The Recognition Of Jesus
Edward Holloway
Doctrine and personal appeal, - sheer radiant power to attract men and women and to hold them in love, - this was one thing and one force in Jesus Christ. The person we call The Word was made flesh and spoke an intelligible and humanly expressed word of truth and of way of life. We call it his 'doctrine'. There was no divide between some dry, harsh, abstract set of propositions imposed by an authority external to the personality of the Master Himself. There was no dichotomy between the Church, the Establishment, 'The Twelve', and this wonderful, lovable, merciful Jesus. From this radiant personality whom we say we are seeking to love and to follow, and from whom we learn our way of life, there came out just this sort of teaching, both about Himself, doctrine of faith that is to say, and about the good life, the fulfilling life: doctrine of morals that is to say. The doctrine spilled out from the very mind and heart of Christ. It was Jesus Himself who said that ,out of the abundance of the heart the mouth spoke. The inner truth of the doctrine He saw and lived made Jesus the sort of person He was. The sort of person He was made Jesus brimful of the doctrine he taught. There is no way we can separate the two, no way at all. We live in an age of nostalgia just now. If you have lived long enough to have been 'in' on the stuff when it first came out, whether it be classical jazz, 'rock' or tap-dancing, you may be of the opinion that it was not at all as wonderful as it looks through pretty, pink tinted nostalgia glasses. When it comes to writing up the characters of very selfish, very lecherous, very drug rotted people as if they were Saviours of mankind, and putting up monuments to them you may want to be sick .Nostalgia can be a sigh for an imaginary golden age, the reflection upon dead men and women of some inner desire, hope, or ideal that you would like to see around now and don't see. As the book of Genesis puts it, a little out of context just here, "now there were giants on earth in those days" (Gen. 6:4.) In the spiritual order and in even the cultural order, they may in fact have been much smaller.
1 think we are in danger of setting up a nostalgia dream of Jesus Christ as the real thing. Men and women today we are told, especially the young, love and accept Jesus Christ, but they cannot stand that drab, authoritarian institution called the Church. When you peel the layers off their conscious mind and reach the subconscious ,you will find most times that they mean they don't like the teaching this institution gives about poverty, prayer, attendance at the Eucharist, and their sexual life, whether in or out of marriage. Then, do they really know anything at all about Jesus?
The Word Spoken and the Word Living It is not only the modern world of non-doctrinal, vaguely emotional Christianity which needs to ask itself whether it really does know Jesus, and really does love Jesus. The, modern intellectual establishment of the Roman Catholic Church needs to ask itself the same question. If it will not ask itself the question, then it must bear to be quizzed about the matter: who is this Jesus of yours ? The thinkers of his own time were abruptly dismissed by St. Paul as worthless and foolish before God (I .Cor. 1:20). Because they neither recognised Christ nor savoured the personality He radiated. He was not their sort of person, not their love, not their intimate friend. They certainly did not draw life from Him. Is it really different to-day with Kung and Schillebeeckx in doctrine of faith, with writers and lecturers like Curran and Dominian in the right evaluation of sex, love, an human fulfilment ? One does not think so.
It is first of all a matter of knowing what the Jesus of history really said and taught. Are the gospels and the pastoral letters of Paul and the other apostles direct, hotly written, and clearly sincere expressions of a living master or are they remote, carefully written up studies upon one who has long left the scene ? The spontaneity, the sheer human verve, and the naivety at times of the apostolic writings is there for all to see. Jesus, lovable and magnetic and merciful as He was, managed to embroil himself in an awful lot of contradiction in His own day, even with the common people, the Temple crowds. He managed to get Himself crucified, and except for the appalling claim of His bodily resurrection from the dead, there is no intelligent manner of explaining how He and His disciples ever made a comeback. The hard things in the doctrine of Jesus, including the hard things about marriage and sexual holiness ,are already in the Gospels. They are present even more bluntly in the writings of St. Paul. They are found with the living evidence of history in the first documents and apologetics of the early Christian Church. These realities of human nature and life both the inspiring and the difficult, are found again but polished and refined in presentation in the Fathers of the Church. Christian doctrine is a well worked out edifice of theology by the year 500 AD, a sophisticated but yet very unworldly synthesis of human and divine wisdom, presented by men who really and truly lived what they taught, and who had experienced the fulfilment and the liberation of the doctrine they wrote about. There was for instance St. Augustine the Great, who is very unpopular today with the New Theology establishment. He presented to the Church of his day, after much dialogue and discussion a doctrine of Original Sin which the Church recognised as true in all essentials to what she did in fact believe. The Church did not accept every philosophical speculation Augustine suggested, sometimes tentatively, to explain the 'how' of it. Likewise against the Manichees in the matter of the goodness of sexual desire and function, and against the Pelagians in the matter of its perfection and the need of inner grace to attain that perfection ,Augustine gave again to the Church a synthesis of divine and human reasoning which the Church in his day, and for a thousand years andmore afterwards, recognised as true in fact to the consequences of her doctrine. The doctrine of Augustine is still enshrined in the solemn statement of Humanae Vitae: in fact Augustine is still blamed for it. He is therefore very unpopular with the Currans and Dominians of our day, whose own doctrine of fulfilment inhuman love involves a constant confusion of the spiritual, the somatic, and the specifically erotic in human love as an experience. In fact many of the modern 'Christian' philosophers of our day have gone way back beyond the Pelagian's and have linked up quite frankly with the ancient classical Paganism of Greece and Rome. So long as they happened to be born in the upper classes, they would find themselves very much at home if they could manage a re-incarnation back, rather than forward, in the time series.
