THERE is a strange little story in the early annals of the Franciscan Order, of how Brother Giles, one of the holiest of the first Companions of Francis, deeply shocked some Dominican friars by the casual observation that St. John the Divine really says nothing at all about God. In answer to their horrified exclamations at this apparently profane utterance, Brother Giles went on to say that one might think of God as a mountain of grain, as great as the Monte Cetano which was towering above them; and of St. John as no more than a sparrow, who picked here and there a few odd grains from that unmeasured richness, without making any real impression upon it at all. In which it appears to me that St. John proved himself to be indeed the patron saint of all theologians.
It was with this searching little story in my mind that I read the terms of reference which are put before this Summer School, namely: 'To discover and to define the Catholic doctrinal basis for the Christian life, personal and social.' We are further told that we are successively to study from this point of view
1 Paper read at the Anglo-Catholic Summer School, Oxford; 20 July 1925.
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the World-order, the Nation, the Industrial order, and the Home; and in the course of our explorations shall have to consider three things:
(a) The implications of the Catholic faith in practical life.
(b) The distinctive Catholic principles on which social action should be based.
(c) The view that the manifold activities of life when rightly understood all come within the range of religion; and constitute a unity in God which theology must express.
Considering these statements over against the mysterious Presence of God, I then began to wonder which among the particular grains of truth which mankind has brought home from the mountain were to be regarded as 'specific Catholic doctrines'. It sometimes seems to me that the distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic is not a very fruitful one: and that the distinction between those who do, and those who do not, love and adore God revealed in Christ and refer all things to Him, goes deeper into the reality of things. But if we keep to the language of our syllabus, and try to define the essence of Catholic Christianity, I suppose the first things that come to mind are the Catholic emphasis on the Incarnation and its continuance in the sacraments, and the concept of the absolute value and authority of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.
When, however, we look further, these doctrines are seen to derive their deepest significance from the fact that they are special demonstrations and developments of one over-ruling truth; which we might call
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the priority of the Supernatural, and its presence and revelation in and through the natural. Catholicism requires the central truth of God as Spirit and Father of Spirits, the one Absolute Reality; and of this God-Spirit, as eternal, loving, personal, prevenient and self-revealed—supremely in what we call the Incarnation, continuously in various degrees in the sacraments of religion and of life. If we accept this philosophic position, our first proposition will then be that Catholic doctrine is uncompromisingly theo-centric. For it, in the last resort, only God matters. And this at once means that the Catholic can never consent to mere social and material betterment, as being in itself a sufficient Christian ideal. We are called to seek perfection—all kinds of perfection only because God is perfect first. So if we wish to discuss our first term of reference—the Catholic doctrinal basis of the Christian life—we must look first at the Catholic idea of God and the soul's relation to Him. Of course the real virtue and the doctrinal heart of any religion always is decided by its idea of God; and Christian effort in the past has often failed through forgetfulness of this. And it is that richly living concept of God's concrete reality and utter distinctness from the world, yet His ceaseless activity within and for every bit of it, escaping monism on the one hand and deism on the other, which is decisive for Catholicism. We must balance that deep, awed sense of the transcendent mystery of the mountain which alone is truly religious, by the certitude that even the sparrow can and must go there for its food.
This position means that the Catholic attitude
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towards existence can never be merely naturalistic or this-world. It can never permit religion to become merely an aid to the full and virtuous living out of the natural life. It fixes the mind, not on the possible perfecting of the animal creation, but on the ever-growing and never-finished perfecting of the spiritual creation. It must refuse to attribute absolute value to the world of change, save in so far as it incarnates the Unchanging. It requires a constant sense of mystery, depth, the supernatural; it is, in fact, a two-step religion.
Again, Catholic philosophy can never regard as complete any theory of the spiritual life based on self-development from within; nor can it consent to the doctrine of the soul as an impenetrable monad, or expound the possibilities, apprehensions and experiences of that soul on the basis of 'unpacking its own portmanteau, and explaining itself to itself'. Everywhere in life, though in varying degrees, it requires and finds the prevenient presence and action of something other than Nature: the vivid reality of grace, Spirit, God. Thus it rests on a profound duality, which goes right through religious experience, and must govern our view of personal and social life: the distinctness and over-againstness of the eternal and the historical, of God and the soul, of grace and nature.
