Robert Hugh Benson - Paradoxes of Catholicism
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Robert Hugh Benson >> Paradoxes of Catholicism
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8 PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM
BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON
_These sermons (which the following pages contain in a much abbreviated
form) were delivered, partly in England in various places and at various
times, partly in New York in the Lent of 1912, and finally, as a
complete course, in the church of S. Silvestro-in-Capite, in Rome, in
the Lent of 1913. Some of the ideas presented in this book have already
been set out in a former volume entitled "Christ in the Church" and a
few in the meditations upon the Seven Words, in another volume, but in
altogether other connexions. The author thought it better, therefore, to
risk repetition rather than incoherency in the present set of
considerations. It is hoped that the repetitions are comparatively few.
Italics have been used for all quotations, whether verbal or
substantial, from Holy Scripture and other literature_.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
HARE STREET HOUSE, BUNTINGFORD
EASTER, 1913
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
(i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN
(ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN
I PEACE AND WAR
II WEALTH AND POVERTY
III SANCTITY AND SIN
IV JOY AND SORROW
V LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN
VI FAITH AND REASON
VII AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY
VIII CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM
IX MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE
X THE SEVEN WORDS
XI LIFE AND DEATH
PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM
INTRODUCTORY
(i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN
_I and My Father are one_.--JOHN X. 30.
_My Father is greater than I_.--JOHN XIV. 20.
The mysteries of the Church, a materialistic scientist once announced to
an astonished world, are child's play compared with the mysteries of
nature.[1] He was completely wrong, of course, yet there was every
excuse for his mistake. For, as he himself tells us in effect, he found
everywhere in that created nature which he knew so well, anomaly piled
on anomaly and paradox on paradox, and he knew no more of theology than
its simpler and more explicit statements.
[Footnote 1: Professor Huxley.]
We can be certain therefore--we who understand that the mysteries of
nature are, after all, within the limited circle of created life, while
the mysteries of grace run up into the supreme Mystery of the eternal
and uncreated Life of God--we can be certain that, if nature is
mysterious and paradoxical, grace will be incalculably more mysterious.
For every paradox in the world of matter, in whose environment our
bodies are confined, we shall find a hundred in that atmosphere of
spirit in which our spirits breathe and move--those spirits of ours
which, themselves, paradoxically enough, are forced to energize under
material limitations.
We need look no further, then, to find these mysteries than to that tiny
mirror of the Supernatural which we call our self, to that little thread
of experience which we name the "spiritual life." How is it, for
example, that while in one mood our religion is the lamp of our shadowy
existence, in another it is the single dark spot upon a world of
pleasure--in one mood the single thing that makes life worth living at
all, and in another the one obstacle to our contentment? What are those
sorrowful and joyful mysteries of human life, mutually contradictory yet
together resultant (as in the Rosary itself) in others that are
glorious? Turn to that master passion that underlies these
mysteries--the passion that is called love--and see if there be anything
more inexplicable than such an explanation. What is this passion, then,
that turns joy to sorrow and sorrow to joy--this motive that drives a
man to lose his life that he may save it, that turns bitter to sweet and
makes the cross but a light yoke after all, that causes him to find his
centre outside his own circle, and to please himself best by depriving
himself of pleasure? What is that power that so often fills us with
delights before we have begun to labour, and rewards our labour with
the darkness of dereliction?
I. If our interior life, then, is full of paradox and apparent
contradiction--and there is no soul that has made any progress that does
not find it so--we should naturally expect that the Divine Life of Jesus
Christ on earth, which is the central Objective Light of the World
reflected in ourselves, should be full of yet more amazing anomalies.
Let us examine the records of that Life and see if it be not so. And let
us for that purpose begin by imagining such an examination to be made by
an inquirer who has never received the Christian tradition.
(i) He begins to read, of course, with the assumption that this Life is
as others and this Man as other men; and as he reads he finds a hundred
corroborations of the theory. Here is one, born of a woman, hungry and
thirsty by the wayside, increasing in wisdom; one who works in a
carpenter's shop; rejoices and sorrows; one who has friends and enemies;
who is forsaken by the one and insulted by the other--who passes, in
fact, through all those experiences of human life to which mankind is
subject--one who dies like other men and is laid in a grave.
