PERSPECTIVES IN THEOLOGY

CONTENTS

The Rediscovery of God

A Personal God

The Knowledge which is Faith

The Recognition of Jesus

Meditation for Mary Immaculate

Word Church and Bible

The Son of Man

Communion in God

The Parish

The Eucharist

The Word Certain and Sure in all His Ways

THE REDISCOVERY OF GOD

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 16, no. 3, May/June 1984.

In our day an ever-increasing number of scientists are rediscovering God, and an enormous and exciting potential is offered to the Church in the follow-up to this discovery.

The Second Vatican Council is already twenty years ago. What are the fair fruits of its hopes and prayers? In the Western world of the older, mature Christendom at least, the results are nearer to a fiasco. The hopes for apostolate have run out of steam. We failed to see the signs of the times twenty and even thirty years ago. The signs were there, the message of the Spirit was given, but men had not the humility to listen. There is offered now another chance to seize eagerly upon that very principle of the communion of science with revelation, which was at the heart of the aggiornamento the Church was looking for and praying for. So far, the very call for a modernisation of the Church’s pastoral life, and of the framework through which she taught men her philosophy and theology of God, has meant in its main stream only the infiltration of that now very old heresy of Modernism, which is the reason for the fiasco of the post-conciliar period up to now.

Modern Scientists are Rediscovering God

Two articles have recently been published on the theme of modern man’s rediscovery of God. One is Beyond Darwin by Mark Doughty.1 It is the shorter, and is beautifully and succinctly written. Almost at the same time there appeared another article, covering much the same ground and many of the same arguments, in the excellent American Homiletic and Pastoral Review, entitled Cosmos: a Trap or a Home? written by Fr Owen Bennett OFMC.2  Fr Bennett’s article is a summary and an appreciation of the work of the Hungarian-born Benedictine priest, Stanley L. Jaki, lecturer in recent years at Edinburgh and Oxford, and now professor at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. It is a longer and somewhat heavier article. On the other hand it is more detailed, and does expressly take the reader to the outskirts of the doctrine  of  creation  and  the  meaning  and  purpose  of  a  cosmos  which,  in  its  very mathematical structure alone, is forcing the scientist to admit the existence of God—though as yet of a God who is, to the scientist, an abstract and impersonal figure. We say again that it was to this principle, and to take advantage of this new turn in the affairs of men, that the Holy Spirit was at least trying to lead the Church in her leaders during the last Vatican Council.

This new excitement concerning the existence of God graced the pages of The Times a few  years  ago,  with  letters  from  Professor  Fred  Hoyle  among  others.3   In  1976  we commented4 upon a discourse by Professor Lovell in Guildford Cathedral,5 which also took his listeners to the outskirts of a doctrine of creation unto meaning: which is to say an evolution of the universe, which, in man, goes beyond matter even to the manifestation of God. It is a doctrine of creation which gives hope to the individual too, within the family of the People of God; hope of a life which, beginning within the universe, transcends that universe, and goes on in meaning and in fulfilment into the very bosom of God (John 1:18).

Professor Lovell did not draw out the majesty of that vision, or the unity of its principle, which begins with the poised exactitude of the Big Bang itself. He could not: he had not the key. The Church alone has the key, and it is an utter woe for mankind that she has not realised what it is she holds in her hand, and has not yet placed it in the lock of human knowledge, and opened to mankind a new door and a new perspective. But Professor Lovell did at least insinuate that the medieval scholars were not such utter peasants in making man and his world the centre of the universe. For man indeed was placed at the Centre of Immensities, inasmuch as he alone, and his order alone—the communion within one creature of matter and of spirit—was placed at the peak of an ordered system of cosmic evolution. And with man, at that peak, was the centre of meaning, of purpose, and of fulfilment in the universe.

An Argument from Mathematics?

This writer would dare to say, and has said, that we can do more than speak of a generalised philosophical argument to the existence of God. There is the argument from simple common sense; and that presumably is the basis of the definition of the First Vatican Council, that man can know from unaided natural reason alone, and know with certainty, the existence of God.6

The argument from more sophisticated philosophy does not introduce any new principle; it only outlines with fuller majesty the content of the first simple apprehension. Both arguments are based upon the recognition of dependence for being and for reality upon some other thing. Nothing is its own first cause, nothing is its own unaided fulfilment. Nothing is an island in creation. The creation itself, as a harmony of beings that mutually cause, control, fulfil, and balance each other, looks for an Absolute outside its own order of total, ontological dependence. But in following that order of cosmic interrelatedness, at least in the realm of mathematics and physics, it does seem that we may speak in a true sense of a proof from mathematics itself.7

The modern scientist, tracing back the evolution of the universe to a primal past, has discovered with awe that the random movements and accretions of vast gas-clouds are far from being a sufficient foundation upon which to visualise the evolution of the cosmos. Instead a very precise formulation is necessary to attain, over vast periods of time, the very ordered, interrelated, and interlocked system of life and being within which we live in the universe. Some ten years ago Professor Lovell was telling us that the precise frequency of the elements that was needed to evolve into a life-bearing universe was determined within at most the first three seconds of the primal expansion. In like manner we find Mark Doughty writing: “The potentiality was there from the start. … Modern atomic physics and cosmology are now engaged in establishing that the fundamental conditions that obtained at the very first instant of the Primal Bang—or, on the newer model, at the moment of initiation of the inflationary universe—were just exactly what they should have been to produce this living cosmos by a slow process of evolution. … Not a few, like the professor of theoretical physics at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, are suggesting that ‘science offers a surer path to God than religion’ (Davies, God and the New Physics, ix and 229). … What causes modern scientists to wonder is the realisation, as Professor Davies puts it, that if, for example, the gravitational force had been different from what it is by only one part in a trillion trillion trillions, all stars would then have been either blue giants or red dwarfs and life as we know it would have been impossible (op. cit., p. 188).” To which one would add that there may not even be a single ‘spare’ atom in the whole universe. The totality is one exactly ordered equation of meaning and function.

Similar statements concerning the universe as an orderly equation of being can be made, or at least divined, without the help of such perfect mathematical precision. For instance, it occurred to this writer as a youth studying cosmology in Rome (in the despised old days before the Council) that, from the relationships of the atoms within the periodic table,  and  the  virtual  certainty  even  before  they  had  made  ‘the  bomb’  that  the  heavier elements evolved within the interior of hot stars, one could argue that creation must be one continuous mathematical  equation.  Equations  do  not suddenly  start  up within  a  random universe, and then bring in stability everywhere. It was possible also to argue that if creation were one ordered process—ordered by the interplay of one form of being upon another—that almost certainly the evolution of life would be by sudden ordered mutation when the precise conditions of the environment were right. This also is becoming accepted, and is the real point of Mark Doughty’s title Beyond Darwin: Darwin was right only in his cosmic perspective, totally wrong in the mechanism by which he envisaged the evolution and development of life. It was possible to see the same ordered equation at work in the development of life itself, far beyond the relatively simple sphere of physics. One could consider the evolution of the brain upon the basis of the notochord of primitive life, all the way to the brain of man. This brain has been built up in a stable manner, over aeons of time, upon the basic laws of primal electrical energies in a completely stable way. Moreover, the complexity of that brain has been related to a way of life, becoming ever more complex and versatile, but always ordered with stability to the environment that was developing around it. At all times we are in the presence of an equational harmony of being and of mutual control and direction within that ‘Equation’ by which the developing cosmos is held in stable order. In all fields and in all relationships, from the ecologies of life in field, air and ocean, to the poising and movements of the galaxies, there is a unity of control and direction.

Unity-Law of Control and Direction

This unity of control and direction, which harmonises all things at all stages of evolution and in all relationships of being within the whole universe, we call in our book8 the Unity-Law of the Universe. To what is this ordered purpose and mutual control of one aspect of being upon another, one form of life upon another, orientated? Just to one purpose and to one peak!

Teilhard de Chardin makes many a mistake in philosophy and in theology in his own effort to grasp the vision of the cosmos as a unity—most pioneers do. But he is quite right to see the universe and the order of life as a pyramid, broad at the base, rising to one unique and sharp apex in mankind. Teilhard was wrong to see the ascent of being in the universe as ‘directed chance’: there is of course no such thing. He was even more wrong to see the soul in man as one principle of being and order with matter. He just missed the real truth, namely that the movements of energy in the universe, in all their ‘local’ laws, are held within one Unity-Law of control and direction to an overall finality and to a unique purpose at the end of the ages. He failed to see that the answer to man is not within the material order at all.

The supreme peak of the ascent of being from the primal expansion of energies governed by form is the brain of man. In the mutation which is man the physical process of evolution  reaches  the  supreme  peak  of  the  Unity-Law  of  control  and  direction  which pervades the universe and works through the universe. It cannot give the soul, for the whole order of being that belongs to matter-energy is under the rule of determinism. However wonderfully versatile, the order of purely material life is programmed, controlled and directed through the interplay of the brain with the environment around, within which the brain of any living thing finds the law of its own specific life, its round, its times and its seasons, and responds accordingly, each according to its kind.

The answer to the question “what is man?” is much more wonderful, and yet so simple in principle—as the things of God always are. In the brain of man there occurs a mutation for power, energy and ‘form’ of life, which cannot be programmed to the material environment, because the power begotten is so totally in excess of the power of that static, deterministic environment to provide a law—since all that ‘nature’ around can determine is a life  bounded  by  food,  procreation,  mating,  lair  building,  holding  of  territory,  evading predators etc. The brain that is to become a constituent of man would be a diseased sport within nature, an energy without a ‘form’ within the universe to which it was directed, and without a life-cycle within the environment to which it could be programmed for its law of life. This is because, however versatile the animal brain, however much it mocks the intelligence of true man, it is actually always within the order of the programmed and controlled; it is instinctual and repetitive. It cannot do any ‘programming’. It is made to be programmed, just as much as any computer is.

Man: Continuous with Evolution but a Special Creation

The miracle of man is that the material mutation, which is born within nature to be this new form with this super power of energy in the brain, is by its very nature as physical directed to the order of the spiritual—to the soul, made in the likeness of God, and which only God can give. There is no question of God ‘deciding’ to give this animal a soul. That would be an arbitrary action. Even less possible is the absurd suggestion I once heard a seminary professor give to us in class, “God could give a cat a soul if He wished”. No, God could not. The two principles of being that make man, the material body and the soul, must be mutually made for each other. The physical ‘formula’ which is the brain of man was ordered in the beginning as the unique and peak achievement of that Unity-Law which framed the universe in exactitude in the moment of the Big Bang. It is the final and utter achievement of that Law of harmonic ascent of being. Thus in its very physical reality man’s body calls for, and is intelligible only in relationship to, that personal soul which God alone can create. God must give this soul within the womb at the ‘moment of man’, under the very Law of His own wisdom in creating. In this way man is at once a product of the evolution of the material creation and also a special creation through the soul.

There is much more, one suggests, than we usually see in the comment of Christ to Nicodemus: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (John 3:6) For the body of man, centred in the brain, is the supreme gift of the flesh and of all material creation. At that peak it becomes related by necessity of being to the soul, made in God’s likeness, and which only God can give in the act of creating man. This text is of course the first and most recommended in our Baptismal service books. In a much more wonderful way than we can cover in an article, it celebrates the peak of creation by development, the finality of the flesh in its order, and the finality of God in the order of our sonship and daughterhood of God. It gives the final meaning of all creation, in which man, whether male or female, is taken up into the order of the Divine Being, and God’s own fulfilment, in the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit who is the love which binds the being of the Father and of the Son.

In Him we live and move and have our Being

The real excitement of the rediscovery of God by men of science begins here. In man the Unity-Law—which is the working harmony of the universe as a going concern, as an economy, or as a progression—now continues in a new dimension. The Unity-Law, which provides the control and direction for man’s life, the food and nourishment for man’s life, the growth and development in love for man’s life, is now in God Himself. It must be so. This is the wonderful vision and challenge which we can and must now at once offer to the modern scientist. For what he sees now will be the common stock of ordinary perception within two generations, even as, in the same way, the former scientific denials of the place and need of God became, some generations later, the common agnosticism concerning faith and morals and the authority of the Church in the heart of the common man.

The scientist may say (and in our opinion Mark Doughty in The Tablet lets him off too lightly) “I cannot as a scientist say anything about that. I am forced to argue to an equation of energy which is always poised in meaning with utter exactitude. I grant that an infinite regress is impossible. I admit a mind that poises and presumably makes matter-energy in the poising of its energies under a Unity-Law. I can go no further. The God I acknowledge is the God of abstract reasoning. This God is real but impersonal. I know nothing of Him as a person.” Yet this is not true, because the very nature of man is part of reality. It is the peak of reality. Man is not created in an impersonal, neutral condition. In the body he is made by parental love, and from birth cries for care and food. In the whole of his person, with the body but through the spirit, he asks “why” and “what for”, and looks for wisdom, truth and a lasting and delightful love. He is aware that he is more than an animal of the fields, and that the dimensions of his life go out beyond the physical and material to the spiritual, the eternal and the immortal. How then does the Unity-Law, within which the universe was framed, provide for him and environ him with a law of life and wisdom, to which he will respond and should be eager to respond? The answer to this key question is the bond which links together the orders of science and of religion in the unity of one wisdom and one economy of God.

For this reason the doctrine of the autonomy of science and religion, of reason and of revelation, is not acceptable. Religion is the summit of science, because religion is the provision for man under the Unity-Law within which the whole universe is made and poised. St. Paul gave us the answer so wonderfully at the beginning of the Christian era, though the text has been woefully undervalued, at least in the Latin West and among its theologians. Of God he says: “‘In Him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring’.” (Acts 17:28) There it is! Merely material life is programmed to a law of control and direction immanent within nature and within the impact of other material things. When man takes the material, through the soul, into the order of God and spirit, then God becomes man’s environmental law: God provides for man a life-law and wisdom, a truth, a good, a meaning, a final end, and the inner nourishment we call grace to grow to the plenitude of the likeness of God. Children are not born fully mature, but babes, although they are in the image of adults. Man is born a spiritual babe, seeking the milk of God, so that outwardly and inwardly, in the public order and in the private communion of the heart, he may grow to the full likeness of God, to the ‘perfect man’. We are of course jumping the full evidence and the unrolling of its proof for lack of time to say it, but we do know  in  fact  that  Christ  is  the  full,  total  and  utterly  consistent  manifestation  of  that relationship of God to mankind, the fullness of the Godhead to whose maturity we are born to grow, and at once the ultimate meaning of the Unity-Law within which the universe is framed in life and hope and expectation: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Science and Faith not totally Autonomous

Science has its own proper principles of discovery, and in the evaluation of knowledge in its own sphere it is in one sense autonomous. Those laws and relationships that arise within the material universe, in physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology, are valid in their own right, and they were so before man appeared on the scene. Yet the autonomy of science from religion, of reason from faith, is not absolute so that we could show merely a mutual consistency, but no organic relationship or dependence. There is more than a communion of orders, namely science and religion, in the being of man. There is, in the fact of man, a communion of reason and faith within a man’s one nature. Man’s intelligence dominates from above anything that is less than man. Man, in his own right, can know and evaluate the principles of the sciences in their own right, but only because his intelligence is Godlike in nature. He does not need religion for this, he does not need faith for this.

But in his own being—both privately and in the public relationship of humankind by which we form families, communities, nations, and eventually one world federation of mankind—man does by very nature need God as his ‘Environer’,9  his principle of life, meaning, teaching, formation, and ultimately all that is expressed in the word ‘Salvation’. This, we say, not only from the supernatural order in its technical, theological sense, but in the very natural order itself. When man is created, his being is a communion of the making of the body by nature and the making of the soul by the direct will of God. By very nature, and at the summit of the order of nature, the Unity-Law of creation, within which all things were poised as potential through time and ages, has passed into the Being of God as the determinant of man. This has happened by very nature and as part of God’s act of creating the universe itself.

In the presence of God, man is like a baby just born. To tell the truth, he is more like the tiny fertilised ovum of life itself, just conceived. There is many a period of development and growth in that living relationship to God, within which men as individuals must grow, and within which the communal life of mankind as ‘Church’ must grow. The scientist cannot hope to evaluate God from above. He cannot hope to set down the laws and principles of this knowledge in autonomy and in independence. In this knowledge, and in this relationship of fulfilment,  man,  like  the  child  at  the  breast,  is  partly  in  the  state  of  a  limited  natural knowledge, and much more in an order of a natural faith, hope, trust and dependent love. As the parent reveals the natural order of dependent knowing and loving—the order of ‘faith’ within which a child lives, breathes, and has its being—so also God holds man at the breast, and must declare, unroll, and nourish him to the full order of man’s life, being and meaning.

This follows from the very communion of science and of religion in the nature of man and in the understanding of man.

Beyond  that  first,  natural  communion  of  two  orders  in  mankind,  reason  and revelation, there is also the meaning of supernatural life and destiny. We cannot dwell on it now, but the supernatural, properly as such, means the order of love and of existence to Himself, to which God calls us, which is a sharing of the Divine Being in its own reality and unimaginable bliss. This is something we could never claim a right to or demand by any fact of nature, not even by creation itself, even though God is our Creator. But by very fact of nature there must be from God some order of truth, good, love and joy to be given us—by our very creation into the order of existence at all. Even this we could not know in its measure and communion with God unless He revealed it and worked it upon us. This would be an order of ‘faith from very nature’, because God is our fulfilment and our Father simply by the fact of our spiritual souls.

The Splendid Vision

At the peak of man’s making, then, we must look to God to know who we are, and why we exist, and what our bliss is, and whether it is immortal and eternal, as is the soul. Only God can reveal all and give all. What He does reveal and give is so much more than it has entered into the heart of man to conceive or desire. For God gives all that man or nature may ask or desire, and gives so much more besides.

Why do we not give this wonderful vision to mankind at once, here and now? Here at one stroke would be the answer to the meaning of the Second Vatican Council.

Why did the scientist, in the person of Professor Davies, declare that “science offers a surer path to God than religion”? Was it not because science is real, factual and magisterial, and religion, as he knows it, is vague, mythical, emotional and subjective? But we can show him a religion that is founded on fact and certainty, because it takes over the work of the formation and fulfilment of this creature, man, at the point where the guiding Unity-Law of the universe transcends matter, and passes into the personal work of the God who made both matter-energy and the higher energy and form which is spirit, which is the soul.

Do we not thus see the real meaning of religion and of faith? It consists in magistracy and in the nourishment of the spirit. The relationship of the soul of man to God must be in the order of actual and factual nourishment and growth, and the teaching must be in the order of unique and certain truth. It becomes clear to us that, following the line of evidence to the manifestation of God to mankind, we are going to look for a divine and transcendent Magisterium. And so we perceive from afar the very principle by which we can deal a death- blow to the Gnosticism and Humanism (in older diction Neo-Modernism) which has made the hopes of the Council a mockery, and made the Church herself a laughing-stock to the pagans of the post-Christian era, whom she had hoped to reclaim.

Something Beautiful for God

It would be futile to attempt to draw out the full line of argument now. We can only hint at the consequences that follow once man today admits that, if not from classic philosophy, then at least from the very mathematics of the universe, he is forced to recognise a mind and will, similar to his own and immensely more perfect, acting within the universe, and at once immanent and transcendent to the universe. We will see Christ at the end of our seeking as the very Son of God and Son of Man. We will meet and recognise the problem of evil in the fact and doctrine of the Fall, in the reality of sin, in the self-division of our damaged nature. We will be able to show with an utter consistency how and why the Salvation of God, which was always to be one with the joy of creation and utterly without pain, is turned in the Lord of History, when He came, into a painful and yet acceptable sacrifice of redemption and Resurrection. Once God the Environer of Man, our all and our principle of life and life abundant, has declared Himself to us in the flesh as Son of Man, then, because of His Living Godhead, the principle of infallible Magisterium is brought into human religion until the end of the economy of God within the present season of this planet. It is this authority of God which alone is the life-principle of Ecumenism, and the only principle by which men, divided by the frailty of human opinion and the pride of the human will, can ever be reunited again as One in God and in His Christ.

We can show such wonderful things. We can make the desert of the empty seminary and the abandoned religious novitiate bloom again like the rose. We can give a newer and purer vision of love, and reinforce again within marriage its role as an office in time and in eternity, an office and a ministry too in the Church. Why do we not do this now? Why do we not do this “beautiful thing for God”, to use the language of Mother Teresa? Finally, why do we not convert ourselves, and see, in the cosmic vision given to St. John in the Apocalypse, at once the vision of the communion of science and faith in the order of nature, and its consummation in the office of the womb of Mary?

And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. … She brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne. (Rev. 12:1-2,5)

For, firstly, planet Earth is the woman clothed with the sun, teeming with life and fruitfulness through the womb; fertile ultimately with mankind. The sun has been its principle of life and evolution over countless ages. When the order of faith takes over in man from the order of material natural law, then, in one and the same vision, this earth is with child in the womb of the Virgin Mary; and in her, through the sorrows and travails of sinful men, the Church and all creation with her is impatient to be delivered of the Son of God and the Son of Man. He is the Lord of Life and History, the Maker and the Restorer of all things.

Why do we not give to men this wonderful, beautiful and consistent vision? Why do we not see within its order, in the patrimony of the Church, a new principle for our times by which to re-evangelise the West, and to evangelise all nations, as the world moves through blood to a final unity of order and community in “the last times”? (Cf. Hebrews 1:1-4).

1 The Tablet, 4 Feb 1984.

2 Homiletic and Pastoral Review, Dec 1983.

3 See e.g. Wickramasinghe in The Times, 10 December 1981.

4 Editorial, Faith, Jan/Feb 1976.

5  Bernard Lovell, Presidential Address to the British Association, 27 August 1975. Cf. Lovell’s book In the Centre of Immensities, Granada, 1980.

6 DS 3004, 3026.

7 Cf. E. Holloway, Catholicism: A New Synthesis, p. 66.

8 E. Holloway, Catholicism: A New Synthesis, Faith-Keyway, 1970.

9 Holloway coined the technical term Environer to denote God as man’s environment in an active, personal way.

A Personal God: Does it Matter?

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 8, no. 3, May/June 1976.

More correctly this article ought to have been called “The Transcendence of God: Does it Matter?”, but on the front cover it could have been very off-putting!

A number of recent articles in The Times1  have given clear evidence of the total loss of Magisterium in the Church of England. That is to say, there is a total loss of divine certainty in the proposal of doctrine, and a total loss of divine authority in the interpretation of doctrine on faith and morals as the way (cf.  John 14:6) which is the Christian life as lived.  This disintegration and crumbling is not unique to the Church of England. It is even more marked, if possible, in the Non-Conformist Churches. It is the common problem of all the Churches of the Reformation, because it proceeds from the prime principle of the Reformation itself. This first principle of the Reformation was the denial of the inerrancy and infallibility of the Church. Because popes could err, councils could err, the Church herself could err, therefore the received doctrines of Christendom could be attacked and swept away. The Book alone was infallible.

Now the Book is far from infallible: at least it is not infallible as the printed word, subject to the charismatic interpretation of the private individual. The Book is infallible only insofar as, through the ages, it is the Church speaking, living and writing. The Book, as the Church writing, is always, and has always been, subject to the Church living and speaking. The Book is not a final dead letter of the first Christian century, but the living voice of God the Word: a voice that lives on in popes and in councils and in universally received Catholic doctrine. For the Church’s voice is guided always by the Holy Spirit, who “will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:14)

Insofar  as  Humanism  and  Neo-Modernism  sweep  whole  provinces  of  the  Church—Benelux,  France  and  Germany  in  particular—then  once  again  we  live  in  the  era  of  the Reformation. For all Humanism proceeds from the one prime principle: the denial of divinity in Christ, and from the denial of its corollary, Magisterium in the Church as a teaching institution. Therefore our present ecumenism, as it is taught by leading Catholic theologians, some of whom are bishops of high prestige, is an utter nonsense, and is itself disintegrating the Catholic Church. This is because it is trying to bring about the reunion of the Churches without the renunciation of the prime principle of the Reformation itself: the substitution of human theological opinion for transcendent, divine Magisterium. To try to effect a reunion on the basis of the prime principle of the Reformation itself is a total contradiction of the very being of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Importance of the Transcendence of God

To affirm that God exists as transcendent  means, in the language  of theology,  that God is personal,  and  exists  independently  of  creation.  He  is  self-explanatory,  self-sufficient,  and infinite. The creation need not exist: it does exist, and is explained, only because of Him.

If God is not transcendent then God is immanent in creation. God emerges in space and time through the intelligent human creature, through us. God speaks in history only insofar as He speaks through the consciousness of men. God, and the teaching we ascribe to God’s revelation, is subject to historic relativism, which means to say, the limitations of given men at a given age in a given culture. There is no escape from the closed circuit of the prime principle of the Reformation, the subjection of doctrine to human understanding.

If God is transcendent then a certain vision unfolds before us. All creation is gathered up and poised in its being by the Alone Necessary and Almighty God. And it is poised towards its destiny to climax in Christ, the Heir of the Ages. This Christ is God the Word, God in Person, literally divine and transcendent.  The  alternative  is  that  creation,  as  it  evolves,  throws  up ‘Omega-points’2   or  ‘Christ  points’  in  its  development,  as  the  race  of mankind  proceeds  to ‘Christo-genesis’, to a becoming divine which embraces the whole stock. The process, and its interpretation, is subject to human wisdom and human judgment. In so much as Teilhard de Chardin reduces the Christ of historic Christianity, so much he makes himself—but quite unconsciously—the greater than Christ. The same is true, much more true, for those intensely arrogant Nordic theologians, Fuchs, Ebeling, Bultmann, Marxsen, Pannenberg, along with the rest, who have reduced Christ to their own personal interpretation of a dead book. For Teilhard de Chardin Christ is at least a mighty person, even if unconsciously made in the image and likeness of the Phenomenon which is Man.3  For these Germans Christ is just ‘the event’. He could not be more, of course, because they only know Him by what they humorously name ‘faith’. They just do not have any adequate historic evidence about Him at all.

But if God is transcendent, then Christ is literally divine, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, of one Being with the Father. And if He is divine, the Church must also be infallible and magisterial. The development of her doctrine, though not necessarily foreseeable from the limited understanding reached by men of an age before, must follow with direct continuity and without any loss or diminution in faith or morals. This is because the Holy Spirit, who happens also to be transcendent, is the ‘soul of the Church’4  and guides her into that one fullness of truth which is a living unity in the intellect of God the Logos, the Word of God— alias Jesus Christ, for less theologically educated readers. I ask pardon for pointing out that this total meaning, which is one living unity in the Divine Word, is possible because He also happens to be transcendent.

If God is not transcendent but immanent, i.e. part of man himself, then there is no authority higher than the mind of man, which is God emerging in history. There is no divine rule or guidance outside of man and the limits of purely human history. There is no literal divinity in Christ. And even if you think there is, you cannot prove it (for lack of historical evidence, you see, and the impossibility of generalising doctrine from one segment of human experience, etc.). There is most certainly not any infallibility in the Church.  And the Christ we know and reverence could very possibly be superseded.  In any case (one nearly wrote ‘event’) Christ becomes one figure measured against other figures on a finite scale in ‘religious anthropology’ (which used to be known as ‘theology’!).

So, you see, there is quite a lot at stake in that word transcendent.