It is no use saying that we cannot know the Christ of history. He lives in the Gospels inexplicit speech. He lives in the Pastoral Letters of the Apostles in explicit speech. He lives in the witness of the primitive Church, the Fathers, and the teaching Church of Rome, and for that matter of Constantinople, down the ages. He lives alive and dynamic in the consecrated host, whenever it is lifted above the heads of the people at Mass. With all due respect to Fr. A. Boylan, who is not terribly good at being a little child for the Kingdom of God's sake, it is actually very convenient to have altar breads which are small, round, white, and coin-shaped. Even if you give people large craggy lumps of brown bread o the consistency o cardboard, it does nothing to add to devotion, and with senior citizens it does not increase fervour, to be trying to lick it off your denture plates allthe morning, or all the evening. Neither does it overcome the profoundly philosophical objection of a fourteen year old from Dockland to whom it was my privilege to minister in the swinging liturgical late sixties: "a little bit of 'oly bread, and a lick of 'oly wine aint no noshup". The shape, size, and consistency of the bread is of no account at all. The Lord Himself said it a long time ago: "Do you not understand ? It is the spirit that quickens, the flesh profits nothing, the words that 1 have spoke unto you are spirit and life" (John. 6:64). When the Lord communicates Himself to us in the Eucharist in His physical reality as man, it is the Spirit, the Divinity that quickens; the flesh, the breadiness of the bread, profits nothing. When will some people accept the divine paradox, and by becoming little children grow up as adults in Christ ? In the Eucharist moreover we have Christ in Person, and because He is The Lord of history He is also the historic Christ. Through this centering of the Church in and through the Eucharist which is the Living Christ, He is also the Lord of the Magisterium, the true word of the Word Incarnate. First, in the solemn doctrine preached to the people in the Liturgy of the Word; then through General Councils with the Pope, and finally through the solemn definition of Peter and his successors through the ages, above all when "Satan has obtained to sift you like wheat, but 1 have prayed for thee, that thy faith fall not . . ."(Luke. 22:32). We really do know the mind and heart of the radiant Jesus that Schillebeeckx and others call on us to go out and meet. If, however, they describe him in terms other than the doctrinal witness we have outlined above, they are either describing themselves writ large, or simply playing back a nostalgia feature and calling it 'the Christ of faith'. Nostalgia is premature for Jesus, because Jesus lives on, in His own physical reality, and in man's history.
Christian Maturity It is important to find, and to state, the link between the Jesus of history, the Jesus of the "essentialist" Church that lives in doctrine of faith and morals, and the "existential," the "vibrant personality" Jesus whom we are called upon to do more than just know, and more than just love. The question was raised by some of the youth, especially by some of the girls, at the excellent and heartening Faith Movement, Summer School last August. It is essential to 'know' Jesus. It is essential to fill out the vision of the Gospels, and the even more explicit vision of the Pauline Letters with the vision of the Lord of Creation, who in His very self and divine being, fulfils as man that Unity-Law of control and direction to fulfilment within which the universe is framed. Yes:-it is essential to proclaim the meaning of St. John and St. Paul through the Holy Spirit, against a larger canvas of truth, as modern knowledge has made it possible for us to do. Just as necessarily it is vital to possess Jesus in love, in a humble love and in an obedient love. Jesus was not made Incarnate to dazzle us, but to make us conformable to the divine being, the divine reality and holiness. Knowledge alone can puff up, and men and women who are puffed up even with a wisdom about God which is not false, may yet fall constantly and weakly into sin. . . . into sins of the flesh for instance, and into a lack of generosity of spirit in heeding the call of the Master. There is no desire in saying this, to weaken any man or any woman's trust in the constant and repeated mercy of God. But, it was Jesus Himself who said, if you love Me, then keep my commandments (John. 14:15). Without the love that actually keeps the commandments, there is not the dynamic holiness that evangelizes men. Is that not the reason why the Church herself groans and is in travail until saints arise and lift her, and with her all mankind out of the morass of worldliness and little achievements ? Is that not why we, being many achieve so little, and the real saints being few, achieve so much? 1once lived as a curate under an old Canon who was asked by an Irish colleague why it was that so many nuns were canonized, and so very, very few priests ? The Canon by the way, was Religious Superior to a large congregation of Sisters, and of course the question was meant to 'take the Mickie' out of him. "Ah, Father" said the Canon, "it is because the poor Sisters read the scriptures and since they don't know any theology, they take it literally; whereas we priests know a lot of theology, and we know we don't have to take it just like it says ... but God.! - It makes saints out of the Sisters"! It is the childlike who are the saints, and only the saints achieve.
