UNREASONABLE?

Let me begin with a few quotations.

“Faith…protects reason from any temptation to distrust its own abilities, stimulates it to be open to ever broader horizons, keeps alive in it the search for foundations and, when reason itself is applied to the supernatural sphere of the relationship between God and man, faith enriches its work.” But reason can also help faith. As St Thomas Aquinas put it, it does so by “demonstrating those truths that are preambles of the faith; giving a clearer notion, by certain similitudes, of the truths of the faith; resisting those who speak against the faith, either by showing that their statements are false, or by showing that they are not necessarily true.” And hence the whole history of theology is that of the mind showing “the intelligibility of faith, its articulation and inner harmony, its reasonableness and its ability to further human good.” (Benedict XVI, The Doctors of the Church, s.v. St Thomas Aquinas)

I have been rereading and pondering this passage for several days, and believe it to reflect something that is both crucial and too often neglected. Many years ago I used to visit a deeply devout and very charming charismatic community in Canada. But my relationship with them came to an end when it dawned upon me that, as I ended up telling them, they behaved as if God had created every part of them except their brain. It is true that, as a Carthusian put it in a letter to a friend, love is more important to faith than knowledge; but God did create our brain, our mind, and our capacity to reason, and to see that (however implicitly) as functioning only outside the faith is to underestimate the Creator and to lend credibility to simplistic atheism.

(My only justification for writing this as one who has read little of Aquinas and less of most other Church Fathers is my conviction that in this I am not alone; and that the thinness of my own arguments may stimulate others, as it is stimulating me, to do something about that ignorance.)

On this last day of the Church’s year, on the verge of an Advent that for many is a frantic period of shopping between the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas one, it may be useful to slow down and think about the “reasonableness of faith” – if only because so many around us deny it. They may be quite kindly about our condition, but they tend to regard it as a strictly private hobby, like collecting stamps or a passion for baseball; and our basic position they consider nonsense, i.e. un-reasonable.

It is, therefore, crucial for us to consider wherein our faith is reasonable. In the first place, it is no less reasonable today than in other times to be led by contemplating the universe to supposing the existence of a Creator. After the Creation myths, science came to believe that the universe had always existed and would always do so. Now science believes in the Big Bang, i.e. in a point where the universe began and where time and space were born. In other words, in a moment of creation. So why is it then reasonable to insist that there cannot have been a creator?

Secondly, most humans, over history, have believed in some kind of existence after death. Most humans, when hot and tired, long for drink; water exists (so does beer, but that’s another story). The fact that a hypothesis corresponds to a desire does not invalidate it, any more than, as Oscar Wilde said, the fact that a man dies for an idea makes it true. The fact that no ordinary human has returned from death does not invalidate it either: no butterfly (as far as we know) returns to inform caterpillars what it is they will turn into.

Thirdly, the existence of evil is not proof of the non-existence of God. This is the story of free will, which I’ve already mentioned on this blog. Love is limited – even God’s love is limited – by the necessity of leaving the beloved free to return it or not. If man chooses to live in what he fondly believes to be heroic (or simply comfortable) independence of faith, superstition and anything beyond his five senses, his family and his bank account, he not only closes the door on the Person who loves him most, he leaves himself horribly vulnerable to evil. Evil can make use of idleness, it can employ godlessness, and it can pervert faith. Most of us who know some history can think of examples: using these exploits of evil to “prove” that there can be no loving God is proof only of naiveté, dimwittedness or bad faith.

Fourthly, the existence of natural catastrophes does not necessarily invalidate the concept of a loving God. We humans are born, we live and we die: this we have in common with all other living creatures. If God loves us, He wants the best for us (subject to our free will, which is the law of Love itself). Why should we know better than He what is best for us? Perhaps the existence of tsunamis and typhoons is a warning to us that we can’t count on having all the time in the world to become what we (you or I) are meant to become. Moreover, most of us die in some sort of pain: the earthquake that spares us may deliver us over to a cancer of the throat. In other words, perhaps what we die of, and when, is not the point. Perhaps the point – God’s point – is how we die: in what relation to His love.

Perhaps enough for today. This has not been a demonstration that our faith is reasonable; rather one that it is not unreasonable. It’s a beginning. And once again, this has all been said before, often, for many centuries, and far better. As Eliot put it:

. . . . And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate – but there is no competition –

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL?

After the Kingdom – or the kingship, the reign – the Will. Fiat voluntas tua: Thy will be done. We say it, often mechanically, as the third petition, or option: “may” or “let” Thy will be done – the verb is an optative, a mood of hope or encouragement. In the present case, of course, it may also be one of resignation. But how often do we really concentrate on what it means, what it can mean, what it might mean?

            The first stage of thinking about it is one of humility. Not my will, Lord, but Thy will be done. It is a phrase of obedience. You lead, Lord, and I will follow. Even if I think I want fishhooks (remember Tom Sawyer?), the fact that I don’t get them when I’ve prayed for them means, presumably, that Your will is for me not to get them. Oh well, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it: Thy will be done.