The Viewpoint of a Young Theologian

February of this year was indeed a month of inexplicable theological fertility! While the very important  articles  cited  above  were  being  written,  the  editor  had  the  privilege  of  a  most interesting  exchange  with  a  young  American  theologian  studying  at  Oxford.  Among his comments one notes:

I would say that your Conciliar document Dei Verbum was the best Catholic answer available to all that is best in Protestant existential scriptural technology, as you find it following the pipes of pan with Fuchs, Ebeling, Bultmann and others. As I see the end-of-century theological scene, the Germans are on top and look as immoveable as Hitler’s Reich looked after the breakthrough of 1940. The French are, in their own word, passé: even Teilhard only just about manages to gather a Gnostic spiritual clique around him.  The Germans can’t stand him. Whether that is temperament or nationalism I would not know. They would not even consider the implications of his synthesis. … The theological mind of the Church in the USA, in Germany, and I think here at Oxford, and Rome also as far as I was able to assess in a brief visit, is wasting its time descending on the ‘Good Book’ armed with existential powers of total demythologisation, and we are, all of us, following the New Protestantism.

You, Sir, are claiming for theology something quite astounding, namely that it can and  does  attain  existentially  to  the  Wisdom  of  God,  and  that  is  why  the theologians used once to be saints, and the only theologians who have been any good in the Church were saints. If you could make them understand that you are trying to say just that, I would gladly fight with you back to back. You won’t even get looked at by the theological  establishment  of today, because you will get written  off  as  a  neo-Scholastic,  and  therefore  a  stick-in-the-mud,  the  sort  of dinosaur that exists only in places like your Loch Ness after twenty years of very thorough, very learned, German led ‘theological renewal’. You see, Father, my problem is not to show to my elders (I cannot consider them my betters) that there is a distinction between that which is controlled and directed, and that which controls and directs, but that the distinction is at all important.

The Theological Divide

This is the heart of the matter. If they don’t consider it important whether there is a distinction between that which controls and directs and that which is controlled and directed,5  then they don’t consider it important whether God is transcendent or not. If you don’t think it matters, then in fact you have said that God is not transcendent. That means to say He is not personal, not distinct from creation, not the direct controller of the mind of man. It means that Jesus Christ is not literally God Incarnate, and that there is no objective, magisterial infallibility in the Church or anywhere else. The word transcendent covers the whole difference between a God who made man, teaches and governs man, fulfils and saves man, and a ‘God’ who is merely man’s own spirit and mind, made conscious in history as idealism, and seeking for the good and true. This is the whole difference between Catholicism and Humanism flavoured with a Christianity which is now passé.

The Prime Principle of Catholic Christianity

Catholic Christianity also has a prime principle. It is the transcendence of God. It means that God is HE WHO IS, at all times, independently of the universe. Through His free will the universe of angels, matter and men came into existence.

In the likeness of this God, the soul in man is also transcendent over the body. That is to say that the intelligent principle in man is not material. It does not evolve with matter or through matter. The soul or spirit in man is that which controls and directs matter; matter is that which is controlled and directed: for matter is deterministic of very being.

When  the  Eternal  Word,  the  second  and  transcendent  Person  of  the  Holy  Trinity, becomes flesh for us, then Jesus Christ is literally God in divine Person. There is only one personality in Jesus, the divine personality; but He exists in the nature of God and the nature of man, and these are truly distinct from each other. Jesus brings the divine transcendence, which prompted the Law and the Prophets and the Scriptures, into human history as a divine and a human fulfilment of the order of mankind. Since Christ sent out His apostles with exactly the same mission as His own, therefore there is transcendence in the very constitution of the Church of God. That is to say there is divine truth, divine power to rule, and divine power to command the conscience of man in the name of the Maker of man’s being and conscience.

There  can  be  no  vindication  today  of  the  Christian  gospel,  unless  in  this  hour  of disintegration we can educe from the entire heritage of the Church a new development in philosophy and theology. It must be coherent with, but expanding from, the pre-Conciliar life of the Church. It must manifest the divinity which is within her, by offering to man, from the magistracy of Christ, that control, direction and fulfilment in his life and social order, which the nature of man demonstrably requires. Such a renewal is within our power. It is only arrogance and pride which holds it back. Lord Hailsham, also writing in The Times in that most fruitful of Februaries, proclaimed that we need a new Aquinas, a new Doctor Angelicus. The noble Lord, one presumes, will be denied a hearing by the present theological establishment because of such gross and open ‘neo-Scholasticism’! The first need is for a Pauline era, and one is not referring to  the  present  Pope!6   We  need  the  vision  of  the  faith  to  be  seen  and  taught  through  the perspective of modern, scientific man, pagan though he be. It can be done, but it must proceed from the prime principle of Catholicism, from the transcendent, which ultimately means the truly divine and truly magisterial. It cannot proceed from the prime principle of the Churches of the Reformation, which is private judgment, the immanent, the mind of man made the measure of God.

We may hope and pray that a true movement towards unity will mean the reunion in doctrine, communion, and spiritual perfection of the Church of England with the Church of Rome. But we cannot and we may not proceed as if the Holy Spirit had already revealed this intention to episcopal members of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. Without fear of charismatic contradiction, one can say He has not done this. History shows that quite another course could follow. There could be many coming from the East and the West, Anglicans and Free Churchmen. At the same time many could stay on just as they were. Or rather they would decline further, through the agnosticism, from which none of the Churches of the Reformation can possibly rise without a true and new vision of the meaning of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. There could also be many, very many, who will go out of the communion of Peter, from the theological Left, and some perhaps from the fundamentalist  Right. There could be a great gathering in, and a great exodus as well.

What is certain is that we must renew the Church not as an open-ended, agnostic body, but as a strongly centred family of Christ, drawing life, strength, vision and fire from a new vision of Christ and the Church, in which not one jot, not one tittle of the former perfection and spiritual idealism has been erased. There is no other ecumenism which is honest or which makes sense of the Catholic Church. There is no other way, ecumenical or otherwise, which can permit the Christian Church to survive into the next century in her historic identity, with a truly divine gospel, and with authority from God to preach it to all the nations. It is time to stop fooling about, and to say the truth bluntly, even at the cost of a confrontation. When it comes to doctrine, there is no doubt who will win. It is also time to proclaim a great hope with a great faith. But it must be the truly divine God we proclaim, the truly divine Christ, the truly divine Magisterium of His Church. There is neither hope nor beauty nor joy except in a return to the prime principle of Catholicism.

1 C. Longley, “The Difficulties of Defining Anglican Doctrine”, The Times, 16 Feb 1976; letters from Rev. Graham Dowell and Rev. Prof. Peter R. Baelz, The Times, 20 Feb 1976; Bishop F.R. Barry, “The Un-Making of Christian Doctrine”, The Times, Feb 1976.

2  The term Omega-point  was used by P. Teilhard  de Chardin  to signify the end-point  of history,  in which all individual minds will be fused into a cosmic, divine consciousness.

3  Cf. the title of Teilhard de Chardin’s most well known work, The Phenomenon of Man, first published in French

as Le Phenomène Humain, 1955, first published in English in 1959.

4 Cf. Lumen Gentium 7.

5 This distinction of spirit and matter as “that which controls and directs” and “that which is controlled and directed” is a key idea in Holloway’s theology. – Ed.

6 The pope referred to is Paul VI, 1963-1978.

The Knowledge which is Faith

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 11, no. 6, November/December 1979.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. … By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear. (Heb 11:1,3)

Many sterile controversies concerning faith—whether it is an act of the intellect or of the will, or a mixed act of both intellect and will, etc.—would cease if we thought of faith in its living environment. That environment is our relationship to God, who seeks us and is sought by us, who loves us and is loved in return. For the intellect does not ‘elicit acts’ of understanding nor does the will ‘elicit acts’ of loving. It is persons who think and love through their minds and through their wills. We would be spared the weary incoherence of many a study written about faith if we would only bear in mind that faith—both the act of faith  and  the  virtue  of  faith—is  knowledge  and  recognition  in  a  context  and  in  an environment. And the environment, in which men know and love God through their intellect and wills, is the living God in Himself. We are taught as much by St Paul: “In Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

What is Faith?

There is no difficulty at all about knowing some things, like the existence of God, from unaided natural reason, and knowing the same things by faith. You can know a person as a neighbour, smile, exchange the time of day, put coins in a collecting box when they call for good causes. But you do not then know them in the sense in which you know someone if you enter into a communion of life and love and care with them, as when you marry them for instance. Similarly in the act of faith the knowledge of nature is taken up into a different kind of relationship; it becomes the basis of a personal relationship which is also a relationship of fulfilment in the very order of your being.

Faith is a knowledge conditioned by the relationship of our dependence on God for fulfilment. There are many sorts of knowing in nature around us, which give us clues and analogies to the nature of faith in God. A newborn baby has this sort of knowledge, deriving from dependence of being, when it gropes and clasps with tiny hands, seeking the breast and the first drops of mother’s milk. But this, you may say, is surely hope rather than faith? No, because there is no hope which is not pointed and focused towards a goal. If the hope is not a blind thrashing about, a hopeless hope, then the seeking and yearning must be directed by an innate knowledge of some sort. Even a bird, migrating year after year to one precise spot, does so from some inborn power to orientate and ‘know’ built into its very being. Hope is a love seeking and desiring, usually a love which is already real and already possesses the beloved in part; but it wants more of what it loves because its fulfilment is incomplete. But all love and all hope is guided and focused; and whatever guides and focuses the will can be called in some sense ‘knowledge’.

This knowledge implies an inbuilt dependence in us upon some external principle, which perfects and fulfils us beyond our own personal capacity. It can be a very dim knowledge in the beginning. In fact it must be a dim and partial beginning, or it would not be faith. It is built upon a certain natural power and need in us to seek for fulfilment in the order of our spiritual nature, which means to seek through the mind and the heart, through knowing and loving. The fulfilment we seek is not one with us, but is of an altogether higher order. It prompts further our seeking and yearning in mind and in heart. It communicates to us a knowledge and a love of God Himself, which not only gives joy, but which also deepens us in the power of being, making the soul grow and develop in its very self as a spiritual being.

We found a likeness to this faith in the infant seeking for the milk of life from its mother, and ‘knowing’ in some way before it could reason that she was the source of its life, joy and comfort. St Peter, inspired not by learned studies couched in ear-cracking technical language but by the Holy Spirit, used the same analogy: “Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.” (1 Pet 2:2-3)

Faith is not the sort of knowledge we gain from physics, chemistry or electronics, for example: the sciences through which we understand and dominate the world around us. In ourselves we are bigger and deeper than the material order of physical energy. That is why in this age of technology we can stand over it, so to speak, grasp it totally, and use its secrets to make so many things for our partial fulfilment, and also make things for our danger and destruction. Faith is not that sort of knowing. Faith is like getting to know one whom you love. This is a slower, less easy sort of knowledge, but it is the only sort of knowledge which fulfils you from within yourself. Likewise, the love which is born out of that sort of knowing is the only fulfilment which completely satisfies your human person.

If getting to know and to love another human person is a process which is partial, dark and gradual, how much more so when the One you seek to know, to love, and to lay hold upon in communion of being, is the source of all mind and love, and is infinitely above you and superior to you! In the book of Proverbs among the things which the seer names as “too wonderful for me” to understand is “the way of a man with a maiden” (Prov 30:18-19). He is right, for man and woman are made for each other in body and in soul, in a complementary psychology of being. There is a dependence here, and a coming to know which is of very nature, but which is hard to fathom and hard to follow in all its relationships. How much more so with God. God is not in His very being dependent upon us, as male and female are to each other; but we are totally dependent on God, not only for very existence but also for fulfilment in the spirit, in our inner wisdom and joy, in that inner love which is bliss.

Faith is a Gift of God

Faith, then, like the charity which grows out of it, is God-prompted and God-revealed and God-given. Only God can communicate Himself as the Lover to be known and loved and held. The seeking is of our human nature; the prompting and answering by God take us beyond the power of our nature and the order of our nature. They take us into the very sharing of the divine nature (cf. 2 Pet 1:4). Yet it is our only fulfilment, and the thing we are made to grow up to as ‘babies’ in God. It is the milk which alone answers our newborn cravings. Once it is given it becomes the principle of our growth in the likeness of God: growth in that divine order which eventually brings us to know and love Him as He is in Himself.

Christ Himself likened faith to a seed, a mustard seed, the very smallest of the seeds (Matt 17:20, cf. Matt 13:31-32). This likeness has a great perfection in making us see what faith is, and how faith is generated in the soul. The English language has a very beautiful and sensitive word in its ‘springtime’, because the seed deep down, hidden in the cold and dark earth, really does spring in its upward thrust to its paschal season of life and life more abundant (cf. John 10:10). The frail shoot of life is brimful with a dim, innate ‘knowledge’ of the sun, which is above it, and which is the ‘draw’ that pulls it on. The shoot thrusts up with the imperfect love which is ‘hope’, to the source of its life and its harvest. This is the sort of relationship we mean when we speak of knowledge within a context and knowledge within an environment. For the being of the seed and the being of the sun are interdefined, they are made for each other. It is similar with God and us. He indeed is not made for us, but we are made for Him. He is our sunshine, the principle of our life in the springtime of life, and the principle of our harvest time (please God, in His mercy) in the finality which is heaven.

It is clear that we cannot lay hold on God from our tiny, limited being. If a newborn baby cannot find mother and mother’s milk unless she first bends down to him and gives him the breast, so it is with us and God. The mother, who fed us in the first weeks of life and was the source of our being and its growth, can also through the years become a most loved and revered friend. In the same way God is all things to us. God is the source of our being, our nourishment, our wisdom, our good, and our total and lasting joy. Here indeed is a knowing and a loving within a context and within an environment! We cannot exhaust that source of life, who is the Bread of Heaven for us. We cannot plumb that deep wisdom which threw the universe across the vast expanse of space and time and growth of being—and did that as the least of the achievements of the Living God. We cannot lay hold on all that joy in that vast Love who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and final end of all loves. God must commune with us, touch us from within, nourish us by the creative goodwill of the divine being, whose very goodwill to us is of itself life-giving and grace-giving.

Faith, we see, is a getting to know God as He is in Himself. Therefore it must be dim, incomplete, dark and partial. It must also be the supreme thrill of all our life and being. The seed, which is springing upwards to the sun, thrills to the sun in every atom of its being. So do we thrill to God. We are made for Him. In union and communion with Him alone we live as the inner man.

This communication of who and what He is, how He is given to us, what we are, what we mean to Him, and what we mean to each other for His sake—all of this is the measure of the vast economy or plan of God, in its wisdom and in its power to fulfil. When we speak of the full measure of the field in which faith operates, we are speaking of the total revealing and working of God in the Church. For faith operates in the individual and personal spirit and upon the field of all mankind as a whole, now and through history, past, present, and future. When one writes ‘the Church’ one includes the whole sweep of God’s self-revealing to mankind, all the way from Adam to Christ and to this very day. For the Church does not stand without Christ, nor is Christ an episode in the Church. Christ lives and works in the Church in a personal manner, with the Father, through the Holy Spirit of them both.

Personal Growth in Faith

Therefore when we speak of faith we acknowledge an interior and personal union of God with the individual spirit, and to this infusion or touch of the Divine the soul responds. In fact, it is better to say the person responds, for the whole man, body and soul, responds in the deepest centre of its powers. When does this process begin, do you think? This writer would say in the womb, from the first moment of individuation of a living person—but we cannot dwell here on so vast a consideration. It most certainly is active at Baptism, because it is the teaching of the Church herself that faith, hope and charity are infused in the very making and accepting of the newly baptised infant as a son or daughter of God. God is drawing and enlivening this man in the powers of the spirit. Even the body is being ‘drawn’ to God through the central powers of his spiritual being. This, then, is the first beginning of faith as a state or habit or virtue in a Christian man or woman.

After that, as the years go by, even in the individual person, the insight of St John applies: “From His fullness have we all received, grace upon grace.” (John 1:16) The inner word of comprehending God will grow by the raising of the mind and heart to God. And the love of God, the state or habit or virtue of charity, will follow. In order to make a point, one might almost say it must follow as necessarily as the Holy Spirit must proceed from the Father through the Eternal Word. And the virtue or state of hope will also be present as the mind and will seek for a deeper communion, seeking with a ‘greed’ that is holy, not coming from disordered desire. For the desire for God is a holy greed, and its name is hope.

The state of grace, the state of life and growth in God through the divine indwelling, cannot be enlivened within us by God without the virtues of faith, hope and charity. There must  be  a  basic  ‘yes’  to  God  from  the  inward  man,  and  an  orientation  of  the  human personality through mind and heart to God, who is true and wise, good and loving. This relationship to God, through the powers of the intellect and the will, gives us faith and charity. It also gives us hope as the hybrid product: a product of at least the will, and more probably of intellect and will together, since the spirit yearns to know more as well as to love more.

In a child this quality of faith and charity can be very vague from an adult viewpoint, but it can be full of dynamic energy and even a contemplative union without clear words and concepts. In the simple, untramelled soul everything around, everything that gives joy and happiness, can and will lead to God: as it is written, “The Spirit of the Lord has filled the world, and that which holds all things together knows what is said.” (Wis 1:7) This fact can be used in teaching and in catechising, for the law of God which infuses all creation is a good law and works to good. The law of sin in creation is a secondary and an extraneous law, brought in by the will and the Fall of man (cf. Rom 7:21-27). This exulting of the human spirit in God, from the very goodness of creation and its beauty—from life, health, happiness and love—can be for many a youngster who knows nothing or next to nothing about God or His Christ, the prompting principle of a Baptism of desire and an innate love of God. For us in the school and in the catechism class, the bubbling joy of young exultation in life and being can be the starting point for a deepening of the knowledge of God and the love of God. It goes almost without saying that the happiness of the good Catholic home, with its love for Mum and Dad and its respect for their words, leads to the more conscious and more explicit personal love of God; and the more so when parents say morning and night prayers with their young children at their bedside. It does this not by nature alone but also from the grace of matrimony. Let us remember also that a basic faith and a basic love is born through all the many ways by which God gets through to men and awakens them through the spiritual powers of the soul. Even outside the Christian fold this is the very catechumenate of Christ, and is precious.

The Fullness of Faith

Faith, we have striven to say, is not an external assent only, not merely a belief based upon an external authority. Yet this aspect of faith is also valid. For when the God, who is the sunshine of human fulfilment, is spoken to us, there will be many things which we cannot fully understand. For, even when He is spoken of in the clear words of priest and prophet through social and communal revelation in the Church, God is incomprehensible in Himself in all His majesty. The doctrine revealed can be clear, above all since the coming of God to this creation in Christ, because the Eternal Word made flesh has mediated to us a spoken word which is crisp and clear and very definite—like the doctrine of the Eucharist or the Holy Trinity. We can assent, but we cannot fully understand. Some people will not be able to understand explicitly from any inner principle of knowing at all, because their inner appreciation of revelation is so unformed.

It is important, however, to stress that with the exterior word of revelation there is also the interior ‘word’ of knowing and loving God according to our lights, within the individual mind and heart. I do not think it is the obligatory teaching of the Church, but I would suggest that wherever the interior virtues of faith and charity abide, there is a state of union and contemplation between the spirit and its God, no matter how dimly or in how seminal a condition. That is why one said in the beginning of this article that faith was a personal knowing of God in a dark and dim way, like the seed thrusting upwards to the sun it has not yet ‘seen’. Faith is that activation of the spirit through the intellectual powers of the soul, which springs to life when God touches and draws the spirit, to recreate it and to redeem it. This order of ‘revelation’ is an offer from God of a personal knowledge of Him and a personal love of Him. In that order there can be an immense growth. Of its nature it must grow through all the many ways open to men and needed by men.

We must therefore expect and presume the union and communion of God with men through space and time, through history and society, through priest and prophet. And what a majestic theme is this!1 It is the surge of God’s communion with men until it is crowned in the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, our God in Person, who fulfils all in all—from the foetus in the womb to the entire People of God as Church and as community in heaven and upon earth. For us, who are given the fullness of the Word in Christ and the fullness of the same living Word in the magisterial word of the Church, a living joy is possible and should be achieved within us. It is a personal sense of blessedness, with awe for the majesty of the Sacrament of the Universe, the dispensation of God that is in Christ. His care and His love extend across the whole People of God: in heaven, in the state of expiation in purgatory, and pilgrim upon earth. It reaches out to the foetus newly conceived in the womb: “[You] knit me together  in  my  mother’s  womb  …  and  moulded  [me]  in  the  depths  of  the  earth.”  (Ps 139:13,15) Even in this deep darkness, the darkness of the seed of human life latent in the earth, if the upthrust of its springtime be shattered by the murdering hands of men, yet one dares to hope and believe that it will find its sun and its Saviour at the end of the world, though its beginning was lacerated in the wintry soil of human sin: “If I lie in the grave, You are there … even there Your hand would lead me, Your right hand would hold me fast.” (Ps 139:8,10)

Summary

So, at the end of our reflecting upon faith as an act, faith as a virtue, faith as a state or manner of being in the human spirit, we return to the initial theme. Faith is a knowing because God in Person offers Himself to us as persons. Hope is a knowing and a desiring which is incomplete in both orders: of the intellect and of the will. Hope is hungry in both ways: to know more and to love more. Charity, or love, is personal union and communion with God, not so much the act of a faculty as the response of our whole being in joy to its fulfilment in both knowing and possessing. There can be some sort of ‘faith’ even when one has lost the grace of God and is ‘dead’ to Him through true mortal sin. But the charity of which St Paul writes (1 Cor 13) is that living charity, in which God the Truth is savoured as wisdom and possessed in union and joy. Faith will “pass away” only because it is completed in vision, for faith is a dim seeing, a seeing through an opaque mirror in a dark manner.

Faith must be the gift of God, whether in the external word of God revealed in the economy of Christ from Adam to the Parousia, or in the inner word of the soul knowing and loving God through the years of life as best it may. We cannot work it out, because we cannot work God out. We cannot ascend to God and bring down the word. The word must descend to us in priest and in prophet and finally in Him whose personal name is the Word of God. This communication of love is again a gift.

1 For a further discussion of this see E. Holloway, Catholicism: A New Synthesis, Faith-Keyway, second edition 1976, chapter 11, “The Evocation of the Word”, pp. 115-134.

Faith is the possession of the All Beautiful, the All Life-giving, the All Joy-giving in Himself. We cannot earn it or demand it of ourselves. Like the newborn baby we are made for it; we can cry, we can yearn, but He must bend down and extend His cherishing. For faith, hope and charity are a relationship to God in a context, in a seminal context. Unfortunately, perhaps, we cannot see a soul or analyse a spirit. Too many people think of the psyche of man or woman as something finished in its own right and nature, and fulfilled only in an external way by the vision of God. It is rather as if heaven were a ticket to see the supreme wonder of creation, as one might go on a tour to see the seven wonders of the world. It is not like this. Heaven is not a final extra to our creation. If we could see a man as God sees men, we would see, in the whole personality of that man, a seed, a baby just born. We would see at the font a baby in soul, as well as a baby in the natural growth of the flesh. We would see a spirit, born and now reborn, but wanting to grow in the spirit to the proper stature of its manhood in the order of Jesus Christ. Faith, hope and charity: these three are the health and abundant life of that growing up. A child is only partly matured in its development. Likewise in our relationship to God, in the personal order of grace and in the full social order of the Church and its sacramental life, the spirit also is maturing from darkness to light, from liking to a final loving.

The mystic saints give us a glimpse of what this process of attainment should be. Through faith we should come to savour the Lord in a deepening wisdom and understanding of His very self and His plan in creation. We should savour Him in an ever increasing wisdom which is permanent joy and love. We should “taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Ps 34:8) This is charity as joy. But charity is proven by deeds, or the joy is superficial: “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” (John 14:15) He did not say “appreciate my values”; He said obey, and then you shall enjoy.

Conclusion: Journey’s End

If there is one place where the waters of private, inner knowing and loving in prayer and in faith meet the great sea of public, social revelation in scripture and in Christ, then it is in the Holy Eucharist. For the Eucharist is the consummation of the personal and the public gift of God in His only Son. That is why all the Eucharistic Prayers have the same doxology: “Through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.” To which the angels and saints in heaven respond “Amen”; the holy souls, expiating, learning and loving to perfect health, respond “Amen”; and  the  people  of  God,  pilgrim  and  striving  upon  earth,  respond  “Amen”.  This  is  the threefold Amen of all creation. It is explicit in the liturgy of the East, and one wishes it were explicit in the liturgy of the West.

And faith ends at the end of the journey. For faith is a travelling on, and it ends when the threshold is crossed and our homecoming is completed in vision and embrace. Hope ends on the same threshold, as it did for holy Simeon: “For my eyes have seen Your salvation which You have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to Your people Israel.” (Luke 2:30-32). Charity does not pass away, for charity is knowledge beckoning and love desiring. As Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are defined mutually to each other through intellect and will, through knowing and loving, so charity is one’s very self knowing and desiring in the state of grace and union with God. And we do not pass away, we enter upon our eternal inheritance. Then the pledge given in the Eucharist, which is our union and communion with God in this One Bread and Cup, will pass into the most total communion of being and life in love that even God can give. Charity never passes away, but it is fulfilled.

Therefore at this Christmas season the Church looks upon this One Bread and Cup and murmurs as Isaiah murmured in the ‘season’ of Christ’s Advent as man, “Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness; let the earth open, that salvation may sprout forth.” (Isa 45:8) We may be forgiven if we add with St John, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20) For He is the full sight, of which faith is the insight.

The Recognition of Jesus

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 13, no. 6, November/December 1981.

Doctrine and personal appeal: these were one thing and one force in Jesus Christ. The Person we call the Word was made flesh and spoke an intelligible and humanly expressed word. He communicated the truth and a way of life. We call it His doctrine. And this same Word Incarnate had a sheer, radiant power to attract men and women and to hold them in love. There was no divide between some dry, harsh, abstract set of propositions imposed by an external authority, and the personality of the Master Himself. There was no dichotomy between the Church, the Establishment, the Twelve, and this wonderful, lovable, merciful Jesus. It is His radiant personality whom we say we are seeking to love and to follow, and from whom we wish to learn our way of life; and from Him came just this sort of teaching, both about Himself, that is to say the doctrine of faith, and about the good and fulfilling life, that is to say the doctrine of morals. It was Jesus Himself who said that “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Matt 12:34) The doctrine spilled out from the very mind and heart of Christ. The inner truth of the doctrine which He saw and lived made Jesus the sort of Person He was. The sort of Person that He was made Jesus brimful of the doctrine He taught. There is no way we can separate the two—no way at all.

A Nostalgic Dream of Jesus?

We live in an age of nostalgia just now. If you have lived long enough to have been in on something when it first came out, whether it be classical jazz, rock or tap-dancing, you may be of the opinion that it was not at all as wonderful as it looks through pretty, rose tinted nostalgia glasses. When it comes to writing up the characters of very selfish, very lecherous, very drug rotted people as if they were saviours of mankind, and putting up monuments to them, you may want to be sick. Nostalgia can be a sigh for an imaginary golden age, the projection upon dead men and women of some inner desire, hope or ideal that you would like to see around now and don’t see. As the book of Genesis puts it (a little out of context just here) “Giants were on the earth in those days.” (Gen 6:4) In the spiritual order, and even in the cultural order, they may in fact have been much smaller.

