All Things Made New

Ash Wednesday and Lent

2012-02-22T12:20:00.001Z

Here is a wonderful meditation for Ash Wednesday from Magnificat, which offers daily spiritual reading, Mass texts and other spiritual resources for every day of the year. It is from the Venerable Louis of Granada OP.

'It is necessary to mention here a great deception that often befalls those who begin to serve God. Sometimes they read in spiritual
books how great are the consolations of the holy Spirit and how sweet charity is and they think that the whole path to perfection is filled with delights and that there is no effort or fatigue involved. As a result, they prepare themselves for it as for something easy and pleasant and do not arm themselves for entering battle. They do not realise that while the love of God is in itself very sweet and delectable, the way to perfect charity is arduous, because to attain it, one must completely conquer self-love, and this involves a constant struggle against self. Thus, Isaiah says: “Shake yourself from the dust; arise, sit up, O Jerusalem.” In other words, the soul must shake off the dust of worldly affections and attachments and arise from its sins before it can enjoy the pleasure of seating itself in charity. However, God bestows marvellous consolations on those who faithfully struggle and on all those who trade the delights of earth for the joys of heaven. But if this barter is not made and a man does not want to surrender his spoils, this celestial refreshment will not be given to him. For we know that the heavenly manna was not given to the children of Israel until they had finished the grain that they had brought with them out of Egypt...'

And earlier, in a meditation on 16 February, Caryll Houselander spoke of the fact that "suffering, if we are one with Christ and so offer it in his hands to God, is the most effective of all acts of love." Christ "did not bring suffering into the world, but because we had done so and it was there, he came to wed himself to it, to make it inseparable from his redeeming love, one thing with love itself... In it the world’s healing begins. It is this power of his own love that Christ has given to us. Because of it our personal share in the world’s suffering is never useless, always potent. it is the most effective gift we have for the good of our fellow men."

'In Christ all humanity is contained. If we live in him we can lift up all the world’s suffering in our own, and we can bear this mystery without staggering because of the miraculous economy of pity, through which in each man’s suffering all suffering can be turned to love, but no one man can suffer more than his one heart’s measure of grief.'

Discovery of God

2012-02-21T18:44:00.000Z

Balthasar’s “fourfold distinction” is his way of affirming a fundamental dualism in reality that is resolved in the Trinity. It is elaborated in the final part of Glory of the Lord, Vol. 5, and is regarded as the heart of his contribution to metaphysics. I am grateful to Adrian Walker for helping me to improve the following exposition, which has ended up being as much his work as mine.

1. The first distinction is the polarity I discover between "self" and "other" as I become aware of my own existence in relationship to other human beings, such as my mother leaning over me in the cradle. This is the discovery of the self and the other as mutual gift.

2. This matures into an awareness of a distinction between the multitude of existents (myself and all others) and the inexhaustible Unity we all belong to, on which we are dependent, which could be called Being. This is the second distinction, the distinction of existents (essentia) from Being (esse). It is the discovery of Being as gift.

3. But if we stayed at this second level, we might conclude that all things are a sort of inevitable unfolding or mechanical self-expression of Being or Spirit (monism, pantheism, idealism). That still leaves actuality itself, along with our sense of Being as gift, unaccounted for. Neither Being (esse) nor existents (essentia) are absolutely prior with respect to the other: existents need Being in order to be, but Being also needs existents to receive it. This is the third distinction, by which we recognize not only that existents depend upon Being, but also that Being depends on existents (polarity, co-dependency).

4. Since Being and existents both differ from and depend upon each other, together they point beyond themselves to something higher or deeper. We find we have to distinguish between the "Being of the world" and the pure Act that makes things exist. Worldly existence (the dual unity of esse and essentia) must be grounded in a necessarily existent Act, pure "is-ness" whose essence is "to be" and which therefore cannot not be. Thus the fourth distinction is between worldly existence and God (also named "subsistent esse", "Beyond-Being", actus purus, or "the Good").

But doing justice to this fourth distinction requires, even philosophically, a notion of creation as distinct from mere emanation. The ground of everything is pure freedom. Thus the distinction is really between God as creator and the World as created – the discovery of the Giver of the gift. Indeed, in the light of revelation, Christ manifests this unconditioned existence of pure Act (equivalent in Hindu philosophy to Nirguna Brahman) as gratuitous, self-giving love (Trinity).

Commenting on the fourth distinction, Balthasar writes: "This mystery of the streaming self-illumination of Being, which was glimpsed by Plato and Plotinus and which alone explains the possibility of a world (that is, the paradoxical existence 'alongside' Infinite Being which fills all things and which stands in need of none), attains its transparency only when, from the sphere of the biblical revelation, absolute freedom (as the spirituality and personality of God) shines in" (Glory of the Lord, V, 626).

He goes on: "God is the Wholly Other only as the Non-Aliud, the Not-Other (Nicolas of Cusa): as He who covers all finite entities with the one mantle of his indivisible Being in so far as they are able to participate in his reality at an infinite remove – as 'entities', which are not Him, but which owe their possibility to his power, and their wealth (to grasp Him as the One who is actual and to shelter in Him) to his creative freedom."

"So that they may be one..."

2012-02-18T14:45:00.000Z

One of the perennial philosophical questions is the relationship of the One and the Many, God and the World. Although the question is inexhaustible, it comes down in the end to God and myself – for I am both one in myself and other than God: does that make God and myself part of a "many" that includes us both, or is this an illusion of separateness to be dispelled by mystical experience?

The mystics tell us that rest and happiness, for the soul and for the creature, "is to be found nowhere but in the one, indivisible unity that is God.... When all that goes to make up a man’s being has become lovingly one with God, then all the soul’s cries are hushed, and the unrest of longing and of acting has ceased" (John Tauler, cited in Magnificat, 8 June 2011). But self-forgetfulness in God is one thing. Does it really mean that the self ceases to "exist" at all – or even that it never existed? That would appear to be the message of Advaita Vedanta and the great sufi Ibn Arabi, and even at times the Dominican Meister Eckhart. But it is a misleading oversimplification, certainly in the case of Eckhart, maybe in the other cases too (see article).

Is Christianity "dualistic"? Philosophers such as Arthur Lovejoy and Robert Bolton would say so, though not in the sense either of extreme Cartesianism (mind-body) or Manichaeism (good vs evil). Christianity is dualistic in that it teaches that God created the world, and that the world is other than God, possessing (received) being of its own. The infinity of the divine Principle means it can create lesser realities without any diminution of or addition to its own substance – and those lesser realities are indeed real: they may be infinitely less than the infinite, but they are infinitely more than nothing. The being of creatures is freely willed in the groundless abyss of the Godhead. That "abyss" or ungrund where the Son is eternally begotten (and us with him in the "ground of the soul") is the source of all freedom, even man's.

This post has been by way of a footnote to the second chapter of All Things Made New. The image, from Wikimedia Commons, shows the Eckhart Portal of the Erfurt church.

Nature and Grace

2012-02-12T17:34:00.000Z

On 10 February, the following appeared as part of the meditation for the day in Magnificat. It is by the great Thomist and spiritual writer, Dom Anscar Vonier, the Abbot of Buckfast between the wars.

"There is only one end for man, and that end is not to be found within himself. Man’s end, man’s purpose is God, something outside himself which is greater than himself. It would be false Christian spirituality to say that the end of man is his own perfection. That is not the end of man. Man’s perfection is not in himself, nor can it ever be in himself. Man’s perfection is in God, in incorporation in Christ, and, through Christ, in God. All your virtues and all your piety, so to speak, would remain unfinished and incomplete if you were not raised above yourself to God."

One of the biggest, most important, but at the same time most obscure quarrels in modern theology rages around the correct interpretation of the "natural desire for God" – the idea that our hearts are restless till they rest in God (St Augustine). In fact St Thomas taught that all our desires, even for limited ends such as wealth or sexual pleasure or fame, can only be perfectly fulfilled in God and so imply a
desire for Him. But this means that by nature we desire a happiness, an end, that we can’t give ourselves by nature, because the Essence of God is infinitely beyond our natural grasp as finite creatures. The further problem is that, once he has created us this way, God seems obliged to offer us a way of reaching this impossible fulfilment.

As St Thomas puts it in SCG, III, ch. 25, "to understand God is the end [telos, goal] of every intellectual substance [mind]", for "all creatures, even those devoid of understanding, are ordered to God as to an ultimate end," and intellectual creatures like ourselves or the angels can only achieve it "through their proper operation of understanding", i.e. by understanding God – not merely that He is, but what He is (His substance or Essence). In chapters 51-53 of SCG he explains that because we have a "natural desire" to understand the divine substance, it must be possible for this desire to be fulfilled; that is, for God's Essence to be seen intellectually (just as the presence of thirst implies the existence of water). But this can only happen if the divine Essence becomes "both what is seen and that whereby it is seen", i.e. if the Essence is "joined as an intelligible form to the intellect" so that we can see God through God and not through anything less than Him (such as our own limited ideas). Only God can see God, so if we are to see Him it must be by participating in His knowledge of Himself. The created intellect is made able to receive this Essence as intelligible form by divine assistance in the guise of the "light of glory"promised in Psalm 35:10: "In thy light we shall see light."

But does this (some theologians worry) give us a "right" to grace and thus deprive God's gift of its freedom, since He is under an obligation to give it to us? Hardly, since it was his decision to create intellectual creatures that have this need. In any case the divine freedom is perfect, and so coincides with necessity. The highest freedom is not freedom of choice but self-possession; or, one might say, the complete "ownership" of every decision or act of will. Free choice between various options is second best: it is simply what freedom looks like when transposed into the realm of ignorance. If a good person knew what was the right thing to do, he would simply do it, without bothering about alternatives. God does what he wills, and He wills according to His wisdom and justice and goodness – i.e., according to His love.

This was the position advanced and defended by Henri de Lubac SJ in the early twentieth century, against a Neo-Scholastic tradition that saw man as having been created with a natural end (that is, a possibility of natural happiness in this world), and then gratuitously called by God to a supernatural fulfilment through grace. The difference may seem very slight, but its implications are huge. The latter position implies secularism. Or at least it leads to the separation of theology from every other discipline concerned with this world, since it implies that the world is intelligible without theology. (It represents a retreat to a kind of pseudo- or quasi-Aristotelian position, in which philosophy can satisfy our curiosity by arriving at the Prime Mover and so explaining the world, while theology adds on top of this the revealed doctrine of the Trinity and Incarnation which we have to accept on faith.) Theology, in the separationist view, concerns a supernatural call that is not intrinsically related to the structures and tendencies of this world. Persons without faith, or sciences that prescind from faith, can therefore proceed about their business without any reference to God or to theology, which can be treated as superfluous. De Lubac's position, on the contrary, implies that every science has some intrinsic relation to theology, and that human nature cannot be finally understood except in the light of Revelation.

Illustration: St Teresa in Ecstasy, by Bernini.

More on Mary and John

2012-02-06T11:06:00.000Z

In an earlier post I wrote about the dynamic that explains the structure of the book, All Things Made New, which is the relationship between Mary and John at the foot of the Cross. Another aspect of this relationship is brought out in the meditation found in Magnificat for 4 February 2012, by Fr Marie-Dominique Philippe OP, where he says:

"Mary’s mediation implies that we rest in her as the place God has given to us to enable us to contemplate, to go to the end in love. To recognise Mary’s mediation practically and divinely is to rest in her in our contemplation. It is to rest in her heart, a heart transformed by the fullness of charity, to rest in her wounded heart, in the seven wounds of her heart. If we do not rest in Mary’s heart, we only live by her moral mediation, by her mediation as advocate, we do not live by the proper mystery of Mary’s mediation, which is that of the Cross, where, in unity with Jesus, she communicates grace to John – grace in superabundance – as instrument of the Holy Spirit for him."

We think about the importance of his Mother's presence at the foot of the Cross for Jesus himself, but not so often about the importance of Mary's presence for John. She accompanied him there, and he accompanied her – both no doubt being a comfort to the other, and both witnessing the "hour of glory", not alone but together. Afterwards John made a "place" for her in his home, but she had already become the "place" for him to rest in contemplation of the Saviour, just as she had offered her maternal arms to embrace every Christian disciple – the new "mother of all that live", the new Eve, by virtue of the Holy Spirit dwelling within her.

Illustration: Deisis – Mary, Jesus, John, by Sr Petra Clare

Angelico Press now online

2012-02-02T18:43:00.001Z

The publisher of All Things Made New is now online here.

The Symbolic Imagination

2012-01-27T09:25:00.001Z

Worldly intelligence is not enough. Rationalism equated Reason with discursive, conceptual thought (ratio) – thought that is both “prosaic” and “mechanical”. All very well in its place. But there is another, rather vital kind of intelligence, which the medieval writers tended to call intellectus. “Intellect”, in this sense, refers to our capacity for the intuition of essences. The Intellect is not discursive, linear or mechanical. It makes leaps, it is “poetic”; it is the heart thinking (if by “heart” is understood the highest or most central element of the person, or the faculty in which body and soul are gathered to a unity). Intellect perceives the truth directly, rather than inferring or deducing it; and indeed it may never express that truth in words, for the deepest truth of an essence or of a being is not such that it can be fully captured by any verbal proposition. Intellect, then, perceives the truth directly; but normally in our human condition it does not do so without some kind of mediation or support, at least as a “trigger”; and this support for intellection is called the symbol.

Another distinction, comparable to that between Reason and Intellect, might be made between Fantasy and Imagination. One sees Fantasy at work in the modern media industry, where the manipulation of images fosters the fragmentation of consciousness and the arousal of desire. No wonder so many Church Fathers viewed it in purely negative terms, as leading to spiritual death. But the soul lives by the Imagination, if we may broaden this concept to include the whole process by which we integrate and order the contents of our consciousness, moment by moment. These contents – composed of various sensory impressions, memories and feelings – may be well or badly ordered. If ordered well, then the “meaning” of those experiences becomes apparent. In the case of symbols, this meaning is due to the intelligible light that shines through them, illuminating the rightly-ordered soul (that is, the soul possessed of a “pure heart”). It is this fusion of the light that comes from the spirit or Intellect with the materia of the soul that creates the symbol, and to “read” it as pregnant with meaning is an act of the Imagination.

Symbolism is the primary language in which God addresses us, and the necessary support for intellection. It is the symbolic which is the basis of the sacramental, when God takes a ritual form and fills it with his own presence: the symbol then becomes literally an extension of his Incarnation. A sacrament, then, is a set of symbols that God has chosen to use as a vehicle for the transmission of grace. The symbolism of bread and wine and water is not unrelated to the kind of grace that is transmitted by them, and its purpose. Grace builds on nature. This is why the Church’s neglect of the Imagination has been so catastrophic in recent times, and is closely linked to the collapse of effective catechesis in homes, parishes and schools. Only by the training of symbolic consciousness can the basis be established for a continued, living interest in the truths of faith and the possibility of spiritual progress.

A book of spiritual exercises

2012-01-06T10:13:00.000Z

In the fourth chapter of All Things Made New I refer to a comment by Valentin Tomberg, the (no longer) anonymous Catholic author of Meditations on the Tarot. Here I want to expand that reference. Meditations, of course, is a highly controversial book, and at the mere mention of it orthodox Catholics tend to reach for their pitchforks. The positive (but not unreserved) recommendation by Hans Urs von Balthasar has undoubtedly done more to damage Balthasar's reputation than to elevate Tomberg's. Nevertheless, this strange book contains many interesting insights – things which "ring true", to me at least. Let us look at what he says about the Book of Revelation.

"The key to the Apocalypse is to practise it, i.e. to make use of it as a book of spiritual exercises which awaken from sleep ever-deeper layers of consciousness. The seven letters to the churches, the seven seals of the sealed book, the seven trumpets and the seven
vials signify, all together, a course of spiritual exercises composed of twenty-eight exercises. For as the Apocalypse is revelation put into writing, it is necessary, in order to understand it, to establish in oneself a state of consciousness which is suited to receive revelations."

This is roughly the approach I adopted in my book. The author of Meditations, however, then goes on to specify the "key" to the Apocalypse in the four "arcana" symbolized by the first four cards of the Tarot (which, I should emphasize, is NOT being treated here as a system of divination or black magic). The first stage is that of "concentration without effort" taught by the card "The Magician" (and also, the author points out, by St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross). The first principle (i.e., of "esotericism" – another red-flag word, but meaning here simply the "way of the experience of the reality of the spirit") is expressed in the following formula: Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!

The concentration spoken of is the "fruit of moral purification of the will", the silence of desires, imagination, and discursive thought. "One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony." This "service of silence" is "concentration without effort". Once this state becomes permanent in the soul, all activity is without effort and thus work is transformed into play. One is able to draw from the "zone of perpetual silence" a sort of "secret and intimate respiration, whose sweetness and freshness accomplishes the anointing of work and transforms it into play".

For the "zone of silence" does not only signify that the soul is, fundamentally, at rest, but also, and rather, that there is contact with the heavenly or spiritual world, which works together with the soul. He who finds silence in the solitude of concentration without effort, is never alone. He never bears alone the weights that he to carry; the forces of heaven, the forces from on high, are there taking part from now on.