            But think some more. Where have we heard that phrase “not my will, Lord, but Thy will be done” before? That’s right. It leads straight to Gethsemane, and via Gethsemane to the Cross. It gets very serious indeed. You can get dead that way.

            Now keep thinking. Because it also leads us to a major problem. Christ, in Gethsemane, knew what His Father’s will was, or at least He had a pretty good idea, even though He was human enough to hope and pray it wouldn’t happen. But when we try to apply the phrase in our own lives, we run up against the serious fact that most of the time we do not know what His will is.

            I saw a photograph of a hand with W W J D tattooed on four fingers: What Would Jesus Do? It’s one way out of the problem: let our imagination suggest to us what He would do in present circumstances. But we are not called to be Jesus, and I’m not always sure we are even all of us called to be Disciples: there were only twelve of those, while there were hundreds, thousands, who were touched by Him and whose lives were changed. W W T D – What Would They Do?

            The second problem with this is that we’re depending on our imagination, which is a useful servant but an uncertain master. In fact, what “Thy will be done” should lead us to is Discernment. This quality, mentioned quite often by St Paul, is in its simplest form the capacity to tell good from bad; but as life is complex and the human mind was created to be a fine instrument, we can and should take Discernment further. At its best, discernment is the use of human reason in the support of faith.

            The relation of faith to reason is the chief topic with which the remarkable writings of Pope Benedict XVI are concerned; and in his little guide Doctors of the Church he reminds us that it is the essential element in the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas. Not only, said Aquinas, does faith illuminate reason; reason can be very good at underpinning, supporting and protecting faith.

            In other words, “Thy will be done” leads us down two paths. One is to using the minds God gave us: instructing them by reading (serious Jews read far more of their faith’s writings that Christians tend to), training them to analyze situations, and using them to help our faith live and work in the world. The other leads to the Cross. And there I am reminded of the final words of the great John Donne’s final sermon, “Death’s Duel”, on the text “To God the Lord belong the issues of death”, preached at Whitehall before King Charles I at the beginning of Lent, 1630. Donne was dying; and some in the congregation said that the Doctor was preaching his own funeral sermon. And he ended it with these words:

There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Amen.

A HAPPY MAN

I read this article in the French daily La Croix a few days ago and found it very much worth translating.

A few decades ago, Brother Francklin Armand decided to meet a formidable challenge: to pierce the land of Haiti, a dry soil eaten away by erosion, with artificial lakes in order to allow farmers to irrigate their land. And who knows? maybe to fish . . . A simple idea, but in no way self-evident in a country used to seeing water pour down in buckets during murderous cyclones and sow desolation in its wake.

            But water is life, too. And the project has grown, to the point where the Government has, in recent years, asked Brother Armand to widen his outlook, and has financed the creation of lakes on a national scale. Money is scarce and never on time, but the work gets done: the cheerful monk and his teams have so far created nearly 200 lakes in the entire country . .  Acres and acres of water, gallons and gallons of life.

            “It’s particularly important for the peasants in those parts of Haiti where it rains massively for six months, but then there is nothing for the rest of the year,” Brother Armand explains, during a stay in Paris this autumn. In the Central Highlands, for example, an area bordering the Dominican Republic, where in 1976 he founded the Little Brothers of the Incarnation, and then, a few years later, the Little Sisters of the Incarnation. Religious communities inspired by the spirituality of Fr Charles de Foucauld, combining prayer and action, “peasants among the peasants.”

            In Pandiassou, where the two congregations are installed, this man is always on the move. People to see, things to do . . . When the news gets around of his return from Port-au-Prince, where the Little Brothers also run a school, people crowd around. And it’s while walking along the country roads and side-trails that he listens to some and advises others. On matters as diverse as family worries, land quarrels or agricultural problems.

            In Haiti, erosion is an essential topic. Radical deforestation has made the country vulnerable to wind, rain and drought. But, speaking symbolically, Br. Francklin Armand points to four other forms of aggression that undermine the country: economic erosion – which ruins the countryside and feeds the anarchic growth of slums, even more so since the 2010 earthquake --, social erosion, due to an absent Government, intellectual erosion, a consequence of the flight overseas of the élite, and finally spiritual erosion, linked notably to voodoo.

            Hence the monk’s frustration when he observes the political class, for all its huge challenges, spending more time on its own problems than on those of the country. In a nation used to tearing itself apart in quarrels and disputes, he works, he walks, he advances. He is known to be closer to the Lavalas [political] school of thought of former presidents Jean-Bertrand Aristide and René Préval, beaten in the 2011 election, than to that of Michel Martelly, the current Chief of State, who does not deny his friendship with the family and friends of former dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, in power from 1957 to 1971.

            But Br Francklin Armand remains discreet. “We have worked with all the presidents, whoever they were,” he reminds us. “Haiti’s problem is this division, the fact that people have other things on their minds . . .” Hence it is not rare to hear some people suggesting that it might be good for the country if he gave a new dimension to his uniting energy – that of power and politics. Wasn’t he declared, in 2008 at the age of 61, a National Treasure? Br Francklin Armand smilingly rejects the idea. He prefers to continue on the road where he feels most useful. Digging . . .

