_Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy
neighbour as thyself_.--LUKE x. 27.
We have already considered two charges brought against Catholicism from
opposite quarters; namely, that we are too worldly and too otherworldly,
too much busied with temporal concerns to be truly spiritual, and too
metaphysical and remote and dogmatic to be truly practical. Let us go on
to consider these same two charges produced, so to speak, a little
further into a more definitely spiritual plane; charges that now accuse
us of too great activities in our ministry to men and too many
attentions paid to God.
I. (i) It is a very common complaint against Catholics, laymen as well
as clergy, that they are overzealous in their attempts to proselytize.
True and spiritual religion, we are told, is as intimate and personal an
affair as the love between husband and wife; it is essentially private
and individual. "The religion of all sensible men," it has been said,
"is precisely that which they always keep to themselves." Tolerance,
therefore, is a mark of spirituality, for if I am truly religious I
shall have as much respect for the religion of my neighbour as for my
own. I shall no more seek to interfere in his relations with God than I
shall allow him to interfere with mine.
Now Catholics are notoriously intolerant. It is not merely that there
are intolerant Catholics, for intolerance is of course to be found in
all narrow-minded persons, but it is Catholic principles themselves that
are intolerant; and every Catholic who lives up to them is bound to be
so also. And we can see this illustrated every day.
First, there is the matter of Catholic missions to the heathen. There
are no missionaries, we are told, so untiring and so devoted as those of
the Church. Their zeal, of course, is a proof of their sincerity; but it
is also a proof of their intolerance: for why, after all, cannot they
leave the heathen alone, since religion is, in its essence, a private
and individual matter? Beautiful pictures, accordingly, are suggested to
us of the domestic peace and happiness reigning amongst the tribes of
Central Africa until the arrival of the Preaching Friar with his
destructive dogmas. We are bidden to observe the high doctrines and the
ascetic life of the Brahmin, the significant symbolism of the Hindu, and
the philosophical attitudes of the Confucian. All these various
relationships to God are, we are informed, entirely the private affairs
of those who live by them; and if Catholics were truly spiritual they
would understand that this was so and not seek to supplant by a system
which is now, at any rate, become an essentially European way of looking
at things, these ancient creeds and philosophies that are far better
suited to the Oriental temperament.
But the matter is worse, even, than this. It may conceivably be argued,
says the modern man of the world, that after all those Oriental
religions have not developed such virtues and graces as has
Christianity. It may perhaps be argued that in time the religion of the
West, if missionaries will persevere, will raise the Hindu higher than
his own obscenities have succeeded in doing, and that the civilization
produced by Christianity is actually of a higher type, in spite of its
evil by-products, than that of the head-hunters of Borneo and the bloody
savages of Africa. But at any rate there is no excuse whatever for the
intolerant Catholic proselytizer in English homes. For, roughly
speaking, it is only the Catholic whom you cannot trust in your own home
circle; sooner or later you will find him, if he at all lives up to his
principles, insinuating the praises of his own faith and the weaknesses
of your own; your sons and daughters he considers to be fair game; he
thinks nothing of your domestic peace in comparison with the propagation
of his own tenets. He is characterized, first and last, by that dogmatic
and intolerant spirit that is the exact contrary of all that the modern
world deems to be the spirit of true Christianity. True Christianity,
then, as has been said, is essentially a private, personal, and
individual matter between each soul and her God.
(ii) The second charge brought against Catholics is that they make
religion far too personal, too private, and too intimate for it to be
considered the religion of Jesus Christ. And this is illustrated by the
supreme value which the Church places upon what is known as the
Contemplative Life.
For if there is one element in Catholicism that the man-in-the-street
especially selects for reprobation it is the life of the Enclosed
Religious. It is supposed to be selfish, morbid, introspective, unreal;
it is set in violent dramatic contrast with the ministerial Life of
Jesus Christ. A quantity of familiar eloquence is solemnly poured out
upon it as if nothing of the kind had ever been said before: it is said
that "a man cannot get away from the world by shutting himself up in a
monastery"; that "a man should not think about his own soul so much, but
rather of what good he can do in the world in which God has placed him";
that "four whitewashed walls" are not the proper environment for a
philanthropic Christian.