Yet, on the other hand, Catholicism emphatically declares an intimate contact between all these pairs of opposites. Spiritual reality is not and never can be cut off from the world of sense. There is at every point a penetration by God of the world: a truth
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which of course underlies the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Hence the God of Supernature is also the God of Nature; and it is not Christian to say that the world is very evil, although we often are: Christianity says that the Father of the Eternal Wisdom is the father of the sparrow too.
This emphasis on the over-ruling reality and distinctness of the supernatural, yet refusal to make water-tight compartments between it and the natural, covers, I think, all the affirmations most distinctive of Catholicism: the Incarnation considered both as a general truth and as historical fact, sacramentalism, the Communion of Saints. It commits the Catholic at least to a modified dualism. It commits us to the view that the spiritual life of humanity is not completely articulated unless it has an inside and an outside too: and that in so far as we are aware of spiritual values, we are bound to try to give them adequate expression in the world of sense. It rejects mere unbridled immanence on the one hand, and a sharp separation between God and the sense-world on the other hand. It recognizes that matter and sense do play their part in all contacts between God and the soul; and that therefore the phenomenal world has and retains true importance, even in the loftiest reaches of spirituality. And here it provides a point of departure for discovering the method and aim of Christian social action. Such a view is consistent with the general trend of the great New Testament writers. Indeed, the first clause of the Lord's Prayer at once commits us to the view that we are creatures of supernatural affinities; that our real status cannot
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be understood merely as a development from within the natural order, for this only tells half the truth about the soul. And the whole of the spiritual life can be regarded as a progressive realization of this truth, as we expand into fuller personal being; deeper, humbler and more loving awareness of God. From one point of view all real human progress means such spiritualization—in technical language, a growth in and a yielding to grace—and the practices of religion are the food and helps of this growth.
If then we regard man's life, corporate and individual, from this angle, where shall we stop? Where are the frontiers of human life and possibility to be fixed? And how shall we reconcile such a thorough-going other-worldliness with our obvious this-world obligations? This is a problem which ought to be before the minds of all social reformers. As Catholic Christians they cannot logically acquiesce in any schemes for the making of a social order, however otherwise desirable, that shall oppose or check in any way the trend and expansion of the soul's supernatural energy. They can never accept the Utopia of the kind-hearted materialist; or give comfort, safety, even political freedom, the rank of a Christian ideal. Civilization and spiritualization are not the same thing; and for the Christian, spiritualization must always come first. On the other hand, we are bound to work for the elimination, here and now, of all conditions hostile to that spiritualization; all checks on the soul's healthy life. Thus the many things which are plainly hostile—drink, prostitution, bad housing, tyranny, reduced moral standards, embittered class or race
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relationships—become of intense importance, even, and perhaps specially, to the most thorough-going supernaturalist; and are all matters with which religion ought to deal.
But we cannot stop there. Such a general view of the intimate relation of the natural and spiritual is not sufficient unless it is regarded as the preparation and incentive of action. The recognition that God acts within life by means of the material order brings with it, or should bring, a further recognition that we in our turn are called upon to be the creative instruuments of God in space and time; co-operating according to our measure in the ceaseless loving action of His Spirit upon life. The sparrow in whose beak a grain of the living manna has been placed, is therefore bound in its strength to do his best for the sparrow world. True, religion will deal best with the problem of evil by its own method of individual inward sanctification, which was the method of Christ. But such personal sanctification is the first of two movements. It is only in the exceptional and purely contemplative nature that the obligation to incarnate God's Will, further the redemptive action of the Holy Spirit, can be met by devotional self-expression alone; and even in such natures, the more purely the flame of contemplation burns, the more in the end it is found to inspire saving action. This proposition could be illustrated again and again from the lives of the Saints. We cannot sit down and be devotional, while acquiescing in conditions which make it impossible for other souls even to obey the moral law. For it is not God who imposes such an impossibility. It is we, in the corporate
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sense, who do so; and we have no right to ask God to mend conditions, unless we are willing to be ourselves the tools with which the work is done.
The obligation to do something about this seems to me to rest with crushing weight on every Christian communicant, for reasons which are too sacred to be given detailed discussion here. But at least we can say that there must be a sense in which the whole world and everything in it is sacred to us because God loves it; and therefore we are committed to doing our best in, with and for it—our best physically and mentally, as well as our best spiritually. I should like to see the Ignatian act of consecration recited after all those prayers in which we ask the Divine Love to do something about the social and industrial miseries our Christian civilization has produced: , Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty; my memory, my understanding, my will, all I have and possess.'
