Getting to the Point

With a hymn composed in the eighth or ninth century, thus for over a thousand years, the Church has greeted Mary, the Mother of God, as “Star of the Sea”: Ave maris stella.

Human life is a journey. Towards what destination? How do we find the way? Life is like a voyage on the sea of history, often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that indicate the route. The true stars of our life are the people who have lived good lives. They are lights of hope.

Certainly, Jesus Christ is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the shadows of history. But to reach him we also need lights close by—people who shine with his light and so guide us along our way. Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her “yes” she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent among us (cf. Jn 1:14).

Spe Salvi 49

Reflection – With this entry I will have now successfully blogged the entire encyclical Spe Salvi,  on the salvific nature of hope. I’ve taken this last week or so to revisit and finish my blogging on this encyclical because it seemed timely. The world is in some very difficult and sad times—yesterday’s second beheading of an American journalist is one more movement towards what seems almost certainly a renewed military engagement in Iraq, and of course that is only one small corner of the world that is in great turmoil and distress—Eastern Europe and Western Africa are in sore need of prayer and aid now, too.

The sea of history is indeed ‘dark and stormy’ and it is all too easy to lose sight of the destination of the journey in these times. The passions—anger and avarice, gluttony and lust, despondency and sloth, pride and vainglory—all too easily beckon us when the world is in turmoil. They seem to offer us a way through these dark stormy waters, but to what end?

We can strike out against our enemies in anger, tightly cling to our own wealth, drown ourselves in physical pleasures, collapse into despair, or exert our mastery to put everyone else underneath us—but to what final end? What good is it, indeed, to gain the whole world and lose one’s soul?

And so we have the stars of hope, the light shed by the saints in glory, and above all by the great Mother of God who lights the path to the true end of humanity. It is so crucial in these days when the world does seem to be blowing up just a bit (and, we’ll see, perhaps quite a lot), to know that this world and our life in this world, good and precious as it is, is not the destination of the journey, not our ultimate home.

‘The true stars of our lives are people who have led good lives.’ What a lovely and simple sentence to explain the devotion to the saints which has been part of the life of the Church since its very beginning. This is why it is so important to read the saints and know something of their lives, the choices they made, the sufferings they endured, and what it was all about for them. So many genuinely foolish mistakes about Christianity and what it means to live as a Christian in the world would be avoided if we would let ourselves be taught by our betters, the men and women who have done this thing, lived this life, and whose lives serve as brilliant guides to us along the ways of the world.

Mary is supreme among the saints. She shows us that, no matter what the circumstances of our lives, no matter what is going on around us, inside us, in our world and in our own little worlds, the road to the good end of life is the road of fiat, of faith, of humble obedience to God. That the whole purpose of God in creation and in humanity is to make of us an open door for Himself to enter in, that the world’s salvation and ours does not come through human power and mastery, not by violence and not by sensuality, but through the work of God transforming our flesh into His, our lives into His, our humanity into His divinity, as His Spirit overshadows us as it did Her.

Our Lady is the star shining brightly in all the world showing us that this is the path of life and that it leads to a brilliant and glorious end. I don’t know what the great political and (possibly) military solutions are to the very real problems we are facing in the world today. I do know that we haven’t a chance of finding our way through these times if each of us personally does not set our course by the stars of hope the Lord has laid out in the heavens for us, and that the true way of peace in the world comes only through walking the path God opened up for us and that Our Lady reveals to us in its fullness and its beauty.

Let us now consider a more or less randomly chosen episode from the Middle Ages, that serves in many respects to illustrate what we have been saying. It was commonly thought that monasteries were places of flight from the world (contemptus mundi) and of withdrawal from responsibility for the world, in search of private salvation. Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired a multitude of young people to enter the monasteries of his reformed Order, had quite a different perspective on this.

In his view, monks perform a task for the whole Church and hence also for the world. He uses many images to illustrate the responsibility that monks have towards the entire body of the Church, and indeed towards humanity; he applies to them the words of pseudo-Rufinus: “The human race lives thanks to a few; were it not for them, the world would perish...”

Contemplatives—contemplantes—must become agricultural labourers—laborantes—he says. The nobility of work, which Christianity inherited from Judaism, had already been expressed in the monastic rules of Augustine and Benedict. Bernard takes up this idea again. The young noblemen who flocked to his monasteries had to engage in manual labour.

In fact Bernard explicitly states that not even the monastery can restore Paradise, but he maintains that, as a place of practical and spiritual “tilling the soil”, it must prepare the new Paradise. A wild plot of forest land is rendered fertile—and in the process, the trees of pride are felled, whatever weeds may be growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is thereby prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish. Are we not perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current history, that no positive world order can prosper where souls are overgrown?

Spe Salvi 15

Reflection – This paragraph of the encyclical follows upon the previous, asking whether or not hope of salvation and the care of the soul are essentially selfish and individual concerns, and whether or not Christianity is thus essentially a selfish religion. In this historical example of Bernard of Clairvaux’s vision of monastic life, we see the fullest answer possible to this.