And yet, after all, what is the Contemplative Life except precisely that
which the world just now recommended? And could religion possibly be
made a more intimate, private, and personal matter between the soul and
God than the Carthusian or Carmelite makes it?
The fact is, of course, that Catholics are wrong whatever they do--too
extreme in everything which they undertake. They are too active and not
retired enough in their proselytism; too retired and not active enough
in their Contemplation.
II. Now the Life of our Divine Lord exhibits, of course, both the Active
and the Contemplative elements that have always distinguished the Life
of His Church.
For three years He set Himself to the work of preaching His Revelation
and establishing the Church that was to be its organ through all the
centuries. He went about, therefore, freely and swiftly, now in town,
now in country. He laid down His Divine principles and presented His
Divine credentials, at marriage feasts, in market-places, in country
roads, in crowded streets, and in private houses. He wrought the works
of mercy, spiritual and corporal, that were to be the types of all works
of mercy ever afterwards. He gave spiritual and ascetic teaching on the
Mount of Beatitudes, dogmatic instructions in Capharnaum and the
wilderness to the east of Galilee, and mystical discourses in the Upper
Chamber of Jerusalem and the temple courts. His activities and His
proselytisms were unbounded. He broke up domestic circles and the
routine of offices. He called the young man from his estates and Matthew
from custom-house and James and John from their father's fishing
business. He made a final demonstration of His unlimited claim on
humanity in His Procession on Palm Sunday, and on Ascension Day
ratified and commissioned the proselytizing activities of His Church for
ever in His tremendous charge to the Apostolic band. _Going, therefore,
teach ye all nations ... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever
I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all the days, even to the
consummation of the world._
Yet this, it must be remembered, was not only not the whole of His Life
on earth, it was not even a very considerable part of it, if reckoned by
years. For three years He was active, but for thirty He was retired in
the house of Nazareth; and even those three years are again and again
broken by retirement. He is now in the wilderness for forty days, now on
the mountain all night in prayer, now bidding His disciples come apart
and rest themselves. The very climax of His ministry too was wrought in
silence and solitude. He removed Himself _about a stone's throw_ in the
garden of Gethsemane from those who loved Him best; He broke His silence
on the Cross to bid farewell even to His holy Mother herself. Above all,
he explicitly and emphatically commended the Life of Contemplative
Prayer as the highest that can be lived on earth, telling Martha that
activity, even in the most necessary duties, was not after all the best
use to which time and love could be put, but rather that _Mary had
chosen the best part ... the one thing that is necessary_, and that it
_shall not be taken away from her_ even by a sister's loving zeal.
Finally, fault was found with Jesus Christ, as with His Church, on
precisely these two points. When He was living the life of retirement in
the country He was rebuked that He did not go up to the feast and state
His claims plainly--justify, that is, by activity, His pretensions to
the Messiahship; and when He did so, He was entreated to bid his
acclaimants _to hold their peace_--to justify, that is, by humility and
retirement, His pretensions to spirituality.
III. The reconciliation, therefore, of these two elements in the
Catholic system is very easy to find.
(i) First, it is the Church's Divinity that accounts for her passion for
God. To her as to none else on earth is the very face of God revealed as
the Absolute and Final Beauty that lies beyond the limits of all
Creation. She in her Divinity enjoys it may be said, even in her sojourn
on earth, that very Beatific Vision that enraptured always the Sacred
Humanity of Jesus Christ. With all the company of heaven then, with Mary
Immaculate, with the Seraphim and with the glorified saints of God, she
_endures, seeing Him Who is invisible_. Even while the eyes of her
humanity are held, while her human members _walk by faith and not by
sight_, she, in her Divinity, which is the guaranteed Presence of Jesus
Christ in her midst, already _dwells in heavenly places_ and is already
_come to Mount Zion and the City of the living God and to God Himself_,
Who is the Light in which all fair things are seen to be fair.
