity upon the diversity, that great theories of science have arisen which have later been corroborated as facts. The soul of a genius went before these facts, the intellectual intuition went before the demonstration. From the partial and potential knowledge the spirit in a man leaped the gap, and with a thrill predicted the full complement of meaning. It is strange that from the very nature of creative intellectual genius, men cannot, or better will not see that the nature of the soul is to reduce the related to unity in a correct perspective.

The soul in man in the beginning did just that for the body which it inherited and which it did itself develop and align in the last analysis to be human, for the very formed body of man is not human and distinct from the merely animal, in the configuration and organisation of its brain, except through the active, formative presence of the spiritual soul. The soul in a man was now and is now the judge and director of the faculties of the body of man, and to that soul the body was knit in obedience. The personal presence of God to the personality of a man within the soul begot that grace of life more abundant within the spirit, by which a man knew the wise and true and rejoiced to know, and was glad to do the right. That is how it was in the beginning, and should have remained unless sin had intervened from the deliberate ill-will of the spiritual not the material power in man.

True relationship of the soul to physical passions

Freedom then from disordered desire, freedom from concupiscence that is, derives partly from the body, because the flesh had always through the ages of development looked for and responded to its natural law, and its proportion to good. It derives in the beginning partly through the soul, because the wisdom of the soul, carrying conviction and certainty of purpose, draws the body into one awareness with the spiritual power of a given perspective as true and as good. The flesh assents with the spirit to that balance in which the good consists. As an experience this is peace and joy in the heart of a man.

Even in the present state of man's fallen and very disordered nature, a synthesis of the good and the true which is held to by reason enlightened in grace and sweetened with the love of God, can impose a quite remarkable freedom from lustful desire in mind or in body in even the ardent years of youth. This joyful peace, consisting in a personal synthesis of values which is true and satisfying, tends to be invaded by the inrush of doubts, denials, and confusions from other minds. Then indeed a degree of upset in body and soul, though not necessarily with consent to sin, or doubt concerning the values held, may enter upon the personality. The experienced priest knows from his experience the truth of the foregoing statement, and how much more fully would the faculties and physical powers of a man be ruled in the peace that inheres in wisdom if man had never fallen, and if the social environment in which men lived did not burgeon with every manner of lie, lust, and hopeless confusion of thought and of action!

The soul, to control and direct the whole personality of a man, flesh and spirit, to its perfect good and true, needs itself to be joined to God in a living communion. It is not that the soul is unable to judge rightly from its natural powers, but that it is never neutral and never quiescent. The soul also has a ‘metabolism’ proper to its nature as spiritual. In the existential order, which means in the reality of life, its decisions take place in a dynamism of wisdom and goodwill energised out of its living inner adherence unto God. This is that relationship of the Divine Indwelling of God the Trinity within a man of which Christ speaks. The spirit has to grow in its own connatural powers, and to deepen, otherwise it will not be able to judge with adequate wisdom the bearing of its life, and the pressures of its human environment, upon God and the things of God.

Through failure in this respect, or through uncertainty of mind, derives the easy slide into error and into evil under the waywardness of human weakness, and the impetus of plausible, seductive lies from other men. Through failure to deepen, and failure to abide in the energizing communion of God, come the failures of spirits of great spiritual or great artistic powers. So often they are total slaves to physical passions or addictions, so often they evince an amazing shallowness of moral wisdom and a blindness of judgement upon the powers and the destiny of men. The soul like the body must grow within its own life-principle, and for full development requires the most favourable environment. The greater or more sensitive the soul, the more it needs to grow in the full sunshine of the Environment of the Living God, and if not, the results will be more than averagely disastrous, both for itself, and for the society of men influenced by its magnetism. Without the inheritance of a nature damaged, without the pressures of a negative and sensual social environment and its tradition through the ages, the life of grace within the soul fostered by God through the Church in priest, prophet, and saint would be unimaginably greater, and unimaginably more coherent.

Of human love

Therefore according to the nature of man from the beginning and even at this present time for those who live according to the healing grace of Jesus Christ, sexual intercourse is not the function of love in human nature. God loves: the Being of God is defined through Love, but in God there is no sexuality. Those spiritual beings we call the angels, who are defined in their substance through intellect and will without matter, know love and joy, but not sex. Man too, though compounded with matter as well as with spirit, does not possess sex in order for that faculty to be the function inseparable from and expressive of natural human love.

The levels of human love are many, love in a man may proceed from many different degrees of nearness to God. Yet all types of human love which are truly right and good, proceed not through the body as their principle of eliciting, but through the spiritual soul, and that spiritual soul draws the body with it in a common assent of matter and spirit to the object of love, and the joy of that love. Yet sexual intercourse, or below the consummated act the lesser degrees of specifically sexual pleasure, is not a function of human love. Sexuality is a function in one state of love, a function in an office of love, a consecrated way of life, and a sacrament of union and communion between a man and a woman and God himself. Yes: but even in this relationship only a function in the love and of the love, a function according to time, propriety and reasonable measure, not an end in itself, or a function of love as ‘married’ love at any time or at all times, even when directly divorced from its connatural physical relationship to the getting of children and the love human and divine, which is the environment of their growth.

Is there then any specific concomitant of human love in the body, which is admitted to be characteristic of human love at any time and in all circumstances? There is. It is the tranquil warmth of possession in joy, an experience which is a reality in both the body and the soul. As a physical reaction of sense this is not specifically sexual, and in the lesser order of animal life it is obviously present according to their lesser level of awareness, both in and out of the breeding season. It is very obvious for example in animals which are associated intimately with man, whether as pets in the home or favourites around the farm. In man the physical warmth of joy, love in tranquil possession and communion, should be capable of development to a much higher sensitivity, being knit to the soul which also shares in this joy in its own higher manner. Through the soul there should be a constant sweetness both spiritual and physical, a higher and a willing obedience to the ordering of wisdom and truth in friendship and love between man and man, men and women. Human nature is capable of such, and there are some who have experienced such an ordered and delightful love.

Through countless ages however, the experience of love, especially the experience of love between man and woman, has been conformed deliberately by the will of man to the concomitant excitement of the specifically sexual pleasure as an end in itself to be laid hold on. This is to say as an act of lust, whether in mind or in deed, not as an act of love within a consecration of love. The very experience of love therefore, as an act of joyful possession, comes, in a manner now pseudo-natural to man, to trigger automatically the sexual impulse, sometimes a little, sometimes very much, for there is great temperamental difference between individuals. This phenomenon is not the natural expression in man of the communion of love, it is the overdevelopment and the misdirection of nature in man, from the power of the will of the soul upon the material in man. It is in effect derivative from Original Sin, increased through the ages by sin, and much more urgently capable of habitual overdevelopment by direct personal habit, as in the case of all other pleasures of addiction. While not a drug, it can and does become like a drug in the ferocity of the addiction which can be induced. Such a condition of man into which we are all born is now historically and actually ‘natural’ to man in the sense of a fait accompli: but it is not of the nature of man, nor his natural condition in truth, and the work in grace of the Divine Environer upon this wounded and warped nature in us all, is to heal, redintegrate, and refine, to restore in an increasing manner the original likeness of man, to the image of both true Man and God in the likeness of Christ. This, the striving towards perfection, is an achievement which cannot be gained with-out a struggle.

The law of love in human friendship

As the word is used here, there is no real difference between friendship and love, in common use the terms may be taken to show a difference of degree. Men and women of the world often use the word ‘friendship’ to stand for a certain blend of mutual admiration, fascination, and combination for mutual advancement which is a misnomer in reality for the noble name of friend. Likewise many relationships from the trivial to the degraded are given euphemistically the divine name of love. Any friendship worthy of the title carries a degree of union and communion of personality, and to be fulfilling and good must be focused through values on either side which are true and noble in human beings. Friendship or love in this sense, bears a near infinity of degrees of ordinariness or of sublimity. In all its forms it has this in common, that it does not depend on nor tie down with the urgent exigencies of libidinism. From the soul it derives its strength, and through the soul it draws its joy and its control over blind, anarchic desire.

To the natural charm and the charm which derives from nobility of personality in a man or woman, may be added the special warmth and protective fulfilment which a man feels towards the woman he loves, and a woman feels towards a man. In her case it will be rather a sense of being cherished and of returning the same love with devotion. In the most spiritual and sincere love between man and woman there will be a special glow of joy which attaches to the complementary nature and the mutual helpmateness of man and woman in their sexual natures. This is as it should be. Even among the animals, in their lower manner such a presence to each other in joy must be that which keeps them together, in those which pair for life, and it is something other than the relationship of sexual coition, which they do not exercise out of season, nor in the pregnancy of the female. Neither does the existence of a complementary attraction between man and woman as such lead to the sexual act of intercourse as such, nor confer any right to it. The fact that in the present condition of man there is an obvious triggering reaction, at least in youth, is neither here nor there. There is a great deal of physical greed and anarchic desire which is pseudo-natural to human nature as it now is, and that element can be and must be separated out and denied. Otherwise a note of untruth, as well as of selfishness and slavery, enters into human relationships. This special complementary joy, secondary though it is in all human friendship to the depth of love, even in many cases to the physical sense of joy in love, ought to exist at all times, and be part of the spiritual and sacramental companionship of man and wife. This will be true at all times, even when sexual intercourse is not possible, would be unwise, imperfect, or unkind.

The mind and heart of love

In man the soul's recognition of the good and the lovable should draw the body with it according to the kind of relationship that exists, and according also to the personal type of union that exists. It is possible sometimes to be forced by a very deep and good youngster to elicit a love which is more equal, comradely, and respectful than any affection one may feel towards the old, powerful and important, but weak and cowardly of soul. It is possible to elicit then in the body the equality of a male and comradely love towards a youngster who is great of spirit, and to elicit something of a father or a mother's compassionate care for somebody much more mighty but much more weak and childish. It is the soul of a man in its power of wisdom and power of love through the will which elicits first the relationship of love, and through the soul's union with the human body, itself so finely and fully developed in physical sensitivity through the spirit, a corresponding type of reaction must be elicited.

It does not seem to be possible to distinguish between the secondary warmth and protectiveness that a man may feel towards a woman, and a similar physical reaction of care-full love which he may feel towards another man who for reasons of temperament, gifts, or weakness may be aligned to him spiritually in a manner which would evoke a physically ‘feminine’ type of response. This can happen without any question of moral wrong or effeminacy of fibre, and the love can be true and spiritual. It may of course trigger a sexual response incidentally, but if the love is true and sincere that can be and will be set aside. To give detailed advice on this sort of human relationship is a matter of spiritual direction, and could fill many a book by itself in all the ramifications and subtleties of the subject-matter. There need be no limitations on the right to love, it is the absurd dragging in of sexual addiction every time, like insisting on a ‘right to smoke’ anywhere and everywhere in all inflammable circumstances, in a contract of work, which makes life a valley of confusion and insincerity. The essential point is that human loves in their manifold subtlety and diversity are not tied to, and do not imply need for or right to sexual intercourse, or specifically sexual pleasure as such.

This, then, is the overall law of human love; but to develop it in full, to attempt an answer to every question or misunderstanding that will arise, is impossible within the compass of this general synthesis of theology.

Yet the teaching defended does contain a moral absolute, and contains it specifically against those who deny the existence of moral absolutes in human sexual relationships, for it teaches that human love is not a ‘human sexual relationship’ as they understand it. The sexual relationship is a function in one state of love, holy with the holiness of a sacrament, basic to life in time and in eternity, but even in this context still a function in love, not a function of love, a distinction underlined as supremely important. Out of the sacrament of marriage, sex has no connatural place, it becomes an aberration, a ‘sin’ in human affection. By sex is meant the specific coitial pleasure of the genital faculty, whether directly or indirectly indulged. It does not mean the wider complementary joy between male and female, as has been explained earlier.

In the relationships of friendship which grow out of the freedoms of work and play in modern living, this will be accounted by many ‘a hard saying, and who can hear it’? Some of the promiscuities of modern life are unworthy of human dignity in any culture, and represent the commercial subjection of human life to the economics of the machine, through the outlook of a ‘science’ motivated by materialism and a sub-conscious contempt for spiritual values. Some of the throwing together of men and women in three shift work for instance, with the constant stresses it involves, and all its nervous and social disruption, is the enslavement of man and human dignity to the machine, in the sacred name of maximum profitability. Yet, such issues apart, it is clear that the more the standard of culture rises and the more men master their material environment in all its aspects, the more freedom men and women will demand to know and to love. They will demand it because it is of the nature of men that they mix freely and interchange, and nobody can refuse to love where the lovable presents itself and is found.

It is all a matter of what we mean by ‘love’ and how far we may go. Not every love of the beautiful or vivacious is a love of deep moral worth or fulfilling life values, neither does every pull of a pretty face justify that we lead it to bed. Again, this is not love, this is selfish desire. There is a discipline to be imposed upon love, otherwise love vanishes, the gold is at once debased. It is not lawful, from the very nature of things, and the truth which from nature defines the true ordering of human life, that men and women may pick out values from their mutual persons which give a spontaneous joy of body or of soul, and indulge them as ends in themselves, out of the relationship such powers have to their whole personality as a united whole, out of the relationship they have to others bound to them by love, to husbands and wives, children, and others, out of the relationship every human personality has to God himself as a Person. The order of truth demands that all these relativities be in focus before a love is true, and good, and may be lain hold upon.

Therefore there will be sacrifice in human relations, that love may truly exist between men and women. There will be renunciations, settings aside, the rationing of times and of meetings, and control over the more intimate embraces of love, lest love be overwhelmed, as so often it is, by lust and disloyalty.

Love governed by truth, not blind desire

If this law of life, the law not of a code but of sheer reality, the reality of truth and goodness in itself, is not accepted, then deliberately men and women refuse to focus the lower gifts of love and friendship through the higher. This is treason to love, and to God also, from whom derive the lineaments of love. How can ‘love’ shatter the trusting faith and loves of hearth and home, the lives of wives and of children, how bring in every kind of greed, seduction, and crafty beguilement, and still be love? Over the wrecks of lives men and women grasp hands and bleat ‘we have a right to be happy’. Love is not divided against itself: to renounce as well as to possess is the condition of a love which will range widely and be free.

It is not possible to rupture the order of truth and good as it is established between God and human nature, or between a man and his neighbour, and still experience fulfilment. Therefore at the bottom of every love which is false there lurks a pain. The pain may be denied, it may be deeply secret, great efforts may be made to exorcise its acknowledgement by sensual joy, by philosophy that flows over in books, and waffles through the air. Men and women may close the hatches upon layer after layer of the subconscious mind, but the sense of pain, and the nameless fear will remain with them.

Why is this? It is because whatever the sin and whatever the arrogance in a man, whatever the emphasis he may lay upon natural charm as an end in itself, the love of a human being for another must proceed first from the soul, according to the tier of the spiritual values in human life, and the body must follow according to natural order and right precedence. If there is a lie at the heart of a man's loving, he cannot experience joy, for the experience of joy demands peace as an ingredient, and peace requires the possession of the good. To enjoy the good, the good must be true, and if a man has lied in his spirit in the attainment of his ‘love’ then there is sadness and fear at the roots of his soul, and he does not enjoy the sweetness of peace. Without peace there is no compensating happiness, whatever else a man has. In the human personality, pleasure is only a peripheral constituent of joy; even in the body, the peace of love possessed is a much more precious joy than any pleasure within the love, as all true lovers know.

For the great majority of men and women marriage itself is the best anchor and guarantee of their sincerity in love, and the best assurance of their nobility in any other friendship. This is not because of any relief from tension through sexual intercourse, there is more to it than that. It is the spiritual and companionate love of marriage, the committal in loyalty to hearth and home, spouse and children, which itself ennobles men and women in the taste of deeply spiritual care. This is the way in which, to use a blunt but down to earth phrase of the ancients, the married state is most truly a ‘remedy for the disordered desire of nature’, and regulates the social and professional contacts of men and women. To achieve this degree of responsible truth in loving, men and women must first of all envisage married love on the level of a consecrated communion of spiritual as well as physical life. It is because the vision of love and the ideal of love has fallen away progressively in modern society, that marriages break up with increasing ease, and work-a-day life becomes an occasion of daylight hour concubinage. Sexual life or sexual joy at no time solved the problem of desire by itself alone. The more libidinal desire is indulged for its own sake, the more the values of mutual love are built around the sexual act, the more likely is the relationship suddenly to tire, and become a bore. Then openly or secretly the partner is blamed, other pastures are wanted. ‘We are not being fulfilled in each other’ they will say, but in fact they have devoured each other with a cold heat, and sickened of each other, and of themselves. As St. Augustine puts us in mind, from all of this men and women do not necessarily learn to be sincere, for sensuality is a hard taskmaster. They demand new stimulation, another union, ‘serial monogamy’ some Humanists have called it, dropping an antipriestly blessing upon it with a cynical smile. Whatever it be called it is neither joy, nor peace, nor creative living.

The power of the soul in sex and love

A man is able to centre all his works, thoughts and feelings utterly upon himself without regard to God or his fellows. He can school his nature against Nature to mingle sexual delectation with almost any other human experience, with power, cruelty, aesthetic feeling and so forth. In this manner the worst and most socially dangerous of perversions can infiltrate individual lives and human society. The more a sense is used, so much the more it develops, and so much the more does the whole organism of the body become aligned along the greater place and meaning this experience now has in the life of the individual. In Nature, which is a vast equation of entities working to the ontologically good, the development of a sense and the alignment of the being in respect of the faculty developed will be a mechanism of natural selection, and Nature cannot go wrong. The selection exercised by Nature proves the fitness of an organism to survive, and the total equation of Nature as it is worked out in the history of being in ascent, is always to the good.

This law ceases to work organically in the case of man. The controlling power and the developing power over the body in the case of man, is vested in the soul. The relationship between the flesh and the soul is based upon a presumption of goodness and of truth in what the spirit ministers to the body, but presumption yields to the truth of facts. A withdrawal from the grace of God, the incursion of evil through the Fall, means that it is possible for the soul of man to develop both in the individual and in the stock attributes and obsessions which are destructive of the nobility of a man, of his nature, and of the better inherited tradition of human society. As power over matter increases, this crisis of the spirit must increase for mankind. Unless Man rises to the exercise of control over himself through spiritual law, power over life and lusts will bring in the slavery of the masses to the hedonism of sex and other physical excitements. The intellectual scientific oligarchy which rules will be no less enslaved to sensuality, but their principal obsession will be their own arrogance of intellect, and joy in the determination of the personalities of lesser beings. There cannot be the achievement of true humanism, true nobility of human personality, except through that unique dimension of the human personality which has emancipated man from the beasts, but is able to be also the principle of his own personal vandalism of the spirit. Through this unique dimension of knowledge with free will a man is different from all else that lives, through this then he must create his own perfect order and find his law of fulfilment in and through a personal union with his own Environer. Neither Christian society, nor any other free and creative human order, is going to be saved for true humanism and human dignity by the discovery and prescription of the perfect pill, whether it be to control sex, or to control other and higher faculties of the human personality.

3. SOME STATES OF LIFE AND OF LOVE

The place of chastity in the love of God

The ideal of the Religious life, the gathering of men and women into communities bound under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, for the perfect love of God and the more perfect love of their brethren, is a vast topic and it is impossible to do justice to it. The beginnings are found for the Christian within the Jewish dispensation in Moses, and the same impetus arising naturally or better say supernaturally in the non-Christian Faiths, is found with especial wealth in Buddhism. This is to be anticipated, for the root of the urge is contemplation.

Contemplation is not passivity, at its higher levels it draws away from immersion in the world and the cares of worldly life, and is centred upon God and the life that is lived in familial communion with God, but at all levels it is active life, even as God is Active Life. In even the most active Orders of men and of women contemplation enters as a necessary element of their vocation. Contemplation means direct communion with God, the most perfect and the most spiritual way of knowing and loving God, and there is no deep and saintly love of God into which such communion of soul does not bring one of the degrees of contemplative prayer. The degrees of nearness to God are many, there is the communion which is more perfect by faithful achievement through grace, and the communion which is intrinsically higher by sheer gift of God and vocation. Yet God gives no high vocation of contemplative love and perfection to a soul which is not also a vocation with Christ unto the brethren: all the gifts of God in creation are of Christ, and configure to Christ, and the love of Christ for the Father takes up and sweeps with Himself the bloody burden of us all. The contemplative cannot be a brother with Christ, except he also has a vocation in achievement and co-redemption unto his brethren. That again, is true of us all, it derives from the character of baptism itself, but there are degrees higher and degrees lower. Our anxiety is to show that no contemplative soul is perfect, loves, or suffers for himself alone, but for all mankind in communion with Christ, the vivifying principle of all a man's spiritual life in any vocation of human life.

For the Christian layman too, there is no deep love of God into which the contemplative element does not enter, but in this introduction we are concerned more with that Religious Life into which vows, and especially the vow of chastity, do enter. Many people do know and do love God with a contemplative communion, in the lower reaches at least of that communion, without having the faintest idea that they do so. They will confess that they do not know what contemplation is, but to them God is real, and in that reality with humble endurance they live, suffer, love, and are at peace. They do know what is contemplation. On the other hand there is the Religious met all too often at this time, flitting hither flitting thither between TV studio, university chaplaincy, intellectual societies, who is a sham, and has not a clue to the true ethos of his vocational commitment. The reason will be pride, pride that springs up in the soil of personal vanity, and matures into a harsh self-conceit of spirit. Nothing could be more totally opposed to the knowing and the loving of God which is in contemplative union.

The state of heaven is the perfect union with God, and the perfect maturation of the soul in its likeness to God, according to the measure of the gift of God. In the state of heaven therefore, all are contemplatives. The state of damnation is the total aversion of the inner personality from God, from that union which is achieved by personal communion in grace, and this turning away brings about the total cessation of inner growth and further conformation to God. Therefore it is possible to be very intellectual, very voluble, frightfully impressive in a waffling way, and to lack all principle of true union with God. This inner hollowness can be verified of atheist or priest, if the sincere orientation of the will to God be lacking.

The very experienced can judge from the impact of a man's personality whether or not there exists the fundament of true union with God, but in this path few are experienced, and most men would make gross errors. For most men who are revered as experienced and consider themselves to be so, are but worldly wise, exercise influential positions, or have achieved longevity and are long on the road. None of these things amounts to the ability to judge souls, for the gift of the discretion of spirits is the natural outgrowth of a truly supernatural depth.

The vows that men and women take to foster the love of God among themselves, and further their dedication in love towards their brethren, are not a different nature or value of love from any other sort of human affection worthy of the name of love. This must be stressed: from friendship to marriage, to the love of the Carthusian in his cell, the Love which matures men and women and quickens their mutual love of each other, is one order of being, one stream from the Spirit, one quickening from the Flame of God's spiritual being and reality. ‘In my Father's House there are many mansions…’ but the House is the same, the family of God lives by the same Holy Spirit. In man all things are Christ's, the body and the soul, the world and the Church, he is the Heir of the Ages, through his love all things whatsoever do proceed, and unto him again they return in one organic and united economy.

Love is all one genus and kind

The call of Religion is to a love which is familial, whether that call is consecrated by the official vow and a common institution or is not. That is why he or she who leaves father and mother, brethren, wife, or lands, receives one hundredfold, brothers and sisters and lands, and so forth in this present time. So long that is, as the life is lived fully and with commitment, without let or hindrance; the price must be paid. Familial too is the life of the parish gathered with its priest around the local Tabernacle which is the dwelling place of Christ with the People of God. Familial, too, is the life and love of the family, gathered around their common table, their common flesh and common board sanctified by prayer and communion in the One Lord. These are but specifications of the one genus, spiritual love, the genus of love which proceeds within a spiritual being whether with matter or wholly immaterial in nature. In a very similar way, within the genus of the living form there are many diversities of type and of, so to speak, natural vocation within Nature. Here also there exist hierarchies of perfection of potential being, and the norm of this greater or lesser fulfilment of the potential of Life is the versatility of the brain. So also in the Kingdom of God: there are diversities of gift and of vocation, and degrees of perfection, degrees which are measured by likeness to the Being of God. Just as in the kingdom of Life which is below mankind, all is of one organic nature and kind, so also the degrees of love which proceed within spiritual beings, if good and true love, are of one nature and one kind from God and back again unto God in Jesus the Christ.

This stresses the point that love is not the sexual power, love in man is no different in nature from the love which defines God in himself, much less then is it different in principle from the love of the angelic spirit. In man the physical powers of the body and of the sexual-genital faculty, are taken up into a much more complex spiritual reality. Within that reality they have a place, a function, and a meaning. Through this perspective of the spiritual soul and its making of man, they find their proportionate and limited value. They do not define or constitute any human love of their own virtue or pleasures. The potential of human love and the fulfilment it bears is not defined through the physical and material organs of sense in any man or woman, but these through the soul, and the soul's own law of good. Where the values are inverted it is not love of which we are in the presence, but disorder of soul and addiction of body. Love is always permissible, and always free, because love is the highest fulfilment of the spiritual personality. Nobody needs to deny himself love, but if a man wishes to enjoy love freely, then he must obey with exquisite sincerity those rules and controls by which and through which love lives, and in the state of Man Fallen is disciplined. To love freely, one must deny ‘free love’, promiscuous physical pleasure is not love, but cynical usage, not free, but slavery to sense, and it is sacrilege against the nature of God and the nature of a man. Fire is good, there is no life which lives without fire, yet nothing so quickly kills and sterilises beyond recall as does fire when it is out of control. The sun is fire, and the principle of life upon earth, a nuclear furnace, —but a fire which is controlled.

The vocation of love in Christ

The vocation of Christ could never have been fulfilled without love; just as Love is the name of God in all the Divine Persons of the Trinity, so also it must have been given and received by him in his human nature for his human perfection and human fulfilment. The vocation of Jesus Christ as man was a vocation of love in the essence of his Salvation and Redemption, for true love is committed to work, toil, tears and compassion, not simply sensible joy. The very human affection of Christ stands revealed in many asides and incidents, not least his love of children, hardly a feature of the rabbinical attitudes of the time, as his disciples manifested in their own reactions, and stood corrected. It stands revealed in the manner in which John almost boasts of being, in virtue of his chastity, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’, and let it be urged in passing that the text of the incident at the Last Supper does much better mean ‘who leaned on, rather than at the breast of Jesus’; only an age as enslaved as ours to sensuality and homosexuality would have thought it necessary to play down the text. It is sexual libertinism which so restricts love and its natural expression that the kiss or the embrace can be nothing but the preparation for or partial substitution of copulatory pleasure. There are other things, there are other experiences, but only the free to love may know the delight of them.

The vocation of Jesus Christ committed him to human affection, as the pages of the gospels make clear, but he did not marry nor use the sexual faculty. This was not part of his mission or vocation as man. It is not only as God, but as God made man, that the heart of Christ has long been in Christian devotion a symbol of his love. Neither is it any ‘ethical’ heart of Christ which has been revered, but the heart of Christ as it symbolises and incarnates the Person who cares and loves. To fulfil in love, and to be fulfilled in love, it is not necessary to experience the act of sexual copulation, indeed many who have had a lot of sex have never in their lives known the meaning of love. This is not said to demean the sexual act, but to emphasise the true perspective concerning man. Through the soul love is formulated and is matured in a creative law, and the body is taken up into that spiritual perspective. It is not instinct, times, seasons, nor the law of mating which is the law of love for man. God is the law of love for man, and the likeness to God is of the nature of the soul. Far from demeaning the sexual faculty, this perspective gives to human sexuality its dignity and beauty in human nature. Sex is not ‘having fun’ as even many married couples think it to be, it is a sacred power which cannot be separated from the spiritual in a man's personality, nor from the spiritual love which proceeds within a man's personality. The physical pleasure itself of the sexual act has its goodness and its rightfulness within the same perspective of proportionate balance and valuation, it should be one joy with true love, reverence, and peace of soul, not a devouring lust which thrusts aside the presence and the peace of God in the moment of its consummation. When a love truly human is properly joined to God and to a noble love of the partner, the spiritual element in that love will strive more and more successfully to eliminate the tendency to inordinate greediness in the act itself, and to make of the sexual function one common joy in the unity of the spirit in soul and in body. For between man and wife, the presence of God who has joined them abides with them in all times and seasons of human life.