I think we are in danger of setting up a nostalgic dream of Jesus Christ as the real thing. Men and women today, especially the young, we are told, love and accept Jesus Christ, but they cannot stand that drab, authoritarian institution called the Church. When you peel the layers off their conscious mind and reach the subconscious, you will find most times that they mean they don’t like the teaching this institution gives about poverty, prayer, attendance at the Eucharist, and their sexual life whether in or out of marriage. Do they really know anything at all about Jesus?

It is not only the modern world of non-doctrinal, vaguely emotional Christianity which needs to ask itself whether it really knows and loves Jesus. The modern intellectual establishment of the Roman Catholic Church needs to ask itself the same question. If it will not ask itself the question, then it must bear to be quizzed about the matter: who is this Jesus of yours? St Paul abruptly dismissed the thinkers of his own time as worthless and foolish before God (1 Cor 1:20) because they neither recognised Christ nor savoured the personality He radiated. He was not their sort of person, not their love, not their intimate friend. They certainly did not draw life from Him. Is it really different today with Küng and Schillebeeckx in doctrine of faith, or with writers and lecturers like Curran and Dominian in the right evaluation of sex, love and human fulfilment? One does not think so.

Knowing the Real Jesus of History

It is, first of all, a matter of knowing what the Jesus of history really said and taught. Are the Gospels and the letters of Paul and the other apostles direct, hotly written, and clearly sincere expressions of a living Master or are they remote, carefully written up studies of one who has long since left the scene? The spontaneity, the sheer human verve, and the naïveté at times of the apostolic writings is there for all to see. Jesus, lovable, magnetic and merciful as He was, managed to embroil Himself in an awful lot of contradiction in His day, even with the common people, the Temple crowds. He even managed to get Himself crucified; and except for the appalling claim of His bodily Resurrection from the dead, there is no intelligent manner of explaining how He and His disciples ever made a comeback.

The hard things in the doctrine of Jesus, including the hard things about marriage and sexual holiness, are already there in the Gospels. They are present even more bluntly in the writings of St Paul. They are found as part of the living evidence of history in the first documents and apologetics of the early Christian Church. These same realities of human nature and life, both the inspiring and the difficult, are found again, polished and refined in presentation, in the Fathers of the Church. Christian doctrine is a well worked out edifice of theology by 500 AD: a sophisticated but yet very unworldly synthesis of human and divine wisdom, presented by men who really and truly lived what they taught, and who had experienced the fulfilment and the liberation of the doctrine they wrote about.

There was for instance St Augustine of Hippo, who is very unpopular today with the New Theology establishment. He presented to the Church of his day, after much dialogue and discussion, a doctrine of original sin which the Church recognised as true in all essentials to what she did in fact believe (although the Church did not accept every philosophical speculation Augustine suggested, sometimes tentatively, to explain the ‘how’ of it). Similarly he gave to the Church a synthesis of divine and human reasoning against the Manichees in the matter of the goodness of sexual desire and function, and against the Pelagians in the matter of its perfection and the need of inner grace to attain that perfection. Again the Church in his day, and for a thousand years and more afterwards, recognised it as true to her doctrine and its consequences. The doctrine of Augustine is still enshrined in the solemn teaching of Humanae Vitae. In fact Augustine is still blamed for it. He is therefore very unpopular with the Currans and Dominians of our day, whose own doctrine of fulfilment in human love involves a constant confusion of the spiritual, the somatic,1 and the specifically erotic aspects in human love as an experience. In fact many of the modern ‘Christian’ philosophers of our day have gone way back beyond the Pelagians and have linked up quite frankly with the ancient classical paganism of Greece and Rome. If they could manage a re-incarnation back in history, they would find themselves very much at home, so long as they happened to be born in the upper classes!

It is no use saying that we cannot know the Christ of history. He lives in the Gospels in explicit speech. He lives in the pastoral letters of the apostles in explicit speech. He lives in the witness of the primitive Church, the Fathers, and the teaching Church of Rome and, for that matter, of Constantinople, down the ages.

He is alive and dynamic in the consecrated host whenever it is lifted above the heads of the people at Mass. With all due respect to certain well-known liturgists, it is actually very convenient to have altar breads which are small, round, white, and coin-shaped. Even if you give people large craggy lumps of brown bread of the consistency of cardboard, it does nothing to add to devotion; and for senior citizens it does not increase fervour to be trying to lick it off your denture plates all the morning. Neither does it overcome the profoundly philosophical objection of a fourteen year old from Dockland to whom it was my privilege to minister in the swinging liturgical late sixties: “A little bit of ’oly bread and a lick of ’oly wine ain’t no nosh up”. The shape, size and consistency of the bread is of no account at all. The Lord Himself said it a long time ago: “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” (John 6:63) When the Lord communicates Himself to us in the Eucharist in His physical reality as man, it is the spirit, the divinity that quickens; the flesh, the breadiness of the bread, profits nothing. When will some people accept the divine paradox, and by becoming little children grow up as adults in Christ? In the Eucharist moreover we have Christ in Person. And because He is the Lord of history He is also the historic Christ.

Through this centring of the Church in the Eucharist, which is the living Christ, He is also the Lord of the Magisterium, which is the true word of the Word Incarnate. This word speaks out first in the solemn doctrine preached to the people in the Liturgy of the Word, then through General Councils with the Pope, and finally through the solemn definition of Peter and his successors through the ages, for “Satan demanded to have you [plural], that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you [singular] that your faith may not fail.” (Luke 22:32-32) We really do know the mind and heart of the radiant Jesus that Schillebeeckx and others call on us to go out and meet. If, however, they describe Him in terms other than the doctrinal witness we have outlined above, they are either describing themselves writ large, or simply playing back a nostalgic feature and calling it ‘the Christ of faith’. Nostalgia is impossible for Jesus, because Jesus lives on, in His own physical reality and in the history of mankind.

Christian Maturity: Childlike Love

It is important to find, and to state, the link between the Jesus of history—the Jesus of the ‘essentialist’ Church that lives in doctrine of faith and morals—and the ‘existential’ Jesus—the ‘vibrant personality’ Jesus whom we are called upon to know and love and adore.

It is essential to know Jesus. It is essential to fill out the vision of the Gospels, and the even more explicit vision of the Pauline letters, with the vision of Christ as the Lord of creation. For in His very self, true God made true man, Christ fulfils that Unity-Law of Control and Direction to fulfilment, within which the universe is framed. It is essential through the Holy Spirit to proclaim the meaning of St John and St Paul against a larger canvas of truth, as modern knowledge has made it possible for us to do.

It is just as vital to possess Jesus in a humble and obedient love. Jesus was not made Incarnate to dazzle us but to make us conformable to the divine being, the divine reality and holiness. Knowledge alone can puff up (cf. 1 Cor 8:1), and men and women who are puffed up, even with a wisdom about God which is not false, may yet fall constantly and weakly into sin—sins of the flesh for instance—and into a lack of generosity of spirit in heeding the call of the Master. In saying this one has no desire to weaken any man’s or woman’s trust in the constant and repeated mercy of God. But it was Jesus Himself who said, “If you love Me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) Without the love that actually keeps the commandments, there is not the dynamic holiness that evangelises men. Is that not the reason why the Church herself groans and is in travail until saints arise and lift her, and all mankind with her, out of the morass of worldliness and little achievements? Is that not why we, being many, achieve so little, and why the real saints, being few, achieve so much? I once lived as a curate under an old Canon who was asked by an Irish colleague why it was that so many nuns were canonised, and so very, very few priests. The Canon, by the way, was Religious Superior to a large congregation of sisters, and of course the question was meant to take the mickey out of him. “Ah, Father”, said the Canon, “it is because the poor sisters read the scriptures, and since they don’t know any theology, they take it literally; whereas we priests know a lot of theology, and we know we don’t have to take it just like it says. But, God! It makes saints out of the sisters!” It is the childlike who are the saints, and only the saints achieve.

We seek, then, union and communion of love and life with Jesus. But we don’t seek just the love of friendship or the love of admiration. We are not content even with the love of discipleship, unless that word is given its specifically Christian meaning. People can be disciples of a saintly man or woman, disciples of a ‘guru’. Our relationship to Christ transcends all that. Our love towards Christ is of the same order of life and being as a baby’s is towards its mother. The baby loves and caresses the mother, but it also draws the milk of life from her. Christian maturity of being is that sort of relationship to Christ. It is a participation in the being of God; a maturity of spirit, of love and of emotion; a maturity of wisdom and love; a harmonious balance of every desire of spirit and of matter. The life of grace is the growth of being in beauty and real truth through this vital union and communion with Jesus Christ.

Seeing Yourself Imaged in Christ

So we come back again to the personality of Christ: to Jesus, the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). We come back to Jesus the lovable, the merciful, the totally wise. This same Jesus could also be intransigent, demanding and, in modern language, a bit of a bully. He really hurt that poor, rich, nice young man who had always been such a good boy (Matt 19:16-22)! We come back to Jesus, the real and ultimate truth in doctrine and in fulfilment as a living experience of human joy. You take the package entire. Jesus cannot be parcelled out. It is vitally important to get this relationship right, both in the matter of the personality of Jesus as He beckons to us, and also regarding the doctrine that Jesus taught and still teaches alive in the Church. For Jesus is the mirror in which we see our own personality and find our own identity.

The personality of Jesus—and this again is a matter of confused teaching just now—is not merely a human personality, it is the radiation and the life giving power of a divine Person. This is the identity in whose image and likeness we are made. Christ, as Son of God and Son of Man, is the mirror image of man. In His being, as God and Man, is your identity and my identity; in Him is the identity of male and female without distinction. We draw life, joy, and likeness and conformity to God from Christ.

This identity of our own personality is not a likeness of the mind alone, a likeness of vision and of truth. It is not a likeness of obedience alone, nor of the pain of sacrifice; although undeniably obedience and the pain of sacrifice will be there for us, and will become part of our experience in conforming our being to Christ’s being. There is also the joy and the happiness of Christ, which is the radiation through His human psyche of the joy which defines the being of God in Himself. Unless our conformation to Christ, the Mirror of Man, is perfect, we are not going to experience within ourselves the perfect fulfilment and joy of our manhood or our womanhood. Like all spiritual creations, whether man or angel, our specific identity is not in ourselves, or in the order of creation at all. It is in God, who is beyond our order of being and limitation, but to whose image alone we are fashioned, and in whose order of joy alone we find our bliss. That is why all Humanism, with the capital letter, is a mistake. The fulfilment of man is in God. In God made man we find our identity. That is really the meaning of the title, Son of Man: a title hardly found in the Old Testament except towards the end of the period of Messianic prophecy, but the title preferred above all others by Christ when He spoke of His mission to us and of our relationship to Himself.

In passing, may one make a speculative suggestion that is not going to be taken up here, but which the philosopher and theologian may care to ponder, in case there may be some new, at least partial truth in it? The human nature of Christ, the Son of Man, is the perfect image of our own identity and holiness, our wholeness in body and soul through God. So likewise, in the order of the spiritual soul, the divine Being itself, as pure and perfect spirit, is the mirror image of our spiritual perfection, now and unto the beatific vision. It makes sense of the appalling proposition that through Christ we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). It also means that Christ, as God and man in the unity of His one divine Person, is the total manifestation of our human truth, our goodness, our wholeness and our beatitude: both in heaven and now upon earth. It was Jesus who said, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt 5:48)

Forming Christian Life

If teachers of status, whether priests or lay folk, do not themselves accept the doctrine of life and human goodness that Jesus taught on earth and still teaches in His Church, and if they do not teach it to others, they will not form within those others the true identity of the real, living Jesus.  What  you  do  not  yourself  believe,  or  rather  what  you  yourself  deny  however regretfully and secretly, you cannot live in yourself as an experience of life and nobility of being. Nobody judges other people more nobly, more sincerely, or more chastely than he lives within his own life. It is a point worth remembering when someone passes judgment on another: how do you rate the speaker for wisdom and holiness of heart? Nobody judges better than he or she is.

This principle is important in the home, regarding the spiritual quality of parents. They are the natural, and in a sense the hierarchical, teachers of their children, for marriage is to be looked upon as a ministry in the Church as well as an office in creation. The principle is important in schools and in parishes. We priests form men and women, and even more manifestly and often much more successfully, we form children. It is important therefore in university chaplaincies and most of all in seminaries. It is a betrayal of good young men when bishops and seminary rectors allow men and women to lecture with authority on sex, love, and the meaning of sex in marriage, when they are manifestly in error over the doctrine of Christ, however distinguished academically they might be. If people make the Church, and therefore Christ teaching within her, to be wrong in the psychological evaluation and use of sex, whether in marriage or out of marriage or by the misuse of their own bodies, then it follows that they perceive and live a distorted experience of love within their own personalities, however much the world lauds them as ‘experts’. Nobody who teaches error can live the truth. Nobody who teaches error can form another in the truth. That of course is why we all suffer from the burden of original and actual sin at the hands of others, as well as within our own minds and hearts.

Even in these days, when there is so much talk of academic freedom, good and noble young men in seminaries are expected to accept the formation provided for them by their teachers with humility of heart and obedience of mind. When psychological error is proffered to them as part of their formation in this matter of human love, it not only makes for confused and faulty teaching later as priests, but makes for self-crucifixion in their own lives as men who have taken a vow of chastity for the kingdom of God’s sake. For this malformation of men, on whom the very future of the Church and the formation of Christ’s people depends, rectors and bishops will answer to Christ directly and very severely. For these know perfectly well that to bring in teachers of doctrinal dissent as honoured persons, whose opinions are very, very important to your pastoral understanding later on in your priestly lives, is a betrayal of their own personal mission to Christ as rectors or as diocesan bishops.

Knowing who you are is Knowing Christ

It is not only priests who talk about identity crisis. The expression is surely getting a bit dated now, but one finds it still very much an ‘in thing’ among the young. One has even found it in the youth club. This writer has lately been asked very earnestly by a teenager, “Do you know who you are, because I don’t?” Knowing who you are is not a matter of being a priest or being married or being single. It is not a matter of vocation at all. Knowing who you are is a matter of knowing Christ as He really is, and of humbly loving Him and conforming your whole life to Him. Knowing who you are is a matter also of bearing anguish and pain and sacrifice and the sneers and contempt of others. It means bearing loneliness also, rather than betraying the truth and goodness revealed in Christ. If you don’t know who you are, if you have an ‘identity crisis’, it means either that you have never found Christ and are still looking for Him, or else that you don’t love Him enough or faithfully enough: you don’t obey Him. Knowing who you are is first of all to find Jesus Christ in His real self; that is, to find doctrine of truth, love, and moral goodness in our relationship to others. It is to find God and one’s neighbour in life, in love, and in prayer.

When you have this degree of union with Jesus Christ—especially in youth, though at all times in all ages of life, actually—then from a full heart you will say to the same Jesus, “Lord, what will you have me to do?” That may well be the application of your identity to life and to vocation, whether in religious life or in marriage or in the single state in the world. St Paul suffered an identity crisis as he set out breathing threats and slaughter along the road to Damascus. He had been taught error concerning the real Jesus, therefore he was in a mess, and was unfulfilled and confused inside himself. When Jesus struck him down on the road his identity crisis was cured. He knew who he was in the Person who both reproached him and invited him with love.  He asked what he was to do.  He applied his new identity, his Christlike identity, to Christ’s work. He accepted the application of his new identity, to be the apostle to the nations.

Follow Him

It is the same for us today. Nobody loves God perfectly unless he knows God with full truth. Nobody knows God perfectly except through Jesus Christ. That is what the enfleshing of God as man is all about. Nobody will find all his yearnings, loves, emotions and drives fulfilled in harmony and truth, unless they are mirrored in that identity of truth which is the Person of Jesus. Live with Jesus your friend and teacher; love Jesus your friend and teacher; be conformed to Him. He alone really knows what is good for you, joyful for you, fulfilment for you. He ought to know: you were made by Him and through Him. Even as human, as yourself, you were modelled upon Him, for He was coming as the Son of Man. You cannot parcel out the truth of what He taught from the personality who breathed His teaching out with fire, saying “I came to cast fire upon the earth.” (Luke 12:49)

Ignore all the rest. At best they are sophists, no matter how well intentioned. They themselves are damaged inwardly in their own persons by original sin, even if they deny its existence. There is only one teacher without any trace of sin, having therefore the clear eye of perfect truth and the clean heart of a totally perfect love. Follow Him. He Himself said, “Call no man teacher upon earth, for you have only one teacher, and He is the Christ.” (Cf. Matt 23:8-10) Whoever stumbles upon that Rock of the Teacher will be badly bruised, while if the Rock should fall upon him, he will be ground to powder (cf. Luke 20:18).

Similarly you, oh son or daughter of man, you have only one identity to achieve. It is Christ’s identity living in you, radiant in you. Do not try to divide the doctrine of Jesus Christ—which is to say His Magisterium in the official, guaranteed Church—from His fulfilling and loving self. You cannot separate a tree from its fruits or a man from his words.

Much less can you divide them in the Living God. Do not expect to find within yourself the power to live it, or the full will to live it. That is Humanism again: being me-centred and man-centred. You are made to be God-centred, and that by the law of nature as well as by the law of grace. “Apart from Me”, said the Son of God and Son of Man, upon whom you are centred, “you can do nothing.” (John 15:5) Make your communion with Him; feed on Him in your heart; feed on Him in the Holy Eucharist. Remember that in the last days, because affluence  and  power  over  nature  has  abounded,  so  will  iniquity  abound.  It  has  been prophesied that many will fall away (Matt 24:10-12). How hard it shall be for those who have riches—entire affluent nations of them—to enter into the kingdom of God (Matt 19:23)! You however, son of God, daughter of God, “strive to enter by the narrow door.” (Luke 13:24) Never be scared by any scandal, no matter how grave, within the Church: it must needs be that scandals come; but woe to those by whom the scandal comes (Luke 17:1), and those who lay out the red carpet for them, right up to the front door. You will find Jesus easily enough if you look for Him. “Him who comes to Me”, said our Lord, “I will not cast out.” (John 6:37) He speaks in the Church, the real Church, in solemn doctrine, in the Pope and in Ecumenical Council. Forget the others. You cannot miss the voice of Peter in the Church; it is loud and clear.

1 I.e. bodily.

Meditation for Mary Immaculate

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 14, no. 6, November/December 1982.

“Why only for Mary?” asks the thoughtful and devout mind. It is not that we are jealous of Mary’s prerogative. And of course it was completely fitting that the Mother of God, the source of the flesh of the Word made Flesh, should be all pure and holy even from the first instant of her conception. Rather, it is that in the things of God we look for an order of coherent and consistent wisdom, for a principle of ‘reason why’ intrinsic to the unity which is the mind of God.

It does not convince men and women, in an age when ancient spiritual claims are considered myths, if the decrees of God appear arbitrary and His works a matter of wand- waving. Yet the argument of Duns Scotus does seem rather arbitrary and in the best tradition of The Lord of The Rings! Concerning the mind and power of God in the matter of Mary’s Immaculate Conception he proclaimed, “Decuit, potuit, ergo et fecit.” (It was fitting, He had power to do it, therefore He did it.)1  It seems, then, that divine power does not include us! But all of us live now in the salvation of Christ risen. It is a new order, a new creation, the restoration of what was lost in Adam. Why then are we not conceived without original sin and without that concupiscence of disordered desire which is the penalty of original sin in the flesh? Even if people lost such a ‘justice restored’ afterwards by personal sin, it would appear fitting that, as Mary was conceived Immaculate by the merits of Christ foreseen, so we should now be conceived immaculate by the merits of Christ directly applied. This would solve all the problems about unbaptised babies, would manifest convincingly the will of God to save all men, and would vindicate beyond doubt the complete victory of Christ over sin and death. Why, then, only Mary, much as we love and honour her?

“Wretched man that I am”!

It would indeed be hard to explain this issue in terms of God’s wisdom and love and the will of Christ to save unbaptised and aborted babies, if the speculative explanation of original sin of some post-Reformation Catholic theologians were to be followed. These theologians make the grace of original holiness and freedom from disorder within our nature to be simply an extrinsic and incidental gift of God, super-added to a basic state. Once this grace was lost, human nature, although deeply bereft of its historic condition of nobility and happiness, simply fell back into its basic condition of ‘a state of pure nature’, in which condition it was basically as good as new. Indeed, if God had so willed, He could have made man from the beginning in that condition, without any call or vocation to possess God in the fullest degree, which is the state of the beatific possession of God, the order which alone is truly a supernatural order and state.

If original holiness were simply an accidental (i.e., in modern English, incidental) gift, added onto human nature from outside, then it becomes incomprehensible why that which was lost in Adam is not added back on again after the Resurrection of Christ. Again, if so naïve an explanation of the loss to man’s nature were true, then it is just as hard to explain the state of human nature which we find within our being, wounded and divided within itself, and far from the harmony of any sort of purely natural goodness. This is the state magnificently depicted with pathos by St Paul, when he speaks for himself and for all of fallen mankind: “Wretched man that I am! For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin.” (Rom 7:24,19,23) This self-division, by which “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other,” (Gal 5:17) is not the work of God.

These theologians say the state of basic nature is simply that the flesh seeks blindly any natural pleasure or desire, and that the soul must impose the law of reason upon the flesh. They presume that this is the order of nature below mankind, the law of the jungle and the field. They show their ignorance of natural science. In nature below mankind pleasures and desires are linked to functions, and are naturally subordinate to a law in the environment, which gives a life-law of times and seasons to all living things. There is no anarchy in nature, no self-division, and no resistance in the individual to the law of God. God could not make man one being, a unity of matter and soul, and have one element in his being, the material one, indifferent to or hostile to the rule of the soul, which itself must be harmoniously orientated in natural obedience to the wisdom of God and the natural law of God within man’s order of life. This would be true even if God had created man in a lower order of excellence and gift than the one which is actually given us, namely to be co-sharers through Christ in God’s own divine nature.

The Law of Disorder

It makes better sense, along with the Fathers of the Church and especially St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, to recognise in original sin a true, inner wounding of man’s very nature: a wounding in the order of the soul and its supernatural destiny, a wounding too in the order of nature itself and its natural obedience to whatever is its final joy in God. Through this Fall and loss we can no longer grow towards God in a straight line, and we are no longer a true reflection of the image of God in the order either of grace or of nature.

From God comes the ‘law of my mind’, that perfect truth concerning right and wrong and holiness in living, which is made a spoken word in the Incarnation of Christ, who is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) of God for men. The ‘law in my members’ is the urge of disordered desire, inherited only through the flesh, but communicated to the soul in the moment of its conception. That ‘law’ comes from the evil power of the soul over the body, and comes originally from the will of Adam. So God-like is the relationship of the soul to the body in man, making one living person, that the power of the disobedient will of the spiritual order can now introduce, for the first time in all creation, a principle of selfish disobedience to the law of God, the will of God, and the law both natural and divine that governs the true life and happiness of man.

The processes by which this ‘law of disorder’ can be inherited through the natural laws of generation do not concern us here. That would be too intricate a theme. It is a fact that it is so inherited, and that the evidence is indisputable in all human history and in the life and struggles of every individual man or woman. Of all things God created, we alone are not harmoniously related to our law of life and happiness, and we alone of all beings admit within our conscience a law of truth and goodness which we fail to achieve because of the drives and desires that tear us apart.

Original  sin  does  not  destroy  within  human  nature  all  yearning  for  God  or  all tendency to seek God’s law. That is why Luther was wrong to say that human nature since the Fall was intrinsically corrupt. The ‘law of my mind’ is still there, but weakened in its response to God. It is also overlaid by a secondary, sin-induced ‘law of my members’, a disobedience to the harmony and balance within which human nature was originally constituted by God and orientated to God in the communion of grace and love. This principle of selfishness is the basis of the coarseness, dullness of conscience, inner confusions, and addictive drives of human nature. To it we so often add by our own personal sins and bad habits in life.

God Himself cannot wipe out this condition in our material inheritance because the laws of natural, physical inheritance are deterministic, material laws. They pass on what they are given. They are meant to pass on the good, but they can also pass on loss and disease. As spiritual, the soul can turn to God in perfect contrition and perfect love. Such an urge of goodness and love has a healing effect also on the body, but not a total and perfect healing. Even in great and holy souls, whose nobility of spirit shines in their faces, the basic tendency, the flaw in the inheritance, will remain. A young man in a moment of silly bravado may deeply burn his leg with a cigarette. The wound may fester, there may be danger of gangrene and loss of the limb. By that time, in his spirit he may be deeply sorry, much more noble of soul, much closer to God in mind and heart. This however will not equally heal the flesh, because the change in the body is subject to more physical, more mathematical, and more deterministic laws of life. The wound in the flesh may heal, but may never perfectly heal. So with original sin.

Even in the order of redemption God cannot simply ‘add on’ what we lost before, because the wound is intrinsic to human nature and the very laws of the material creation. Man redeemed is capable of true, interior growth in holiness and goodness; but even in the saints, he is not capable of such a perfect holiness as would have been possible if men had never sinned at all. That is why St Paul tells us that even we, who have through Christ “the first fruits of the Spirit”, must yet “groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” (Rom 8:23) The flesh, basically imperfect, must pay the penalty of death and sin within its own now natural inheritance. The full restitution of man must await the second coming of Christ, an order which does away with marrying and giving in marriage (cf. Matt 22:30) and with the present order of the inheritance of the flesh.

The Predestination of Christ

“Now”, all those thoughtful and devout minds will say, “you are hoist with your own petard, dear Father! In the case of Mary, born of the seed of Adam and the line of David, you, and Holy Mother Church with you, have made an exception to these deterministic laws, and in just one singular case.” One would think that for St Thomas Aquinas this was one of the problems in admitting that Our Lady was conceived Immaculate in the very first instant of her conception. Therefore he considered that he had to concede that the shadow of original sin did fall across her created being, only at once to be redeemed and taken away.

It looks very different if we take at face value those many texts in which it is taught— quite clearly, one suggests—that Christ predestined our eternal glory in Himself, not just the Word but the Incarnate Word, before the foundation of the world, and therefore before the Fall of man (e.g. Col 1:15-20, Eph 1:3-10, Heb 1:1-3). St John too (John 1:1-18) presents Christ as one who is coming as the Heir of the Ages: “all things were made through Him.” He comes into “His own things” by inheritance of divine right, to give man the fullness of that life, the gift of which He intended in man’s very creation. But instead of acclamation He meets the tragedy of an ignorant rejection. This view of the Incarnation would mean that God did not become the Son of Man simply because men had sinned and needed redemption, but rather that He was to come as King of the universe and Lord of all by the decree of creation itself. Sin however changed that glorious Kingship into a work of painful redemption, a winning back of the usurped vineyard (cf. Mark 12:1-12), and the sacrifice of a perfect reconciliation. Christ is always salvation—even to the angels who did not sin—because He is the principle of life and life to its fulfilment (cf. John 10:10) in the beatific vision of God. In our case the salvation is also a redemption.

Concerning the motivation of the Incarnation, whether it was decreed independently of sin or only because of the Fall, both views are allowed by the Church and both views find saints and doctors to speak for them. The view which makes Christ King of all creation, visible and invisible, in the supernatural order, by Primacy from the beginning seems a more noble and truer vision of Christ. It gives a total unity to all His works in Himself. It seems more coherent to the wisdom of God. It seems, too, more in harmony with the theology of the Greek Fathers of the Church, and to be the only logical development of the titles they give to Christ. It is significant that Duns Scotus, that great and holy Franciscan who was in some ways  a  rival  to  Aquinas,  both  held  this  view  of  Christ  and  was  one  of  the  foremost protagonists of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Did his perspective on the Incarnation make it any easier for him to see the necessity and coherence of the special privilege of Mary? One thinks that it did.

