In “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo“, Hopkins says that the only way to keep beauty from vanishing away was to give it back to God, “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver”. Surrender to God is also the theme of his “Morning, Midday, and Evening Sacrifice”. The times of day, of course, represent the stages of life. I’ve included the notes (taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, OUP: 1996) that were most helpful to me.
The dappled die-away°
Cheek and wimpled° lip,
The gold-wisp, the airy-grey
Eye, all in fellowship—
This, all this beauty blooming,
This, all this freshness fuming,°
Give God while worth consuming.
Both thought and thew now bolder
And told by Nature: Tower;
Head, heart, hand, heel, and shoulder
That beat and breathe in power—
This pride of prime’s enjoyment
Take as for tool, not toy meant
And hold at Christ’s employment.
The vault and scope and schooling
And mastery in the mind,
In silk-ash kept from cooling,°
And ripest under rind°—
What life half lifts the latch of,
What hell stalks towards the snatch of,
Your offering, with despatch, of!
Notes die-away. Suggests subtle colouring and smooth shape. wimpled. Curved, Cupid’s bow of the upper lip. fuming. Suggestive of the fleeting, almost transparent quality of childhood beauty. in silk-ash kept from cooling. GMH explains: “I meant to compare grey hairs to the flakes of silky ash which may be seen round wood embers burnt in a clear fire and covering a ‘core of heat’, as Tennyson calls it.” rind. The outer covering of the ember.
In “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” (text and video of Richard Burton’s reading below), Gerard Manley Hopkins considers the passing of beauty. “The Leaden Echo” introduces the question: is there a way to “keep back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?” It is a leaden echo (gray like the messengers of oncoming age) because it weighs us down to earth. It laments the incessant wearing away of time. The inevitability of death leads only to despair.
But “Spare!” It is an echo of despair, a word rising out of it like a resurrection. It is also a plea for mercy. There is a way to keep beauty from vanishing away – but it is not a solution found in this world, “within the singeing of the of the strong sun”. If you wish to retain your cherished beauties you must gather them up and
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
You must resist the temptation to cling to beauty and instead surrender it to God. Mortal beauty is transient. Its proper role is as a sign transparent to the immortal beauty of God.
We must not be faithless, believing that beauty fades, dies, and decays. God is beauty, and God keeps all our beautiful things “with fonder a care”. Where? “Yonder.”
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so coggard, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.
THE LEADEN ECHO
How to keep—is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace,
lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.
THE GOLDEN ECHO
Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us,
seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks,
lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so coggard, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.
As I was driving through town I was thinking about Ryan. The doctor had just told his family that this latest episode in his long illness would be the last; that if there were any other family members who want to see him before he dies they had better come quickly. I was thinking of the torture he must be experiencing as he realizes he has only days remaining with his wife and four year old son. How do you say goodbye?
I came to the corner where stands the church I’ve often visited during my lunch hour. On an impulse I parked the car and walked in.
As I dipped my fingers in the holy water I noticed a homeless man sleeping on the back pew, head resting on his pack. In the middle of the church an older women with long, straight hair sat erect and silent. I walked to the prayer corner, where there were candles already lit by troubled souls who had preceded me.
I knelt before the icon of the crucifixion, opened my prayer book and began the litany for the dying:
Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us.
Lord, have mercy upon us.
Holy Mary, pray for him
All ye holy Angels and Archangels, pray for him
Holy Abel, pray for him
All ye choirs of the Righteous, pray for him
Holy Abraham, pray for him
Saint John Baptist, pray for him
Saint Joseph, pray for him
All ye holy Patriarchs and Prophets, pray for him
Saint Peter, pray for him
Saint Paul, pray for him
Saint Andrew, pray for him
Saint John, pray for him
All ye holy Apostles and Evangelists, pray for him
All ye holy Disciples of our Lord, pray for him
All ye holy Innocents, pray for him
Saint Stephen, pray for him
Saint Lawrence, pray for him
All ye holy Martyrs, pray for him
Saint Sylvester, pray for him
Saint Gregory, pray for him
Saint Augustine, pray for him
All ye holy Bishops and Confessors, pray for him
Saint Benedict, pray for him
Saint Francis, pray for him
All ye holy Monks and Hermits, pray for him
Saint Mary Magdalene, pray for him
Saint Lucy, pray for him
All ye holy Virgins and Widows, pray for him
All ye holy men and women, Saints of God, intercede for him.
