A Preface to Catholicism

DEAR MRS.—:

Last night at dinner at Mrs.—’s you spoke to me very seriously, charmingly, appreciatively, of the Catholic Church as making for those who sincerely practise the Catholic religion a centre of peace and stability in the otherwise rather mad and terrible whirlpool of life.

It is, alas, very characteristic of my poor self that I seem always to be unable at a dinner table, or in general in society, to respond appropriately and as a priest should to remarks of that kind. I fear you had reason to think me cold and uninterested. I can sometimes flash back with considerable vivacity — alas, too much — against a hostile or depreciatory criticism of the Church if it seems to me to be the fruit of ill will or of culpable ignorance, but otherwise social occasions are apt to leave me rather dumb in regard to these matters.

However, your remark pleased me very much, and although I know little, I fear, of your general point of view or state of mind, I am writing you a response which I hope will be fitting, although I am almost sure that it will be too long for your patience.

I suppose that any system of religious or ethical doctrine which is not quite crazy and which is sincerely practised stabilizes life and gives it a certain dignity and peace; but I agree with you, I take it, that the Catholic Church does seem in this matter quite uniquely to hit the bull’s-eye, shall we say. I take it also that you agree with me that one has to look rather far beneath the surface to see why this is so; the incrustations are dense. It was just here, I suspect, that your remark was meant to give a lead which I had not the wit or courage to follow. Let me follow it now.

One thing, and one thing alone, thoroughly redeems life and makes it worth while: to learn to suffer in patience, in humility, in confidence — in confidence that suffering has a meaning and purpose; not the only meaning and purpose, but the supreme meaning and purpose of life. In learning to suffer so, there is peace, and more than peace; just in proportion as the lesson is deeply and thoroughly learned, there is positively joy. This paradox is the central fact of existence so far as the human race is concerned; and it constitutes the mystery which lies in the heart, or rather in the root, of Catholicism, and which the Church ‘ gets over,’somehow, into the minds, or at any rate into the lives, of all her children, even the most ignorant, stupid, or superstitious, provided they are sincere and in earnest. This is Fact Number One about Catholicism, and outweighs in its importance all other facts. Catholicism is the Religion of the Crucifix, the Way of the Cross.

Fact Number Two, which in its turn outweighs in importance all subsequent facts about Catholicism, may be stated as follows: No one can really learn to suffer in patience, humility, and confidence who does not try sincerely to be prudent, to be just, to be self-controlled, to be steadfast in his daily conduct. Perhaps it is important to stop here long enough to insist upon the point that in regard to these two fundamental matters of learning to suffer and of moral practice it is far more essential that men should be induced to act sincerely and earnestly according to the lights that they have, even though these lights be to a considerable extent darkness, than that men should be thoroughly enlightened with reference to the highest ethical standards in all matters. (For example, the Pharisee and the Publican.) This is a truth which can be easily abused by lazy or designing ecclesiastics, and they have in the past plentifully abused it, and do now; but it is a truth none the less.

In the foregoing paragraph I have used the words ‘to be prudent, to be just, to be self-controlled, to be steadfast in his daily conduct’ — the four cardinal points of rational morality — rather than ‘to be humble; to he forgiving and full of allowance-making kindness; to be detached from every inordinate affection for any other human being, or group, or for the whole human race, as well as detached from all inordinate concern for or dependence upon bodily life and health, material possessions, good repute, or creature comforts; to be heroic’ — which four virtues comprise what we may call the four cardinal points of sanctity. As a matter of fact, the individual who is sincerely trying to learn to suffer in patience, humility, and confidence will instinctively move on the plane of holiness rather than on the lower level of mere rational morality. After all, holiness is simply rational morality with a difference; it is rational morality as rational morality is found in the life of one who is smitten through and through by a sense of the terrible beauty and strangeness, the deep unfathomed mystery, the august yet somehow homely lovableness, of Life itself. Such a one, after all, is the only one who will be sincerely moved to learn to suffer in patience, humility, and confidence.