The sexual union, if it is to be nobly and perfectly exercised in human life, is a spiritual act and an act of religion, because it is the act consummative of a sacrament. Among the baptised therefore, it seems to follow with theological necessity that the abuse of the marriage act, or its use out of the sacrament, is a sacrilege in the strict sense of the word. On the same principle the act should not be made an end in itself, nor used with the greedy frequency that it so often is. Of itself, apart from its relationship to the whole man, it is merely a physical pleasure which neither is love, nor can create love. It is but a function in a state of love, it is not a function of love as love proceeds from loving human nature. Even in marriage it is not the symbol of love as such, nor its ‘full expression’ as sometimes said. The heart remains the true symbol, for it is not the genital organ which expresses human love, rather the human fullness of body and of soul in the creative sanctity of the sacrament in Christ, expresses itself in a total communion of body and soul of which the copulation is an intrinsic part. It is not the forceful and occasional delectation of intercourse which is the human joy of union and communion, but that which is not dependent on time and season, the abiding spiritual and companionate bond which loves, cherishes, and endures till death do us part. Of this, the heart is the traditional and best symbol. To be fully perfect the sexual act in marriage needs to bear much less emphasis than it does in the writings of Catholic publicists whose lives have little real spirituality, or in theologians whose shallowness of theme is a disquieting argument of spiritual aridity. A theology which wanders far from the paths of mystical theology soon withers in its own desert of hedonism and agnosticism.

True sublimation of human love

Because sexuality in its more limited sense does not bear the weight of significance in human loving that modern Freudian error attaches to it, the Son of Man could come loving, and offering himself as the perfect fullness of love and yet not exercise the sexual act, nor need to experience its unique psychological bond. There is a point here against libertinism, the sexual act cannot be exercised in any but the most cannibalistic or commercial manner without effecting a psychological bond of self-giving and communion which, if belied in the facts causes inner disturbance, and is the underlying cause of so much juvenile neurosis. Just as a woman cannot abort an unwanted child without being scarred by physical and spiritual stress, so in the fusion of complementary flesh, what God has joined to pure love in communion of soul cannot be indulged as a selfish pleasure without the experienced sense of sacrilege of soul. It may not be known explicitly as that, but the inner misery and confusion will be there.

In this context we are not treating of the love of God in itself, according as this communion with him is the raison d'être of the life and vows of Religion. It is just too much. It is only the oblique effect we are mentioning, the love of the brethren and the neighbour as these are activated through the immanent grace and love of God. We have wanted to stress that the love of men and women for each other in Religion is just the same sort of love as human, but exercised at a higher specific level, as the love of intimate friendship in the world, and the love of man and wife, where these loves are truly spiritual. All fulfilling love is of the one God, and the one spiritual kind. If there were time to discuss the love of God in itself and its manifestations, the theme would be more obvious still. God is one, and always the same, the nature of the soul in all men is the same, and so there are not different essences or natures of human love, just different depths and specific powers of that one principle.

Therefore we take next the invitation of Jesus Christ to that higher way of love which exists through the vow of chastity. We consider it here less in its personal relationship of love as disciple unto Master, though that is insinuated, but rather as the love of the brethren. This way of life, in a diocesan priest for instance, is not rightly thought of as the taking of a vow of celibacy, or ‘non nubendi’ (i.e. ‘not marrying’) in a purely negative, utilitarian sense. It is to be conceived adequately in the Roman tradition of a vow of chastity according to the invitation of Christ the positive dedication of all the powers of a man in soul and body to the bringing in of the Kingdom of God.

‘The disciples said to him, "if such is the case of a man and his wife, it is not expedient to marry". He said to them "all men take not this word, but they to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who were born so from their mother's womb, and there are eunuchs who were made so by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. He that can take, let him take it." ’ (Matt. c.19.vv.10-12.)

A man or a woman may forgo the bond of matrimony for the more perfect attainment of the contemplative union with God, and the more perfect focusing of mind and heart and cares upon Christ, his values and his work. It is impossible to be a contemplative monk or nun, to live according to the observance of the vow of personal poverty, without that self-committal which is inconsistent with the married life. Not for such persons only is the argument true, it is equally valid for the priest about the parish.

The priest on the parish mission bears the ‘character’ of Christ through the sacrament of Holy Order, in a manner higher than and distinct from that assimilation to Christ the Priest which is conferred by baptism alone. The vow of chastity does not pertain to the essential character of the priesthood, but it does pertain to the full integrity and perfect manner of fulfilling that character among men. This is the example of Christ himself. The only perfect conformation to Christ the Priest, in that sense in which the priest is called ‘alter Christus’ a ‘second Christ’ is to follow his own injunction, —‘he that can take it, let him take it’. For the character of the priesthood is not a merely legal office, nor is it the mere deputation to functions and duties, as would seem to be the presumption behind so much present day rationalist theology.

The notion of the ‘character’ in those sacraments which confer one, is still not yet fully worked out in theology, but there are things which may be said concerning it. The ‘character’ whether of baptism, confirmation, or holy order, has this about it, the character confers a specific and ontological relationship in the soul to the work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in such manner that the ‘mission’ or sending which the sacrament confers in time and in the flesh, parallels the ‘mission’ or inner relationship and work of the Persons of the Holy Trinity one to another in the One Being and Unity which is God. The character of the priesthood then, while most certainly for the Church as Christ is for the Church, and not a private charism or personal adornment, is a real participation of the priestly personality of God the Son, so that the character of the priesthood of the altar, far from being some extrinsic, legal deputation, through the sacramental character is a dynamic communion with Christ in and for the salvation of men. Christ is not only the actual Head of the Church at all times, physically and dynamically so, but the first and the principal member of her Body as well. The character of the priesthood then, is a living relationship in Christ the Eternal High Priest, through the participation of his personal priestly character in the highest degree of that participation. The gift and the office is for the Church and for the People of God, but then so is the very Incarnation of the Word, for apart from our necessities as created there could be no point in the Incarnation at all.

Christ does not confer a vocation in the Church which communicates the character of his priestly office, without this being the vocation also to a being conformed in the highest degree to his own personal wisdom, love, care, and sacrifice in the work of the preparation and consummation of the spiritual creation. The relationship of the priest to the people, and his personal relationship to individuals, participates in a special manner and degree the love of Christ for each and every human person. The fruition of his priestly love is very like unto that of Christ. The love of the priest for his flock differs from the other deep loves of men, in that it carries an altogether personal authority, challenge, and commitment. There is to it a special sort of cherishing, because all the love that is given to others is for the further deepening and refining of their own personalities in the knowledge and love of God. This is the bond, the very sweet and fulfilling bond of priestly love, it derives from his own love unto Christ, and that love is a communion through the character of the priesthood.

In this love for men and women there is always the assumption, —the necessary assumption, of a characteristic power, the power that comes from authority in God, and there is too the communication of a life in the spirit, though this latter must not be separated in thought or fact from the sacramental relationship between priest and people through which this inner life in them is ministered. So very fulfilling a type of love, wide ranging and free, given spontaneously wherever true love of God is seen and recognised in another, the principle of the growth and development in particular of the young of the parish, for whom their priest tends to become the very incarnation of Christ himself, is distinct from the most sweet love of natural friendship however holy, deeper too, in its spiritual content. To the writer it seems that the priest who is married must be to a degree in a false position to his own wife and his own children in this respect. The love of natural fatherhood, even more the love of natural married communion, does not contain this particular note of authority, power, and cherishing of the inward man which derives from the priestly character, and in the love of marriage must make for an awkward dichotomy.

How can you be so sure? Well, if in early manhood, let us say, you fall very much in love with a very attractive, noble, and deeply spiritual girl, you will know at once the beauty and the sincere spiritual joy of true love as it leads on to marriage. Of course it is a very possessive love, it has to be, and it is above all the love of two equals in a mutual and complementary fulfilment. At the same time you may have found that with all the affection both natural and of grace of man and woman, what most of all draws and holds you in this love, is the spiritual depth and nobility of the girl you are loving. Not only is this love drawn from your own inner union with God, but you find a desire to foster it, to deepen it by teaching and by cherishing, and that not merely as a lover, but as a leader, and one having authority in Christ…

Then it may occur to you that you are going to feel this way, and to react this way, whenever you meet a deeply good boy or girl, you will want to invite higher and to prompt higher, want to belong to, but yet not be totally possessed by, the one you are loving, for to be fully possessed in soul and in body carries intrinsic obligations which canalise the spirit and constrain it. In this experience you have felt a certain contradiction between the love which binds till death do us part, with its claims to vocation, cares, and toil, and this higher, freer and more perfect moulding of the mind and heart. I think it is a contradiction, and having sensed it very fully in the early years of manhood, and having renounced the one to possess the other, see no reason across the years of life to revise that judgement. After all, the earlier decision did not lack its pain, however much the rightness of that decision, and also of the Church's invitation to chastity in the name of Christ, was recognised. The arguments for the weakening of the discipline of chastity in the Western Church do not proceed from any sound basis of Christian perfection or modern necessity. They proceed from a quite worldly yearning to have the experience of sex and the spiritual relationship to men as well. In these days of gracious living, and contraceptive knowledge, marriage does not carry the heavy toils that it used to even fifty years ago. Death is not so frequent, nor the constant contact with deadly and infectious disease, the human arguments from sheer utility against a married clergy are not nearly so strong.

Celibacy the perfection of loving in Christ

The essential arguments are if anything stronger than ever. It is an age when men and women move freely, exchange freely, and love freely. A priest, to meet the challenge of this time and age, needs to be the more dedicated a disciple of Christ, and the more a missioner of the spirit than ever before. He needs to be free with the freedom of God, to know the experience of sincere and spiritual love, and to know also the discipline of his sexual powers, so that, in the words of St. Augustine, he does not ‘trouble the water of friendship with the diet of unclean appetite, nor obscure the brightness thereof with hellish lust’ (Confessions, book 3, ch. I). Modern men and women are not finding today that marriage holds them to a chaste life and safety in their friendships. On the contrary, the stimulus at work of the younger woman, the stimulus of the oh so different and charming personality, the stimulus of intellectual vivacity and challenge of personality, all this is bringing an increasing promiscuity into professional life. The only safety from sexual betrayal is the spiritual life, spiritual humility, and spirituality in the way we love and in what we love in others. Knowledge comes to a priest by many confidential and uniquely sincere channels, and it becomes obvious that for so many men and women the principle of their easy infidelities is the boredom of their married lives, together with their familiarity with and habituation to the act of sex. There is the less shrinking from that which is entirely familiar, the more so when there is no ‘risk’ attached thanks to the efficiency of chemical and other contraceptives. The sexual act, in or out of marriage easily becomes just a relationship of regular pleasure in the body, not truly prompted by love, nor the expression in truth of any consecrated relationship in mutual vocation with Christ. It is the spirit which gives meaning to the physical in man, not vice-versa, and to be safe from temptation a man does not need to be married, but to be versed in the right values of life and the sincere love of God. The chastity of the priest in these days, if he lives his life to the full, can be a witness to the freedom of the sons of God, and also to the manner in which modern men and women may fulfil their own desires to mix freely and to love freely if they will pay the inevitable price of an appalling sincerity of soul and a humble, prayerful discipline under God.

The many ‘privations’ listed in the life of a priest by priests who are yearning to be rid of their vow, do not exist entirely in their imaginations, but occur only through their own miserable lack of spirituality. A priest who does not commit himself fully and without stint to God, must fall between two stools, —he attains neither the strength and companionship of dynamic union with Christ, nor can he retreat comfortably from the spiritual arena to take refuge in what can be a much more humdrum and undemanding way of life. Of course such a man will be miserable, and lonely as well, and he will cast an envious eye upon the pleasures of money, comfort and of sense available to other people. Not that the pusillanimous priest is the spiritual equivalent of the spiritual layman, God forbid, the devout layman reaches a much higher standard and pays a much higher price in internal sacrifice and sincerity, but the layman who does not try too hard can take refuge without being noticed in so many worldly and transient consolations, while from the outset a priest who has failed within himself and become a worldling has no such avenue of respectable retreat from the realities of the spiritual life and of spiritual failure.

The priest, who lives his priesthood to the full can never be lonely. For one thing, loneliness is not a state of life but a state of soul. There are many married people who are very lonely indeed. Down the years of life, not everybody attains a high standard of spiritual achievement, and to be married to an unspiritual, worldly, selfish and grossly materialistic partner is the most lonely and sad of crosses for the devout and God-loving man or woman. This sort of cross can be borne the more easily in younger years of life when children are at home, and a common interest and the cheerful presence of youth softens the realisation of a growing apart between man and wife. When children marry and move away, now in the maturer years of life, the more spiritual of the parents who has been left behind can feel bereft indeed. At all times of life, unless married couples grow equally in the deeper love of God, there can open up between them a cleft of non-communication, a certain dissatisfaction, and a sense of being lonely. The sharing of bed and of board does not fulfil the soul, the companionate love and the understanding of God must also grow together. It takes three in a house to make a happy marriage, and the third person is Christ. There is no escape from the burden of human sorrow in this life in any walk of life, only the deep peaceful love of God consoles always, abides always, and never disappoints or dissipates in prosperity or in pain.

In the life of a good priest there is too much work for loneliness and too much preoccupation with the needs of others. His is the opportunity through all the crosses and the rejections, to form the most sweet and holy of loves with those who love God, and among no age or condition of men is this more fulfilling and joyous than in the case of the generously spiritual young. A priest can lead them on with a unique privilege of power and affection, to greater heights of the love of God and Christian idealism, even to the dedication of themselves to God in the priesthood, or the more perfect paths of the Religious vocation. This sort of love, given to a priest by men, savours of the very fullness of the love of commitment men gave to Christ himself, and to the mind of the writer any other avocation or commitment, like those of wife and family of one's own, with all their holy bondage in body and in soul, must derogate from the unique belonging inherent in this Christlike commitment and eternal challenge of God to men that lasts down the ages of human history. For the love of the priest for his people, and that of the people unto a good priest, is a participation of the love of the disciple unto the Master. He who has had the experience knows from living facts.

So much is this the power and the love that comes of Christ and is returned back to Christ, that sadly and miserably, from the corruption of sin in human nature, parents and others recognising that there is in this relationship of their children to the priest, an authority and a love of a type which they cannot themselves claim from even the most loving of children, can be jealous of it rather than grateful to God. In as much as it may lead to the priesthood or the religious life, and frustrate their own more worldly and more selfish hopes in their children, they may try to break it, or make of it something which is an interference with their rights that should not be. Even this attitude is a witness to its uniqueness, power and perfection, and a calling like this, and a love like this, is so similar to that of Christ, teaching with authority, calling with power, loving with the depth of Divinity, and moving among men with great freedom and detachment of spirit, that it is obvious that to be free of other ties of the flesh and the spirit, ‘in the likeness of the flesh of Christ’ as the Fathers often put it, is the only full and perfect manner of realising in a man who is alter Christus, a second Christ, the image and the office of Christ whose character he bears for ever.

Christ does not give any call to perfection which renounces the joys of a love and a companionship which is smaller and more possessive for all its holiness and necessity to very creation, without giving more, even one hundredfold, with persecutions, in this time. Notwithstanding its sacramental holiness and power of mutual help to perfection, the state of holy matrimony is not easy to live to the height of its own perfection. St. Paul indicates rightly how the demands and the imperfections of one's partner can be a brake on the things of God, and a first preoccupation. There are too, degrees of perfection in the use of the sexual intimacy of marriage, and given the element of physical disorder in the sexual urge, the most perfect use is in no way easy. Perhaps, as Aquinas concedes, the greatest spirits are not drawn down from their height by the drag of the flesh, but most men, even in holy orders, are far from that great, and it seems superfluous in a priest to encumber himself with obstacles to the attainment of the most mature and perfect human love, for reasons which are not relevant to his vocation at its most perfect, but of necessity frequently at variance with it.

If the priest about the parish cannot live all three counsels of perfection in the strict sense, —and in the world of today we would be far more effective if we lived more perfect, and not less perfect lives, —at least let him take that more important counsel of dedicated love in chastity to which Christ invited with a clear emphasis, and the Early Church underlined with her generous response. In passing, we might also have in mind that the perfect love of God is incompatible with dissipation of sense, and that the slavery to tobacco and alcohol sometimes found among us, is not less a reality before God because the clergy, with voices hoarse with apprehension, scream ‘Jansenist’ whenever somebody puts a finger on a sore point. The Second Vatican Council has called us all, laity, priests, and bishops, to a higher, more belt-fastening degree of spiritual life, not to lower and more comfortably hedonistic concessions. There is no sign as yet of any realisation of the call of the Council in this respect among any of the states of the Church, the people, the priests, or the bishops. The Church herself has defined long ago at the Council of Trent, which also was a Council let us remember against some of our Dutch and German friends, which was attended by no less august a Person than the Holy Ghost, that the life dedicated to God under the vow of chastity was intrinsically higher a way of life than the state of marriage. It is when arrogance and worldliness batten on other things in men consecrated to chastity that the fruit of this counsel is largely lost, and then its relevance to priestly perfection is challenged, whereas in itself it is nothing more than the invitation to the most perfect union with Christ and marriage to the Bride of Christ, the encounter so vividly depicted in the gospels in which ‘Jesus looking upon him, loved him, and said to him: "one thing is wanting to thee, go sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the poor: and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me!..." ’ (Mark c.l0,v.21.)

1And the conception of love in the ‘James Bond’ books is of course typically Freudian.

2’The New Scientist’.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sexual Control and Birth Control

1. CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTO-FREUDIANISM

The traditional teaching of the Church

It is a grief to have to speak of marriage and of married love as if the sexual act were the only thing, or the main thing in life between men and women in whose lives the bond of marriage is deeply and sincerely spiritual. The problems of the use of marriage cannot be discussed adequately except in the entire context of married love, with all the issues both psychological and spiritual which are involved. Such detailed consideration is out of the question in this study.

It is obvious that many of the issues raised in these later chapters require a book to themselves. Why then raise such matters at all in such condensed form? Only because it is necessary to show the impact of the principles behind this synthesis of theology and philosophy of science upon these major issues of modern controversy, and to show the sheer coherence of the doctrine which emerges, however little many people may like what does in fact emerge in logic. The Unity principle of Finalism which has been worked out in this study from the elemental beginnings of the universe and of our own history, allows of a meaningful application to all spheres of theology in its relationship to human culture. While it is impossible to treat with adequacy of all the matters concerned, the main lines of application of these principles of thought to the debated questions of today, must be at least indicated.

From the whole doctrine of the nature of man, and the place of sex in natures below mankind, it will be clear that the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church has been in no way wrong. The perspective it has taught and held concerning the place of sex in married life, and the use of sex in married life, is the only correct one. It was therefore quite unnecessary for Cardinal Suenens to have said in the Second Vatican Council that if any attempt were made to define the traditional doctrine of the Church concerning the moral law of marriage, he would have fear of ‘another Galileo situation’, his concept of the Divinity of Christ in the Church is inadequate.

The morality of sex, whether in or out of marriage, has been very much a theological problem of mankind for ages of time before the modern sciences were thought of. If we are going to be serious at all about the claims of revealed Religion, it must be very much the province of God, before and since the Incarnation in Christ, to see to it that the initial authoritative doctrine of the Church was true, and that the lines upon which that doctrine have developed through history are also coherent truth. Sex is very much the concern of morals and of religion, it pertains to the essence of the theological competence of the Church, and we could not possibly wait until the age of science and psychology to have true guidance from God and from reason concerning the basic moral law of sexual intercourse, and the perfection of married love between men and women.

The way of perfection must lie open to men at all times through the Church, especially since the Incarnation of God, it must be available without necessary recourse to the theories, partly true, partly quite false of the modern and very inexact science of psychology. The primitive, natural, and only fully adequate way for a man to govern his nature and himself lies in the means provided by God from the first moment of Man, which is now a long way back in history, and a long time before the age of clever chemicals. The natural means of self-control to ordinary goodness, or beyond that to the highest perfection, lies in the co-operation of the soul within a man with the grace of God. Through this union with God he finds both the light and the strength to be able to control his body, and to be very much in control even when the spirit lusts against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit, because what is commanded is a matter of difficulty.

The gist of all that has been said already concerning the sexual faculty in man reduces to the teaching of the Church Catholic that the primary purpose of sexual intercourse is the procreation of men, and that the so-called secondary purposes of the sexual coming together are not independent of this purpose, nor are they equal or parallel ends in themselves without reference to that primary end. From its physically procreative nature the act itself, and its seminal constitution cannot be physically separated, as is most obvious, and what God has joined together, no man has the right to put asunder. It is very Nature here that declares the intention of God embodied in the properties of organs and organisms. The evidence of the intention of God from physical nature coincides with the historic doctrine of orthodox Christianity.

It is besides the inevitable deduction of reason from the fact that sex is a function in a state of love, not the expression of human love itself. Once the secondary purposes of the use of sexual intercourse are elevated to purposes in themselves, then, as argued already there is no moral law left in marriage or out of it. It is not possible to judge rightly of the place and meaning of sex in human life, —sex in the narrower meaning of the word, —without recourse to the original state of man's nature and personality as God intended and endowed it. If this essential reference back of Christian moral law and doctrine is ignored, then the orthodox doctrine of the Fall has been denatured, and the only remaining criterion of what is natural, good, and permissible in man's nature is what physical desire does in fact prompt unto, and what any man judges to be right for him in his case. This is just a lengthy way of saying anarchy.

There is not the slightest doubt that the perspective the Church has always entertained towards the morality of sexual intercourse in human love, namely that as a function in only the one state of love, it is absolutely wrong in any other relationship, and that the only primary reason for the existence of sex in human nature in the intention of God is for children, is completely true to the facts of life and the facts of the Religion of Christ.

The purposes of sexual intercourse

To say that the primary purpose of sexual intercourse in marriage is the begetting of children does not reduce the sacramental relationship of married love to the level of a purely biological operation. Critics of the Church, including Catholic publicists of doubtful orthodoxy, take it to mean that the spirituality of married love is measured by the biological aspect of procreation, and they protest that married love is —oh, so much more! They have their priorities wrong, and from their own outlook misinterpret the perspective of the Church.

The principle means that sexual intercourse is exercised the most worthily and holily in the communion of a love which is as spiritual, companionate, and creative as the love of Christ and the Church. The creation for eternity of a son or daughter of God is never simply a biological operation. It is the spiritual love and its nearness to the mind of God which informs and ennobles the act of sex and which unites both the joy of unique possession and physical joy in the act to the spiritual communion and love of holy matrimony. This is sex as God meant it to be, and as it still is when exercised in its most perfect use. To say this is to illustrate how spiritual and noble is the highest love of man and woman in Christian marriage, and youngsters engaged to be married would not be able to contemplate the consummation of sexual intercourse before the day their love was pledged in Christ, if they pondered deeply this subordination of the physical and biological to the spiritual in marriage. It is not the impetus of desire and the pleasure of sexual intercourse which is the measure of human love, the uncontrolled element in the desire, the disproportionate value placed upon the bodily delectation for its own sake, is not a reflection of perfection, nor a reflection of the creative bounty by which God is defined in his own Being, but a reflection of the imperfect state of human nature. Many theological popularisers, following teutonic hedonism in this matter, speak as if the Divine Immanence stood in the eternal erection of some super-sexual Orgasm called Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The absence of a female principle must be an embarrassment for them. It is not thus, the joy of the spiritual order is a love defined through perfection of wisdom and perfect proportion of valuation. To be perfect, what is physical in man must always be caught up to the focus of the spiritual nature of man, and that physical must not exceed the meaning contained in its connatural function, because the spiritual in man does not depend upon the physical, but the perfection of the physical does depend entirely upon its place in the spiritual nature of Man. Angels do not have genitals and they manage to be happy.

Descent into the libido

The spiritual love which abides always in human loving, and which proceeds from the nature of the soul, not from any state of life, will prompt a specific joy of possession in the body as well, and that joy of possession will be the diffused spiritual and physical joy of happiness in goodwill, which must be experienced to be understood. The spiritual love does not and of its own self cannot prompt a purely specific function like the sexual urge, as the expression of its love. It is utterly wrong, therefore, to say or write ‘sex is for loving’ because sex is not for loving, sex is for children, in a state of loving. This false emphasis subordinates the spiritual to the physical, and since the point of focus in the human personality means that all knowledge and experience are framed around that point of integration, it will mean in fact that all love is related to the sexual act, and is expressed through the sexual act, and is not fully perfect or fulfilling except with the specific sexual delight. This is in fact what we are getting and seeing in modern society, and this makes hedonistic cannibals of men, and is a denial and a distortion of human nature and true human love.

This is not Christianity, this is Christo-Freudianism, one of the most important aspects of that modern mélange of Marxism, Freudianism, and Teilhardism, which is the central nucleus of the new modem wave of heresy in the Church. It implies, though this is not always realised by its proponents, a Pantheistic concept of God, the unity and confusion of matter and spirit in one order, and the Teilhardiste perspective on the nature of Original Sin, as part of the limitation and disorder of matter-spirit in ascent. After all, while the Teilhardiste perspective of man refers to the ascent of being through ‘directed chance’, one may emphasize either the directive, or the chance, according to context, and according to personal taste. This twisted vision of sex is to be found in the unofficially released ‘position point’ of the theologians who advocated ‘Reform’ of the Church's teaching on birth control, in the debate within the Papal Commission. The fact that it may be found in all essentials in books or pamphlets which bear the imprimatur of premier Sees of the Catholic Church does not make it right, but only emphasizes the crisis of theological error in the Church.1

From a connatural and altogether easy development of the same viewpoint comes the whisper, which will soon be raised to a shout that Jesus Christ was a homosexual, because he ‘loved men, women were only friends’ and because ‘he did not marry, and why did he not marry…?’ and there is that shocking business of John, the pretty young boy of the party calling himself for identification the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’, and reclining intimately on the bosom of the Master at the Last Supper, etc., etc. This is not a reference to a certain Canon of the Anglican Church, who claims that his meaning was grossly misrepresented in the press, but the restatement of what I have had and heard personally from university graduates and undergraduates on a number of occasions in recent years. Some of them found it a ‘consolation’ and reassurance concerning their own way of living and loving.

This is the inevitable slavery of soul which is the final nadir of ‘free love’ linked to a view of man which ignores or denies the doctrine of Original Sin. If the nature of man as we find it is the normal for man, then man ends by being denied all power of love which is not dominated by his privy parts, it is a sad travesty of the destiny of the sons of God and the crown of creation. The challenge to this modern mentality, above all through the theses explicit and implicit on which it depends, is the entire theme of this book. From the theme of this work and the doctrine it contains can be gauged the justification for the answer made simply here by way of statement: marriage and sexual intercourse had no part in the life of Christ, because Christ is not a human person, but the Person who is God manifest and operative as the Environer of man through a human nature. Marriage and the sexual communion are not intrinsic to the perfection, joy, or fulfilment of the human person in any case, human love is essentially spiritual in order, and its deployment in marriage is one path of fulfilment, but not the only one, and not the highest one. The height of human fulfilment in love is determined by the destiny of a man in God and for God, and thus the life given to God in prayer, works, mission, and spiritual love of God and the neighbour together with dedicated chastity, is a higher fulfilment of the human personality, and even more fully human. The norm of the human fulfilment is God himself, not anthropoid apes. This is the justification of the celibate, religious life.