Midway through this part of the litany I was struck by its audacity. I was invoking not only great Christian saints, but some of the most extraordinary human beings who have ever lived. I was asking those enjoying the beatific vision to stop their activity (whatever that may be) and attend to one emaciated man in a Bloomington hospital bed.
Of course, I should feel the same amazement when praying directly to God. But for my entire life I’ve been told that God loves us and hears our prayers, so I guess I’ve come to expect this. Then I realized that the invocation of the saints is a practice flowing out of this belief. If the saints are now united with God and share in God’s love, then it is no more audacious to request their intercession than it is to call upon God directly. Their human hearts have experienced our pain and react in compassion.
I know the arguments against the invocation of the saints. For that matter, I know – and have felt keenly – the arguments against any prayer on behalf of others. My only defense is that I was obeying a deep instinct. “The heart has its reasons.” In the face of death we have only sorrow and rage and silence and prayer. And, as Ryan’s mother said to us three days after his death, no prayer is in vain.
In Tokens of Trust, Rowan Williams says that the Bible is not “full of comfortable and reassuring things about the life of belief and trust”. There are “moments of conflict with God, anger with God, doubt about God’s purposes, anguish, and lostness when people have no real sense of God’s presence”. There are no arguments for the existence of God in the Bible; rather the characters are “caught up in something the imperative reality of which they can’t deny or ignore. At one level, you have to see that the very angst and struggle they bring to their relation with God is itself a kind of argument for God: if they take God that seriously, at least this isn’t some cosy made-up way of making yourself feel better”.
He then goes on to say that witnessing this struggle is the way faith begins for some people. “It starts from a sense that we ‘believe in’, we trust some kinds of people. We have confidence in the way they live; the way they live is a way I want to live, perhaps can imagine myself living in my better or more mature moments. The world they inhabit is the one I’d like to live in.”
This, of course, puts the pressure on believing people. Nevertheless, we must “take responsibility for making God credible in the world”. He gives the example of Etty Hillesum who, before being murdered at Auschwitz, took it upon herself to “bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times”. Williams continues, “It is plain that she saw her belief as a matter of deciding to occupy a certain place in the world, a place where others could somehow connect with God through her – and this not in any self-congratulatory spirit or with any sense of being exceptionally holy or virtuous, but simply because she had agreed to take responsibility for God’s believability.”
Affirming Catholicism is a liberal Anglo-Catholic organization within the Church of England, with members in other parts of the Anglican Communion as well. The final section of their Guidelines for Christian Living says:
With its long inheritance of profound theological thought, Catholicism challenges us to turn our mind as well as our heart to Christ. In face of the various kinds of fundamentalism on offer today our experience is that God speaks to us through reason as well as through tradition and scripture. Whatever our intellectual capacity, and whatever our place in life, we are all called to integrate our reason and our belief and to be able to give an account of that belief to those around us.
Catholic tradition is not an unchanging body of teachings and attitudes which we are supposed to adopt wholesale. That would simply be an alternative form of fundamentalism. John Newman, speaking of tradition itself, remarked, ‘to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’. At the same time, we would be foolish and faithless to change at random, or simply to follow the spirit of the age.
Catholic tradition is rooted and fed by the inheritance of the past, in order that it may grow and adapt to new knowledge and experience, testing the compatibility of the new in the light of the old. Affirming Catholics welcome the ordination of women because we see it, not as a radical denial of tradition, but as a legitimate development within the tradition. Far from undermining the Church’s traditional understanding of priestly ministry, the priestly ministry of women deepens and enriches it. In the same way, many Affirming Catholics affirm the grace of God in faithful same-sex relationships and believe that this understanding represents a proper extension of, not a threat to, the Christian theology of marriage.
In keeping with this position, we encourage developments in Catholic liturgy which combine intelligibility and accessibility with the depth and mystery which have been its traditional hallmarks. We want to explore new ways of teaching the faith. We want to promote Bible study which takes on board the insights of biblical scholarship and seeks to close the gap between academic theology and parish teaching. We want to explore new possibilities of unity with other denominations, both Catholic and Protestant, and to be more daring in transcending ancient divisions. We believe that in all these contemporary issues, as in those of the past and in those yet to come, a genuinely Catholic approach avoids both a congealed traditionalism, opposed to all change, and a rootless liberalism, which embraces any change uncritically.