Is it any wonder then that, now and again, some chosen child of hers
catches a mirrored glimpse of what she herself beholds with unveiled
face; that some Catholic soul, now and again, chosen and called by God
to this amazing privilege, should suddenly perceive, as never before,
that God is the one and only Absolute Beauty, and that, compared with
the contemplation of this Beauty--which contemplation is, after all, the
final life of Eternity to which every redeemed soul shall come--all the
activities of earthly life are nothing; and that, in her passion for
this adorable God, she should run into a secret room and _shut the door
and pray to her Father Who is in secret_, and so remain praying, a
hidden channel of life to the whole of that Body of which she is a
member, an intercessor for the whole of that Society of which she is one
unit? There in silence, then, she sits at Jesus' feet and listens to the
Voice which is _as the sound of many waters_; in the whiteness of her
cell watches Him Whose _Face is as a Flame of Fire_, and in austerity
and fasting _tastes and finds that the Lord is gracious._
Of course this is but madness and folly to those who know God only in
His Creation, who imagine Him merely as the Soul of the World and the
Vitality of Created Life. To such as these earth is His highest Heaven
and the beauty of the world the noblest vision that can be conceived.
Yet to that soul that is Catholic, who understands that the Eternal
Throne is indeed above the stars and that the Transcendence of God is as
fully a truth as His Immanence--that God in Himself, apart from all
that He has made, is all-fair and all-sufficient in His own Beauty--to
such a soul as this, if called to such a life, there is no need that the
Church should declare explicitly that the Contemplative Life is the
highest. She knows it already.
(ii) The _First Great Commandment_ of the Law, then, is inevitably
followed by the Second, and the Catholic interpretation of the Second is
thought by the world, which understands neither, to be as extravagant as
her interpretation of the First.
For this Divine Church that knows God is also a Human Society that
dwells among men, and since she in herself unites Divinity and Humanity,
she cannot rest until she has united them everywhere else.
For, as she turns her eyes from God to men, she sees there immortal
souls, made in the image of God and made for Him and Him alone, seeking
to satisfy themselves with Creation instead of with the Creator. She
hears how the world preaches the sanctity of the temperament, and the
holiness of the individual point of view, as if there were no
Transcendent God at all and no objective external Revelation ever made
by Him. She sees how men, instead of seeking to conform themselves to
God's Revelation of Himself, attempt rather to conform such fragments of
that Revelation as have reached them to their own points of view; she
listens to talk about "aspects of truth" and "schools of thought" and
the "values of experience" as if God had never spoken either in the
thunders of Sinai or the still voice of Galilee.
Is it any wonder, then, that her Proselytism appears to such a world as
extravagant as her Contemplation, her passion for men as unreasonable as
her passion for God, when that world sees her bring herself from her
cloisters and her secret places to proclaim as with a trumpet those
demands of God which He has made known, those Laws which He has
promulgated, and those rewards which He has promised? For how can she do
otherwise who has looked on the all-glorious Face of God and then on the
vacant and complacent faces of men--she who knows God's infinite
capacity for satisfying men and men's all but infinite incapacity for
seeking God--when she sees some poor soul shutting herself up indeed
within the deadly and chilly walls of her own "temperament" and
"individual point of view," when earth and heaven and the Lord of them
both is waiting for her outside?
The Church, then, is too much interested in men and too much absorbed in
God. Of course she is too much interested and too much absorbed, for she
alone knows the value and capacity of both; she who is herself both
Divine and Human. For Religion, to her, is not an elegant accomplishment
or a graceful philosophy or a pleasing scheme of conjectures. It is the
fiery bond between God and man, neither of whom can be satisfied
without the other, the One in virtue of His Love and the other in virtue
of his createdness. She alone, then, understands and reconciles the
tremendous Paradox of the Law that is Old as well as New. _Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy neighbour as
thyself _.