Humility, by the way, is a virtue so much depreciated and misunderstood, and counts for so much more than almost anything else in any religious, Christian, Catholic scheme of life, that I think I ought to say precisely what I mean by it. Humility is the habit of trying to see one’s self, not as one likes to think one is, but as one really is, and of acting accordingly. It most decidedly includes not merely trying to see one’s self as one really is, but also trying to see all the family, local, occupational, economic, social, national, racial, religious groups to which one belongs and into which one extends one’s self, so to speak, not as one likes to think these groups are, but as they really are. Perhaps no part of humility is more important than the effort (a) to see human nature and the human race as a whole, to see man’s place in the universe and the essential conditions of the human lot, not as one likes to think these arc, but as they really are; and (b) to are accordingly.

Fact Number Three of the great Catholic facts is ‘the wild, indeterminate, infinite appetite of man,’ as the old Anglican Bishop Jeremy Taylor called it; the incorrigible or, at any rate, only partially corrigible exuberance and exorbitance of human desire; the incorrigible or only partially corrigible restlessness of the human heart. This, by the way, more than anything else, more than all the evils that press upon us from without, more than all merely physical pains as such, is what we have to learn to suffer in serenity and peace — this continuous, irrepressible, instinctive insurrection of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, the pride of life within us; not one of these lusts being evil in itself, — please mark that thoroughly, — but each of them, and all three together, an inexhaustible spring of restlessness.

This ‘corruption of our nature’ — that is, the radically insatiable and only partially corrigible exorbitance of human desires — is what makes heroism, heroism linked or, rather, intimately fused with humility, the most indispensable factor of human happiness. Life is terrible, but it may none the less be made by each one of us somehow glorious. Its essence is conflict, struggle. The chief enemy each one of us has to fight turns out to be, as every prudent man soon discovers, himself; one has to curb the irrational exuberance and exorbitance of his will to live, of his will to power; of the ‘wild, indeterminate, infinite appetite’ within him. The certain issue of this conflict is relatively failure, defeat; because our threefold concupiscence or libido (1) of pleasure, (2) of knowledge and novelty, and (3) of power, prestige, and having one’s own way, can only imperfectly be brought under the yoke of the rational will while life lasts. Yet the valiant and persistent fighter, if he learns how to rely in all humility not upon himself but upon the innermost and permanent Reality of things, manages to snatch somehow, from the very jaws of defeat itself, victory, peace, joy.

Fact Number Four concerning Catholicism is very interesting and very little understood. The great Mystery of the Cross affords a great purchase or hold, so to speak, to fanaticism or to mere pessimism. This or that individual who is responding to the call to walk in the Way of the Cross may, through some happy disposition of natural temperament or of the circumstances of his life, avoid the pitfalls of fanaticism or pessimism. But men in general cannot be as devoted as they ought to be to the Mystery of the Cross and cannot be as deeply penetrated as they ought to be by the recognition of the ‘corruption of our nature’ without danger of fanaticism or pessimism unless they are steadied and made sane by having under their feet a sound, rational philosophy of life which leaves no room for anti-rational conceptions or sentiments of any kind and does full justice to the gifts and tasks of culture and civilization, of conjugal love and family life, of friendship and good-fellowship. Such a philosophy the Church is convinced she has found in Aristotelian Platonism (Aristotle’s systematic development and drastic correction of Plato’s teachings); and not until the modern world brings forth a philosophical system which, in regard to central and fundamental matters, surpasses Aristotle’s in totality, centrality, sanity, proportionality, and balance will the Church leave Aristotle — or, rather, Saint Thomas Aquinas, his Christian commentator and exponent — for any other. Probably the Church will never leave them, since the Thomistic-Aristotelian system has a magnificent metabolism, an unrivaled capacity for absorbing and assimilating to itself extraneous philosophical and scientific matter from all sorts of quarters. It is a pity that this capacity of assimilation is not put to the proof more than it is by the Catholic exponents of Thomistic-Aristotelianism. Just to give you an intimation of what I mean without allowing myself to expatiate on a favorite topic or writing a long bill of fare, the ThomisticAristotelian system could make a morning’s meal of Karl Marx’s so-called materialistic conception of history, of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and of the endocrinological theory of human temperament and character without suffering the slightest indigestion if its Catholic keepers would feed this magnificent philosophical lion adequately instead of keeping him on a low diet.