To this it may be added that Christ himself would be expected in any case to honour his own invitation to the dedication of a life of chastity for the fuller bringing in of the Kingdom of God, according to his words in St. Matthew, ch. 19, vv. 11 and 12. This should have answered in its own right, the question posed by Canon Montefiore concerning why Christ did not marry, whether he believes in the Divinity of Christ in the literal and historic sense of orthodox Christianity or not. As a fire-hardened and incorrigible Roman Catholic may one add the following: not only so, but because Christ was perfect as man in his human nature, therefore he did not experience the involuntary surges of disordered sexual desire in any case, for in him neither sin, nor any of the effects of Original Sin, had any personal part. The effects in him of Original Sin we men wrought upon him in body and in soul, and to understand that the reader must be referred again back to the chapters on the salvation and redemption of Christ.

Sexual intercourse as such is not the perfect expression even of married love. The physical can express the spiritual only to the degree in which it is the vehicle of the spiritual operation. So the head and face do very perfectly express the majesty of the wisdom and the love of man, for the brain is the supreme organ of human nature.

The phallus however does not constitute the most perfect expression of married love, for the love of marriage is a work and union focused through the soul of man through and in the body, and it does not, this work, this union, and this many-sided love, consist in the maximizing of sexual intercourse. It consists in the totality of care, cherishing, faith, communion, sacrifice, and prayerful dedication to God and to family which defines the many-sided relativity of human love in one sacrament. There is no one adequate symbol of human love, in marriage or out of it. The nobility of the human person as it shines out in the face and mien is really the best, but since the office and meaning of the privy parts are consummative of a sacrament only through and in the soul as giving form and meaning to man, as opposed to all other flesh, the heart may as well stay as the most acceptable symbol. There was sex on earth long before man, and long before true, human love, and the sexual act will not bear the enormous burden of meaning that Rosemary Haughton and so many other authors would seem to put upon it.

When sexual intercourse is exercised in union of mind and heart with Christ for the making of men, it is an act of love in the unity of the whole personality of a man and a woman which is most deeply spiritual and sacred as well: it is an act of religion as well as an act of love. It is an act of joy in possession and in mutual communion, but for all of this to be true it must be the spiritual which dominates and gives form and significance not the animal act as such, and it is through the soul in union of love with God that the fervour of animal passion is reined in, and is attuned to the love in dignity of the partner, and to the meaning and proportion of this bodily act in the wisdom and good which derives from God. This must be true, for perfect love without any sense of embarrassment or lust, in the existential order of the experience, not merely in the essential order of relationships of doctrine.

The effect of grace is to deepen and to heal, and the root of imperfection which remains in our actions and reactions, as well in sexual urge as in eating and drinking, the flare of anger and the snarl of power, does not deprive us of inner merit, nor of deepening in the good before God and in union with God, not so long as the primary urge of the spirit in a man is upwards to God, according to his wisdom and his will, in humility and in constant effort to deepen and refine. So understood the primary meaning of sexual intercourse carries with it a fulfilment and complementary love which is of the primary and not of the secondary purposes of wedlock, for spiritual and sacramental love, joy of possession, and the fulfilment of human, complementary vocation in one flesh, are all taken up to God and to his throne in one unity of harmony.

‘Evolutionary development’ in this context

An evolutionary development in the significance and the natural use of sexual intercourse in man is not possible; it is not possible because the soul is distinct in order from matter, and does not admit of evolution in its spiritual nature as such. The nature of man, and the physical meaning and relationships of body and soul in terms of function and fulfilment were the same in the first man on earth as they will be in the last one. The only principle of inner perfection possible for man, either as an individual or as a species, is the compenetration of the human spirit and the human order by the divine working of God, and that is what the Incarnation and the Church is all about: there is no other form of development. We are not becoming God or gods, bit by bit. This is the point de départ of orthodoxy from the Teilhardiste position so clearly manifest in the ‘progressive’ argument for radical change in the Church's assessment of love and of marriage.

In any case, what sort of absurdity is this ‘more perfect dominion and development’ of man over his basic nature, urged upon the Church by this point of view? The use of rubber goods, the introduction of coils, the consumption of hormones which are certainly an interference with the perfect health and function of nature, and in the case of the hormones and the chemicals, perhaps more dangerously so than is at the moment conceded, is no ‘further perfection’.

Perfecting of nature proceeds only from an inner principle

Anything which perfects, improves and develops physical nature in the fundamental physical harmonies and rhythms of nature. There is no method of artificial contraception which is other than an interference with nature, actually or potentially dangerous, and never looked upon by the users as more than the lesser evil. To name this situation man's fulfilment of his vocation to perfect his nature and its processes, or worse to perfect the order of Nature as creation, is sheer humbug. There is no milder word accurate enough to describe it. Whether what is done be morally lawful or unlawful, this is certainly not the intrinsic or even extrinsic perfecting of nature in its relationships to life. The reasonably exact parallel which comes to mind is the use and impact of some of the modern pesticides which were so widely deployed and so hurriedly forbidden. The injury, frustration, or poisoning of Nature is not its intrinsic perfection.

Only the spiritual soul in man, itself powered by direct union with God through grace, can supply continuity of principle and of order in the perfecting of human nature and of Nature as the creation. This way, the power and the balance comes from within a man through wisdom and love in God, without rubber goods, chemical, or hormonic poisons. This way is very hard for men in the present state of human nature, which is so far removed from any sort of ‘natural perfection’ in any possible order of human fulfilment, but it is also a way which truly fulfils in peace and joy of spirit. The reluctance argues not the foolishness of God, nor the haphazard evolution of ‘divine consciousness’ as Evolution proceeds: the difficulties argue a great flaw in Man, and the remedy will not be to whip up to a frenzy the overdeveloped craving of sense, while applying chemical and mechanical irritants to prevent the natural result of the operations of organism. This may conceivably solve the population problem, while further deepening the neurotic and psychotic unbalance of the personalities of men. The ‘sex is made for loving’ school of thought may write in the tones of Hollywood ‘sacred background’ music but the Flower children, very much the children of this world, are their spiritual offspring.

If God had meant that from the nature of things, and especially from the very perfectibility of human nature across the ages, sex should have been ‘made for loving’, because that is ‘what marriage is about, a couple do not get married just to hold hands across the breakfast table do they’ etc., etc., then it must be conceded that God is a bungler indeed. We are in the presence of a God who intended that sexual joy should be the expression of a love which is a ‘lifesharing’, a God of explosive love of which sexual delight is the very physical symbol, but who had not the wisdom and intellect to manage to separate out the physical delight of sex from the intrinsic reference to procreation. Surely He could have thought of a way to do it better? I mean if we poor risen apes can manage a bit with surgery, rubber goods and chemicals of various kinds, surely Infinite Wisdom could have gone rather more than one better with perfect health of mind and body, and without any disruption whatever of human personality? The point is not that our methods of birth-prevention by these agencies are crude, for we may find very much better ones, but that He just has not made any intrinsic provision, and the problem has been with man for endless ages, but men did not much complain, being resigned from their inability to do anything about it, to ‘the will of God’ embodied in the all too obvious facts of human life. If the Catholic Christian Church were at this stage of her history to accept the specious arguments of the Christo-Freudians as a sign of the wisdom of God and his will in creation, little Audrey might indeed laugh, and laugh and laugh: precocious child, she would know that it was a darn sight more likely not that God had suffered a very late conversion to broadmindedness and common sense, but that the chap did not exist at all!

If there is now a flaw in human nature, not a flaw in God's creative wisdom, if man has made a god of sex in the abuse of Nature and his own nature, then the whole matter is summed up and understood in one glance at the crucifix. It will also follow that the ‘new’ philosophy of love and marriage propagated by the Christo-Freudians is only the old ‘tanha’ the thirst of desire, which the sages of the East knew so well, the ‘concupiscence’ of Christian theology, the lying hedonism of the Fall in human nature, fitted out in the latest ‘gear’ jargon of a scientific age. It is not man as God made him. Today man has power to prevent the consequences of easy sexuality and can ignore the reverence due to the sexual act. The temptation to set up the Phallus as the great God Incarnate and his symbol returns more terribly than ever. In essentials though, human nature since the Fall is the same, its problems are the same, and the answers are the same: ‘plus ça change, plus la même chose’…

God did not fashion sex ‘for loving’ but that the Incarnation might be the gift of creation from the potential of its own resources for the enfleshing of God. There can be no other ultimate reason for the division of the work of life-making so relatively far up the tree of life except it be seen as the means by which Nature may cooperate of its own for the Word made flesh in the womb of Mary, the natural vehicle of the flesh and nature of a man, without the subjection of the Divine Person to the creative law which makes a human person.

If this is the true meaning of sex, then the love and friendship which binds a man to a woman must be seen indeed in the bond between Christ and the Church. In that very fact less, not the more emphasis must be given to the sexual act and pleasure in its own self, for the love of man and woman must be measured by the entirety of the spiritual care and formation by which a human person is made in co-operation with God from Whom alone comes the human soul, and measured too by the spiritual Fullness of Christ in the formation and training of mind and heart which presents back to God a son, or a daughter of Christ, noble and glowing with the love of himself. That indeed is a work of love, and that is the full and true meaning in human culture of human sexuality.

In strict propriety of language the act of physical sex is not ‘joy’ much less ‘ecstasy’ in its own right. It is a natural, organic pleasure, akin to eating and drinking and other works of the human senses. It comes to have a higher richness than pleasure as such only when it is taken up in the unity of one experience, with that genuine spiritual happiness which is the spiritual-physical joy of all true love, and the holy and fulfilling joy therefore of married love. It ceases to be joy, and becomes pleasure, and may even sink to be craving, lust, or habitual release, according as there is less and less of the spiritual union in its content, from the manner in which it is used, or the manner in which the physical is emphasized above the spiritual, or made an end in itself without any spiritual content at all. This can happen also in marriage, and is the more likely to happen when the physical is made to bear the burden of the spiritual content, instead of being taken up, refined, and restrained into truer focus by the purity and power of the spiritual bond. One is talking now not of the abstract and the essential order, but of the existential and experienced order of the sexual relationship.

It is from the frequent sense of incompatibility in their sexual experience of each other, of an element of animal craving, of lust in the purely technical theological sense, together with the spiritual and sincere contentment of holy love, that men and women, and most especially women, come to feel a distaste for the sexual act itself. This is still very much a fact of married life, and it does not yield to harangues from theological popularisers concerning the remaining dregs of Victorian inhibition and clerical malformation. It is a fact which proceeds from a difficulty deep in human nature, and the more the pity if so few have the guts to say what really causes the phenomenon in normal, sensitive and cultured people.

At a level of human love much more superficial, it is the direct collision of the spiritual with the ungoverned urgency of the flesh in their love-making, which causes in men and women, especially the young, a sense of sheer mutual cloying, dissipation and downright contempt for each other. There is no substitute for love, and love is the spontaneous gift of nobility of soul. We all possess genitals, the acquisition of nobility of soul is rather harder going.

From the same root of confusion in human love, a sense of tension between ‘the law of my mind’ or say better the law of my soul, and ‘the law which is in my members’ there derives the conscious or unconscious refusal of otherwise educated and cultured people to discuss the problems of sex with their children at any level of real depth. They may tell a priest, these parents, ‘I had a pretty rotten introduction to life in my first job, and even now one does not seem to get it quite right…’ they are blissfully unaware that most of mankind is saying the selfsame thing. Few people do get it really right, in theory or in practice, and it is difficult to say who does the most damage to the mind and heart of the young, the self-assured publicists of no great spiritual depth who rush in where angels would fearfully tread, or the parent who commits treason by deciding that the children must find their own way through the marsh as their mother and father did.

The personalities of men and women are not in the real order of experience divided into neatly sewed up departments. The personality is made and defined in our living by the depth of spiritual insight and spiritual joy which we here and now possess, a level which is always rising or shrinking, but never remaining static for very long. There may be from principles but two or three possible attitudes and standards of human behaviour in love and in loving, but in approximate achievement if there are any two thousand couples, there will in fact be around two thousand different standards. This is not to say that the objective standards of sexual behaviour in marriage are entirely ‘a matter for the individual conscience’, removed from the direct authority of God in the Church. This sort of attitude is modern hypocrisy, different from the institutional hypocrisy of the Victorians, but just as much sheer unmitigated humbug. If Christ is literally God, then he is still the norm of the absolute truth, even when He is an awful nuisance. Absolute standards from clear principles can be given and are given, but the experimental living of the norms of perfection, whether in marriage, in the single state, or the religious life, are a very different matter. There are many degrees of approximation to the living of that perfection by which your heavenly Father is perfect.

Saints, unlike wagon-jumping theologians, are not mass produced. Saints are very rare, and in the existential order of their lives, thoughts, doctrines, and deeds, very much a minority movement. Yet through the ages it is the saint which the Chinch recognises as the norm and exemplar of her own true life and ideal, it is the saint, not the representative of the spirit of the age who is raised to the altar in that recognition of heroism in approximation to God Incarnate. The Church is the Church of the saints. It is a doggerel cliché that life with the saints in heaven is glory, but life with the saints on earth is hell! Actually, it is only purgatory. If the saint be genuine, it is not the fault of the saint, but the judgement of God upon sinners who realise that where ignorance is bliss, 'tis disaster to be made wise. That is why men crucified the Exemplar of the saints. There is no reason on earth why anybody should want to crucify the Christo-Freudians.

The secondary ends and birth control

In practice, when people speak of the ‘secondary ends of sexual intercourse’ they mean as a rule sexual intercourse when it is not desired to add to the family. It is clear that without any question of spiritual imperfection there can be many reasons for not wishing to add to present family. The problem is stark and in essence simple, and there is no point in evading the issue.

The teaching of the Church is clear, it has always been that procreation in the context of deep family love is the primary meaning for sexual intercourse in the intention of God, and that to this end all other ends and reasons are both secondary and also intrinsically subordinated. This is to say that the secondary ends, however we name them, ‘the expression and fostering of mutual love’ etc., are not ends and purposes of the sexual act independent of the primary end, and parallel to it in nature and valid right. From this teaching it follows that the exercise of the sexual act for these secondary ends, whilst directly frustrating the procreative possibilities of the act, is not ever lawful.,

It is precisely this authoritative position of the Church's teaching which has been abandoned completely by Christian communions in the Protestant tradition, and which is fiercely challenged to the point now of schism or heresy by many members of the Catholic Church, lay and clerical, at the present time. From the perspective of this synthesis of natural philosophy and of theology it will be clear that the position taken up by the Catholic Church is perfectly correct, whether from the natural law, from the nature of human love, or from the authority of the Magisterium of the Church, which last is nothing more than the voice of Christ himself everliving and teaching within her.

To this frank and unpopular assertion something else must be added from which a number of theologians flinch even among those who are willing to accept the traditional doctrine of the Church, no matter what may be the ecclesiastical or social consequences. It follows with an inevitable logic that in the original intention of God, apart from the Fall, and the many, many stresses brought by the effects of sin into human nature, sexual intercourse was intended to be used only for the procreation of men, and was an expression of marital love in that sense and in that context only.

Any Christian theologian who does not accept this position, which is also the historic and traditional presumption of the Church through the ages, reduces his theological position to sheer bumbling incoherence. There are often the best of reasons, whether personal or social for not desiring to add to the number of one's children. There are also frequent and urgent reasons of health and strength why a woman should not be asked to do so for some years, or perhaps not at any time. If the use of marriage as the expression of married love in its own right, and with the direct prevention of children were part of the will of God, then any form of contraception not repulsive to the mind of any average Christian is perfectly lawful. The intention of God does not become sudden and manifest just now in the age of ingenious techniques, it has stood from the beginning.

If God intended the use of sex independently of its procreative potential as the expression of marital love, to foster marital love, or as the perfect expression of love, —and they do not always insert the word ‘marital’ into this last, —then contraception has been lawful at all times in human history. There have always been sincere reasons for not wanting to add to a family, and there have often been reasons why a man who was truly kind and loving would see to it that a given wife did not bear another child for years, perhaps not ever again. In more primitive days, if what the orthodox theologians have called the secondary purposes of sexual intercourse were as equally and independently valid reasons as the primary reasons, it would follow that sodomy or the more ‘natural’ forms of mutual masturbation were perfectly justified. Christian morality therefore, on this reckoning, has always been in error.

Even in these days, if the secondary ends are valid ends of marital intercourse in their own right without any subordination, it is not clear why masturbation or the use of an alternative channel, elegantly conducted, should not be just as lawful as the use of the contraceptive appliance or the various pills. It is all a matter of how the alternatives are viewed by a given couple, and the primitive alternatives have at least the advantage at present of natural simplicity, complete reliability, and medical safety. I know there are ‘committed Christians’ among married people who agree with this appraisal. Indeed, the perspective on sex of the non-Catholic Christian Churches, and of so many Catholic theologians and prelates, could be made, it seems to me, more elegant to principle, and more ancient in theological pedigree, if we say that the so-called secondary ends in sexual intercourse have always been equally and independently valid ends of sexual intercourse and sexual life. For this reason the Lord in his Wisdom has designated the secondary use of other privy channels besides the genital tract to serve the secondary ends of sexual intercourse without any intrinsic risk of conception. This is a very neat theological position, and I recommend it to progressive minds, together with an apology for such completely justifiable sarcasm.

The older theologians lived in ages less sensitive about their own imperfections, and less conscious that the intrinsic norm of moral perfection was the level of married perfection acceptable to any individual Catholic journalist. Deplorably conditioned by hard and primitive living to calling a spade a spade, whether in Anglo-Saxon or in Latin, they spoke of a permitted use of sexual intercourse ‘in remedium concupiscentiae’ which may be rendered according to the modern idiom as ‘for the tempering of disordered natural desire’ in the condition of human nature since the Fall. It was, such use, still subordinated intrinsically to the primary end or to its physically natural possibility. This is still in all essentials the position in theological principle of the use of the infertile period, in the present orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church.

It is nonsense to say that the deliberate use of the infertile period is exactly the same as any other form of contraception, or that it is just as artificial. It is certainly not the same, or there would not be so much outcry about its insufficiency and risk of pregnancy. The potential of conception native to the act of intercourse is not obstructed, and therefore the primary end intrinsic to the physical nature of the act of sex is not subordinated to other purposes. The Catholic couple who use this form of family limitation pay homage to the intention of God embodied in the content of nature, and therefore to the moral law of their sexual relationship as this follows also from the mind of God when He created that relationship in the flesh and its potential powers. The fact that they may do so with reluctance, makes no difference to the fact that they do so.

But, you will say, this clumsy method of alleviating abstinence is just as artificial as any other. There is the careful calculation of days from the calendar, perhaps supplemented by a thermometer check at 5.30 in the morning, —it is hardly spontaneity! I would grant that it is certainly not spontaneity, and much of the psycho-logical mentality will be the same. However, it cannot ever be quite the same. This anxious and meticulous desire to know the exact state of nature does still take place only because of an overriding acceptance of the need to respect the intention and priorities of the Lord of human nature as these things are embodied in the organisms of natures. People who go to so much trouble to avoid writing off the moral law of human nature, are never in exactly the same case as the merely disobedient, who also take every care over their appliances, balance their pills judiciously, or cultivate the arts of perversion until perversion becomes in them a second nature.

There is an element of misery, God knows, in all this machinery for avoiding conception, worse to many souls than plain abstinence. This is the sheer witness that sexual intercourse by nature and consequence is thoroughly procreative, and so it could not have been the original intent of God that it should be otherwise used. It is evidence equally that a little more love and a lot less sex would do much to leaven married life. It is written that ‘perfect love casts out fear’ and if it had been of the creative wisdom of God that man should use sexual intercourse for the connatural expression of love in marriage without fear of offspring, He would have provided in its manner and season for such natural use without these tensions which follow from the necessary peril of conception.

One way out of the misery is to teach again a higher, nobler, and more spiritual use of marriage. The attitudes and mentality of the manuals of moral theology have been often deplorable in this respect, containing no elements of spiritual idealism, and some of downright misguidance. The most perfect perspective on the idealism of the use of sexual intercourse is that of Aquinas; the language may need modernising, but the doctrine is right. Gold is always gold, the coin may need a new image and superinscription to be a current usage, but the metal cannot be bettered. The doctrine of Aquinas accepts the full idealism of the Early Church, learnt of Christ and developed by St. Augustine, and purifies it of the minor errors which influenced by a less correct understanding of soul to body, occasionally mar in an incidental manner St. Augustine's presentation of the ideal in sexual intercourse.

2. ARE CONCESSIONS POSSIBLE?

Concerning principles and perfection

Whatever may be true of human nature as God intended it, and however true it may be that the only perfect place of sexual intercourse in human love is for family, account has to be taken of human nature as we find it. As we find it, sex is a vastly overdeveloped faculty in human consciousness, overdeveloped in its physical impact and in its psychological valuation, and giving us a pseudo-natural condition in man in which erotic desire and sexual attraction in the broader sense of the word sex, overlap as if by very nature. Add to this the corruption of the young by the debased standards of their parents, and the books and drama of an age of the most hypocritical decadence, and a state of life is reached in which very many well meaning, good-hearted, but really quite nominal Christians assert with all sincerity that they can neither agree with nor live up to even the minimum standards and ideals of sexual behaviour proposed by historic Christianity.

There supervenes the argument of the population pressures in some parts of the world, the argument too, though sociologically it is specious, that the underdeveloped nations cannot possibly reach an acceptable level of development unless there is an immediate respite from rapid growth of population. The arguments concerning population in its general aspect will be considered in the next chapter. Over the habitable globe as a whole the argument is entirely specious. Eventually there will be a population problem on the world scale, but not for some generations yet.

It depends of course on what you think of man, how you regard man. If you think that the earth is for man and not man for the earth, then you will consider the earthly bringing into creation of spiritual persons with an eternal destiny to be one really important function of life in the terrestrial environment. The alleged ‘destruction by man of man's natural environment’ will seem to be begging the question. There has been such destruction, but it has been based on stupid or rapacious farming for the most part. The well farmed and intensively cultured lands of the Western hemisphere, broken up by spacious and well-engineered roads, —at least, in some countries, —and intelligently planned belts of town, are an immense improvement upon hundreds of miles of dreary, silent forest or tangled savannah. Man has always been altering his environment, and on balance the environment is much the better for it. The purpose of this planet does not consist in keeping out the neighbours from one's ill-tended three acre paddock, or preserving as much as possible of the world as a beautiful desolation in the name of ‘Conservation’. Some of us would not share with Professor J. Huxley, the delectation of being able to follow the destructive migration of several thousand head of antelope across Africa, and so forth. It seems a small, horribly snobbish viewpoint, deriving from the pessimism of the Humanist and other atheist viewpoints of man. They see man as just one more animal, all the more beastly and boring for being so numerous and so very much like oneself. There is a genuine local population problem in some parts of the world, and the personal problems of individuals remain at all times.

Is any concession possible to the alleged social needs of mankind, or to the weakness of individuals within the minimum orthodox framework of Catholic doctrine? Ecumenism or not, let it be said frankly that Catholic doctrine is the only Christian doctrine worth considering. The alleged ‘doctrine’ of other Christian communions (and for the author the Greek Orthodox Church is not ‘other’) is just one long, regular retreat back to whatever seems to be the ethical tolerance level of the average decent chap and his wife at any given age in history. The Church of England in particular might be called the very barometer of moral pressure against the harsh perfections of Christ on the weakness of human nature. So much for the Divinity of Christ, the Light of the World, the Redemption of the debased, and ‘all power is given me in heaven and upon earth, go therefore teach all nations… and behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world!’ (Matthew, c. 28, v. 18.)

There does not seem to be any play for important changes in doctrine here. There may be alleviation of the pressure of personal difficulties from various other factors.

For instance, it is quite possible that a cervical swab will be invented which will, without danger or injury, give a reliable indication of the onset of ovulation. This, or similar ‘tests’, perhaps chemical, may make it less hazardous to rely on the infertile period. Different drugs and hormones do so many things in diverse ways, and one discovery follows another so closely, that nobody surely can do more than clarify the principles, and try to make an honest assessment of situations as they arise.

There does seem to be a tendency which biologically is absurd, for some Catholic popularists in theology to speak as if the ‘safe period’ were God's own special way of birth control for his peculiar People. A manner of course more difficult and troublesome than the ways of other people, but then it's a hard Religion, you have to go to Mass on Sundays, and eat fish on Fridays,2 and you must expect that God's provision of birth control for Roman Catholics will follow the same strait and narrow way… The infertile period is not God's own natural manner of providing contraception for Roman Catholics. It is a certain point in a cycle of rest and renewal of which a couple may take advantage for the secondary ends of intercourse, hoping in their personal minds that they will not conceive, but doing nothing to obstruct the primary potential of their sexual act.

This does not entitle theologians to regard the so-called ‘safe period’ as a natural period of birth-control which is in some persons, and at some ages difficult to calculate exactly, or be sure of anyway in practice, but a sufficiently natural fact for it to be artificially copied and regulated by the use of hormones. It is first of all not a static period of infertility, but a continuing cycle of biological activity which has a natural high, and a natural low point of fertility, the fertility depending on the likelihood of ovulation, and the fitness of the uterus to receive a fertilised ovum. It is said by some doctors in the teaching hospitals that sexual stimulation alone may be capable of releasing the ovum out of due time, and if this stimulation, operative upon the pituitary glands or otherwise, is capable of fostering the womb to receive and accept implantation of the fertilised ovum, then of course the infertile period cannot be considered to be an entirely ‘safe period’ in all women.

The use of hormones which regulate the state of the ovaries and induce a condition of quiescence during pregnancy to prevent ovulation or implantation, or otherwise to change the state of the natural cycle while the womb is void, was declared by Pius XII to be a form of ‘temporary sterilisation’ and that of course in essentials is the judgement challenged by Catholic theologians and doctors. The judgement seems hard to challenge on theological principles, for to induce sterilisation does not mean necessarily to inflict external injury or force upon organism, but to interfere by the introduction of some foreign body whether mechanical, hormonic, or chemical with the natural functioning and natural relationships of meaning of that organ relative to the processes of the body as a whole, for reasons extrinsic to the meaning and function of the organ.

To preserve life it can be allowed, the organ is subject to the good of the body of which it is a part, but in Catholic teaching it has never been allowed just to invert the priorities and valuations of God as these are embodied in human nature. The essential principle it would seem, is not whether there is an intrinsic distinction between the use of a mechanical contraceptive which vitiates the act of intercourse, and a hormone which frustrates the potential of the act afterwards, but whether what is done does, of its nature and intent physically, not just morally in the will of the doer, subordinate the primary end potential of the sexual function to the secondary ends, or does give to the secondary ends an independent and parallel existence on their own divorced now by human agency from the primary end potential of the function in act and in its cycle of natural consequences.

It seems that any of the chemical and hormone substances do thus subordinate the primary end potential of the sexual act and the functioning of the sexual glands and organs, to these secondary ends. Neither does the introduction of the coil seem to differ from the other agencies of mechanical obstruction. In so complex a matter one must bow to medical judgement as to whether it is possible to produce ‘the infertile period plus’ and yet not be guilty of contraceptive interference. To use the term ‘extended repose of the ovaries’ instead of ‘temporary sterilisation’ does seem to be a delightful bit of humbug. To copy the infertile period very exactly by chemicals or hormones, to fix the organs ‘as if’ it were the natural period, and so forth, is not to help nature or cure nature, but just to imitate the process of nature by artificial agents. It looks to me like sterilisation. Orthodox theologians would not be so embarrassed if they did not concentrate so legalistically upon the ‘frustration of the act’ and did not seem to put the entire moral law into the act itself. They have been hindered too by defective recent attitudes to Original Sin, and defective perspectives of the nature and implication of concupiscence, in the theological and not the sexual meaning of the word. They have been hindered by a woefully deficient insight into the reality of the Natural Law, its relationship to organism, and the relationship of the originally obedient flesh to the spiritual soul. All of which insight refers to the state of human nature and natures below man, apart from the damage inflicted by moral evil, which can come only from the free will of a spiritual being.