This is, for me, a satisfying statement of a modern Anglo-Catholicism, and one that more or less describes where I now find myself. I admire and have learned from both liberal Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, but for various reasons cannot wholly embrace either. The Anglo-Catholicism presented above seems to split the difference.
Another mediating vision of Catholic Christianity that I have often returned to is that presented by Derek Olson in “An Anglican Moderate”:
I am an Anglican moderate. What does this mean? Chiefly it means these things:
• I fit neither of the extremes in the current debates
• I hold to a literal interpretation of the creeds and place great importance on the sacraments
• I believe that the Anglican Way is a distinctive way of being Christian organically derived from the monastic tradition of the Church rooted in a proper balance of liturgical formation and an embrace of critical reasoning as chief means of growing into the Mind of Christ.
Derek goes on to say this about finding a middle way:
Some Anglo-Catholics (and other Catholics) attempt to simply ignore these happenings [the Enlightenment, modernity, post-modernity] as if they had never taken place but in doing so they succumb to an odd form of antiquarianism itself made possible by these developments. I have come to believe that to attempt to live the life of faith and to carry on the doctrine and discipline of the church as if these things had not occurred is to live a fantasy. Now, in no way should we capitulate to these developments and fall into the error of liberal Protestantism. Rather, we must discern a path in accord with the classic teachings in light of our new surroundings and a radically different world from the one our spiritual fathers inhabited and envisioned.
As I see it, we hold to the words of the Scriptures and the Fathers for they are the things that have formed us in the past. However, just as important is to see these teachings for what they are—not simply a set of dicta set down for all times but a reflection on the method, the logic of faithful Christian living. The words of the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the writings of the Fathers show us faithful Christian minds wrestling with how to live the Gospel in their day. We can do no better than to follow in their footsteps. Critical reasoning formed according to the Mind of Christ is inherent in them all. As a preliminary to what can only be a much longer and more involved discussion suffice it to say that in Vincentian terms the limits of the body of doctrine are the creeds and the words and works of Jesus and the principle at the heart of the body is the twofold love of God and neighbor.
”Faithful Christian minds wrestling with how to live the Gospel in their day.” That’s the thing.
The layout of the room [the boardroom (albergo) of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco] posed several challenges. Three different architects worked on the Scuola’s design. When it was finished by Scarpagnino in 1549, the building’s small, elevated windows provided only minimal interior light. The albergo was also wider than it was long, so that any painting covering the back wall would have to be viewed from close proximity and below.
Tintoretto conceived of a revolutionary program. Rather than keep his design locked in strict perspective, which would have been distorted by the room’s oblique points of view (think of the front row of a movie theater), Tintoretto folded his narrative around the central figure of Christ on the cross. He then depicted Christ bending down — to address the good thief, the figures in mourning at the foot of the cross, and our gaze from below. The fixity of the cross provides an anchor within an undulating sea of dark details that seems to extend beyond the picture plane out into our own space. With blank faces, the mundane figures surrounding Christ stir up the awful scene. A crowd of onlookers, carpenters, soldiers and even a dog make up “a centrifugal energy that charges the entire picture,” as the art historian David Rosand wrote in his survey of 16th-century Venetian painting.
The ominous tones, curved landscape and artistic urgency that underlie Tintoretto’s color choice, composition and paint handling make this work a point of departure. Rather than look back to the neo-Platonic ideals of classical sculpture — brilliantly embodied at the start of the 16th century in the ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel — Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion” anticipates the fallen angels of our modern era.
Like a thunderbolt from the brush, Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion” can stop you in your tracks. The Victorian writer and artist John Ruskin certainly thought so. “I have been quite overwhelmed today by a man I have never dreamed of — Tintoret,” he wrote to his father on his first visit to Venice. “I always thought of him a good and clever and forcible painter, but I had not the smallest notion of his enormous powers. . . . And then to see his touch of quiet thought in his awful crucifixion — there is an ass in the distance, feeding on the remains of strewed palm leaves. If that isn’t a master’s stroke, I don’t know what is.”
Tintoretto’s great painting of the crucifixion fills a wall forty feet wide in the boardroom of the Confraternity of Saint Roch. It develops an idea that is present in many crucifixion paintings of that time – that Jesus on the cross is like Jesus judging all history at the end of time. The disposition of people is therefore like that of the saved and damned in Last Judgments, by a display of the instruments of the Passion (cross, nails, crown of thorns, spear) around the Judge. This meant that he got his authority to judge by virtue of the sufferings he underwent for the saved.