If the Incarnation is decreed from the foundation of the universe, you meditate it this way: God communicated Himself directly to the angels as pure Spirit upon pure spirits. There was no let or hindrance. It is natural for pure spirits to learn of God and love God by total contemplation. God made them through His Logos, through that Word who later became for us the Christ. He loved and fulfilled them in His Holy Spirit. They were perfected in all that they had and were through the Word in the Holy Spirit.

If this cannot also be done for man, it is hard to see why God made matter at all. It is at best an irrelevance to the spiritual order, and at worst a drag upon it. Matter, in its own order and without incorporation into the being of man, cannot even know God directly at all. Clearly God cannot perfectly commune and unite our nature to Himself—perfectly in our way, and perfectly in His way—by the same means as He does for the angels. This is because matter is an obstacle: it learns, loves, and enters into communion perfectly only through the spoken word and through the word enacted as deed. But it is quite different if man can be saved and, in the sense of the Greek Fathers, divinised in all his nature, matter and spirit, by predestination to the divine life through the Incarnation of Christ. This gives us as much as the angels of God. Then that Word, through whom all things were made, becomes the Son of Man, not because of sin, but in the most perfect possible ordering of the Wisdom of God: He becomes the root of our stock and the One upon whose coming as Messiah all the laws of the universe, all the slow ascent of being through space and time, were aligned for His perfect birth on earth. In Christ, coming for man, both earth and heaven are joined in the one Person but two natures of Jesus Christ.

If it is viewed that way, sin plays no part in the gift of Christ, for sin is not of God but only of the creature, and of the evil and disobedient creature at that. Sin as such plays no part in the creative initiatives of God because sin belongs to loss and imperfection. Sin does not condition the majesty of God’s creative largesse in the decree of creation. Once sin enters creation through the creature’s free will, it can damage and frustrate the good works of God and the design of God. Yet it cannot wholly do so, for the mind of God does not change because of sin. God overcomes and triumphs in the creature in spite of sin, although His salvation becomes now a winning back and a painful redemption of what the creature has wantonly lost.

The Predestination of Mary

Looked at in this way, Mary is before Eve. She is willed before Eve because she is willed in the decree of the Incarnation of Christ, which also decrees the universe of matter, crowned with man, as the Kingdom of the Son of God and Son of Man.

When non-Catholics are scandalised at our and the Greeks’ devotion to Mary, they must bear in mind that Mary, in her relationship to Christ, is always “per ipsum, et cum ipso,

et in ipso” (to borrow a thought from the doxology of the Eucharistic Prayer in the Mass). Mary, with all her prerogatives, exists and is defined into being only through Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ. She is in fact only for Christ. She is creation’s first minister and first member for the Incarnation of God. She has no imperious, independent role. To the roots of her being, she is defined in the divine Wisdom and in the divine Mind as “handmaid of the Lord”, as her Magnificat acknowledges and proclaims (Luke 1:48, cf. 1:38). This is true also of any role of intercession and care the Church attributes to Mary. She is always for Him whose human flesh defined both her being and our own creation in the Son of Man. If Christ was to come into “His own things” by the decree of creation, then the womb of woman, the womb of Mary, had to have been present in the very first laws of creation and the movement of the first dynamic explosion of creative energy. There is no independent honour for Mary. She is defined for Him, and after her all things materially created are willed for Christ, through her as the vehicle of life, the woman of the vision of St John in the Book of Revelation (Rev 12:1-6). How then can we possibly deny her the title Mother of the Church, who, in the intentions of God, is the first member taken up into the Body of Christ in the decree of the Incarnation, as the minister of His personal flesh?

In this way, though we are all willed into being as sons and daughters of Eve, in the mind and predestination of God, Mary is willed before Eve, and her status in heaven and earth as Queen of men and of angels is decreed in her vocation as minister of the flesh of the Word made Flesh. Even in the first instant of her creation, in the divine mind and will she does not come under the law of the inheritance of sin through Eve, because her being and her destiny precede the intention of creating Eve in the mind of God. When the Father creates matter through the Son, the Son willed Incarnate, Mary is predestined with Christ, because His human flesh is not intelligible as an event in time except it be ministered through her flesh.

The Incursion of Sin

Mary then, as God knows her being as part of His divine providence for us all, does not come under the law of natural inheritance from Eve in the first instant of her conception. What we are saying is this: Eve is conceived in the mind of God through Christ, and through Mary, because Mary is the earth’s minister of material being to its Maker in the flesh of Jesus Christ. The liability to the stain of sin in Mary is therefore extrinsic only. She derives in time and in the actual created scene after Eve and by natural descent from Eve; she is not however, like us, willed through Eve as child in the order of nature and in the order of grace. Indeed, Mary’s relation to Eve is rather that of exemplar and Mother: Eve is made feminine for Mary’s vocation. In the mind and will of God Eve is ‘thought of’ and ‘loved’ because of Mary. It is exactly the opposite for the rest of us: we are ‘thought of’ and ‘loved’ through Eve.

Mary,  Virgin  and  Mother,  is  only  for  Christ,  uniquely  for  Christ,  and  uniquely ‘spouse of the Holy Spirit’ for the ministry of manhood to God in Jesus Christ. The impact of original sin comes upon Mary not as an intrinsic liability but as an external invasion and threat to her predestined integrity. It is in a secondary and not a primary relationship to our first parents that Mary is liable to the stain of original sin. In our case original sin is a natural inheritance from the stock, Adam and Eve, in whom we are willed and from whom we are descended. Mary does not incur liability by law of entire descent, by intrinsic connection of being, but only in the manner that a man or woman may incur any sickness or contagion by the actual accidental contact of their own flesh with that of another. It is then not by law of inheritance from her origins in our first parents that Mary could incur liability to sin, in either the order of God’s predestination or the order of descent according to the will of God. God wills us in Adam and Eve, but He willed Adam for the sake of Christ, and Mary as the vehicle of life through which He was to come. God then, willed Eve through Mary.

The theme cannot be dwelt on now, but we have argued in more than one place2 that God would not have divided human life into male and female except through His need for the womb of Mary as the vehicle of His human life. He was not to be born as a person created in time, but as a Person was to enter into His Tabernacle on earth, the womb of Mary, and take flesh  from her  immaculate  seed.  Because  in  her ministry as Mother of God Mary was predestined with Christ before the world was made, therefore she had a right to be defended and preserved from the incidental incursion of evil upon her status that occurred through her birth in time through the fallen flesh of Adam. She is preserved and redeemed from original sin then only in a secondary sense, inasmuch as through descent from a fallen stock in space and time she would have been tainted ‘from outside’, whereas in the primary sense she was willed for Christ before other men and women were conceived in the mind of God through Adam and Eve.

This vision of Mary is possible only through the vision of Christ as predestined from the beginning of the material creation, Lord Incarnate of the material universe and of the spirit of man; predestined independently of sin and before the ill-will of the creature brought sin and its defilement into the beautiful works of God. So viewed, Mary’s predestination as minister of His flesh must be one with Christ’s will to be Incarnate as Son of Man. If Christ is literally the “first-born of all creation” (Col 1:15) because the material universe is willed through His Incarnate being, then Mary is the second-born as minister of His flesh. In that vocation she is also second-born of all creation as the first material creature willed in Christ, as the first member of the Church through Jesus Christ, and as Mother of the Church in that ministry of motherhood to Him and to all mankind for Him. This vision of Mary unfolds logically from the Greek and Scotist perspectives of the Incarnation. Had St Thomas Aquinas been able to see the scriptural and doctrinal evidence for this view more clearly, one thinks it would have solved his problem over the Immaculate Conception of Mary. For it was because of her status as willed through Adam and Eve that he found her liable to the inheritance of sin, at least in the first brief moment of her initial conception. Had he, with Duns Scotus, been able to see that she was willed before sin could be as “ministra carnis Unigeniti” (minister of the body of the Only-Begotten) in the decree of the Incarnation itself, he would have realised that even as a creature she had no intrinsic liability by descent from Eve.

The Love that Heals and Creates

All the same, are we not in the end forced to agree that God does work one direct miracle, other than the miracle of making man into the supernatural order of His own divine life: just one very defensible and direct ‘sign’ in the positive ‘healing’ of the living matter that was to form the Holy Mother of God in the womb of St Anne? If it were so, it would be in no way incoherent, in no way arbitrary, and altogether defensible.

Nevertheless this writer suggests—with, of course, some diffidence in so speculative a subject—that the reality of what God did in the making of Mary was even more wonderful, and was a work which did not require any direct intervention of God to offset the incursion of Adam’s sin upon her. It required no miracle except inasmuch as her vocation itself is in a sense a ‘miracle’. I am suggesting that in the first instant of her conception the Holy Spirit hovered over the living seed, male and female, that was to be the body of the Virgin Mother of God: the same Spirit who was later to overshadow Mary for the completion of her work. In that love of the Father, mediated through the Son, and personally expressed in the Holy Spirit, there was breathed out upon Mary in time, existentially, and in the order of her creation, the one same love with which she had been loved in Christ as His minister in the decree of the Incarnation. This love—a love in which the whole universe and every rational creature was loved and wanted, was made and fulfilled—is so great and so total that, of its very force and power and its nearness to the Divinity of Christ made man, it must form the matter of Mary into a unity of total perfection. It does so not by a decree to heal but by sheer, primary, creative love, and love unto perfection. That was the love with which Mary was loved in the first instant of her conception. And in the presence of that love all presence of sin or sickness of any sort is made laughable and irrelevant.

The love of God is hierarchical in its order. On the view of creation which we suggest, mankind is loved and made only for God Incarnate as Christ, and through Christ human nature is given as high a status as the angels of God, and in as perfect a way. Then Mary is first loved and willed, that the order of the Incarnation may come to be. In that order, from the beginning God makes the womb and creates man male and female so that, as the Determiner of the womb of Mary, He may come into His own inheritance. Through Mary, the one who exercises the ministry of the cooperation of the material universe unto Christ, all the rest of us are willed and loved in our order. We, however, are truly children of Eve and are not made uniquely and specially for the purposes of God as Our Lady was. Upon this basis we can erect a theology in which the Immaculate Conception of our Lady is utterly coherent, decreed from the beginning, and caused in the first moment of her being by the totality and perfection of that love by which she is loved for the work of her person in the economy of salvation. This, we suggest, is the magnificence and the majesty of Mary.

The Revelation to St John

Surely it is all summed up so well in the great revelation given to St John.

“And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. … She brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne.” (Rev 12:1-2,5)

The vision is cosmic. It extends from the first moment of the explosive energies of the universe’s beginning to now. Earth, our planet, is rightly shown as ‘woman’, teeming with life and fertility. The earth is clothed with the sun and has the moon, the lesser luminary subject, under its feet, “for signs and for seasons and for days and years.” (Gen 1:14) The earth is made for God in the womb of Mary, for whose vocation every womb, human and below the human order, exists and is made. It is Mary who brings forth a male child, the Son of Man, for all creation in her virginal body.

The vision unfolds, giving its fuller sense. The crown of twelve stars is first of all the whole galactic background of the earth itself, the laws of nature that have worked for this end: the birth of Christ. Then, too, as all material things are for man, and man is for Christ, the twelve stars are the twelve tribes of Israel, the order of trusteeship for the Messianic “fullness of time” (Eph 1:10, cf. Gal 4:4). After that they are the twelve apostles of the Lord. The woman is first the earth itself, then the holy Mother of God, and finally the Church, shown through Mary personally as Mother of the Church. These are not different senses but the one full sense of a vision which embraces the total economy of God, the predestination of creation and salvation in all its parts.

When Christ was entering Jerusalem and the leaders of the people told Him arrogantly to rebuke the children who acclaimed Him Messiah and Son of David, He replied: “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” (Luke 19:40) All creation was made for Him, was aligned upon His Incarnation, and was awaiting His coming. So also with the Blessed Virgin: one could say with pious folly—for it is folly—that if God had not made her Immaculate, the stones and the trees and the beasts of the field would have cried out in protest. For Mary is part of their gift to God, their meaning, and their vocation: the gift to God of the flesh of an earth which had never sinned save only in man! But all nature holds its peace because the love with which the Father loves the Son Incarnate is in her, and such a love can create only the Immaculate. She is, in all things and on behalf of all God’s creatures, “our tainted nature’s solitary boast”. (Wordsworth)

1 III Sent., dist. iii.

2  E. Holloway, Catholicism: A New Synthesis, Faith-Keyway, second edition 1976, p. 148-151; Sexual Order and Holy Order, Faith Pamphlets, 1978.

Word, Church and Bible

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 23, no. 2, March/April 1991.

The Church: what is she? We use many an image. She is our Mother, the Body of Christ, the holy People of God, the Ark of God’s salvation, and others besides. The Church is God’s communion on earth with us. In these images we think of the Church of God as an institution: an institution which is natural, loving and caring—like the family, which is also an institution and natural to man. Almost unconsciously we put our personal relationship to God into a category running parallel to, yet beside, that relationship to God which we profess in the living body of the Church. Take as an illustration our distinction between liturgical prayer and private prayer. There is, of course, a distinction, but partial and not perfect. In the last analysis all our knowing, praying and loving is prayer of the Church. We pray within the family of the Church. We are brothers and sisters to the physical body of Jesus Christ.

The Meaning of Man

What is the answer to the meaning of everyone’s seeking and searching in mind and heart? Who am I? How do I come to be here? What is my meaning? Who wants me? Does anyone love me? Where does my real, all-embracing happiness lie? For we are not fulfilled by sun, air, earth and water, like everything else around. We are not animals. Earth and angel mingle as one in us. We are not fulfilled by possessions, pomp, money and physical excitement. Even power leaves the heart unloved. All these are gathered under a greater, ordered wisdom at the core of the real, ultimate ‘me’. This I name my soul or spirit. Earth, air, sun and flowing waters are not my joy-place. God is the joy-place of man. God is reality, peace that is stable, wise joy in thinking, timeless happiness in possessing. God as ‘parent’ is the answer to human seeking: He is “our Father”. Families are at once all personal and all social. So is the Church. The Church is familial, but the ‘fatherhood’ is not of earth. Mother Church binds earth to heaven—to God.

The Foundation of the Church

Where shall we place the foundation of the Church? Some would say, very beautifully, in the moment of Mary’s assent: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38) The conception of Christ was the first mutual work of God and men, and Mary is thereby Mother of the Church. There is also the perception of the Fathers of the sacramental life of the Church flowing as donation from the wounded side of Christ. Then there is the priestly ordination of the apostles at the Last Supper—and the Holy Eucharist is at the centre of the Church. And there is a sense in which Pentecost marks the first public moment of evangelisation, and thus of the Church.

In a theology which sees the meaning of all matter in the Word made Flesh, and places the motive of the Incarnation in the ordered flash with which the universe begins, there is another vista for the Church. The primal moment of the Church, utterly personal and utterly social and communal, is when God, having made the man, divides the powers of his life, and Adam recognises Eve as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman (ishshah), because she was taken out of Man (ish).” (Gen 2:23) Then with His family, personal and institutional, God walks in the cool of the evening air in paradise. We overlook the prophetic, lovely significance of God walking with them, in the cool of the evening  air  (cf.  Gen  3:8).  All  the  Earth  is  Eden,  God’s  Garden  of  Delights.1   And  the friendship of loving recognition and contemplative love, however simple, marks the primal revelation of God to His people. This surely must be the moment of the Church.

The covenant of perfect friendship is broken by guile and disobedience. Decay and corruption of spirit and flesh follow at once: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Gen 3:11). Earth will no longer be Eden, God’s royal Garden of Delight. The covenant is broken, but it is immediately renewed in friendship. However this redemption comes with pain. Yet the economy of God goes on unchanged: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Gen 3:15) But sadly the King’s Son shall “come to His own home, and His own people will not receive Him.” (cf. John 1:11) His star throws a cross-shaped shadow over the crib.

Here is the beginning of the Church: salvation without sin; salvation lost through sin; salvation restored but in redemption’s pain.

The Unity of Tradition, Scripture and Magisterium

From this brook in Eden rises the Bible. The rivulet enlarges and runs and rolls through history, as Ezekiel was shown.2  It is the river of the evocation of the Word of God.3  There follows a vital truth relevant to this day: Tradition, God’s word of teaching, has priority over the word written down. For long ages there could be no Holy Writ, but there was a teaching Church.

The original principle subsists to this day in the Catholic Church. She makes no claims for her theologians. For better or worse theologians are only a ‘service industry’! But for her priestly and prophetic ministry she claims the right of Magisterium: the right of office to interpret the God-given meaning of the Book—if needs be, inerrantly. It was so from the beginning. The Bible is hers. Unless the teaching ministry precedes, there will be no written word. The authority of the written word is one principle with the solemn authority of the teaching word: namely “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matt 28:20) Tradition and Holy Writ are one principle, not two. The written word was, and remains, the one divine teaching. The teacher is teaching to a climax, to His coming in the flesh as Emmanuel. After He has ascended to the Father He teaches still, with divinity, with God’s own authority on earth as the Environer4 of man. “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak … for He will take what is Mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:12-14)

The principle of the Catholic Magisterium is not man’s feeble and fallible authority. That indeed would be only the word of the theologian. It is the authority of the Spirit, receiving from the written word and the spoken word of the Logos of God. Development is natural to the Church, but God’s own, not man’s ‘new insight’. We have only one teacher, the Christ (cf. Matt 23:8-10). The word of Magisterium interprets Holy Writ and past apostolic Tradition. It also discerns whether new developments are true or false. All of this is one principle: the word of the Word. From this we know that the Catholic Church is at the centre of centres. The fullness of God’s revelation rises in her and subsists in her. She is ‘Genesis’ where God walks with men in familial converse.

The Necessity of Holy Writ and living Magisterium

Because of the familial relationship of God to men which answers the prayer and seeking of the individual soul, and because of the social intercommunion of the word by which men reach out to each other, God must raise up the priest and the prophet through human history. Anthropology is an ‘in’ discipline (it is hardly a science) just now. It traces the nature of man as human culture develops, throwing up community and society, the king and the counsellor and the council of state. So, by right of nature and of grace, God must raise up the priest and the prophet and the council of priests and teaching rabbis. This is the Church. It is one principle with God walking with Adam and Eve in converse in the cool evening air.

We could not possibly dispense with Holy Writ. It is the witness to the ongoing teaching and communion of God with men through the ages. It is a cliché used when warning young priests and students against writing imprudent or angry letters (Never write when you can speak or telephone!): scripta manent, verba autem evanescent—letters remain, the word dies  in  the  air.  In  a  positive  sense,  how  would  we  know—how  could  we  prove—the wonderful unity and coherence of God’s revealing and communing through the ages without the Bible? How could we store the precious heritage of truth and love in the psalms and wisdom books without the written word, as men grew in maturity and civilization? How could we be sure of prophecy and of the all-important evidence of Messianism unique to the Bible, unless the same word of God the teacher were written down?

It is the same even in mundane things: you must have written instructions. But if they are not clear, go to the one who wrote them down. The same principle applies in the Church. She wrote them down, they are her letters, she knows in the last analysis what they mean.

The Unity and Continuity of the Old Testament and the New

It is here that the form critics, and now the redaction critics, of the Bible go so wrong again and again. The culture did not make the Judaeo-Christian religion. The religion formed the culture. God was always a direct actor in the teaching and the writing through long ages. That is why there is prophecy, God’s direct and personal leading on, only and uniquely in the Old Testament and in no other great world religion, even though elsewhere there is beauty, truth, and a vocation from great souls to their brethren. In religious anthropology revelation is not of one order and kind (pace Rahner and others). The meaning of the Bible cannot be ascertained adequately from text and context in the history-conditioned culture of its age. There is always a sensus plenior, a fuller meaning of prophecy and type, which is never totally distinguishable from the so-called literal sense. The full sense is perceptible only when we can look back from the future with the hindsight of fulfilment. Yet the expectation of that fullness was always there. The whole of the Old Testament is one great season of Advent for the coming of the Messiah. The greatest of the rabbis were convinced that everything in the Law and the Prophets spoke only of fulfilment in the days of the Messiah.

The prototype of the Catholic principle of Magisterium and apostolic Tradition exists also in the Old Testament. The principles that Newman applied to the coherent development of doctrine from the early Christian Church to now, can be applied in one coherent and continuous order from the Old Testament through to the New, and on to the beginning of the third millennium. There was never simply a written and edited record which every man interpreted as he saw fit (except for the Sadducees, who were the exact counterparts in Judaism of today’s liberal rationalists). The scribes and the Pharisees had sat on the Chair of Moses (Matt 23:2-3). Their Magisterium was imperfect and prophetic, awaiting the day of the Messiah. Yet it was still the Magisterium of God, not of men; and Christ recognised it, while warning against their deviant works.

All the oracles of Israel have but one beginning: “This is the word of the Lord”! It was an imperfect word, but nonetheless the word of God’s own Magisterium, a word of the ‘Church’. Its fulfilment in the perfect word of Yahweh is hymned in the prologue to the Gospel of St John, and also in the Benedictus, in which the Bishop,5  who is the ‘Day-Star’ from on high, “has come to visit us” (Luke 1:78).

This continuity of principle and type between the Jewish concept of Magisterium— abiding divine teaching authority—and the Catholic concept may be part of the reason why the laborious critiques of scores of Nordic scholars are consigned to the discard pile of scholarship every fifty years or less. They have little sense of the Semitic mind or of the prophetic divine oracle, a faith speaking to the future. The concept of a divine teaching Magisterium of the spoken word on earth is alien to the theology of the Reformation. It’s denial was the cardinal principle of the rejection of the papacy four hundred years ago.

The devout Christian convert from Judaism Alfred Edersheim was not a Catholic Christian, it is true; but he has in his works all the tenacious Semitic reverence for fact handed down and for the principle of prophecy as the shaping force of Israel up to and including the time of Christ. After a century his works have been reprinted in paperback.6 He is still relevant and reliable. Whether there will be similar demand for Bultmann in paperback in a hundred years time is matter for prudent doubt!

There is no dividing line between the Old Testament and the New. The Old Covenant lives by God’s oracle, God’s leading on, God’s protection of His word spoken, written and edited down the ages by patriarch and priest, by psalmist and prophet. It gives us living, vibrant, expectant Messianism as the ‘substantial form’ of the whole of the Old Testament. In the prologue of St John’s Gospel this passes in perfect continuity of principle into the fact and Person of the Messiah. Jesus Christ is God from God, God in Person, God in the flesh, tabernacled7 among us.

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known. (John 1:17-18)

The whole meaning of the Bible, and all the beauty of its prophetic and wisdom literature, is now fully comprehensible. For, in one who is fully Son of God and fully Son and Prince of Man, the oracle of prophecy has passed in one continuity of principle into final fact and final authority, and into a love for man which is absolute. The prologue of St John’s Gospel is the witness of the transition: the fulfilment of man’s expectation from the time God walked with His own in the afternoon air. It is also the witness that the perfect Light has come into the world when God the Teacher takes flesh and tabernacles among His people. The principle of divine Magisterium—God teaching in the private mind and heart, in one family of His People; one authority in Holy Writ and sacred Tradition—continues in Christ, God and man.

St Peter was well aware of the tradition of his fathers when, speaking in defence of St Paul his colleague, he reminds Jew and Gentile Christian:

First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (2 Pet 1:20-21)

A little further on (2 Pet 3:15-16) the authority of “scripture” is conferred on Paul’s letters, which equates apostolic authority in the beginning of Christianity with the inspired word of God.

The Need for an Infallible Magisterium

So the one principle of God teaching, loving, consoling and redeeming “the men whom You gave Me” (John 17:6) exists in the Old Testament and lives within the Church of the New Testament. Only now God the Messiah lives in His people. He speaks, declares, loves, and offers Himself in them as the sacrifice which takes away the sins of the world. The dimension of divinity is now finalised among men, and the principle of Magisterium—God’s own Personal Word—lives in her teaching, her priesthood and her Councils. If the Church is not infallible down the ages; if she does not preach Christ infallibly; if she does not infallibly give Christ, communing in the private heart, in the family, and in the whole community of the People of God as Lord, Lover and Saviour, then there is no divinity in Christ, and we are of all men the most miserable (cf. 1 Cor 15:19). Once again, the principle of the Christian faith will be the total, divine authority for faith and fulfilment of the word of the Word: Holy Writ and the apostles’ teaching through the ages, with the Holy Spirit bringing to their remembrance “all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). Scripture and Tradition are one principle. Tradition knows the meaning of the word. The word is not dead, it lives in a teacher, abiding and declaring.

This writer has mentioned this incident before, but returns to it again because of the profound impression it made on him. It witnesses to the abiding, divine authority of Peter and the apostles in the Church through the ages. Men die, men are born, men wax, men wane, and over them all Christ’s voice proclaims, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” (Matt 28:18-19) It was the occasion of  the  definition  of  the  Assumption  of  the  Blessed  Virgin  Mary.  One  stood  in  a  vast concourse in the humbler spaces of St Peter’s Square.

By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we proclaim, declare and define as a dogma revealed by God…8

That is how it is, how it always was: one authority of Christ the Lord, speaking and writing, living and loving, always divine, for God is tabernacled among His people. There is no divinity in Christ except within this vision and this power to bind the assent of the proud mind and heart of man.

The Authenticity of John

We must therefore repudiate and resist the effort being made at present in some Catholic circles to diminish the sincerity, the objectivity, and the historical witness of the New Testament. Since the end of the Second Vatican Council human arrogance and smallness of mind has had a field-day. First and foremost, in the matter of the Gospel of St John we reject the suggestion that it is pure late theology of St John, meditating his time with Christ and putting his own words into the mouth of Christ. Similarly, we reject the equally common attempt to make St John’s Gospel, and especially the prologue, the combined witness of a whole ‘Johannine Community’, who composed the prologue and, among other things, the farewell discourse of Christ (John 13:31–17:26) as the witness of the Spirit to their own minds and hearts, very late in the second century. There is not a shred of evidence, of course, that John did not write his Gospel—most probably, indeed, with editorial help.

The constant effort to play down the full, startling vision of John and to ignore its total, obvious unity of theme and detailed eyewitness account, is based, in the end, on the sheer refusal to believe that God did become man and did so reveal Himself to the disciple He had loved and trained in a unique manner to comprehend His divine personality.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that a cogent reason for the modern denial is, or at least was, the clear and even startling portrayal in Jn of the divine sonship of Christ. If it could be shown that the gospel was not in fact written by one of our Lord’s immediate followers, but by a Christian of later date, the force of the historical evidence would be weakened, thus making it easier to deny its claims.9

The  sentiment  remains  true  if  for  “Christian  of  later  date”,  we  substitute  “charismatic Johannine community”.

Repudiation of the De-Mythologists

We have to repudiate also the attempted distinction between a ‘Christ of faith’ and a ‘Christ of history’—there is no objective evidence whatever why we should not. For instance, it has been stated that where the infancy narratives of St Luke offend the modern Western mind as ‘mythological’, they may without qualm be quietly ignored. They may not. They mean what they say. They relate with objectivity the most objective work of God in human history. The divine actuality of God in the Incarnation is at stake, both in the virgin birth, and also in the shekinah, the actual numinous presence of God overshadowing Mary, so that the Holy One conceived shall be “the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Likewise, in the Jerome Biblical Commentary we read that the account of the Magi and the massacre of the boy infants is quite possibly a midrash—a type of creative legend—indulged in by Matthew to set off Jesus Christ as the king prophesied by Isaiah.10 Thus in this view it never really happened. This in spite of the historical dating of the death of Herod and the stormy context of the barely gained accession of Archelaus.