We seek then union and communion of love and life with Jesus, but we don't seek just the love of friendship or the love of admiration. We are not content with even the love of disciple-ship, unless that word is given its specifically Christian meaning. People can be disciples of a saintly man or woman, disciples of a 'guru'; our relationship to Christ transcends all that. Our love towards Christ is of the order of life and being as a baby's is towards its mother. Baby loves and caresses mother, but also baby draws the milk of life from mother. Christian maturity of being is that sort of relationship to Christ, participation in the being of God, a maturity of spirit, of love and of emotion, a maturity of wisdom, love, and harmonious balance of every desire of spirit and of matter. The life of grace is the growing in beauty and real truth of being through this vital union and communion with Jesus Christ.
Seeing Yourself Mirrored in Christ So we come back again to the personality of Christ, - to Jesus the Way, the Truth and the Life. We come back to Jesus the lovable, the merciful, the totally wise. The same Jesus was intransigent, demanding and in modern language, a bit of a bully. He really hurt that poor, rich, nice young man who had always been such a good boy! We come back to Jesus the real, the ultimate truth in doctrine and in fulfilment as a living experience of human joy. You take the package entire, Jesus cannot be parcelled out. It is vitally important to get this relation-ship right in the matter of the personality of Jesus as it beckons to us, and in the doctrine that Jesus taught and still teaches, alive in the Church. For Jesus is the mirror in which we see our own personality and find our own identity. The personality of Jesus, and this again is a matter of confused teaching just now, is not merely a human personality, it is the radiation and the life giving power of the Divine Person in person. This is the identity to the image and likeness of which we are made. Christ as Son of God and Son of Man, is the mirror image of man: this is the Son of Man, and in His being as God and Man is your identity and my identity, the identity of male and female, without distinction. The identity of our own personality, as we draw life and joy, likeness and conformity to God from Christ, is not a likeness of the mind alone, a likeness of vision and of truth. It is not a likeness of obedience alone, or of the pain of sacrifice, although undeniably obedience and the pain of sacrifice will be there for us, and will become part of our experience in con-forming our being to Christ's being. There is also the joy and the happiness of Christ, which is the radiation through His human psyche of the joy which defines the being of God in Itself. Unless our conformation to Christ, the Mirror of Man is perfect, we are not going to experience within ourselves the perfect fulfilment and joy of our manhood or our woman-hood. Like all spiritual creations, whether manor angel, our specific identity is not in our-selves, or in the order of the created at all. It is in God, who is beyond our order of being and limitation but to whose image alone we are fashioned, and in whose order of joy alone we find our own bliss. That is why all Humanism, with the capital letter, is a mistake. The fulfilment of Man is in God, and in God made Man we find the identity of ourselves. That is really the very meaning of that title, hardly found except towards the end of the period of Messianic prophecy, Son of Man, the title preferred above all others when Christ spoke of His mission to us and our relationship to Himself. In passing, may one make a speculative suggestion that is not going to be taken up here, but which the philosopher and theologian may care to ponder, in case there may be some new, at least partial truth in it. As the human nature of Christ is the perfect image, in The Son of Man, of our own identity and holiness, our whole-ness in body and soul through God, so in the order of the spiritual soul, the Divine Being itself, as pure and perfect spirit is the mirror image of our spiritual perfection, now and unto the beatific vision. It makes sense of the appalling proposition that through Christ we become co-sharers of the Divine Nature'. It also means that Christ is the total manifestation as God and Man, in the unity of His one divine Person, of our human truth, our goodness, our wholeness and our beatitude. We mean, in heaven and now upon earth: it was Jesus who said "be you perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt. 5:48.).
For Christian Life If teachers of status whether priests or lay folk do not accept themselves, and do not teach to others the doctrine of life and human goodness that Jesus taught on earth and still teaches in His Church, they will not form within others the true identity of the real, the living Jesus. What you do not yourself believe, or better what you yourself deny however regretfully and secretly, you cannot live in yourself as an experience of life and nobility of being. Nobody judges other people more nobly, more sincerely ,or more chastely than he lives within his own life. It is a point worth remembering when judgement is passed on another: how do you rate the speaker for wisdom, and holiness of heart ? Nobody judges better than he or she is. This principle is important in the home, the spiritual quality one means of parents who are the natural, and in a sense the hierarchical teachers of their children. For marriage is to be looked upon as a ministry in the Church, and an office in Creation and in the Church. It is important in the schools and in the parishes: we priests form men and women, and even more manifestly and often much more successfully we form children. It is important therefore in the university chaplaincies and most of all in the seminaries. It is a betrayal of good young men when bishops and seminary rectors allow men and women who, however distinguished academically are manifestly in error over the doctrine of Christ to lecture with authority on sex, love, and the meaning of sex in marriage. If people make the Church, and therefore Christ teaching within her to be wrong in the psychological evaluation and use of sex, whether in marriage or out of marriage, or by the misuse of their own personal bodies, then it follows that however much the world lauds them as 'experts' they perceive and live a distorted experience of love within their own personalities. Nobody who teaches error can live the truth: nobody who teaches error can form another in the truth. That of course is why we all suffer from the burden of original and actual sin at the hands of others, as well as within our own minds and hearts. In seminaries especially, even in these days when there is so much talk of academic freedom, good and noble young men are expected to accept with humility of heart and obedience of mind the formation provided for them by their teachers. When psychological error is proffered them as part of their formation in this matter of human love, it not only makes for confused and faulty teaching later as priests, but makes for self-crucifixion in their own lives in men who have taken a vow of chastity for the kingdom of God's sake. For this malformation of men on whom the very future of the Church, and the formation of Christ's people depends, rectors and bishops will answer to Christ directly and very severely. For these know perfectly well that to bring in teachers of doctrinal dissent as honoured per-sons, whose opinions are very, very important to your pastoral understanding later on in your priestly lives, is a betrayal of their own personal mission to Christ as rectors, or as diocesan bishops.