The picture shows a crown forming a circle around the cross. We, standing at the break in the circle, complete it as part of the group around the collapsed Virgin. On the “saved” side of the picture is Jerusalem, with a prophet pointing to Jesus. The good centurion is on a white horse, while his surrogate offers the wine-soaked sponge to Jesus. The cross with the good thief is being raised in its socket as the man turns with hope to Jesus – like the souls being drawn up by the rosary in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment [lower left quadrant]. On Jesus’ left are the Jewish priests, the soldiers gambling for Christ’s clothes, and the bad thief wrestling against attempts to fix him on his cross.
To show Jesus as the timeless judge as well as the temporal victim, Tintoretto makes him preside on the cross. He is only partly in time. His arms stretch along the upper edge of the painting almost as if he were going to take flight. The large halo around him is only a semicircle, with a tarnished glow. If the upper semicircle were shown, it would be resplendent in heaven. Since Jesus’ arms stretch along the upper limit of the picture, the projection of the cross above his head, where the inscription is normally nailed, is missing. To displace Jesus from his temporal abode, the cross itself is ambiguously located in the fictional space. At the upper edge, Christ is flush with the surface of the canvas. But the lower part of the cross is so recessed that nine people are shown between it and the surface of the picture. It is impossible to tell where the socket is that holds the cross – whether it is on the platform that comes toward us with a wedge shape, or on the earth in front of the platform. The mysterious figure in black who stands and looks straight into the mystery is one of the Sybils who prophesied Christ’s fate. Mary is being attended by John, the Magdalene, Mary the wife of Clopas, three of the grieving women Jesus warned of the future, and Joseph from Arimathea, who will bury Jesus.
This is the most theologically rich representation of what the cross means in all of art. It involves prophecy, fulfillment, and promise in a setting that merges time and eternity. Everything revolves around this central fact and mystery of the death of God. The defeat is a triumph – as in the line of a Chesterton poem: “Yet by God’s death the stars shall stand.”
I mentioned on Twitter than Hans Urs von Balthasar believes that, for most laypeople, saying the daily Office is a mistake. Rather, he recommends contemplative prayer. A few people asked for an explanation so I hastily wrote this post. I hope I don’t misrepresent Balthasar in any way. Also, to be fair, his comment is almost an aside. But here is how he arrives at that position, as far as I can tell:
The Church is the place where heaven and earth come together, the point at which earth becomes heaven (in the communion of the saints, the Church Triumphant) and heaven becomes earth (in the sacraments and in the souls which participate in the Kingdom of God).
The prototype of the Church is Mary, in whose womb heaven and earth came together. She is also the model contemplative: she “kept all these words and pondered them in her heart.” Those who practice contemplative prayer, then, will do the same.
The liturgy also exemplifies this contemplation. The first part of the liturgy centers on the readings and the sermon – the word as word. Next comes the portion from the Offertory to Communion – the word as flesh. All of this we are to, first, receive and, second, respond to.
Contemplative prayer is that response. It is the human side of a dialogue. Essential to contemplative prayer is docility toward the word of God resulting in ready obedience.
The liturgy, however, doesn’t allow sufficient time for this contemplation. But contemplation is necessary if the liturgy is to be linked to our daily lives and bear fruit in obedience. Here is where Balthasar says that attempting to make that connection by praying the Office won’t work in most cases:
Some laypeople, with a view to taking a more sustained part in the liturgy of the Church, follow, to some extent, the manner of life and prayer of priests and monks, and say the daily Office either in whole or in part. But, in general, they have less understanding and spiritual freedom than those who, in the less formalised practice of contemplative prayer, allow God’s life that is in them to illuminate their way. The former practice may be recommended in exceptional cases, but, for most people, it is a mistake. Contact with the word of God through contemplation is, for those who are capable of it, the normal way to develop the resources of the sacramental life; above all, it enables them to derive more fruit from the sacrament as time goes on. (Prayer, p. 97)
Since it is less formal than the Office, contemplative prayer allows more time for understanding. Contemplation, because it is directly related to it, allows more contact with the word of God, not least because the lectionaries used for the liturgy and the Office do not go through the entirety of Scripture.