The essential and of itself simple issue to be considered in the Church's teaching, is whether that which is done by human artefact does in fact subordinate the primary purpose potential of the sexual function and organs to the secondary purposes of the sexual act, this subordination understood of the physical ordering of nature. If this subordination of the primary meaning to secondary man-imposed meanings does in fact take place in the organism, then the will of man has replaced the will of God against the order of Nature and the Natural Law, as much as occurs in the fact of concupiscence which is the result of Original Sin. Such an inversion seems to be gravely wrong, and will of course argue a state of perversion of intention also in the personality of a man, as well as in that which is done to the flesh.

In time different circumstances will no doubt arise. It will become possible to vary the intrinsic fertility of men and women by the addition or subtraction of substances which exactly replicate natural hormones, etc. Such degree of natural differentiation seems to occur from nature in any case. To depress the intrinsic fertility of man by putting it into low gear so to speak, would not seem to be the intrinsic subordination of the primary potential to the secondary ends of sexual intercourse, since the primary end could be realised and at times would be, even as now the use of the infertile period does not interfere with the intrinsic possibility of the order established by nature in the organs of sex. One reads that variation of fertility would be a relatively easy matter, if only such variation did not usually carry with it a depression or loss of sexual desire ‘which is unacceptable’. This does of course underline the whole human difficulty in this matter, and the way in which, in God's mind and intention, sexual desire and procreation of family go together intrinsically and without regard to secondary ends which exclude the desire for family. The best and most holy way of birth control is then to order the use of one's sexual intercourse to the original and aboriginal mind of God. That alone is the perfection of holiness and pure love in human personality and family life.

Further theological considerations

So vast has been the literature and controversy on this matter that only certain perspectives can be offered as they seem to follow within the framework of orthodox Catholic doctrine. The implication that the Church has taught error in this subject-matter, does teach error now in its official doctrine, or had to wail for 'modern sciences’ to understand the true nature of human married love and of the moral law of marriage —this sort of approach is rejected outright.

Theologians who are looking for development of doctrine in this respect, must subordinate the development to the connatural norms of theological development. That is to say, they must invoke an existing principle within theology, and must show that it can be applied to the new circumstances without derogation or denial of other principles existing in theology which are just as organic to the orthodoxy of Christian teaching. Christian teaching is Christ's teaching, everliving in the Church, not the common denominator acceptable to comfortable people at a given age of history.

There are only two principles which, it seems, can even possibly be invoked, and one is not hopeful of either of them. One is to extend the connotation in theology of the use of marriage ‘in remedy of concupiscence’. This, after all, is an extrinsic principle in theology, in the sense that its admittance is a concession to the stresses brought into human nature by original sin and its effects. The fact that the Church has always allowed this extrinsic principle means that Christ also has allowed it, and it is admittedly a principle of indulgence, of the permissive in view of weakness, that means. Yet, let us observe that the Church, interpreting through time the mind of Christ, has never yet allowed this principle to be used to the direct infringement of the connatural priorities inherent in the sexual act and the functioning of the sexual organs, that has been made most clear, whether in ‘Casti Connubii’ or elsewhere.

Could the principle of ‘in remedium’ be extended to cover the personal problems of individuals and the social problems of mankind since sin? Personally I do not think so, but this is precisely what many orthodox theologians are trying to prise from the Bishop of Rome. The power of the keys, they say, extends even to this, —to recognise that the power of man over matter, life, and even death itself, is bringing an intolerable tension into human personal and social life, a stress truly quite distinct in dimension from anything which has heretofore existed. Man's moral achievement does not improve in line with the growth of his intellectual power, and the natural relief offered him by death is being eroded away. In a short time men may have the power to extend life by years, even by decades, a point which underlines the unique status of the modern question.

While the Church continues to teach the same doctrine and the same intrinsic standards of perfection, the power of the keys would mean that even Christ himself, recognising the intolerable stress which from the scientific period proceeds from man's intellectual and moral imbalance of nature, allows a dispensation from the fullness of the Natural Law, even as in the Old Law, God allowed Moses to make such a dispensation in the matter of divorce which otherwise ‘from the beginning was not so’… (Matt. c. 19, v. 8.)3

It is an attractive position, and if it could be granted without the undermining of Christ's work among men, any priest of heart and experience would be glad to see it conceded. It is attractive because it does not amount to a direct devaluation of the moral law itself. The Church would still teach the same doctrine and the same objective moral standards, but in effect she would be saying that forms of contraception which objectively were gravely sinful, and hence excluded from holy communion, were now permitted as the lesser of two evils, as in effect a positive imperfection, or even a venial fault, but not as grave sin. It does not escape notice that earlier ages of the Church's theologians did consider certain uses of marriage, for instance use when a woman was pregnant, to be venially wrong, but modern theologians would dismiss the matter with a shrug. One must not digress into a vast field, but if any kind of pill is permitted as not amounting to sterilisation, it is going to be impossible to restrict mechanical contraceptives if it is found that a substantial percentage of women cannot use it safely, or that it has to be discontinued after a maximum dosage, for a long while. The principle of dispensation, if possible, does avoid this difficulty.

The Church might offset the danger of moral devaluation in her sexual theology by defining the primary purpose of sexual function, and the subordination to it of other ends, and then proclaim the perfect striving for this ideal as the only perfect norm while making allowance ‘secundum indulgentiam’4 for direct or doubtful inversion of these priorities to meet the new crisis brought into human life, etc... Well, there it is, the developments usually proposed seem rather to be derelictions of doctrine without admission of error. Whether the Church could extend the principle of ‘in remedium’ beyond present limits is for the Church to declare, and since the apostles are at sixes and sevens in this matter, for the Pope to decide.5 In view of this sort of crisis across the ages the Lord declared: 'Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for thee, that thy Faith fail not, and thou being once converted, confirm thy brethren.’ (Luke c. 22, v. 31 and 32.) We look to be confirmed: only Peter has the grace and status.

It is unworthy to sit on the fence simply because one is not certain which ground will be found the true ground. It may be suggested that confessors ought to be allowed maximum leniency in dealing with souls in this difficult matter, in presuming the ‘material’ rather than the formal grave sin, the more so since most people have never had the chance to learn a high ideal of sexual life. It does not appear, however, that in fact the Church can ever change the matter of the Law of Christ, or dispense in the essentials of that Law once declared. Another way of saying this, is that the mind of Christ declared once in the Church, is the divine and eternal truth, and can never be remitted. In the example alleged from the Mosaic permission of divorce, it is mostly taught that God ‘changed the matter on which the Law of God operated’. Though too technical to pursue here, this statement can have a perfectly intelligible meaning. Even so, the text can be interpreted another way of Moses, it can mean that Moses himself, a man of his times, did not advert to the imperfection of the people, the times, and the Law as he gave it, and God ‘winked at the times of this ignorance’ (Acts c. 17, v. 3U). God then did not intervene to correct him, but allowed ‘invincible ignorance’ to prevail until the age of greater grace… In either case the certainty is that Christ, challenged on the issue of perfection and truth, admitted the imperfection in the Mosaic law, and revoked the permission of divorce in the name of truth and of the will of God which was from the beginning.

The whole teaching of Christ is an uncompromising exhortation to ‘be you perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect,’ and he presented himself as the only norm of human truth, good, and moral perfection. There is no indication that the revocation of the standards of objective truth and of perfection even under the greatest stress, ever was, or can be, part of the mission of the Son of Man. Challenged precisely on this issue of human stress, the encyclical ‘Casti Connubii’ invokes the grace of God, which is to say our living union with Christ, as the means by which the commandments of God are always possible, and as the guarantee that God does not ask nor command the impossible. The measure of a man's possibility is not himself, nor the powers of nature, but God to whose image men are framed, and through the communication of whose Life they are vivified. This also is a ‘law of Nature’ because it is the only Law of Life for created spiritual natures.

If the encyclical letter of Pius XI on Christian Marriage did not lower the standard of Christian life, as did the Lambeth Conference immediately preceding it, the documents of the Second Vatican Council reaffirm the validity of that earlier magisterial document. Christ himself spoke of days of trial to come, when the disciples would long ‘to see but one day of the Son of Man, and it will not be given unto you…’ (Luke c. 17, v. 22.) This confirms the stress indeed, but contains no hint of surrender. There is also the prophecy of a great defection from the Church which is to precede the end of the present Economy of time, at least as it affects this planet, and the assertion that when the Son of Man shall come again, he will not find faith upon earth any more than before, and that because iniquity has abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. All of this points not to any Teilhardiste consummation of human development, but rather to a heightening of crisis, as man, forced individually and socially to rise to greater heights of sanctity, to match his growth in intellectual power in the likeness of God, fails to rise to the challenge of divine grace, and in that failure re-enacts again the tragedy of the Cross upon the Body of the Church, upon human nature and human culture itself, until the agony of the second crucifixion passes into the final Resurrection of all things in Christ.

There is no hint in the prophetic vision of the New Testament of any surrender of the witness of Christ in his Church, either upon faith or upon morals. The magistracy and witness of the Church through the ages is the magistracy and witness of the Christ who ever lives within her, and there is no indication that the pattern of perfection or the words which proceeded from the mouth of the Word made flesh can ever change for the less, but rather must they develop and deepen down the years of human history, for the work of God is creation, it is his work, the vineyard does not belong to other husbandmen, and only in himself can it be consummated in natural and supernatural perfection.

For this reason it does not seem that any radical change in the doctrine the Church teaches concerning sexual intercourse in marriage is possible. It is sure to come about that methods of preventing conception of much greater refinement will be perfected, methods concerning which it will be hard to say whether they amount to sterilisation in the sense of the older theologians. For instance, the possibility of the inoculation of a woman against the male sperm may become a real possibility, or some other way may be found of diminishing the potential of conception to vanishing point, without the total denial of the primary end and purpose of the sexual function. What will the Church decide then? Most moral theologians may be glad to rush in and point out the analogy with the permissive use of the infertile period, and feel that now all their worries are over. Yet will they be over? If the power of man over matter reaches a level at which sheer hedonism can be the rule of married life in youth, this will in no way save Christian culture, or save the youth of the peoples for the Way of Christ. If the impression is given that in marriage, after the second child, the secondary ends can be equated in fact to the primary end of sexual intercourse then unmarried teenagers and others will quickly tell their parents, and, the Church, that the rule of ‘do as you like’ in marriage is equally true for themselves, out of marriage. Sex will have become the Great God of the human race and of the age.

The increase of the power of man in the image of God, whether in knowledge through the intellect, or in omnipotence very nearly, through his will, must inevitably bring with it an increasing spiritual and moral crisis. The only adequate way to control power, and to orientate power, is the Equation of perfect Wisdom and Good, and so long as this is not understood in the creaturely manner, it is one way of expressing the Blessed Trinity of God. The equation of perfect wisdom in the personality of men and women at any rate, means to live according to the wisdom of the Mind of God, and the good of the Will of God. The nourishment within the inner man from which he will find strength and health enough to do this thing, Itself is the communion of God. Such must be with certainty the path of the Church in the grim years to come before her now; let perfection not opportunism be preached, no matter what the confusions and perplexities of judgement which are thrust upon her. The Way of Christ, the truth of the Perfect Son of the Father who is Perfect, is always clear and manifest, and constantly ignored and explained away, even by theologians, bishops, and now cardinals. Let the People of God then, at least know what is the path of perfection, let them be presented with this ideal of truth, integrity, and love, less than the fullness of which is never the best way, even if it be a tolerable service of God. At present the people receive no such teaching upon perfection, especially the exercise of perfection in the ideal of married love. In the ordering of their loves, in their controlling of their natural passions and the powers of human life, they are taught only the barest minimum of the good, and over the rest there is allowed to hang a vast conspiracy of silence. It was not always so in the life of the Church: certainly it was not so in the days of the great Schoolmen, it is not so in Gregory the Great, or in Augustine, any more than in Aquinas, and it should not be so fearfully and feebly so now, this smallness of soul in the Church is the very infection source of her decadence.

Can concupiscence become aggression against the race?

From the outset in this study solutions or principles which are manifestly erroneous in theology or which redound into assertions that up to now the Church has been teaching men error or denying them the full and free use of the truth have been rejected. Among the orthodox principles of development which might, prima facie at least, be invoked to allow a freer use of contraception, there comes to mind the principle of justified defence against the aggressor, even against the aggressor who is only ‘materially’ such, that is to say, one who is not responsible for his evil actions.

Is it not possible to say that failure to control growth of population, a failure which is due to personal inability to control the sexual passion, or personal failure to do so in fact can become a menace to the life and happiness of human society, and that therefore the public authority could require that after say the third child, sterilisation should be given in the interests of the common good? There is certainly a sense in which irresponsible parenthood could become a crime against society, even as in sluttish homes it seems to become one now against the children themselves, when they are born not of love or care in any sense, but of utterly careless and negligent sensuality. After all, in the intention of God, grace and wisdom would control the number of children to a family, and as the world began to fill up, it would presumably be more spiritual to have fewer children than the many. It does not seem inconceivable that sexual concupiscence in man should become a menace to the species, as the death rate diminishes, for of its nature the faculty of procreation calls for some control. The obvious control is the power of the soul, enlightened by divine grace, and the living of the highest standard of love in marriage, but when that does not take place, if numbers are not controlled otherwise, may not a form of real aggression, materially speaking at least, be considered to be taking place?

There does not seem to be an obvious flaw in the invoking of the principle itself, but it does not follow from this that the principle could be used to justify sterilisation, which would in fact be a penal sterilisation after a given number of offspring. There is nothing certainly in the documents of the Church up to now which gives any real hope that the doctrine of the Church concerning the use of sex can be much modified, and the Second Vatican Council expressly denies to the public authority the right to control the number of children in an individual's family, or to take over the right of the parents to decide how many children they shall have. The Council points out quite rightly that to have a large family, which one can and will bring up well, and in devotion to God, is a gift to God for time and for eternity, and this element of human vocation does not come under the power of the State.

Theologians might hedge, and urge that the Council speaks of the present time, when the world as a whole is far from overburdened with men, and its resources are barely touched outside a few highly developed countries by the magic hand of science, and that in any event the Council is denying to the public authority the intrinsic right to control family life, not the extrinsic right to insist that individuals live up to their duties to the community. If the Church concurred that in fact, in years to come, to exceed two births a union in a life time, a life time in which death may have been greatly deferred if not quite abolished, were a form of aggression against the human community in an overburdened world, would it not then be lawful for the public authority to urge their duties upon individuals in a penal way, if they did not recognise those duties for themselves?

The principle of lawful resistance to the aggressor, whether the aggressor be formally and knowingly such, or merely actually but ignorantly so, is a just principle in itself. It is exactly the same principle as the principle of the just war. It may come about in the modern world, that for reasons of the evils unleashed no war could in fact ever be justified, but the right of the individual or of society to resist aggression by the use of proportionate force will never die out, otherwise in the end no civil sanctions could at all be justified, even the policeman's baton would be an immoral weapon. It is more than doubtful whether such a principle could be extended to permit either temporary or permanent sterilisation ‘in poenam’6 as a general principle. In any case, it would apply only for reasons of the common good of the human community, and would not justify the individual couple who did not wish to have any family for purely individual reasons, even good reasons.

The effects of such a policy could and would be just as much an invitation to sexual chaos as any other form of extrinsic contraception. Neither does it seem to be compatible with the spiritual dignity of a man's personality to attempt to offset the wound in man's spiritual nature by a direct mutilation, even by chemical or radioactive means of high sophistication. It would do nothing to cure the root of concupiscence, and it would demean man in the essentials of his likeness to Christ, demean him that is, in his Christian personality.

What then is to be done? This issue deserves a very long discussion and to be correlated to other spiritual and cultural aspects of modern man and modern life, and that detailed study cannot here be attempted. To state mere principles, without developing them so that their genuine relevance may be vindicated, is an unfortunate business, and often misleading, but the risk in this subject-matter and within present limits, must be accepted. We can show the certainty of God's existence, and of a divine economy which culminates in Man, in the spiritual being. We can show also the reality of the soul, and God's care and provision for the human person, body and soul together. We can show in the very and most appalling fact of the Crucifixion the reality of sin, and the commitment of God to cure, and perfect, to bring by redemption back to salvation. God and man then are active partners in a common work. This means that God can, and God must be trusted. The agnostic and the Humanist would order the world as a splendidly appointed stud-farm in which the human personality will be enslaved to sensuality and degraded and starved in its spiritual powers. If creation had a beginning below man, given the spiritual soul it has an ending beyond and above man. Nothing could be more reasonable. Therefore God should be trusted in his providence for mankind, and men should be encouraged to realise their potential as individuals, and in society, by developing, controlling, and fulfilling themselves through their intellectual and moral powers, in co-operation with the indwelling of God within them. This is the tremendous eminence which lifts man above the beasts of the field: a man is not a piece of living meat to be reared and castrated at will.

There is no intrinsic reason why we should urge on Christian people a family which exceeds three or at the most four children, but let the decision and vocation of those who wish for more and will rear them in happiness and devotion remain. None of us can measure the value of a human person, while it is the common experience of modern nations that there can be and will be many good reasons for wishing to have a small family, without inevitable selfishness of motive, however often sheer selfishness is in fact the reason. We should work for a society in which youngsters can be pure, in which they are not destroyed by deliberate sexual seduction from the early teens by the filthy, commercial liars of the ‘cultured’ world of today. These lepers of the age of science have no right to corrupt, invading the living rooms of the nations, dropping the ordure of their spiritual incontinence upon the souls of the children. Let men and women know and attempt to live the very highest standard of married love with a more realistic, down to earth, and tranquil valuation of sex. Unless it is worked upon by constant titillation from new bodies and personalities, sex is, and must become a very matter of fact physical event of life over the long years of life together. Unless it is blindly and stupidly worshipped as an idol, it will be obvious to all, especially steadfast married couples, that sexual intercourse is a very much over-rated experience.

Let the Church do what her Founder came simply and solely to do —preach perfection as the Father is perfect, not the barest avoidance of mortal sin. Let her children strive for perfection in all things, and in the matter of their love in marriage make use of such assistance to human weakness and a nature cruelly handicapped by stress and confusion, as the Church does now permit, and may in the future be able to permit. It is certain that scientific knowledge will, in the future, be able to mitigate much more the difficulties —and to many they will seem such —of self-control of body and soul by wisdom and by grace, by a more exact knowledge of the processes, times and seasons of nature.

This is not a denial of the rule of perfection, it is only realism. The principle of ‘in remedium’, ‘unto the control of desire’, is already there in the theology of the Church. Of this principle as applied to sexual intercourse, St. Thomas Aquinas remarks a little sourly that prayer and penance are even better cures for disordered desire. Quite right, but the bruised reed thou shalt not break, and the smoking flax thou shalt not extinguish… not everybody is in fact going to rise to the spiritual generosity of the Aquinases of the Church. The prudent use, and especially in younger days, of the spiritual rule of the Church, with the self-control and implicit recognition of an ideal and a purpose that it does contain, together with permitted mitigations, such as the exact knowledge and use of the infertile period, or other methods which the Church may later be able to approve as not directly inverting the intentions of God, is a direct means of spiritual progress.

The way of perfection is not recognised as the perfect in an experienced manner, and is not given the real assent of the mind, except from the level of perfection just below it. This is common spiritual experience in the Church. A young lad may begin to love God with greater generosity in prayer, and Mass-serving or going, and little by little he rises to the vision of the priesthood, and offers himself. The ascent is by steps. It is the same in married life. People do not in fact agree or see that the only quite perfect use of sexual intercourse is for family unless they have acquired a deep spirituality together over the years of married life. If they honestly cannot see or find in their own sincere experience of soul that there is any imperfection in other use, so long as they are obedient to the Authority of Christ in the solemn teaching of the Church, they will profit rather than lose in their love of God by use of such helps to control as the Church can permit. The more they strive to love God and serve him as first priority in all things, the more, I would say, they will of their own begin to suspect the truth of the ideal presented in this study. If they do not in the beginning or even later sense it as the truth, they will not lose spiritually by living and loving in the best and holiest way they know, knowing full well that what they do and exchange has the full sanction of Christ, and of the Church, for this sanction is one Authority. Nor can I see any reason why couples should not learn to ‘lie in each others arms’ as the novelists would express it, without the act of copulation. This is not in any way perversion or dishonesty, so long as purely incidental sexual delectation is let pass by without being directly sought, encouraged or accepted. It is quite irrelevant in such a case whether emission takes place, etc., it is the will of a man and a woman, and the good as it is sought, in its proper order of valuation by the spiritual intellect and will, which constitutes good and evil. There are many times, especially during pregnancy, when to exercise intercourse is an obvious imperfection against nature, and therefore the will of God, but so to lie and to love belongs to the sacredness of their state and mutual work with God in bringing life to be, and to be in happiness and security of love. It belongs to the constant love of marriage, so it seems to the writer, that the spiritual and physical joy of unique possession should be so realised and expressed, and it is wearisome and ridiculous that the maximisation of physical copulation should be equated with this joy. This it is which dissipates the soul, and puts a black hand of spiritual death upon spiritual love, and the recognition of what love is and what is the freedom of love. The experience of the writer is not only that men and women can behave as suggested, but that it reassures in an increase of love, and with time sedates sexual concupiscence in the specialised sense of the word. One should learn to love, and not to be terrified at the pseudo-natural aberrant excitement of venereal desire, and while the price of truth and achievement here is an exquisite sincerity of soul, it is the unique and narrow path of complete spiritual understanding and liberation of spirit in the learning of what love is, and its many-sided freedom in sincerity and truth.

The Church too, should be more earnest and steadfast in the elevation of the status of Motherhood to a holy vocation in life: explicitly, and of set purpose, for this is the meaning of sex. The feast of the Motherhood of Our Lady, introduced as it was to mark the vocation of Mary, through her womb as Mother of God in the literal sense, might be made a Holyday of obligation for married people at least, if not for all the Faithful. Why should not the Church introduce into her liturgy the concept of the Holyday which marks the state of life and vocation common to the vast majority of the People of God? In the modern world men will learn to reverence their wives in the sense mentioned and intended by St. Peter, ‘likewise you husbands live considerately with your wives, bestowing honour on the woman as the weaker sex, since you are joint heirs of the grace of life, in order that your prayers be not hindered’ (1 Peter, c. 3, v. 7) if they see in their wives a vocation sanctified in the birth of Christ, through the vocation of Mary, Virgin and Mother.

If men and women reverenced more explicitly the only meaning of sex that matters unto God, the creation in love for love in him of sons and daughters in whom he takes all his delight, they would not be able to use sex except in harmony with the wisdom and love of God in the original destiny of human nature, and with a sense of reverence and nearness to God. As I understand this, the request of Mary for the gift in the Church of ‘Holy Motherhood’ is the meaning and implication of the phenomenon some years ago known as the ‘Madonna of Syracuse’. If the Mother of God weeps, it is for the little reverence and love in chaste honour shown to the state of holy motherhood; for every woman who bears in the womb, even from lust or rape, yet is in a holy state. The more so, if it is right to say that every human being is a catechumen unto God, in the infusion of the soul, within the womb. Our Lady weeps also for the social greed, the pride of life that ignores the poor, or the coloured skin, the whole gamut of lust and covetousness which desecrates the most holy vocation of the womb, the seat most sacred and tender of life in Life, for time and in eternity! The Church should exalt in her public life and liturgy the ideal and the Feast of Holy Motherhood: this is the only spiritual and absolute answer to the hedonist degradation of the human personality, of sex, and of womanhood.

For the rest it was no Pope nor lesser doctor who said: ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the prophets, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. For truly I say unto you, until heaven and earth do pass, not one jot or one tittle shall fall of the Law, until all things be fulfilled. He therefore who shall dissolve one of the least of these commandments and shall thus teach men, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven, but he that shall do and teach all, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.’ (Matt. c. 5, vv. 17-19.)

This says all there is to say concerning the thought and stress of the Church upon matters of human perfection: the norm of that perfection is God, and Christ must have been aware of the temptation to devalue the standards, or he would not have given us this clear reminder of the norms, and of the temptation. The work of Christ in the Church is the proclamation in the Church of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing less than the truth. Theologians, and especially those from our nordic countries who as four hundred years ago, begin once again to mistake hedonism for fulfilment, sex for ecstasy, and licentiousness for freedom of spirit, should grow up, and growing out of this foolishness of spiritual juvenility take note of the words of Christ, and the implicit threat it contains upon the judgement in both time and eternity on their own real status. There is only the One Theologian who is the real authority upon Christian theology, and his ‘opinion’ and his norm stands to be read and understood by all those who are not deliberately blind.

1All these sections were written some months before the release of ‘Humanae Vitae’ and I see no reason whatever to rewrite them. —The author.

2or did, till just lately !

3This was written before ‘Humanae Vitae’ but is exactly the position conceded in fact by the French hierarchy. It is still in opposition to ‘Humanae Vitae’ though, in principle and fact.

4’for human weakness’.

5All these sections were written before ‘Humanae Vitae’ and in view of the correlation between the theology here presented, and the encyclical, I have thought it better not to make alterations. —The author.

6in penalty.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Scientific Society

1. CONCEPTS OF OWNERSHIP AND POWER IN SOCIETY

Personal control and social power

In this the final chapter of detailed study of Christian theology and philosophy in its application to the modern world, an attempt will be made to sketch the impact of the Christian way of life upon the problems briefly indicated. It is the embryonic concept which must be defined, to illustrate its unity of philosophic principle with what has gone before. There is no pretence made here of bringing to birth a detailed system of thought concerning society.

For a long time the concept of ownership has been dominant in the social thought of the modern world. Preoccupation with its problems helped to give birth to Marxism itself, and since the rise of Marxism as a world philosophy, the concept has passed over into a philosophic principle of economic and social evolution. As the word rings upon the mind of an Englishman, ‘ownership’ is too small a term to denote all that is meant by the ‘economic Man’ of at least the earlier thinking of practical Marxism. The issues of ownership in society have not been issues simply of holding land or farms, or being able to be a small craftsman or producer and so forth in a given social milieu. The issues of ownership have been issues of control and power within society, not only over the standard of living of citizens in their relationship one to another, but in terms also of the development of personality, of knowledge, of control and direction by a man over his own life and that of his children. It is a very complex issue indeed, and even today in honest discussion, there is very little appreciation of how wide a connotation needs to be given to this notion of ‘ownership’. Because of the distinct nuances of meaning contained within the word, it is often quite overlooked that gain of apparent ‘ownership’, of effective control by individuals over the earth as their means of living and personal fulfilment, are counterbalanced by a loss of power and effective control in some other direction of social life, the nature of which is overlooked just because we do not think of it as a form of ‘ownership’.

The background problem

Ownership is taken in common speech to mean that you hold the title deeds of some form of property, productive or otherwise, that you can ‘do as you like with it, it is mine, I own it’. Yet ownership in this personal context is not a large enough idea to include, in popular speech, all that goes and has gone to the rise of the interdependent and organic society of the scientific revolution, whether it be the society called Capitalist, the society called Socialist, or the mongrel offspring of them both, so dear to British tradition, which is a distinct unity out of both philosophies. The notions of authority, jurisdiction, power, all related ideas, pass over into the relationship we call ownership, and for that reason the origins of the Capitalist society for instance, cannot be well understood without reference to the religious and philosophic disputes of the modern age.

