The Power of Christ: Saint Paul vs Caesar

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

    The boxer Robert Fitzsimmons, who was slated to fight the much larger James J. Jeffries in a heavyweight title match in 1902, supposedly quipped: “The bigger they come, the harder they fall.”  While Fitzsimmons failed to demonstrate the truth of his remark on that occasion (he lost the bout to Jeffries in the 8th round), it has become something of a proverb.  How many times have we seen that the more formidable the opponent, the more dramatic the impact when he comes crashing down?

    The nascent Church faced just such an opponent in the days after the ascension of Jesus, an opponent much more formidable than James Jeffries and Robert Fitzsimmons put together.  This man “was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 8:3).  Not satisfied with terrorizing the followers of Christ in Jerusalem, “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, [he] went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:1-2). And yet this man, Saul of Tarsus, reached Damascus a very different man, because on the way he met the Risen Christ:

Now as he journeyed he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" And he said, "Who are you, Lord?" And he said, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. (Acts 9:3-8)

“Oh what a fall was there!”, as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony says of the death of Caesar.  And when Saul fell to the ground it was indeed a great fall, one which the Church commemorated yesterday, as it does every January 25th, as the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul.  Saul, of course, later calls himself Paul, and goes on to become Saint Paul. While both might have been great falls, each in its own way, Saul's was a very different fall than Caesar's.  Caesar pursued greatness to satisfy his own ambitions, and any lasting good that came of it was simply a happy consequence God’s working everything for good (see the quote from the same St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans at the top of this post).  This working for good  took a very different form in the case of St. Paul himself. When Paul arrives in Damascus the Lord tells a man named Ananias to “come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight” (Acts 9:12).  Ananias has heard about Paul, and is afraid of him, but the Lord assures him that “he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” (Acts 9:15).  Unlike Caesar, who lived only for his own glory, Paul now lives for the Glory of God or, as he himself puts it: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). While Caesar's fall was the end of his life ("Now die, Caesar!"), Saul's was the beginning of new, more glorious life.

The laying on of hands: Joseph Ratzinger (later
Pope Benedict XVI) is made a cardinal

    Likewise, any power that St. Paul and the other Apostles wielded was very different from the sort of power that Caesar fought for.  Caesar’s power died with him under the jealous daggers of conspiratorial senators, and it would take almost two decades of ongoing civil war before another man, his great-nephew Octavian, seized supreme command in the Roman Empire and had himself proclaimed Augustus, the first emperor.  It generally happened that emperors after Augustus gained power through violence and bloodshed, and lost it in the same way.
St. Paul, on the other hand, was simply a conduit for the power of Christ, who tells him "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9).  It is a power that comes from outside of him, which was before him, and which continues after him.  We can see this in the fact that yesterday’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is usually followed by today’s memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, just as Timothy and Titus themselves followed Paul (since today is a Sunday, we are not observing the customary feast of Timothy and Titus).  St. Paul made both men bishops by the laying on of hands, just as Ananias had laid hands on him, and wrote letters addressed to both that are now included in the canon of Sacred Scripture. Timothy and Titus likewise passed the power of Christ on to other bishops.  This power is still working through our bishops today, centuries after the bodies and the power of the Roman Emperors have crumbled into nothing.

    The bigger they come, the harder they fall.  We all fall at some point in our lives.  Let us pray that we fall not like Caesar, in a futile pursuit of worldly ambitions, but like St. Paul, born to a new life in Christ.

Christ, or Anti-Christ? Art & the Power of Imagination

This Throwback was first published 1 August 2015 on the blog Principium et Finis.

Who do you see in the picture?

     The Incarnation remains among the most astounding of Catholic doctrines.  It's not easy to believe that the Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Word,

 . . . though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Phillipians 2:6-8)

The Infinite God, St. Paul tells us, willingly took on finite humanity in the Incarnation.  Because we believe this, Catholics have always understood that humble and material things can serve as channels for greater, immaterial things.  The chief examples, aside from the God-Man Jesus Christ Himself, are the Sacraments, which are created things that serve as vehicles of God’s Grace.  We also find the same principle at work, albeit on a less exalted level, in art, music, and other works of the imagination.