And, “above all, it enables them to derive more fruit from the sacrament as time goes on.” Why does he say this? The sacraments are more or less fruitful according to the disposition of the recipient. Living faith is what brings about a correct disposition. What better means for increasing faith, docility toward the word of God, ready obedience, than contemplative prayer?
When I first heard about the protests of parents in Bavaria demanding the removal of crucifixes from schools because their children were being forced to look at such a dreadful spectacle, I just could not believe how people brought up in a culture saturated with Christianity could totally fail to understand the message of the cross.
After all, Christianity truly does not glorify violence! It simply does not censor the reality that violence is part of parcel of our world and our Lord was not spared it. But it also says that violence does not have and must not have the last word, that Jesus preferred to allow himself to be killed through violence, rather than use or condone violence. Christian belief states that after Christ took violence upon himself, violence no longer existed as a harrowing absurdity, but underwent an inner transformation, by the meaning that Christ gave his suffering and death. The cross is not a “demonstration” of violence, suffering, and death; on the contrary, it is a message about a love that is “stronger than death.” It preaches the strength of hope that relativizes and mocks death itself: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your string?”
Tomas Halik, Night of the Confessor, p 160
I agree with this, of course. But, to be fair, I can certainly see why people would think that Christianity glorifies violence. Even Christians don’t always get this theologically-informed view of the cross from their priests and pastors. Certainly Christians who belong to churches that emphasize the wrath of God (as in some forms of penal substitutionary atonement) don’t get this. And the United States, a Christian nation according to many of its citizens, is certainly not a peaceful nation. Then there’s the sordid history of the Church as an instrument of persecution and war.
Another reason people believe Christianity glorifies violence
So, Fr Halik, as much as I admire you and agree with you, I’m not at all shocked that people believe Christianity glorifies violence. That’s also why our world so desperately needs voices like yours.
Scientific solutions are needed to solve global crises — from food and water shortages to environmental destruction — “but the public now does not understand science,” leading US climate change expert and Nasa scientist James Hansen told the meeting.
“We have a planetary emergency, and very few people recognise that.”
The theme of the five-day meeting, attended by some 8,000 scientists from 50 countries, was “Flattening the world: Building a global knowledge society.”
“It’s about persuading people to believe in science, at a time when disturbing numbers don’t,” said meeting co-chair Andrew Petter, president of Simon Fraser University in this western Canadian city.
Nina Federoff says that “belief systems, especially when tinged with fear, are not easily dispersed with facts.” And this denial of facts could lead to real-world consequences in the form of global environmental disasters.
It can also lead to spiritual disasters. Last night at our parish’s Shrove Tuesday pancake supper I was talking to an older couple who left their previous church (which they had attended for 35 years) because of this anti-science attitude. The husband was a high school science teacher for over thirty years and kept up to date on the latest research. After making a few pro-science comments in the Sunday School class he taught, he and his wife came under increasing pressure. Finally they decided to leave that church for the greater intellectual and spiritual freedom of our little Episcopal parish (which, incidentally, they have to drive a long way to attend).
While that story is not quite what you’d call a spiritual disaster, it wouldn’t be difficult to come up with stories that are.
In Night of the Confessor Tomas Halik offers an interesting explanation of the problem. (I do not know enough about history to judge its validity. Perhaps someone else can comment.) He claims that as modern science began to explain the world around us Christians made the mistake of viewing God as the mechanism by which these things came to be. They failed to differentiate – as Thomas Aquinas did – between levels of causality and placed God in the “supernatural” category, which was used to explain “natural” processes. The problem is that science learned that they didn’t need a supernatural explanation and called into question the whole category of supernatural things. God, then, became a casualty in an unnecessary war.
Learning that the pre-modern theology of Thomas Aquinas presents a solution to this problem has been one of the most pleasing discoveries of the past year. I imagine that most of the people who read this blog also read John’s, but in case you don’t I recommend reading his post on Aquinas and the levels of causality.
The more I come to know the world’s religions and the more I encounter their devotees (in a spirit of “meeting halfway” and striving for unprejudiced understanding), the more I feel rooted in Christ and the Catholic Church.
My feeling of belonging to Christianity is deeper, freer, and more self-evident; it does not need to assert itself by demonizing others. In order to perceive the light of Christ and rejoice over it and in it, I don’t need to regard the others as sons of darkness and don the dark glasses of prejudice when looking at them. In like manner, my patriotism does not require me to hate Germans and despise Poles, nor does my proud Europeanism mean I must disparage Asians or Africans.