Even the very marvels of that Life he seeks to explain by the marvellous
humanity of its hero. He can imagine, as one such inquirer has said, how
the magic of His presence was so great--the magic of His simple yet
perfect humanity--that the blind opened their eyes to see the beauty of
His face and the deaf their ears to hear Him.
Yet, as he reads further, he begins to meet his problems. If this Man
were man only, however perfect and sublime, how is it that His sanctity
appears to run by other lines than those of other saints? Other perfect
men as they approached perfection were most conscious of imperfection;
other saints as they were nearer God lamented their distance from Him;
other teachers of the spiritual life pointed always away from themselves
and their shortcomings to that Eternal Law to which they too aspired.
Yet with this Man all seems reversed. He, as He stood before the world,
called on men to imitate Him; not, as other leaders have done, to avoid
His sins: this Man, so far from pointing forward and up, pointed to
Himself as the Way to the Father; so far from adoring a Truth to which
He strove, named Himself its very incarnation; so far from describing a
Life to which He too one day hoped to rise, bade His hearers look on
Himself Who was their Life; so far from deploring to His friends the
sins under which He laboured, challenged His enemies to find within Him
any sin at all. There is an extraordinary Self-consciousness in Him that
has in it nothing of "self" as usually understood.
Then it may be, at last, that our inquirer approaches the Gospel with a
new assumption. He has been wrong, he thinks, in his interpretation that
such a Life as this was human at all. "_Never man spake like this
man_." He echoes from the Gospel, "_What manner of man is this that even
the winds and the sea obey Him_? How, after all," he asks himself,
"could a man be born without a human father, how rise again from the
dead upon the third day?" Or, "How even could such marvels be related at
all of one who was no more than other men?"
So once more he begins. Here, he tells himself, is the old fairy story
come true; here is a God come down to dwell among men; here is the
solution of all his problems. And once more he finds himself bewildered.
For how can God be weary by the wayside, labour in a shop, and die upon
a cross? How can the Eternal Word be silent for thirty years? How can
the Infinite lie in a manger? How can the Source of Life be subject to
death?
He turns in despair, flinging himself from theory to theory--turns to
the words of Christ Himself, and the perplexity deepens with every
utterance. If Christ be man, how can He say, _My Father and I are one_?
If Christ be God, how can He proclaim that _His Father is greater than
He_? If Christ be Man, how can He say, _Before Abraham was, I am_? If
Christ be God, how can He name Himself _the Son of Man_.
(ii) Turn to the spiritual teaching of Jesus Christ, and once more
problem follows problem, and paradox, paradox.
Here is He Who came to soothe men's sorrows and to give rest to the
weary, He Who offers a sweet yoke and a light burden, telling them that
no man can be His disciple who will not take up the heaviest of all
burdens and follow Him uphill. Here is one, the Physician of souls and
bodies, Who _went about doing good_, Who set the example of activity in
God's service, pronouncing the silent passivity of Mary as the better
part that shall not be taken away from her. Here at one moment He turns
with the light of battle in His eyes, bidding His friends who have not
swords to _sell their cloaks and buy them_; and at another bids those
swords to be sheathed, since _His Kingdom is not of this world_. Here is
the Peacemaker, at one time pronouncing His benediction on those who
make peace, and at another crying that He _came to bring not peace but a
sword_. Here is He Who names as _blessed those that mourn_ bidding His
disciples to _rejoice and be exceeding glad_. Was there ever such a
Paradox, such perplexity, and such problems? In His Person and His
teaching alike there seems no rest and no solution--_What think ye of
Christ? Whose Son is He_?
II. (i) The Catholic teaching alone, of course, offers a key to these
questions; yet it is a key that is itself, like all keys, as complicated
as the wards which it alone can unlock. Heretic after heretic has sought
for simplification, and heretic after heretic has therefore come to
confusion. Christ is God, cried the Docetic; therefore cut out from the
Gospels all that speaks of the reality of His Manhood! God cannot bleed
and suffer and die; God cannot weary; God cannot feel the sorrows of
man. Christ is Man, cries the modern critic; therefore tear out from the
Gospels His Virgin Birth and His Resurrection! For none but a Catholic
can receive the Gospels as they were written; none but a man who
believes that Christ is both God and Man, who is content to believe that
and to bow before the Paradox of paradoxes that we call the Incarnation,
to accept the blinding mystery that Infinite and Finite Natures were
united in one Person, that the Eternal expresses Himself in Time, and
that the Uncreated Creator united to Himself Creation--none but a
Catholic, in a word, can meet, without exception, the mysterious
phenomena of Christ's Life.