REIGN AGAIN

Today, the readings and commentary in my little French daily booklet seemed to chime so remarkably with my last post that I can’t resist sharing them here. In the passage from Wisdom, the wonderfully lyrical description given of her struck me as a perfect portrait of the Third Person of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit. And the use of the feminine pronoun (from the Greek original of ‘wisdom’) has something pleasing about it, since there is no reason necessarily to imagine the Spirit as masculine.

Wisdom 7:22 – 8:1

For within her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, shrewd, irresistible, beneficent, friendly to human beings, steadfast, dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying, penetrating all intelligent, pure and most subtle spirits.

For Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion; she is so pure, she pervades and permeates all things.

She is a breath of the power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; so nothing impure can find its way into her.

For she is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God's active power, and image of his goodness.

Although she is alone, she can do everything; herself unchanging, she renews the world, and, generation after generation, passing into holy souls, she makes them into God's friends and prophets;

for God loves only those who dwell with Wisdom.

She is indeed more splendid than the sun, she outshines all the constellations;

compared with light, she takes first place, for light must yield to night, but against Wisdom evil cannot prevail.

Strongly she reaches from one end of the world to the other and she governs the whole world for its good. [in the old translation: “and sweetly doth she order all things”.]

It is the Gospel reading that struck me most, with reference to my previous post: Jesus tells the Pharisees ‘God’s reign is among you’ – it’s there already. This should give us furiously to think. If it’s here already, it may just be growing slowly like dough with a core of yeast . . .

Luke 17:20-25

Asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was to come, he gave them this answer, 'The coming of the kingdom of God does not admit of observation, and there will be no one to say, "Look, it is here! Look, it is there!" For look, the kingdom of God is among you.'

He said to the disciples, 'A time will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of man and will not see it. They will say to you, "Look, he [or: it] is there!" or, "Look, he is here!" Make no move; do not set off in pursuit; for as the lightning flashing from one part of heaven lights up the other, so will be the Son of man when his Day comes.

But first he is destined to suffer grievously and be rejected by this generation.’

The commentary is by Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau, a Benedictine hermit from Southeast France whose comments are almost always the most intelligent and nourishing. She is the only hermit to whom I have ever written a fan-letter. (Obviously, there was no reply: I didn’t expect one.)

The Gospel verses belong to the “synoptic apocalypses” that deal with the Last Things, but not by way of calculation or speculation. In them, Christ rather invites us to take account of the unexpected nature of the irruption of God’s Kingdom and, in view of that, to live in vigilance and confidence. Jesus also warns us against the temptation of seeing signs everywhere, without taking time for discernment; a work to be undertaken under the guidance of the Spirit and in genuine inner freedom, yet without abdicating reason and good sense.

So we still wait: but not impatiently for a coup de ciel. We wait in 'vigilance and confidence' -- confident that the reign has already begun and that we are part of it; intelligently vigilant as semioticians of true signs.

PRAYING FOR REIGN?

Meditating in bed, as I often do upon waking, I thought of a friend who sometimes says, “I wish God would just take over. Why doesn’t He?” And for a moment I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly. He is all-powerful. He made the world, the worlds, and us, and look what we – so far alone, at least in this corner of this galaxy – have made of the experiment. Why doesn’t He just blow the whistle, call the end of the exercise, and bring in His reign? The English Lord’s Prayer has “Thy kingdom come,” but in fact it is “regnum tuum” and it would better be translated “They kingship come,” or “Thy reign come.” So why leave it in the optative, the subjunctive, or any of those wish-list tenses? Why doesn’t He just take over in a coup de ciel and set this lamentable planet to rights, once and for all?

Of course, we know why. As I used to say to my students, if you are in love, and an apparently good fairy offered you the magic power to make your beloved love you back, would you take it? To their credit, they all said No. In that context, love and power are fundamentally incompatible. And God’s very essence being love, this is the one ineluctable exception to His omnipotence: He cannot go against His own being. Hence, loving all of us, it isn’t that He will not force us to love Him in return: He cannot.

The result is that for many thousands of years He has watched us doing good things, and smiled approvingly; but also watched us coming it the unspeakable, and not been able to stop us. The law of love is an iron law, and it binds even the Deity. I tried to imagine this, and found myself thinking of the tears of God.

It’s not as if He hasn’t done anything. He planted seeds of goodness in our hearts. He picked humans to work with: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and quite possibly Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Seneca. And in the end, He even sent His own Son to help us get it right; and when, typically, we crucified Him, He resurrected Him so that we might be liberated from the tyranny of definitive death. Given the iron law of love, there is not a lot more that He could do. So: instead of wishing for a coup de ciel that would overwhelm even CNN, we would do better to think of His tears. Children, and even adults, are acutely uncomfortable when they see their own parent weep. How much more should we mind the tears of our Father, and do what we can to dry them. . . .