Hence the last part of the formula, based on Matt. 11:30: make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light. This is the stage at which we perceive the world as composed of correspondences, based on the "analogy of being". We read the book of the world as speaking of spiritual realities.

The second stage ("High Priestess") involves reflection or becoming conscious of the fruits of the first, as indicated by the instructions of Jesus to Nicodemus: "unless one is born of Water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God". Water "must become a perfect mirror of the divine Breath", in a perfect integration of active and passive, taking us into the realm of "Christian Yoga", which leads not to unity (as in Eastern or monistic Yoga) but to unity of two, or in other words the unity of love (lover and beloved), the essence of the Christian Way. This stage is analogous to the incarnation of the Word in the womb of Mary. It corresponds to the formation or opening of the "book" of knowledge – the book with seven seals in Revelation. It is the development of a "gnostic" or contemplative sense (the result of listening in true silence), which is the equivalent of vertical or typological memory, the memory of what is "above".

The third stage ("The Empress") is that of the union between two wills – divine and human ("on earth as it is in heaven"), which is the essence of true "magic", i.e. divine magic or imagination, and the healing miracles of the saints, and the Tree of Life, and the theological virtues, and the seven trumpets – not a forcing of the divine will to accord with ours, but a submission of the human to the divine. And so the fourth stage ("The Emperor"), as I understand it, is that of divine authority, revealed in the seven bowls of wrath and the sufferings of Christ on the Cross where all the consequences of human sin were experienced by God in man.

All of this will seem like nonsense, and dangerous nonsense, unless one can see through the surface of the words to the intentions behind them. And it is true that the author of Meditations sometimes puts a foot wrong – he is not consistently orthodox (and I may discuss those aspects in a later article). The book may be dangerous for many people, and I certainly don't recommend it to everyone. But for some, it can serve as a road out of the "New Age" and the world of "occultism" in the direction of true wisdom and Christian conversion: see my review of the book at the Ignatius web site, and this weblog by a convert from the New Age.

Animals in heaven

2011-12-28T03:03:00.000Z

Will there be animals in heaven? There certainly are. The Book of Revelation (4:7) tells us that around the Throne of God, on each side of it, there are four living creatures "full of eyes" in front and behind: "the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle".

The symbolism is ancient, and I discuss it in All Things Made New. John himself is echoing Ezekiel's vision during the time of the Babylonian exile (1:10), and the image recalls the Babylonian sphinxes or composite creatures known as "cherubims". They also represent the four fixed signs of the Zodiac; that is, the four corners of the celestial cosmos: Aquarius the winged
man, Taurus the ox/bull, Leo the lion, and Scorpio the eagle. For Christians these are also the four Evangelists: Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John. We see them everywhere in Christian art. Perhaps when combined into a single figure, a Tetramorph, they can also be said to represent the integral human being, whose human face speaks for body (ox), soul (lion), and spirit (eagle).

But I think we can also think of them as the noblest representatives of the animal kingdom – even of those animals we see (the ox and the ass) grazing in the stable at Bethlehem and gazing at the child Christ on his throne of hay, or the wild beasts who were with Jesus in the wilderness after his baptism (Mark 1:13). In fact all through the Bible there is a strange correspondence between animals and angels. In the Garden of Eden, God brought the animals to Adam to be named, and one of them (the serpent) was certainly an angel, as we discover later. Maybe all of them were. In that case the submission of the animals to Man for the process of naming would be the "testing of the angels" that legend speaks about – a test which Lucifer failed out of pride, not wanting to serve a creature of mud.

It is not that all animals are angels (I think of a certain dog I know, for example), although on occasion angels have spoken through them. But I suspect each animals species is an angel, and so in heaven we will meet the angel of which our cat or dog or horse – or the more exotic animals we would not let anywhere near us – was an instantiation or expression. Is that a consoling thought, or a terrifying one?

Photo by Rose-Marie Caldecott

"On earth as it is in heaven"

2011-12-25T00:00:00.000Z

The Lord's Prayer itself is composed of eight elements, the first of which invokes the Father, the remainder consisting of seven petitions. The first three elements in fact invoke all three persons of the Holy Trinity, as St Maximus explains:

"The words of the Lord's Prayer point out the Father, the Father's name, and the Father's kingdom to help us learn from the source himself to honour, to invoke, and to adore the one Trinity. For the name of God the Father is the only-begotten Son, and the kingdom of God the Father is the Holy Spirit."

If the "name" is the Son, then when the Lord tells Moses (Numbers 6: 22-7) to "call down my name on the sons of Israel" and bless them with the words, "May the Lord let his face shine on you and be gracious to you", he is instructing them
to pray for the coming of Jesus Christ, in whom all the nations of the earth will be saved (cf. Psalm 66).

The third "petition" is given in the form, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This, you could say, is the petition of Christmas, when "earth and sky changed places for an hour, And heaven looked upwards in a human face" (G.K. Chesterton).

"God is now on earth, and man in heaven." – St John Chrysostom

In Gentile da Fabiano's bright picture, the child lays his hand on the old man's head, the eternal Child touching the aged earth in order to promise a new spring, indeed a resurrection after death. Heaven reaches down to earth, because in this Child and his mother God's will is done in both earth and heaven for the first time since the Fall. A host of others follow the old man to salvation, wealth kneeling before poverty, earthly wisdom before heavenly foolishness.

As Pope Benedict says in his Christmas homily: "if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our 'enlightened' reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God’s closeness. We must follow the interior path of Saint Francis – the path leading to that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see.... Let us allow ourselves to be made simple by the God who reveals himself to the simple of heart."

"Formed by divine teaching, we dare to say..."

2011-12-21T06:00:00.000Z

In the new translation of the Roman Missal, the Lord's Prayer is introduced with the words, "At the Saviour's command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say..." The prayer itself is so familiar to us that we often forget that it was given to the disciples in the context of a series of instructions about how to pray it. What is this teaching in which we have been "formed"?

In Matthew 6: 5-15 the Prayer is taught in the context of the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5, 6, and 7), which concerns the various dimensions of the living of the Christian life, beginning with the Beatitudes which form the portrait of the perfect Christian. Immediately before the teaching on prayer, he speaks of the love of enemies and of almsgiving in secret. This leads him naturally to go on: "when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." This is the lead-in to the Lord's Prayer itself (6: 9-15), and it is paralleled by a passage at the end where he speaks of fasting: "when
you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret, and your Father who is in secret will reward you." He then continues with reference to the nature of the "reward", namely "treasures in heaven" (6: 19-21), adding "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Immediately after that, he adds the instruction about the eye of light ("the eye is the lamp of the body"), the need to serve only one master (6: 24), the need not to be anxious (6: 25-34), and so on. All these teachings are interconnected; they are the unfolding of a single teaching, of a piece with the Lord's Prayer itself. So let us look at this sequence.

1. Almsgiving is the preparation for prayer. Why? Giving to others is the law of love, it is part of the war against greed, it detaches us from material possessions, it makes us rely solely on God – but only if we do it for his sake, without seeking praise or thanks from men. To give away what we have accumulated is to turn our back on the past. In this way it prepares us for prayer, prepares us to be with God alone, makes us "empty" enough to receive treasures from God, prepares us to close the doors.

2. To go into our room and shut the door is to withdraw from the world of the senses, to the interior, our "spirit" which is the apex mentis or "soul of the soul". Since our Father "is in heaven", according to the Prayer, the "secret place" where he is and from which he sees us must be heaven, and our own spirit must be open to it. In John 10: 9, Jesus himself tells us that he is "the door", so it is through him that we enter into God's presence. The door is also the "now", the "present moment" or instant that divides past from future, our one "opportunity"("port" means harbour, entrance, passageway, gate). To enter by this "narrow way" into life (Matt 7: 14) is to defeat the distractions on the two sides of the doorframe, namely our memories of the past (by almsgiving) and our imagination and worries about the future (by fasting).

3. Fasting in a sense follows prayer. Fasting is only made possible by prayer, for we have turned to God for our "bread" and now we can live without material food, or at least we have put material food in its rightful (secondary) place. Otherwise we would be "serving two masters", namely God and our own body. Fasting strengthens our prayer, and extends its effects. Again the "Father who is in secret" is mentioned, but in order to be with him so that he sees us and rewards us we do not once again close the door and go into a private room, but rather anoint our heads (with oil) and wash our faces. In other words we invoke the Holy Spirit (oil), and purify the gaze we turn to the Father, so that our faces are unmarked by the world, and do not reflect worldly concerns that distract us from the presence of God. In particular, in the case of fasting, we refuse to panic at the thought of lacking what we will need to go on living. We "turn our backs on the future".

4. The reward we must seek from God, the "treasure in heaven", is simply the "one thing needful" that is God himself – for God's gift, being perfect, is himself, containing all sweetness, all consolation, all that is good. His gift is the "person-gift", his own nature transformed into gift; that is, the Holy Spirit (as he makes clear in Luke 11: 13, in another version of the giving of the Lord's Prayer which I will comment on later). Where this treasure is, there will our hearts be. To find this treasure is to find our hearts, to find that "heaven" where the Father is, our refuge. "One thing I have asked of the Lord, that I will seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple" (Ps 26[27]: 4).

5. There then follows the teaching that when your eye is "single" (not just "sound" or "pure") your whole body will be full of light. For someone who has withdrawn from the distractions of time, and concentrated on receiving the gift of the Spirit from God, is able to see everything with this noetic light shining from within – in contrast with which the darkness of normal vision seems dark indeed.

Dawn of the Real

2011-12-18T06:00:00.000Z

We tend to think of "the Eucharist" as a "thing", a particular sacrament, albeit a very important one because it contains the Real Presence of Christ. We think of the Mass as an anamnesis, a living memorial or making present, of the Last Supper and of the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. This is all true, but an Orthodox theologian, Fr Alexander Schmemann (d. 1983), opens up another perspective in his books Liturgy and Tradition and For the Life of the World.

Schmemann tells us that the Eucharist is first of all a state of existence. "Eucharist, thanksgiving, is the state of the innocent man, the state of paradise. Before sin, man's life was eucharistic, for 'eucharist' is the only relationship between God and man which transcends and transforms man's created condition" (Liturgy and Tradition, p. 111). "Eucharist", therefore, is a state of being, a state of complete dependence lived as "love, thanksgiving, adoration", and this is true innocence and freedom.

Original sin, he goes on, was "the loss of that eucharistic state", of the blissfully real life we had in love and communion with God. The Old Testament is a record of failed attempts to recover this eucharistic state. In the end, of course, it was restored to us in Christ. "His whole life, and he himself, was a perfect Eucharist, a full and perfect offering to God. Thus the Eucharist was restored to man."

This is what happens in the Mass, as Schmemann tells us in his exposition of the Church's mystagogy. It happens because the Mass (the Divine Liturgy) places us in the "eighth day", the eschaton. It does not just place us in the past, by making us present at the Last Supper or at the foot of the Cross. It cannot, because those events themselves project us into the eschaton, into the state of glory which is the life of the Holy Trinity, in the presence of the holy Angels (invoked in the Sanctus).

Schmemann was quite concerned that the richly symbolic, or allegorical, accounts of the meaning of the Byzantine Liturgy that developed after the first few centuries tend to bear little relation to what actually goes on in the liturgy, as though they were being "read into" it, rather than unfolded from it. In order to get back to a more authentic mystagogy, one has to look at what is actually said and done in the liturgy, and this, he thought, could best be understood in terms of eschatological symbolism. The words and actions performed by the priest and people reflect the very heart of the early Christian experience of the Church as a "passing over" into Christ's kingdom, in order then to bear witness to it in the world.

This authentic early Christian experience of the liturgy is reflected above all in the Book of Revelation, as I indicate in All Things Made New, and we can recapture this experience by attending properly to the Mass and making it our own – by "participating" in the action of the liturgy. As the Roman Canon puts it, the holy victim is "borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty, so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son, may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing."

Detail of the Ghent Altarpiece from Wikipedia.

Seeking the face of God

2011-12-16T06:00:00.000Z

The Genesis account of the Creation and Fall, poetic and metaphysical, takes place in an archetypal landscape that lies behind our world and shapes it from within. In that sense, while we are conscious of the state of fallen nature, into which we have been exiled – it is evident in the facts of death and suffering and the weakness of our will – the archetypal landscape of Genesis is not entirely inaccessible. Chesterton speculated that the garden of Eden lies all around us still, only our eyes have changed so we cannot see it. There are some of the English mystics who have "cleansed their eyes" and seen paradise: Thomas Traherne, William Blake, and Samuel Palmer were among them. Traherne wrote: "Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake
in heaven; see yourself in your Father's Palace... clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars." In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Even fallen nature is created by God and reflective of his nature. So a Monk of Most Holy Trinity Monastery writes on our web site:

"It is not merely by convention that the night sky reflects God's immensity and majesty. Creatures... not only signify the thoughts of God the way words do; they express and make visible what is hidden within God the way a face expresses what is within the person. The expressions on a face are natural signs containing in themselves a sensible likeness of the movements of the soul. A baby understands in a mysteriously direct and untutored way the facial expressions of its mother. Creation, then, is not only the book of God, it is the face of God. And man's contemplation of God through the creation is meant not only to be a deductive interpretation of symbols, but also an intuitive penetration of the personal mystery of God in the face of creation."

Living in the state of exile from God's presence, the Psalmist prays, "You have said, 'Seek my face.' My heart says to you, 'Your face, Lord, do I seek.' Hide not your face from me" (26[27]:8-9). With the Covenant, already the state of friendship with God has begun to be restored. Moses speaks to God "face to face" and his own face is full of light. When Jesus comes, who is the Face of God, his whole body is transfigured on the mountain. The divine countenance is uncovered to the eyes of faith. "No one has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (Jn 1:18). "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9). Now through the grace of Christ all of us can find ourselves in the presence of God, face to face in paradise.

The eyes of faith

2011-12-12T08:35:00.000Z

The first volume of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord lays the foundation for a recovery of the lost art of reading "objective symbolism" and thus the deeper meanings of Scripture. In it the history of the tradition of the spiritual senses – faith as a "theological act of perception" – is thoroughly explored, and the importance of its recovery for our time is explained. The weakness of Christianity after the Enlightenment is due very largely to the distortions induced by rationalism, sentimentalism, moralism, and voluntarism. Balthasar writes (p. 140) that the integration of the act of perception back into our understanding of faith

"is not only of theological and theoretical interest; it is a vital question for Christianity today, which can only commend itself to the surrounding world if it first regards itself as being worthy of belief. And it will only do this if faith, for Christians, does not first and last mean 'holding certain propositions to be true' which are incomprehensible to human reason and must be accepted only out of obedience to authority."

For a generation unwilling to accept the truths of faith on the authority of tradition or of the Church, there has to be an act of seeing into the words of Scripture and the events of history, which reveals not merely the logical consistency of a Creed,
not merely the merits of a moral code, but the beauty which unites logic with life, truth with goodness. The eyes of faith open to reveal "radiance from within" that they are formed to see. Not that faith and knowledge are the same, but they circle around each other, each leading into the other at a deeper level.

As Aquinas saw, the concept of truth applies to things as it does to words, for things are words: the reality of a thing is its inner light, its meaning as an act of communication originating in God. It is therefore possible to penetrate through the many veils of the symbolic, through the natural signs and the metaphors of nature, through the various levels of poetic and metaphorical language – a language which has been refined and abstracted until its metaphorical quality is virtually invisible and easily forgotten – until at last, at its highest and at its deepest, even abstraction gives way, and the human mind enters into the dazzling darkness, which is a mystical union of the knower and the known.

As Origen wrote in the 3rd century, "No one can perceive how great is the splendour of the Word, until he acquires dove's eyes – that is, a spiritual understanding." The people of today are longing for the reintegration of the life of the mind with the life of the spirit, the inner life. It is time for Christianity to offer that to them once again.

Photo by Rosie Caldecott.

The language of the heart

2011-12-10T06:46:00.001Z

If we read the works of the Church Fathers, especially the Alexandrians, one of the things we find is a gift of imaginative penetration into the language of symbolism. “Symbolism” here includes not just the humanly constructed symbols of art and poetry and liturgy, but the natural symbols of earth, air, fire and water, and all the forces and dimensions of nature. This tradition within Christianity did not cease with the Patristic Age. It flows down through all the great mystics and doctors of the Church to our own day. It is clearly manifest in the construction of the great cathedrals of Christendom.

If this intuitive vision or “depth-perception” has been neglected, if we are living only on the surface of our faith, if we have not been listening enough to our poets and visionaries, we will find, as we are finding now, that the faith our ancestors professed is easily dislodged as tumbleweed. It has no deep root in us, for we have not grasped its significance as the key to understanding the world – even
the world of everyday life. The Victorian poet Coventry Patmore, a convert to Catholicism, wrote in Religio Poetae (1893),

“I do not see what is to become of popular Religion, parodied and discredited as Christianity is by the ‘religions’ of Atheists, Moralists, Formalists, Philanthropists, Scientists, and Sentimentalists, unless there can be infused into it some increased longing and capacity for real apprehension.”