Namely, that without the care of the soul, without a concern for one’s own interior purification, the restoration of Paradise within oneself, no real social good or social justice or social restoration can happen. The whole monastic movement in the West was a sort of 'from the inside out' affair—the monks seeking to belong to God and God alone, to dedicate themselves to prayer and work, a consecrated life of virtue and holiness, and from that going out in missionary or apostolic life.

This was, in fact, the way a certain tarnished and abandoned artifice was fashioned in the first place. I refer, of course, to Western Civilization. It was the monks, first from Benedict and then from Cluny and Citeaux, who cleared the land, planted crops, copied ancient manuscripts (both sacred and secular), established schools, cared for the sick, brought the faith to all corner of the Continent and the British Isles—on and on and on. All flowing from this life of intense spirituality and depth of prayer. 

There is very little about the heritage of Western Europe, of which virtually everyone reading this blog has been touched by if not wholly shaped by, that does not have a monastic foundation to it. So much for the idea of monks living selfish lives contributing nothing to the great society!

These celibate men are, in fact, the progenitors of our whole civilization. And this is the chaste fecundity that can be seen over and over again—a life wholly given over to God and to humanity is a life that bears fruit. In fact, it is the only way a life can really be said to be fruitful, regardless of one’s vocation.

“What you do matters, but not much. What you are matters tremendously.” Catherine Doherty said it as well as anyone ever has. It is the great paradox of our faith and of our humanity that unless we tend that garden within, the innermost chambers of the heart where pride and greed and vanity flourish, or faith, hope, and love take root, we cannot tend the garden without—the greater good of society, the needs and challenges of our times—with any success.

That which seems most selfish, most self-seeking, the pursuit of virtue and the battle against vice, is factually the most selfless thing, the necessary work if we are to do any good for anyone ever. A dirty rag cannot clean; a broken tool cannot build. So many efforts to save the world and build a new world order of peace and justice founder because the people doing them are not tending to the weeds of their own hearts’ gardens.

All of this is so utterly relevant to my own MH vocation and how we understand our life here in this corner of the Lord’s garden that I could go on (and on, and on, and on) about it. But that’s quite enough for one day. Let’s go weed our gardens instead, within and without.

There is one broad fact about the relations of Christianity and Paganism which is so simple that many will smile at it, but which is so important that all moderns forget it. The primary fact about Christianity and Paganism is that one came after the other.

Mr. Lowes Dickinson speaks of them as if they were parallel ideals—even speaks as if Paganism were the newer of the two, and the more fitted for a new age. He suggests that the Pagan idea will be the ultimate good of man; but if that is so, we must at least ask with more curiosity than he allows for, why it was that man actually found his ultimate good on earth under the stars, and threw it away again…

There is only one thing in the modern world that has been face to face with Paganism… and that is Christianity. That fact is really the weak point in the whole of that hedonistic neo-Paganism of which I have spoken. All that genuinely remains of the ancient hymns or the ancient dances of Europe, all that has honestly come to us from the festivals of Phoebus or Pan, is to be found in the festivals of the Christian Church.

If anyone really wants to hold the end of a chain which really goes back to the heathen mysteries, he had better take hold of a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of sausages at Christmas.

Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin, even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French Revolution is of Christian origin. The anarchists are of Christian origin. Physical science is of Christian origin. The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is one thing and one thing only, in existence at the present day which can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is Christianity.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

Reflection – GKC goes on here (at some length, as is his wont, although I guess I’m in no position to criticize), to delineate many of the true distinctions of Paganism and Christianity, and the very real virtues and strengths of the first. He counters however with the unique virtues of Christianity, which he names as charity (“a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul”), chivalry (the love of the weak because they are weak), and humility (knowing oneself as weak, and in that knowledge becoming boundlessly strong).

Ultimately he credits Paganism with being a wholly reasonable and common sense approach to life, but “we cannot go back to an ideal of reason and sanity. For mankind has discovered that reason does not lead to sanity.”

While the romance of Paganism has somewhat worn off, and certainly never took off the way Dickinson et al. thought it might, it is still around. Neo-paganism exists. It is worth asking Chesterton’s question: why, if Paganism was all that great, did the pagans all become Christians?

We cannot answer that they were forced to by a dominant Church. The dominant Church, the Church that had power to force its will on the general population, factually did not show up until the second millennium of Christianity. We’re talking here about events that happened in the first five to six hundred years of Christianity, when the Church was a rag tag group scattered across the Roman empire, one ancient upstart cult among a hundred. Constantine did not impose Christianity on his subjects; he merely ended the persecution of the Church. And part of his ending the persecution of the Church was because by that point a rather large percentage of his subjects had become members of it, in an era when it exerted no political power whatsoever.

Now why would that be, if Paganism was such a perfect religion, so suited to the needs of the human person? OK, so Paganism may not be your bag, anyhow (somehow, I don’t think too many Wiccans are reading this blog…). But there can be a sense in modernity that we just need to get back to some kind of natural state of man—the sort of Rousseauian ‘noble savage’ idea. If only we can ‘get ourselves back to the garden’ by way of Woodstock.