I recall the liberating moment when I realized that perspectivism, that is, the perception that we all look from our own particular limited perspective and fail to see the whole, is no shallow relativism. Truth is a book that none of us had read to the end. That by no means implies that I must regard what is proper to me – what I see from my standpoint, my own tradition and my own faith – as less mandatory for myself, or that I must not share my experience or offer it to others. I simply can see no reason why I should look acrimoniously at people who view reality from a different angle.
Yes, I believe that Christ is the fullness of truth, that in him “dwells the fullness of godhood,” and he will never be for me “one of the avatars.” But at the same time I know that we each perceive his fullness only to the extent of our human capacity to perceive, and that the Church, “the pillar and foundation of truth,” admittedly received his Revelation in fullness, but there is a difference between the fullness of that Revelation and the historically condition forms of its understanding and interpretation. The Church itself as “God’s people journeying through history” is maturing to a full knowledge of Christ. Here (in this world at every stage of history) we see only in part, as in a mirror, says the apostle; only when the curtain falls on the historical stage for the last time will we see Him “face-to-face.”
I reject with absolute firmness the statement so popular nowadays that “all religions are actually the same, and equally valid.” No person has the right to make such a bold, and also ludicrously superficial, judgment; those who do so unwittingly set themselves in the position of a god over all. Who could possibly have such a perfect knowledge of “all religions” in order to make such a judgment? Who could compare them all together with such superior detachment?
The more I study religions, the more I am aware, on the contrary, of their differences, their variety, their plurality, and their incomparability. Each of them in unique. And as my awareness of their diversity grows, so also does my humility and restraint when it comes to expressing any judgment about their validity, even if my intention were to sound good-natured and bring them all down en masse to the same level. They are not the same, and our feeling that they are “similar” stems largely from our badly focused lenses and the poor standard of the telescopes we use to view them. And the question of whether their value is more or less equal (measured in respect of what?), which is “more,” which is “less,” is – I repeat – a question I cannot answer. And were believers from many different religions to come together and produce quotations from their holy books to prove that God Himself chose theirs as the only right one, who is to stand in judgment from among the people? Let’s leave this task to God alone, let us wait until the Last Judgment instead of playing at it.
- Tomas Halik, Night of the Confessor, pp 104-105
Elsewhere in the text Halik refers to Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions”. The text begins by recognizing that as the people of the world come into closer contact the demand that the Christian Church examine its relationship with other faiths becomes more urgent. It acknowledges that God is the origin and ultimate goal of all humanity. Then:
Men expect from the various religions answers to the unsolved riddles of the human condition, which today, even as in former times, deeply stir the hearts of men: What is man? What is the meaning, the aim of our life? What is moral good, what sin? Whence suffering and what purpose does it serve? Which is the road to true happiness? What are death, judgment and retribution after death? What, finally, is that ultimate inexpressible mystery which encompasses our existence: whence do we come, and where are we going?
2. From ancient times down to the present, there is found among various peoples a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history; at times some indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father. This perception and recognition penetrates their lives with a profound religious sense.
Out of these questions and based upon this perception the religions of the world have arisen. Furthermore, “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”
The document ends, a bit anticlimactically, by disapproving of all discrimination and exhorting its readers to “maintain good fellowship among the nations” and live in peace.
I say the document ends anticlimactically because its premise opens up fascinating possibilities, ones that need exploring. (To be fair, many of those implications were explored in later years.) Leaving aside certain exclusivist understandings of the faith, it seems to me that something like Halik’s openness is necessary. Not only are there truths in other religions that Christians must not reject (which sounds too much like the old saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day), but there are genuine seekers after God in those religions. And, furthermore, if there are genuine seekers after God in those religions then the Spirit must be active among them. Therefore we must affirm (even those who are not universalists like myself) that God has sheep in other sheepfolds.
There are many more issues to explore and I admit that my thinking is unpolished here. Someone who has done a lot of reading and thinking about these issues is Lee at A Thinking Reed, and I recommend browsing his posts tagged “interfaith”.
![Michelangelo’s Last Judgment [lower left quadrant]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Michelangelo%2C_Giudizio_Universale_02.jpg){kind=link}