He was right, and we have seen exactly what has become of it. He goes on to say that “that which is unseen is known by what is seen”, by natural similitudes or metaphors, and that this is the only true and universal language – “a doctrine destined”, he adds, “to produce some amazing developments of Christianity, which is yet in its infancy, though it seems, as it has always seemed to contemporaries, to be in its decay.”

“It would be of great use to many if the meaning of a few of the principal of the symbolic words common to all great religions were made a part of religious instruction; though it is wonderful how, by a sort of instinct, some of these keys are discerned and read by the simplest and least instructed of those who, among their low surroundings and labours, lead pure and meditative lives.”

Elaborate educational qualifications are not required; humility and openness of heart, and a closeness to nature, constitute a much more important preparation.

Christian philosophers have spoken of the “natural moral law” that is “written on our hearts”. But less attention has been given to that other universal phenomenon, the language of the heart which is a language of symbols. We need to relearn this language if we are ever to speak of Christ to men and women for whom the Gospels are an alien landscape.

Illustration: a view of Orvieto Cathedral, by Rosie Caldecott.

Sacred Signs

2011-12-06T09:19:00.000Z

The little book Sacred Signs by Romano Guardini is a model for a kind of mystagogical catechesis that is sorely lacking in today's Church. In order to appreciate the sacraments and sacramentals, we need to see that they employ a symbolic language that has much wider applications. This can help us see the whole world in a different way, as linked together not just by the causality investigated by modern science, but by analogies and resemblances that add other layers of meaning, and which speak of the "vertical causation" by which God reveals himself in creation. The translator of the book, Grace Branham, in her excellent Preface writes:

'Guardini's "Sacred Signs" was designed to begin our reeducation. It assumes that correspondence between man and nature, matter and meaning, which is the basis of the Sacramental System and made possible the Incarnation. Man, body and soul together, is made in the image and likeness of God. His hand, like God's, is an instrument of power. In the Bible "hand" means power. Man's feet stand for
something also he shares with God, as does his every limb, feature and organ. The writers of the Bible had an inward awareness of what the body means. As the head and the heart denote wisdom and love, so do the 'bones,' 'reins,' and 'flesh' signify some aspect of God written into our human body. The contemplation of the body of Christ should teach us what this deeper meaning is.

'The next step in our reeducation after the symbolism of the body, which once pointed out we instinctively perceive, is for modern man something of a leap. He will have to abandon or leave to one side the notions instilled into him by modern science. Symbolically, if not physically, nature is composed of only four elements: earth, air, water and fire. Earth, humble, helpless earth, stands for man, and water, air, and fire for the gifts from the sky that make him live and fructify. Combined in sun, moon, and stars, they represent Christ, the Church and the Saints, though perhaps rather by allegory than symbolism. The sea signifies untamed and lawless nature, the primordial chaos; the mountains signify the faithfulness of God.

'Objects, things, are not the only symbols. Their use and function, again stretching the term, is a sort of immaterial symbol. The positions and movements of human hands and feet may symbolize God's action. Direction, dimension, are also symbolic, and so are those two philosophical puzzles, time and space, which provide the conditions of human action and progress. The course of the sun is a sign to us of time; by prayer we eternalize time; and the church breaks up the sun's daily course into three or seven canonical hours of prayer. Its yearly course, which governs the seasons and their agricultural operations, signifies to us, as it has to religious man from the beginning, life, death and resurrection, and in revealed history God has accommodated the great works of our redemption to the appropriate seasons.

'The last field of symbolism the sacred signs indicate to us is one that causes us no surprise. Art from the beginning has been symbolic. The Temple of Solomon like the "heathen" temples was built to symbolize the earth, and Christian Churches are (or were) built upon the model of the Temple in Jerusalem and of its exemplar the Temple in Heaven from which the earth was modeled. The axis of a Christian Church, its geometric shape and numerical proportions, the objects used in its worship, the disposition of its windows, its ornamentation to the last petal or arc, all carry our minds to the divine meaning behind the visible form.'

Illustration: The Oxford Oratory restored.

The three stages of Christian life

2011-12-01T09:34:00.001Z

As I said at the end of The Seven Sacraments, "mystagogy" is the stage of exploratory catechesis that comes after apologetics, after evangelization, and after the so-called "sacraments of initiation" (Baptism, Eucharist, and Confirmation) have been received. Baptism and Confirmation may be given only once. Christian initiation, however, is a continuing adventure, since the grace of these sacraments is the source of a new life of prayer that must continue to grow, if it is not to wither and die.

One of the greatest of Christian masters of mystagogy, who wrote under a pseudonym around five hundred years after the birth of Christ, is Dionysius the Areopagite, sometimes called Saint Denys. His influence on Christian mysticism, art, and architecture (through, for example, the school of Chartres in eleventh century France) has been immeasurable, his orthodoxy assured by such admirers and interpreters as Maximus the Confessor in the East and Thomas Aquinas in the West.

Dionysius divided the Christian Way into three phases, which he called purification, illumination and union, and linked these to the three hierarchies of angels, who were thought to assist in each of these three phases—to put it
another way, the active, inner, and contemplative life. The schema has been well tested over the centuries, and many saints have found it helpful. Of course, it remains only a suggestion, and you may find another approach more congenial. Perhaps for this reason, the Catechism does not refer to it very explicitly, even though it speaks of the purpose of creation as union with God the Holy Trinity, and the goal of the Incarnation as the divinization of man by grace (e.g. paras 260, 460).

Dionysius’s threefold classification reflects the Trinitarian structure of the Christian spiritual life. It also corresponds to other familiar triads that are explicitly discussed in the Catechism, such as the three Theological Virtues of faith, hope, and love (paras 1812-29). Faith corresponds to purification, hope to illumination, and love to union. Similarly, the Catechism talks about three Evangelical Counsels as providing a fundamental pattern of authentic Christian existence (paras 915, 1973, 2053). The counsel of poverty corresponds to purification, chastity to hope, and obedience (the integration of our will with God’s) to union.

Finally, the brilliant fourth part of the Catechism divides Christian prayer into three types: vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplation (paras 2699-2719). These, too, can be seen as corresponding to Dionysius’s three phases. Vocal prayer brings the body into line with the spirit by expressing the spiritual Word in voice and gesture. We can think of it as a kind of discipline that points us towards God. Meditation involves the imagination, the “eyes of the heart,” by which we penetrate gradually to the inner meaning of the words and images of faith. Finally, Contemplation is the prayer of silent union with God, a beginning or foretaste of the life of eternity.

Though the Christian religion does not depend on spiritual techniques, it does offer guidance and assistance in developing a life of prayer, and also in putting that prayer into action as a life of love. The encyclical of Pope Benedict, Deus Caritas Est, does just this. But one of the most beautiful passages on Dionysius’s three stages of Christian life was written by Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, in the final chapter of his last book, Memory and Identity. This commentary by a saintly pope can serve as a wonderful encouragement to us to set out on our journey in search of a “deeper Christianity.”

The Purgative Way, John Paul explains, is based on observance of the Commandments (see Matthew 19:16-17). It enables us to discover and live our fundamental values. But these values, he goes on, are “lights” which illuminate our existence and so lead us into the Illuminative Way. For example, by observing the Commandment You shall not kill we learn a profound respect for life. By not committing adultery we acquire the virtue of purity. This is not something negative, but bound up with a growing awareness of the beauty of the human body, both male and female. This beauty, he says, “becomes a light for our actions,” so that we are able to live in the truth.

By following the light that comes from Christ our Teacher, the Pope says, we are progressively freed from the struggle against sin that preoccupies us in the stage of Purification. We become able to enjoy the divine light which permeates creation. This perception of “illumination” is based on a conscious awareness of the world’s nature as gift: “Interior light illumines our actions and shows us all the good in the created world as coming from the hand of God.” The Illuminative Way therefore leads into the Unitive Way, realized in the contemplation of God and the experience of love. Union with God can be achieved to some degree even before death. And when we find God in everything, created things “cease to be a danger to us,” regaining their true light and leading us to God as he wishes to reveal himself to us, as “Father, Redeemer, and Spouse.”

Illustration: Angelic hierarchy by Hildegard of Bingen

The Ascent to God

2011-11-25T18:23:00.001Z

St Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum or The Soul’s Journey Into God is based around the image of the six-winged Seraph seen by St Francis on the slopes of Mount Alverna; a vision that imprinted on him the living seal of the Stigmata. According to Isaiah, “each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew” (6:2). This image may be considered a private revelation to Francis by one of the Seraphim, who presents him with an image of the Crucified that is also an intimation of the divinized form of Man, of Francis himself as the saint he will one day become, transformed by God’s grace.

According to Bonaventure’s interpretation, the two lower wings of the figure correspond to the human body, the second pair to the soul, and the third to the spirit. In several prophetic visions of the seraphim, their wings are covered in eyes to signify consciousness. Thus they represent three types of consciousness – as
he puts it, the awareness of things outside us (in the physical world), of things within us (in the psyche), and of things above us (in God). According to Bonaventure’s commentary, we rise from the level of the Body to that of the Soul and then the Spirit not simply by turning our sight in one direction or another, but by the elevation of our will, in the power of the theological virtues.

The first two wings enable us to know the natural world in which our bodies are situated. Bonaventure calls them Sensation and Imagination. Freedom at this first level, the first pair of wings covering the feet, has to do with choice between possibilities in this material world. In order to achieve this, both wings are needed – that is, both Sensation and Imagination – because we can hardly be said to have a real choice if we can only see what exists in front of us, without being able to imagine alternative courses of action. Nevertheless, at this level there is not yet full moral freedom, no fully developed sense of good and evil, because our choices tend to be dominated simply by pleasure and pain.

Visionof Christ/ Love

“Image” “Likeness”

5^thwing - Spirit - 6^th wing

Intelligenceor Synderesis

Understanding Anamnesis

3^rdwing - Soul - 4^thwing

Reason Faith

Rationality Theological virtues

1^stwing - Body - 2^nd wing

Sensation Imagination

The second two wings, the ones with which we “fly”, are the ones that enable us to advance beyond the world of the senses, firstly by reflecting interiorly on the mind, and then by seeing in our minds the image of God. Bonaventure calls them Reason and Understanding, the latter being illuminated, he says, by the three theological virtues, beginning with Faith. So here we have reached John Paul II’s “Faith and Reason” as the middle pair of three sets of wings. These give us freedom of the second level, which is freedom of movement between earth and heaven – or as John Paul II puts it, freedom to “rise to the contemplation of truth”.

With the help of Reason we can see the invisible patterns within things, and with Faith (our eyes reformed or enlightened by grace) we can grasp the providential pattern or meaning behind them. This is also the level of the virtuous habits that develop in us the divine image. But both wings are necessary because without a supernatural faith in the transcendent source and locus of the Ideas, Reason will quickly close in upon itself, the sacred reality of beauty and divine Wisdom will be denied, and the cosmos will be regarded as a mere piece of machinery to be taken apart and put back together, as has happened in much of modern thought.

And just as, when one has fallen, he must lie where he is unless another is at hand to raise him up, so our soul could not be perfectly lifted up out of these things of sense to see itself and the eternal Truth in itself had not Truth, taking human form in Christ, become a ladder restoring the first ladder that had been broken in Adam.

As for the third and highest pair of wings, Bonaventure calls them Intelligence and Conscience (using the technical term synderesis), meaning the faculties that enable us to contemplate first Being, and then the Good. These two wings covering or touching the face of the figure represent the twofold “contemplation of truth” to which our flight on the wings of Faith and Reason raises us. The freedom of this third level is the power to “be”, with a view to our final end or purpose. If the highest achievement of Reason was to contemplate Beauty in the order and harmony of the cosmos, the achievement of Intelligence, according to Bonaventure, is to contemplate “the divine unity through its primary name which is Being”. (This is the level at which a dialogue with other religions could become truly fruitful.)

But the third level is also where we become able to hear the voice of the transcendent – that which transcends even Being, or (if you prefer) reveals the inner meaning of Being. For Bonaventure says that the sixth wing, “the spark of synderesis”, is the very “summit of the mind” (apex mentis). This is the highest point of the soul, which according to St Jerome, in his commentary on the four-faced cherubim in Ezekiel, is the “spiritual element” in man not extinguished by the Fall. Like an Eagle flying above the Man, the Lion and the Bull, it rises above the rational, the irascible, and the appetitive parts of the soul. It is the “gravity” of the soul towards goodness and away from evil, the deepest mark of the divine image, our point of communication with God. Consequently for Bonaventure it is this wing or faculty that contemplates God not as Being, but as the Good, and not as One but as Three – as Bonaventure puts it, “the most blessed Trinity in its name which is the Good”.

It is in his capacity as the Good, not just as Being, that God reveals himself to be a Trinity of Three Persons – the trinity is the Good “giving itself” perfectly within itself to itself. The human person bears this image of the Trinity as its supreme end or the goal of its existence. As we might say today, the human person is “called to holiness”, or called to self-gift, and in this way will be caught up in the Trinitarian life of God. This is where we derive or intuit the norm of human holiness, and that is why Bonaventure likens the sixth wing to the sixth day of creation, the day on which Man was created. In Christ that human image is seen in its perfection.

So the fifth and sixth wings of the Seraph touch the face of the supreme mystery hidden from all ages. Together, they bring us face to face with the unity of human and divine natures in Christ, the Alpha and Omega, who reveals being as Trinitarian love.

How "Made New"?

2011-11-20T15:49:00.000Z

"Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Cor. 5:17).

As I argue in All Things Made New, this is perhaps the key insight of Christianity – that the coming of Christ changes everything – which the Book of Revelation expresses in rich imaginative language, and the prayers of the Rosary celebrate and penetrate through repeated meditation. The "new" is not yet fully revealed. It is visible to the eyes of faith, and it walked the earth in the days before the Ascension of our Lord into heaven. It is the Resurrection, the world of matter and time made over again by the Creator, purified through death, losing nothing that is of value, and raised into the spiritual world.

Our life is hidden in Christ – that is, our new life, which grows in us as the old continues to pass away, until we find ourselves caught up in the flow of love between the Persons of the Trinity. But how do we know this to be so? People today are reluctant to believe things on "faith", but that is because they oppose faith to experience. "Give me experience and I will believe (if I choose)." In Hebrews 11:1, on the other hand, faith is defined as the "reality" or "substance" (hupostasis, meaning something or someone to be relied upon) of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen. Faith may operate in the dark, but when we do find ourselves in the dark we rely on other senses than sight, particularly hearing and touch. This is perhaps the best analogy. Faith is a supernatural gift akin to the opening of a new sense, enabling us to hold on to a truth that our bodily eyes are simply not yet suited to grasp.

The Book of Revelation is a translation into visual images and symbolic language of the truths grasped by faith. John knows that creation in its entirety has always been ordered towards the Incarnation. Its order and intelligibility are due not to its being a pale imitation of the One, but to the presence within it of the God-Man. This presence is brought about by an action, by God’s willing to give himself both in eternity and in time – and the latter intention necessitates the creation. The universe is grounded in the freedom of love. The wellspring of this Johnannine tradition, that flows down through the Letters and Revelation through to mystical writers such as Dionysius and Eriugena, is to be found in the Prologue to John's Gospel and the Farewell Discourses, where Jesus speaks of the overcoming of the world and his own glorification, the indwelling of the Son in the Father and of the believers in the Trinity.

John Scotus Eriugena describes faith using another metaphor, based on Jesus's words in Scripture. Faith is a seed, like a mustard seed, "a certain principle from which knowledge of the Creator begins to emerge in rational nature." Faith is not an alternative to knowledge, but the beginning of a certain mystical knowledge or experience of God, which leads to him as it matures. It is the awakening of the supernatural life of the soul, the seed of the fruit of the Word. See his commentary on the Prologue in The Voice of the Eagle.

(Readers may also be interested in the very fine philosophical and textual commentary The Beginning of the Gospel of John by James R. Mensch, which is available online minus the Greek.)

Lectio Divina

2011-11-18T07:01:00.001Z

One of the greatest gifts of St Benedict to our civilization was the daily practice of lectio divina or "spiritual reading", which has now spread from the monasteries to enrich the whole Church. The basic steps are outlined in Verbum Domini. Lectio divina is an attentive and reflective pondering of sacred scripture, so that it becomes prayer (CCC, 1177). It enables the believer to “hear God’s Word as it speaks to us, ever personally, here and now” (Pope Benedict). Magnificat has been running a series of lectio meditations each month, and the following example is taken from the November 2011 issue. It is a reflection on Matthew 25: 14-30.

[The kingdom of heaven] is like a man on his way abroad who summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them. Has God really gone away? Certainly it seems like that to us, but perhaps it is we who have become absent from him. But there are two other important points in the same sentence: God calls us, and he has entrusted something to us – namely all that he owns. He holds nothing back, he pours out his nature for us.