(ii) Turn now again to the mysteries of our own limited life and, as in
a far-off phantom parallel, we begin to understand.
For we too, in our measure, have a double nature. _As God and Man make
one Christ, so soul and body make one man_: and, as the two natures of
Christ--as His Perfect Godhead united to His Perfect Manhood--lie at the
heart of the problems which His Life presents, so too our affinities
with the clay from which our bodies came, and with the Father of Spirits
Who inbreathed into us living souls, explain the contradictions of our
own experience.
If we were but irrational beasts, we could be as happy as the beasts;
if we were but discarnate spirits that look on God, the joy of the
angels would be ours. Yet if we assume either of these two truths as if
it were the only truth, we come certainly to confusion. If we live as
the beasts, we cannot sink to their contentment, for our immortal part
will not let us be; if we neglect or dispute the rightful claims of the
body, that very outraged body drags our immortal spirit down. The
acceptance of the two natures of Christ alone solves the problems of the
Gospel; the acceptance of the two parts of our own nature alone enables
us to live as God intends. Our spiritual and physical moods, then, rise
and fall as the one side or the other gains the upper hand: now our
religion is a burden to the flesh, now it is the exercise in which our
soul delights; now it is the one thing that makes life worth living, now
the one thing that checks our enjoyment of life. These moods alternate,
inevitably and irresistibly, according as we allow the balance of our
parts to be disturbed and set swaying. And so, ultimately, there is
reserved for us the joy neither of beasts nor of angels, but the joy of
humanity. We are higher than the one, we are lower than the other, that
we may be crowned by Him Who in that same Humanity sits on the Throne of
God.
So much, then, for our introduction. We have seen how the Paradox of the
Incarnation alone is adequate to the phenomena recorded in the
Gospel--how that supreme paradox is the key to all the rest. We will
proceed to see how it is also the key to other paradoxes of religion, to
the difficulties which the history of Catholicism presents. For the
Catholic Church is the extension of Christ's Life on earth; the Catholic
Church, therefore, that strange mingling of mystery and common-sense,
that union of earth and heaven, of clay and fire, can alone be
understood by him who accepts her as both Divine and Human, since she is
nothing else but the mystical presentment, in human terms, of Him Who,
though the Infinite God and the Eternal Creator, was _found in the form
of a servant_, of Him Who, _dwelling always in the Bosom of the Father_,
for our sakes _came down from heaven_.
(ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN
_Blessed art thou Simon Bar-jona; because flesh and blood hath not
revealed it to thee, but My Father Who is in heaven.... Go behind me,
satan, for thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things
that are of men_.--MATT. XVI. 17, 23.
We have seen how the only reconciliation of the paradoxes of the Gospel
lies in the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. It is only to him who
believes that Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect Man that the
Gospel record is coherent and intelligible. The heretics--men who for
the most part either rejected or added to the inspired record--were
those who, on the one side, accepted Christ's Divinity and rejected the
proofs of His Humanity, or accepted His Humanity and rejected the proofs
of His Divinity. In the early ages, for the most part, these accepted
His Divinity and, rejecting His Humanity, invented childish miracles
which they thought appropriate to a God dwelling on earth in a phantom
manhood; at the present day, rejecting His Divinity, they reject also
those miracles for which His Divinity alone is an adequate explanation.
Now the Catholic Church is an extension of the Incarnation. She too
(though, as we shall see, the parallel is not perfect) has her Divine
and Human Nature, which alone can account for the paradoxes of her
history; and these paradoxes are either predicted by Christ--asserted,
that is, as part of His spiritual teaching--or actually manifested in
His own life. (We may take them as symbolised, so to speak, in those
words of our Lord to St. Peter in which He first commends him as a man
inspired by God and then, almost simultaneously, rebukes him as one who
can rise no further than an earthly ideal at the best.)