It is not only priests who talk about identity crisis. The expression is surely getting a bit dated now, but one finds it still very much an 'in thing' among the young. One has even found it in the Youth Club. This writer has lately been asked very earnestly by a teenager 'do you know who you are ... because 1 don't?' Knowing who you are is not a matter of being a priest, nor a matter of being married or being single. It is not a matter of vocation at all. Knowing who you are is a matter of knowing Christ as He really is, and of humbly loving Him and conforming your whole life to Him. Knowing who you are is a matter also of bearing anguish, and pain, and sacrifice, and the sneers and contempt of others, - loneliness also, rather than betray the truth and goodness revealed in Christ. If you don't know who you are, if you have an 'identity crisis' it means either that you have never found Christ and are still looking for Him, or else that you don't love Him enough, or faithfully enough. you don't obey Him. 'Knowing who 1 am' is first of all to find Jesus Christ in His real self. That is to find doctrine of truth, love, and moral goodness and our relationship to others. It is to find God and one's neighbour in life, in love, and in prayer. When you have this degree of union with Jesus Christ, then from a full heart you will, especially in youth (though at all times in all ages of life, actually) say to the same Jesus "Lord, what will you have me to do?" That may well be the application of your identity to life and to vocation, whether in Religion or in marriage, or in the single state in the world. St. Paul suffered an identity crisis as he set out breathing threats and slaughter along the road to Damascus. He had been taught error concerning the real Jesus, therefore he was in a mess, and was unfulfilled and confused inside himself. When Jesus struck him down on the road, his identity crisis was cured. He knew who he was in the Person who both reproached him and invited him with love. He asked what he was to do, he applied his new identity, his Christlike identity to Christ's work, he accepted the application of that new identity of his, to be the apostle to the nations.
It is the same for us today. Nobody loves God perfectly unless he knows God with full truth. Nobody knows God perfectly except through Jesus Christ. That is what the Enfleshing of God as man is all about. Nobody will find all his yearnings, loves, emotions and drives fulfilled in harmony and in truth except they be mirrored in that identity of truth which is the Person of Jesus. Live with Jesus your friend and teacher, love Jesus your friend and teacher, be conformed to Him. He alone really knows what is good for you, joyful for you, fulfilment for you. You were made by Him and through Him, He ought to know. Even as human, as yourself you were modelled upon Him; He was coming as 'the Son of Man'. You cannot parcel out the truth of what He taught from the Personality who breathed it out with fire. He did say "I am come to cast fire upon earth"(Luke 12:40). Ignore all the rest, at best they are sophists no matter how well intentioned. They themselves are damaged inwardly in their own persons by Original Sin, even if they deny its existence. There is only One Teacher with-out any trace of sin, having therefore the clear eye of perfect truth and the clean heart of a totally perfect love. Follow Him. He did say himself "call no man Teacher upon earth, for you have only One Teacher, and he is The Christ" (Matt. 23:10). Whoever stumbles upon that Rock of the Teacher will be badly bruised, while if the Rock should fall upon him, he will be ground to powder.
Similarly you oh son or daughter of man, have only one identity to achieve. It is Christ's identity living in you, radiant in you. Do not try to divide in Jesus Christ His doctrine, which is to say His magisterium in the official, guaranteed Church from His fulfilling and loving self. You can't separate a tree from its fruits, a man from his words: much less can you divide them in the Living God. Don't expect to find within yourself the power to live it, or the full will to live it. That is Humanism again, being me centred and man centred. You are made to be God-centred, and that by the Law of Nature as well as by the Law of Grace. "Without Me ,"said the Son of God and Man upon whom you are centred, - "you can do nothing." Make your communion with Him, feed on Him in your heart, feed on Him in the Holy Eucharist.
Remember that in the 'last days' because affluence and power over nature has abounded, so will iniquity abound. It has been prophesied many will fall away (Matt. 24: 11-12). How hard shall those who have riches, entire affluent nations of them, enter into the kingdom of God! You however, man of God, daughter of God, strive to enter by the narrow way. Never be scared by any scandal no matter how grave within the Church: it must needs be that scandals come. Woe to those by whom the scandal comes, and those who lay out the red carpet for them, right up to the front door. You will find Jesus easily enough if you look for Him; "he that comes to Me", said Our Lord "I will in no way cast out" (John. 6:37). He speaks in the Church, the real Church, in solemn doctrine, in Pope, and in Council. Forget the others, - you cannot miss the voice of Peter in the Church, it is loud and clear.