To one he gave five talents, to another two, to a third one; each in proportion to his ability. Then he set out. The way he gives is in proportion to ability. He gives only what is appropriate to each one: no more, no less. He knows us better than we know ourselves. And what he gives is described as “talents” – not to be confused with our abilities, which are the reason he gives these talents to us. A talent in the ancient world was a great deal of money. These talents represent the wealth known as “grace”. Only the Virgin Mary is “full” of grace in the sense of possessing it all. The rest of us receive only a part. But what have I received – what help, what support from God has been entrusted to me, and for what purpose? This is what I need to discover.

The man who had received the five talents promptly went and traded with them and made five more. The man who had received two made two more in the same way. But the man who had received one went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. The Church fathers speculated above the symbolic meaning of the numbers five, two, and one, but the essential point is that by “trading” – which means by giving to others and receiving from them – these talents can be doubled. If we give, we receive again not only what we gave away, but the same again. Grace is a gift we keep by spending. But if we “bury” the silver, in order not to give or spend it as the master intends, and to hide his generosity rather than reveal it, we ourselves receive nothing at all.

“Sir,” he said “you entrusted me with five talents; here are five more that I have made.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have shown you can be faithful in small things, I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness”. At the final judgement, the man who “traded” in this life is able to give back to his master what he has received from him. Now he is able to receive infinitely more: he is able to receive the master’s own happiness, to become one with God himself. The same is true of the man who received two talents. Though he received less, his reward is the same, because he did what he could in the same spirit.

Last came forward the man who had the one talent… “I was afraid, and I went off and hid your talent in the ground. Here it is; it was yours, you have it back.” The man’s self-justification is crucial. His failure is a refusal to love and to trust. This means he does not recognize his master’s true nature, and behaves accordingly. Do we not sometimes do the same, behaving as if God needs to be placated or blamed? He throws the gift back in the master’s face. But a gift such as this cannot be returned except by being multiplied by use in the world.

“You wicked and lazy servant! So you knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered? Well then, you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have recovered my capital with interest. The master implies that even fear should have motivated the man to seek some return, albeit by the unclean business of banking, just as some people are motivated to do good to others in this life by the fear of hellfire. But the man simply did nothing.

So now, take the talent from him and give it to the man who has the five talents. For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but from the man who has not, even what he has will be taken away. The man who does nothing with the grace he was given has never truly received it in the first place, and what was given to him will be possessed instead by the one who is most worthy of it.

Concluding prayer: Lord, may we be grateful for whatever we have received, and pour it out for others with the same generosity, not keep it hidden through fear and pride. Amen.

Mysteries of the Rosary

2011-11-16T12:44:00.001Z

The second half of All Things Made New reflects on the mysteries of Christ through the eyes of Mary, and borrows its structure from the prayers and meditations of the Holy Rosary: that is, from the Creed which affirms the whole apostolic faith of the Church (traditionally understood to be composed of twelve parts corresponding to the twelve Apostles), the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, and the Way of the Cross (an expansion of the Sorrowful Mysteries). Whether or not, as legend has it, the Rosary was revealed to St Dominic by Our Lady herself in a vision from heaven, it certainly reflects and evokes a "Marian spirit" of prayer, which is the inner attitude of wonder, gratitude, awe, and love – of seeking to know and to do the will of God "on earth as it is in heaven" and in every moment. Mary is a bridge between earth and heaven, an immaculate or heavenly garden while on earth, raised to heaven in her body as the beginning of the new creation in her Son.

The Rosary is a very "metaphysical" prayer. Mary is like the primordial waters lying open before the life-giving action of God at the beginning of the world.
By praying we are trying to become like her, receptive to the will of God. Mary’s fiat ("Let it be to me according to your word") echoes God’s fiat ("Let there be light") in the very beginning of creation, and her Son’s fiat ("Let not my will but thine be done") in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22: 42).

The five Joyful, five Sorrowful and five Glorious mysteries describe the life of human childhood, the adult life and the supernatural life. Taken as applying to the individual soul they describe, first, the life of the soul as it opens itself to grace, second as it struggles to follow Christ, and finally as it experiences the transformation wrought by grace. Blessed John Paul II introduced a further set of five "Luminous" mysteries to be prayed between the Joyful and the Sorrowful. These summarize Christ’s public ministry between his Baptism and his Passion (the Baptism in the Jordan, the Miracle at Cana, the Preaching of the Kingdom, the Transfiguration, and the Eucharist).

Ancient and medieval thinkers found symbolic significance in numerical patterns. The Apostles’ Creed through which one enters the Rosary has twelve sections, like the gates of the New Jerusalem. The Lord’s Prayer which begins each sequence has seven, like the seven sacraments or the seven days of creation. The Glory Be with which each sequence ends is Trinitarian. Each sequence of beads is made up of ten Hail Marys, ten being the sum of seven and three, itself symbolic of the expansion of the totality of numbers contained in One. A Rosary contains five mysteries, five being the number of life and growth, found especially in flowers and leaves. (Five is also closely related to the Golden Ratio and thus to many aspects of beauty in nature.)

By the addition of the five Luminous Mysteries, bringing the number of rosaries to four, Pope John Paul II seems to have brought the ancient tradition to its completion. The fourfold structure of the Mysteries recalls the fourfold Gospels, and each of the four sets of Mysteries corresponds to one of the Gospels in a special way. The Joyful Mysteries correspond to the Gospel of Matthew, whose symbol is a Man and who emphasizes the titles “Son of Man”, “Son of Abraham”, “Son of David”. The Sorrowful correspond to Luke, whose symbol is the Ox and whose Gospel emphasizes the role of Jesus as sacrificial victim. The Luminous would then correspond with Mark, whose symbol is the Lion, and who proclaims the divine power of the Lord. Finally the Glorious Mysteries can be associated with John, whose symbol is the Eagle, and who teaches us the most about the intimate relationship between the Son and his heavenly Father.

The illustration shows a Rosary icon from Innerwindows.

How to read the Bible

2011-11-15T21:28:00.001Z

As longs the deer for running streams,
So longs my soul for Christ, the Well:
From him, the living waters flow
Through wastes where withered spirits dwell.

These lines from a popular hymn evoke the picture in the title of this blog, which is a detail from the ceiling above the shrine of Our Lady of Oxford. They express the yearning for living waters that we feel as we approach Sacred Scripture. A rich discussion by Adrian Walker of Scripture as "living water" especially in the thought of Benedict XVI was published in Second Spring and Communio and may be found online here.

In All Things Made New I provide a summary of the current state of Biblical scholarship, which is in the process of outgrowing an obsession with historical-critical interpretation. In the Middle Ages it was commonplace to speak of the four
"senses" of Scripture: the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. According to the medieval rhyme: "The letter teaches what took place, the allegory what to believe, the moral what to do, the anagogy what goal to strive for." In Theological Fragments (Ignatius Press, 1989, 109-127), Henri de Lubac comments that the "allegorical" approach reads the narrative in relation to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, or the Old Testament as pointing to the New; the "moral" (or tropological) involves the grasp of the “interior drama”, understanding the Bible as a mirror of the soul and its struggle with sin; while the “anagogical” pertains to the divine realities themselves, the highest mystical doctrines, and the end of the world.

Modern scholars, influenced by Enlightenment thinking for better or worse, tended to reject allegorical and other kinds of spiritual interpretation in order to concentrate on the "literal", now reduced to meaning merely what the original (human) author was intending to say. In this way the spiritual usefulness of Scripture for the devout reader was diminished. Much was discovered about the historical process that led to the formation of the canon and the redaction of texts, but what was lost was an ability to read those texts as living waters flowing from God, in the Holy Spirit who guides the Church through historical time and beyond. More recent biblical exegesis have taken other directions: "canonical criticism" in particular enables us to recover a sense of the Bible as a living whole. But we need also to become more sensitive to the language of symbolism and its importance for the biblical authors if we are to understand their true intentions. (See Jason Byassee on the "return to allegory" movement in Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine.)

I would almost say that we should once more take as primary the fact that every word of sacred scripture is true in an exact symbolic or spiritual sense, and as secondary the fact that some of it may be true also in a literal, historical-realist sense. The Bible is written in the language of the spirit and the imagination. Poets tend to understand this quite well. The Victorian convert Coventry Patmore, in an essay called "The Language of Religion", once said that "neither in ancient nor in modern times has there been a poet, worthy of that sacred name, who would not have been horrified had he fancied that the full meaning of some of his sayings could be discerned by more than ten in ten thousand of his readers." How much more is this true of Scripture, a document crafted by the genius of God working with man, to speak to each of us in the present moment of our soul and its journey back to God.

Then will I dwell forevermore
Where crystal rivers run like fire
From Christ whose presence fills my heart
And satisfies my life's desire.

The Unveiling

2011-11-14T08:34:00.001Z

The Apocalypse ("Unveiling") has long been a challenge to exegetes. In fact it is one of the most mysterious works of the inspired imagination known to humanity. It is more than a vision of the End Times, with the great battles and judgments depicted in paintings throughout the Middle Ages. It is a vision of the underlying structures of the cosmos, and the reality of the spiritual life. The City that descends out of heaven in the final chapters of that great book is the City of the human soul, redeemed and purified, and of the community of eternals – a human and angelic society that is the goal and fulfilment of history. Permeated with
number symbolism, the book is best read in the light of the great mystical Jewish and Pythagorean wisdom tradition, forgotten and despised in an age of materialism. (Though Isaac Newton spent as much time trying to unravel its esoteric meaning as he did laying the foundations of modern physics.)

The Apocalypse was designed to have a certain effect on its hearers when read aloud, and it was to be read ecclesially, in the communion of faith. It should not be treated as a mere book-end, nor dismissed as the eccentric indulgence of an overheated imagination. It has to be received into the soul; it should make a difference to the hearer; it should be taken seriously. The first half of my book was written to explore how John’s extraordinary cascade of images might help to "unveil" the whole Christian tradition for us. I wanted to demonstrate how – with the eyes of faith – the Apocalypse can be seen as a compendium of the Christian mysteries.

As a layman trying to understand the Book of Revelation, some of the texts I found most helpful were by Ian Boxall, Richard Bauckham, and Austin Farrer. Scott Hahn, who sees the Apocalypse as a liturgical commentary, was also an influence on this section, as was Margaret Barker, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and of course Pope Benedict XVI, who for me exemplifies the most balanced ("post-critical") approach to biblical interpretation – a subject we will return to very soon.

In general I avoid the kind of literalistic and often lurid interpretations that take John's prophecies to be a coded description of some very particular historical reality – even though our own period, with its wars and famines, plagues and earthquakes, and the collapsing towers of the worldly city, "Babylon the Great", seems to lend itself to such an approach. I take the prophecies as applicable to any time, and as spiritually applicable to each of us in particular. Readers who want to study more "sensational" aspects might refer to Emmett O'Regan's recent book Unveiling the Apocalypse, which relates the Apocalypse not only to recent historical events but to apparitions and prophecies of Our Lady at Fatima and La Salette. It also has some interesting sections on Gematria, a topic I also touch on and will be discussing in this column later.

John and Mary

2011-11-14T03:16:00.001Z

In the next few posts, I want to reflect on some elements in the book All Things Made New. I have already situated it in the context of mystagogy, or the attempt to penetrate more deeply into the richness of Christian teachings for the sake of truer conversion. The blurb explains that "The shattering impact of the Incarnation was felt first by the Mother of Jesus and by his closest disciples. Its meaning was best understood by Mary as she pondered these things in her heart, and the beloved disciple, John, who took her into his home. Mary and John at the foot of the Cross are witnesses and teachers of the mystery of God’s love." Thus
the book revolves around the interpretation of some characteristically "Johannine" and "Marian" texts, namely the Book of Revelation and the prayers of the Rosary. I take these as opening up the "esoteric" dimension of Christianity.

The link between Mary and John is emphasized particularly by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who in his book The Office of Peter and elsewhere speaks of the fundamental "constellation" of relationships around Jesus, represented by Mary, John, Peter, and Paul, each having a distinctive and essential role or office in the Church that is the extension through time of the Incarnation – Paul being the bridge to the Gentiles, Peter the rock of "Office" on which the Institution is built, John the contemplative heart of the Church, and Mary (closest of all) the innermost core of the immaculate Church in person, the "Church of Love". John forms the central link between Mary and the office of Peter which guarantees the Church's unity (see also Balthasar, Our Task, 66). In the Mother-Son relationship established supernaturally upon the Cross by the last words of Jesus to Mary and John is preserved and, as it were, replicates within the Church the filial relationship, the childlikeness, of the eternal Son himself, and it becomes the model of true Christian discipleship.

Balthasar writes in Mary – The Church at the Source (p. 140):

The Church is primarily feminine because her primary, all-encompassing truth is her ontological gratitude, which both receives the gift and passes it on. And the masculine office, which has to represent the true giver, the Lord of the Church (albeit within the Church's feminine receptivity), is instituted in her only to prevent her from forgetting this primary reality, to ensure that she will always remain a receiver and never become self-assertive possessor and user.

The institution of masculine office in the Church, and therefore hierarchy, via the "apostolic foursome" of Peter, John, James, and Paul, takes place within this (ultimately more important) feminine, Marian act of consent to which John is the bridge.

It was with this pattern of relationships in mind that I chose to focus on Revelation and the Rosary and illustrate the book with Daniel Mitsui's fine drawing of Mary and John at the foot of the Cross. The "Johannine writings" of the New Testament are quite diverse, comprising the Fourth Gospel, several Letters, and the Apocalypse. Most scholars these days would deny they were all written by the same person (though some assert this on questionable grounds), but all I really take for granted in the book is that they came from the community or tradition we associate with the Evangelist, and bear his "mark" and spirit. John was the one who lay on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper and spoke with him most intimately. His Gospel is seemingly the most theologically sophisticated (and for that reason often set apart from the synoptics). The visions of Revelation, whether they were granted to the Evangelist in his old age or not, bespeak the same theology – the same high, Trinitarian christology – and the same intimacy. This is an "eagle's eye" view of the salvation wrought by God in history, and a mystical commentary on the Divine Liturgy, which reveals itself to be the wedding feast of the Lamb.

For image see "The Story of the Cross".

Is Christianity Esoteric?

2011-11-14T02:49:00.001Z

“For He was sent not only to be known but also to remain hidden” – Origen.

The term “esotericism” dates from the nineteenth century (along with “mysticism” and “occultism”). In his book Guenonian Esoterism and Christian Mystery, Jean Borella describes it as a form of hermeneutic “apt for the opening of our consciousness to the presence of the Spirit hidden in revealed forms and sometimes under the appearance of the most baffling symbols,” developed for an age in which the sense for symbolism and tradition has long been in retreat – relating this also to Saint Paul’s contrast between the letter and the spirit, and the mystagogical catechesis of the Alexandrian Church Fathers.

Strictly speaking, there is no Esoteric Christianity, in the sense of a secret teaching different from that which you will find in the Catechism and known only by a inner ring or elite, because Christianity by its nature dissolves boundaries like that. It is itself a kind of Esoteric Judaism turned inside out and offered to the world. There is something bizarre about this. It is pearls cast before swine, riches trampled in the mire. Jesus talks of this in the parable of the Wedding Banquet, where the Lord in the story drags the hedgerows and street corners for riff-raff to fill his table, the honoured guests having declined to attend.

There is no Esoteric Christianity; there is, however, a Christian Esoterism. (See longer article.) Anyone can pick up a pearl, but only a few know what to do with it. "Even so truly a ‘church of the people’ as the Catholic Church does not abolish genuine esotericism. The secret path of the saints is never denied to one who is really willing to follow it. But who in the crowd troubles himself over such a path?" – Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Jean Borella

2011-11-11T22:21:00.001Z

“Having set out in search of the secret of Charity, one day I ‘encountered’ Trinitarian theology… I went back to ancient doctrines like a delighted child going from discovery to discovery, from treasure to treasure, from marvel to marvel…. Drinking in the freshness of the ages, I felt my Christian soul revive. Henceforth it was impossible to repudiate the source of our faith, impossible not to offer it to drink.” (Jean Borella, The Secret of the Christian Way, p. 3.)

An important reference-point for today's revival of metaphysical Christianity is the work of Jean Borella, a Catholic Traditionalist who has in recent years distanced himself from Frithjof Schuon, having concluded that both Schuon and Guénon had failed to understand some crucial elements of the Christian tradition (as
crucial, indeed, as the sacraments and the Trinity). His book The Sense of the Supernatural, building on the analysis of de Lubac, is an attempt to wrestle with the question of what went wrong in the Church that led to the modern loss of the sense of the sacred, and to formulate a valid ontology and epistemology that will be acceptable within present-day Catholicism. He recognized the “new evangelization” initiated by John Paul II as “a project of vast proportions”, undermining the tension with the Catholic Traditionalists. “By calling them to the task of recovery in which he has been involved, he is showing that henceforth it is not absurd to carry on this struggle from within the Church”.