Do these scholars ever stop to weigh up the psychological state of mind they imply in the evangelists? Herod may have been a depraved beast, but it would be a monstrous crime to frame even Herod with a murderous outrage he did not commit. Do scholars like these know anything about the love of God as an experience or the objectivity and peace and truth with which it floods the soul? They obviously do not.

The Fathers of the Church and the great early critical historians of the age of the Fathers did know this experience. They treat in a measured, objective way of the critical problems of the New Testament, but never doubt the objectivity or historicity of the solemn Magisterium handed  down:  the  ‘Holy  Writ’,  which  is  the  written  witness  of the  actual teaching Church before 100 AD.

There is not a trace of midrash in the doctrinal writing of the early Church. If it had been there in the Church’s beginnings, it would inevitably have shown up in the doctrinal development of Christian theology. The early centuries abound in apocrypha and alleged apostolic writings, especially in the Gnostic communities. These and their ilk have no place in the teaching Tradition of the orthodox Church of the great Councils, and every historian of doctrine is aware of it.

It is therefore unacceptable for Rahner and others to suggest that midrash exists in the New Testament, and that perhaps at that time people would have been aware of it.11 If it had been there in the beginning, the Church would have developed as Gnostic and eclectic in type, and the structure and type of the great Councils of the first five centuries would have been impossible. The Tradition of Magisterium, which built upon, developed, and solemnly defined the things that are of Christ, always treats the New Testament as inspired, factual and objectively true. There is no other way our Christ can be divine and not a Nestorian creation: a man through whom God most fully worked, but in his radical person, a man. Rahner demonstrably has problems here as well.12

It is a marvel that serious theologians do not see the wonderful clue to the detail, vividness, and confidence of St John’s portrayal of the divinity of Christ in the words, confrontations, and prayers to the Father which John records for us. He was the ‘beloved disciple’ for just this one thing. He was not Jesus’ ‘little pet’ among the Twelve. He was prepared and deepened by sheer contemplative love to recognise before, and more completely than all others before the Resurrection, that “it is the Lord” (John 21:7).

The Essential Witness of Divine Magisterium

The solemn Magisterium of the Church is now under attack from disobedience as never before. We are at pains to assert that, just as the oracle of God leading on to a climax was the divine Magisterium of the Old Testament, so the Magisterium of Christ in His Church— solemn and infallible in Pope and Council—is the same one principle of God’s divinity among His people now on earth. It was the Truth which prompted and protected Holy Writ. And there is no other way in which the Truth can save that Writ from corruption under the critical mind and imperfection of fallen man than by a teaching Tradition through the ages, which is the final word of the Word Incarnate. The Church too, in her spiritual leaders, must have the courage to use that power. It is a power which carries a duty to men and to Christ who ever lives in His Church.

If there is no effective power to define and declare the living truth of the Living God, who was made man, and who witnesses in the New Testament, then after two thousand years those words have only a relative, history-conditioned beauty and truth. They do not bind us. It was all a long, long time ago, and people were very simple in those days. Why, they could not even distinguish disease from possession by devils! Jesus Christ did not know exactly who He was supposed to be, so the Christian claim for Him to be ‘divine’ has only a limited sense. We cannot trust John. He was a dear, beautiful old man running a loyal charismatic community. He rhapsodises about the Master he knew, loved and so sorely missed. It is all very beautiful, and true in a mystic sense (whatever that is, dear!). We can be edified, forget it, and push on with organising the third millennium.

The Bible alone, subject to such interpretation as the ‘Spirit’ may give to each and every reader, cannot save Christianity in the third millennium. This has to be said at the beginning of a decade of evangelisation. There would be no authority left with which to preach and proclaim.

What we require from the pages of the Gospels, and from the teaching and pastoral epistles which back them up and apply them, is first and foremost the sheer impact of Jesus Christ: the personality of God Himself and the authority of God Himself. There is only one ‘I’ in Jesus Christ: the ‘I’ who said “before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). The ‘act-centre’ which speaks in the New Testament is, as St John’s prologue so vividly declares, the Living Mind and Love through which all things were made, visible and invisible. We don’t want a Jesus who was just like us, but more holy under pain. It is a falsehood which has spoiled too much post-conciliar theology, that before the Church was ‘let free’ we emphasised too much the divinity of Christ and suppressed His humanity. Both accusations are false, and devotions like that to the Sacred Heart of Jesus give the retort to either error. The whole of the Messianic urge of the Old Testament culminates in the Episcopate of God the Messiah, and there is no power in the New Testament unless we accept St John in particular just as he is.13

Requirements of a New Evangelisation

Such has always been the life, witness, love and solemn declaration of the Roman and Catholic Church. In the modern world it is not the Bible alone which will save Christianity, but the word of magisterial, divine teaching which first wrote the Bible through apostle and evangelist, and then developed and defined it through the centuries. Scripture and exercised Magisterium is the sole hope of any evangelisation in a world which has long ago lost its certainties, but not the lusts which helped it forget them. We must have a new apologetics, not the courteous indifferentism of Weaving the Web and similar catechetical exercises, which neither teach the divinity of Christ to men nor form His divinity in the souls of men. Human beings are going to grow more godlike in all their power over matter and the engineering at the bases of the universe. It is pitiful to base any re-evangelisation on a scheme of Christianity which is founded upon human interpretation of a holy book which, in that tradition of theology, has already been abandoned by its theologians, and worse, by its bishops. If there is to be any meaningful ecumenism—and there has been little up to now— then this crisis over the divinity of Christ and the claims of Christ upon the human conscience must be faced.

At the heart of the matter is the need to answer the question of the meaning of man, and the control and direction of man’s fallible but free and powerful spiritual intellect. Matter is controlled within the universe; man is not. We must vindicate anew the reality of a soul in man which is not one with matter-energy, nor some sort of incoherent ‘self-transcendence’ which is intelligible neither in the order of science nor in the order of free spirit. The only sign we have to give to modern men and women that human life does have, as we would expect, a controlling and directing Spirit leading us towards our fulfilment and salvation, is the continuity in time and the continuity in principle of that one, unique, divine Magisterium which is the Bible and Tradition as one and the same revelation. Then we can show the Church’s life as one of development and definition, which again is in strict continuity with that one same principle. The divinity of God in Christ must exist on earth and be bravely exercised on earth—for teaching, not just for reading. It can be shown to be there through the ages. But the courage to re-proclaim it is not too evident just now, as good men and women agonise in doubt.

The teaching Tradition of solemn doctrine, for which the infallibility of God is claimed, is a double miracle. The miracle consists partly in the Magisterium’s very existence on earth: it is a corollary of the claim for Christ of a real teaching ministry until the end of time. And it consists partly in the fact that through the development and definition of doctrine it answers the needs of God’s people. Answers must be given; human nature demands them. They must be final, or human nature disregards them.

At this time of great crisis we must expect that God will give new support and a new prophetic vision in His Church—the Church continuous with the teaching oracles of God, the Church at the centre of centres. When this is done—and we think it is—there can then emerge a new vision and a new insight into the mind of God in Christ and the love, human and divine, in Christ. It will renew and command the spirit of man. There will follow from this insight a call to a deeper conformation of us all to the personality of Christ as Son of God, and Son and Prince of Man. As God and man, Jesus is the norm of human joy and fulfilment. We are made to the image of God. It is to God that we approximate. A new vision must make the vital point that man is not self-fulfilled nor morally autonomous. There is for us a control and direction, a law of life and being. It is centred in God. God has communed with us and is in communion with us. The growth and noble deployment of a truly human personality does not and cannot consist in technological self-mutilation or the abdication of human responsibility in our loving by ever more brilliant pills and chemicals. The true vision of human holiness and the self-dignity of human love, given to the young, would thrill many of them. We know it does. There is no guarantee or expectation that all, or even most, will accept that way. Did they when men crucified Jesus?

But to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13)

From Genesis to Apocalypse

This is the meaning and mission of the ‘Church’ from Genesis, from ‘Beginnings’, until now. Perhaps later someone might ponder the perspective in which this ‘inculturation’ into Christ should be done in sermons, schools, groups, the intimacy of the home, and the communing of Christian friendship. Then, beyond renewal in the Church, lies the going out to other faiths in sweetness and utter humility. This article has been concerned with the main wonder of God’s communing with men: the coherence and utter continuity of God’s control and direction in the  spoken  word  and  the  written  word  of  divine  Tradition  until  now.  Sweetly and wonderfully, in the original communion of innocence; through priests and prophets under the labour of sin; and now finally in the painful and most loving communion of redemption, God has walked and talked with us as friends in mutual communing in the cool of the evening air. This is Word, Church and Bible.

1  The linking of the Hebrew word eden (pleasure or delight) to the Septuagint rendering by paradise (an enclosed garden or park) gives us the sense of “Garden of Delight”. It would belong to a great lord, who would go out to commune with guests and courtiers after siesta, in “the cool of the evening air”. The Islamic concept of heaven, the two “Gardens of Delight”, is very similar.

2 Ezekiel 47:1-12. The vision begins in his time but reaches out to the Messianic flood of grace and healing.

3  See E. Holloway, Catholicism: A New Synthesis, Faith-Keyway, second edition, 1976, chapter 11, “The Evocation of the Word”, pp. 115-134.

4  The term Environer is used to mean God as man’s Personal and active environment, not a merely passive environment.

5 The Greek word for bishop, episkopos, is closely related to the verb to visit, episkeptomai. See chapter 8, “The

Son of Man: A Meditation upon Psalm 8”.

6 See, e.g., A. Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah and The Temple and its Ministry at the Time of Christ; both currently published by Hendrickson, USA.

7  TheGreek verb in John 1:14, esknMsen, usually translated as ‘dwelt’, literally means ‘pitched His tent (or tabernacle)’.

8 Pius XII, Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, 1950. DS 3903.

9 W. Leonard, “St John”, in A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, ed. B. Orchard et al., Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1953, p. 971.

10 J. L. McKenzie, “The Gospel according to Matthew”, in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. R. E. Brown et al., Geoffrey Chapman, 1969, 43:17,22.

11 K. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, (German original 1976) English translation Crossroad, 1978, p.

376: “In the New Testament stories it is not impossible in certain circumstances that we find forms of midrash and that they were originally intended to be such, so that according to scripture’s own meaning the ‘historical’ truth of a story can be relativized without any qualms.”

12 See, e.g., K. Rahner, Foundations, pp. 244-246, 280-300.

13  See chapter 8, “The Son of Man: A Meditation upon Psalm 8”; E. Holloway, Jesus: Did He know who He was?, Faith Pamphlets, 1978.

The Son of Man: A Meditation upon Psalm 8

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 15, no. 4, July/August 1983.

Son of Man. Christ Himself used and loved this title above all others to express His work as Messiah and Redeemer, and His relationship to our human kind, to our history and to our purpose upon earth. It is a title whose full and thrilling depths are only now, after two thousand years, coming to be appreciated in Western theology. It is said to be a somewhat mysterious title, Messianic indeed, occurring in Daniel and Ezekiel especially, but rather rare. It is difficult therefore to see why it should so dominate the self-proclamation of Christ. There is good reason to challenge this assumption of obscurity and mystery if we read more deeply into those prophecies and psalms which speak of the Christ as the King of Israel.

The tradition of the Eastern Fathers of the Christian Church shows a much livelier understanding of the richness of that title and the wealth of doctrine it contains. From the time of Irenaeus onwards the Christology of the East is dominated by the vision of Christ common to St John the Evangelist and to St Paul, especially in the epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians. Christ, the Eternal Word of the Father, holds the primacy over all things, over the invisible order and over the visible order, because in Him they were all decreed and created. In Him they all cohere together in unity like a great equation of life and being. Through Christ the Eternal Word they form one vast economy and communion of joy and praise: an economy coming from God to the angels, and then to man, and through man to the elements of matter, the world of the galaxies, and the universe around. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.” (John 1:1,3)

The Divinisation of the Spiritual Creature

In this vision of Christ we are divinised and made co-sharers in the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4) as humankind—creations of matter and spirit—through the decree of the Incarnation, in exactly the same way as the angels of God are divinised by the communion with their totally spiritual natures of the knowledge of God and the love of God. The totality of God’s gift of being, God’s own spiritual being, is poured upon the angels directly: Pure Spirit upon pure spirits. There is no matter in between to hinder the direct work of God, so to say. Thus the angel is beatified into the order of the full and perfect possession of God. In the West we speak of this as the elevation into the ‘supernatural order’. The East speaks more beautifully and perhaps more accurately of a ‘divinisation’ of the creature, brought about through its creation by, and its communion with, the Word of God, the Logos, through Whom all things are made.

In the Eastern theology of Christ, and later in the Scotist school of the West, this theology of the Eternal Word, upon whose likeness all things are made and through whom all things are made, takes on a very profound beauty. For the angels of God are not divinised and beatified in the Logos by a decree of redemption, which is consequent upon a Fall in their nature by some sort of original sin. There was sin even in the angels, but those who sinned passed beyond the possibility of redemption into an eternal condemnation. (Just why redemption is not possible in the angelic nature we cannot now ponder.) Those pure spirits who are the blessed and holy angels of God are beatified, and the totality of their nature is made one in perfect communion with God, by their being created into this order. And they were created into this order because they were known and willed in the Word of God: that Word through whom was made everything that was made.

The Greek Fathers of the Church see the divinisation of the angel as following the gift of perfect and total ‘sonship’ of God in the Eternal Word of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, pre-existent before time and before any Incarnation in our order of reality. But they also see man as having in Christ the same perfection of sonship, in spite of the fact that our nature is compounded of matter and spirit, whilst in God there is no material energy at all. If the thought of the Greek Fathers is carried through logically, it seems to mean that man’s kind is willed and decreed unto the beatific vision, unto the divinisation of both spirit and matter, in the Incarnation of the Son of God made the Son of Man; and this Incarnation must have been decreed before time and matter. This gives us a certain equality and parallelism with the angels of God, and makes sense of the creation of matter. For matter is not meaningless if it too can be brought near to the Divine through the flesh of the Word made Flesh.

This vision of Christ does seem to be the doctrine of the Gospel of St John (1:1-18), of St Paul in his epistles, especially to the Colossians (1:15-20) and the Ephesians (1:3-10), and of the letter to the Hebrews (1:1-4). The Greek Fathers are very fond of speaking of Christ as the Universal Man, in whom the whole creation is focussed, recapitulated, and centred in meaning. According to this vision of creation, the angels of God are created by the Father, through the most pure spirit of the Word, in the love of the Holy Spirit. It would mean that humankind is created by the Father, through the Word made Flesh, in the love of the same Holy Spirit. Thus the whole of our nature, the body as well as the soul, is ‘taken up’ into the divine or supernatural order of God’s being in the Word made Flesh. The flesh is no longer an irrelevance in a creation otherwise wholly spiritual in order.

In this vision of Christ, the Fall and the decree of the redemption of man are not the primary motive of the Incarnation of God. It does follow, however, that if we were originally willed and loved in the Christ, God Incarnate, then we are still willed, wanted, and redeemed in Him after the incursion of original sin. And it follows that this redemption must take place in the very bosom of the Divine Being, in those relationships of the Persons of the Holy Trinity to each other, which define the being of God as Unity and Trinity. It cannot be meditated in this article, but this view of the meaning of the Incarnation will throw further light upon the whole meaning of Christ’s sacrifice, and upon the nature of the satisfaction or full communion of love, which it restores for us and in us. There are exciting and beautiful depths here for theology to ponder and further develop.

The Living Image of God

When we say that God has made us to His own likeness, or in His own image, we can so easily miss a very profound point. We think perhaps of an image as light is reflected from an object, as an image is seen in a glass. Or we think of a likeness by comparison, the likeness of similarity. Thus we say to ourselves, “God has intellect and will, and He has made me with intellect and will … That is what it means to say that I am made to His image.” The Penny Catechism of my boyhood did not go any further when it said, “This likeness to God is chiefly in my soul.”1 In other words the body, matter, is something of a leftover, and if God had never intended to assume human kind apart from its fall into sin, you wonder why He made it sinless and called it into the order of divinisation at all! When in Rome years later one studied De Verbo Incarnato (Concerning the Word made Flesh) in Cardinal Billot in lovely Latin, neither His Eminence nor one’s professors added anything intrinsic to the Penny Catechism.

Yet being made to the likeness of God is much more than a reflection of being or a comparison based on the analogy of a spiritual nature with the nature of God. For the image of God and the likeness of God is a living Person. It is not an abstract relationship, that Image of God; it is the Eternal Word, the Logos, the Personal Content and Reflection of all that the Father has and is in God’s own reality of nature. This is what is meant by saying that we are made to the image of God: we are made to the likeness of Christ, and made through Christ and by Christ, who is that Image consubstantial with the Father through whom were made not only the angels, nor just ourselves, but everything that was made. How much more magnificently this is true if the material in man is made and decreed in the likeness of Christ as Son of Man as well as Son of God. Then Christ is King of all creation by right of being, by right of perfection in every sphere, and not simply by right of redemption from sin, which was an evil, a disfigurement of God’s good creation, and which God can indeed redeem but never intrinsically will.

If this vision of our creation and status is true, then, in the very decree of the supernatural order—the order of the divinisation of the creature in the knowledge and love which exists between the Persons of the Holy Trinity—the Father has crowned humankind with glory and honour in the Christ, our Prototype, the Son of Man. Through Christ God has made us indeed “just a little less than the angels” (Ps 8:5) in order of being and nature. In our solidarity with Christ, the origin of our stock, He has set upon our heads a crown of precious stones. We reign with Christ because we are membered into His Kingship, first by creation in original holiness, and now, in the order of redemption, by that holiness restored. We are a holy people because we prophesy or proclaim Him and sing His praise. We are a royal priesthood  because  we  are  membered  into  Him,  the  source  and  head  of  our  kind.  So membered we share through Him, as Son of God and Son of Man, one mediation, one communion of being, and one communion of reparation of the whole order of the material creation in Him and with Him. In the words of St Paul,

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” (Rom 8:22-23)

A Psalm Quoted by Christ Himself

The thought came to mind that this theme of man’s creation and glorification in Christ, by the gift of being created in the Son of God made Son of Man, might well be adumbrated more than is commonly taught in Psalm 8.

After all, this psalm was quoted by Christ against the sneering rejection of the chief priests and the scribes at the time of His entry into Jerusalem and cleansing of the Temple (Matt 21:16). This was indeed the solemn entry of Jesus as Messiah into His own city, the city of the Messianic expectation. Its very name means ‘vision of peace’, and it was founded to be fulfilled in the Prince of Peace. In the teaching of St John in his Gospel, its very Temple foretold and represented the body of the Christ: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19) All the solemn feasts celebrated there, even the details of the liturgy itself, prophesied by types the Person of the Christ and the work of the Christ for mankind. The entry into Jerusalem then, on Palm Sunday, was a momentous event; and in evaluating one’s Christology it remains a momentous event. The striking meaning of Christ’s reply to the authorities when they say “Teacher, rebuke your disciples” (Luke 19:39) has already been briefly  indicated  elsewhere:2   Christ  clearly  implies  that  His  entry  into  Jerusalem  is  the solemn liturgical fulfilment of the text. He also makes the psalm mean that God, in the Person of Christ, is so mindful of the son of man, that He Himself visits humankind as Son of Man, and that as this He was the Expectation of all the material creation. If the children acclaiming Him along the way had held their peace, then inanimate nature, nature which had never known sin, would recognise its God and its Saviour, the reason for its very creation, and “the very stones would cry out”. (Luke 19:40)

The Translation of the Psalm

One found, on a little study, that the text is startlingly clear and thrilling in its magnificence. And let us bear in mind that, whatever the details, the basic exegesis of this psalm is given to us by Christ Himself. This not only affirms its prophetic meaning; it also indirectly educates us in the manner of scriptural exegesis itself—an education which will throw into clear relief the miserable inadequacies of most modern scriptural exegesis. For most modern exegetes, even those who are or who want to be fully orthodox and loyal to the mind and Magisterium of the Church, are so blinkered by the secularist concepts behind modern biblical translation that they have emptied out the claims of prophecy to contain the meaning intended by God. That meaning of God, living in the Church’s revealed Tradition, gives us the translation to be understood, as well as the principal theological meaning.  God is, begging everybody’s pardon, in spite of being terribly old and out of date, and lacking a decent degree in scripture studies, still the main author of the text and the only determinant of its actual meaning and relevance.

The text one chose is the Vatican edition of the Greek Septuagint. This text, going back to 250 BC, must be judged of very respectable antiquity. While the text used in our modern Bibles seems to differ marginally from the Septuagint, it is the Septuagint which is the text of the Church’s liturgy and doctrinal development, from the beginning of her history to the latest official revisions of, say, the Roman Divine Office. It is also the text which appears most naturally to imply the interpretation Christ puts upon Psalm 8. So we can safely believe the Holy Spirit to have indicated that we will find the full, developmental meaning of this psalm in our textus receptus in the Roman edition of the Septuagint Greek.

The writer takes responsibility for the translation given, after comparing some eight

English translations, ancient and modern, and doing a little work of his own. It reads:

1.    Oh Yahweh, our King,

How wonderful is Your name in all the earth!

Above the high heavens is Your majesty exalted.

2.    Out of the mouths of babes, sucklings at the breast,

You have restored Your praise, and perfected it beyond measure

To confound Your enemies,

Thus You make an end of rebellion and baleful vengeance.

3.    When I look upon the heavens, the work of Your hands, The moon and the stars which You have set in order,

4.    What is man’s kind that You should be mindful of him,

The Son of Man that, Shepherd and King, You should visit him?

5.    For You have lessened Him only a little less than Your angels, You have crowned his head with glory and with honour:

6.    Lord, You have placed him over the works of Your hands.

You have made all things subject beneath his feet,

7.    All sheep and cattle, wild things that roam the fields,

8.    The birds of the air, the fishes of the sea,

All life that moves along the highroads of the sea.

9.    Oh Yahweh our King,

How wonderful is Your name in all the earth!

Verse 2: Salvation and Redemption in Christ

The first striking point one notices is that Yahweh, King of Israel, brings forth perfect praise against the faces of His enemies. This exactly parallels the dramatic confrontation of Jesus Christ and the chief priests, when He, Priest-King of the new order of Melchizedek, comes as the Heir of the Ages to lay claim to His own. It is Christ who points out this text as fulfilled in Himself in this confrontation. It also parallels His own exclamation: “I thank you Father … that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.” (Matt 11:25-26)

One could also add that the verb used in this phrase (kateptiso) means in fact both to repair what is crumbled and also to furnish completely or to the fullest measure. It does not seem exaggerated then to include both senses: to repair the glory of God repudiated by the power of sin in Christ’s enemies, and also to perfect it beyond measure. Thus the ideas of both redemption and salvation are found in the psalm.

One must make the point too that the word often translated as “destroy” (katalusai) means really to dissolve utterly. The sense can well be “in order to make an end of all enmity and the vengeance due”. While most commentators seem to make this mean “in order to wipe out hostility and utterly defeat baleful enemies seeking vengeance against the Christ”, it could also mean the working of a perfect redemption, wiping out (in the phrase of St Paul) “the handwriting which was against us” (cf. Col 2:14, Douay translation) and, in that perfection of salvation, making an end of the vengeance due from God upon all power of sin and hostility against His Kingship. At least one does not see why not from the text—and this is just what Christ as Redeemer has done for us.

Verse 4: The Visitation of God

Much more exciting is the phrase, “What is man’s kind that You should be mindful of him, the Son of Man that You should visit him?” In Greek the final verb is episkeptei; and while it does mean ‘to care for’, it means to care for as one having an office of care, and is often used in the sense of ‘to visit’, as a king visits or as a bishop makes a visitation. The full and surely stupendous significance of this verb, and one totally overlooked by all the modern translators and commentators, is that this word is the root of the noun episkopos (bishop), as any good lexicon announces quite casually. This type of caring is the whole heart of the ministry of the New Testament, and this name is given to its priest-overseers, the bishops of the New Testament.

It is in this sense, then, that Yahweh visits the kind or nature of man, visits humankind and, as Son of God and Son of Man, comes as Priest, Prophet and King to claim His own and to fulfil His own. If we want to know the godly, divine and prophetic sense of this line, we must observe that the psalm is addressed to Yahweh as Universal King. The New English Bible for instance translates the first line as, “Oh Lord, our Sovereign”. It does not make sense to understand this psalm simply as treating of the glory of mankind’s nature, set over the material creation by virtue of his intellect and spiritual nature, made in the general likeness of God. Even in the average modern translation—like the Jerusalem version for instance, which translates, “the son of man that You should care for him”—Yahweh is caring and looking after in some way, not simply granting a dignity of status in creation.

But beyond this blinkered anaemia in translating is the thrilling sense of episkeptei: that Yahweh comes as Priest, Prophet and King, in a word as the Messiah, and comes on a visitation of His People. This is an echo of St John’s Gospel, that “He came to His own home (eis ta idia), and His own people received Him not.” (John 1:11) And note that the earlier passage, in which the same Lord utterly destroys the enemy and the avenger, also has overtones of St John’s sequel, “But to all who received Him … He gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12), which is the setting aside of enmity between God and men, and the stilling of all vengeance towards men of goodwill. It also, of course, most perfectly foreshows the prophetic, spiritual and historical meaning of the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and the final convulsion of rejection by the authorities which precipitated Christ’s seizure, trial and crucifixion. One can have little doubt that this psalm also prefigures what we call ‘the end of the world’: a manifestation given to men, its rejection, and the final persecution and crucifixion of the Church, with what we name the ‘second coming’ as the final end of the history of man and of the Church. But that is quite another story, not now to be followed through.

One cannot avoid a sense of anger at the failure of the modern translators to see that the old and traditional sense of visit should have been retained in this psalm. Why, not only do the ordinary Greek lexicons give this sense, but one of them at least even indicates that it has a religious sense and meaning, as in the phrase ‘unvisited by dreams’ of a seer rejected by the gods! But what does that matter, when the very verb used in the Greek is the root of that sense of episcopate which is at the heart of the very Priesthood of Christ, as a new and messianic  priesthood  of  the  order  of  Melchizedek,  setting  aside  in  fulfilling  the  old priesthood of Aaron? This meaning of episcopate defines the very constitution of the Church in this the final and messianic age. It defines the fact and meaning of the Eucharist. It defines above all the salvation and redemption of the Christ, and the Magisterium He exercises over mankind. It defines also that Magisterium, ministerial but actual and divinely protected, of the episcopate of the Church and the episcopal office of that bishop who is, as it were, the ‘re-incarnation’ of Peter in the Church in every age.

There is no way one can translate scripture accurately without reference to the former and the latter history of the Church. The history of the Church is the history of Jesus Christ, the Lord of History. In setting His own finger as pointer to this psalm and its meaning, what a wealth of wonder and prophecy fulfilled in the past and in the future of His Church has He revealed! You cannot rightly understand the meaning of scripture unless you bear in mind always that the transcendent God is the principal author of the Holy Writ, and His meanings are evinced in her past, her present, and her developmental life among mankind.