Edward Holloway
Doctrine and personal appeal, - sheer radiant power to attract men and women and to hold them in love, - this was one thing and one force in Jesus Christ. The person we call The Word was made flesh and spoke an intelligible and humanly expressed word of truth and of way of life. We call it his 'doctrine'. There was no divide between some dry, harsh, abstract set of propositions imposed by an authority external to the personality of the Master Himself. There was no dichotomy between the Church, the Establishment, 'The Twelve', and this wonderful, lovable, merciful Jesus. From this radiant personality whom we say we are seeking to love and to follow, and from whom we learn our way of life, there came out just this sort of teaching, both about Himself, doctrine of faith that is to say, and about the good life, the fulfilling life: doctrine of morals that is to say. The doctrine spilled out from the very mind and heart of Christ. It was Jesus Himself who said that ,out of the abundance of the heart the mouth spoke. The inner truth of the doctrine He saw and lived made Jesus the sort of person He was. The sort of person He was made Jesus brimful of the doctrine he taught. There is no way we can separate the two, no way at all. We live in an age of nostalgia just now. If you have lived long enough to have been 'in' on the stuff when it first came out, whether it be classical jazz, 'rock' or tap-dancing, you may be of the opinion that it was not at all as wonderful as it looks through pretty, pink tinted nostalgia glasses. When it comes to writing up the characters of very selfish, very lecherous, very drug rotted people as if they were Saviours of mankind, and putting up monuments to them you may want to be sick .Nostalgia can be a sigh for an imaginary golden age, the reflection upon dead men and women of some inner desire, hope, or ideal that you would like to see around now and don't see. As the book of Genesis puts it, a little out of context just here, "now there were giants on earth in those days" (Gen. 6:4.) In the spiritual order and in even the cultural order, they may in fact have been much smaller.
1 think we are in danger of setting up a nostalgia dream of Jesus Christ as the real thing. Men and women today we are told, especially the young, love and accept Jesus Christ, but they cannot stand that drab, authoritarian institution called the Church. When you peel the layers off their conscious mind and reach the subconscious ,you will find most times that they mean they don't like the teaching this institution gives about poverty, prayer, attendance at the Eucharist, and their sexual life, whether in or out of marriage. Then, do they really know anything at all about Jesus?
The Word Spoken and the Word Living It is not only the modern world of non-doctrinal, vaguely emotional Christianity which needs to ask itself whether it really does know Jesus, and really does love Jesus. The, modern intellectual establishment of the Roman Catholic Church needs to ask itself the same question. If it will not ask itself the question, then it must bear to be quizzed about the matter: who is this Jesus of yours ? The thinkers of his own time were abruptly dismissed by St. Paul as worthless and foolish before God (I .Cor. 1:20). Because they neither recognised Christ nor savoured the personality He radiated. He was not their sort of person, not their love, not their intimate friend. They certainly did not draw life from Him. Is it really different to-day with Kung and Schillebeeckx in doctrine of faith, with writers and lecturers like Curran and Dominian in the right evaluation of sex, love, an human fulfilment ? One does not think so.
It is first of all a matter of knowing what the Jesus of history really said and taught. Are the gospels and the pastoral letters of Paul and the other apostles direct, hotly written, and clearly sincere expressions of a living master or are they remote, carefully written up studies upon one who has long left the scene ? The spontaneity, the sheer human verve, and the naivety at times of the apostolic writings is there for all to see. Jesus, lovable and magnetic and merciful as He was, managed to embroil himself in an awful lot of contradiction in His own day, even with the common people, the Temple crowds. He managed to get Himself crucified, and except for the appalling claim of His bodily resurrection from the dead, there is no intelligent manner of explaining how He and His disciples ever made a comeback. The hard things in the doctrine of Jesus, including the hard things about marriage and sexual holiness ,are already in the Gospels. They are present even more bluntly in the writings of St. Paul. They are found with the living evidence of history in the first documents and apologetics of the early Christian Church. These realities of human nature and life both the inspiring and the difficult, are found again but polished and refined in presentation in the Fathers of the Church. Christian doctrine is a well worked out edifice of theology by the year 500 AD, a sophisticated but yet very unworldly synthesis of human and divine wisdom, presented by men who really and truly lived what they taught, and who had experienced the fulfilment and the liberation of the doctrine they wrote about. There was for instance St. Augustine the Great, who is very unpopular today with the New Theology establishment. He presented to the Church of his day, after much dialogue and discussion a doctrine of Original Sin which the Church recognised as true in all essentials to what she did in fact believe. The Church did not accept every philosophical speculation Augustine suggested, sometimes tentatively, to explain the 'how' of it. Likewise against the Manichees in the matter of the goodness of sexual desire and function, and against the Pelagians in the matter of its perfection and the need of inner grace to attain that perfection ,Augustine gave again to the Church a synthesis of divine and human reasoning which the Church in his day, and for a thousand years andmore afterwards, recognised as true in fact to the consequences of her doctrine. The doctrine of Augustine is still enshrined in the solemn statement of Humanae Vitae: in fact Augustine is still blamed for it. He is therefore very unpopular with the Currans and Dominians of our day, whose own doctrine of fulfilment inhuman love involves a constant confusion of the spiritual, the somatic, and the specifically erotic in human love as an experience. In fact many of the modern 'Christian' philosophers of our day have gone way back beyond the Pelagian's and have linked up quite frankly with the ancient classical Paganism of Greece and Rome. So long as they happened to be born in the upper classes, they would find themselves very much at home if they could manage a re-incarnation back, rather than forward, in the time series.