Professor Tawney, among others, was perfectly justified, in those brilliant studies, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and The Acquisitive Society to have made this point and to have underlined it. The conception of ownership in its narrowly popular meaning, could never have explained the massive edifice and ramifications of Marxist philosophy. From the very nature of the achievement and the emphasis upon social unity and centralisation, it was power in all its forms in the society of men, which was truly the issue at stake.

There exists a very strong analogy, strong because derived from intrinsic principle, between the Reformers' denial of the authority of the hierarchical Church in the definition of doctrine and enforcement upon conscience of the moral law, and the denial also of the social control of profits and of usury, of the rights of guilds, and of the claims of the poor upon the rich in society, which marked the end of the medieval period.

The principle of the authority of private judgement in doctrine and in the interpretation of the scriptures as the sole final norm of religious belief, was not, in the beginning a declaration of the rights of anarchy. Relying unconsciously upon the spiritual capital of Christendom which survived the break up of its living unity, the Reformers formed points of organised religious life around strong personalities. In the case of the non-episcopal churches in particular the system needed to attract or to elect strong personalities after the death of founders, to continue the organisation as a type. This did happen. In like manner the merchant adventurers and the new trading classes in general, needed to provide strong personal control and formation over the rising mercantile empires of gifted individualists.

In the course of time, sects multiplied in the religious sphere, then later still with the beginnings of rationalist criticism, a process of agnosticism began to diffuse through the structure of doctrine. Fewer and fewer ‘basic truths’ could be called reliably self-evident to men of honest goodwill. In industry also something similar happened, as concerns became larger, the lack of stability and security inherent in the state of society was felt more and more. The new Capitalist had so very much to lose by conditions of riot and sedition, or sheer governmental incompetence. Standards of honesty, spheres of mutual interest, all these things were found not to be necessarily self-evident and reliable. The countryside drained its high birthrate into the cities, and the tense individualism and sheer financial egoism of Capitalism sharpened the realisation of class, and its consciousness of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Some of the confusions, and much of the social progress of the last one hundred years have been owed to brilliant solutions of social difficulties, which used the general power backing of organised productive society, without a clear realisation of what was being invoked, and without for that matter a principle of corresponding social obligation. Instances would be the growth of ‘advances’ by banks, and the formulation of the limited liability company. Both of these, as we find them by the middle of the last century, are pledging forward and relying upon the work, the organised moral stability, and the military power ultimately, of the society itself. In this, and in very many other instances which could not be considered here, the various grades of social class, including very much indeed the working class, were relied upon to produce or to react with intellectual and physical support in a given manner against possible crisis. This was essential to the success of the new institutions, and it was the utilisation of a form of ‘surplus value’ which Marx considers very little at all, but covers entirely under the exploiting function of the Capitalist state. Had he considered it in a more constructive and less negative manner, he might have found reason to doubt whether the dialectic could, after all, be relied upon to bring about the inevitable Capitalist collapse, for the ‘surplus value’ here drawn upon, and so often by way of an exploitation, is the mutual membering together of men in charity and familial love which is the real root of society and community itself.

Today as well, society bristles with unconscious assumptions of doctrinal and moral principles which survive the decline of doctrinal Christendom, and for which no purely extrinsic defence can be furnished. First, there is the presumption of the worth and lovableness of men, that in them which is worth redeeming so to speak. Without the doctrinal inelegancies of the doctrine of sin, original and actual, and the need to watch and pray lest you enter into degeneration, it appears as the presumption of the starry-eyed type of socialist that Man is prone to goodness from his youth, and hard to prevent from becoming always much better. Poverty, large families, poor housing and poor education, these are the real causes of anti-social behaviour and crime.

The young have never had it so good, the crime rate stands at an all time high, drug addiction may become a national scandal, but sexual addiction already is. To have a baby on the side in some areas is a teenage status symbol, soon to be replaced probably by having a National Health abortion instead: the more often the more fabulous. Yet still our Humanist apologists dash the tears from their eyes and recite bravely the old, old story: somehow, somewhere it is the fault of Religion!

Other principles of our national democracy which are taken for granted are the absolute value of the human personality (but not in the womb) the virtues of democracy as a way of life, the inherent social and electoral wisdom of the average solid citizen, honesty about money, the immunity of officials from bribery, the unthinkableness of perjury and so forth. None of these values is self-evident, and they are taking a good hard knock in society just now, and there is nothing the would-be reformers of men can do about it, unless they can establish a principle of absolute and firm authority which carries its sanction within the minds and hearts of men.

So also in the beginnings of the age of modern Capitalism the formative drive was a fierce, individualistic idealism, sometimes for achievement in the good, sometimes for money and for power, mostly for all of these things commingled in the one philosophy that God helps those who help themselves, whilst wealth was the distinguishing proof that God loved the Protestant nations and abhorred Papists, and that the United Kingdom was in particular the Israel of God.

It was not simply ‘surplus value’ which the merchant classes arrogated to themselves from the men, women, and children who toiled beneath them, when the civilisation of Western Europe entered upon the Industrial Revolution. It was also ‘surplus social power’ and ‘surplus jurisdiction’ as well. The shape of society in its laws and enactments became property conscious and property centred, the moral virtues and education itself became the necessary tools of the new economic order, and from the market value and social alignment of such attributes, part of the mercantile Establishment1 itself, with a common vested interest.

This was not the fault of the Church, not even in the Protestant countries, it was the fault, or better simply the impact, of the driving power behind society which had made Protestantism itself in the beginning. That driving power was dynamic individualism, and it was centred in the bold, tenacious, and intelligent merchant and technical class. The virtues and skills which made for stability and were so good in themselves, became organised more from necessity than from choice in their social relevance, around the entrepreneurs.

This is the age-old tragedy inherent in the wound of sin within human nature, that corruption of any kind generates ‘reforms’ which are equally erroneous by excess. What is true in religious belief and doctrine is true also in social and political doctrine.

The social relationships of the Middle-Ages, such things as the guilds, their rights and restrictive practices, the primitive Christian socialism of the Church as a welfare service, the laws against usury, even the rights of the peasantry over the common lands in some places —all these had begun to grow obsolete. More ominously the social class structure of the Crown and the Court, which was representing less and less the true weight of power within society, was beginning to grow obsolete. Perfect reformers are rare and late on the scene, and are so often themselves crucified in the fulfilment of their mission. The perfect reformer will find a middle way, not because there is virtue in mediocrity, but because truth so often lies somewhere between warring extremes. Reformation of ideas and institutions means to find a way of developing out and developing anew the spirit and the traditions, indeed the entire organic relationship of an old truth to a new deployment in a new context. The Reformers of the Reformation were not perfect in any such sense, and they had destroyed not only the ‘de facto’, but the ‘de jure’ authority of the Church, as part of their mission of ‘reform’ to mankind.

Society therefore lost its sense of responsibility for the poor, the sick, the needy. The Religious Orders were no longer there to cope with the work, and life is so very busy. The lands and revenues which provided the money for such welfare had been transferred, a little to the public weal and to public schools, and the bulk to the Crown or private pockets. The duty of individual charity remained, but the Church through her religious life was no longer the special organ of God's care in society for the broken and for the wretched. It was long before the State could be or would be organised on such a basis. The concept of a social duty, of the public servant as the steward of God in society presiding over claims of social justice and social charity, the concept of stewardship within a family of men, this, with the closing of the monasteries, was an irrelevance.

Laissez-faire: the faith of society

In the room of the law of charity which interdefines the good of the individual and of the neighbour in a common equation of policy and of action, there supervened within society the practical, individualistic law of laissez-faire. This is the law which states with complete sincerity that maximum freedom for egoistic competition, the maximising of self-interest in society, will work like a natural law, which it was claimed to be, and will work for the greatest good of society as a whole.

In the last century the same mentality underlay the original conception of evolution as the law of the development of the living form. There are still thinkers whose outlook in biology is dominated by such a concept of integration through maximum competition, and an indication has been given already that this type of Nominalism or Liberalism in the philosophic sense, infuses the psychology of Freud. Such could never be the law of the synthesis of the exact sciences in the ascent of being to complex reality. As mathematical, such sciences are complex equations, harmonics of function and being, and it was at least unlikely ‘a priori’ that biochemistry and biology which are built upon the basis of these harmonics, could be sciences of anarchic competitive individualism. Nevertheless, this was the presumption, the theory of the survival of the fittest was constructed along these lines originally, and the presumption stands naked and without camouflage in the expression ‘law of the jungle’ as a reproach to the laws of economic Capitalism in its classical form.

Neither in biology nor in economics does the law of maximum self-seeking work to the good of the greatest number. If the Law of the universe and of all natures is indeed an harmonic Law, this could not possibly happen, because the stresses of maximum self-seeking do not add up to harmonic law. In economic life the Marxist critique of Capitalism as a system of violent oscillation from boom to slump was a true analysis, and the long prophesied breakdown of world Capitalism failed to come about because Marxism itself was in error concerning the nature of this crisis in Capitalism.

Marxism was in error in this respect first because the Law of Dialectic is not, in fact, a Law operating upon an intrinsic antithesis. The antithesis is only incidental, and it derives from human sin. The Marxist would have been better served had the world focus of Capitalism been in a Latin nation, here very likely a classical break-down would have occurred. Unfortunately the world focus was in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian complex, phlegmatic peoples with a pragmatic sense of compromise, and they proved that the dreadful heresy of ‘Revisionism’ could and did work: ‘by evolution not by revolution’ is itself the unconscious proclamation of an act of faith in an harmonic and ordered social relativity among men. The Marxist was in error also concerning the nature of ‘surplus value.’ The theory is, much better was, that the Capitalist arrogated to himself the value of the product, usually his selling price, less the cost to him of his necessary overheads, and his labour at subsistence wages. The theory in its day had a very high proportion of truth in it, but it never was the whole truth, and of course today in advanced countries it is not the truth at all.

Even in the days of the ‘Communist Manifesto’ it was not true in principle, and being true or false in principle is the acid test of any theory that must be worked out in deeds and in institutions. It made insufficient allowance even then for the technological contributions, both the direct and the indirect, the conscious and the unconsciously inspired, which entered into machinery and invention of every kind. It would be impossible to evalue the economic worth of most technical inventions in terms of money, the more so since while they are quickly superseded in ages of technical ‘breakthrough’, the more effective process or machine which succeeds has been inspired by the prototype. One would have a real job of it, trying to estimate in terms of money value and surplus value the amount now due to the man who invented the wheel! Technicians, unlike inventors themselves who mostly are robbed and copied, are paid wages or salaries much above the subsistence level, and no matter how much work a Capitalist gets out of his men, in the cases where he himself is an organising genius active in the concern, he rates more than his subsistence value. The advent of the large limited liability companies does change the matter very much, and does add more point to the charge of the confiscation of surplus value. The gravamen always existed in the charge, but the individual capitalist or family firm could claim that much of the surplus value was put aside for reinvestment, which was a social function as well as an individual profit. The growth of the anonymous concern where the maximum profit accruing to shareholders was the measure of success did of course lead to lop-sided development, and to economic slump and every kind of malaise. Even here though, the profits of industry would be in large measure returned to industry for reinvestment by direct or indirect routes. At no time did ‘surplus value’ represent total exploitation, because even for the profit of the Capitalist classes, part of that value must represent a social function —wages, at least at subsistence value for the workers in the future, or all profitability would cease. It was never total exploitation, but it is true to say that the social claim it represented was regarded by Capitalists as individuals as something incidental to their rights, and subject to their whim. The transfer of a process abroad, leaving a whole town in unemployment and misery, would not, in the bad old days, have seemed to the average entrepreneur to be anybody's business except his own.

Some flaws in classical Marxism

The first and greatest weakness of classical Marxism, as has been argued in some detail in the early chapters of this book, is that intelligently interpreted it ends up at the necessity of the existence of God. This is in technical slang, a really nasty ‘bug’ in a system of thought which must run on Atheism. Another weakness is the definition or lack of precise definition, of the field covered by ownership itself. For the Marxist, ownership of the means of production which involves the employment without full partnership of minds and bodies other than one's own, becomes a form of exploitation of the neighbour, and the whole of history is based upon this interpretation of the ownership of productive goods. It is the logical reason for the justice behind total state Nationalisation of productive resources.

Yet exploitation of this kind is conceded to be a law of Nature itself. If everybody were a true and full scale partner, no progress would be made at all, along much the same lines of thinking by which a camel has been described as a horse designed by a committee. The aura of wickedness which surrounds productive ownership, is related to the intrinsic principle of war, of the antithesis that is, which is at the heart of material being itself, until being reaches the very consummation of evolution in perfect beatitude. The various forms of oligarchic dominion over the masses, the rise of the state and its power, of laws, and of Religion too, all of this is an instrument of sanction and of fear which is conceded to have been an aspect of human progress in the past, but which now is time-dated, and passes at once from the quality of the necessary and venerable to that of the obscene and hateful. In this perspective, the law of the evolution of man through social stages involves the human race by necessity in a greater degree of intrinsic misery for the greater number, until social perfection is reached. Unless there is the exploitation of the average dim masses by the brilliant and strong few, there will be no progress, and unless there are suffering under-dogs there will be no communist paradise in generations to come. The earlier one is born into history and society it seems, the less intrinsically happy will one be, by the law of Nature. This of course is a quite defensible position, especially if man is only matter, because then there must be, by evolution, an intrinsic progress in the quality and the happiness of mankind. Final communist man will be the loveliest thing that blooms on earth.

For the handful of exploiters and their minions, things will be pretty good within the limits of power over the material environment. If moral categories applied, and without a personal God or a spiritual soul they do not apply in any strict sense, these primitive exploiters and their supporters through Religion, could console themselves with the thought that even if evil, they were truly a necessary evil. It is a defect however in a philosophy where the general and universal social fabric erected by man everywhere when in ascent is coloured for the student and the man in the street by the emotive concept of the class war and the beastly exploiter. While using the theory of the necessary inherent contradiction upon Hegelian lines, the Marxist has in fact capitalised, if the word may be forgiven, upon the Christian tradition of a basic charity in the ascent of being, and in the development of human society. The wicked had to be, that good might come of them, but looking back a man has to hate them in their ontological necessity. That sort of immanent contradiction does not make sense. The Russians may be growing out of it, but the Chinese are still fundamentalists in this doctrine.

The economic Man

The economic Man of Marxism is a logical concept, a concept too, more intelligent and more attractive than at first appears. It is not merely the definition of a man through the work he does, and the daily bread and butter he gets for it, it is the definition of man through his productive character in all things within society, the strictly economic and the cultural and spiritual in some sense as well. It is the definition of the individual whether by himself or as the member of a family, as a cell of human society, and as such as an integrant in the social organism. The Marxist vision of the ascent of man is very near to that of Teilhard de Chardin, and that of course is the reason for the similarities that Teilhard remarks, almost as if surprised, between his own thoughts and those of the leading Marxist philosophers of Science.

The Community is the first existential reality, the primary reality of the progressive ascent. As sheer body, it is best expressed as ‘community’ but as an organism of embodied wisdom, a unity of finality and power, it is best called ‘society’ as the word more expressive of the intellectual and unified life it manifests. The inversion of the Christian ordering of the real, by which in Marxism the individual is defined through the Unity-concept of society, rather than society through the mutual membering of individuals, explains well why it is a law of Nature that the more powerful man organises and exploits the weaker, making him an instrument of personal power and ease of living. Nevertheless, by advancing the status of the community, by making possible the beginnings of civilisation, until such time as the latent antithesis reaches a critical tension of acerbity, the individual and his family will be better off than lone savages, or primitive nomadic tribes.

The State is both an instrument of oppression and a necessary organ of progress: it will be a necessity of movement upwards by revolution, but there is a promised climax ‘not in our time’ and therefore with something of the features of ‘pie in the sky’ when, at the climax of evolution on earth even the purgatory of socialism is done away with, and perfect communism dawns,2 and the State itself must ‘wither away’ for as State it is the outward sign of inward disgrace, of the inner principle of oppression in human society, and it must die because it is of fear, and perfect love casts out fear. There is nowhere yet in the Marxist world where the State shows the slightest sign of withering away.

The practical antithesis in Marxism

The appropriation of the productive capacity in society to the community, allegedly to the ‘workers’ when the higher and socialised phase of social development is reached, is the obvious logic of Marxist analysis and of Marxist synthesis. Even in Capitalism vast resources which belonged in legal and jurisdictional title to the individual or shareholding ‘owners’ had in fact to be put aside for social investment, and so it will be of the essence of Marxist philosophy to transfer all but the smallest of social enterprises to the control of the people, of ‘the workers’, for ownership is only one aspect of that which by another name is real social power and social jurisdiction. The take-over is of the nature of the Marxist case. In hard fact, and hard facts are the bane of all false though lovely faces of philosophy, when the means of production are ‘nationalised’ by transference to ‘the people’ they are not in very deed appropriated to them at all. As Djilas saw with clarity and cynicism —but not with more clarity or more cynicism than the silent millions of Marxist ‘workers’ themselves —the means of production, all social power and jurisdiction, and the distribution of the fruits of social labour passes into the autocratic control of the new rich class: the class of autocrats and technocrats of the totalitarian state. The rulers of this philosophical and technical aristocracy of excellence decide both their own powers and their own rewards. It is not surprising that the comrades are very reasonable to themselves.

In the Capitalist system as well vast powers of social control and social patronage derive both directly and indirectly from wealth and from the control of the social vehicles of production of goods and of influence. Newspapers and the press in general, is for example the production of goods of influence rather than of consumption. This influence is more subtly concealed, for the social dominion over other men does not, under the Capitalist system, derive by right or by nature from ownership. It is just a fact. Among so many means the law itself is a means of social power at the beck of great Capitalist combines under Capitalism, because only the richest persons or corporations can afford to fight. Legal aid hardly touches the fringe of the problem, the law has always been geared to those who can pay, and by that fact alone represents a ‘de facto’ gearing of jurisdiction in favour of the rich. To lose at English law against a rich opponent is to be financially ruined in the process by having to bear the costs of the other side. At the same time, by parliamentary and other processes, it is a fact of life and of the law that even in the present decadence of Western culture, the richest Capitalist and the arrogant administrator can be humbled before the law and before the public and be forced to apologise or to make restitution to the least of the little ones. It can be done, but whether through democracy as a political vehicle or other means, a man needs to have more than ordinary courage, and friends with power, to achieve it. It remains a fact that the possession of money is nine points, even of the law, in so many ways.

In the West, the power of wealth is actual and not of philosophy, and it is tending to be on the decline. The power of social law, ministerial mandate, cultural force exercised through parliamentary majority, all of this is on the increase. The very fact of nationalisation and bureaucratic control through social state agencies is beginning to assimilate to itself a philosophical sanction, especially through the large scale provision of welfare and education. Powers of dominion are being gently arrogated to the state away from the very power of the parent or the citizen to intervene at all. Yet this power is not at the present a comprehensive theory, nor a comprehensive right exercised over the brethren in the very name of the social vocation of the state. In the East, the aristocracy of social power, vindicated originally through ownership, is one with state power and with the ultimate human sanctions. Therefore it is an aristocracy, even if it should be, as it claims to be, an aristocracy of natural and intellectual excellence. To be more clever, more socially aware, is not to be above arrogance nor to be always right. In the Marxist philosophy once the Revolution has consolidated itself, right is might and conversely might is right, always a most hateful conversion ratio.

There is nothing dishonest about Marxism as a philosophy, except that error of principle will always mean dishonesty in practical applications. If the West presumes that command over the wealth and financial power of a nation has nothing to do with the source of the rights of a man in society, this does not follow from its sciences, nor from Materialism as a philosophy, nor from Humanism, it follows from the inheritance of the Mosaic and Christian social tradition of rights and powers, reinforced by the rather different democratic principles of ancient Greece. The West does not define a man in and through his relationship to society as a dynamic and living Unity. All philosophies akin to Hegelianism do. Marxism must be expected to make the greatest headway in the East, because its intrinsic principle is so similar to the great despotisms of the East. The despots were the literal sons of Heaven, and in them and through them were their peoples found, and defined. Marxism has an exactly similar principle with a more sophisticated basis in the philosophy of Science. The People of the covenant of Yahweh had no such thing; even God, and he only, was their Father.

Since the psychological approach of Marxism is much more familiar to the East than to the West, and is based also upon the sciences in its claims and its appeal, it will seem to offer a way out of the chronic corruption and cynicism which pervades the utterly archaic and irreformable social orders which prevail in most regions of the East.

When the Marxist defines man through economic relationships and through society, he is defining man through all the rising evolutionary and social power of the scientific state. For the Marxist the culture and philosophy of the state is a supreme Paternalism of a central oligarchy, which tends to be enshrined in the flesh of one father-figure. This conception of the state as a vast family, in which the head, as origin by blood exercises direct rights of dominion over those begotten of him, as well as direct dominion over the collective familial effort, is the very essence of the social structure of the East. In wiping out the hindrance of caste and fixed social status, and bringing in scientific advance to replace ignorance, illiteracy and superstition the Marxism has something to thrill the Eastern mind. That mind wants to accept and love its all-powerful Father-figure, all it asks is to be loved, and to be sure of a total dedication at the top, free of corruption and nepotism and all other aspects of the mean, and smaller vision. While it can hope and think that it does receive that leadership from the top, it will never question the source of the power nor the rights of total exercise which accompany that power. If man were just a brain programmed to a given function and a given reaction in the material environment like any other and lower form of life, Marxism would be entirely defensible. The human community would be analogous to the ant-hill in strict definition of functions which proceeded from very nature, but on an immensely higher level of communal cultural achievement. It would be correct to define the individual and his rights as well, not through his individual personality, but through the society which gave him his meaning. It is quite otherwise if there is a personal God, if men have a spiritual soul, and if men give society its meaning.

The essential flaw in Capitalism

The essential flaw of the Capitalist society which must be underlined in an outline pointer of social principles, is the presumption that ownership is an absolute right which is not of its nature intrinsically shared with anybody, in which event it is also a sovereignty which is, by nature at least, absolute. This presumption is nearly dead in the so-called Capitalist economies of the West, but it is still important to suggest where its essential error lies, because from that erroneous basis false theories of social ownership derive, which blunder from one ineptitude to the next. If a right to own and dispose of productive goods and machinery is absolute, it may still be controlled, but only from the outside. That is to say in the name of public good or public necessity, the state may restrict the owner's right of control and of disposal in the name of a higher law and a higher principle, but he must be able to vindicate his case in each event, because there is no intrinsic sharing of the right of control over one's property, no matter how vast the concern, with anybody else. The workers themselves have no internal and intrinsic claim to influence the exercise of the rights of the owner from their own claims of work, and their own claims of family necessity and wellbeing. Society itself has no claim of intrinsic nature to modify the rights of this owner. All that the state can claim, and of course it is a lot, is the right to intervene as a still bigger boss, in the name of a still bigger power of dominion, and say ‘thus far, but no farther in this respect’. Here again, we are in the presence of a principle which operates very like the Freudian libido, it does what it likes, until it collides with a rival power. The likeness is not absolute, since no intelligent Capitalist would deny to the state the intrinsic right to act as referee and controller of interests which collide head-on, and this brings into human society some principle of Natural Law, even though the limits and scope of that sovereignty of the state are vague and empirical rather than definite and from principle.

The presumption that ownership is a univocal right and a univocal concept, not a participated right, and an analogical concept, stands in the present situation in which, in most businesses at least, the legal ownership stands entirely in the possession of shares, and not even of any shares, but of the ‘ordinary’ shares. From this conception there follows the device of the ‘Holding Company’ through which a concentration of finance in the hands of a few persons or interests, can control the operation of vast industries and patterns of trade. In such a system the work and interests of the tens of thousands of operatives of every kind and skill, of their families, and of the regional or national economy have no direct power, have no ‘vote’ in the policy and disposal of these vast assets.

If this were the naked operation of Capitalism, Engels, Marx, and Lenin would be proven right about Capitalism to the very hilt. It would be one vast conspiracy to oppress and to dispossess. There is little doubt that many great Capitalists have in the past tried hard to vindicate and to arrogate to themselves just this very power. They would have got away with it if they could have done so. In the modern world this would be such obvious economic and social suicide that few would even try to exercise such despotic personal and social power without any admission of some intrinsic limits. Nevertheless, they will still try to get away with as much as they can, both in control and in profits and in human ruthlessness: facts must be faced. The mentality of the Trade Unions is often as outdated and restricted as that of the medieval guilds at the time of their overthrow, but they have a basic reason for their attitudes, and so much does depend on a ‘Government we can trust’.

What has happened to Capitalism, especially in the British Commonwealth, is that a combination of sheerly Christian socialism, combined with Marxism, and the militant edge of Marxism, has brought about in the structure of Capitalism reforms which have set it very nearly right in organic relationships, even if the externals bear the mark of the old Adam. The pressure of the welfare state has brought about a very large redistribution of income, in both health and education services, and in the provision of many other social amenities, to which now redundancy payments must be added, and this has been done through the structure of central and local taxation. The system cannot now be broken up in its substance, and it is, reform of the actual tax structure apart, probably as good a solution as can be devised.

There may be much to improve upon in the matter of wage and salary bargaining, and the estimating of rewards, but in all of this, in the institution of the Trades Union Congress, in the acceptance of shop stewards, whose rights still need objective defining, in the many factory and employment acts, what has happened is that the worker has been given a direct and complementary power in industry which balances that of the employer. In other words, while the delimitation of the power of ownership under Capitalism has proceeded as a pragmatic fact, with the Unions and the workers not caring one jot whether it be intrinsic or extrinsic, so long as the control is gained, in point of fact what has been brought about is the co-operative and participated power in mutual productive work. This is the all important basis of a correct vision of ownership. If this vision is gained and made to work, then the necessity for the collision in Antithesis is out: Revisionism works: the Law of Love is the Law of the world and of the essence of being. This is more than a little important, this is the heart of the social application of Christianity, the loving of the neighbour as thyself.

In finding once again the concept, in this field at least if not in that of personal life and morals, of the harmonic law, the Natural Law that is to say, the whole climate of society in the matter of ownership, whether public or private has begun to change. The tendency is to co-ordinate and to co-operate, rather than to merely compete. It is the same in Religion as well, as we remarked in the earlier chapters of this work, the individualism of Capitalism, which saw no harm in endless multiplicity and competition, gives way to a sense of the overriding need for unity and comradeship. With it of course, there is and there must be, whether in Religion or in the sphere of social control of every kind, a revival of the notion of authority and of the organic relationship of authority to the manifold initiatives of men. This statement, and this implication of improvement in the social philosophy of the Western peoples, is perfectly compatible with the assertion of decline and decadence in other spheres. For the vision is not complete and coherent, it is presumed that there must be authority and balance in one sphere of human life, and total individualism and rampant lawlessness in another, the sphere of personal morals and personal behaviour. Only if the vision of co-ordination and of the authority intrinsic to natures by very Nature is accepted, can there be true harmony and happiness in society and in the individual life and the individual home.

The defects in Nationalisation

The sheer Nominalism to use its philosophical description of the conception of ownership inherent in Capitalism may be about to die a pragmatic death in social practice, but it remains in the philosophy of Nationalisation as this is usually conceived. Because it is conceded that in theory and in philosophy the power of the right to own consists in the money-power with which a concern is bought, as represented in its shares, therefore when a Government ‘nationalises’ it usually takes over the control of the industry or service, giving money as compensation. There may be occasions when such is the better thing to do, but even so, the practical solution for the administration of the industry concerned will be different from the lines followed so far, because on the lines followed up to now, there is a false principle at work. The false principle at work is the presumption that total ownership, together with the power and dominion inherent in that ownership, resides in the monetary owner of the industry, and that when the concern is taken over in exchange for money, all power and all dominion inherent in the concern passes to the new owner, in this case to the state. This presumes, once again, that the rights and powers of dominion and the exercise of personality inherent in the ownership of a concern, no matter how vast, is concentrated in the titular monetary owner, and that the rights of the staff and workers who run the concern are purely extrinsic to the title of control.