Catholic Fact Number Five is, I suppose (to correct in a measure what I said some way back), practically the most important of all, because men are, after all, influenced by persons more than by anything else. No way of life has any power or purchase upon men except as it is embodied in a person; Jesus — Jesus as the Gospels give Him to us — is the inspiration and the example of those who are seeking peace in suffering and joy in the Cross. When those who have practically sunk themselves deep in the mystery of suffering experience with ineffable joy that somehow a Strange Presence or Otherness comes in the depths of their hearts to suffer in them, with them, and somehow instead of them, — this is the acme of religious experience, — it is, if they really understand His history, as Jesus of Nazareth (Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Father of Eternity, the Prince of Peace) that they identify this Mysterious Stranger. And the day will come when this will be no different in Asia than it is with us, for the Buddha did not promise joy — only, it seems, a somewhat negative peace; yet it is joy, not merely peace, that men want, and it is joy — such seems to be the experience of the Christian and Christianlike saints — which is found by those who are perfectly thorough and generous in practising the mystery of suffering. Christ is joy; Christ is risen!

Catholic Fact Number Six is constituted by the fact that the gregariousness of human nature requires such a way of life, if it is to be practised in any measure by large masses of men, to be practised in common — to be the enterprise of a community. Some gifted individuals here and there may be able to consecrate a way of life for themselves although they practise it more or less in isolation; though even they are usually living upon the capitalized communal traditions of spiritual experience that have come down to them in one way and another from highly organized religious groups to which their parents or grandparents belonged. But I think history makes it very plain that the immense majority of men require something more or less in the way of public worship and common prayer, of sacramental certitudes and common discipline, if they are to hold any especial way of life as being sacred. This is particularly true when the way of life in question rests upon principles that are as repugnant to the majority of men and to almost all men in their ordinary moods as are what I have called Fact Number One (suffering alone redeems life) and Fact Number Three (the corruption of our nature). For instance, speaking as I did just a moment since of ‘sacramental certitudes,’think how the Sacrifice of the Mass, especially in connection with Holy Communion, enables the pitiably extraverted mass of men — and even the wholesomely introverted ones in their ordinary, everyday, extraverted moods — to realize instinctively and objectively the mysterious presence and as it were suffering-triumphing action within the soul of that Eternal Otherness which thus becomes more we than we are ourselves.

Catholic Fact Number Seven, and we are through with our enumeration. If our community is to be vigorously maintained and preserved and to operate effectively, it will have to be highly organized, and organized on a world-wide scale, since such a community represents a way of life which is meant for all men and which cannot allow itself to be too much modified by irrelevant racial, national, or local influences, or by the changing moods and fashions of different historical periods. Such a high degree of communal organization and of resistance to dissolving influences demands, of course, a fixed centre of high, of supreme, potentiality such as the Papacy — an institution that has its inevitable inconveniences and is very liable to abuse, but is quite indispensable to the life and continuity of any society which is necessarily as much at war with the general way of the world as that community must be at war which is devoted to the way of life that I have outlined in the above points.

It cannot be too much insisted upon, indeed every possibility of understanding the ecclesiastical problem depends upon seeing, that all the influences and interests of everyday life, all the claims of culture and civilization, — looked at superficially, that is, which is the way men mostly look at them, — tend to ignore, to dissolve, or positively to fight against, the Way of the Cross. The Church must be militant; it must fight. There has to be a G. H. Q., and a Commander in Chief with plenary authority. Usually the Church seems to be fighting simply for her own selfish interests — that is, for the selfish interests of her clergy, her hierarchy, her Pope; and no doubt this is often the case. But were every Pope a saint, were all bishops, clergy, and ‘religious’ saints, masterpieces of wisdom and disinterestedness, the Church would still necessarily be at war, and even more so, with the world, even with the world at its possible best. There is an inevitable tension, an incorrigible antagonism, between the world, even at its possible best, and a community whose object is to proclaim and practise peace in suffering and only in suffering; joy in the Cross and only in the Cross.