It is no use saying that we cannot know the Christ of history. He lives in the Gospels inexplicit speech. He lives in the Pastoral Letters of the Apostles in explicit speech. He lives in the witness of the primitive Church, the Fathers, and the teaching Church of Rome, and for that matter of Constantinople, down the ages. He lives alive and dynamic in the consecrated host, whenever it is lifted above the heads of the people at Mass. With all due respect to Fr. A. Boylan, who is not terribly good at being a little child for the Kingdom of God's sake, it is actually very convenient to have altar breads which are small, round, white, and coin-shaped. Even if you give people large craggy lumps of brown bread o the consistency o cardboard, it does nothing to add to devotion, and with senior citizens it does not increase fervour, to be trying to lick it off your denture plates allthe morning, or all the evening. Neither does it overcome the profoundly philosophical objection of a fourteen year old from Dockland to whom it was my privilege to minister in the swinging liturgical late sixties: "a little bit of 'oly bread, and a lick of 'oly wine aint no noshup". The shape, size, and consistency of the bread is of no account at all. The Lord Himself said it a long time ago: "Do you not understand ? It is the spirit that quickens, the flesh profits nothing, the words that 1 have spoke unto you are spirit and life" (John. 6:64). When the Lord communicates Himself to us in the Eucharist in His physical reality as man, it is the Spirit, the Divinity that quickens; the flesh, the breadiness of the bread, profits nothing. When will some people accept the divine paradox, and by becoming little children grow up as adults in Christ ? In the Eucharist moreover we have Christ in Person, and because He is The Lord of history He is also the historic Christ. Through this centering of the Church in and through the Eucharist which is the Living Christ, He is also the Lord of the Magisterium, the true word of the Word Incarnate. First, in the solemn doctrine preached to the people in the Liturgy of the Word; then through General Councils with the Pope, and finally through the solemn definition of Peter and his successors through the ages, above all when "Satan has obtained to sift you like wheat, but 1 have prayed for thee, that thy faith fall not . . ."(Luke. 22:32). We really do know the mind and heart of the radiant Jesus that Schillebeeckx and others call on us to go out and meet. If, however, they describe him in terms other than the doctrinal witness we have outlined above, they are either describing themselves writ large, or simply playing back a nostalgia feature and calling it 'the Christ of faith'. Nostalgia is premature for Jesus, because Jesus lives on, in His own physical reality, and in man's history.
Christian Maturity It is important to find, and to state, the link between the Jesus of history, the Jesus of the "essentialist" Church that lives in doctrine of faith and morals, and the "existential," the "vibrant personality" Jesus whom we are called upon to do more than just know, and more than just love. The question was raised by some of the youth, especially by some of the girls, at the excellent and heartening Faith Movement, Summer School last August. It is essential to 'know' Jesus. It is essential to fill out the vision of the Gospels, and the even more explicit vision of the Pauline Letters with the vision of the Lord of Creation, who in His very self and divine being, fulfils as man that Unity-Law of control and direction to fulfilment within which the universe is framed. Yes:-it is essential to proclaim the meaning of St. John and St. Paul through the Holy Spirit, against a larger canvas of truth, as modern knowledge has made it possible for us to do. Just as necessarily it is vital to possess Jesus in love, in a humble love and in an obedient love. Jesus was not made Incarnate to dazzle us, but to make us conformable to the divine being, the divine reality and holiness. Knowledge alone can puff up, and men and women who are puffed up even with a wisdom about God which is not false, may yet fall constantly and weakly into sin. . . . into sins of the flesh for instance, and into a lack of generosity of spirit in heeding the call of the Master. There is no desire in saying this, to weaken any man or any woman's trust in the constant and repeated mercy of God. But, it was Jesus Himself who said, if you love Me, then keep my commandments (John. 14:15). Without the love that actually keeps the commandments, there is not the dynamic holiness that evangelizes men. Is that not the reason why the Church herself groans and is in travail until saints arise and lift her, and with her all mankind out of the morass of worldliness and little achievements ? Is that not why we, being many achieve so little, and the real saints being few, achieve so much? 1once lived as a curate under an old Canon who was asked by an Irish colleague why it was that so many nuns were canonized, and so very, very few priests ? The Canon by the way, was Religious Superior to a large congregation of Sisters, and of course the question was meant to 'take the Mickie' out of him. "Ah, Father" said the Canon, "it is because the poor Sisters read the scriptures and since they don't know any theology, they take it literally; whereas we priests know a lot of theology, and we know we don't have to take it just like it says ... but God.! - It makes saints out of the Sisters"! It is the childlike who are the saints, and only the saints achieve.