Borella is particularly concerned, in the last part of his book, with the concept of “deification” and its implications. He argues that the loss of the sense of the sacred and the supernatural in the modern world (and among the Modernists in the Church) is linked, as de Lubac showed in the 1940s, with the loss of a sense of human transcendence – the possibility of “transformation into God” as taught by Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the great mystics. Once again, he insists on the tripartite nature of the human being, with the spirit or “soul of the soul” as the actual place of our union with God. It is in the heart and centre of the soul that “the divine Essence unites with created being and becomes the very act of its intellect”; in other words, where the knowledge and will of the creature become one, in perfect receptivity to the actus purus which is God. Borella adds:

“Does all this involve the literal identification of the creature’s substantial being with God? Certainly not. The created being as such remains a created being, and never ‘becomes’ the Creator.... Far from effacing the creature, deification alone makes it possible for it to exist in its integral truth. If deification were equivalent to a negation of the creature, it would be a sheer contradiction, since to negate the creature is to negate the creative Will of God and therefore God himself. Deification is, to the contrary, the only possible affirmation of the creature.”

It is, in fact, the completion of that process which the Christian tradition calls “creation”. The final paragraph of Jean Borella’s book is full of significance for us:

“The grace of the active assumption of finiteness is conferred on us by the Passion of Christ’s dying on the Cross. ‘Abandoned’ of God, he renounces the ‘God’ of his natural will and goes, with a single loving rush, right to the end, right to the exhaustion of created being. In him the human will, espousing in a mortal and crucifying union the creative Will of divine Love, accepts being only what it is; it wills its own ontological finiteness, it accomplishes the infinite Will of the Father.”

Trinitarian Man

2011-11-10T10:14:00.000Z

What is man? For Descartes, and for most of us unconsciously, man is a compound of body and soul; that is, a body and various mental states and faculties uneasily stitched together. But the traditional conception of man is rather more sophisticated, and needs to be recovered. We see a reference to it in St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians (5:23): “spirit and soul and body”.

Cardinal Henri de Lubac devoted a long essay to the development and subsequent neglect of Pauline tripartite anthropology in the Christian West (it can be found in the volume Theology in History, published by Ignatius Press in 1996).
In the first part of this he establishes that St Paul’s references to this anthropology have deep roots in Scripture as well as in human experience. They were not simply imported from an alien Greek philosophy, as some have alleged (de Lubac notes the existence of “Plato phobia” among many Christian scholars, especially in the modern period). But the term for “spirit” (pneuma) remains deliberately ambiguous in Paul. On the one hand it may refer to the Holy Spirit or divine life implanted in man by baptism; on the other, it may refer to a part of man, and specifically to that “breath of life” which God breathed into his nostrils at the very beginning (Gen. 2:7). It becomes clear as he proceeds that we are talking of the “highest point of the soul”, and that the ambiguity in question is precisely due to the paradoxical relationship of nature to grace in our human destiny. We are created to share in the life of God, but we are not compelled to do so: we can attain that life only through the exercise of freedom.

The Fourth Council of Constantinople (870) is sometimes thought to have replaced this paradoxical, tripartite anthropology within orthodox Catholicism by a more a dualistic understanding of man. However, that Council took the position it did in order to oppose an incipient dualism. It was concerned to ensure that the distinction of the spirit from the soul of man would not introduce a “Gnostic” duality into the human subject of salvation (see Catechism, para 367). St Thomas, similarly, four centuries later, was concerned to defend the immortality of the soul by resisting the teaching of the Arabian Peripatetics who made a single angel the common source of intellectual illumination for all men. For Thomas, the light flows directly from God to the human spirit, and belongs to the essence of the soul, though it may be “strengthened” by an angel’s light. St John of the Cross (in his “Counsels of Light and Love”) seems to imply actual angelic transmission to the individual soul: “Consider that your guardian angel does not always move the desire to act, though he ever illumines the reason”.

De Lubac, at any rate, does not judge the decision of 870 worthy of mention, but sees the tripartite tradition continuing without interruption right through the early Scholastic period. In St Thomas, the distinction takes a slightly different form: that between action and contemplation, or the moral and the mystical life, or ratio and intellectus. It re-emerges fully in the Renaissance with Nicholas of Cusa and Ficino. Despite the triumph of the new Cartesian dualism in the universities, the authentic Christian tradition shines through in a continuous chain of authors up to and beyond Paul Claudel (who speaks of “this sacred point in us that says Pater noster”). How could it not, when the experience of every spiritual master confirms the existence in us of a place where we encounter God - the spirit, or “soul of the soul”?

Spirit of Assisi

2011-11-08T02:11:00.001Z

Religious differences as a factor in social violence has become a familiar theme, and one which the New Atheists make much of. In October at Assisi, the Pope invited to a gathering of religious believers a number of agnostics, led by Julia Kristeva – people “people to whom the gift of faith has not been given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God.” He saw that such seekers are the true allies of the faithful. They seek truth and goodness. They are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.” “They ask questions of both sides,” never giving up hope in “the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it.” But they will not settle easily and blindly into faith. They challenge the followers of religions “not to consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others.” This is the critique we need, for believers have done more harm than good by their attempts to manipulate others into faith. Once again, we see the importance of keeping faith in harmony with reason, because it is unreasonable to trust hypocrites. Unfortunately, physical violence in the name of faith is only the tip of the iceberg: violence begins with judgment and rejection, fear and resentment, anger and pride. The path to peace is the path of prayer and opening to grace, which alone can renew the face of the earth.

For an interesting article on the Pope's approach to inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue, by Gabriel Richi-Alberti of Oasis, go here.

The Lord's Prayer

2011-11-04T10:26:00.000Z

In my new book (see below) I include a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, and in The Seven Sacraments (on the right) I tried to show how the seven petitions of the Prayer correspond to other patterns of seven in the Christian tradition, and to the needs of the human heart. But there is always more to say about this Prayer, so deceptively simple and yet profound. One of the most fascinating and richest expositions I have ever seen is G. John Champoux’s The Way to Our Heavenly Father, which shows how the whole of Scripture and all the spiritual teachings of the Fathers can be organized and correlated with the various parts of the Prayer, as though before our eyes the entire Christian revelation was flowering and refolding back into the one Prayer. The collection consists not of detailed commentary (although there are
wonderful commentary sections) but mainly of extended quotations from Scripture and the Eastern Orthodox Fathers arranged to help open the spiritual eye of the heart. The Commandments, the Liturgy, the Gospels, the Apocalypse, and the Psalms are formed into “verbal icons” of extraordinary intensity and luminescence. The book may be one of the great spiritual achievements of our time. It is a book to pray with, a page at a time.

The beginning of the Prayer itself is implictly Trinitarian. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” anchors it in the Father, to whom it is addressed. “Hallowed be thy name,” refers to the Son, who is the name or icon of God for man, the one who names the Father “Abba” and whose own existence is reciprocal with that of the Father, since there is no fatherhood without filiation, without generation. “Thy Kingdom come” is about the Holy Spirit, through whom the presence of the Father and Son are breathed into the world, and “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is actually accomplished.

After that, the Prayer asks of this Trinitarian God the four things we need above all else: the Bread to sustain eternal life, the forgiveness to be able to receive this Bread (which is conditional on our readiness to forgive others), defence against temptation on the way to eternal life, and final deliverance from all evil.

Announcement

2011-10-27T03:53:00.000+01:00

The book after which this blog is named is now published. You can order it from Amazon US, or Amazon UK, or through your local bookshop, or the publisher. ISBN: 978-1-59731-129-8. The spectacular cover art is by Daniel Mitsui. Go to his web-site for a detailed view. Review copies of can be requested from the publisher, John Riess (jriess718@gmail.com). Angelico Press is new, so watch out for some interesting books in the next few months.

All Things Made New explores the Christian mysteries by studying the symbolism, cosmology, and meaning of the Book of Revelation – reading this as a prophetic and mystical commentary on the Divine Liturgy rather than a set of predictions – as well as the prayers and meditations of the Rosary, including the Apostles’ Creed and the Our Father. The shattering impact of the Incarnation was felt first by the Mother of Jesus and by his closest disciples. Its meaning was best understood by Mary as she pondered these things in her heart, and the beloved disciple, John, who took her into his home. Mary and John at the foot of the Cross, depicted on the cover by Daniel Mitsui, are witnesses and teachers of the mystery of God’s love. The book attempts to explore the Christian Mysteries as much as possible "through the eyes" on John and Mary, with the help of the Book of Revelation and the Rosary.

I have run a series of posts on this blog discussing aspects and themes of the book that may be of interest to potential readers. The series runs in order as follows: Mystagogy, John and Mary, The Unveiling, How to read the Bible, Mysteries of the Rosary, How "Made New"? The series then continues through November and December 2011. Readers interested in Mystagogy might like to know that All Things Made New forms a sequel to The Seven Sacraments : Entering the Mysteries of God.

To go to the Home Page of this blog click here or on the main title bar above.

Faith, reason, and imagination

2011-09-22T12:43:00.000+01:00

The French poet Paul Claudel once wrote:

"The evil we have been suffering from for several centuries is less a split between Faith and Reason than between Faith and an Imagination become incapable of establishing an accord between the two parts of the universe, the visible and the invisible."

The quotation comes from an excellent article on Claudel by Michael Donley in the Temenos Academy Review for 2005 (p. 45). How might this thought be expanded? What is the role of the Imagination?

The imaginative faculty mediates between the sensory and the intellectual world in its own way just as the reasoning faculty does. But like all mediators it is ambiguous. It has two sides or faces, depending in this case on its relationship to the higher spiritual faculty. When the imagination faces "upwards" towards the archetypes of reality, assisted by the active imagination, it is capable of mediating and transmitting truth, as it does in the true visions received by prophets, and also in the works
of the great artists and poets. In such cases the "matter" that it receives from the senses and holds in the memory is transformed and raised up into a symbolic form, luminous with the reality of the higher world. One sees this in Byzantine icons, or great works of art.

But when the imagination is turned downwards, it can dissolve and obstruct our perception of truth, leading us away from a world of order into a desolate and chaotic landscape of shadows. Some of the less uplifting products of the surrealist and expressionist movements in art might provide examples of this. Fantasy that is oriented in this direction leaves the soul feeling bereft, melancholy or even unclean. An extreme example would be pornographic images, which focus the mind on the human body as such, virtually excluding any consideration of the spiritual dimension or the person as a whole.

Implicit in what I have been saying is a theory of askesis or spiritual purification, according to which human desire must be progressively redirected. From facing downward it must be turned towards the light, the only direction in which true human fulfilment is possible. This is not the same as trying to escape the body, as if it were an evil trap. On the contrary, our bodies must be raised up to the level of spirit - in token of which both Christ and his Mother were assumed into heaven.

S.T. Coleridge once said, "The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am". No wonder Blake identified the Imagination with Christ himself. But the Imagination is situated in a hierarchy of levels and may face either way. When correctly oriented in accordance with sanctity, it “repeats”—to use Coleridge’s word—in the finite mind the eternal act of God, which is not merely to create, but to incarnate the Invisible. Yet the goal of this incarnation is to unite the material cosmos with the God who transcends it. As Chesterton said in his book on Blake, "the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material". God and the spiritual realities are not less solid and definite than we are but more so.

The new Missal translation

2011-09-01T09:20:00.000+01:00

It has been called "the flawed product of a flawed process", and so it is. But then so was the previous one; flawed in different and perhaps more serious ways. The new English translation of the Roman Missal being introduced across the whole English-speaking world from 4th September is more archaic in style, perhaps more dignified, richer in scriptural reference, and certainly more faithful to the underlying Latin. But the action of the Mass is the same and hasn't changed.

We have been explaining the changes in Magnificat month by month. One of the most obvious is in the greeting at Mass. The Priest says, "The Lord be with you," and we no longer respond, "And also with you," but, "And with your spirit" (which is exactly what the Latin says: "Et cum spiritu tuo"). What does it mean? As Lawrence Lew explained in the June issue of Magnificat, the expression comes from Saint Paul (cf. Ga 6: 18; Ph 4: 23; 2 Tm 4: 22), and is linked with the greeting from Ruth 2: 4. the “spirit” refers to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, specifically here with reference to the ordained who “performs the sacrifice in the power of the Holy Spirit”. In a sense, we are praying in charity that our priest might abide in the Spirit. A prayer always needed, and never more than today when priesthood is under such attack.

For Anthony Esolen's commentary for Magnificat on the poetry of the new translation, see Zenit or First Things.

Theology of the body

2011-07-29T09:05:00.005+01:00

An old friend of mine (and long ago of Charles Williams), Lois Lang-Sims, recently said that “All these teachings about sex and about the sanctity of human life and the human body have their roots in metaphysics,” which, she added, is the last thing anyone these days wants to talk about. Pope John Paul II understood this and called for a renewal of metaphysics in his encyclical Fides et Ratio. The key to his Theology of the Body seems to me this:

“The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” – John Paul II, 20 February 1980, General Audience

The same Pope talks about the “spousal” or “nuptial” meaning of the body, which he says is “not something merely conceptual” but concerns a “way of living the body” in its masculinity and femininity, an “inner dimension… that stands at the root of all facts that constitute man’s history”. This nuptial meaning has been limited, violated and deformed over time and by modern culture, until we have almost lost the power of “seeing” it, but it is still there to be discovered with the help of grace, like a spark deep within the human heart. The “language of the body”, therefore, must be recovered, and that is what the Pope seeks to do. But as he says, correctly reading this “language” results not so much in a set of statements as in a “way of living”.

Since I posted this item, a brilliant interview on the subject has appeared with Bishop Jean Lafitte. And if anyone wants to study the subject in depth, the best book-length introduction I know is Called to Love, by Anderson and Granados. I will return to this subject on another occasion.

Hortus Conclusus

2011-07-16T09:51:00.001+01:00

The medieval mystics loved to meditate on the Virgin Mary as the “enclosed garden” or “walled garden” of the Song of Songs, and as the new “Garden of Eden”, Paradise restored. St Bernard of Clairvaux is frequently cited – as here, by St John Eudes in The Admirable Heart of Mary (Loreto Publications, 2004, 70):

Thou art an enclosed garden, O Mother of God, wherein we cull all kinds of flowers. Among them, we gaze with particular admiration on thy violets, thy lilies, and thy roses, which fill the House of God with their sweet fragrance. Thou art, O Mary, a violet of humility, a lily of chastity, and a rose of charity.”

In the original Garden, St John comments, man hid from God and God had to call for him. In the new Garden, the second Paradise, God hid himself and his glory for love, so that the three kings who came from afar had to ask, “Where is he?”

The tradition of the hortus conclusus is entwined with that of the Immaculate Conception, because just as Adam was made from the earth before the Fall, so it seemed eminently fitting that the second Adam should be made from a woman similarly untouched by sin. God was making a new beginning for the human race. In order to plant the new Tree of Life, he had to establish around it an enclosed garden, protected from the corruption of the world outside. That garden was Mary.

More on offering

2011-07-11T19:26:00.001+01:00

I think we are too quick to think in terms of rules in both the moral and spiritual life (which are really the same thing), without realizing what those rules really mean. There is a rule, for instance, about going to confession before receiving communion if we are in a state of serious sin, and lots of lists of what sins are "serious". But the point is surely that the spiritual effect of communion depends on the quality of our self-gift. When the priest prepares the offerings at the altar, we are attempting to join ourselves to those gifts, so that the self we give to God in them can given back to us transformed. In receiving communion we receive into ourselves not just the host, but Christ himself, and in him the new self that he is wanting us to become. But sin is always a form of attachment to the old self. Thus if we are in a state of sin before Mass we are in a state of attachment, of holding back part of ourselves from the gift - and this part of ourselves cannot be transformed. Going to confession is a way - the best way, sometimes the only way - of detaching ourselves from ourselves, so as to benefit from the Mass.

Forgiveness

2011-06-10T19:10:00.000+01:00

“Forgiveness does not mean that God says to me: Your evil deed shall be undone. It was done and remains done. Nor does it mean that he says: It was not so bad. It was bad – I know it and God knows it. And again it does not mean that God is willing to cover up my sin or to look the other way. What help would that be? I want to be rid of my transgression, really rid of it….”

This is a quotation from Romano Guardini (one of the excellent daily spiritual meditations in the monthly publication Magnificat, in this case scheduled for the Sept 2011 issue, pp. 142-3). Guardini continues: “What possibility then does exist? Only one: that which the simplest interpretation of the Gospel suggests and which the believing heart must feel. Through God’s forgiveness, in the eyes of his sacred truth I am no longer a sinner; in the profoundest depths of my conscience I am no longer guilty.”

“I am no longer a sinner,” although the sin remains. What does that mean? That the “I” has changed. I am no longer the person who committed that sin. That person has been detached from me, stripped off, and washed away. I am a new person, though I include everything that was good and worthwhile in the old – even the wounds left by sin have now become my trophies and emblems. Only God can bring about such a new birth, such a resurrection, such a “new earth”.