Verse 5: The ‘Sacred Head’ of Christ

The sense of this psalm too, as it applies to the Christ decreed before time to become Incarnate, must mean that, in deciding to visit man’s stock as God and Shepherd and King, Yahweh has given man an equality of order with the angels. The angels are given the totality of God totally, into all their being, and this has supernaturalised or divinised them in their being and order. In the decree to visit man’s kind as Son of God and Son of Man, Yahweh has decreed our creation into the same supernatural order through the Word made Flesh. In this parallelism with the angels, God has “made us in creation only a little less in nature than the angels of God”. This line refers primarily to the Christ, not primarily to man as the rational creature. It means that in the Christ, as Son of God and Son of Man, we are crowned with glory and with honour, for we share in His Kingship and His Sonship of God. It is human nature and its status which is crowned in the visiting of flesh and blood in the Son of Man. No wonder Jesus Christ so loved and so used this title. It says all that He is and works and means to us until now. It says all that He is in His priests, His episkopoi, even until now, as well as in the membering into Himself of all His faithful people in a royal priesthood of mediation for all mankind.

Finally, may one add one last thought? Inasmuch as we may read first and primarily of Christ, and not of ourselves as men, “you have set upon His head a crown of precious stones”, we can and we ought to pay reverence to the Sacred Head of Christ as the seat of all wisdom, human and divine, natural and revealed. One thinks that the humble Anglo-Irish schoolteacher, Teresa Higginson, was right about this, and that her message has a relevance to the Church in this age, and to our own hopes for the reunion of faith between England and the Holy See of Rome. It is a thought and a devotion which parallels the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the seat of an infinite, compassionate and ever-redemptive love. If the Church comes to see the significance of this revelation of the Sacred Head of Christ, perhaps it will be better to focus it through the majesty, the power, the beauty and the integrity of the face of Jesus in the crowned head of Christ the King.

Perhaps also it will bring home to many the majesty of a vision of Christ in which this Sacred Head of Christ also enfleshes in human nature the Image of the Sonship of God, the Image of the Eternal Word, through whom all things were made and who holds the primacy in all creation. This title means that all fullness dwells in Christ most literally and quite apart from sin; it means that after sin, through His passion, death and Resurrection, all fullness of life restored dwells in Christ in surpassing measure. Literally, and without stint, in all things Christ holds the primacy of creation and of redemption and of all Magisterium in heaven and on earth, over the invisible order and over the visible order. (Cf. Col 1:15-20)

Oh the poverty and the wretchedness of the Bultmannite mind, even as scholarship! We who are the little ones of Christ, the unlearned rabble that knows not the law (cf. John 7:49), we give thanks to Him who is the source of our life, its status and its redemption. We give thanks to Him who has crowned us in Himself with glory and honour, and manifested to us the truths that He has hidden from the sophisticated and the arrogant (cf. Matt 11:25), with the joys of sonship and daughterhood in the beatitude they contain and in our communion with Him!

1 A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Question 4.

2 E. Holloway, Catholicism: A New Synthesis, Faith-Keyway, second edition 1976, p. 239.

Communion in God: The Identity of the Church

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 20, no. 2, March/April 1988.

Communion as a Quality of Loving

This month we welcome and introduce a new book on the thought and spiritual pilgrimage of John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Church a Communion, written by Fr James Tolhurst.1 It is a fascinating study of the younger Newman’s growth in understanding of the many related dimensions of human communion within the ethos of Christian wisdom and Christian love. Newman was one of those spirits both blest and cursed, who could tolerate no mediocrity. His piercing intellect, at once analytic but capable of brilliant synthesis, cut through every trace of unconscious humbug—in others, but most of all in himself. “England”, said a piece of graffiti scratched on a window of my student room at St Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst, “is the paradise of little minds and the purgatory of the great.” The attribution was not appended. Whether it is so or not, John Henry Newman was not one who could drift contentedly along with the crowd as folk drift up to the common to view a fair—perhaps Vanity Fair, the scene of life itself. He had more than mind, he was gifted with a sensitive and loving disposition. His first great formative experience of Christian communion was a close and loving family circle. Men like Newman are destined to be cynics or saints. For Newman the compass needle  of  the  Church’s  judgment  is  swinging  towards  the  greater  and  much  rarer achievement.

At Oxford he developed in the experience of Christian friendship as more than a bond of nature. It became for him the formative loving of shared discipleship in Christ, as both friendship received and friendship given. It is not surprising that after the usual agonising, which marked all the big decisions of his life, he offered himself for Holy Order. His Parochial and Plain Sermons2 need to be read to gauge the intense personality of the man. He was no mere academic, being too warm and too greatly human to stay beached on that strand. It has been many times remarked that Newman did not preach so much as deeply and earnestly converse in meditation to himself and with his people. It seems to have been at Littlemore, while vicar of St Mary’s, that Newman came to a mature and profound appreciation of human nature.

At the same time he also came to appreciate the need for a deeper concept of the Church  as  a  communion  than  he  had  received  in  the  company  of  deep  and  earnest companions in his Evangelical days. Newman became aware, with a certain alarm, of the conscious and unconscious pride of the human mind, and the wilfulness of the fallen will. His letters (and The Church a Communion is a study of development in Newman himself, based largely  on  his  letters)  show  us  that  even  in  his  Oxford  days  Newman  recognised  the arrogance of the gifted mind, and the power of secularism already threatening the Church of England from the Liberal, rationalistic movement at the universities. In the parish he found the same corrosive pride of human opinion set against the word of the Word of God, and in all sorts of people, especially those whom he could recognise as manifestly less spiritually perfect.

Tensions of Orthopraxis and Orthodoxy

It was in his priestly ministry that he began with some disquiet to question the priority of orthopraxis over orthodoxy—right doing and living over right faith and doctrine—which the Evangelical  mind  unconsciously  presumed.  He  found  himself  emphasising  the  divine authority of Christ, to inculcate and to defend the fullness of the Christian inheritance, the Christian Tradition. He began to realise that Church order and Church authority, especially episcopal authority, are more than a useful external scaffolding which supports the building up of the invisible Kingdom, the communion of holy souls, the chosen known only to God. Newman began to see that the emphasis upon orthopraxis or good will, and the minimising of orthodoxy or the rule of faith, was in fact the philosophy of the priority of the will over the intellect. Without the corrective of an authority and an intellect superior to the will of man, such a path would slowly but surely disintegrate the unity and the fullness of Christian truth.

Today we are at the very end of that road of personal opinion and personal interpretation of the Mind of God. It has passed beyond the reliance upon one’s own opinion of the meaning and worth of the Bible, whether as a book or as a Tradition. The very being and divinity of Christ is now subject to a Christian’s own evaluation of who He was, what He was,  and  what  the  ‘divine’  itself  consists  in.  Today,  in  all  Christian  communions,  the emphasis in pastoral life and in the liturgy is upon love, courage, and service; very rarely upon truth as the Light of God. This was not the emphasis of Jesus Christ. His emphasis was the Word: the Personal term of the divine Self-Knowledge, who was made flesh and was the light of the world (John 9:5). Before Pilate too, our Lord’s answer to, “So you are a king?” was, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” (John 18:37) It is not only in the non-Catholic churches that this emphasis upon the truth has been deliberately laid aside. In the pastoral life of the Catholic Church too, there is a weary emphasis upon ‘love’ without any clear identification of the nature and characteristics of Christian loving. It is the Church ‘horizontal’ without any corrective of the Church ‘vertical’. A desert is a horizontal landscape, and so is the soul of man without the clear delineation of the truths which alone give form, vigour and beauty to Christian love.

Structure and Communion in the Church

Newman was far ahead of his day in his thinking as well as far above his milieu in the quality of his loving. He came to see and to seek always more earnestly the divine, higher and transcendent truth, which ennobles the Christian intellect and gives truth and beauty to Christian love.  Such an authority must go beyond the individual.  And so the mind of Newman turned to the role of the churches among themselves as a communion of teaching, love, and certain formation of the soul. Almost at once he saw the role of the bishop as the centre of unity, life, witness, truth, and love.

By virtue of his office, the bishop must be the centre and guarantor of the truth of Christ. But he must be more than that. Newman had never seen office in the Church as similar to office in the state or in the military forces. From his very temperament he had learned that Christian care is also a formation in the true and the good. Christian care is to another spirit what the sun is to the earth: a principle of both light and warmth, of truth and love. Both must be present together. Warmth without light generates growth without form and without fruit. Light that is cold illuminates a landscape, but no seed springs. The bishop must be in a communion of teaching and loving with his people, which holds the community of the diocese together. The authority of a parent is derived from his or her position as source and origin of life. A father teaches and loves, but authority is part of the very fruitfulness of both teaching and loving. A priest teaches and loves, but without an authority derived from his ministry of Order there is no final, formative power. A bishop teaches and loves, rules and unites, but without an even greater authority of source as father in the spirit, he is no different from any officer of the state or in commercial management.

Newman was well aware that it was the life of Christ that lived within the Christian Community, in every aspect from the cradle to the summit of the Church. The life and love of Christ moves upon us in mother and father, in priest unto people, in bishop unto his priests and his flock, and in bishop unto bishop in the communion of the Church, “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic”. The centre of this relationship must be in the life and love of Jesus Christ. The authority of Jesus Christ must also reside within this communion of Christian love, this koinonia of the human family around the Person of God Incarnate. If it were not so, Jesus and His Church would have less power to persuade, to command, and to form the mind and heart than a human father has. If the corrosive wilfulness of human opinion is not to destroy the very nature of Christ’s revelation and Christ’s communion with men, then the certainty of Christ’s authority must be as native to the Church as it is to the office of father and mother in the Christian home.

So Newman was now engaged—quite feverishly, as his letters and comments show— in reading the Fathers of the Church. He had seen for himself, almost as if by personal revelation, what it must take in a bishop to hold the wayward heads and hearts of a flock. As he read the Fathers, all that he consciously and unconsciously sought he found in abundance. He found more than authority in the word; he found also the source of that authority in the life of the Christian communion around the liturgies of Baptism and the Eucharist. He found the insistence on the word of the bishop, and on the word of the bishops before him, deriving from apostolic continuity with the apostles themselves, and thus from continuity with Christ, the enfleshing of God in Person. He had found the meaning of sacred Tradition as one with the Book, but the Mother of the Book. As he read the beautiful musings of the Fathers, he discovered the sacraments as acts upon men of the Body of Christ: not just symbols or effective signs, but truly acts of God Incarnate.

Mystery and Magisterium

As he says openly in his letters, Newman had found the meaning of mystery as deep and reverent communion with the Person of Jesus Christ: communion in wisdom and faith, communion in love and obedience, communion in repentance and healing. For mystery means more than the unfathomable. Mystery is the knowing and loving upon a mother’s breast: the knowing and the loving of a child-mind, which does not comprehend everything, but grows in comprehension and in fullness of joy as it grows in wisdom, age and grace. The Psalmist, inspired by the Holy Spirit, had understood the essence of this long before John Henry Newman, or any great soul before him, had struggled to such a recognition of mystery as the communion with God perceived in love:

O Lord, my heart is not proud nor haughty my eyes.

I have not gone after things too great nor marvels beyond me.

Truly I have set my soul in silence and in peace.

As a child has rest in its mother’s arms, even so my soul.

O Israel, hope in the Lord

both now and for ever. (Ps 131)

So the bond of Christian communion is a living link, building up much as the molecules do in the human body, from organ to organ and function to function, but ever integrated, always aspects of one truly bodily and living unity. There are no organic breaks. There is nothing secondary or incidental in the union of this common life.

Newman perceived it, and comments on it in the writings of the Fathers concerning the communion of the bishop with the people, and the communion of all, through the bishop, with the Living Lord. Mystery, as Newman now realised, is reflected also in Magisterium. If the Church is a communion of the life and feeding of Christ, if “Feed on Him in your hearts”3 meant anything as an exhortation before the Holy Communion of the Eucharist, then it must be the divine Mind and the divine Good that ruled the mind and opinions of man. Newman had discovered the infallibility of the Church as teacher of the meanings of Christ. He found it first in the Fathers, and then, as he admits, from the unique authority and prestige of Rome. It certainly was not the infallibility of the Pope which drew Newman into the Catholic and Roman Church: it was the infallibility of the Church as the truly living and thinking body of Christ. Of this body the Holy Spirit is the soul and the guide through the apostolic office. Newman has some beautiful passages in meditation upon this perception.

Newman on the Pride of Life

Newman’s power of synthesis, that is, his ability to project forward the consequences of thoughts and acts, allowed him to project forward also the consequences of disintegration, the human breakdown of the unity of the divine. He had a profound grasp of the consequences of original sin in man as a lesion of nature. Thus he placed the heart of concupiscence where it should be, in the pride of life (1 John 2:16): above all in the wilfulness of arrogant opinion, of “I’ll think and do as I like, as my own conscience tells me.” This becomes that which is anti- Christ (cf. l John 2:18). There is a passage in the Difficulties of Anglicans, which shows his devastating discernment as a thinker and as a spiritual director. It can be given here only in a shortened form; for its full impact it must be read in the original.

The very moment the Church ceases to speak, at the very point at which she, that is, God who speaks by her, circumscribes her range of teaching, there private judgment of necessity starts up; there is nothing to hinder it. The intellect of man is active and independent: … he feels no deference for another’s opinion, except in proportion as he thinks that that other is more likely than he to be right; and he never absolutely sacrifices his own opinion, except when he is sure that the other knows for certain. He is sure that God knows; therefore, if he is a Catholic, he sacrifices his opinion to the Word of God, speaking through His Church. … But again, human nature likes, not only its own opinion, but its own way, and will have it whenever it can, except when hindered by physical or moral restraint. So far forth, then, as the Church does not compel her children to do one and the same thing …, they will do different things: and still more so, when she actually allows or commissions them to act for themselves … and recognises them as centres of combination, under  her  authority,  and  within  her  pale.  …  The  natural tendency  of  the children of the Church, as men, is to resist her authority. Each mind naturally is self-willed, self-dependent, self-satisfied; and except so far as grace has subdued it, its first impulse is to rebel. … In matters of conduct, of ritual, of discipline, of politics, of social life, in the ten thousand questions which the Church has not formally answered, even though she may have intimated her judgment, there is a constant rising of the human mind against the authority of the Church, … and that in proportion as each individual is removed from perfection.4

A Divine Church an Infallible Church

It is obviously untrue that Newman made his submission to the Church of Rome because he was a tortured and insecure soul looking for spiritual sanctuary. He was too great in intellect and in spiritual power for that. As he prayed in communion with God, he could not allow the breath of uncertainty and the corrosion of imperfect human pride to lessen the lustre of Christ, whom God revealed to be followed as “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Newman expressed doubts about the expediency of the definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council. He did accept it, but was always more interested in the infallibility of the Church as the word of The Word, addressed to the People of God over the ages. When the definition of the Petrine power did come, it was Newman’s concept of papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction which was defined. The Vicar of Christ is not endowed with some personal charism of oracular infallibility, but “with that infallibility which the divine  Redeemer  willed  to  be  inbuilt  (instructam)  into  His  Church  in  the  definition  of doctrine on faith or morals to be held by the universal Church: hence such definitions of the Roman Pontiff of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, are irreformable.”5

The power of the Pope to define ex cathedra is one power with the solemn Magisterium of the Church as it is exercised through the bishops throughout the world. It must be so, for the source and guarantor is the one Word Incarnate, speaking in the Holy Spirit.

Without Infallibility Christianity crumbles

In his book Oxford Apostles Geoffrey Faber states, “For Newman the struggle between intellect and feeling for priority of place necessitated submission to a paramount arbitrator, such as he could discover only in the Roman system”.6 One may not entirely agree, but he is close to an important truth. Newman had diagnosed the source principle behind the modern faltering of the Church. As usual, Newman could see where the road would end before others had divined what was around the first corner. He saw that the denial of an inerrant guide and voice in the Church on earth, potent to overrule the coarseness and disobedience native to the mind of fallen man, meant the end of any truly divine gospel, especially in modern cultural conditions. If, as has been stated recently in the General Synod of the Church of England, there is no such thing on earth as infallibility, then the witness of the Church will never exceed the limits of toleration and acceptance of the average, decent, comfortable folk in the pews. In doctrine and in morals Newman is vindicated as a prophet to our times. The end of this road is a long way from the imperatives of a divine Saviour, a long way too from the life and writings of the original Christian Church. Put the mind of man at the helm of Christ’s revelation, a mind powered by a wayward will, and time can only crumble doctrine, morals, and even the divinity of Christ. This is the sickness unto death of the Anglican Communion as it sinks into the Humanism of ‘decent people’ in the closing years of this millennium. The disease is infectious. In medical terms the Church of Rome would be unstable and rather poorly. Newman’s message brooks the divide for both of us.

Communion: the Trinitarian Image

If, or more likely when, John Henry Newman is canonised, one presumes he will be made further illustrious by the title of Doctor of the Church. In terms of influence, relevance, and a lasting and increasing readability, this writer would dare to say that he is the greatest pastoral theologian since St Augustine.

One would like to offer a seminal thought—seminal because not worked out but merely glimpsed. It is a thought prompted admittedly by the reading of Newman. No school of thought can rightly teach the primacy of the intellect over the will, or of the will over the intellect. Perhaps in philosophy and theology we speak too much of the faculties of the spiritual soul, the intellect and the will, as if these acted in their own right upon the basis of an inert nature which merely supported them in their activities. Surely it is our whole self, our being as act, in the traditional language of the schools, which has entity and is realised as living being through the intellect and through the will.

If we may apply the analogy of the Blessed Trinity here—and we must not underrate the meaning of being “made to the image of God” (cf. Gen 1:26-27)—then there is an important lesson to be learned by us as individuals and by the Church as a communion. For the being of God is not ‘inert essence’, as it is sometimes unconsciously treated. In the being of God, the Son, who is the Living Truth and content of the Father known in the nature of God, necessarily proceeds first, according to knowledge or intellection. The Holy Spirit proceeds  from  the  Father  and  the  Son  according  to  will  or  love,  as  the  spiratio  or outbreathing of love and fulfilment between the knowing Father and the known Son. We will not attempt to analyse this in any depth in this short essay.

Yet a consequence follows that is not so hard to grasp. It is a desperate mistake to attempt to bring in the Kingdom of God, for instance the reunion of Christians at this time, by deliberate  or  unconscious  minimising  of  content  or  clear  integrity  in  the  truth.  The Christian’s growth in fulfilment in communion with God will and must imitate the nature of God’s own being. It must imitate the proceeding of the Son and the Holy Spirit within that being of God, and the manner in which the Persons of the Godhead relate unto each other. There can be no joy in perfect and holy love unless it proceeds within the fullness of the Father known in the Word who is the only-begotten Son. The Holy Spirit of God’s love cannot dwell in us individually except in that perfection of knowledge of the truth, by which the Person of the Holy Spirit is breathed out as Fulfilment in the being of God. An imperfect truth begets an imperfect love in us. If from pride we refuse to enlarge our spirits with the authority of the perfect truth, then we can never, never attain to a perfect love. On the moral plane it may make our lives seem easier, but we starve ourselves of the experience of perfect joy in the fullness of the Spirit, in perfect communion of love with God.

Koinonia: the Identity of the Church

We can never sell the truth short in order to safeguard love or to promote love. This will lead to anaemia of the soul. If our truth becomes simply an intellectual creed, a philosophy of revelation, without the communion of love as joy, love as comradeship, love as an evangelisation, then we will again have impoverished not simply the word, but the Living Word who was enfleshed among us. Christ said not only, “As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you”, but also, “No longer do I call you servants … but I have called you friends.” (John 15:9,15) As within the living being of God it is not possible for the Holy Spirit to proceed antecedently to the procession of the Eternal Word from the Father, so within our own souls the perfection of the communion of love proceeds only from the comprehension of the perfect divine truth. This is the law of communion with God for the individual man and woman, through all the identities of Christian communion—the family, the diocese, friendship, love—to the constitution of that koinonia, or communion, which is the Church herself. It is the general law and a necessity of all Christian communion as membership of Christ.

The  merit  of  John  Henry  Newman,  and  his  service  to  the  Church,  lies  in  his perception of this total ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ upon earth, and the warmth and sincerity with which he brings it home to us. It is the merit of Fr Tolhurst’s work that with scholarship and documentation he conducts us through this personal development within Newman’s soul: the recognition of the living and universal or catholic dimensions of the communion of God with men. We know where it led Newman, albeit with sadness and a lasting pain for what he was losing, even with the peace in what he was finding.

The law of this order of communion is the identity of the Church. The life she bestows, and the communion of God with men that she nourishes, must impart the order and relationship which define the Life of the Holy Trinity. The Father, the Source and Origin, is contemplated in the Eternal Truth, the only-begotten of His Being. The Holy Spirit, the Love and Fulfilment of the Father and the Son, proceeds between Them according to will and good. In the constitution of the Church, perfect communion in God Incarnate means infallible and objective certainty in the Word revealed, perfect and total good in the truth, the love without derogation which is communion in the Spirit. In us, who are membered into the living Christ, it requires and offers communion in perfect truth, and in perfect love formed on such truth.

Application to Ecumenism

This recognition makes sense of the requirement that there must be full communion with the Church, in unity of faith and charity, before a baptised person may be admitted to the Holy Communion of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is more than a symbol, more than an effective sign.  It  is  the  personal  presence  in  sacrifice  and  sacrament  of  Him  who  is  the  Full Communion of all, individual and ecclesial, given back to the Father as an “everlasting gift”7 in the reconciling love who is the Holy Spirit. God is perfect and His works are perfect. The Church is perfect in the manner in which she is membered to Him.

Along such perspectives, humbly offered and humbly sought, the Church of Rome and the Church of England could seek and find reconciliation. Yet there would have to be metanoia, conversion of mind and heart. The sole, transcendent Truth must be the form of the Love which is ecclesial communion. This is neither the seeking nor the expectation of our present ecumenical initiatives.

There does not exist on earth any man-made via media. Newman could not find it; neither can we. Reunion is not a political merger, not a consensus. God does not make deals. This is relevant when the leading figures in the Catholic Church in England and Wales express an ever closer commitment to unity in pastoral integration, which ignores the increasing doctrinal and moral fragmentation of the Anglican Communion. The last Anglican Synod finally abandoned the concept of mortal sin and of divine commandment in sexual matters, agreeing by human consensus to proclaim instead an “ideal” to which all should aim, and failing to do so, should feel “repentance”. It is not historic Christianity, as a particularly funny but very cruel edition of Spitting Image on the television at once underlined. The tragic affair of Dr Bennett8 was not truly a personal attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury, as his text plainly shows, but the agony of a man close to the school of theology which Newman begot within the Anglican Communion, who recognised the final loss of the divinity of Christ within her proclamation.

Does the Swanwick declaration9  therefore make any coherent sense? Is the Roman Catholic being asked, as the Anglican is, to seek unity or truth, rather than unity through truth? For this writer the matter was encapsulated by the comment of an ordinary, devout parishioner, who said of Swanwick recently, “I don’t understand it. If they want reunion this way, we have to give up lots of things we have always taught. We have to make concessions all round. They are not moving our way. They are giving in more and more all the time.” This perception is the plain truth.

The types of initiative being more and more urged upon us are such as can only lessen the Catholic identity and spiritual firmness of our own people. One would recommend to our leaders, with respect, a passage from the Vulgate version of the book of Ecclesiasticus:

Son, when thou comest to the service of God, stand in justice and in fear; and prepare thy soul for temptation. Humble thy heart, and endure: incline thy ear, and receive the words of understanding: and make not haste in the time of clouds. (Sir 2:1-2; Douay translation)

As a youth one was caught halfway across the striding edge of Helvellyn when swirling cloud and a wind squall moved in. One is therefore rather fond of this reading, and thinks to know what the sacred writer had in mind. If they press on regardless of realities, some shepherds may lose the life of faith, but certainly far more of the sheep behind them will.

The true Road forward

Cardinal Newman’s personal pilgrimage of grace marks the road across the striding edge for all of us. Chesterton’s Chariot of the Church makes the same point in Orthodoxy:10 the path is narrow, the route direct, not a matter of consensus. Lenten and other ecumenical meditations should return to the consequences of the divinity of Christ as the Lord of human history. There can be no path to reunion by the consensus of human minds who do not recognise any eternal, objective truths of faith and moral life on earth.

As the Christian Church approaches the third millennium, it should be obvious that the Church and mankind need a further vision and coherent understanding of the meaning of Christ, God Incarnate, under the Unity-Law within which He framed the whole of creation. This is the vision of God made Incarnate to be the everlasting and infallible light of the world for the intellect of man, the norm of holy love, and the perfect happiness for the human will. Newman began the work; he did not finish it. The potential and vision by which to finish it is within our power, if we have the humility to accept it. But it must be God’s intervention and revelation, not man’s cobbled job. We must begin anew at the point where John Henry Newman left off: the further development within the Church of what the processions of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, must mean for the individual, and for all Christians as the communion of God’s People.

1  J. Tolhurst, The Church a Communion, Fowler Wright Books, 1988, with preface by Archbishop Maurice Couve de Murville.

2 J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols, 1834–1843.

3 Cf. Book of Common Prayer, 1662, at the administration of Holy Communion.

4 J. H. Newman, Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, vol. 1, 1850, Lecture 10, “Differences among Catholics no Prejudice to the Unity of the Church”. Emphasis Holloway’s.

5 Vatican I, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus on the Church of Christ, chapter 4. DS 3074.

6 G. Faber, Oxford Apostles: a Character Study of the Oxford Movement, Faber & Faber, second edition 1974, chapter 6, p. 403.

7 Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer III.

8  The Rev Dr Gary Bennett, an Oxford don and church historian, had been asked to write an anonymous Foreword to Crockford’s (1988 edition), the prestigious annual Anglican Directory of Clergy. This was critical of the Anglican Church in general but in particular of the policies of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Bennett’s name as author was leaked to the media. There followed a national debate about the whole affair. The result was that Dr Bennett committed suicide.

9 Churches Together in England, 4 Sept 1987.

10 End of chapter 6.

The Parish: The People of God

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 10, no. 3, May/June 1978.

The people of God have an identity. In the flesh they are one stock with the Word made flesh, in their spirits they are kindred to the divine Spirit of the eternal Word. This is the family likeness to which they are made. In this way the Son of God is made fully the Son of Man. Therefore the first unit ‘on the ground’ in the life of the Church is the believing community. It is the whole family of all ages, types and cultures that is gathered around the man who has the very power to bring into being the body and blood of the Lord. The parish comes first, with all deference to A Time for Building, The Church 2,0001  and similar position papers which bear signs of not having been thoroughly thought out. The real ‘basic community’ must always be committed to the man or team that offers in the family group the sacrifice of the eternal covenant and proffers the Bread of Life.

There is one common altar on which the everlasting sacrifice is offered, and through it, and through Him, we are taken up to the Father, with the Son, in the love of the Holy Spirit. That altar of the New Passover also binds God and men forever in the New Covenant.

It is worth remarking that in the sacrament of marriage the groom bears the likeness and ministry of Christ to his bride, and she bears the likeness and ministry of the Church to her spouse. The covenant of their union in one flesh, which binds “till death do us part”, is directly related to the covenant by which Christ creates us, redeems us, and gives us life in abundance. The vocation of Christian spouses is a direct sharing with Christ in that creative and redemptive work. It is a vocation and a covenant gathered up into His covenant at Mass. It is a pity that we hardly ever preach it that way and show Christian marriage not only as a vocation but also as an office in the Church.