We seek then union and communion of love and life with Jesus, but we don't seek just the love of friendship or the love of admiration. We are not content with even the love of disciple-ship, unless that word is given its specifically Christian meaning. People can be disciples of a saintly man or woman, disciples of a 'guru'; our relationship to Christ transcends all that. Our love towards Christ is of the order of life and being as a baby's is towards its mother. Baby loves and caresses mother, but also baby draws the milk of life from mother. Christian maturity of being is that sort of relationship to Christ, participation in the being of God, a maturity of spirit, of love and of emotion, a maturity of wisdom, love, and harmonious balance of every desire of spirit and of matter. The life of grace is the growing in beauty and real truth of being through this vital union and communion with Jesus Christ.
Seeing Yourself Mirrored in Christ So we come back again to the personality of Christ, - to Jesus the Way, the Truth and the Life. We come back to Jesus the lovable, the merciful, the totally wise. The same Jesus was intransigent, demanding and in modern language, a bit of a bully. He really hurt that poor, rich, nice young man who had always been such a good boy! We come back to Jesus the real, the ultimate truth in doctrine and in fulfilment as a living experience of human joy. You take the package entire, Jesus cannot be parcelled out. It is vitally important to get this relation-ship right in the matter of the personality of Jesus as it beckons to us, and in the doctrine that Jesus taught and still teaches, alive in the Church. For Jesus is the mirror in which we see our own personality and find our own identity. The personality of Jesus, and this again is a matter of confused teaching just now, is not merely a human personality, it is the radiation and the life giving power of the Divine Person in person. This is the identity to the image and likeness of which we are made. Christ as Son of God and Son of Man, is the mirror image of man: this is the Son of Man, and in His being as God and Man is your identity and my identity, the identity of male and female, without distinction. The identity of our own personality, as we draw life and joy, likeness and conformity to God from Christ, is not a likeness of the mind alone, a likeness of vision and of truth. It is not a likeness of obedience alone, or of the pain of sacrifice, although undeniably obedience and the pain of sacrifice will be there for us, and will become part of our experience in con-forming our being to Christ's being. There is also the joy and the happiness of Christ, which is the radiation through His human psyche of the joy which defines the being of God in Itself. Unless our conformation to Christ, the Mirror of Man is perfect, we are not going to experience within ourselves the perfect fulfilment and joy of our manhood or our woman-hood. Like all spiritual creations, whether manor angel, our specific identity is not in our-selves, or in the order of the created at all. It is in God, who is beyond our order of being and limitation but to whose image alone we are fashioned, and in whose order of joy alone we find our own bliss. That is why all Humanism, with the capital letter, is a mistake. The fulfilment of Man is in God, and in God made Man we find the identity of ourselves. That is really the very meaning of that title, hardly found except towards the end of the period of Messianic prophecy, Son of Man, the title preferred above all others when Christ spoke of His mission to us and our relationship to Himself. In passing, may one make a speculative suggestion that is not going to be taken up here, but which the philosopher and theologian may care to ponder, in case there may be some new, at least partial truth in it. As the human nature of Christ is the perfect image, in The Son of Man, of our own identity and holiness, our whole-ness in body and soul through God, so in the order of the spiritual soul, the Divine Being itself, as pure and perfect spirit is the mirror image of our spiritual perfection, now and unto the beatific vision. It makes sense of the appalling proposition that through Christ we become co-sharers of the Divine Nature'. It also means that Christ is the total manifestation as God and Man, in the unity of His one divine Person, of our human truth, our goodness, our wholeness and our beatitude. We mean, in heaven and now upon earth: it was Jesus who said "be you perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt. 5:48.).
For Christian Life If teachers of status whether priests or lay folk do not accept themselves, and do not teach to others the doctrine of life and human goodness that Jesus taught on earth and still teaches in His Church, they will not form within others the true identity of the real, the living Jesus. What you do not yourself believe, or better what you yourself deny however regretfully and secretly, you cannot live in yourself as an experience of life and nobility of being. Nobody judges other people more nobly, more sincerely ,or more chastely than he lives within his own life. It is a point worth remembering when judgement is passed on another: how do you rate the speaker for wisdom, and holiness of heart ? Nobody judges better than he or she is. This principle is important in the home, the spiritual quality one means of parents who are the natural, and in a sense the hierarchical teachers of their children. For marriage is to be looked upon as a ministry in the Church, and an office in Creation and in the Church. It is important in the schools and in the parishes: we priests form men and women, and even more manifestly and often much more successfully we form children. It is important therefore in the university chaplaincies and most of all in the seminaries. It is a betrayal of good young men when bishops and seminary rectors allow men and women who, however distinguished academically are manifestly in error over the doctrine of Christ to lecture with authority on sex, love, and the meaning of sex in marriage. If people make the Church, and therefore Christ teaching within her to be wrong in the psychological evaluation and use of sex, whether in marriage or out of marriage, or by the misuse of their own personal bodies, then it follows that however much the world lauds them as 'experts' they perceive and live a distorted experience of love within their own personalities. Nobody who teaches error can live the truth: nobody who teaches error can form another in the truth. That of course is why we all suffer from the burden of original and actual sin at the hands of others, as well as within our own minds and hearts. In seminaries especially, even in these days when there is so much talk of academic freedom, good and noble young men are expected to accept with humility of heart and obedience of mind the formation provided for them by their teachers. When psychological error is proffered them as part of their formation in this matter of human love, it not only makes for confused and faulty teaching later as priests, but makes for self-crucifixion in their own lives in men who have taken a vow of chastity for the kingdom of God's sake. For this malformation of men on whom the very future of the Church, and the formation of Christ's people depends, rectors and bishops will answer to Christ directly and very severely. For these know perfectly well that to bring in teachers of doctrinal dissent as honoured per-sons, whose opinions are very, very important to your pastoral understanding later on in your priestly lives, is a betrayal of their own personal mission to Christ as rectors, or as diocesan bishops.