This is an indefensible position, if the rights and dignities of men proceed from their personalities, and if through them the state is formed and defined, rather than through the inverse and Marxist perspective, in which indeed the rights of the individual and his personal dignity proceed through the state.

There has never at any time been an absolute sovereignty in the ownership of those productive goods which require co-operative work among men, and from the same principle we can argue later that there cannot be either an absolute national or regional sovereignty over the earth or over parts of it: no man, no tribe, no nation, is an island independent of the rest of mankind. All are bound to co-operate one with another, even though through this there will be subtle and inevitable changes of culture, way of life, and language itself. The supreme dominion over the earth as a planet and the inhabitation of mankind rests with God, and rests specifically upon Christ as King. This is meant literally, and as no abstraction. It will follow that the claim which a man has, or which nations have, to work the earth and to be fulfilled upon it, is a personal claim from birth, held upon the title-deed of spiritual personality, upon it being the common inheritance of their Father, even God. The obligation of men to integrate their initiatives until we have in the end one common world society for the good of all, and the fulfilment of all is not an abstraction either but a fact. We are members of a common family, and in his vision of one common interest in community the Communist is right. However, the vision and the claim is contained without atheism or error in the ‘Our Father’, long before Marxism.

Let us leave this important and revolutionary principle for a while, and return to the analysis of ownership. It comes to this: where a man applies his work he applies his person, and because his person cannot be separated from himself as he makes provision for himself and for his dependents, therefore he exercises control and dominion where he exercises his work. Not in vain does the inspired seer of Genesis see Adam in vision as put into the Earth as ‘a garden’, ‘to keep it and to till it’ nor in vain does the seer make God say of the sons of man: ‘increase and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth...’ (chapters one and two). It is utterly amazing how often the simple, apparently irrelevant expressions of the Book of Genesis contain in seed and in principle a truth capable of enormous potential development and fulfilment. Here also, the words are spoken of Man, in the persons of the first pair, and therefore of human nature, and of all human persons in the likeness of their parents from the beginning. By nature then, all men have a stake and a claim upon the earth their common inheritance, and the right of dominion over matter for personal fulfilment is inherent in all men, and is exercised in the productive application of their persons to their work.

This is not the same as Nationalisation, nor the same as Marxism. It is not through the paternalism of the state that this right is exercised, nor by definition in and through the state as Super-Unity or as the Collective Super-Conscious. It is by right of birth as a spiritual person.

This right does not mean that Anarchism is the true principle of social life. It means that the right of dominion is participated, is shared in degree, and there can be almost an infinity of such degrees. It does not rule out the right of a man to be hired without intrinsic claims, and to prefer such a way of life, to be hired and to be fired, to owe no obligation to stay, and claim no right to be permanent. There are many ways of earning a living, and men are not serfs of the good God that they may take no risks, but must be bound to an employer or to an industry till death do them part. What is essential to say is that civilised life, and the growth of science and technology, is not at all compatible with the nomadic existence, and that in fact men do pledge the fortunes of themselves and their own by their stability in an area, a trade, or a service. Where they exercise this work and service they invest their well-being, and this gives them a certain intrinsic dominion over what happens to the industry or to the service. They are not simply hirelings with no intrinsic rights.

In modern states, this concept must be extended to the whole nation. Technological changes will mean the death of industries and of services and of techniques. Men have to be willing to be re-trained, and to be re-deployed. In that case, the right of control and dominion a man possesses comes back upon the state itself, not as his great boss, but as the centre of the familial authority, in which his own is a valid claim by right of his individual dominion as a person. The state is the ultimate servant as well as in a sense the ultimate immediate landlord, and within this concatenation, all have direct rights, duties, claims, and personal fulfilment in vocation. This is the true conception of the ‘corporate state’ and in the vision properly aligned, the great social encyclicals of the Church are perfectly vindicated without the suppression of the individual dignity and rights of a man.

The philosophical meaning of this concept

We are arguing in effect, for those who know and understand the importance of philosophical principle, that the right of ownership is analogical and not univocal. This means to say that there are organic degrees in all ownership, and so the relationship of manager and workman, higher echelons and lower authorities are implicit in the very nature of work and rule over the earth. Man as a social animal does not lose his right to own as he advances, he exercises it in a more complex way, but a way which, if properly understood and exercised is so much more fulfilling for us all. Ownership then is dominion, and dominion is by degree and from degree, and is always a participation of power, and of organic membering one to another in power.

The State should not ‘nationalise’ in the Marxist sense. There are rights of direct dominion between management and workmen, these rights should be harmonised and bargained over between Employers and Men, between Confederations of Industry and Trade Unions. This does happen, it is right it should, but the power is just on both sides, it is not for Government to arrogate it to itself. Apart from the right of dominion inherent in work, there is the right of the public in general, the ordinary ‘consumer’ to exercise a dominion derived not immediately from his work, but from his personal dignity and right to justice, from the impact upon him of the initiatives of others. There is a social control inherent by right in the state, or in local governing bodies, as the servants of the people to control and direct the initiatives of vast concerns of Management and Men. These have no right to hold us all to ransom, either by the conspiracy of the selfish agreement by which they mutually aggrandise their own rewards from an industry, and pass the burdens upon the rest of industry and upon the public, nor by the partisan anarchy of the unofficial strike or the arbitrary lock-out. There is a direct right of overall control and direction inherent in Government as a positive power and a positive duty, but it does not extend to the total ownership of any concern, for ownership includes the rights and privileges, and the fulfilments in work which derive from a man's personality applied to the earth and to its fruits.

Government then, instead of nationalising should normally exercise a direct influence of control and of direction, and become a partner in industry from a general technological and social plan. It has a right to put in directors without nationalising, it has a right to bend the local interest to the larger good. It has a right to harmonise and co-ordinate by positive power, but not to expropriate. It is due largely to the false perspectives of Capitalism and of Marxism that Governments so rarely take this path. They fear non-co-operation from the ‘bosses’, or else the ‘workers’ suspect Government co-operation and control with great industries as being merely a con-spiracy of those in power. Because in typical ‘nationalisation’ there is no personal master, no real ‘boss’, and no personal profit interest, we get endless waste, inefficiency, boredom, frustration, and constant, irritating governmental interference, which angers both sides of industry. This is not state control, nor state participation, or state guidance but State-Capitalism, and it can be more totalitarian and arrogant than any form of private ownership. There is no need to dispossess with money vouchers, the state has an intrinsic right of interest and control. So have the men, through organised labour Unions, so have the Management and the Shareholders too. In Britain we have entered already upon a social development in which these essentials are being realised with much accuracy and an encouraging truth to facts, and to human nature. We need to integrate this pragmatic sanction for what we do, into a coherent social philosophy, that is all. Otherwise it may deviate in the end into a Governmental Absolutism: the well-meaning, and Paternalist State. From the denial, or loss of understanding of the spiritual soul, the root of true personal freedom and personality as exercised, this must happen, unless deeds are focused through clear principles of direction. Sheer reason, sheer co-operation, sheer recognition of the positive parts that we all play in social productivity has done much to make Capital and Labour, Masters and Men, owners and workers, into common teams in this country, and in this economy. There is no intrinsic difficulty at all, wisdom, justice, and charity are all that is required. There will be haggling, there will be jealousies, there will be incidental injustices, there will never be heaven on earth or the complete Utopia.

Present social development potential in Christian philosophy

From the many degrees intrinsic to ownership, social and state control should be exercised less and less the smaller the unit, and more and more the larger the unit. This control should also be positive and co-operative, and not simply penal. To sum up, because once again this theme could be vastly expanded, —the right to own was warped in Western society at the end of the Middle Ages, by loss of its social counter-claim. It was re-defined by the rising Capitalist class from the philosophic Nominalism which is at the heart of true Protestantism, as a dominion which is absolute and univocal in kind. The right to own is not such a dominion. In the Middle-Ages the right of dominion possessed by a Lord of land was qualified intrinsically, limited from within and from nature that is to say, by the tenant's rights of use. This is so very important, because we have here a principle of shared dominion between master and man which is capable of intrinsic development, and of application to the world of scientific industry and marketing in which we live.

This principle redounds in philosophy, and especially in the Christian philosophy of the schools of the Middle Ages, into the statement that ‘ownership’ is not a concept which is univocal in content, that is to say, with an exclusive dominion, upon which there are rights of external restraint, but no internal and natural degrees of positive determination from the rights of others. To help to get the example clear in the mind of the intelligent reader who has no background in such philosophical argument, other than perhaps that of the Marxists, something similar can be expressed in the following: If you live all by yourself, or with a housekeeper, as a bachelor, and have neighbours living next door, within your house and garden you are the absolute lord, and your right of dominion over your own, in relation to the neighbours next door, is similar to absolute dominion, and is a univocal idea. It has one simple content —power within these limits, without qualifying interest. Of course the neighbours have rights of restraint from an extrinsic title, that outside title which says ‘you must do this or refrain from that, because you are hurting me’. Thus, the radio must not be perpetually at full blast, one may not run a noisy lathe in the cellar, nor ruin the neighbours' telly-picture by electrical interference. One must maintain the fences for which one is responsible in reasonable repair, and not light noisome bonfires on other people's washing day. This is by way of preventing the encroachment of my rights on those of somebody else, it does not determine my own dominion intrinsically and from within.

It will be rather different if I am the father of a family, or even if while not so, I let part of my house to tenants with children and with access to the garden and so forth. Immediately, the natural needs and exercise of personality of other people come into play and determine or qualify intrinsically and from within the things I do, and the things I try to abrogate within my own dominion. There are degrees of such qualification, and the more intimate the mutual relationship between myself and the others, the more intimately their rights and human necessities modify my dominion. If I am a married man with a family, I shall have to negotiate pretty hard to get anything I want at all, in the house or in the garden. Even if I have tenants, I shall have to give an ‘area of interest’ in return for interests and privacy of my own, if not I shall soon hear ‘for goodness sake man, be human’ because you cannot be human unless you admit and defer to the human needs of those with whom you live and work, and who exercise with you a common claim upon goods, by reason of living or by working together in the same place.

The concept of ownership then, is a dominion limited intrinsically by the reasonable rights of use of other persons, and as this principle can be developed to meet the needs of the modern age, it redounds into saying that the right to own, the right of dominion over goods of possession or of production, is a relationship to God and to men which is analogical and not univocal of very essence. Therefore, there can be many degrees, some intrinsically higher and others intrinsically lower of this dominion. In addition, there can be simple and very complex dominion. Ownership is an organic concept, and like the organs of a living body, cannot be understood except in a relationship to other organic functions which integrate the whole. The bigger the extent of the technical ownership of a man or of a company, so much the more is that dominion of theirs determined from within by the fulfilment of other lives, and especially by the co-determination of the personalities of other men who also are seeking to fulfil themselves as intelligent personalities through the goods and services represented by these possessions. This right of participating or sharing in the decisions made by the large-scale owners-at-law, rises from the very relationships of human persons working one with another and for each other.

This would not actually entail that all concerns must be partnerships in the strict sense. Taken by and large most men do not wish to be held to such obligations anyway, and obligations in full partnership must be mutual, not only binding at the top. Men who do not wish for full partnership but value their mobility and power to pass elsewhere to better themselves, cannot expect all the benefits and none of the risks and botherations of fuller obligation. Yet modern vast-scale industry is passing over more and more into a ‘de facto’ partnership, and such benefits as redundancy payments, rights of appeal against unjust dismissal, and so forth, bring in many of the elements of partnership. It is necessary to keep a true distinction between the functions of management and that of men. It can be done, what is asked of management is that decisions taken for the concern shall be mutually profitable for them and for their workmen, and it is the right of organised labour to put pressure upon employers to see that only such initiatives are chosen which do in fact, make a man his brother's keeper. It is an irony of the times, that in so many recent mergers and take-overs it is not the ‘workers’ but the higher and middle ‘staff’, poorly organised and with no big bully brothers to fight for them, who have been as cruelly exploited as ever the common working labourer was at the turn of the century. The great power struggles of recent years among the industrial giants have made it clear that we still have our utterly ruthless industrial philistines with us, and both the Unions and the Government must meet force with force, no matter how much policies are deployed around grounds of idealism. Capitalism may be passing from jungle to national park status, but the tigers that have licence to live are not for that reason domesticated cats.

There is an enormous potential in this concept of ownership as an analogical concept, and not a univocal, and it cannot be developed now. As a concept of a human relationship to goods and to other men which is by nature a right individual and social in a common concept, it is the mirror-image of Man himself and of his nature. It implies the direct right of public authority to control the initiatives of individuals and of groups in the interest of the community. In the case of the state, the exercise of this authority will be mainly, at first at least, extrinsic, the role of co-ordination and the requirement of a just social obedience. With the progress of technology this will not be the only role of the state or other local public authority, and it is important to give the relevant principle why, even if it cannot be developed.

Urgent need to re-define ‘surplus value’

There is a much neglected point of truth in the concept of the ‘surplus value’ which is the power of mind embodied in machinery and tools and processes of every kind. An inventor may get some footling reward of recognition, but the extension and improvement and copying of ideas which derives from the initial impetus is too vast, too unconscious, and too complex to trace in every detail. It passes into the cultural inheritance of human society, and it thus represents both a surplus value on which all have a claim, towards the good life, and also a social influence and power which must be controlled by public authority, industrialists, and working men in a co-operative harmony the actual form of which is a pragmatic balance of power acceptable to reasonable men as the judges of the condition of society and the dignity inherent in work, and in human nature.

Under the old classical Capitalist society there was besides monetary surplus value, this surplus value of social power which was arrogated by the Capitalist to himself. Since the Capitalist worked for himself and his own financial interest in the most narrowly selfish way, this led to great hardship, for production went up and down, works were closed or opened, according to the profit motive only. It was not simply the money which went all one way, but the social power and the authority over social resources. At that time the state was not developed enough anywhere to exert its authority in the name of society, the development of the new Capitalist power was of the nature of things, and was not an antithesis. If there were no sin and coarseness in human nature, Capitalists would have recognised at once their social vocation and social obligation, and have acted according to it, and not the profit motive in its narrowest context. Some people did, and among practical reformers and practical Christians who did, the great Quaker families in British industry have an excellent record. The antithesis is incidental and of sin, but it will be found everywhere, and it cannot be exorcised except by sincerity, prayer, and humble living in the presence of God. The state however is today aware of its power and of its responsibilities, and it should use them, yet always by co-operation and not by regimentation.

The profit motive

This brings us to the issue of the profit motive, about which so much nonsense has been spoken and written. It is neither the holy and sacred Name to be whispered with bowed head, nor another way of writing the name of the Beast. From apocalyptic Marxism it would appear to be the latter. In itself it is natural, good, and necessary. The profit motive exists in all work —workers who want higher wages, lower hours, and better amenities, are actuated by the profit motive in their work, and want the good life on easier terms. Employers and shareholders do the same thing, and none of the parties to a claim upon the ‘national cake’, to use the coarse language of industrial bargaining, is doing something immoral and very shameful from the nature of things.

The profit motive is natural and good. It is as natural and good as the sexual faculty, and every bit as liable to become an overdeveloped greed. Yet just as the world without sex would be a desert and void of life, so also work and industry without the profit motive becomes sterile and unprogressive. When the most simple savages of ages long past hunted over a given terrain, or raised a primitive catch crop on a clearing, they were actuated by the profit motive. Men wanted to live, and live better, and then better still. Nothing could be more natural or reasonable. The profit motive however, because it is an aspect of the nature of man, and man is individual and social by nature in one definition of himself, is also individual and social in its relationship to environment, and thus must be intrinsically and of very nature, exercised in a social context of co-determination and co-operation with the neighbour. Therefore the profit motive, exercised in society and through socially membered work, must be exercised within an equational relation to control, whether this be within the individual firm, or within a national or international plan as a whole. The profit motive then is not an end in itself, but a meaningful function in life and in society. It is like sex also in this, that in its proper context of being wed to the interests of others in work and in social obedience, it is fruitful and fulfilling for all concerned, and out of that context becomes a selfish and disruptive force. It is foolish to deny that given human nature as we have it, the profit motive must be given a full deployment. Men are by nature prone to laziness and cowardice, and something more than the sheer love of God is needed to make men work hard, and take risks and incur all the burdens and sorrows of great responsibility. Industry is not the priesthood, and one of the cardinal sins of Marxism is to speak as if it ever could be so.

Idealism is fine and most necessary, so long as the limitations of men are borne in mind. If the profit motive is denied, the managers of the Marxist society simply become the new rich and the new overprivileged. The profit motive is replaced by the graft motive, and the perks-with-the-job motive, which is only a perversion of the good and natural profit motive in human work. The profit motive is by nature and by the supernatural destiny of man subordinate to its proper social context of consideration and care for the neighbour. Let that context be demanded of it in its exercise, and social peace will prevail, albeit with a degree of haggling and accusation which will never at any time cease upon earth, until the New Jerusalem does really come in with Christ the King, for it will not come in any other name.

It follows from the principles we have tried to outline, and nothing more than outline in the barest way, that every gifted individual who ‘rises in the world’ has a social vocation to his brethren, in that very fact, and he should be allowed to exercise it; in like manner the workmen, through the Trade Unions who represent their organised power. These are mutual vocations in work, and they demand their connatural sphere of influence in the name of human personal dignity, and not by derivation of Man, or of Unions, from the pre-existence of the State.

There is an essential evil in the Marxist dispossession as far as is possible of the great industrialist and the great wielder of financial power. These men are public servants, and by their genius the common weal is better established, as well as their own personal profit. Let them be subject only to a common weal in which they do render their just obedience. We know they are not models of St. Francis of Assisi: there is the tiger in them, but there is the same in every man. We are not greedy and liable to exploit because we are Capitalists but because we are human beings with a fallen nature. Some of the worst capitalists and exploiters are working-men, within their own homes and families. When the industrialist is dispossessed, when all industry becomes ‘nationalised’ somebody wields the effective power, and power just as great. That somebody is in the end an aristocrat of public, technical, and financial power. It is far better that all who integrate society should give of their own and their best, and obey a common norm, than that all power should be vested in public servants, answerable to nobody, and forming a mutual protection society in which the truth for any abuse or failure is at the bottom of a well deeper than any ‘Mohole’. Either way, the money and the perks will go with the real power in society. It is better to be honest, the Marxist society becomes in the end a sort of secular hierarchical priesthood based upon a theology of the most utter humbug and pompous. hypocrisy. The building up of society along the lines we suggest will avoid the two extremes of concentrated State Paternalism which is the higher slavery, and disjointed, cynical Individualism which does not recognise the intrinsic social obedience which must frame its social deployment. Once again, the principles of social peace may be developed from the orthodox framework of orthodox and Christian thought, and from no other source, ancient or modern.

2. RESOURCES AND SOVEREIGNTY

Population and planning

Whether or not a man thinks the world is overpopulated already will depend on the worth he accords men and persons: whether he thinks the development of the universe part of a plan with a further consummation yet to come, and on whether he thinks that planet earth is uniquely for man, and that it is natural to man to rule over the earth and subdue it, and to increase and multiply until he fill it. If a man thinks this way, as the present miserably heretical and non-conformist writer, he will probably think also that elegantly and adequately filled with men, it will constitute also a more pleasant human environment than when it ran wild.

The whole issue of overpopulation bristles at the moment with contradictions. For instance in these small islands we have until lately encouraged the immigration of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, in the name of labour shortage, immigrants mostly from peasant stocks with a very high reproduction rate. We have in addition made for ourselves a social problem, in at least the short term, by doing so. Why did we act thus, if in any event these islands are already overcrowded? While the social sirens sound the alarm of over-population, the workers drain away steadily from the land and into the great cities, from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the North of England. It is to the South that the main drift continues, but no serious attempt is made to apply a national plan which would compensate in very much higher monetary rewards for either the worse climate or the present lack of amenities in the underdeveloped areas.

The growing Nationalism of the Celtic regions of the British Isles, while it contains some backward-looking elements unworthy of the interdependent and mutually co-operative world that must be looked for in a civilisation of Science, is also in part a healthy reaction against the anonymous levelling and the dreary cosmopolitanism of London directed culture and administration. The current ‘British’ culture, especially that which comes over the radio and television network, has no more personality than has a broiler chicken. There is another cause also for the growing nationalistic reaction in parts of the British Isles. The Celt is not more sensitive than the average Englishman, who in any case is of far too mixed a pedigree now to be called Anglo-Saxon in the ethnic sense, but the Celt is mole logical in the Gallic manner, he can and he will draw verbal conclusions from his half-conscious mind. In those depths he has judged, quite rightly, that the Englishman is decadent, getting rather hateful, and creating a pointless, futile, and sick cultural life. Therefore, from his more introvert temperament the Celt turns in upon himself, renounces the tie with England as a tie with an alien culture, and seeks new inspiration from his own cultural traditions. So far as it goes, this is admirable. It will not be so admirable if it leads to political exclusiveness and failure to co-operate in that planning and working in the world as one world, which the modern age requires.

The South of England is becoming one vast conurbation. If the rest of the country and the rest of the regions of the British Isles were developed intelligently towards it as to a natural market and industrial nerve centre, the tendency to further urbanisation would not matter very much, and the pace of it could be slowed. Even in the South of England however, where we are told that land is being devoured to the destruction of the nation, no attempt is made to farm the land to its capacity in the national interest. Unlike the French, and other nations who have had to feed off their own countryside or starve in time of war, we have never considered the land or its use to be a social responsibility upon ourselves, not at any rate since the Industrial Revolution. A man may drive from Guildford to Southampton through very lovely countryside, but for most of the way the view will give the illusion that the road is cut through forest and untilled common. The countryside appears to be owned very largely by speculators biding their chance to sell for development, or else by multitudinous institutions which have no real interest in food production. This same area of England alone, the South East and the South West extremities, is full of largish detached houses on the outskirts of the villages and the market towns. They stand in from two to ten or more acres of land, used for nothing much except for lawns, wild woodland, and a paddock for the children's ponies. It would be possible to draw a circle around most of the villages and small country towns in this area of the country, in which such estates could be in fact filled in and redeveloped with little loss to food production, because so much of the land is already sterilised by the presence of these villas, which are only high-class dormitories for an urban dependent, higher executive type of population.

Positive and negative planning

The alarm over population pressure in these islands seems to spring from a rather different principle of thinking. It is the heart-cry of the vivacious but often horribly snobbish professional and professorial classes of this country, who run everything, and who, whatever their antecedents in terms of class, come in very much one mould from the educational establishments of Old England. They see a threat to their unbroken skylines, and to their ‘unspoilt’ rural retreats, not more than two hours by fast train from the centre of London. By ‘unspoilt’ countryside they mean that they have succeeded up to now in keeping the common, the very common people out of the place. With horror they see red brick here and red brick there upon the view line, roads are driven through the copses, the moujiks are enfilading them in cars and in caravans, while in the summer horrid little leprechauns in khaki shirts and shorts invade the fields, and their multicoloured tents sprout like mushrooms through the bugle-shrilled woodlands. It is dreadful: Man is destroying his environment and competing with much more interesting animals, and they are jolly well going to use their great influence to do something about it.

Certainly there are parts of the world with a true population problem, but so much of the outcry is the sheerest exaggeration. While the combined populations of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales do not add up to as much as that of the London conurbation, the situation in these islands is not yet desperate. The failure to plan the environment for man, and for the feeding of man, that is another problem, and requires a different effort of the will.

As objective evaluation of the earth as a whole will still be very reassuring. The vast North American continent, with barely more than two hundred million people, could support six times that number and have a lot of land not fully utilised. The whole of South America supports less than three hundred million souls, and the same can be said for Africa more or less. In both of these areas the scientific age, in application to the development of the earth and its fruits, has hardly even begun. Soviet Russia sits upon some fifth part of the land mass of the world, also with less than two hundred million people, and could support some five times that number, notwithstanding the hard climate of much of her terrain. China has indeed a vast population but also vast territories. While subsistence farming has reached a high level of perfection in China, so much so that it is the answer in part to so many of our population pessimists, it is still true that the application of science and of scientific planning to agriculture in China has hardly begun. India too, for all the pockets of hopeless overcrowding, boasts her large areas of jungle, and many semi-arid lands at the mercy of the monsoon. In India agriculture appears to be the national scandal, and part of the blame must be laid at the door of a decadent system of landlordism and high usury rates in that country. The same hindrance to development from utterly archaic and despotic social systems seems to be true also of Indo-China. No peasant can have any motive, or even the physical power to improve his lot when his efforts are at the mercy of a landlord who will drive in and claim from forty to sixty per cent of the income as his rents. The Marxists are entirely right about so many of the problems of the underdeveloped countries, and that is why their power in them is so great. If the Marxists alone possess the vision and the integrity to recognise that nothing but a social revolution and the sweeping away of the old order by dedicated and idealistic young people can solve these ageold problems, then the Marxists will have to be the ‘scourge of God’ like Attila of old, upon the face of this apathetic and socially corrupted part of the earth.

To the South of heavily populated Japan and the alternating millions and misty jungles of Malaysia, lies the subcontinent of Australia, and the fertile little islands of Tasmania and New Zealand. Over this enormous area, for all its deserts pregnant with great potential under the power of modern science to change the course of rivers and conserve water, some fifteen million people of European stock hold sway. They have a birth-rate relatively low, and waste their enormous territories in as much as they live a mainly urbanised life, with three quarters of this small population contained within six great cities. This is a flagrant ethnic injustice upon the face of the earth. The earth belongs to men of all colours in their needs, and not to teeming millions of conies on millions of wasted acres.

As a whole, the world is not more overpopulated today, in relation to the powers of men, through science, to make the earth and its seas fruitful, than was North West Europe in the days of Malthus. There must be a population figure which morally if not physically speaking is an absolute, it is true, but as yet it is far from reached. Population figures and pressures are relative factors, not absolutes, from the nature of the case. One hundred and fifty years ago, Malthus considered the England, and indeed the Europe of his day to be in the throes of a major population explosion. Today, the same area supports four times that population, and with a much higher standard of living. It is not only the opening up of the New World of the Americas and Australia which has been responsible for this, but the much higher yields of both agricultural crops and of livestock which now, through the application of the sciences, are taken for granted. It was not possible for Malthus to anticipate the full potential of these factors, and indeed it is not possible for us to anticipate them fully even now.

What constitutes the invitation of God in the biblical book of Genesis to ‘increase and multiply and fill the Earth’ must be judged in the context of the world potential of the planet itself, in the age of Man now come to his age of majority through the wisdom of the sciences.

‘Faith’ as Evolution looking beyond itself

A new mentality and a new outlook is needed today, it is not possible to be sincerely progressive, and to admit the sovereignty of God over the earth, as a Christian should, and then still to view the world through the narrow, tenacious eyes of a tribal nationalism. Nor may we view the earth as a series of private cabbage plots, to be worked or left wild at the whim of every individual owner. Some authorities will hold, with very doubtful validity, considering its universal devastation, that relative over-population was, again, at the root cause of the medieval ‘Black Death’. If this often reiterated proposition is true at all, it underlines how very much the support of population is a function of a given potential of the earth in terms of crops and livestock. The world as a whole is full of deserts and of barren lands, the task before mankind of working the world and its seas as one vast economic and agricultural complex is daunting to the potential even of modern man. Certainly the potential of the planet so viewed is greater than the present potential of the earth for feeding mankind, in comparison with that potential in the days of Malthus. The potential of man to produce, and very likely even to synthesise excellent foods directly from mineral elements, will grow with every decade. Even now man is enlightened enough and knowledgeable enough to sense his near equality to such a challenge and rise to it.