The House where Your Glory abides

In the Old Testament the presence of God was manifested by the shekinah, the luminous ‘glory’ in which God dwelt, and which on occasion descended upon the Temple and covered the Holy of Holies (e.g. 2 Chron 7:1). So I love churches where the heart and the eye are drawn straight to the end of the nave—or to the central focus in a round church—and find the tabernacle. For this is the real seat of the shekinah, “the place where Your glory abides” (Ps 25:8). There the Lord of the shekinah dwells “in His physical ‘reality’”.2 The tabernacle may have to be positioned elsewhere in basilicas or great cathedrals where men drift and roam at all times and great ceremonies take place often in the day at the central focus of the church. But in ordinary towns and villages it is otherwise. The Lord should not be banished to a hole in the wall. If the Eucharist reserved is really “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28) one does not have to labour the reason why!

“He is given for my food, and not for my adoration.” Insofar as that is true at all, it was true also in Palestine two thousand years ago: “given for the life and nourishment of the world”. But still He is given for adoration, because “before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). When a babe sucks the breast, is it forbidden to look up to its mother’s face and smile with love also? So lovely is the church where the heart and eye go straight to the tabernacle, which is the true house of God. Lovely too is the church whose walls and benches are rather like the Temple and its courts, which shrouded the Holy of Holies. It is worth remembering too that the tabernacle is house of God and house of gold second in time to Mary, who first was the house of God and the house of gold without stain of dross.

Over the tabernacle, the ‘House of Bread’ (and Bethlehem means ‘house of bread’), I like to see a great cross, throwing its shadow over the tabernacle and the altar of sacrifice. If, as in my own church, the cross is part of a beautiful window of coloured glass, then it is even more effective. Either way, in light or in shade, the shadow of the cross over the altar and tabernacle says for ever, “Do this in memory of Me”.

It is lovely when a school is hard by, and children bustle noisily in at lunch break, and flop with a hurried sign of the cross before the tabernacle. Heart and eye know where to go. There is no hunting for the Lord and no forgetting Him. This is the house of God. Here literally the Glory dwells.

Surely a church should be warm and human, welcoming with a human beauty, not stark like a museum. It should certainly not be like the town hall, where births, marriages and deaths are registered, and where meetings take place for “matters of human concern”, as A Time for Building so hideously envisages with little thought for the abiding presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. “My house shall be called a house of prayer.” (Matt 21:13) So, while art must always be in good taste, surely the main ornamentation should not be surrealist or abstract.

Again, there should be statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph; and there should be some colour too, in good taste. There is dignity and beauty in the natural human face: in little children, in generous youth, in mothers and fathers, and in serene old age when the face shines “like the shining lamp on the holy lampstand” (Sir 26:17). When children look up to the features of Jesus, Mary, Joseph or another of the saints, they should recognise a human beauty and dignity. In the empty barns which many modern churches are, they sometimes see emaciated features, distorted as if by electrical shock treatment—if they see anything at all. There may be a place and a proper meaning for such images elsewhere, but not in the common house of God.

For the church building of the local Catholic Christian community is also a room in the houses of every person in the parish, married or single, rich or poor. Let it then be welcoming, as is home. Again, because it is a room in the home of every family in the parish, and the room moreover where Christ dwells among His people, the parish church must be the centre of the liturgical, spiritual and prayer life of the people of God. It cannot be God’s town hall. This is the distinction between Catholicism and Humanism, by which Catholicism is quite unconsciously being replaced.

The Teaching in the Temple

Christ taught the people in the Temple. And he who has power over the body and blood of the Lord teaches the people in the likeness of Christ. He is president not because he is chairman of the parish council but because he bears in his person the eternal character of Christ through that ontological power over the body of the Lord. The priest is not a guru nor an instructor in ‘morality without religion’. He is not there to impart knowledge, but to feed: “Feed my lambs … feed my sheep.” (John 21:15,17) There is a world of difference between a lecturer and a priest. The priest teaches as a disciple who knows his Master in a living love. His every word and work is to bring men and women to know and love Jesus the Lord, and to bring them, through the inner touch of that same Lord, to grow up to fulfilment and joy.

Whatever the incidentals of our path, for most of us the desire to be a priest has been rooted in a personal awareness of God in love and joy, and a desire to share the same love and joy with others. If mothers and fathers rejoice to see their children growing to maturity sound in wind and limb, so a priest rejoices to see the nobility of the love of God deepening from childhood to adolescence in “the men whom You gave Me” (John 17:6). This is the joy and the thrill of the priestly life, and there is none other like it. “He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” (Matt 19:12)

Upon the priesthood descends something of the shekinah, the glory of the Lord. This is because of Christ’s work and love for His own, not because of our personal worth, nor merely for our personal consolation. How otherwise can it be that the priest in the parish finds fresh growth in his work at an age when other men and women are retiring, drawing in their horns so to speak, and resigning themselves to declining years which will be alas somewhat more lonely and less full? Because even in the sixth decade God gives one another bevy of golden boys and girls who love and accept and grow towards God in a special way through the ministry, word, authority and personal love of the priest. Amazing grace! that “your youth shall be renewed like an eagle’s” (cf. Ps 102:5). The man of God is never alone any more than Christ was alone, “for the Father is with Me” (John 16:32). So also my Master is always with me, and where the Master is, there is a divine power and attraction. The lonely priest, one is forced to say, is a man who has lost his way.

So in teaching the people we try, to the limits of a limited ability, to teach as Christ did. There is Jesus on the hillside, telling a simple, powerful parable. There is Jesus communicating the deeper, secret wisdom, giving direct knowledge of “the secrets of the kingdom of God” (Luke 8:10): this is the Jesus recorded by St John the evangelist. There is the Jesus of St Paul too, a Jesus whom even now some find hard to understand: the Jesus who is Lord of the universe, whose coming was predestined before all ages, and through whose coming the whole universe and all its organic parts hold together (Col 1:12-18). The Jesus revealed to us in the Bible is not only the simple and easy Jesus of the synoptic Gospels: the entire majesty belongs to Him; John and Paul also belong to the full vision of revelation.

In every age of the Church the face of Jesus, literally divine, must shine out to His people and must carry conviction. In this age there must be an authentic development that will reveal the relevant face of Jesus: Jesus the creator of science, wisdom and power. Youth at school and college must see the sweep of God’s work in the Old and New Covenants as woven into the wisdom embodied in the very structure of creation: that wisdom which man has inherited in our day, for good or for fearful destruction. The divine and human face of Jesus must deepen with the centuries, His message becoming ever more meaningful and relevant as men inherit His power. It is much the same as when a child grows up knowing and loving a deep and holy human genius: love and appreciation grow with the years and with the ability to understand. It is not that Christ changes, but that men grow in understanding. “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” (John 16:12)

Such a teaching must be certain, firm, full and divine. It must be a total Catholic Christianity, not a vague, generic ‘Christian’ faith that avoids the specifically Catholic and so erodes the divinity of Christ and the very attraction of Christ. As priests and religious, parents and teachers, we cannot bring men and women to know God and to love Him unless our own personalities radiate a warm, vibrant confidence in Jesus known, possessed and fully loved. This requires a full, total conviction of all that Christ’s divinity means throughout human history. And we cannot pass it on unless we experience the Master in faith, hope and love. If we do not experience, we are lecturers and not disciples.

The Liturgy of the People of God

The liturgy of the Mass can be more beautiful because the priest now faces the people. Whatever some people may have secretly intended, the Mass facing the people need not desacralise the liturgy of the Eucharist. Facing the people places more emphasis on the character of the priest acting in the Person of Jesus at the Last Supper, and on the manner in which he is among the brethren as Christ was among the Twelve. It can deepen the identification of the priestly character with that of Christ, because it better emphasises how “He always loved those who were His own in the world. When the time came for Him to be glorified by You, His heavenly Father, He showed the depth of His love. While they were at supper, He took bread, said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to His disciples.”3  In humble love and in thanksgiving for his call let the priest sink his own personality into the personality of Him who sustains him and makes him ‘meaningful and relevant’ among men! That way he will never distract the people by the intrusion of his own foibles and imperfections upon their reverent participation in the Holy Eucharist. Whatever a man’s colour,  culture  or  accent,  a  total  union  with  Christ  in  mind  and  heart  will  cause  his personality to radiate reverence and draw all men to the body and blood of the Lord.

Music at Mass may indeed be lighter and gayer on occasion—but beware! From the age of ten you can hear boys and girls, but especially boys, mimicking the pretty, tinny little tunes and repetitive themes that may be suitable at seven, but which by ten years of age are already the cause of a contempt for religion. They need meat and not simply milk or candyfloss. The people need a music which, while it moves and stirs, also induces a strong, inner contemplative union with God and a reverence for Him. Qualities of merely physical excitement, however much enjoyed at the time, will not deepen that inner growth of spirit, which alone holds young men and women to their faith after the age of thirteen. Music, like teaching in words, must say something and say something beautiful, deep, true and chaste. If the predominant idiom of popular music is incapable of this development, then create a new music and a new culture. It has been done before. With the grace of God we are not less able to achieve and create than our fathers before us.

An altar guild should be more than a gaggle of boys. They should be bound to the priests of the parish by a bond of affection and learning that grows into comradeship, and for a few into discipleship. The service of Christ at the altar is the most natural apprenticeship for the priesthood. Young men give up time, outings and yearned for television programmes for the love of Jesus. And Jesus is not mean or ungrateful. He often extends a love which says, “Come, follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Cf. Matt 4:19, 19:21)

If the service of the altar belongs properly to the boy, because whether as potential husband or potential priest he shows forth in the Church the physical office of Christ, it seems to me—though one speaks as one less wise, and always subject to the official Magisterium of the Church—that the offertory procession belongs more properly to the girls and women of the parish. In her sexuality the woman is the Church: both male and female members of the Church. For mankind looks to God for fulfilment in Christ, and offers its own ‘offertory gift’: the womb of Mary, a gift that can only be offered through the womanhood of Mary. Mary first offered gifts “which earth has given and human hands have made”, 4 to be transformed into the body and blood of God. I like to see the girls present the gifts and the boys take them with reverence to the hands of the priest. The very chivalry of chaste love shines out for me in this. There is so much undeveloped theology in the sexual order, which has been established by God in nature and in the Church for the Incarnation of Christ!5

The Diversity of Gifts and Charisms

The best parish would always be a team mission in the modern world. In one’s own opinion, the effort to destroy the parish, in the sense we have been considering it, is antichrist. But one does agree that the lone priest in the small parish, in which ‘nothing happens and all is so very dead’, is rather a reflection of an agricultural society in which men, women and children worked from dawn to dusk, and where anything that happened on high days and holidays involved the whole village community around the church. Nowadays, when the sacred and the secular have been totally dismembered from each other, what remains can be simply a ‘dormitory parish’ in a ‘dormitory suburb’—and the emphasis can indeed be upon sleep!

The answer would seem to be parishes which are manned, built and run like many of the larger parishes which are administered by religious orders. This should work as well for the diocesan clergy as it does for the religious orders. Here the ‘small group’ comes into its own. There can be a multitude of small groups, whether parish-based or inter-parochial (like the SVP, for instance), which cater for prayer, study, apostolic formation, visiting of the lonely, the sick and the lapsed: for catechesis and for professional and community interests. Where a parish had the facilities—the halls, recreation and social centres, even the tennis courts and swimming pools (one does not envisage golf courses in England)—it could offer an integrated Catholic life, in which the small groups supported and enlivened the life of the whole parish as a total community. So many facilities could be brought under one roof.

At present only the larger religious congregations can even dare think of such things. Should therefore the life of the diocesan secular clergy move nearer to the organisation of Oratories as Newman envisaged them? Was that saintly man a prophet in this respect also? Would such an organisation of parish centres, with lesser satellite parishes or chapels of ease surrounding them, be nearer to the highly successful organisation of the Church in the city- states  of  Roman  and  medieval  times?  Did  not  the  great  monasteries  and  their  scholae publicae fulfil just such a vocation, among men, not among verdant fields? Should we be thinking that way again? If we do, there will be even more reason and need for priestly celibacy, for the total giving of self in the likeness of the flesh of Christ. This was how the Fathers saw the meaning of the vow of chastity in the priest and in the religious brother and sister.

Such an apostolate would need a total unanimity of mind and heart and a deep conviction of the truth of the full and official faith of the Church. And so lastly we must ask whether existing seminaries and institutes are capable of fulfilling that need in their present disarray. Do we need, as some seem to think, new oratories of diocesan priests: a variant of a new order, similar again to Newman’s Oratory or to the Oblates of St Charles? If so, then team leaders could form their own members and vocations, as did the Jesuits, and as did so many congregations of priests and nuns at the time of the Reformation. Do we need such again?

It is a time for building, but only on foundations of prayer and deep thought. There are many things to ponder and pray about around that title, People of God. But the challenge is a joy, for life is an adventure and should be lived as such. If sanctity is the supreme adventure of life, let us pray the Lord of all sanctity for guidance upon the theme of His people, the People of God!

1 Pastoral Strategy document of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, 1976.

2 Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Mysterium Fidei, para. 46.

3 Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer IV, institution narrative.

4 Roman Missal, prayer at the offertory.

5 See E. Holloway, Sexual Order and Holy Order, Faith Pamphlets, 1975.

The Eucharist: Living Drama of the Universe in Christ

Theological Comment, Faith, Vol. 26, no. 4, July/August 1994.

I love the atmosphere of the offering of the Holy Eucharist at the Faith Movement youth conferences. I love the hope and joyousness of youth, and the sincerity and the purity of the prayer offered before the altar of God. It says “sursum corda” (lift up your hearts), and so it should! So to do, so to feel, is the prerogative of young minds and hearts. For we are gathered around God in Person, around Jesus Christ, in the Memoriale Domini.

This is the everlasting Passover upon the Christian altar, in which our great High Priest, the Son of God but also Son of Man and Prince of the Cosmos, ever lives to intercede for us (Heb 7:25) in the flesh of His Resurrection. It is the one same offering as the cross, because it is the Person who gives value to the sacrifice. But now His painful “consummatum est” (John 19:30) is crowned with its fruit. At the Last Supper, in which His sacrifice was ratum non consummatum (consigned but not yet consummated), Jesus prayed, “Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, may be with Me where I am, to behold My glory which You have given Me in Your love for Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17:24) Now this prayer begins to be answered within history upon the altars of the People of God: in basilicas, in grass roots parish churches, in shanty town and bush and jungle huts—wherever “the men You have given Me” may be. For we are the fruit of that obedient  love  which  is  the  redemption  of  Christ,  that  reparation  in  justice  and  perfect manhood of the Son of Man.

For us gathered at these Faith Movement conferences there is also so very often the joy of the new green shoots of Christ: newly ordained priests and deacons. They are the living sursum corda of Jesus Christ. Thus in an arid land, in a tired and thirsty season of drought in the life of the Church, we can celebrate a rich oasis. For wherever God is well preached, well presented, well obeyed and well loved there is no dearth of generous disciples. “Those whom My Father has given Me, no man shall snatch out of My hand!” (cf. John 10:29)

Memoriale Domini

The Mass is a drama. And most of us, even the well taught, unconsciously think of it like most other dramas, as the celebration of heroic action of the past. It is not so. The Eucharist is the always Living Drama of Jesus risen, victorious and living among His people. He is still living for He is risen; and as our great High Priest He is ever-interceding for us. He is indeed the very sacrifice of the Cross, but now bestowing among His people the fruits of a new creation.

The expression Memoriale Domini (Memorial of the Lord) and the words at the consecration, “Do this in memory of Me”, are misleading to the Western mind. Christ’s reference at the first Eucharist is to the Passover and means, “Do this as your new and everlasting Passover in Me until I come again”; that is, until the Eucharist on earth is fulfilled in the wine drunk new in the banquet of the kingdom of My Father (cf. Matt 26:29), the banquet of the Eucharist of eternal life. That is why the new order of Mass of the Roman rite insists that:

Calling to mind the death Your Son endured for our salvation, His glorious resurrection and ascension into heaven, and ready to greet Him when He comes again, we offer You in thanksgiving [i.e. Eucharist] this holy and living sacrifice.1

We will see later that the Fathers of the first five centuries of the Christian Church linked the liturgy upon our altars to the liturgy of eternal life envisioned in the book of the Revelation to St John. On earth and in heaven the cross and the Eucharist are just one liturgy.

A Liturgy which spans all Creation

For the Jew the Pasch was much, much more than a memorial of the redemption from bondage in Egypt and the translation into a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Ex 3:8 etc.). It was also the hope and expectation of the Messiah, the One to come, the Long Expected. In Him the inner meaning of that ‘memorial’, which is the Passover, would be fulfilled: the Law and the Prophets and the unique line of Messianism which permeates the whole vast history of the Bible.

So it is for the Catholic Christian. We celebrate the Eucharist as a ‘thanksgiving’ for the mercies of the Lord, fulfilled in the redemption won in Jesus Christ. It is no mere remembrance of the past mercy of the Lord. It is the continual working out of this mercy in the kingdom of God on earth, His Church, until the climax of the age of the Messiah. This is the climax prophesied by Christ before Caiaphas: “‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ And Jesus said, ‘I am; and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.’” (Mark 14:61-2)

The Mass therefore is the living drama of our living Lord. At the altar we are called to live it with Him and in Him. It is the contemplation of God in all His mighty works, from the beginning even until now. The Eucharist is a universal, a cosmic communion with God. That which we offer on earth does not stand alone: it is part of the Eucharist which is the communion of God with His saints in heaven, with the holy souls of the Church of the purification, and with ourselves, the pilgrim Church on earth. See it that way. Understand it that way. It is summarised in the feasts of All Saints and All Souls and in their climax, the feast of Christ the King, which concludes the Church’s liturgical year even as it will conclude the creation itself.

The Contemplation and Love of God

The Eucharist is more than the Church’s primary and central act of adoration. It is our primary act of contemplative insight into the real presence of God, and also our primary act of savoured love of God in His real presence. The Person of Christ in His Mysteries is enveloped by the incense of the prayers of His people. Let it be the luminous cloud which shines in the young faces2 in the beautiful and hope-filled Masses we celebrate at our conferences. The Person of Christ who comes upon our altar at the ‘moment of the Mass’, the consecration, is the one source and origin of all our contemplation and all our action. For in our life, as in the life of Christ, the works follow the inner savouring of God in knowledge and in love. The Eucharist is our powerhouse of sheer contemplative knowing, loving and savouring in joy and in sorrow. Live it that way. Teach it that way. Love it—or rather love Christ our Eucharist—in that way.

The proclamation of the Gospel, the ‘Good News’ of the revelation of God in Christ, proceeds first from the presence and priesthood of the Son of God and Son of Man. Then that proclamation draws us around the Master, to live and learn, to be holy, to love holily, and to ask a loving pardon when we fail. The essence of the beatific vision will not be in word and teaching, but in savouring and loving. So here on earth the word goes out from Jesus Christ to draw us back again to the fullness of loving and of understanding the Master Himself. Our calling is to sanctification in the truth, as was His own: “For their sake I consecrate Myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth.” (John 17:19)

Never forget this draw to the reverent contemplation of God in Christ in every Mass, whether solemn and high, plainsong, polyphonic, folk, or something in between. The Mass is not concert, nor theatre, nor Pop festival. The drama is the Master Himself in all He has done, is doing, and will consummate in the life and history of mankind. The Mass is never a ‘holy meal’ which we celebrate around His ambiguous ‘presence’. The Mass is the self-giving of the Son of God, into which we are taken up in humble love. It is not Godspell, it is more than Jesus Christ Superstar: it is the manifest fullness which we have always been seeking to fill the emptiness of our souls.

The Richness of the great Liturgies

The Mass for me has always been a living joy and delight, even from boyhood. But never until I read Dom Cyprian Vagaggini’s Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy3  did I realise the fullness of its gift!

The great liturgies of East and West were complete in their adult beauty by the beginning of the sixth century. They simply thrill to the majesty of God in His works, celebrated not as things done in the past, but as the glory of the Master, living, present, known, and loving His own in the supreme celebration on earth of the Word made Flesh. The Roman Canon is beautiful but somewhat laconic and lapidary in style, as was the ancient Roman temperament. For my part, I admit I warm more to the lovely lyrical liturgies of the Greek-writing Fathers of the Church: to the liturgies of St John Chrysostom and above all St Basil. And do not knock the new Eucharistic Prayers. The third has strong overtones of the liturgy of St John Chrysostom, while the fourth is a most beautifully rendered synopsis in all essentials of the liturgy of St Basil. Its theology is most beautifully consonant with that of the Faith Movement.4 We have had the humility to enrich ourselves from the treasures of the East (whatever may be thought of the shortcomings of the ICEL translation—and they exist). To see this we simply have to read something from the anaphora, or Eucharistic Prayer, of St Basil (see appendix).

This anaphora takes in just about the entire works of God! But notice, it is not a commemoration of the past, it is a living exultation of God, living and present among His works. And it reaches its consummation with the bread and wine becoming God Incarnate at the moment of the words of Christ. Through these words the Eucharist is constituted both as a sacrifice and as the sacrament of God dwelling (literally, “pitching His tent”) among His people (John 1:14). In the anaphora of St Basil the people answer “Amen” to each of the words of consecration, over the bread and over the wine. I wish to God they did the same also in our Roman liturgy! It would reinforce their confused and muzzy faith.

The Companionship of the Angels

The Eastern rites are full of the joy and presence of the angels of God. They are invoked in the Eucharist, and just as fully in the sacraments of the Church. It used to be the same in the Roman rite of Mass and in the administration of our sacraments. The reference to the angels has not perished entirely in the Mass, thank God, but it has almost entirely disappeared in our new rituals of the sacraments. These rituals taken as a whole, but especially the rites of the Communion of the sick and the anointing of the sick, are poor, emasculated, cut-down things. Even in the Mass, the vision of God enthroned above the twelve legions of Angels (cf. Matt

26:53) as “Lord, God of hosts” has been enervated to “God of power and might”:5  not a translation of the original! All this must one day be put right.

In the Middle Ages the churches of our parishes, even the humbler ones, had the walls of the sanctuary, and often the roof vaulting too, covered with frescoes of the angels of God. Just  pretty  mediaeval  superstition?  No:  the  realisation  and  explicit  teaching  that  the Eucharist, in which we participate with Christ, is a cosmic reality. It is the liturgy, that is the public celebration, of the King of Kings, surrounded by His court, and that means the angels and saints in blessedness, as well as ourselves, the plodding pilgrim Church on earth.

The angels of God are a reality.  Christ refers to them frequently, including the guardian angels of the little ones who are never to be despised (Matt 18:10). The liturgies of the Greek-writing Fathers abound in references to the angels, especially in the Cherubikon, the hymn accompanying the Great Entrance. In the West it is the preface at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer which joins the angels of God to our celebration on earth of the oblation of Christ. Did you know that the ‘angel of the sacrifice’ is found in all the great liturgies of East and West, and that we have it in our original and oldest Eucharistic Prayer, the Roman Canon? We pray: “Almighty God, we pray that Your angel may take this sacrifice to Your altar in heaven. Then, as we receive from this altar the sacred body and blood of Your Son, let us be filled with every grace and blessing.” A lovely thought: the body of Jesus upon the altar is borne by the angel of the sacrifice to the altar of the Father in heaven. There, in the love who is the Holy Spirit, Jesus is received and accepted as our pledge of peace and reconciliation, and given back to us with all the fruits of grace and blessing.

Because of this, we then exchange the sign of that peace with each other. For this reason I am sure it is better and more fitting that the sign of peace should be given at the communion, and not at the offertory as some would wish. With the passage of time the Church has preferred the better and deeper symbolism of placing the giving of Christ’s peace to one another just before our Holy Communion in and with Christ; also placing the gift of reconciliation with each other close to that prayer for forgiveness which has just preceded in the Our Father. Liturgical renewal must never become archaeology. Newer and deeper beauties can develop in the adult age of the Church. There are some people who like to take their childhood teddy bears to bed with them at an advanced age—I knew one who used to pretend it was to stop draughts! A charming eccentricity, but we don’t have to indulge.

The Christology of the great Liturgies

We will have enormously more joy in God if we see the Eucharist in the dimensions of the first five centuries of the Church. They were the centuries in which all the great questions of Christology were hammered out in the fierce fires of controversy and in General Councils: questions concerning His one Person but two natures, one human and one divine.

We could never get to the divine and human unity of Christ of the great liturgies of the Church from a Christology ‘from below’. Such Christologies must always end either with two persons in Christ, or else with a super-man adopted into the Divinity as an irrevocable sign and pledge of redemption.6  The emphasis of the Mass is always upon the divine, upon the pre-existent eternal Word who, in taking flesh as man, said “Mine” of His human nature, and in whom there is unambiguously only the one divine ‘Me’.

Thus  the  great  liturgies  of  East  and  West  are  all  Christologies  of  the  Divine descending. They see the glory of God shining in His angels, the purely spiritual creation. They see too the glory of God shining in the face of man, because the eternal Word is to take flesh as Son or Prince of Man and dwell among us, His very flesh being the Tent of Meeting between God and mankind. Therefore all the liturgies of East and West link the Eucharist on earth to the Eucharist eternally celebrated in heaven as the everlasting joy and happiness of God. In that Eucharist God interpenetrates all, and Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the one principle of beauty and joy in all the works of God and in all the stages and degrees of His creation.

The Eucharist and the Unity-Law

At this point I feel that I ought to introduce the fourth Eucharistic Prayer of the revised Roman rite, to allow you to savour something of the reality which we have been talking about in the more abstract written word. You will see how beautifully it summarises and simplifies the cosmic sweep of the vision of the glories of God in the anaphora of St Basil (see appendix).

The vision of the Eucharist in this fourth Eucharistic Prayer is full of the vision of Christ we expound in the Faith Movement. According to this perspective the Incarnation is decreed from the beginning of creation and not simply because of the Fall of man. All creation is a unity in God, and His works are all fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The Kingship of Christ is the crowning glory over all creation of Him who is the Son of God, and also the Son of Man because He is the source and origin of humankind. And the tongue of man praises God “in the name of every creature under heaven”.7 For nature without a soul cannot know and love God personally. But man in his body is the summit of all the material creation, and in body and soul he is made for God in Christ. He can and must praise and love God in the name of all creation, whose final, crowning glory he is. The anaphora of St Basil declares this aspect perhaps even more gloriously than our fourth Eucharistic Prayer. There is so much of Christ as “heir to the ages” in the anaphora of St Basil and the fourth Eucharistic Prayer.

You will find the same ideas in the Apocalypse of St John, which the Christians of the first five centuries saw as the vision of the final end and meaning of the Eucharist: the glory of heaven; the final banquet of the Lamb of God; the New Jerusalem; the Thanksgiving or Eucharist  of all  the  saved,  men  and  angels,  around  the  glory  of  the  Holy  Trinity.  The references which the great liturgies of East and West took from the Apocalypse are too many and too scattered for the scope of this paper. One can refer especially to the souls of the just under the altar of God, who plead for the quick coming of the Kingdom and the end of all evil, to whom are given white robes (6:9-11). In chapter five the Lamb stands as once slain, with His escort of elders with harps and golden vials which are the prayers of the saints (5:6- 8). The same imagery occurs also in chapter eight, where before the altar of God an angel is given much incense which is the prayers of all the saints to be offered upon the golden altar before the face of God (8:3-4). There is so much else I cannot discuss, especially the final vision of God as the light and life and food of all His creatures in the final chapters of the book.