Everything which I have put before you so far is built logically upon a fact which, as so often happens in such matters, is nowhere expressly mentioned, but which perhaps I should have stated in the beginning as Catholic Fact Number One. It is a fact impregnably certain, but, like so many other fundamental and impregnably certain facts of our experience, intrinsically clear-obscure — the difference between happiness and pleasure. Like the difference between the pleasant and the beautiful, the difference between happiness and pleasure is very difficult to conceive but very easy to experience. Pleasures and pains belong, so to speak, to the category of ‘the Many’ — they are, as it were, mechanically atomistic, like the atoms of Democritus; they form transient aggregates, never a unified whole. Among pleasures only the tonicity of a healthy body, the glow and tingle and vigorous sense of abounding physical health, is a kind of adumbration or presentiment of happiness. Happiness (Heaven!) and misery (Hell!) participate somehow in ‘the One’; misery, as a schoolman would say, ‘ privatively ’ — that is, by life’s missing the mark which it is born to hit. Happiness is the glow and tingle of spiritual — that is, intellectual-volitional-emotional — health; the vigorous sense of God-given adequacy to meet, to master, or somehow victoriously transcend, by perfect inward acceptance and peace, all the vicissitudes of life. ‘The sage,’ — a Greek’s only way of describing what we call a saint, — ‘the sage will be happy even when stretched upon the tyrant’s rack!’ Who do you suppose said that? Epicurus, of all men and philosophers — Epicurus, the classical exponent of hedonism, the philosophy of pleasure, and the name-saint of all subsequent ‘epicures.’ For saying it he deserves, almost, to be treated, one might say, as one of the Fathers of the Church.

Upon this rock, — the essential difference between happiness and pleasure, — as upon Peter, Reality has built in majestic and unique solidity the Roman Church (its innermost citadel is constituted by the holy contemplative Orders, — Carthusians, Cistercians, Camaldolese, Carmelites, Poor Clares, and their like, — in whose life the reality of the difference between happiness and pleasure is practically demonstrated with incomparable magnificence), and one hardly requires the gift of faith, so it seems to me, to be certain that neither the gates of Hell nor the tides of time will ever prevail against it.

At any rate, whatever of moment I know or believe or have experienced concerning the Christian religion and the Catholic Church can be conveniently subsumed under one or the other of the above seven or eight points. Everything else is poetry, or incrustation, or a matter of convenience more or less passing or more or less age-long. I am free to say that I like immensely much of the poetry and even some of the incrustations, and find that there is a good deal to be said for the ecclesiastical arrangements that have been made, early or late, as matters of convenience — although of course, like all large bodies, the Church can easily be too slow in laying aside or modifying those arrangements which have outlived their usefulness in their existing shape; but these are mostly very secondary matters.

However, the specific genius of Hebrew-Jewish-Christian religious tradition is to seek and find the Eternal, not so much in metaphysics, mysticism, or personal experience, as first and foremost in social, and above all historical, — that is, epoch-making, — acts and facts. Ecclesiastical tenets and institutions which have from the first grown up naturally, so to speak, as a tree grows from a sapling, out of words or acts of Jesus or of His original Apostles, will never be regarded by those who are under the influence of the HebrewJewish-Christian way of thinking as merely matters of convenience, but will be recognized as sacrosanct; which need not prevent the Church, as time goes on, from distinguishing between their substance and the accidents with which time has clothed them. Nor, what is more, need it prevent the Church from distinguishing more and more, as time goes on, in the words and acts of Jesus and His original Apostles, between their time-conditioned, placeconditioned ‘flesh’ or ‘letter’ — ‘the flesh’ which of itself ‘ profiteth nothing’ and ‘the letter’ which, unduly pressed, ‘killeth’ — and the everlasting universal import of these words and acts, the ‘spirit’ of them that maketh alive.

But, for reasons which all I have written has tried to make clear, for me at least it would be nothing short of treason to wish to think, speak, or act, in these secondary matters of religiousphilosophical and theological interpretation, independently of the Catholic and Roman Church, which somehow uniquely incorporates, realizes, and is energized by the living idea of what is for me the central fact of existence: that is, the redemptive efficacy — the peace-giving, joy-bringing, somehow eternalizing efficacy — of suffering heroically undertaken or patiently, humbly, confidently endured in union with the Suffering Servant of the Eternal, ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,’ the Crucified God of this strange, this bittersweet universe.