The spiritual machine

2011-06-06T19:06:00.000+01:00

I was speaking with someone who has lost heart because going to Mass seems to do nothing for him. There is no spiritual experience involved, so that he is just going through the motions. It increasingly feels like a waste of time, if not actual hypocrisy. The answer to this problem, I think, lies in how we participate. The Mass is the greatest-ever work of "spiritual engineering". Like a suspension bridge over some huge chasm, or a giant piece of machinery, it is intended to do something. But in order for it to do its work, you need to cooperate or participate. You do have to walk over the bridge, or turn the machine on. Most of the time we don't do that: we just watch. The only way to participate is to give ourselves spiritually - that is, in our will, or intention - to the action of the Mass. The Liturgy of the Word at the beginning of Mass, with the act of contrition and the reading of Scripture, is designed to prepare us to do that. The actual giving takes place in the Offertory, when we add our hearts to the sacrifice. The first part is like a kind of "melting" of our hard hearts, which are frozen in a particular configuration, a particular shape. We are supposed to then "pour ourselves" into the Mass, just like molten metal is poured from a crucible into a mould, where it can be set into a new shape. But this is harder than it sounds. We tend to want to hold at least part of ourselves back. We are afraid of changing, or we are attached to something we don't want to let go of, which we can't give to God. That is the struggle, and it is that which makes Mass interesting. But to the extent - even if it is a limited extent - that we manage to let go and to give something of ourselves to God, he is able to do something with it, and we will immediately start to feel something very definite, something subtle but unmistakeable, which confirms to us that the process is happening.

Giving it "up"

2011-05-30T07:06:00.004+01:00

A scene from Leonie Caldecott's "The Quality of Mercy"

One of the main difficulties people have with Catholic belief is the notion of sacrifice. Actually, sacrifice is central in every religion, but very little is done to explain to young people what it means and why it is necessary. Here is one way of doing it.

We sacrifice something good, or enjoyable – we give it up – not as a punishment for sin, and not merely to demonstrate our obedience, but in order to obtain something better. Or rather, to make room in ourselves for something better that we hope for. Why get rid of something? To make room for something else. We give up food, or sleep, or sex, for the sake of something better – a sense of divine presence, or a more intimate union with God. We give up bad company in order to find good company. Naturally, as soon as we stop believing in that better thing, or its possibility, sacrifice will stop making sense to us.

It should be easy enough to explain, because this principle works in everyday life without any reference to religion at all. I give up snacks for the sake of slimming, I give up a lazy afternoon in order to exercise, I give up my favourite TV programme in order to spend time with someone who needs me. This implies that there are some goods and pleasures – feeling healthy, seeing a friend – that are qualitatively better, “higher”, than others. Extend the principle to include goods that are better yet, and types of happiness even more powerful and refined, and the notion of religious sacrifice suddenly makes perfect sense.

As we kneel at Mass, giving ourselves to God by identifying with the bread and wine that the priest is about to offer on the altar, we are emptying ourselves in order to receive a new self, the life of Christ which he pours out for us on the Cross and in the sacraments.

Liturgical changes

2011-05-26T10:10:00.001+01:00

The ongoing "reform of the reform" of the Catholic liturgy seems to be leading towards an interesting goal. As readers may know, the Old Rite has in the last few years been made once again widely available, and the New Rite promulgated by Paul VI after Vatican II is receiving a facelift, in the form of the new English translation of the Missal to be phased in from September. But Cardinal Kurt Koch recently let slip that “The Pope’s long-term aim is not simply to allow the old and new rites to co-exist, but to move toward a ‘common rite’ that is shaped by the mutual enrichment of the two Mass forms.” This did seem to be the implication of Cardinal Ratzinger's comments years ago at a conference I attended in Fontgombault. My own paper from that conference is available here.

Meanwhile, back to the facelift. We are running a series of articles on this in Magnificat (US and UK editions have different articles), and of course the new Mass texts will be available each month in Magnificat as needed. Elsewhere I recently ventured some thoughts of my own on one of the changes. The words by which the bread is consecrated remain pretty much the same as before: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you.” But the words spoken over the wine are changed. They were previously: “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 so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.” Those are the familiar words, but now they read, in the revised translation: “Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.”

In the new version, the words “for many” replace “for all”. This is done on the grounds that
the Latin text has pro multis, a term which might actually have been captured more effectively in English by saying “for the many” or “for the multitude”. Replacing “all” by “many” might seem to imply that some will not be saved. But in his book God is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life (Ignatius Press, 2003), Joseph Ratzinger writes: “We cannot start to set limits on God's behalf; the very heart of the faith has been lost to anyone who supposes that it is only worthwhile, if it is, so to say, made worthwhile by the damnation of others.… It is a basic element of the biblical message that the Lord died for all – being jealous of salvation is not Christian” (p. 36). The Pope reaffirms this in Jesus of Nazareth, Part 2, where he talks about the words of institution and their origin in different passages of Scripture (pp. 134-8). Clearly we cannot assume that all will be saved, since human beings always retain their freedom to reject God’s salvation, but no more can we assume that some will not.

So what is the deeper reason for the change? My comments are based on an article I wrote in The Catholic Herald, but have been revised to take account of subsequent correspondence. The Catechism of the Council of Trent is clear, as far as it goes. When our Lord said: “for you”, in relation to the body and blood, “he meant either those who were present, or those chosen from among the Jewish people, such as were, with the exception of Judas, the disciples with whom he was speaking. When he added, ‘and for many’, he wished to be understood to mean the remainder of the elect from among the Jews or Gentiles.” But this does not take account of the fact that “for many” is said only in relation to the blood. The body, too, was surely given up for the “remainder of the elect” as well as for those to whom he was speaking, but in the case of the body the words “and for many” were not added.

The old Catechism adds, intriguingly, “Beneath the words of this consecration lie hid many other mysteries, which by frequent meditation and study of sacred things, pastors will find it easy, with the divine assistance, to discover for themselves.” What might these “other mysteries” be? I venture a speculation, though I am no "pastor". It is probably not one that the fathers of the Council of Trent would have contemplated, but I think it is perfectly orthodox. The words “Take this, all of you…” are pronounced during the Last Supper. They are addressed to us as disciples, as members of the Church, and it is as such that we are invited to eat and drink the Body and Blood of the Lord. (Non-Catholics are not offered the Eucharist.) By adding the words “and for many”, the logical implication is that the Blood is poured out not only for the disciples or members of the Church who are directly addressed, but also for an indefinite number of others.

The pouring out of the Blood “for many” refers to all those outside the visible community who will nevertheless be recipients of the Lord’s grace: those “invisible” members of the Church, not qualified to receive Holy Communion, yet who belong to the Church “spiritually” – those whose lack of formal baptism cannot be imputed to them as a fault or a refusal. The Blood poured out is in other words for all people everywhere – that is, for everyone who is willing to receive it (salvation is still not automatic). What do others think?

Detachment

2011-05-15T10:19:00.000+01:00

When I was briefly with a Tibetan teacher, Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, I was shown a form of Dzogchen meditation that involved allowing thoughts and feelings and images in the soul to come and go. The essential thing was to allow them to flow without following them, without identifying with them as we normally do. In this way we penetrate to a deeper level of the self – Buddhists might say beyond the self altogether. Our usual state is one in which we identify with the flow of our thoughts, and create a false self that is mightily invested in things that don’t last. Let go of that, and you can allow yourself just to “be” without knowing who or what you are (a “feather on the breath of God”, as Hildegard says). After all – from a Christian point of view – only God knows us anyway.

Christians often criticize Buddhists for being turned inward on themselves, introverted, passive in the face of evil and suffering. Buddhists reciprocate by seeing Christians in flight from interiority, losing themselves in outward show and a well-intentioned activism (rooted in the false self and its judgments) that only makes the world a worse place. Yet the inward and the outward, contemplation and action, are not necessarily in opposition. The Buddhist is seeking a reality that lies beyond the false self. The Christian believes we become our true selves by doing what God gives us to do. Buddhist detachment closely resembles complete abandonment to God and his providence.

The statements of many Christian and Buddhist mystics can sound very much alike. Of course, Christians refer to God, whereas Buddhists do not. But, again, the “God” that Buddhists deny is a false God, just as the self they deny is a false self. In each case it is an idol we have fashioned for ourselves. “We will know God to the extent that we are set free from ourselves.” That was said by Pope Benedict XVI (see Magnificat, August 2011, p. 384). And Catherine of Siena (cited on p. 44 of the same issue of Magnificat) writes: “We rejoice and are content with whatever God permits: sickness or poverty, insult or abuse, intolerable or unreasonable commands. We rejoice and are glad in everything, and we see that God permits these things for our profit and perfection. I’m not surprised that we are, then, free from suffering, since we have shed the cause of suffering – I mean self-will grounded in self-centredness – and have put on God’s will grounded in charity.”

Catherine would probably say the Buddhist has “shed the cause of suffering” but has not yet “put on God’s will grounded in charity”. Pity and compassion, which Buddhism possesses in abundance, are not the same as love, which is directed towards the affirmation of the true self, not the dissolution of the false. Henri de Lubac SJ, in his excellent study, Aspects of Buddhism (1953), writes that without the fullness of charity, no one will ever realize the "void" of detachment. Buddhism lacks this fullness; it can take you only half way. But this should not cause the Christian feel superior to the Buddhist. Smugness would be a sign that the Christian has not yet achieved even the first half of his journey. And can we really say the second half is only open to those who possess the relevant conceptual apparatus?

A Church imperfect but valid

2011-05-12T13:05:00.000+01:00

If the Church is full of the Holy Spirit, if it represents the very presence of Christ in our midst, why is it so shabby and awful so much of the time? The Church is not the kingdom of heaven. The Church is a process leading to the kingdom. It is a place – a community, a structure, evolving in time – in which each new generation of human beings are offered a great gift, and most of them squander it. Still, there are enough saints to keep the Church alive, and the sacraments remain valid even in the hands of unworthy ministers.

You can see the imperfections of the Church in the earliest times of all – reflected in the letters of Christ to the seven churches as set down in the Book of Revelation. This was the apostolic age, within a century of the death and resurrection of Christ, and yet the squabbling that had been evident even among his disciples while he was on earth is very evident.

There has been a lot of controversy recently about the alleged “mistakes” of the Second Vatican Council. Traditionalists claim that the Council of the 1960s was infected with Modernism, not only distorting the Catholic liturgy through its reforms, but even contradicting the infallible teachings of earlier popes by accepting religious freedom and democracy. I don’t want to enter into the details of that controversy here. We know that we can trust the basic teachings of the Church and rely on her sacraments, because the Holy Spirit lives in her. (This assurance is given by Christ, for example at Matthew 16:18 and John 16:13.) We know that she sometimes takes decades, or centuries, to get things right. In the meantime we have to pray, trust, and use our wits. To undermine our confidence in the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, as the traditionalists do, seems to me the work of the devil. Newman was right: doctrines develop, circumstances change, and our understanding evolves. New aspects and applications of the truth reveal themselves.

Vatican II is by no means the first Council after which some Catholics have concluded that the Tradition has been betrayed, nor will it be the last. There are often good reasons, good excuses, for thinking in this way. After the First Vatican Council it was the “Old Catholics” who broke away. The Orthodox believe that the Latin Church went off the rails more than a thousand years ago, and will trust only the first seven Councils. But right at the dawn of the Church, a similar principle was at work among the Jews who refused to accept Christ. And personally I think God respects this kind of loyalty, allowing some of his grace to continue to flow through bodies that have separated themselves from the main stem of the Church out of love for the Tradition they had grown up with.

And yet the fullness of life and truth and grace remains with Peter and his successors, and those who maintain the communion of the Church. We see that fullness revealed from time to time in the saints who continue to appear in the Church of Vatican II – saints like Mother Teresa, and Padre Pio, and many others, whose loyalty remained unbroken despite the turbulence of those years.

Meister Eckhart

2011-05-11T10:37:00.001+01:00

The German mystic Meister Eckhart is often viewed with suspicion by orthodox Catholics, and cited with approval by those who think he overcame the limitations of Christian dogma and made common cause with his fellow mystics in other religions.

The reason why Eckhart often reads like a heretic is that he was concerned to express not our own knowledge as individual creatures, but the divine knowledge itself, basing himself in the “ground” of the soul. As he says, “only in the ground of the soul is God known as he is,” for there “the intellect knows as it were within the Trinity and without otherness”. This possibility of knowing God “as God knows God” is opened to man by the Hypostatic Union of divine and human natures in Christ. C.F. Kelley’s Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge (Yale University Press, 1977) is a masterly study of exactly this point. As Kelley explains:

“A genuine understanding of the principial mode, which is constituted as it were within Godhead, is an understanding of truth that is beyond the potentiality of human cognition, restricted as that cognition is to individuality. Insight into this truth is a possibility only by way of transcendent act, never by way of potentiality. Yet the revelation of the Word is that transcendent act as assented to by the intellect when moved by the detached will to know.”

When the perennialist Alvin Moore Jr reviewed Kelley’s book some years ago in Studies in Comparative Religion, he noted with stern disapproval the fact that Kelley (in Eckhart’s name) “equates the Godhead with the Trinity, sachchidananda with nirguna Brahman.” This goes to the heart of the matter. Kelley refuses, in his interpretation of Eckhart, to follow Schuon’s distinction between Being and Beyond-Being (that is, between the “relatively” Absolute and the “absolute” Absolute, thus relegating the Trinity to a subordinate status), or the related distinction between form and substance in the religions which underpins The Transcendent Unity of Religions.

Kelley’s exposition hinges instead on esse or Being, which he translates as isness, the “act or isness of pure knowledge itself, or Godhead”, the “all-inclusive Reality” (p. 42). He even cites Dionysius in support of Eckhart: “We apply the titles of ‘Trinity’ and ‘Unity’ to that which is beyond all titles, designating under the form of Being that which is beyond Being” (p. 30). Kelley means by all this that the Trinity is not, as Schuon would say, simply the “prefiguration of Manifestation in the Principle”, or the relatively Absolute which stands at the summit of Maya, but is itself the unconditioned Absolute about which “nothing can be said” – save what God authorizes us to say. I have written further about this in "Trinity and Creation: An Eckhartian Perspective".

Also recommended is Cyprian Smith OSB, The Way of Paradox (DLT) and Commentaries on Meister Eckhart Sermons by Sylvester Houedard OSB.

Christian non-dualism

2011-05-05T08:18:00.003+01:00

Two men and a bird...? Images of the Trinity are not uncommon in Christian art, but they have all to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The Trinity is one of the distinctive doctrines of Christianity. It goes hand in hand with the doctrine of the Incarnation, since if Jesus Christ was God, and at the same time the Son of God, there must be a distinction between God and God. The implications were worked out several centuries after the resurrection and ascension of Christ, giving Unitarians the opportunity to argue that the doctrine was a mere human invention. I think it can be shown that Scripture does imply and even teach the Christian Trinity. But does the doctrine make sense, metaphysically? As I wrote previously, the Sufi author of The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Frithjof Schuon, does not think so.

Schuon writes in Christianity/Islam (p. 97): “what Islam blames Christianity (not the Gospels) for is not that it should admit of a Trinity within God, but that it should place this Trinity on the same level as the divine Unity; not that it should attribute to God a ternary aspect, but that it should define God as triune, which amounts to saying either that the Absolute is triple or else that God is not the Absolute.”

But if this is what Islam thinks, then Islam blames Christianity for a sin it does not commit. The Church teaches that the Absolute is both One and Three, but not in the numerical sense, not “triple”, as if one could place the three Persons side by side and count them. As Meister Eckhart writes in his Commentary on Exodus, “God is one, outside and beyond number, and is not counted with anything”, and adds that in the Godhead “the same essence and the same act of existence which is the Paternity is the Sonship: the Father is what the Son is. Nevertheless, the Father himself is not the Person who is the Son, nor is the Paternity the Sonship.” Eckhart’s teaching is implied in this simple statement by St Augustine, cited by Joseph Ratzinger in his classic Introduction to Christianity (p. 183): “He is not called Father with reference to himself but only in relation to the Son; seen by himself he is simply God.” The Trinity is not a view of God from the outside – despite its symbolic depiction in Christian art – but is a secret of his interior life, of his relations with himself.

Islam’s inability to grasp all this is, of course, perfectly understandable. It cannot be grasped. We cannot “know” the Trinity, for the Trinity itself is something we can only accept in faith as Eckhart did, by assenting to the revelation of the Word. If a Muslim assented to that revelation, he would become a Christian. We can never get “outside” the Trinity in order to grasp it as an object. It is within the Trinity that we ourselves are grasped and understood, and “then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” (1 Cor. 13:12), but not otherwise.

If you like, read my "Face to Face: The Difference Between Christian and Hindu Non-Dualism".

Illustration: Holy Trinity, by Luca Rossetti da Orta, 1738-9, from Wikimedia.