I. (i) Just as we have already imagined a well-disposed inquirer
approaching for the first time the problems of the Gospel, so let us now
again imagine such a man, in whom the dawn of faith has begun,
encountering the record of Catholicism.
At first all seems to him Divine. He sees, for example, how singularly
unique she is, how unlike to all other human societies. Other societies
depend for their very existence upon a congenial human environment; she
flourishes in the most uncongenial. Other societies have their day and
pass down to dissolution and corruption; she alone knows no corruption.
Other dynasties rise and fall; the dynasty of Peter the Fisherman
remains unmoved. Other causes wax and wane with the worldly influence
which they can command; she is usually most effective when her earthly
interest is at the lowest ebb.
Or again, he falls in love with her Divine beauty and perceives even in
her meanest acts a grace which he cannot understand. He notices with
wonder how she takes human mortal things--a perishing pagan language, a
debased architecture, an infant science or philosophy--and infuses into
them her own immortality. She takes the superstitions of a country-side
and, retaining their "accidents," transubstantiates them into truth; the
customs or rites of a pagan society, and makes them the symbols of a
living worship. And into all she infuses a spirit that is all her own--a
spirit of delicate grace and beauty of which she alone has the secret.
It is her Divinity, then, that he sees, and rightly. But, wrongly, he
draws certain one-sided conclusions. If she is so perfect, he argues (at
least subconsciously), she can be nothing else than perfect; if she is
so Divine she can be in no sense human. Her pontiffs must all be saints,
her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is
Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest
movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no
self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, since
she is Divine?
Such are his first instincts. And then, little by little, his
disillusionment begins.
For, as he studies her record more deeply, he begins to encounter
evidences of her Humanity. He reads history, and he discovers here and
there a pontiff who but little in his moral character resembles Him
Whose Vicar he is. He meets an apostate priest; he hears of some
savagery committed in Christ's name; he talks with a convert who has
returned complacently to the City of Confusion; there is gleefully
related to him the history of a family who has kept the faith all
through the period of persecution and lost it in the era of toleration.
And he is shaken and dismayed. "How can these be in a Society that is
Divine? I had _trusted_ that it had been_ She _who should have redeemed
Israel;_ _and now--_!"
(ii) Another man approaches the record of Catholicism from the opposite
direction. To him she is a human society and nothing more; and he finds,
indeed, a thousand corroborations of his theory. He views her amazing
success in the first ages of Christianity--the rapid propagation of her
tenets and the growth of her influence--and sees behind these things
nothing more than the fortunate circumstance of the existence of the
Roman Empire. Or he notices the sudden and rapid rise of the power of
the Roman pontiff and explains this by the happy chance that moved the
centre of empire to the east and left in Rome an old prestige and an
empty throne. He sees how the Church has profited by the divisions in
Europe; how she has inherited the old Latin genius for law and order;
and he finds in these things an explanation of her unity and of her
claim to rule princes and kings. She is to him just human, and no more.
There is not, at first sight, a phenomenon of her life for which he
cannot find a human explanation. She is interesting, as a result of
innumerable complicated forces; she is venerable, as the oldest coherent
society in Europe; she has the advantage of Italian diplomacy; she has
been shrewd, unweary, and persevering. But she is no more.
And then, as he goes deeper, he begins to encounter phenomena which do
not fall so easily under his compact little theories. If she is merely
human, why do not the laws of all other human societies appear to affect
her too? Why is it that she alone shows no incline towards dissolution
and decay? Why has not she too split up into the component parts of
which she is welded? How is it that she has preserved a unity of which
all earthly unities are but shadows? Or he meets with the phenomena of
her sanctity and begins to perceive that the difference between the
character she produces in her saints and the character of the noblest of
those who do not submit to her is one of kind and not merely of degree.
If she is merely mediaeval, how is it that she commands such allegiance
as that which is paid to her in modern America? If she is merely
European, how is it that she alone can deal with the Oriental on his own
terms? If she is merely the result of temporal circumstances, how is it
that her spiritual influence shows no sign of waning when the forces
that helped to build her are dispersed?
His theory too, then, becomes less confident. If she is Human, why is
she so evidently Divine? If she is Divine, whence comes her obvious
Humanity? So years ago men asked, If Christ be God, how could He be
weary by the wayside and die upon the Cross? So men ask now, If Christ
be Man, how could He cast out devils and rise from the dead?