Bear in mind that the reference here to the souls of the saints and the prayers of the saints is to be taken in its old meaning, namely the People of God. It means you, it means us. The Eucharist on earth is one Eucharist, in different phases and stages, with the Eucharist in heaven where Christ reigns in glory. On earth He both reigns in us, His beloved people, and suffers in His witnesses, His saints, who fill up in their bodies what is wanting to the Passion of Christ (cf. Col 1:24). This is how the Church in her liturgy sees and understands the Mass we offer, the Mass at which we assist and share with Christ on a Sunday without fail, and daily in generous souls who are able. We are part of His action in the Mass. In the Mass we are also His friends, bound to Him and to each other in a mutual bond of love around His altar. He said:

You are My friends, if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing: but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He may give it to you. This I command you, to love one another. (John 15:14-17)

This is how the Eucharist should be lived, loved and offered. That is how it has always been in the Faith Movement. It is an act of contemplative love unto the Person of Jesus Christ. And it is also an act of love for each other “through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit”.

Jesus is our Eucharist

This is how the Mass should be taught. In the first place is the fact of God, and the ascent of His creation. This is the full meaning of the vision of the woman clothed with the sun (Rev 12:1-5):8  the womb in creation is for Mary, for the Incarnation of Christ the King of the universe. Then comes the reality of the soul and its place in creation and evolution, our knowledge of God and our knowledge and consent to evil: the Fall and original sin. Then we recognise the promise to the woman whose seed will crush the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15), the revelation of God in the inner spirit of man and the public revelation in the Bible and Tradition, growing through the ages. We teach, as we celebrate also in the Mass, the mystery of  the  kingdom  and  the  mystery  of  iniquity:  the  wonderful  works  and  the  glories,  the wretched betrayals and the failures. We thrill to the prophets and the consummation of their vision in the Incarnation of God in Christ. We thrill to our Lord’s preaching and parables in love and in contemplation. We agonise with Him in Gethsemane—we who were, and so often are, the cause of His sweat of blood. We go to Him in a union and holy communion of mutual being; for He is the Bread of our very life, being, and transmutation into co-sharers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). All of this is the Holy Eucharist, the Mass.

To conclude, let me quote Dom Cyprian Vagaggini’s generous commendation of a modern non-Catholic theologian:

It is interesting to see how a Protestant, G. Harbsmeier (Das wir die Predigt und sein Wort nicht verachten, Munich 1958, pp. 161-162), profoundly hostile to  the  liturgy  by  reason  of  the  dogmatics  of  his  own  confession,  has understood so well that, in the logic of Catholic dogmatics, the Mass is necessarily the central point and the epitome of the mystery of salvation in action, and that it reveals a perspective of prodigious grandeur. “The Eucharist,” he writes, “is not celebrated simply in memory of that night on which the Saviour was delivered up and betrayed. This also it does. But along with this … it represents ritually, in symbol, in gesture, in word, in song, just about the sum total of what the Scriptures contain. Those who perform this representation introduce there the sum of all that the world knows about the act of religion.  …  There is presented to our gaze a vast translation into worship of the salvation event: a work complete and perfect. … Here it is understood that if worship can possibly serve as the realisation of the mystery, such a realisation ought to be total.  In this sense the Eucharist is truly Catholic, because it translates into worship really and in a global manner the totality of the mystery of salvation. As interpretation it is a marvellous realisation”.9

Vagaggini is generous. But the Eucharist for us is not the marvellous realisation of an interpretation; it is our living Lord. It is His life, in which we share, in which we sorrow, in which we love, in which we hope, and to which we commend ourselves in our own “consummatum est” in the last moments of life. Do not love it that way; love Him that way. For the Mass is Christ our Eucharist.

Appendix

The Greek Anaphora of St Basil

PRIEST:           The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of our God and Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

PEOPLE:          And with your spirit. PRIEST:           Lift up your hearts.

PEOPLE:          We have raised them to the Lord. PRIEST:           Let us give thanks to the Lord.

PEOPLE:          It is right and just to worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the consubstantial and undivided Trinity.

Trinitarian Theme

PRIEST:           Immutable Being, Master, Lord God, adorable Father almighty, it is truly right and just and proper in view of the magnificence of Your holiness, to praise You, to bless You, to worship You, to give thanks to You, to glorify You, who are the one only true God, and to offer to You, with contrite hearts and in a spirit of humility, this our rational adoration, because it is You who have given us the knowledge of Your Truth. Who is able to tell of Your powerful deeds, proclaim all Your praises or explain all the wonders which You have performed in every age? Master of all things, Lord of heaven and of earth and of all creation, visible and invisible: You who are seated on a throne of glory and look down upon the depths below; You who are without beginning, invisible, incomprehensible, boundless, immutable; the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of our great God and Saviour, of our Hope; of Him who is the image of Your goodness, the seal of Your likeness, who in Himself is the revelation of You, the Father; who is the living Word, true God, eternal Wisdom, Life, Sanctification, Power, the true Light, from whom the Holy Spirit shines forth, who is the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of adoption in sonship, the Pledge of future inheritance, the First-fruits of eternal benefits, the life-giving Power, the Source of sanctification, by whom every creature, rational and intellectual, is enabled to adore You and to extol You with eternal glorification; for all creation serves You. Angels praise You, Archangels, Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, and the many-eyed Cherubim; the Seraphim stand round about You, six wings to each and every one; and with two they cover up their faces, with two their feet, and with two they fly, the while they cry aloud to each other, with voices unceasing, Your never silent praises.

PEOPLE:          Holy, holy, holy …

Christological Theme

PRIEST:           Together  with  this  blessed  company,  Master  and  Lover  of  mankind,  we sinners too cry aloud and say: truly holy are You, and all-holy; nor is there any limit to the magnificence of Your holiness, and You are holy in all Your works because all that You do is done in justice and in true judgment.

God’s Original Plan

For You shaped man, taking soil of the earth, and honouring him with Your image, You placed him in the paradise of delights, promising him immortality of life and enjoyment of eternal benefits, if he would but keep Your commandments.

Its Frustration

But he disobeyed You, the true God who created him, and when he succumbed to the deceit of the serpent and by his transgressions sentenced himself to death, You, O God, in Your just judgment, drove him out of paradise into this world, and made him return again to the earth from which he had been taken,

The Promise of a Redeemer while disposing that by means of a new birth he should obtain salvation again, salvation in Your Christ.

Renewal in Christ the Redeemer

For You, good Creator, did not reject forever the creature whom You had made, nor did You forget the work of Your hands; but in Your mercy You visited him in many ways.

Preparation in the Old Testament

You sent the prophets; You worked wonders through Your saints, who were pleasing to You in every generation; You spoke to us by the mouth of Your servants, the prophets, foreannouncing to us the future salvation; You gave us the Law to help us; You assigned angels to guard us.

Realisation in the Life of Christ

Then when the fullness of time had come, You spoke to us in Your own Son, through whom also You created the world. He, being the brightness of Your glory and the imprint of Your substance, and sustaining all things by the word of His power, did not think it a thing to be clung to, to be equal to You, who are God and Father;

The Incarnation

but, remaining eternal God, He appeared on the earth and went about among men; and having taken flesh from the Virgin, He lowered Himself, taking the form of a slave, made in like form to the body of our lowliness, in order that He might make us in like form to the image of His glory. For since through a man sin had come into the world, and, through sin, death, Your only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of You, God and Father, being born of a woman, the holy  Theotokos  and  Ever-Virgin  Mary,  and  being  born  under  the  Law,  was  pleased  to condemn sin in His own flesh, so that those who had died in Adam might be brought to life in Him, Your Christ.

His Life, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Second Coming

And having become a citizen of this world, He gave us the precepts of salvation, set us free from the seduction of idols and brought us to the knowledge of You, the true God and Father, acquiring us for Himself as a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation; and purifying us in water and sanctifying us in the Holy Spirit, He gave Himself in our place to the death into whose power we had been sold because of sin. And having descended, by means of the Cross, into hell, so that He might fulfil all things in Himself, He loosed the painful bonds of death; and on the third day He rose again, and opened to all flesh the way of the resurrection from the dead. Since it was not possible for the Author of life to be overcome by corruption, He became the first fruits of those who have been laid to rest, the first-born from among the dead, so that He might hold first place in all things. And ascending to heaven, He sat at the right of Your majesty on high. And He will come again to render to each one according to his works.

Sacramental Realisation in the Eucharist

And He left us these memorials of His redemptive suffering which we have now brought forward in accord with His command.

Institution and Present Renewal

For, about to go to His voluntary and celebrated and life-giving death, on the night when He surrendered Himself for the life of the world, taking bread into His holy and immaculate hands, and lifting it up to You, God and Father, giving thanks, blessing it, sanctifying it, breaking it, He gave it to His holy disciples and Apostles, saying: ‘Take, eat, this is My Body, broken for you unto the remission of sins’.

PEOPLE:          Amen.

PRIEST:           In like manner also, taking the cup of the fruit of the vine, tempering it, giving thanks, blessing it, sanctifying it, He gave it to His holy disciples and Apostles, saying:

‘Drink of this, all of you, this is My Blood, that of the new covenant, shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins’.

PEOPLE:          Amen.

Value as Efficacious and Prophetic Memorial

PRIEST:           ‘Do this in memory of me. For every time that you eat this Bread and drink this Chalice, you will be proclaiming My death and confessing My resurrection.’

We too, Master, calling to mind, therefore, the redemptive sufferings accomplished through the life-giving Cross, the three days in the tomb, the resurrection from the dead, the ascension into heaven, Your being seated at the right of Your God and Father, and Your glorious and fearsome Parousia—we offer to You from Your gifts that which belongs to You absolutely and completely.10

The Fourth Eucharistic Prayer

PRIEST:           The Lord be with you. PEOPLE:          And also with you. PRIEST:           Lift up your hearts.

PEOPLE:          We lift them up to the Lord.

PRIEST:           Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. PEOPLE:          It is right to give him thanks and praise.

God’s Plan of Creation and Salvation

PRIEST:           Father in heaven, it is right that we should give you thanks and glory: you are the one God, living and true. Through all eternity you live in unapproachable light. Source of life and goodness, you have created all things, to fill your creatures with every blessing and lead all men to the joyful vision of your light.

The Angels in Heaven

Countless hosts of angels stand before you to do your will; they look upon your splendour and praise you, night and day. United with them, and in the name of every creature under heaven, we too praise your glory as we say:

PEOPLE:          Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

The Creation of Man

PRIEST:           Father, we acknowledge your greatness: all your actions show your wisdom and love. You formed man in your own likeness and set him over the whole world to serve you, his creator, and to rule over all creatures.

The Fall and the Promise of Redemption

Even when he disobeyed you and lost your friendship you did not abandon him to the power of death, but helped all men to seek and find you.

The Old Covenant

Again and again you offered a covenant to man, and through the prophets taught him to hope for salvation.

The Fulfilment in Christ

Father, you so loved the world that in the fullness of time you sent your only Son to be our

Saviour.

His Birth, Life, Death and Resurrection

He was conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary, a man like us in all things but sin. To the poor he proclaimed the good news of salvation, to prisoners, freedom, and to those in sorrow, joy. In fulfilment of your will he gave himself up to death; but by rising from the dead, he destroyed death and restored life.

His Sending of the Holy Spirit

And that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him, he sent the Holy Spirit from you, Father, as his first gift to those who believe, to complete his work on earth and bring us the fullness of grace.

The Invocation of the Holy Spirit on the Gifts

Father, may this Holy Spirit sanctify these offerings. Let them become the body and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord as we celebrate the great mystery which he left us as an everlasting covenant.

Institution and Present Renewal

He always loved those who were his own in the world. When the time came for him to be glorified by you, his heavenly Father, he showed the depth of his love. While they were at supper, he took bread, said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples, saying: Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you.

In the same way, he took the cup, filled with wine. He gave you thanks, and giving

the cup to his disciples, said: Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all men so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.

PEOPLE:          Lord, by your cross and resurrection you have set us free. You are the Saviour of the world.

Efficacious and Prophetic Memorial

PRIEST:           Father, we now celebrate this memorial of our redemption. We recall Christ’s death, his descent among the dead, his resurrection, and his ascension to your right hand; and, looking forward to his coming in glory, we offer you his body and blood, the acceptable sacrifice which brings salvation to the whole world.

The Priestly Prayer for the Church, Living and Dead

Lord, look upon this sacrifice which you have given to your Church; and by your Holy Spirit, gather all who share this one bread and one cup into the one body of Christ, a living sacrifice of praise. Lord, remember those for whom we offer this sacrifice, especially N. our Pope, N. our bishop, and bishops and clergy everywhere. Remember those who take part in this offering, those here present and all your people, and all who seek you with a sincere heart. Remember those who have died in the peace of Christ and all the dead whose faith is known to you alone.

Communion with the Church in Heaven

Father, in your mercy grant also to us, your children, to enter into our heavenly inheritance in the company of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, and your apostles and saints. Then, in your kingdom, freed from the corruption of sin and death, we shall sing your glory with every creature through Christ our Lord, through whom you give us everything that is good.

Final Doxology

Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.

PEOPLE:          Amen.

1 Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer 3.

2  The metaphor is linked to the luminous cloud which in the Old Testament is the accompaniment of the presence of the Living God. It is found at the Tent of Meeting (Ex 40:34-38). It fills the Temple of Solomon on the day of its dedication (1 Kings 8:10-11). It is called the shekinah (i.e. the abiding or ‘real’ presence) and is present sometimes as ‘glory’ without the veil of cloud. It is clearly implied in Luke 1:35 referring to the conception of Christ, and again at the annunciation to the shepherds of the birth of the Saviour (Luke 2:9). It is present in its classic form in the transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor (Matt 17:5). A certain similar ‘glory’ is manifest in the face of Moses, radiant from familiar converse with God (Ex 34:29ff; cf. 2 Cor 3). The implication is that something similar may be seen in the sincere face at prayer from the power of the grace of God. It is not suggested that it always lasts! The deep, inner love of God is the fruit of long, patient, and humble obedience to the will of God.

3 Dom Cyprian Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, Liturgical Press, Minnesota, 1976.

4  In discussing the liturgy and the involvement of the infrahuman world in worship, Vagaggini (Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, p. 324) raises the question of the relevance of an orthodox theory of evolution to the liturgy of the Eucharist. In a footnote he writes: “In such a perspective the connection between man and the infrahuman world, and hence the unity of the cosmos, appears still more wonderful. … All the lower creatures co-operate in a vast organised process to the formation of the human body, endowed by God with a spiritual soul and the human composite enters into participation in the divine life. Man has his apex in Christ, in whom the lower world, the human world, the angelic, and the divine have their greatest unity”.

5 Roman Missal, ICEL translation of the Sanctus.

6 We have heard too much damaging nonsense in the years since the Council concerning our alleged excessive emphasis on the divinity of Christ, to the forgetfulness of His being human. This theology, which tends to demean the full understanding of the Eucharist, and even more devotion to the Blessed Sacrament reserved, is implicit in a number of theologians. There is no way of ever understanding the mystery of the Incarnation except by beginning with the Christ of the prologue of St John’s Gospel and of the Creed. There is no sense in which Jesus, the one Person, is not God. For this reason I would myself totally reject the foundations of the Christology of Karl Rahner SJ.

7 Roman Missal, preface to Eucharistic Prayer 4.

8 See the discussion of this text in chapter 6, “Meditation for Mary Immaculate”.

9 Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, p. 162.

10 Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, p. 164.

The Word Certain and Sure in all His Ways

Editorial, Faith, Vol. 8, no. 6, November/December 1976.

In a recent article Mgr George Kelly ponders the phenomenon of an uncertain Church.1

Kneeling  before  the  Christmas  crib  we  ponder  instead  the  Word  most  certain,  and  the certainty of His word. For, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.” (John 1:1-3)

When we say ‘word’ in English, we think first of a sound or a written sign, and only afterwards acknowledge that it has a meaning. Not so for the wonderful culture which was ancient Greece. In Greek the word is logos, from which our word ‘logic’ comes. The Greek stresses first of all that the word is mind, the content of a man’s wisdom. It is also the content of his personality, that good and noble balance of the truth, in which the attraction of his living person stands. So, for St John, in the beginning was the Word, the divine Mind, the personal Mind and Wisdom who is God. All things were conceived and made through that Mind, working out the purpose of a love which is all joy. This is the Mind most certain and most sure. This Mind or Word, who is God, is the measure of all things. In the spawning of the universe all things were gathered up in that Mind in certainty of nature and goodness, of purpose and plan. We too were there. So before the Christmas crib we rest in sweet peace, for we know our place. And we have our place through Him: “In My Father’s house are many rooms … I go to prepare a place for you.” (John 14:2)

Kneeling at the crib we take heart. The creation is founded through the very being of the Word. Therefore it is founded upon clear meaning, sharply defined truth and bountiful joy. It is founded upon truth. It is not built upon the sand of agnosticism, human opinion and human uncertainty. If there is now a phenomenon of the uncertain Church, it is not the Church of Him who is the Word. They were among us, but they were never of us, or they would not have gone out from us (cf. 1 John 2:18-19). This uncertain Church is the age-old phenomenon of human error and human sin. Why do they never learn? It has happened again and again in the history of mankind. Why do we presume that we are better than our fathers, and are beyond error and sin and the leprosy of heresy? There is nothing to preserve us from sin except humility under the mighty hand of God! This uncertain Church is the ‘anti- magisterium’, the voice of dissent; but it is a voice speaking against the Church which is built into the body of the Word who is God. This Body of Christ will not be vanquished by the virus, nor will the sickness be unto death, for the gates of Hell (i.e. Sheol, the principle of death and sin) will not prevail against her, by the very promise of the Word (Matt 16:18), whose human birth we sing in hymns and happy carols at this season.

A Christmas Certainty

So, “In the beginning was the Word.” And we know how that wonderful prologue comes to its climax: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14) So Mind and Reason, definite and absolute, has framed the universe. It is not hard to believe it, for all the wisdoms and sciences of man’s modern world are gathered up into a unity of meaning, and the laws of the sciences run over into one another. There is no mindlessness here. So it is foolish to be an atheist or an agnostic. Nothing was ever discovered, used or purposed except through Mind, through the principle of the Word. The universe is full of it, and gives witness unto Him.

At the crib we look with joy upon the consolation of God’s certainty, given to us and given for us. Our lives have meaning; and from that recognition joy fills our heart. This joy spreads out over hearth and home. There is no toil without meaning, nothing so little that it does not matter. For the tasks of daily life—the cleaning and the washing and the bathing and the tending to the infant demands—all of them are gathered up with the very explosion of the universe, of which they are all part, into the meaningful dispensation of the loving God. Loving He is, because first He knows that He loves, and brings it to perfection in that balance of truth we call holiness.

Holiness is the perfect good; and to proclaim the perfect is to proclaim the true. We have no deep and faithful love without spiritual truth, stability, and certainty in the way of living of that truth. Come to think of it, this idea was found at the end of the unrevised marriage service (another gem of spiritual intuition thoughtlessly thrown out!): “and thereto I plight thee my troth” (and to these vows I pledge you lifelong truth). There is no lifelong love without that spiritual truth which subjects and subdues all that belongs to the body to its own law and statute. The truth of the spirit is not uncertain, for the spirit is made to the likeness of the eternal Word.

The birth of Jesus Christ is the marriage of God with human nature. In Him, God Incarnate, Emmanuel, we have the pledge of betrothal: we have the truth, the certainty of the divine Love in the unchanging wisdom of the divine Mind. How it lifts up our lives and our loves. How it bursts into lovely, homely songs or carols in every tongue and in the culture of every nation, the most beautiful of true folk music. There would be no Christmas joy except for the certainty of the Word made flesh: the certainty that this child is the Son of Man and the eternal Son of God, “most sure in all His ways”, to quote the hymn of Cardinal Newman,2 a most prescient writer of hymns because most saintly of soul.

Expect the Word in Creation

Expect the Word. Through Advent to Midnight Mass expect the Word and the coming of the Word.

Look for the Word in the starry sky around you. At His fiat it exploded from not- being into reality. At the word of the Word it put on meaning like a garment and wove itself, ascending in majesty through the ages, a monument to Mind and a song of praise and love. It is His very Advent, which also is His footstool, this lovely universe and this world of ours into which most certainly He has come. It is His Advent because it is made for Him, foretells Him, and gives of its own in the womb of Mary to welcome Him. In the stable of Bethlehem Advent ends, when the woman clothed with the sun, crowned with the stars, with the moon at her feet (Rev 12:1), lays in the manger the Son of God and the Son of Man. The certainty of God, predestined from before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4, 1 Pet 1:20, etc.), has triumphed in the event, and despite the Fall of man. The Sacrament of Creation, and its Holy Order, is realised in the body and blood of Jesus the Christ. There is no uncertain word in the living Word of God.

Expect the Word in truth and in joy. Expect His certainty in your own mind and heart, for you are a reflection of God Almighty, made a ‘son’ of God through the Logos. Expect Him in the certain craving of your being to know Him and to love Him. You must expect to pray, you must expect prayer to burst through your soul upwards to Him. So does a baby cry out for mother’s love and mother’s milk and mother’s redeeming care. So, my little children, like new born babes seek your natural milk without guile (cf. 1 Peter 2:1-2). It is the very law of life. It is the cry of your very being for the certainty which is the life and the love of God.

Expect the Word in History

Expect the word as it rises in human life through the ages. It is thrown up in king and counsellor, in patriarch and sage, in the elders of the people and the wise women of the tribes. Expect it much more, then, in priest and prophet too. Expect the words of the Word, for He will strive to get through. This is His Advent in history. Expect Him to give signs of His coming.  You  will  find  them:  layer  after  layer  of  Scripture  and  Tradition,  prophet  after prophet,  great  priest  after  great  priest. You  will  find  too  the  littleness  and  the  sin,  the uncertainty of doctrine and the lusts of the heart. Yes, you will find the adumbration also of the crucifixion. But over it all you will find the certainty of the Event, when the Word, so long expected in Scripture and Tradition, rises majestically over sin and death in the Incarnation of the Son of God. Christmas is the feast of the Word Most Certain. And be sure: as once He came, according to His word, and rose in the transfigured flesh of His suffering body, so He will come again, as He has said He will. For the Word of God is terrible in His utter certainty. Let His enemies know it and tremble, while there is yet time for a change of heart.

Expect the Word in the Eucharist

Expect the Word again as the ‘bread and wine’ of human life, for He is the food of life and immortality. His being is the vine (cf. John 15:1-11), the grapes of which are the blood that inebriates and gives life. Expect Him in His Christmas gift upon the altar, for He is all your life. Therefore expect Him and know Him in the breaking of bread, for this is the Incarnation again, the enfleshment of the Word of life and joy descending upon matter, as first He descended into the Virgin’s womb. Praise Him for His grace and favour!3 He must so come upon the bread and the wine, for in the Incarnation He is the very source of life, and the epitome of the supernatural destiny of man. His body and blood must share in all the work of His divinity. Expect Him, then, upon the cross and in the Resurrection from the tomb, and expect Him also changing bread and wine. For He is God, and the fullness of the Word made flesh must share in all the work of man’s transformation into God. Know Him also with hope, in the gift of the altar, as the sum of all the attributes of blessedness. Know in the Eucharist that matter is good and made without sin, and that God has gathered it around Himself and made it His own body.

Expect the Lord of the Word at Midnight Mass. This, rather than the Easter Vigil, is the supper which the King made for His Son and Heir. This is a fact of liturgy and of doctrine to which the sensus fidelium, the common consent of the people of God, bears witness without any doubt. For on this night and to this Mass come not “those who were invited”, the theologians of the contradictory magisterium, the sophisticated chaplains of the rich and pampered, the prelates of the uncertain word, the ambiguous word. Instead, “compelled to come in from the highways and byways, the hedges and crossroads” of life by the urge of the Holy Spirit, we find “the poor, the maimed, the blind and the lame”, the lapsed and the lost, a motley crowd (cf. Luke 14:16-24). This is the very driftwood of life. Yet suddenly, in the burst of lights and the pealing of the Angelus, there is raised up to God, in voice and in aspiration of spirit, a Palace of Cedar wood, all the splendour of Lebanon. As it is written of this Jerusalem of God, built of the living souls of men:

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on for ever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of the righteousness from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting. For God will show your splendour everywhere under heaven. For your name will for ever be called by God, “Peace of righteousness and glory of godliness.” (Baruch 5:1-4)

Expect the Word in the Church: Certain and Everlasting

Expect, then, the Word enfleshed in Holy Writ and sacred Tradition. Expect the certain, everlasting truth and witness of the Mind which is the Word eternal. His truth and His teaching are from age to age the same. His certainty is everlasting. His promise and His prohibition, both are unchanging with times and with cultures. For man is made to the likeness of this Word, and the likeness is first in the soul, and the soul is immaterial and changeless in nature. Through the spirit of a man, God the Word has given one wisdom and one law to matter, and that law and that truth do not change. The spirit can only grow, and must grow in a straight line of constant ascent. Matter can change its forms and its laws. But man, made to the likeness of the Word eternal, has one law and one truth of life from Adam to the second coming of the Christ. The wisdom of the Word made flesh is measured by the divine name of Everlasting. There is no dissembling before Him; only the pathetic lie of the sheep which has lost its way.

Anticipate the Word of infallible magistracy from the babe laid in swaddling clothes in the manger. It will stand as lasting Good News throughout all times and cultures. The truth may hurt, but the truth is always good news. Expect the same inerrant magistracy also in the word of the Church in which He lives and speaks till the end of the ages. Because of the office of the divine Christ within her, it must be a certain word. It will ring out from Councils and from Popes, for to speak thus is the very commission of the Word Incarnate: “He who hears you hears Me, and he who rejects you rejects Me, and he who rejects Me rejects Him who sent Me.” (Luke 10:16) Expect it also from the very nature of the economy or sacrament of the Incarnation. Look at the formulas by which the Church chiefly defines doctrine and you will find what you expect: “Auctoritate Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, Beatorum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli ac Nostra pronuntiamus, declaramus et definimus …” (By the Authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul and Our Own we pronounce, declare and define …);4 one authority of Christ, living among men in Peter, Paul and Us; no uncertain word. For the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and the kingdom, the power, and the glory are His—the kingdom of the Most Certain Word—for ever and ever.

Oh Thou Word, uttered and proceeding from the mouth of the Most High, command of beginnings and of endings, orderer of all things with sweetness yet with power: come unto us, Word and Wisdom of our life and our way.5

1 G. Kelly, “An Uncertain Church: the new Catholic Problem”, in The Critic, 1976.

2 From the hymn “Praise to the Holiest in the Height” by J. H. Newman, originally from his poem, The Dream of Gerontius.

3 From the hymn “Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven” by H. F. Lyte.

4  Pius XII, Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, DS 3903; cf. Pius IX, Bull Ineffabilis Deus, DS 2803.

5 Cf. Divine Office, Magnificat antiphon for 17 December.

Table of Contents

The Rediscovery of God

A Personal God

The Knowledge which is Faith

The Recognition of Jesus

Meditation for Mary Immaculate

Word Church and Bible

The Son of Man

Communion in God

The Parish

The Eucharist

The Word Certain and Sure in all His Ways