    In recent posts about Star Trek [here] and about biblical films such as Noah [here] I have discussed the power of images and other works that appeal to the imagination to mislead and confuse. Such things can also enlighten us, of course, if they are done properly, and deepen our understanding (which is why the Catholic faith has always had such a large audio-visual component).  I recently came across an interesting example of an imaginative work being used in a more positive manner.  Two imaginative works, actually, because it involves a renaissance fresco appearing in a modern work of fiction.

    The book is michael O’Brien’s apocalyptic novel Father Elijah.  I’m thinking in particular of a scene in which Fr. Elijah himself and a friend are looking at a wall painting in the Cathedral of Orvieto:

Elijah went over to another mural.

His eyes were drawn to the central figure of the image, a figure of Christ.  How strange, he thought, to see a representation of the Lord with the figure of Satan whispering in His ear,and his arm penetrating His robes.  Is that Christ’s hand or the devil’s that emerges from the folds of cloth?

It was not a literal representation of a scriptural scene, he concluded; although it might be the artist’s imaginative rendering of the temptation in the desert?  But there was something out of character in the way Christ leaned into Satan’s embrace and listened with such attention.

He stared at it for a long time.  Suddenly, the meaning of the mural became clear, like a scene viewed through lenses revolving into focus.  The blurred shapes of reality drew together into a sharp, piercing landscape of moral disaster.

The figure held in the devil’s embrace was not Christ but the Antichrist.

Elijah understood why Don Matteo had wanted him to see it.  Now he knew why the old friar would not tell him the reason for his request.  Matteo had wanted Elijah to discover the secret of the mural himself, and in the process, to observe the mechanics of perception.

     I immediately knew the painting by it's description, because I had used a picture of it to illustrate a blog post last winter (called, appropriately enough, "'Choice' And The Father Of Lies", here).  The painting creates a vivid picture of Satan's usual modus operandi: evil working in the guise of good.  The striking image gets the message across much more memorably than a simple explanation (hence the old saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words").

     But there's more to it than that.  Notice that the characters looking at the mural above don't at first realize what they're seeing; neither did I, only it took me a lot longer to figure it out than it does Fr. Elijah.  But that's part of what makes the painting so effective: we think we're seeing Jesus, only to realize that we're actually looking at his opposite.  We are not merely seeing a depiction of deception, we are in fact deceived by the artist's work: we experience deception itself, "in the flesh" as it were.  That's a powerful lesson.  That's why, in O'Brien's novel, Don Matteo wanted Fr. Elijah to experience it first-hand.

     Very often our faith is hindered by emotional barriers: those of us who are believers sometimes give in to doubt, even though we've experienced God's presence;  unbelievers often are incapable of accepting any evidence at all because of such barriers.  A well-crafted work of visual or imaginative art can often weaken those barriers by creating a new emotional experience, and so lead to a new or deeper understanding, while bad or disordered art can lead us further into darkness.  What we see, hear, or read can make all the difference.

     

Prophet Samuel,The Candidates, & the Letter to Diognetus

  Today is election day here in the United States, and we face more a dispiriting choice for our highest office than we have seen in this country for a long time, perhaps ever.  It may be that we are testing the validity of Joseph de Maistre’s famous observation, "Every country has the government it deserves” (Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite).

Give the people what they want: King Saul and Prophet Samuel

    Before we consider that possibility, I’d like to take a look at 1 Samuel, chapter 8,  the Vulgate Latin version of which we are reading in my advanced Latin classes right now.  It occurs to me that this scripture may have some some applicability to our current situation.  In this Biblical reading Samuel, judge and prophet, has grown old, and has passed his office of Judge on to his sons Joel and Abijah.   Unfortunately, the sons do not “walk in the ways” of their father (1 Sam 8:3). In fact, they are thoroughly corrupt: they are greedy, take bribes, and generally “pervert justice” (1 Sam 8:4).  The elders of Israel get together and go to Samuel. After pointing out the (rather severe) shortcomings of Joel and Abijah, they propose a radical solution: “Appoint a king to rule over us, like all the nations” (1 Sam 8:5).  