There are, I suppose, two main ways of taking religion. The religious soul may withdraw more and more from the world and the life of the senses, in order to go by the path of negation to God. Or it may merge itself by love and surrender in the creative Will of God; and in and with that Will, go out towards the whole world. This, of course, is the way of Christianity. Thus we arrive by another path at the conclusion already stated: that the God of the natural and of the supernatural is one, and therefore, though physical and spiritual must ever be distinguished, they must never be put into opposite camps, for this rends the Body of Christ. The rushing out of Christ's love and admiration towards flowers, birds, children, all
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the simple joyous unspoilt creations of God, was part of the same movement, the same passionate desire to further the glory of God in His creatures, which showed itself in acts of healing, compassion, and forgiveness towards disease and sin; and in anger and indignation towards selfishness, meanness and hypocrisy. All these were various exhibitions of the perfect harmony of His soul with the Spirit that loves and upholds the world.
Thus adoration can never exempt the Christian from this-world action; and this-world action, however beneficial, will fail of effect if its foundations are not based upon the life of adoration. To go back to Brother Giles's parable, the sparrow must go to the mountain; but it must also live the common sparrow life, build its nest, and feed its young. The awed sense of the mystery in which we live, and which enfolds and penetrates us, must not stultify our small human activities, but improve them. It is by this alternation of the transcendent and the homely, the interaction of lofty thought and concrete thing—all the friction and effort consequent on our two-levelled human life—that the true growth of human personality is achieved.
We put all this in more philosophic language when we say that being a Christian, loving God, 'finding and feeling the Infinite', does not absolve us from being part of history; or from a full entrance into, and dealing with, the life of succession. On the contrary, it commits us to the task of trying to work out God's purpose in history. Even the contemplative vocation is entirely misunderstood by us, if we sup-
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pose its essence to consist in a solitary and purely spiritual relationship to God. It is, in its fullest expansion, a special arduous and sacrificial method of dealing with the sins and discords of life. The duty towards which any incarnational philosophy points us is the bringing forth within historical succession of more and more of that abiding power, the 'something insusceptible of change' which transcends history. The true life and wonder of the human soul consists in its power of embracing and combining both these terms: the fact that it is able to be intimately concerned both with being and with becoming. And the same is, or should be, true of the corporate soul of society.
Now since what philosophy calls the 'absolute values' are statements about the character of God, though of course incomplete statements—grains picked by the sparrow off the mountain—it is plainly a part of this ability and duty of the soul to try to incarnate these absolute values within that order, that world of succession, with which we are able to deal. The Parable of the Talents hints that the common practice of giving them decent burial in consecrated ground, instead of taking the risks involved in putting them out to interest, is not in accordance with the vigour and realism of the Mind of Christ. St. Augustine's 'My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee' sums up, from this point of view, the Catholic standard both of individual and social action. We must desire this deeper realness not for ourselves only, but for all men, and for all those institutions in which men are combined—since we are called to love all other souls
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as much as our own, and God above all souls—and must oppose and try to eliminate all that conflicts with such expansion of personality. The doctrinal basis for Christian action then becomes the obligation to make the world of life such that it can be wholly full of God; that His Kingdom may come and His Will be done, unimpeded by anything which we can rectify, as fully within the historical order as in the eternal scene. For the real theme alike of Catholic philosophy and Catholic sacramentalism is the continuing intimate presence of God in history; and His revelation through historical processes, historical persons, sensuous symbols and impressions. The bold Athanasian epigram 'He became human that we might become divine' at least warns us against any inhuman aloofness from the natural world. That natural world, that historical order can never of course be adequate to Him; but are nevertheless destined, according to their measure, to incarnate His life and convey it. Anything which contributes to this end has a right to our support and sympathy. Anything which blocks the way to it we must regard as an evil, and as the proper object of Christian attack.
| I am a profound admirer of E.U. Nevertheless there are some areas of difference. I find myself wondering at this point, for example, which part of "Resist not evil," she is having difficulty comprehending. If the Sermon on the Mount has any place in Christian discourse, I do not concede that there is "a proper object of Christian attack". (DCW) |
Thus, in refusing to do our best to improve and purify the social order, we are refusing the religious obligation to make it so far as we can a fit vehicle of the Spirit of God. Redemption is bound to have its this-world aspect; and it is perhaps its this-world aspect which is specially committed to our care. Hurried transcendentalists do well to ponder the extent in which our Lord's short ministry was concerned with the homely details of man's life. 'I
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have felt', said John Woolman the Quaker, 'a longing in my mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of person, cleanness about their houses and gardens; and I think even the minds of people are in some degree hindered from the pure operation of the Holy Spirit, where they breathe much of the bad air of towns.'