The vast potential not only of money, but also of research that goes into armaments, and into commercial and industrial waste and reduplication of every kind, could be turned to the task of treating the enormous area of the oceans as a water reservoir for mankind which could never be exhausted. The processing of sea water for agricultural and general human uses, is at present a small scale and expensive matter. It need not be so. If mankind had an adequate motive, means would be found of converting the seas into water suitable directly for irrigation and for general human purposes. It has never taken scientific man very long to find a way, in even the most complex of natural problems, where he had a will to find the way. The production of food intensively, in special atmospheres under plastic or other cover which admits light of the required frequencies is known to be possible. Again, it hardly exists except on the small scale and by way of research effort. It is a potential for man which is not realised because it does not fit in according to that primitive measuring rod of commercial profit making by which still, even in communities very largely socialised in other respects, we consciously or unconsciously measure all that we do. If the potential of Science as the applied philosophy of all the sciences were to be really put to work in a society which existed for man, and recognised the right of man to rule and dominate the entire environment of the planet, there could be a balance of natural growth and cropping, co-ordinated with human building and city landscaping which would make the environment of the Earth as a planet far more beautiful than it is today.

The very philosophy of Humanism when it is spelt with the capital letter as a way of life utterly myself centred and comfort centred becomes narrow and antihuman. It is not possible to be at heart snobbish and contemptuous of man as just one more animal to be kept in his rightful place, and to offer to man a philosophy for the working of the planet which is exciting and truly forward looking to achievement. If man is the supreme value for which the planet must be ordered and directed, then the provision for men as population increases must call forth new projections of applied science in the feeding of men, the housing of men, and the spiritual and cultural development of men. This will evoke new and adventurous manipulations of the environment of man. It is in a sense an act of faith that the constructive changing of the environment to meet the needs of mankind will be an improvement in that environment, but it is an act of faith in perfect keeping with the very law of Evolution itself. From the first formation of the crust of the earth and the atmosphere above it, there has been constant change, and the change has been in accordance with the complexity and development of life. The changes in the environment due to the being and the operations of man have been in essentials a change for the better, and this change for the better in terms of being and beauty in the configuration of the planet will continue as the earth is subordinated to the needs and the genius of the human being. This will be true even if it should mean that the majority of the great wild mammals will disappear from the face of the earth, and that horses will find their eventual place in zoos rather than forlornly holding up motorised traffic on busy country roads, or as the social appendage of pretty little girls in black riding caps. This process of change has been going on for a long time, ever since in fact man came upon the face of the earth, and while a puma or two in Surrey makes a pleasant legend and an exciting diversion, not even the most ardent of Man-planning Humanists really wants to see the woods alive with wolves again. If there is going to be competition with ourselves on the face of the earth, we men come first, and that is our birthright. The weakness of so much contemporary Humanist philosophy of man is that it cannot transcend the comfortable, and the comfortable in egoistic categories means the vision of the future as a continuation of the present, rather than a future of unknown content. This I take to be also the essential Marxist and indeed Eastern critique of the philosophy of the West, that in lacking any transcendent moral values it lacks a centre around which the human personality can deploy itself for continued progress in moral development. This seems to be a true evaluation of the weakness of the secularist West, that it fears the future, in case there may be discomfort in the unknown.

The New Industrial Revolution

The present Technological Revolution is only the fullness over all mankind of that Industrial Revolution which was its precursor in the West more than a hundred years ago. At that time Western Man took over and annexed the lands of races less industrially and scientifically developed, and worked up the material potential of these areas to his own profit, and to a great degree that of the peoples who were subjugated. This second industrial revolution, the coming of age of the first, makes colonisation as such an irrelevance, as is clear from the resistance everywhere, even in Marxist controlled countries, to an alien dominating power. The Scientific Society requires no longer annexation, but full and understanding co-operation between whole nations and entire economic complexes, in order to create vast spheres of trade and interchange in which this full potential of agriculture, ocean culture, and industrial development can be fully deployed. There could be an American or North Atlantic trade community, and a fuller European Community than the present Economic Union, there could be an East European bloc dominated quite naturally by Soviet Russia, and an Asian area of economic union in which Japan, and China would be the focal points of organisation. Between such natural spheres of developmental focus there would be increasing interchange, and perhaps eventual fusion in a world society which would approximate at last to a cultural Unity.

It is not permissible for Christians to have recourse to total wars of nuclear Megadeath or biochemical massacre, and thus it would be most right and logical, and entirely progressive of us to take the risks of unilateral disarmament, and to concentrate on the fully human vision, the vision of the world for mankind, and not for the tribal frontier. It would not be possible for the West, if indeed it were the Christian West in fact, to be taken over and dominated by Marxist invasion from without, if the standard of moral vision and worth were genuinely higher, more pure, and more completely true than the Marxist vision. The strength and the weakness of Marxism is the moral superiority to which it pretends, and by which it claims its social system is actuated. Because it does not admit God, nor grace nor human sin, it leads to tyranny and moral failure in its leaders. Because it subordinates man to the community, it stifles also freedom and development of true human personality and communication. That which could face it with a vision wider and more true, could embrace its own desired good ends without fear in a context nobler, and yet more soberly truthful to human limitations, would be incapable of being destroyed by it. Thus the Early Christian Church triumphed by the sheer purity and truth of soul in its moral achievement, against the power, propaganda, and material might of Imperial Rome. This seems to be the modern vision of the City of God, as it should come not only in the Church, but also in the State, in the natural community life, which we ought to evoke for man in the present age.

This vision is not less terribly disconcerting, impractical, and revolutionary, nor less at the same time utterly possible and true, than the vision Christ offered men in Israel two thousand years ago, and from which they shuddered away, for his power could not be denied, and he did not fit into the narrow selfishness and power politics of the schemes of men. We could offer the same appalling, disconcerting Christian humanism to mankind again, in the things of the flesh, and the things of the spirit. Whether men would rise to the challenge of their awful power and potential of personality, or whether they would reject the unique and true Way of full development for man, both inwardly as the individual, and outwardly in social life, and crucify again the Son of Man in themselves and in the Church, that remains to be seen. It could go either way, ‘without me you can do nothing’ is true of the uniquely true ‘Humanism’ for mankind, and man is free to accept or reject. The Kingdom of God must be first within, in order that it may come without.

The proclamation of the Kingdom, the tidings of the Evangel, the ‘Good News’ is fully valid, and we should dare to preach it and begin to live it, then no man could say that the Christians have no vision to offer for the earth and for man, or that they were no longer to be recognised by their complete and unqualified love for one another, and for all men, in the brotherhood of Christ.

The problem of population will bring its own solution as the standard of living rises, and when men are able to realise, without drudgery to depress their spirit, the need for a responsible and truly spiritual vocation of parenthood. This is not going to happen until the standard of living itself rises, not at least in free societies. In the West the birth rate has fallen already to an acceptable increase, by the very pressure of the needs and the expectations of both children and their parents. The present birthrate in much of the West is raised by a disconcertingly high rate of illegitimacy, which would itself fall off, if the sexual passions of adolescents were not so cynically exploited, and if their lives were not so empty of meaning and peace in God, that for some of them having a baby is simply a means of bringing purpose, and a sense of being needed into their personal lives. Sexual addiction is the one obviously destructive addiction in modern society about which the welfare state is likely to do nothing. It is powerless to lead, because it has no philosophy of man which carries authority. It also lacks the will, partly because some of its cultural leaders are determined to use this addiction to eradicate what is left of Christian values in social behaviour, partly because for many others this is their own drug of addiction, and they cannot do without it.

Population and cultural development

Some aspects of population problems which are still only in the realm of the possible can reasonably wait for a solution until they come nearer the bounds of probability. The one overwhelming problem would be the power of scientific knowledge either to end death, or to postpone it for a really long time. It is a fact that the growing power of man's intellect shows up more and more horribly the crisis caused in human nature by the impact of sin. We are not able to control the God-like powers of our intellect, through that same medium, intellect, which should so obviously rule the human personality in all its aspects, spiritual and physical. Through the grace of God, adding strength to vision, a man can do such a thing, but in fact most of us for most of the time do not, and will not. The type of problem posed by lack of natural predators against man, lack of environmental control, and so forth, underlines, with the sheer might of man's intellect, that man cannot be explained by the purely material within the equation of evolutionary values. The type of power resident in man, his lack of commensurate wisdom also, is made a more awful vision of possible hell, in the suggestion of people like Professor Kahn, who having left over the calculation of international Megadeaths in nuclear exchange, for the calculation of scientific and social trends by the end of the century, can envisage the possibility of our playing up the ‘pleasure centres’ of the brain from little press button boxes on our chests… It is not that the prophecy is impossible, indeed there is a cold scientific sanity about Kahn's calculations which is very acceptable, it is simply that the degradation of the enormously powerful human soul to the level of slavery to press-button physical pleasure appals. In such a society of neurosis and addiction there can only be the world society of Animal Farm. It is not possible, and is not going to be possible, to distort totally the nature and meaning of the human personality, in a world of super-science, without creating a living hell of the human spirit. But as yet, we have not reached the nadir the professor foresees, there could be a reaction. Should man learn to postpone decay and death for a very long period a special problem will arise. If we believe that there is an intellectual meaning and a personal end behind the world, and the universe of which it is a part, we can justifiably leave that problem to the providence of God if and when the new situation arises. The fact of Christ means that the entrance of God, in Person, into the world, is a fact of providence and of governance. It is not arbitrary, it is not interference, it is finalistic and of the set order of creation, we have a right and a duty, by the very nature of the Christian Religion and its claims for Jesus Christ, to trust the providence of God, and not to formulate too far ahead for every possible menace and danger. God is not just in heaven, he is also an actor in the scene, —‘behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world’; for there is to be a consummation, the Economy is by nature finite and not infinite.

The assessment of what might be morally possible and morally permissible may be left to the situation of man when such a time does come, if God ever permits it to come, of which I would be very doubtful. This does not mean that the Moral Law will change, but there might be ways of diminishing human fertility, or even —perish the thought! —human sexual desire, which would be compatible with the minimum requirements of the observance of the Divine Law. There is no need to worry about it unduly, since God will never leave the Church, or the human family to cope with troubles so great that there is no issue of grace by which good and sincere men and women could bear it. God always waits until the eleventh hour, because until the average Churchman is on his bended knees in near despair, the voice of God does not manage to penetrate without distortion to his mind and his heart, but strain and crisis as this is, the Lord does always come before the twelfth hour.

In the present condition of man, many of the facets of the population bogey are exaggerated, if we will have the courage to glimpse a nobler vision of the importance of man, and of his right to live in time, and pass on to eternity. In a world order which truly changed the environment of the planet so as to activate to the full its material economic potential, the standard of living would rise all the world over, in one common civilisation of Science. With her theology developed with further relevance but without change, to the philosophy of Science, the Church could hope to hold more of the nobler characters among the young. Population itself might be held more in check by less emphasis upon marriage and the sexual union, —holy sacrament though this is, —and more upon the fuller flowering, of the Religious Life, perhaps by Orders and Institutes of modern form, some of which would claim ten years or so of dedicated personal life for the care and good of the neighbour, before a man or a woman passed on to responsible parenthood in marriage itself. If there were less sheer excitation of sex in society, it would be easier for the age of marriage, which has been getting younger, to rise a little again, and to allow of the fuller and more responsible development of personality in all the young, and not merely in the most gifted who already for professional reasons are forced to delay the age of marriage in any case. Quite apart from the impact of age of marriage upon population, and in the West at least it is not a very important factor this, for the majority of average children, their last two years at school are a frantic and frustrating bore, and the legislature is failing to face up to it. To raise further the school leaving age is likely only to worsen matters. The children yearn for their liberation, and their sense of futility derives in part from the fact that while the social life of the state calls out for volunteers and helpers, no attempt is made, from the framework of the state, to utilise in a schematic and creative way this vast reservoir of social power and generous goodwill. In days of old a growing boy helped his father at his work, and the girl her mother. A youngster acquired proficiency in the chores of life, as well as a sense of worth, by growing into them, just as the young Jew of biblical days had to learn a trade. The young grew into responsibility by natural degrees, and so they did not feel a special and unwanted class within society. Some new solution giving this result must be looked for today, for the nature of modern life and its vast cities makes the old configuration of social belonging impossible.

It should be not impossible to organise certain types of creative social work, together with the visiting of the elderly and sick, around the schools themselves, whether in official hours or out of them. The maintenance of public parks and grounds might well be organised from the schools, and not in a makeshift way from youth clubs and parish welfare centres. At the same time, care must be taken not to destroy family life and family initiatives where these do still exist, or to make impossible every fulfilling form of voluntary organisation. A priest soon learns from experience how much, in the case of the gifted child, overladen with ‘homework’, and often taken away on Saturday and even Sunday too, to ‘play for the School’, the School as an organisation can overwhelm the life of the family, the individual, and the district. At the other end of the scale there exists the bored, cynical youngster, for whom school has become meaningless, and the dormitory home an irritation. He has nothing worthwhile to do in school hours or out of them. Some means must be found to fit in, in social work or hospital and other work, a place in the community for him or her, a place where they will be genuinely valued and wanted, and will feel a glow of the pleasure of being loved and being looked for. Whether such service was directly remunerated or not would be of less importance, ideally it should be, and without some remuneration any such service that went beyond official school or social service hours might soon break down. Modern youth is accustomed to having some money.

The status of womanhood

In many parts of the world difficulties in raising the standards of living, and also of lowering the birth-rate, depend upon ending the low personal and social status of women. Women themselves are here the best pioneers and missionaries. This low status is perpetuated by some archaic forms of Religion, by cultures that admit of polygamy or polyandry, by the giving of children in marriage who are barely out of infancy, and so forth. Most of all the very high birth rate of the under-developed areas arises from the grinding poverty and sheer physical cruelty of life. Such pressures depress the human spirit, and while men and women are too crushed to care, sexual pleasure becomes the one release from tensions for which there is time and which is free of cost. It bulks too largely therefore in marriage itself in such cultures, to the impoverishment of true love, true mercy, and real human companionship. To underline what is meant, let it be said that it is not so very long ago in the West that husbands, and perhaps more so working-class husbands, wept into their moustaches for the women they had allowed to die in multiple childbearing, because whatever they knew of the fears of their womenfolk, and of the physical danger to them, they could not and they would not sacrifice one jot or one tittle of ‘my rights’. True love is known in marriage by the willingness to value wife or husband as a most dear companion, rather than by the insistence upon ‘rights’ at whatever cost. The emancipation of women from a nearly servile status has made it clear also to men that rights which are in theory equal on both sides, are for the future actually going to be equal on both sides, and that this will be required in the name of happy family life.

In hard fact, the world is never going to be overpopulated. The virtuous will agree that it is more holy and more responsible to have say three children, and not more, they will arrive at that situation by a virtuous and very high standard of married love, and with the assistance of such means and such knowledge of the cycle of life as helps human nature without breaking the law of God. The not always virtuous will arrive at the same end by means which perhaps are not always virtuous, while those indifferent to the claims of sexual morality in marriage will attain such end by means which are indifferent to morality. Whatever happens, the garish nightmares of the neo-Malthusians are not warranted, and they must at heart be aware of it. Perhaps what so many of them desire is to hit hard at the concept of human dignity in behaviour for which the Church of Rome still stands, and to hit hard while there appears to be some probability still in their arguments.

Whatever may be our religious or philosophical standpoint in this matter, it is important for us all to realise that there can be no sort of responsible parenthood in the Christian sense or in less, until there is achieved the liberation of the personality and dignity of womanhood itself in a larger measure across the world. Until women have, all the world over, full personalities, and the will to care for themselves as persons, equal with the male, they will not discover within themselves the spirit to educate their boys to a higher standard of behaviour to women, and of respect for the meaning and the dignity of the vocation of motherhood that comes through the womb. Women must insist upon the dignity of their bodies and their personalities, they are the very source of life and through the soul, of life more abundant, in educating their children, especially their sons, from the cradle upwards. They have it within their power to form a noble ideal of human love, of the place of sex in human life, and of the love and service of one's neighbour. A son looks to his mother to find in her the ideal of womanhood and the ideal of his own love later for a woman, and girls should live worthily of that ideal from their own teenage years. They should reflect in their teens on the pain they will surer later on, and the loss they will endure, if they came in haste and with a guilty giggle to the altar because they discovered that their first born was already on the way. Children always discover this afterwards with deep resentment and pain, and the discovery both lowers the esteem in which they hold their parents, and their own teenage ideals as well.

Some industrial aspects of population and development

Another reason for a less panicky attitude towards population growth in the undeveloped regions of the world, is the very little there is to show for the disbursement of considerable amounts of aid and ‘know-how’. Quite apart from the political corruption, another factor is coming to be recognised: plant and machinery and know how of every description which is currently used in the West, may be quite unsuited to the primitive conditions of many of the undeveloped regions. It is not enough to train a team of young men to use machinery, or to cultivate better strains of seed, if roads do not exist, if schools are too elementary, if proper servicing facilities do not exist, if men and women have not the mentality to take proper care... in all of these cases the sophisticated aid of the West is wasted. We are being told increasingly that what the simple villager needs in many an isolated village is the type of implement, gadget, and general know-how that was current in country life some fifty years ago in the West. Power plants, too, need to be rugged and unsophisticated, and given the vast reserves of uneducated labour, the best results can be obtained by skills and tools which aid the individual labourer to produce more, rather than by those which do much work and displace human labour. As Industrialisation causes a drift into the great cities as much in the less as in the more developed areas of the earth, the higher birthrate of the primitive villages allows a better use, with simple agricultural skills, of the remaining man power, and not only raises the levels of production, but disposes directly to the appreciation of the machine, and its principles, and thereby prepares the undeveloped society for the fuller development of technical skills.

Before we begin to assert that the pressures of population in the modern world are at crisis point, we ought to ask ourselves whether a population explosion which is maintained over some two or three generations is not rather a requirement of the very social advancement we so continually talk about. In North America, for instance, in the age of the pioneers, which is not so very far back, despite the great influx of immigrants, and a buoyant birthrate, there was a relative shortage of manpower, which accounted for both the high wage levels of North America, and at the same time reduced the type of revolutionary tensions so permanent and so destructive in the older civilisations. So far are we, even in the advanced countries of Europe, from the age of true automation, that rapid increase of productivity has created a labour shortage in Britain itself, ‘overpopulated’ as we are said to be, and the same phenomenon can be seen in the constant migration of seasonal labour; especially Italian, into Germany, and other parts of the North European industrial complex.

It seems certain that for a long time to come, perhaps even at all times, the demands of the affluent societies are going to depend on an increase in manpower to provide the vastly increased and sophisticated forms of service and maintenance for which we are all the time crying out. It may be that in this matter of population we are trying too much to have our cake and eat it also. What is it that we want when at home we describe the modest increase in the birthrate, itself stepped up by prolific immigrants, as a ‘frightening problem’ and then, the moment the economy is in balance, begin to open again the floodgates to immigration because of the ‘lack of labour’ for the jobs available at the Exchanges? Shall we then make it a condition that all immigrants be young, and workworthy, and submit to castration on arrival, in the name of a low birthrate, so that we may call in more labourers from abroad to fill the jobs that are not taken up by the existing birthrate?

We do not seem yet to have appreciated the pattern of development in the affluent societies, their full and overfull employment is related to the fact that they require for their maintenance and servicing a higher proportion of sheer labour power than was anticipated, in much the same way as the most sophisticated army on earth, that of the United States, requires nearly nine men in support to one infantryman in the field. We have to accept that the cities of the future, with their projected invasion of the airspace above the ground with two and three tier traffic lanes and pedestrian walks, their tendency to house the population by expansion upwards rather than by sprawl outwards, are going to require immensely more servicing of every kind than has been allowed for in general planning, and this notwithstanding the improvement of power machinery and the automation of so many processes. So many of the personal services, and so many of the chores for which labour in this country at least is always ‘short’ are local and small scale in themselves, they could not conceivably be provided by automation of any kind. It will come to this, —and so far social science does not indicate such opinion to be error, that the more complex and interrelated the body of the social fabric, so much the greater a network of blood vessels and capillaries it will require for its full maintenance. It is true that much of this network of social blood vessels is feeding and maintaining sheer useless fat on the body of the civilisation. Nevertheless, if men are going to demand it, as service or as entertainment, the need for labour is going to be there.

If the birthrate all over the world came to be stabilised in two generations or so to near the twenty per thousand or so which is the average for Europe and North America, there would not be anything to worry about, short of a marked increase in longevity, for a considerable time. What is required, be it repeated, is the sociological vision of the scientific society of the entire world, as a world built for man and built around man. In this way cities still could grow, roads be carved through the countryside, and crops and livestock be produced the more intensively on the land that was left. This does not take into account the possibilities of reclaiming land which at present is desert or infertile, or the possibility earlier mentioned that science will furnish acceptable food in time by chemical methods or by direct photosynthesis of a kind more economical of ground than present cultivation and by properly harvesting the sea.3 What most of our Western philosophers ask for and look to is the perpetuation of the status quo. This is the state of mental and spiritual indolence which, at the last, always grows out of spiritual and cultural agnosticism, and is reinforced by the woolly and mildly disdainful hedonism which accompanies such a culture. This is a type of culture without forward vision, though with much talk of vision, a culture which, disliking difficulty and discipline, avoids the work necessary to harness the enormous potential of the sciences to the task of making a full provision for man upon a planet barely scratched in terms of utilisation as environment. This weakness, Marxism at least does not incur, not at least until its atheistic negativism causes the loss of its own élan vital.

Only in times of war, disgracefully, has the potential of the scientific society been realised in anything which approaches its full deployment, in Western society. The reason for this is simple enough. Human beings need a motive in order to think and to act with full creativity. The motive of self-preservation has, up to now, been sufficient to override the limitations of both philosophical indolence and commercial profitability. Many a technical factor has been utilised, either for winning the war, or ekeing out civil supplies, in time of such stress, which in time of peace would be waived as ‘too way out’ or ‘not up our street’ in terms of immediate commercial profit. If the motive for the full deployment of the sciences in human work and living were a forward looking vision of man, and the needs of man, and the rights of men to indeed fill the world, as much could be achieved in peace as in war, indeed more at a less insistent pace, because there would not be the destruction and the frustration which accompanies war. In a culture of man which is a true Humanism, there must be an act of faith deriving from the swell of creation, which has taken the rise of being from the elemental energies to the human being itself. There must be an act of faith therefore which is in man, but of God, and which draws its strength from God, the source of creation, of man, and of human destiny, and of individual human fulfilment. This act of faith is justified and embodied so to say, in the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ as the Son of Man, the personal and the social leader and saviour of mankind. It is not possible for us to say with any real authority what is or is not possible for man in three or four decades ahead, much less three or four generations ahead, for we cannot measure the rate of human discovery, nor its interaction in terms of human possibilities. What we can say is that given time and the motive, there is nothing at all needed for the physical and cultural life of man which the environment of man cannot produce as far ahead as we can reasonably see. There is a certain metaphysical truth in the reminder of Christ that ‘sufficient for the day is the care thereof’ (Matt. c. 6, v. 34) just as it is perfectly true to say that the essential difference between Christian humanism and secularist and agnostic humanism, is also comprised in a saying of Christ: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as is one of these. If God so clothe the grass which is alive today in the field, and tomorrow is thrown under the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O men of little faith? And do not seek what you are to eat, and what you are to drink, nor be of anxious mind. All these things do the nations of the world seek, but your Father knows that you have need of them. Seek then first the Kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you’ (Luke c. 12, v. 27-31.)

The provision of God is not by the waving of a wand, for the universe itself is the ordered growth of the divine wisdom in the divine work. It is for man to co-operate with God in God's providing, by the application of his own God-like wisdom and power in proper dependence upon God. The error and the sin derives from a culture which is merely self-centred, this is the root of all the insufficiency, error, and inner failures of quality in human life. The true humanism is God-centred, from this focus is the beginning of being, the development of being, and the connatural fruition of being. It is not possible for us to know or say to what degree the very solar system and its planets may not become more fully a part of the environment of human culture, and provide support for human existence. For my own part I find it impossible to make the most distant acts of faith in that conquest of outer space which forms the backbone of space fiction, and seems to have a scientific following in Russia. It does not seem possible that the limiting factor of the speed of light is likely to be overcome, much less by a space vehicle than by masses of elemental atoms. Yet even here, faced with an alternative between trusting the power of God and his provision for man, and a self-centred defeatism, it would be much more rational to throw all one's care upon him, knowing that he has a care of us. Better to make an act of trust in God, proven in his might, the majesty of his wisdom, and the constancy of his care, than narrow the life of man and the generation of his kind within a small and agnostic distrust of the future and the provision for the future. It is unreasonable to make an act of dis-faith, based on the insufficiency of man unto himself, when all the evidence of creation is that nothing, and no creation, not even man, is a sufficiency unto itself, but its sufficiency is from God, and in co-operating with God.

The nature of sovereignty: its fulfilment in unity

Just as the right of dominion in respect of ownership of property is not an absolute right, but a right which stands in an organic relationship of control or of participation by others who are affected by such dominion, so also with the right of national or state sovereignty. There is no difference at all of qualifying principle, —both the economic and the political forms of dominion are aspects of natural, inevitable human control over the earth and the fruits of the earth. The decline of colonial domination with the abiding heritage of education and development it has left behind, and above all the impetus of applied sciences, have made men conscious of a world which is one community already, though in an imperfect manner. In spite of many a local resistance from the ingrained habits of thousands of years, men are becoming aware of the world as a unity in community in a sense which modifies, and ultimately must eradicate the concept of national territorial and communal sovereignty, and even more the concept of an absolute and exclusive racial Nationalism. Human beings have no more right to the concept and the exercise of an exclusive, prohibitory, and often uncharitable exclusive dominion in respect of territorial sovereignty, than they have to the exclusive and laissez-faire exercise of the right of dominion over property within national sovereignty.

The deduction is reasonably made from common sense applied to the analysis of the human situation. It is just as clear but meaningful today in an especial degree, from the words of the very first chapter of Genesis where of Man, in his first familial origins as a unity of kind it is said ‘And God blessed them, saying: increase and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the Earth...’ (c. 1, v. 28). So, in the first instance there is but one landlord of all the earth, God, and the rule of Man is but a tenancy from him in any event, until the economy of Man upon this planet shall come to its consummation. Even as a unity of kind, as a species or family in the existential sense, Man does not possess the absolute dominion over planet Earth. There is one heir to the vineyard which is this earth, even Christ the King, the Lord of Lords and the Son of Man. In the strict and literal sense then, both naturally and divinely Christ is the Lord of the land which is Earth, and as the Son of Man, all things are subject to his dominion. In the name of Nature and of Religion alike, we must require of rulers, nations, power blocs of any kind no matter how powerful or how arrogant, that they recognise the intrinsic right and claim of other men upon this planet to modify their actions, and to delimit their dominion in respect of the territories of the earth over which they exercise their sovereignty. The direct impact of this claim will fall first, in all probability, upon issues of immigration, and the acceptance of whatever changes of culture and even of sovereignty may derive from the opening up of idle lands to peoples who need, and are willing to develop the land. This is likely to be a hard saying and an unpopular one, even as was the first claim by the pioneers of social justice upon the exclusive sovereignty and dominion of the great landowners and industrial entrepreneurs over their lands and their goods of production. It will seem just as outrageous, and be as simply right and true. If it is not heeded and accepted, then the social stresses caused by territorial injustice may cause wars as hideous, even more hideous if chemical and biological weapons are used, than any the world has seen. Such wars would be analogous in the matter of national sovereignties with the social wars and revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, they would be civil wars within the community of Man.