This is a kind of nostalgia for something that is older and earlier than Christianity, some state of innocence that was fundamentally marred by the incursion of religion and especially the Christian religion with its rules and dogmas. This is certainly one current among many that floats around today.

GKC is well to point out that, in fact, we did all that, we plumbed the depths of human life, human rationality, human enjoyment of the world—Paganism at its heights and depths really was a marvelous thing that left few stones unturned in the human reality. And… then they all became Christians.

And Christianity has no great quarrel with Paganism factually. There is no, absolutely no, record of any great ‘persecution’ of Pagans by Christians—such was unnecessary as they all ran into the Church with enthusiasm, seemingly, over a period of a few centuries. And the Church was happy to receive all the good things of Paganism, the philosophy and the music and dance, the mad merriment and the sober reflection, and make it its own.

In Modernism… knowledge is equated with power… without attention to the dynamics of judgment mediating experience and thought by discovering which are true to reality and which false, moderns wrongly envisage truth as just an arbitrary decision. This is true because some in power decided it was true… knowledge in this context is generated by fear… [In the Catholic tradition] knowledge is born not of fear, but of a love of wisdom and understanding… truth has never been a category of dominative power but of wisdom.

Reflection – You will notice that I have no citation for this quote. This is because I’m writing this in transit (the Ottawa airport awaiting my flight to Philadelphia and from there, Rome, to be specific) and for reasons that are obscure and complex, I have some great quotes on my computer that don’t have the author and source attached to them. If I was in Combermere, I would have the reference at hand.

So, if you are the author of this lovely quote, don’t be mad at me, bro, for quoting you without attribution – when I get back to home base, I will edit the post to credit you. Meanwhile, what a great quote it is. Wisdom and love, and not power or dominance, as the source of truth—this is indeed the Catholic tradition, certainly that of the great monastic schools of theology and the scholastic school exemplified (but not limited to) Thomas Aquinas.

There is this strange caricature of Catholicism that it is a system of power and dominance, where Rome calls all the shots and the rest of us are cowed little sheep, chickens dogged by papal bulls (but let me stop horsing around for now, before I get your goat). It seems to me, based on my studies of the history of theology, that this is really not the case over the whole 2000 years of our Church’s life.

It would take, in fact, what it took me (six years of hard intellectual labor) to show definitively how this is so, but when you look at the great eras of theological development and action—the great patristic era of (roughly) 200-600 and in the Catholic West, the great monastic-scholastic period of (roughly) 1100-1400, the ages in which most of the fundamental vocabulary, theological theory, definitions, and the like became the solid core of Catholic theology, you simply do not see the Pope in Rome issuing decree upon decree, fulminating and excommunicating, defining and demarcarting.

Patristic theology was done primarily by the bishops, in a dialogic process. Monastic theology (think, Bernard of Clairvaux) was done by, well, monks, more often than not in the form of scripture commentaries and homilies. Scholastic theology was done in the incipient universities, generally by friars of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. There is a history of papal supervision and Roman discipline, but the primary work is done in this very different mode.

The bishops were pastors seeking to serve their people by clarifying theology in response to heresy and schism; the monks were genuinely seized by a love of holy wisdom and a desire to plumb the depths of the Word of God; the scholastics were convinced that it was an act of pious love of God to exercise the intellect to its fullest capacity and to achieve the greatest clarity of definition possible by its disciplined use.

It seems to me that it is only later, under the pressures of the Reformation, that theological energy came to be centred more and more in the exercise of papal authority. This era generally has not been looked upon as a great era of flowering of theological depth and wealth. The authority of the Pope has always been there (or so I, a Roman Catholic, firmly believe), and perhaps things had to go this way, given the tragedy of division and theological chaos the Reformation plunged us into, but when you look broadly at the whole of our life as a Church, the Pope's authority hasn’t really been exercised all that much in the realm of theology. The caricature of the Catholic Church as a top-down, repressive, tyrannical authority centred on the Pope is not borne out well by the actual facts of history.

Anyhow, all of this learned excursus, the details of which are available to you if you wish to do six years or so of hard theological labor, is not so much to cause a furious debate about the authority of the Pope or the direction and thrust of current theology--anyone who reads my blog knows where I stand on these things, I think.

Rather, I simply want to clear the ground for us to contemplate this notion of truth as coming from a love of wisdom, a contemplative spirit, a desire not to control or dominate, but to receive, serve, and love. I think this is a spirit we could do well to re-emphasize and re-enter, especially in our highly competitive, disputative, and polemical internet culture. So often it all seems to be about winning the argument and doing the other person down, rather than the quieter search for understanding and insight. Theology has been served well by bishops, monks, and scholarly friars; I'm not sure it is served at all by com-box warriors and snarky tweets.

Something to think about… as I wait in the airport lounge for my flight. Talk to you… well, probably not tomorrow when I’ll be jet lagged to the gills, but Sunday!