More on the Resurrection Body

2011-04-28T19:02:00.000+01:00

Why did the wounds on Christ’s body still appear after the Resurrection? A wound, if you think about it, is an occasion when what is within us is exposed, where the life-blood has been poured out. In Christ’s case, what is within him is love, is the Holy Spirit. The places where human sins inflicted pain on him are the very places where, because that pain was accepted on our behalf and for our sake, Christ’s love was most fully expressed. The wounds are the ways he reaches out to us, invites us into his body; they are ways he shares his blood with us. So those wounds were not just forensic evidence that he was the same person who had suffered, nor mere trophies reminding us of his victory over death, but – according to a widespread mystical tradition – a place for sinners to take refuge. That is, the signs of vulnerability in his physical body remain places of vulnerability in a spiritual sense, places where he may be approached and entered into.

Something similar applies to psychological wounds, which of course cut much deeper than physical ones, and many of which are inflicted in childhood. But Christ had a happy childhood – one might almost say a sheltered one (after the escape from Herod). He was held in the arms of Mary and Joseph, nourished, affirmed, educated. How could he know the psychological suffering that stems from being abused or neglected at an early age by those who ought to love you but don’t?

We know that he accepted the punishment for sins he did not commit – which means the pain that comes from having sinned even though he never did. It must be that he experienced in his Passion at least a taste of every sin, of every punishment, when he was tortured, abused, and scorned, when he carried his cross, or felt abandoned by his Father, or knew himself to be deserted and betrayed by his friends. In order to heal the consequences of every sin throughout history, he had to “assume” them or take them into himself, as he took human nature into himself.

We make the mistake of thinking that because he was just one man, he was a fragment of the whole, of mankind, in the same way that each of us are. The mystics say something different. They say that though he was one man, he was also the whole in which all the parts participate, so that we can each find ourselves in him. When he rises from the dead, he brings us with him, though we follow later. The wounds in our nature do not separate us from him, because they are in him too.

Illustration (Wikimedia Commons): The Incredulity of Thomas, 1268, from the Romkla Gospels.

Sherrard's critique of Rene Guénon

2011-04-26T11:47:00.001+01:00

The late Philip Sherrard, a Perennialist and member of the Greek Orthodox Church, devotes a long chapter in his last book, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, to the “Logic of Metaphysics in René Guénon” – although the points he makes are just as applicable to Schuon, as we shall see. Guénon did more than anyone else to reawaken metaphysical perception in our century, Sherrard says. But he made two important assumptions that predisposed him against Christianity and towards Vedanta (and which help to explain his own conversion from Catholicism to Islam). The first of these assumptions was that a strict correlation must be preserved between the metaphysical and the logical order – thus ruling out in advance the more paradoxical Christian relationship between Unity and Trinity in the Godhead. The second assumption was that every “determination” of the Absolute must be some form of limitation, and is therefore incompatible with the divine nature. These two assumptions led Guénon into an apophaticism so radical that he could affirm nothing at all of the Absolute, except by way of negation – including, obviously, a negation of the Christian Trinity.

Before his death, then, Sherrard had come to the conclusion that a Christian thinker who accepts Revelation must start from an entirely different point of view – must begin, in fact, from the knowledge that the supreme Principle is the Trinity, and furthermore that “personality” (indeed, triple Personality) in God is not necessarily a limitation. Without it, in fact, the Absolute has no actual freedom to determine itself or create a world: the freedom of God becomes merely the absence of external constraint. Although Sherrard assumes Schuon’s “transcendental unity” approach throughout his book, this insight calls into question one of Schuon’s core teachings: that a personal (or Tri-Personal) deity derives from an impersonal Godhead and will be “dissolved” in the gnosis which transcends Being. (As Sherrard writes, “This view thus involves a total denial of the ultimate value and reality of the personal. It demands as a condition of metaphysical knowledge a total impersonalism – the annulment and alienation of the person.”)

Sherrard’s insight leaves the other religions intact. It even leaves open the possibility that the perennialists have correctly understood them. But it separates Christianity, and perhaps even raises Christianity above them, in a way that seems to me incompatible (more so than he himself realized) with the theory of “transcendental unity” as stated by Schuon. Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, for one, believes that what Christians have to say is not something less than, say, Vedanta or Sufism, but more. In fact “the Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics for our time”. Of one exemplary Christian mystic he writes: “Looking into his own ground, Jan van Ruysbroeck sees beyond it into the eternal I, which for man is both the source of his own I as well as his eternal Thou, and in the final analysis this is because the eternal I is already in itself I and Thou in the unity of the Holy Spirit” [Glory of the Lord, V, p. 70]. The encounter with God in this “ground” is a nuptial encounter, a spiritual marriage. Thus “The pantheistic tat tvam asi, which identifies subject and object in their depths, can be resolved only by virtue of the unity between God and man in the Son, who is both the ars divina mundi and the quintessence of actual creation (see Book III of Nicolas of Cusa’s Doctor Ignorantia), and by virtue of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from this incarnate Son in his unity with the Father” [GL, I, 195].

The Resurrection Body

2011-04-24T08:06:00.001+01:00

He is risen! Death, entropy, time no longer have any dominion over him. But what does that mean?

He appeared to Mary and the other disciples, but at first they did not recognize him. He could come and go through closed doors, cook and eat fish, ascend into heaven. His body was marked by the wounds of the Cross. The powers we attribute to Superman and the other comic book heroes, the powers we would love to have – flight, X-ray vision, invulnerability, and the rest – are merely shadows of what we will experience in the resurrection, when we are joined to Christ and live in his world.

There is something dreamlike about the accounts of the resurrection, and yet also a kind of crisp realism, a dewy morning freshness. Resurrection is a bit like waking up, but it is also like having a vision or veridical dream. The world of the resurrection body, the resurrection earth, is closely related to the world of the Angels among whom we will then live, called in medieval writings the aevum or aeviternity, the “world without end”. It is in dreams that we come closest to it, especially in the dreams we call “visions” because they seem more real, looking back on them, than waking life.

St Paul tells us that our bodies will be changed, and indeed the matter of which we have been composed in this life can never be reassembled, since it changes from moment to moment and year to year. It will be converted into something new. The principle of continuity that makes us the same person is the soul which gives form to whatever matter lies at its disposal. The body that dies is like a seed – “a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat of some other grain”; “But God gives it a body as he has chosen,” “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body,” for “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15: 37, 38, 44, 50).

That is why we venerate the relics of the saints – not out of some morbid fascination with skulls, or a belief in the magical properties of holy bones. The dead bodies of the saints are the seeds of the new heavens and the new earth. It is their bones that will be transformed first: this is the place where the resurrection will happen. Read Ezekiel 37: 1-6. “Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.”

The souls in prison

2011-04-23T09:59:00.000+01:00

Holy Saturday. Our old bodies still lie in the tomb with Christ. The world goes on, the world from which we have tried to exile God. The Bible tells us something very strange in the First Letter of Peter (3:18-20). It says that Christ “went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey” at the time of the Ark. In other words, he descended into hell to preach to sinners so evil that on their account the world was all but destroyed. But did he then give them a second chance of salvation after death, which would be against the teaching of the Church? The mystery of who will be lost and who saved is tangled up with the mystery of death and time, for the “limbo” in which these souls exist lies between the “time” of creatures and the “eternity” of God. One might as well say that Christ was travelling back in time into the moment of their deaths, and showing them the truth of his love, as he will show it to us all. That is his “preaching”, and only if they reject it will they enter the sate of damnation. How many will do so? The Church has never said, and we are obliged to hope and to pray for the salvation of all, even the “workers of the eleventh hour”, even Judas who could not forgive himself. This is where my favourite theologian Balthasar got himself into hot water in the eyes of some people, by drawing partly from the mystic Adrienne von Speyr the hypothesis that all indeed might be saved. The last volume of his Theo-Drama (even more than his book Dare We Hope?) is important to read if one is not to misrepresent him. And no one who has read of Adrienne’s experiences of Holy Saturday will think that she denies the reality of hell. (By the way, there are earlier discussions of this topic in our online Forum here and here.)

Illustration: Descent into Hell, from Chora Church, Istanbul.

King of the Jews

2011-04-22T19:03:00.000+01:00

The traditional devotions of Good Friday, with their concentration on the sufferings of Christ, and our own implied or stated responsibility for them, are too much for many people. But in fact they are a great school of Christian mysticism. Christ’s suffering and death was not just an unfortunate consequence of the fact that people did not “get” his message. He was actually taking on and living through the consequences of sin – absorbing it, so to speak, into himself. And that means we can find ourselves in him.

None of us can judge himself. We may secretly think we are not so bad, but none of us really knows how many sins he has committed, or how serious they are, and what their consequences were. In a sense we are complicit also in the sins of others, or else in prayer we can offer ourselves for those who committed them. And then there are sins of omission: things we have failed to do, graces we have resisted. For all these reasons it makes sense to accept responsibility for the numerous small slights and wounds that were inflicted upon Christ, and even for his death. If we absolve ourselves we are usurping the role of the eternal Judge who sees all things aright.

Plunged into the experience of the Passion, we can see the results of what we collectively and individually have done to God, in the world and in ourselves: in the world, where we have silenced him, or despised him, or misinterpreted him, or used him for our own purposes; in ourselves, where we have taken him for granted, or denied him, or ignored him. The sufferings in our own life, which are due if not to our own sins then to those of others, can be located somewhere on the map of Christ’s Passion, or in the mirror of the Cross. In this way we live in him, and he lives in us, through death into resurrection.

Transubstantiation

2011-04-22T10:08:00.001+01:00

Last night was Holy Thursday, when the Church celebrates the gift of the Eucharist and of the Priesthood.

Modern science assumes that the “substance” of something is simply what it is made of – the atoms and energies that are its various elements. However, something deeper is implied by the Catholic Christian belief in what is termed the “real presence” of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. For no one suggests that the host would look any different under an electron microscope before and after its consecration, and yet the Church still teaches that its “substance” has been transformed. To be more precise, she says that during the Mass, as a result of the priest’s words of consecration, the substances of the bread and wine are changed into the substances of Christ’s Body and Blood. This implies that the “substance” of a thing is something deeper than the elements into which we can chop it up. What lies deeper? I think we can say that it is the intention of God – the substance of a thing is the reality of what God is giving in that thing.

Thus when God states “This is my body”, he changes the reality, the substance of what it is that we see and taste. But he need not, and does not, change the way it looks and feels. For the appearances of a thing reflect the gift that is being given, and the appearances of bread and wine are the perfect language in which to express the way in which God wishes to give himself to us – a language that has always been built into creation, waiting for its fulfillment. The ingredients of bread have always existed in order to become the Eucharist. Christ intends to give himself completely, in order to unite himself as closely as possible with those who will receive him, just as intimately as food and drink are united with us when we eat and drink. “For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so one who feeds on me will live because of me.” (John 6:55-7)

Critique of Perennialism

2011-04-21T08:46:00.003+01:00

Earlier I wrote about the “Perennialist” school or movement. Its manifesto could be said to be Frithjof Schuon’s The Transcendental Unity of Religions, which was praised in glowing terms by T.S. Eliot, among others. According to Schuon, if I may paraphrase, each world religion is like a path up the same mountain. Follow any one path to the end, and you will arrive at the identical summit – but woe betide anyone who tries to scramble sideways off one path to join another, or gets the paths mixed up. Such eclecticism may well end in disaster, as the climber tumbles into the abyss.

What does this do to the Christian claim that “there is no other name by which we may be saved”? And what do we make of the clear contradictions between the religious teachings of different religions? How can they all be true at the same time? Schuon accounts for this by distinguishing “absolute” from “relatively absolute” truth, and by relegating certain teachings to the “human margin” of religion. It is the esoteric, metaphysical core that is ever the same, but there is room for great variation within theological systems and devotional practices. Furthermore, he says, each great tradition has a perfectly valid claim to be unique and central, superior to all others. Indeed, for the human collectivity to which it is addressed, it is central and indispensable. Just as each man in a crowd may legitimately call himself “I”, and cannot but view himself in some way as situated at the centre of the world, so in each religion the Absolute says “I” and demands unqualified adherence. That adherence keeps us on the path to the summit.

In The Lord of History Jean Daniélou wrote of Schuon’s predecessor Guénon that he “compels attention by concerning himself with things that are really interesting in themselves, and by his bold denunciation of fallacies that seem to us, as they seemed to him, to be ultimately responsible for the decadence of the modern world. But his constructive system proves, upon examination, to be fundamentally incompatible with Christianity; for he has eliminated the very substance of our religion, in denying the privileged status, the absolute factual unicity of the event of Christ’s resurrection.” The “fundamental flaw” in Guénon’s work, Daniélou says, is “the inversion of the relationship between metaphysics and revelation”. For Schuon similarly, while theology (based on revelation) transcends mere philosophy, metaphysics (based on intellectual intuition) must transcend theology. He says in The Transcendent Unity of Religions: “intellectual intuition is a direct and active participation in divine knowledge and not an indirect and passive participation, as is faith. In other words, in the case of intellectual intuition [gnosis], knowledge is not possessed by the individual insofar as he is an individual, but insofar as in his innermost essence he is not distinct from his Divine Principle”.

Perennialist metaphysics rests on the self-evidence of the One as its first principle. And thus, for the orthodox Christian, one of Schuon’s least impressive books is Logic and Transcendence, where he struggles to make out that the Christian Trinity is merely an upaya – a provisional or skillful means in the Buddhist sense, more or less effective as an aid to devotion but not absolutely “true”. He treats the Persons as aspects of the divine Unity. “Whatever may be the necessity or the expediency of the Trinitarian theology, from the standpoint of pure metaphysic it appears to confer the quality of absoluteness on relativities.” “Only Unity as such can be a definition of the Absolute.” So “to assert, as one has heard it done, that the Trinitarian relationships belong, not to this relative absoluteness, but to the pure and intrinsic Absolute, or to the absoluteness of the Essence, amounts to asking us to accept that two and two make five or that an effect has no cause, which no religious message can do and the Christian message has certainly never done.”

On the contrary, a Christian who is faithful to tradition may wish to argue, this “absoluteness of relativity” is precisely what we are asked to accept. Its other name is love. In future posts I intend to argue for this position against Schuon and the Perennialists, but in the meantime you may be interested in a discussion of the question of whether Guénon and Schuon were biased against love at the Sophia Perennis site? I also recommend the writings of Jean Borella, a Perennialist turned orthodox Catholic, especially (in this context) his book on Guénonian Esoterism and Christian Mystery, which is also relevant to Schuon. My own thoughts on all this, on which the present post is partly based, are developed in an article called "The Deep Horizon" which is available on the Second Spring site but also here.

The Name of God

2011-04-15T20:34:00.002+01:00

“[W]e have to be clear about what a name actually is,” writes Pope Benedict XVI. “We could put it very simply by saying that the name creates the possibility of address or invocation. It establishes relationship." The most archetypal act of naming is God’s naming of himself. In the encounter with Moses at the burning bush, God names himself “I am”. He tells the reluctant prophet, “Say this to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:15). God’s name is himself. It is so sacred that the Jews only allowed the High Priest to pronounce it once a year in the Holy of Holies. When God says "I" it is the act of Being, the primordial act of language, the principial Word.

Thus it is not we who name him, but God who names himself, or rather who gives us sacramental tokens to use as names – tokens of his presence. In particular he names himself "Jesus". The many other names by which human beings try to identify an object for worship, such as “the Just” or “the Merciful”, and even “the Creator”, describe aspects of him only, paths of approach, angles of sight; like colours in a rainbow compared to the white light of the sun.

The Name creates the possibility of invocation, and the invocation of God under a variety of names is one of the fundamental methods of prayer. We associate the "Jesus Prayer" - the constant repetition of the phrase Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me a sinner - with the Orthodox East, but repetitive invocation is important in the West too (and use of the Jesus Prayer itself is increasingly common among Catholics). Even the Rosary, though a more elaborate formula, is based around the repetition of the divine Name "Jesus" at the heart of each Hail Mary: "...Blessed art thou, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus...". The other words around these are just a setting, like a monstrance, to lead us to Christ at the centre. Many saints recommend the use of short prayers that can easily be coordinated with breathing in and out.

Prayers may be endlessly repeated not in order to be "mechanical", but to fulfil the teaching of Scripture that we should endeavour to "pray constantly" (Luke 18:1 and 1 Thess. 5:17). The aim is to lead our constantly changing thoughts and feelings into a single conduit. Normally our minds are in a state of distraction, and this often takes the form of an interior monologue, a stream of consciousness like that portrayed in Joyce's novel Ulysses. The repeated prayer, especially if it contains the Holy Name, absorbs and quietens this babbling stream, smoothing the water as it it flows straight to God.

Illustration: Names of God by Athanasius Kircher

Who or what is God?

2011-04-14T09:00:00.000+01:00

Terry Pratchett is one of Britain’s favourite authors. His “Diskworld” and other fantasy novels have sold more than 60 million copies. He once said he was "rather angry with God for not existing". But later in life he qualified this statement slightly: "It is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that, on the other side of physics, they [the gods] just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows. That is both a kind of philosophy and totally useless - it doesn't take you anywhere. But it fills a hole."