II. We come back, then, to the Catholic answer. Treat the Catholic
Church as Divine only and you will stumble over her scandals, her
failures, and her shortcomings. Treat her as Human only and you will be
silenced by her miracles, her sanctity, and her eternal resurrections.
(i) Of course the Catholic Church is Human. She consists of fallible
men, and her Humanity is not even safeguarded as was that of Christ
against the incursions of sin. Always, therefore, there have been
scandals, and always will be. Popes may betray their trust, in all human
matters; priests their flocks; laymen their faith. No man is secure.
And, again, since she is human it is perfectly true that she has
profited by human circumstances for the increase of her power.
Undoubtedly it was the existence of the Roman Empire, with its roads,
its rapid means of transit, and its organization, that made possible the
swift propagation of the Gospel in the first centuries. Undoubtedly it
was the empty throne of Caesar and the prestige of Rome that developed
the world's acceptance of the authority of Peter's Chair. Undoubtedly
it was the divisions of Europe that cemented the Church's unity and led
men to look to a Supreme Authority that might compose their differences.
There is scarcely an opening in human affairs into which she has not
plunged; hardly an opportunity she has missed. Human affairs, human sins
and weaknesses as well as human virtues, have all contributed to her
power. So grows a tree, even in uncongenial soil. The rocks that impede
the roots later become their support; the rich soil, waiting for an
occupant, has been drawn up into the life of the leaves; the very winds
that imperilled the young sapling have developed too its power of
resistance. Yet these things do not make the tree.
(ii) For her Humanity, though it is the body in which her Divinity
dwells, does not create that Divinity. Certainly human circumstances
have developed her, yet what but Divine Providence ordered and developed
those human circumstances? What but that same power, which indwells in
the Church, dwelt without her too and caused her to take root at that
time and in that place which most favored her growth? Certainly she is
Human. It may well be that her rulers have contradicted one another in
human matters--in science, in policy, and in discipline; but how is it,
then, that they have not contradicted one another in matters that are
Divine? Granted that one Pope has reversed the policy of his
predecessor, then what has saved him from reversing his theology also?
Certainly there have been appalling scandals, outrageous sinners,
blaspheming apostates--but what of her saints?
And, above all, she gives proof of her Divinity by that very sign to
which Christ Himself pointed as a proof of His own. Granted that she
_dies daily_--that her cause fails in this century and in that country;
that her science is discredited in this generation and her active
morality in that and her ideals in a third--how comes it that she also
rises daily from the dead; that her old symbols rise again from their
ruins; that her virtues are acclaimed by the children of the men who
renounced her; that her bells and her music sound again where once her
churches and houses were laid waste?
Here, then, is the Catholic answer and it is this alone that makes sense
of history, as it is Catholic doctrine which alone makes sense of the
Gospel record. The answer is identical in both cases alike, and it is
this--that the only explanation of the phenomena of the Gospels and of
Church history is that the Life which produces them is both Human and
Divine.
I
PEACE AND WAR
_Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the
children of God._--MATT. V. 9.
_Do not think that I am come to send peace on earth; I
came not to send peace but the sword._--MATT. X. 34.
We have considered how the key to the Paradoxes of the Gospel and the
key to the Paradoxes of Catholicism is one and the same--that the Life
that produces them is at once Divine and Human. Let us go on to consider
how this resolves those of Catholicism, especially those charged against
us by our adversaries.
For we live in a day when Catholicism is no longer considered by
intelligent men to be too evidently absurd to be argued with. Definite
reasons are given by those who stand outside our borders for the
attitude they maintain; definite accusations are made which must either
be allowed or refuted.
Now those who stand without the walls of the City of Peace know nothing,
it is true, of the life that its citizens lead within, nothing of the
harmony and consolation that Catholicism alone can give. Yet of certain
points, it may be, in the large outlines of that city against the sky,
of the place it occupies in the world, of its wide effect upon human
life in general, it may very well be that these detached observers may
know more than the devout who dwell at peace within. Let us, then,
consider their reflections not necessarily as wholly false; it may be
that they have caught glimpses which we have missed and relations which
either we take too much for granted or have failed altogether to see. It
may be that these accusations will turn out to be our credentials in
disguise.
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