This hard saying is not a claim upon the conscience of European man only, now here and now there in areas which he has colonised, it is a claim also upon tribes and communities in many a part of Africa and South America, where independent states with tiny populations sit upon vast resources with no apparent intention of doing anything to develop them. This problem would admit of more secure solution if the great and civilised Powers of the world would come together in a fraternal mutual agreement within the United Nations, would agree and then would impose, in case of necessity, a solution of these problems where there is selfish and stubborn non-co-operation from national sovereignties. It does not seem honest to shrink from putting the proposition that such a union of the Great Powers, forming the very nucleus of one World Society, should be willing, if it came to be necessary to impose such an arbitrament by irresistible sanctions, even the sanction of force, given a proportionate need and cause. It does not seem necessary to allow the urgent development and reform of human society in an age of rapid growth of population to be indefinitely delayed by either the intellectual arrogance of aristocratic governments of white men, or by the ignorance and tribal arrogance of backward and indolent peoples who may be making increasing problems in the world and doing nothing at all to help solve them. Yet the thought and the threat of force is not the principle from which we should work, it is suggested only because a degree of just force would be better than the eventual revolutionary explosion of long denied territorial justice in the use of the earth and its seas. Given the keen and generous understanding of youth, especially of youth educated in leadership by university training, it should not be necessary to invoke the sanctions of fear and pain, these latter in their train evoke again the old and primitive passions of national war. The principle to be invoked is the principle of truth and of justice, that the family of Man is manifestly one in nature, origins, and rights, and that the earth is manifestly the heritage of all men under the common Fatherhood of God, and the Kingship of His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Heir of the Ages, and the trustee of the common destiny of all men of all kinds whatever.

There are types of Nationalism, experienced also in the various regions of the most advanced of the nations, which are not necessarily evil, nor by necessity against the vision of man here proposed. Any national or regional sovereignty to be just and acceptable must take account of, and be a reflection of the familial communities and cultures of which states exercising jurisdiction are composed. Where this is not so, or not adequately so, then a Nationalism that demands a degree of autonomy which reflects the status and feeling of distinct communities within a state or federation, is not an evil, but rather the first requirement of a truly personal and universal co-operation among the human family. This argument could be true in the national regions of the United Kingdom, for instance, and more urgently true in many another region, even of the state-sovereignty of Great Powers. The Soviet Union, for example, is very grudging indeed in the admission of the separate identities of its national communities, and this type of levelling in the state sovereignty of Great Powers can be a source of weakness rather than of strength and unity.

Nevertheless, given the concession of national or tribal autonomy rightly desired by tongues and communities, the fact does remain that the mind and will to work the earth as just one habitation of man, in the unity of one society of man, is opposed to the pettiness of national claims and the exclusive aggressiveness of national family pride. It is opposed also to the existence of a vast multiplicity of tongues, and to all the other causes of barbarism and division among the human family.

It is prudent to accord to all cultural groups the autonomy from which a basis may be sought for their willing co-operation towards the true Great Society, —a homogeneity of man which is asked for in the name of peace and love, therefore in the name of God. It will be a hard saying, for it means that tribes and nations do not possess an exclusive right over the uses and development of their land, their waters, their policy for immigration, without regard to what happens in the world outside. To affect an exclusive and absolute dominion is, in this different sphere to claim the right of exclusive dominion regardless of the needs of others, which vitiated Capitalism of old, allowing the rich to live aloof, to enclose common lands, to shut down their plants for purely personal gain, while the poor starved or died a mile or so from their Halls. Man, who began as one in a community of origin under the blessing of God, is destined at the consummation of human society, to find again the same unity and community in One Society on one earth. Eventually this will need a governmental centre which is the supreme authority of a federated world. It must be so, and the vision of peace with the end of racialism it could bring must be a source of inspiration to the young, and most of all it should fire the minds and zeal of Christian men. For us Christians, is not the Incarnation of God, Son of the Father, and Son of Man, origin of the gospel which must be ‘preached to every creature’ the very reunification in reconciliation of the unity of the family of Man, a family divided, wounded, and dispersed by the wounds of sin, and not the forces of Nature?

This should be the culmination of our vision of the City of God among men, that the Kingdom of God should really come, on earth as it is in heaven, according to the prayer we make every day, and which Christ taught us. It will never come in perfection, that we know, it will be challenged and undermined, that we also know. It belongs nevertheless by grace and by nature to the necessity of our very being that we strive for it, for it is the Law of grace and of life that we strive always for the reintegration of Man, wounded and dispersed by sin. We strive for it by the same necessity as the human body sick with a chronic disease strives and resists, and if we cease to strive then we sink lower and further into the chaos of evil. The urge of the Reformer is the urge of life itself, and is itself part of the Evangel, for all the realism of our ‘knowing what is in man’ (John c. 2, v. 25). The bringing of the ‘good news’, the message of peace and of hope to all men, extends to every sphere of nature and of grace, for all is within the sovereignty of God. The Kingdom of God must come first in the sovereignty of God over and within the individual conscience of a Christian man, and be manifested and binding upon the individual conscience in the public teaching and authority of Christ the Sovereign King in the Church and in the magistracy of the Church over the individual and over the family of mankind. Unless first it is fully manifest and fully accepted with loyalty of life and work in the spiritual sphere, it certainly cannot come with truth and sincerity in that temporal sphere where it meets with even more contradiction and more disloyalty than in the Church.

For the pleroma, the fullness of God, we work and strive as Christian men, knowing very well that we will be opposed, and that the opposition will be Satanic in its purposive dynamism, because our striving is not simply with flesh and blood, however fallen, but also with principalities and powers, and with spirits of wickedness in the high places. (Ephes. c. 6. v. 12.) The essential strategy of Satan, most subtle and imitative of God is to transform himself into an angel of light, and by a false humanism which makes Man the centre of his own life, law, and destiny, to withdraw men from God, and from the true norm, way, and environment of their being. The essence of the lie is at all times the same, though different according to times and ages in its manifestation —the enslavement of men through the most subtle of selfishness, through arrogance of mind, through animal passion, through the lust for spiritual dominion over their brethren. As Christians we know this, we have been forewarned by Christ and his apostles, but while with steadfast faith and steadfast hearts we know and recognise this danger, and all the temptations, oppositions, and confusions which must accompany it, we cannot for that reason allow the false vision and the disciples of the false vision, to steal our birthright from us. That birthright is the vision of the full truth, and the office to preach and to proclaim the full vision of the Kingdom of God. Even when we are betrayed by parents, brethren and friends, dragged before kings and governors for Christ's sake, we do not confront the arrogance or the sensual viciousness of the adherents of the Prince of this world with negativism. It is not by denial of life or by contracting out of all things that we bring to perfection in all things and in all men the Kingdom which is of God. There is but one Reformer and Liberator, and this work of his is contained in his very title as Saviour of the world. He, Jesus Christ, is the bringer in of the enormous vision that is splendid, the majesty of the Intellect of God and of Man, the fullness of the Kingdom on Earth which God has made for Man, and can bring to consummation only in and through his creature, Man. For in all things, measures, and ways the Word of God is not the breath of any imaginary pale Galilean, but the splendour and dynamism of God in the power of the Spirit: for his is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory for everlasting ages, Amen.

1 This is not a reference to the Church by law established but the social order becoming, through law, established.

2 An analogy with the Christian parousia.

3 Cf. the many scientific and constructive suggestions made in The Unification of the World by Paul de Hevesy. (Pergamon, 1966).

POSTSCRIPT

What have we seen thus far, in essentials? The concept of the entire universe of matter-energy as poised in an equation of both forces and natures. As Evolution proceeds, the very higher natures, one unto the other still administer the Law of life, control and direction unto each other. This process the man of the modern world knows as ‘environment’. He is often ignorant, and the scientist with him, that 'environment’ is not a random bumping and barging of entities, but the play of equational law. Law has not here legalistic overtones, it is the co-relationship of all beings in life, organic structure, and nature as made for given role, and for determination.

The Unity-Law

This cosmic relationship has been called the Unity-Law of control and direction to fulfilment. It might also be called the Unity-Law of Finalism, because in it and through it all things, from the heart of the elements, through the sweep of galaxies, to the conception of Man, are all inter-defined. Therefore the universe is poised upon a mathematical and organisational law of development, by which, within the order of determinism, the primary value of the universe, as related being in ascent, contains the ultimate value by deterministic necessity, much as the organised seed of life contains its prime of life, in relationship to environment, by development from the womb. When space and time was not, when when, and where and what, all of them meaningful relationships of statement and being were not, they yet were present in some sense. They were present as a necessary potential of growth and of development, and as higher terms and natures: the anthropoid is more than the meson, and Man is more than both.

That which is contained within another potentially, is contained either by necessary inter-definition of origin and outcome, or as the free intention of free will. There is no free-will in radiant energies. What was the future history of the cosmos, and for us of planet Earth, was contained by pre-determined interdefinition, and this is a mathematical conception. It is just the same with the conceived seed of life, it is also potential, to its environment. In this case, the environment is a mother's womb, and the whole universe besides, of which both mature life and potential beginning are part and member.

In the beginning of the universe as history, the universe itself was the organised seed, but the higher beings like men were not there, how could they be? Do elements conceive of Man, or fiery energies admit of flesh and blood? There was no space and time as yet, no meaningful ascent. Could there be? No: not if this was all, for Man is not within the concept of the electron, nor all of them in concert, to conceive. The intrinsically less cannot make the intrinsically greater. Within this universe of all things in radiant energies, either there is no meaning, plan, or outcome, or else there is, but all things are mutually moved and co-determined the one upon another. The latter is true with the life in the womb, at the beginning of development. In the womb this development is centred, from the genetic code of the life, to the ultimate fullness of the brain, there is a meaningful centre of development, no random movement. When you introduce some element that jars, you may get random, uncontrolled reaction, then you have the birth of a defective baby. All life is relative in a meaningful way, and one preferred to call this 'equational’ even in the field of biology.

To the inter-related equation of primordial energies, there was no mother supporting the womb, no other background environment of the primitive and interdefined forms and movements. Therefore the first primary determination, in the radical and ontological sense of determinant of being, and of ascent of being to enormously higher entity, was a centred something of Intellect, Will, and Power, outside these co-relative energies and forms, and their closed circuit of mutual becoming, and mutual need of determination. That centred something is GOD. Argue as we may, presume demagogues and cavil as we may, the ultimate which is sufficient cause of that which is not totally and instantaneously intelligible of itself, is ABSOLUTE BEING: this is another way of saying GOD ALMIGHTY. God, then, is the first and necessary sufficient reason for all that is in that initial beginning of the equational Economy of matter, the explanation of its totality, the inter-relationship within it of Alpha to Omega, primal elements to the majesty of man: that which inter-relates and necessitates this totality is centred Intellect and Will; this means a Person. This Person is, by any other name, GOD.

The necessity of the ascent of beings

The Communist is quite right about the intrinsic necessity at the heart of Evolution, the historic march of progress, the ascent of being, the Dialectic within which history is poised. The Marxist must show how all things can be explained without intellect and will that relates, and all ascent of being be explained without going beyond the powers of primal elements, the movements of primal elements, and the degree of unity and personality contained as primal element. Nothing can give what it has not got. Otherwise show how self-contradiction makes sense, and the writer for one will be willing to undergo debate. In the Marxist scheme the powers and properties of God are presumed without the presence. This is self-deception, and in philosophy, cheating. The Marxist internal necessity within Evolution as history, makes no sense, unless first God is admitted and postulated. The necessity covers the emergence of man, and man is no mass of primal energies, man is more than these intelligibly are, by definition. How? if there is no more than these, because no God, no Mind beyond, in any sense? That which relates Alpha to Omega, is the same necessity when we look back from Omega, to its necessary beginning as Alpha: it was not any other way, and it could not have been any other way. In this sense then, God is the Environment of the universe always, but most specially in the poising of being within, and in, and through the Unity-Law from below atoms, to above apes. There is no other way to explain it. God is necessary because the creation is meaningful.

The Marxist likewise, must abandon the immanent contradiction he puts at the core of matter. No: the ascent is from thesis to synthesis, love to greater love. There is no principle of intrinsic war at the heart of progress. He must recognise the fact, and the meaning of SIN. Sin indeed is the immanent contradiction at the heart of being, but man put it there, or say rather, the spiritual creature, for sin is possible in the nature purely spiritual, and the nature mixed of matter and of spirit. This is the great riddle which has foxed the best minds of mankind from the mystics of the ancient East, to the Marxist who is a modern scientist. The answer to the riddle is what is called Original Sin, and also, in the individual, the additional evil of personal and actual sin. Sin is the refusal to follow the equational perfection which is truth in one's own order, and for one's own nature, person, and destiny. Sin is always illogical, cannot be rational, though the more arrogant the sinner, the more he will rationalise and decorate with attractive labels the path of false living and teaching.

Only the spiritual creature can sin. Sin is damage, disruption, and the mispoising so to speak of the present in an equation of future greater horror and breakdown. This is true in personal life, social life, and cultural life. We see the fruits of it all around us today, the spiritual fruits of the great liars, and great lechers of yesterday, and their children of the spirit are like to them.

Perhaps the most important of all things in the thesis (for such it is) here presented, is the relationship of the body, through the brain, to the soul, in the explanation of man. Animism has been rejected totally, and with it the foundations of the thesis of Teilhard de Chardin, to which this book is a frank counter-thesis and alternative. Animism makes the exact sciences meaningless, and by them is radically disproved. Also, it gives nothing to do of use, to the vaguely imagined misty principle of consciousness, ‘radial energy’ and freedom, which is at the heart of the merest of elements. It is not obvious at all either, how the addition of dim intelligence to dim intelligence, as masses of matter-energy are ‘enveloped’ as suns, stars, and planets, adds up to centred, individual intelligent personality. On this earth, a multitude of fools does not make one genius. The sun should be so much more intelligent than earth and its manlings, for it envelopes so much greater a portion of radial potential ! One could go on much further.

The intelligent explanation is One GOD, who is not of matter-energy, nor immersed in creation as element, nor emergent as Christ, in pantheistic Divinity once, or more often through history, but Creator of all things through the Unity-Law, always the Co-operator with other causes according to that which of their own they can and must give. God who is never the mere pusher around of things, for creation is not by Occasionalism, but he works until now with all that he has made, and he is not contained or determined within the circuit of creaturely energies.

The explanation of man is the ascent of a brain which is potential to its material environment at the highest possible level of reality. If that animal, that brain, that man-like anthropoid goes on developing, mutating through its species for a more capable brain, a time when it is beyond harmonious inter-locking with the environment will come, for this brain is programmed, is organic, as all material life is, and because it is instinctual no matter how versatile, it has finite limits. That is to say, a brain which is to receive its control and direction of life cycle from the environment around, and within the natural law of that environment around, must be intrinsically and harmoniously defined to the limits of that environment and its own cycle of life and rhythms.

The brain is defined in a finite way to a finite environment, there is an equational maximum. If the animal form goes beyond this outer limit, then a non-meaningful animal will be spawned. Non-meaningful, because possessed of a brain made for control and direction, programmed through the senses, and now without a life-programme. Such a sport must die for want of internal survival value, if indeed it can even begin within the womb of Nature, for it is not relevant to Nature to make the non-meaningful. And, by the way, ‘Nature’ is only another word for ‘Environment’ with capitals, the impact as that which forms, determines, and chooses to survive, of all other being, on any one being. Nature is not the fairy godmother of. ‘Religion without God’.

Nevertheless here Man is, the paradox is a fact. H. G. Wells would not see the intellectual inconsistency when he was in his prime, but in sad old-age, and viewing the triumph and the horror of the nuclear explosion, he saw the point. Nature had made an error in man, homo sapiens had been evolved with all the power to transcend the limits of environmental control, but without the parallel development of necessary and intrinsic wisdom to control it. He wrote us off. Jesus Christ did not write us off, but then, Jesus Christ knew the answers, because he was the answer.

The explanation of Man, is that at that point of supreme mutation, the entire body of this animal, becomes potential, or as the writer prefers to say, co-relative, to the spiritual soul, and this gives us the spiritual or rational animal, continuous with Evolution, and yet a special creation, and also existent in a new dimension of personality, the dimension of self-conscious unity, intelligent and free personality, the animal which has instincts, flesh, and all the frailties of animal form, but is not determined and ruled through these within a programmed, instinctual, fixed rule of life. We have got to the Moon, though we could not have evolved there. Therefore we are more than naked brains, we have the soul which is like to GOD. Only God is our Father; our Environer, our Bread of the spirit, our final Joy.

Religion an essential phenomenon of Man

From all this has been traced in bare outline, the need of God to commune with men, in truth and in good, and in the interior development of the soul in power and enhancement of personality. This is the operation of the Unity-Law still, at the higher level of creation which begins with man, but in an absolutely unbroken order of continuity with all that has gone before. Religion then, like man himself, is of the Unity-Law and part of the very vital process of creation itself. Religion is only God giving himself as the ‘Equation’ for man, the principle of growth, law, fulfilment, for man. Only God can provide for the spiritual creation. It is essential to stress the necessity of the relationship of men to God in this way, and the necessity of this emanation of Religion, or human determination to destiny in God and from God. There are no gaps in the Unity-Law.

From this follows the Line of determination, and we considered how it had been confused and muddied almost beyond hope and belief by the phenomenon of Original Sin and personal sin. Almost, but not quite, for if quite, man would have been irredeemable.

Man inexplicable without the Fall

Sin appears as the refusal of the spiritual creature to accept the path of its fulfilment in God, in a love freely given by the creature. The spiritual nature cannot be determined to God essentially, if it could be, it would by essence be God. The corollary for spiritual natures is that God cannot will them with an intrinsic necessity, but their existence is an act of his freely given love, and only in the same order of freely given love can they accept the gift of being, and its order of fulfilment back again in God.

The spiritual creature can refuse, unlike the deterministic nature, some did, and some do. The effect, at the beginning of man's origin is a substantial damage, the confusing, coarsening, and muddling of the response of the physical in man to its good, and the further confusion caused by the overdevelopment and overvaluation of sensual pleasure in the nature of man. This is a lasting ulcer, and because of it the economy of man can never rise to God in perfect harmony, nor can the personality of man be integrated with God in the beatific possession in unity of personality unless death intervene first. The material must be fashioned anew, it is deterministically distorted. For the reasons indicated in the chapters on Original Sin, this is not a true corruption of man, because the basic seeking, and loyalty of even the material in man, is always unto God, even when confused and distorted. Through grace a great healing can take place in soul and in body of the wound of concupiscence, or disorderly desire, and so long as the intension (the ‘s’ is not in error) of the soul is towards God with full sincerity and love, the gift of a man is fully acceptable to God, in spite of the blemishes which are of his mortal inheritance, and cannot in this time, be undone.

The problem of evil is very great and very complex, and the reader must be referred again to those chapters in which it is more fully considered. In summary let it be said that the doctrine of Original and personal sin explains the paradoxes in man in a wonderful manner, and gives a stupendous meaning to the concept of Salvation, i.e. consummation to happiness, by a Redemption, to which work pain is the inevitable concomitant of the created human nature in Christ, to the impact of his holiness and his charity upon the Fallen in man and in the society integrated by men.

From the work of Christ our endeavour was to trace together the organic, intelligible necessities of the confirmation of the fullness of the Unity-Law among men in Christ. That is to say, with the establishment of men in Christ, more than Christ in men, we sought to see what might be the logical manifestation of the continuing work of God Incarnate, the fullness of the mode of operation of the Unity-Law, in the Church of Christ. The inevitable outcome was the existence in this Church of the plenary authority of Divinity in teaching and in ruling in Faith and in Morals, and the absolute necessity that this unique characteristic, the outcome of the Incarnation itself, should be of the basic constitution of the Church, should be known as such, and should be operative and be claimed as such.

The manner of operation of the Christian sacrament followed the same organic configuration of the Church to Christ, He is the ultimate minister and the Gift conferred in one or another relativity to men, in all the sacraments. The ordering of the magistracy of the Church through men, to Christ, in an organic and hierarchic way followed the same essential plan, as also did the significance and plenitude of the Eucharist, in the very physical Person of Jesus Christ. It is not so much correct to view the physical and human in Christ as bringing with it the Divine, as to look upon the Christian order as the Divine bringing with it and sweeping along with it the truly physical and human, for the more perfect communion of God with men, and the more perfect transformation of men, and of the whole created order, to consummation in God.

The chapters that followed concerning the deployment of the Christian mind and heart upon the intellectual and moral problems of the modern world, will not in all things be popular with all men, especially those considerations which define the perfection of human love, and the meaning of sex in human life and love. Whatever the reader may think, whatever the Church may or may not be able to concede, one principle is most urgently pressed upon the reader, —that man, or men, every one of us, and the species of Man as a whole, to be honest in the seeking after happiness, meaning, truth, perfection in life, must be willing to seek first for the Kingdom of God which is within us. There also, in reaching up to accept the help of God, is the sole true means to human happiness, understanding of self, control of self, and liberation from the contradictions, miseries, and confusions of sin and of personal ignorance. The Church must always give this witness, and it is the only pre-ordained and human and natural way for men to fully control and perfect themselves. The perfecting of human nature does not lie through pills, any more than the joy of the mystical possession of God lies through mescalin and other hallucinatory drugs. Mysticism is not escapist release, but solid and higher and permanent achievement of personality in God. There is a price to pay, and it may not be escaped.

The nature of the uniquely true synthesis

The Church must have and she must find a new synthesis between the theology of Christ, and the basic and well-proven wisdom of the scientific age. Not that all the wisdom of the age is truly such, the further it deviates from the exact sciences the more likely it is to become hoary error, and much of the philosophy and psychology of the age is sheer error, error not in its case-data but in a totally wrong interpretation of the data and of the true nature of a man. The full truth alas, will be found to be even more complicated than Freud himself admitted ! New wisdom must be found, but it must be wisdom which preserves the orthodox truth, without which the age-old pedigree of the Church would be no witness of God, and also a truth which derives uniquely from, and not in spite of, the historic, orthodox witness of the Christian and Catholic Church. Any new development, any new alignment of the truth must be because of, not in uneasy partnership with, the defined and the always preached doctrine of the Church. Such a requirement of theological sincerity will rule out most of the ‘New Theology’ that has been thrust upon us.

The Church does not lack counsellors at the present crisis of her history, and much of the counsel offered her in even the high places is error, and it is corrosive of her doctrinal truth and continuity with the past. It is also utterly lacking in the realisation of the need for personal prayer, penance, humility, and union with God by meditation and mystical communion. It is hedonist in spirit, and very insolent, it is simply a god-less ‘Humanism’ in the vestments of the Church. It is not an accident that so much of it, and its pride of life and lusts of the flesh derives from the same cultural traditions and outlook as the great Schism of the West of four hundred years ago. It is indeed the inevitable nadir of the same movement, for Luther was, as a landmark, the beginning of secularism in the Church, by the denial of her living authority, the personal presence of Christ as Sacrifice and Sacrament, and that basic inerrancy on theological doctrine which must be the concomitant of a serious belief in the Divinity of Christ and his lasting power to teach unto Salvation down the ages. What we are witnessing now, in and out of the Roman Catholic Church, is the final phase of that same heresy. It can turn only first to ‘Christian Agnosticism’, and then to secularist Humanism and the totalitarian Scientific State, we see touches and foreshadowings of this inevitable evolution in the behaviour of the modern state today. If the authority of God, and the perfecting of the human personality by grace and inner charity is abandoned, then men will and must take over the ontological gap left in human affairs, and ontological gaps are vacuums which Nature cannot tolerate. The way then lies clear for Antichrist, and the waving of little red books of somebody or others' ‘thoughts’ is only the puny foreshadowing of the indoctrination and subservience of man to men which is to come.

The appeal of the author is to all men of goodwill, especially those who look with a sense of heartfelt misery for some solid synthesis between the certainties of science and orthodox, meaningful Christianity. Among Christians, it is to the English-speaking world that the first appeal for alliance and help is made, for upon the English-speaking world the leadership of Western Christianity is quite likely to devolve in the coming decades. The failure of the Anglican-Methodist unity initiatives do not seem to this author to be a failure, but the recognition among the really committed Christians, both Evangelical and Anglican, that definite principles and definite teaching is of the very essence of the Divinity of Christ. In particular the painful development of the ‘High Church’ from the heart-searching debate which Cardinal Newman initiated, has not been in the name of Unity or of Ecumenism, but in the simple name of the rediscovery or the fuller discovery of the truth of Christ. That alone, the truth of Christ, can be the touchstone of any ecumenism which is meaningful. We do not want, although we hear plenty of, a type of ecumenism which corresponds most exactly to the satire of Ronald Knox in ‘Reunion all round’. The reprinting of the ‘Essays in Satire’ would be salutary reading just now to many, including Cardinals, in the Church of Rome.

It is not by this way, the way of sheer disintegration of doctrine with mutual accommodation in agnosticism of spirit, that Reunion can be established: a Christian, Apostolic, Roman, and Agnostic Church would not give any meaning, or fire any power to vindicate the claim that ‘all power is given to Me in heaven and upon earth, going therefore teach all nations...’ a blanket reunion arranged from the top, which left unchanged every man's purely notional assent, which could embrace in formulas, without dogmatic content, or an assent in continuity with the past each and every man's ‘credo’. This is not the Faith that brings in the Kingdom of God, or is the Kingdom of Heaven established in this world.

The Anglican is well aware of that sheer chaos of doctrinal belief which is bringing his own communion to disintegration and public contempt. There are not many Roman Catholics surely who can now be ignorant that exactly the same chaos in belief, and intellectual arrogance, is bringing their own, with the speed of a forest fire, into the same case?

If we are then both in the same boat, —and, in this metaphor at least, the Church of Rome set sail into the future at Vatican II with good heart and hopes of fair weather, —let us both cry out to the Master ‘Lord save us, we are about to perish’, because in fact, we are. From the depth of the boat the Lord who seems to sleep will certainly rouse himself, command the wind and the waves, and bring a miraculous calm: He will not fail us. We must not be proud or sulky if we should find that when we appeal to the Lord to save us all, in the danger of the utter disintegration of the structure of the Church, that in fact we discover that it is the barque of Peter that we are in, and within which the good Lord stirs himself to save us. Had it not been for the One Saving Lord, Peter and barque would go down together, there is no virtue in the Roman Church which is hers, or Rome's, it is all the Lord's. It remains true that ‘I have prayed for thee, that thy Faith fail not’, it is no man's own charisma. We will not, any of us, be too proud to be confirmed by him whom only the Lord, not human strength, does confirm.

This book and its guiding principles is offered to all men of sincere goodwill, in the belief that it does, in principle, at least, and whatever may be the human errors it contains, indicate the guiding lines of a true, indeed of a unique development of Christian and Catholic theology for the needs of the age. It is for men of goodwill, theologians and scientists, Christians and non-Christians to add, correct, deepen, and enrich. For his own part, the writer yearns to listen and exchange more than expound. Long years as a busy curate and parish priest, for all their joy and fulfilment, nevertheless have not afforded either the time or the status needed to meet many deep scholars and deep hearts who also were deep scientists or theologians. There have been some of course, but not as many as could be desired. It is certain that better scholars and deeper, holier men could much improve and further refine on what is written in this thesis. God grant that they may do so, and quickly!

What the writer urges and presents as his own is subject to the ultimate judgement of the Church, as it must be on the writer's own premiss, if the authority of Christ lives within her. This however means in practice the final judgement of Rome, and not of lesser authorities. This is said with a certain confidence that in the basic substance of what has been presented, no heresy will be found alien to the truth of Christ. What is written here may well be corrected and be superseded, but it can be superseded only by the better, more truthful, and more fulfilling vision, and than that, the author desires nothing more.