It is not only priests who talk about identity crisis. The expression is surely getting a bit dated now, but one finds it still very much an 'in thing' among the young. One has even found it in the Youth Club. This writer has lately been asked very earnestly by a teenager 'do you know who you are ... because 1 don't?' Knowing who you are is not a matter of being a priest, nor a matter of being married or being single. It is not a matter of vocation at all. Knowing who you are is a matter of knowing Christ as He really is, and of humbly loving Him and conforming your whole life to Him. Knowing who you are is a matter also of bearing anguish, and pain, and sacrifice, and the sneers and contempt of others, - loneliness also, rather than betray the truth and goodness revealed in Christ. If you don't know who you are, if you have an 'identity crisis' it means either that you have never found Christ and are still looking for Him, or else that you don't love Him enough, or faithfully enough. you don't obey Him. 'Knowing who 1 am' is first of all to find Jesus Christ in His real self. That is to find doctrine of truth, love, and moral goodness and our relationship to others. It is to find God and one's neighbour in life, in love, and in prayer. When you have this degree of union with Jesus Christ, then from a full heart you will, especially in youth (though at all times in all ages of life, actually) say to the same Jesus "Lord, what will you have me to do?" That may well be the application of your identity to life and to vocation, whether in Religion or in marriage, or in the single state in the world. St. Paul suffered an identity crisis as he set out breathing threats and slaughter along the road to Damascus. He had been taught error concerning the real Jesus, therefore he was in a mess, and was unfulfilled and confused inside himself. When Jesus struck him down on the road, his identity crisis was cured. He knew who he was in the Person who both reproached him and invited him with love. He asked what he was to do, he applied his new identity, his Christlike identity to Christ's work, he accepted the application of that new identity of his, to be the apostle to the nations.
It is the same for us today. Nobody loves God perfectly unless he knows God with full truth. Nobody knows God perfectly except through Jesus Christ. That is what the Enfleshing of God as man is all about. Nobody will find all his yearnings, loves, emotions and drives fulfilled in harmony and in truth except they be mirrored in that identity of truth which is the Person of Jesus. Live with Jesus your friend and teacher, love Jesus your friend and teacher, be conformed to Him. He alone really knows what is good for you, joyful for you, fulfilment for you. You were made by Him and through Him, He ought to know. Even as human, as yourself you were modelled upon Him; He was coming as 'the Son of Man'. You cannot parcel out the truth of what He taught from the Personality who breathed it out with fire. He did say "I am come to cast fire upon earth"(Luke 12:40). Ignore all the rest, at best they are sophists no matter how well intentioned. They themselves are damaged inwardly in their own persons by Original Sin, even if they deny its existence. There is only One Teacher with-out any trace of sin, having therefore the clear eye of perfect truth and the clean heart of a totally perfect love. Follow Him. He did say himself "call no man Teacher upon earth, for you have only One Teacher, and he is The Christ" (Matt. 23:10). Whoever stumbles upon that Rock of the Teacher will be badly bruised, while if the Rock should fall upon him, he will be ground to powder.
Similarly you oh son or daughter of man, have only one identity to achieve. It is Christ's identity living in you, radiant in you. Do not try to divide in Jesus Christ His doctrine, which is to say His magisterium in the official, guaranteed Church from His fulfilling and loving self. You can't separate a tree from its fruits, a man from his words: much less can you divide them in the Living God. Don't expect to find within yourself the power to live it, or the full will to live it. That is Humanism again, being me centred and man centred. You are made to be God-centred, and that by the Law of Nature as well as by the Law of Grace. "Without Me ,"said the Son of God and Man upon whom you are centred, - "you can do nothing." Make your communion with Him, feed on Him in your heart, feed on Him in the Holy Eucharist.
Remember that in the 'last days' because affluence and power over nature has abounded, so will iniquity abound. It has been prophesied many will fall away (Matt. 24: 11-12). How hard shall those who have riches, entire affluent nations of them, enter into the kingdom of God! You however, man of God, daughter of God, strive to enter by the narrow way. Never be scared by any scandal no matter how grave within the Church: it must needs be that scandals come. Woe to those by whom the scandal comes, and those who lay out the red carpet for them, right up to the front door. You will find Jesus easily enough if you look for Him; "he that comes to Me", said Our Lord "I will in no way cast out" (John. 6:37). He speaks in the Church, the real Church, in solemn doctrine, in Pope, and in Council. Forget the others, - you cannot miss the voice of Peter in the Church, it is loud and clear.