The "other side of physics"? Exactly. But it does take us somewhere, and the desire not to go in that direction is partly what lies behind the opposition of the New Atheists to Christianity. There is an emotional, perhaps a spiritual component, in the denial of God. But whatever the motivation, it involves a complete misunderstanding of what we mean by God, which is fundamentally a metaphysical idea. Without understanding that concept of God, and why it is necessary, you won’t be able to recognize the possibility of a revelation. Although a revelation can bring with it at the same time a sense, previously missing, of the metaphysical.

So what do we (believers) mean by “God”? I have tried to answer that question step by step in a “Conversation with a Skeptic”, the skeptic in this case being a scientific atheist. (This piece can be accessed along with a further article called "God on a T-Shirt" in the Christianity section of the main web-site.) As I say in the “Conversation”, if he exists, God is the infinite source of being, of existence, of everything that is good in the world. That means he is nothing less than the Holy Grail, the object of everyone’s ultimate desire, the secret of happiness and immortality, the very meaning of life and love. How can you not regard this as the most important question there is? No wonder that, all through history, people have built their civilizations around the search for this God, or the attempt to connect with him.

I hope these articles are helpful to someone. I have no evidence that any atheists have read them yet. Perhaps that is the real problem – actually getting a conversation going.

Illustration: Bust of Zeus in the British Museum.

Metaphysics of Titus Burckhardt

2011-04-09T17:04:00.003+01:00

One of the most lucid introductions to the Perennialist metaphysics mentioned in the previous post can be found in An Introduction to Sufi Doctrine, by the late Titus Burckhardt. Here we find a doctrine of the degrees of reality very akin to that of the Neoplatonists, for whom the world of the Many exists in dependent relation to the One or the Good. The eide or logoi which are the archetypal forms of everything in the world have no reality apart from God, and the world has no reality apart from the eide in which they participate. As mental forms they are mere abstractions. But as “possibilities” inherent in the Intellect and (principially) in the divine nature, they constitute the meaning and content of reality, which without them would fall back into nothingness.

Inseparable from the ontology outlined in Burckhardt’s book is an epistemology and an anthropology – that is, a doctrine of knowledge (of how we know things and what we can know) and of man (what we are and what we can become). The doctrine of the degrees of reality, in both macrocosm and microcosm, leads Perennialists to reject any “dualistic” anthropology that might deprive the human subject of access to archetypal reality. The human subject, they insist, is tripartite not dual; not just body and soul, it consists of body, soul, and spirit, corresponding to the three main levels of reality. The faculty by which we know the divine Ideas, variously called Nous, Intellectus, or Buddhi, constitutes a ray of the divine Sun in the heart of man. It knows the logoi by “connaturality”; that is, by intuition. At the level of the soul, these intuitions are clothed in symbols by the imagination, which mediates between the intellect (supplier of the “form”) and the bodily senses (which provide the “matter”) for human cognition.

Though these ideas are today more closely associated with writers on Islamic than on Christian philosophy, it would not be hard to relate them (as Perennialists often do) to Scholastic thought in the West, which has survived in fragmentary fashion right up to the present time within the Catholic Church. The Christian Scholastics were well aware of the great Neoplatonic and Islamic philosophers, to whom in many cases they owed their knowledge of the texts of Classical philosophy, and they spent a great deal of time refuting or reworking their ideas in the light of the Christian revelation. Nevertheless, though the Christian, “Pagan”, Islamic, and Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages were in many respects opposed, they were very much closer to each other than they were to the Nominalists of the fourteenth or the Rationalists of the seventeenth centuries. Modernity marks a definite break from the thought-world of the Middle Ages. More on that another time.

Illustration: interior of mosque at Isfahan.

Perennial Philosophy?

2011-04-05T19:07:00.000+01:00

The term is used by Catholics to refer to the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, but in 1945 Aldous Huxley published an influential book of this title, where it functioned as a translation of the Hindu term Sanatana Dharma (eternal religion); that is, an “immemorial and universal” metaphysical and ethical teaching, found in all the great religions and particularly in their mystical traditions. It is in this sense that the term has been adopted by a group influential scholars and writers known as “Perennialists”. Hindu scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, who worked as Research Fellow at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the 1930s and 40s, was one of the three founders, along with the Frenchman René Guénon and the Swiss-born Frithjof Schuon (both converts to Islamic Sufism, the one from a Catholic the other a Lutheran background).

Perennialism crosses religious boundaries but (or so it claims) without undermining them. It insists that truth can only be attained through the sincere practice of one or other living religious tradition. Such mediating forms can be transcended only from within: each revealed religion remains unique and precious in all its details, and must be accepted and practiced as the condition for any authentic spiritual realization. This teaching has played an important part in persuading many people (including myself) to take seriously the need for conversion, and to search for an authentic spiritual home. They have also awakened an interest in metaphysics and symbolism. Future posts will discuss these positive aspects, and also voice some criticisms. Sophia Perennis is one of the main publishers of this literature.

The journey begins...

2011-03-29T14:53:00.002+01:00

When I was very little, I tugged at my mother’s sleeve and asked her to watch me jump. “Look,” I said excitedly, “I am leaving the planet!” “Yes, dear,” she replied, without much interest. I can still remember my feeling of frustration that I could not make her see what I had seen. Of course, I was not intending to go far, but to jump six inches off the earth and be pulled back by gravity is still to leave the surface. All that is needed is to extend the distance some more, and I could be walking among the stars.

At the age of fourteen, the philosophical part of my brain took another leap. In amongst all the other dawning realizations, at the heart of my search for “something worthy of belief”, was a discovery that completely blew the ground from under materialism. What is consciousness? I don’t mean, what causes it, but what is it made of? It obviously isn’t made of matter. Once again, I simply could not get anyone else to see this fact the way I saw it. “Oh yes,” they might say politely, humouring me; “of course.” But if they had truly understood what I was saying the world would have been transformed for them, as it had been for me. The point is this. Normally we take consciousness for granted, and we do our thinking about the stuff that is in our consciousness, the stuff we are conscious of. The world is out there: it is what is revealed to us by our senses. But try to stop thinking that way for a minute. That very awareness, the experience itself, whether we are awake or dreaming, whether we are seeing clearly or not, is itself a thing. True, it is a strange kind of thing, because it is that in which everything else is located for us. But it is just as real as everything else, if not more so.

I was like a fish discovering the ocean, an eyeball looking into itself, a mirror face-to-face with another mirror. Materialism could not be true, because it had missed the most important and obvious thing, the one thing that could not be doubted. Then I opened the books of the mystics….

Picture: "Trampoline" by Rose-Marie Caldecott

The Unknown God

2011-03-25T16:37:00.000Z

Pope Benedict XVI recently announced a new kind of religious dialogue. “Today, in addition to interreligious dialogue,” he said, “there should be a dialogue with those to whom religion is something foreign, to whom God is unknown and who nevertheless do not want to be left merely godless, but rather to draw near to him, albeit as the Unknown.”

One might also and equally speak of the “Unknown Self”, for we do not know ourselves, and the two Unknowns go hand in hand. It has been said that “Unless you know yourself you cannot know God” – and there is an article by Dom Sylvester Houedard which explores this point in detail. Not that God is the self. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in chapter 5 of Orthodoxy, “Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within…. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.”

Brahman may be Atman, but Atman is not what we normally call the “self”. The true self is something very different. But the true self is in God, and this means we can only discover them together. When we know God with God’s own knowledge of himself, then we shall also know ourselves. “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor 13:9-12).

Who am I?

2011-03-22T06:38:00.000Z

I might spend a lifetime trying to find out who I am. But if I simply look inside myself, I am looking in the wrong place.

“By comparison with God, man’s identity is not simply in himself but outside himself, which is why he can only attain it by ‘transcendence’. The Christian believer discovers his true identity in him who, as ‘the firstborn of all creation’, holds all things together (Col. 1:15ff), with the result that we can say that our life is hidden with him in God (Col. 3:3). Through identification with Christ I discover my own entirely personal identity.” –Joseph Ratzinger, The Feast of Faith (Ignatius Press, 1986, p. 29).

But then how do I discover Christ? Didn’t he die many years ago and go back to heaven? Do I have to rely on biblical scholars and archaeologists to work out which passages in the Gospels are most authentic? Ratzinger replies: “We cannot reach Christ through historical reconstruction. It may be helpful, but it is not sufficient and, on its own, becomes mere necrophilia. We encounter him as a living Person only in the foretaste of his presence which is called ‘Church’.”

And this provides an unexpected bridge to the spiritualities of Asia – of Buddhism and Hinduism – that understand God as the “ground of all being”. Ratzinger goes on: “At this point we begin to see how it may be possible to purify and accept the inheritance of Asia. The latter is correct in refusing to see individual identity as an encapsulated ‘I’ over against a similarly encapsulated ‘Thou’ of God, ignoring the existence of other ‘I’s which are themselves related individually and separately to this divine Thou.” This ill-conceived personalism “deprives God of his infinity and excludes each individual ‘I’ from the unity of being.”

Illustration: "The Light of the World", by William Holman Hunt, 1854.

Unity in the soul

2011-03-21T16:21:00.000Z

I said the key to the religious quest is unity, which is how we become fully real, and that this unification can only be brought about by love.

That makes sense of the idea of sin - viewed not as the breaking of some arbitrary rule, but as an obstacle to our own spiritual progress. The modern world doesn’t like to talk of sin, but it still views hypocrisy as a great evil, and seems to admire integrity. Sin is that which divides us. It is that which divides us from ourselves, from God, and from each other.

Charles Williams defined sin as “the preference of an immediately satisfying experience of things to the believed pattern of the universe”. For example, each time I do something in private that is inconsistent with what I profess to be and believe in public, or which would make others think less of me if it were discovered, I am dividing myself, and therefore committing a sin.

The root of sin is a conflict of desires, since it is desire that leads me to act inconsistently. But this conflict only exists at the level where we have many desires. In the end, at the deepest level, we desire only one thing, and that is union with the Infinite, with God. Human desires are insatiable, because we are built to desire the Infinite, and we cannot find the Infinite in the realm of the finite. The purpose of a religious practice is to discover our true self, which is also the discovery of our desire for the Infinite. Everything else is either a distraction from that, or a sacrament of it. Everything else is “intermediate”.

This is precisely why the Eucharist is so powerful and necessary for us, if we can receive it in faith. It feeds our body-soul-spirit unity. Swallowing the Host, knowing what it is, we take into ourselves a kind of “magnet” that helps to draw our divided selves together into one Self.

More on the dynamics of the Eucharist another time.

Purity of heart

2011-03-20T14:39:00.000Z

Our human “problem” was defined very neatly by Father Vincent Nagel, a Palestinian Christian, in a meditation printed in Magnificat for the 9th of March, looking at the reasons people have for acting as they do. “The problem is that we only have one heart, and in the end it can be attached only to one thing.” Most of us behave well and act piously merely so that others will think well of us. We are not really attached to God, but to our own image. “We have had our reward,” then, in this world, and cannot receive it in the next. That is why Jesus tells us to pray in secret, so that people cannot see us, but “your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).

Jesus also tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that only the “pure in heart” will see God, which is how we describe the ultimate achievement of our life’s purpose in perfect happiness. But what is purity of heart? According to Soren Kierkegaard, “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing”. If we investigate this notion a bit further, we find it provides the key to understanding the religious impulse. In The One and the Many, W. Norris Clarke SJ writes of Unity “as a positive energy by which each being actively coheres within itself holding its parts together – if it has any – in a dynamic, self-unifying act” (p. 63). This goes for atoms, it goes for living organisms, it goes for people. It even goes for God, where the “active divine energy of love that is the bond of unity between Father and Son” is the Holy Spirit.

Here is the lesson we can draw from this rather abstract idea: “to be anything real it is necessary to be one, integrated.” Religion is the striving for unity in the soul. This enables us to see the grain of truth in Gurdjieff’s teaching, because as Clarke says, “the unity of what is called our psychological ‘personality’ is not given to us ready-made. It is something we must work at and achieve by our own conscious action.” The transformation we are seeking is a unification of ourselves, such that we are no longer composed of bits pulling in different directions (Romans 7: “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”). Achieving such an integrated personality seems impossible. To this, Jesus replies, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew19:26). Clarke answers that we must be unified by “one great love”.

Unity; “one-pointedness”; integrity; purity of heart; being “true” to ourselves. All these words and phrases refer to the same thing. Buddhism speaks of “mindfulness”. We can only become happy by becoming real, and we become real by becoming one. The missing element is “grace”. That is the thing or force that enables us to be transformed, to become real. We call it “becoming holy” or becoming a saint. Grace is “gift”, the help of the “Higher Power” as AA puts it. Grace is everywhere available from a loving God to anyone who opens himself or herself to receive it. That is the point of the sacraments – not that they automatically make us holy, but that through them, if we are receptive, we can obtain the grace we need.

Illustration: "Prayer Without End" by Nicholas Maes (1656), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Lost Christianity?

2011-03-20T07:35:00.000Z

Prof. Jacob Needleman once wrote a book called Lost Christianity. The thesis was that Christianity tells us a great deal about what we should become, but no longer gives us the means to change. How do we get there from here? How can we be expected to live a faith and a morality that is so difficult, so demanding? Most of the Christians you meet are no better than anyone else, and many are worse. There must be some secret teachings, passed on by Jesus to his closest disciples, which the official Church has forgotten or suppressed. Maybe these are still preserved in some remote monastery. Needleman claimed to have discovered these lost teachings, the missing “intermediate Christianity”, with the help of Father Sylvan, a Christian monk. As he puts it in the new Introduction to to the book, what is missing is the “experience of oneself” or “presence to oneself” without which true contrition and purity are impossible.

There is something deeply true about this, and we need to get to the bottom of it. The reader should know, however, that behind the fictional Father Sylvan lies Needleman’s own teacher, G.I. Gurdjieff, whose teachings revolve around the need to acquire an immortal soul (not all of us have one) through conscious work on oneself. The key is “self-remembering”. There is a wonderful phrase of P.D. Ouspensky, one of G.’s disciples: “Suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself.” But the intensification of self-consciousness (if that is what this is – and perhaps it isn’t: we’ll come back to that question another time) is almost the opposite of Christianity, and in some of G.’s followers (not all) it can lead to an immense arrogance. There is another answer, and in the next posts I intend to speak of it.

Mystagogy

2011-03-19T07:38:00.000Z

It is remarkable how often we assume we know something simply because we have heard people talk about it. Years may go by, and then we suddenly realize that we never really understood what they were on about. That may happen at any level or stage of our lives. It happens to children, but it also happens to adults, no matter how educated or distinguished they may be. It happens to all of us, because it is part of the process by which we grow.

In the case of Christianity, there is no shame in admitting that we do not understand the least thing about it. It appears to us at times like an ideology, a system of thought and ideas that can be learnt and mastered like any other. I can inform myself about its tenets, I can decide between the various interpretations on offer, and I may or may not decide to accept it. But none of this is really Christianity: it is a human invention designed to take the place of Christianity. Christianity actually is a relationship not with an idea, but with a person – Jesus Christ. The reason we do not understand Christianity is that we understand neither Christ nor what it means to be in relationship with him.

The need for ongoing catechesis in the mysteries of Christ and of the Church, a catechesis traditionally known as mystagogia (“initiation into the mysteries”), has been noted in Church circles for years. Baptism and Confirmation may only be given once; initiation is a continuing adventure, since the grace of the sacraments is the source of a new life that must continue to grow if it is not to wither and die.

See also THIS POST on Mystagogy over on my other blog.

Dear unknown friend...

2011-03-19T07:00:00.000Z

The search for truth takes us in many unexpected directions. In my case, growing up I never expected to become a Roman Catholic. On these pages I intend to continue searching, with anyone who wants to accompany me, for the meaning of Christian teachings, and their relation to the truths revealed and proposed in other religious traditions, particularly Islam and Asian non-dualism. This quest for a “deeper Christianity” has so far resulted in two books: the first was called The Seven Sacraments: Entering the Mysteries of God (listed here, along with links to reviews and additional material, written later, that may be helpful to readers). The sequel has now been published by Angelico Press and Sophia Perennis under the title All Things Made New. I hope that these web pages will serve as a meeting point for readers of the book and others interested in going more deeply into the Christian experience. Please make it known to your friends and visit regularly if you find it helpful. You may also be interested in my other blogs: Beauty in Education (based around the book Beauty for Truth's Sake) and The Economy Project (associated with a website devoted to Catholic Social Teaching).

Stratford Caldecott

www.secondspring.co.uk

Oxford

The image on the header is a detail from the ceiling above the Shrine of Our Lady of Oxford, at the Oratory, photographed by Revd James Bradley and used with kind permission. The following verse is from "Jesu, joy of man's desiring", and seems appropriate for the image. Our Lady of Oxford, pray for us...

Through the way where hope is guiding,
Hear what peaceful music rings;
Where the flocks in you confiding
Drink of joy from endless springs!
Theirs is beauty's fairest pleasure;
Theirs is wisdom's holiest treasure;
You do ever lead your own,
In the love of joys unknown.