Here Woolman is surely in line with the homely and human spirituality of the New Testament, and its perpetual acknowledgement of the close interdependence of body and soul, of inward and outward things. Indeed, if the Creator be also the Father, and creates and redeems by and through a physical order, that physical order, once we really understand it, must turn out to be a thing of infinite importance and possibility. And the way to understand it is to love it. 'God so loved the world' involves a totally different theology from 'God so loved the souls in the world'. If, with Baron von Hügel, we agree that the human spirit is called to 'a humble creaturely imitation of the Eternal Spaceless Creator, under the deliberately accepted conditions, and doubly refracting media, of time and space', then this must involve in our own small way something of His loving, all-merciful, generous dealing with all the needs and problems of the world.
The first article of the Creed'—I believe in God, Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth—really contains within itself the full Christian obligation to deal with social problems. If the Eternal Creator be indeed a Father caring even for the sparrows, this lays on us the duty of loving interest in all He cares
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for and sustains. The wider the circle of this love and interest of ours, the nearer it comes to embracing all created life—the more perfect, in other words, our Charity—the nearer we are to the ideal set before man in Christ. The reality of the ascent of our spirits in communion and prayer can best be tested by the extent in which they 'flow out in love to all in common'. The intensity, and special field of action, of this outflowing interest will vary in individuals. But it is a function of the Body of Christ in which all are concerned.
If we accept these principles, then the real problem before us falls into two parts. First, what we ought to do, and why; secondly, what our ultimate objecctive ought to be.
What we ought to do, and why. We ought always to work for the elimination of any conditions which we could not tolerate for persons whom we love; and which, on a higher plane, we see to be inconsistent with our best ideas of God. The reason why we ought to do this 'is because, for the Catholic Christian, the sacramental principle is operative over the whole range of life, in countless ways and degrees, and he is obliged to hold that God comes to man through and in natural means. We must therefore improve those natural means in every department of experience. And we are bound to be personally active in this matter because our own sanctification is only the first of two movements; and is chiefly important as making us instruments with which the Spirit of God, indwelling history, does His work.
What our objective ought to be. The objective of the
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Christian supernaturalist must surely be a material world which shall further in every possible way, for all men and at all levels, the life of the soul; a natural order which shall be the matter of a sacrament expresssing the supernatural. This does not mean the necesssary elimination of pain, tension, difficulty, hard work, or temptation. It means seeking to make these, for all men, more and more contributory to the growth of spiritual personality, instead of hostile to it. Such a programme has nothing whatever in common with an ideal of general comfortableness. Christian conduct can never be actuated merely by humanitarian considerations. On the contrary, it seems to me that the Catholic sociologist must at least try to achieve a balance between the ascetic and the benevolent outlook and action: the balance which we see so perfectly achieved in Christ. Ascetic as regards man's spiritual growth and purification; benevolent as regards his natural status and rights. Christian social reform is not merely the effort of a number of clever, kindhearted, well-intentioned animals to make things as pleasant and wholesome all round as they possibly can. So far as it is a genuine activity of the spirit, it is the response of our individual spirits to the pressure of God's creative love, our effort to let that love find ever fuller expression through our action—one of the ways in which the Eternal Wisdom uses human personality 'as a man uses his own hand'. We do not bring to it a true sense of vocation until we feel this; and feel, too, that all in it which truly matters points beyond this world.
What do those searching and terrific sayings of
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Christ—perhaps the most terrific of all His utterances, when we realize their full implications—about the giving of a cup of cold water, the meat given or refused to the hungry, the receiving of the little child, really mean? What in fact, is involved for us in the one saying which He makes decisive for the ultimate destiny of the soul?
'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.'
Surely there is something here far deeper. and more drastic than a general invitation to 'good works'; or the sentimentalisms of a certain type of pious philanthropy? Does not this bring us once more, from another point of departure, to a practical acknowledgeement of the universal, intimate presence of the Divine life in history: an extension of the Incarnation which does not stop short of our humblest experiences, and which means that our attitudes and acts towards our fellows are always in this sense attitudes and acts towards God? This discovery of the Eternal God in other men—in every grade and aspect of natural life—does not mean pantheism. But surely it does mean loving, and doing all we can for these His lowly dwelling-places and manifestations among us; purifying and unselfing all human relationships. It means too that we cannot dare to claim the benefits of His self-identification with our interests, unless we in our turn are ready to identify ourselves with the interests of other men; not merely those interests we choose to call moral and religious, but every difficulty, longing and need. When Angela of Foligno, at her supreme
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moment of apprehension, exclaimed 'The whole world is full of God!', did not this vision embrace a whole multitude of paths, those we call physical as well as those we call spiritual, along which God flows in on man, and may and will be reached and served by us, so long as we truly mean and intend Him? Such a view involves the possible consecration of every material act. Placed within this living and personal conception of the Divine Immanence, 'Inasmuch as ye have done it' takes on fresh depth and almost unbearable poignancy. It means the discovery, within social contacts of every kind, of an opportunity for the direct service of Eternal Love; and this must involve far more than a mere unorganized kindliness. It means approaching the problems of social life with our heads as well as our hearts; remembering that it is within our power to make social science a department of theology. The apocryphal saying of Christ, 'Blessed art thou 0 Man if thou knowest that which thou dost do !' is supremely true of those who achieve this: and marks the difference between the Christian social action which begins at the altar and comes back to the altar, and the merely ethical sort.
Now what have we said? Really this: that the ultimate doctrinal basis of Christian personal life and social action is that rich conception of God, as both transcendent to and immanent in His world, which it is the very business of Catholic worship to express in its intensest form. And further, that this conception of God, when it becomes to us a living, all-penetrating reality and not a theological statement, is found to require from us a life which spends itself in love and
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service on this world, whilst ever in its best expressions and aspirations, pointing beyond it. A life, in fact, moving towards a goal where work and prayer become one thing; since in both the human instrument is completely surrendered to the creative purposes of God, and seeks more and more to incarnate the Eternal. Since what is true of us one by one must surely as we rise into a fuller humanity become true of us in groups, we have here a principle which might at last become operative in our international, political and civic relationships. As corporate Christians we cannot be satisfied with a merely individual application of our faith. We must set as our goal such an expansion—through, in and with us—of creative and redeeming love, as shall embrace the whole world and be operative on every level of our many graded life.
What would the acceptance of such principles mean? It would mean that every Christian must work for a social order in which the outward would become ever more and more the true sacramental expression of the inward. And as an essential preliminary to this, much faithful purification of that outward; the disharmonies, atavisms, sterile passions and disguised self-seekings which the individual Christian is obliged to face and conquer on his way towards union with God, must also be identified and conquered by the group. Penitence has its social aspect; there, too, humanity is surely called upon to recognize a wrongness that can become a rightness, and the need of action as an earnest of contrition.
But the social order which should emerge from such a realistic correspondence with Reality would not be
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distinguished by a tiresome uniformity, or any oppressive and Puritanical goodiness. It would possess a rich and inexhaustible variety in unity; for it is called to reflect a facet of the Mind of that God Who loves children as well as students, and has created tomtits as well as saints. It would be a social order in which energy would not be wasted in mere conflict ; in which every talent and vocation had its chance. It would give a great place to the contribution which those who seek truth and beauty make to our knowledge of God. It would recognize this world as a theatre of the spirit. Whilst acknowledging and encouraging all innocent and legitimate fields of action, it would yet leave room for, and point to, a life beyond the world; giving fullest opportunity for the growth of those spiritual personalities in whom eternal values are incarnated, and through and by whom Holiness is glimpsed by us. A world-order in fact obedient to the God of Supernature and of Nature; and permitting the fullest development, interplay and mutual support of the active and contemplative lives. For this and only this perpetuates within history the full and balanced Christian ideal. Only this permits man to incarnate according to his measure—and even under the simplest, most homely accidents—the Eternal in human life. Thus he feeds upon and makes his own those few small grains he brings back from the mountain: whilst yet recognizing and adoring, beyond the possible span of all these, his little discoveries and realizations, the unmeasured and unsearchable richness of God.