    Whatever merit there might be in their complaints, Samuel doesn’t like their proposed solution.  He turns to the Lord in prayer, and receives a surprising reply:

"Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.  According to all the deeds which they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. Now then, hearken to their voice; only, you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them." (1 Samuel 8:7-9)

    Samuel follows the Lord’s instructions, and warns them of the various ways in which the king will abuse and exploit them: how he will take their sons and daughters and put them in various roles of service to himself, and how he will take various of their possessions and bestow them on his servants (1 Samuel 8:11-17).  He concludes with a stern warning: “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the LORD will not answer you in that day" (1 Samuel 8:18). The people are unimpressed.  On the contrary, they seem determined to illustrate H.L. Menken’s wry definition of democracy: "The theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”  After Samuel’s long list of the wrongs they will suffer,

. . .  the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; and they said, "No! but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles." And when Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the LORD. And the LORD said to Samuel, "Hearken to their voice, and make them a king."   (1 Samuel 8:19-22)

    The people of Israel don’t understand that they can only be free when the accept the Rule of God, because the alternative is the tyranny of mere men.  As Bob Dylan (in a moment of lucidity) once wrote, “You gotta serve somebody.” Men and women who serve God and his commandments are able govern themselves in this world, on a personal level and corporately.  Those who reject the Wisdom of the Lord in the hope of being their own masters find themselves instead the slaves of fellow creatures, of “such a thing as myself” (as Shakespeare’s Cassius says of the tyrant Caesar) . . . or worse. St. Paul advises us that “the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners” (1 Timothy 1:9).  A state peopled by godless citizens will, necessarily, be under the heel of tyranny.

    That’s my fear for the United States.  I’m not saying that either of our present unlovely candidates will, of himself or herself, bring about the end of the republic.  They are rather a symptom of a deeper problem: we wouldn’t be in this position at all, faced with so execrable a choice, if we had really kept God as our true sovereign.  It’s not that we haven’t had our own Samuels: Benjamin Franklin warned that the U.S. Constitution offered “A republic, if you can keep it”, and I’ve often found occasion to cite John Adams’ warning that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

    My purpose here is not to endorse either of the two stunningly flawed human beings the two major parties have offered as presidential candidates.  I do think it is clear that one of the two is decisively less unacceptable to serious Christians, but it still remains a true choice of the lesser of two evils.  The outcome of this or any election, however, is of only passing importance.  More significant to me is the fact that a substantial number of Americans, from across the political spectrum, have deemed character, morality, rule of law, truth, and even basic decency as less important than getting what they want.  It’s bad enough that such a society will inevitably see ever greater human suffering in this world; a much worse consequence is that it will become even harder to hear the words of the Gospel in so degraded an environment, and many souls may be lost. The election of neither the Republican nor the Democratic candidate will change that grim reality.

    At the same time, this is a season of Hope, and of renewed purpose for those of us who aspire to follow Christ.  St. Paul tells us that, in reality, “our citizenship is in Heaven” (Phillipians 3:20). The anonymous author of the 2nd century Letter to Diognetus elaborates,  reminding us that we Christians  “dwell in the world, yet are not of the world”, and further that

as the soul is in the body, so are Christians in the world . . . The soul is imprisoned in the body, yet preserves that very body; and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they are the preservers of the world. The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle; and Christians dwell as sojourners in corruptible [bodies], looking for an incorruptible dwelling in the heavens.

In other words, we have our work cut out for us.  Nonetheless, the outcome of today’s election, however bad, will be of only passing importance in this world; our conduct in this world will be of eternal significance, both for ourselves and any other souls we can bring with us, in the next.

Lent Prepares Us For Grace

Isaiah's lips are cleansed (Giovanni Battista Tiepolo)

    It’s a commonplace that nobody is perfect.  At the same time, it’s clear from Scripture that the God who is perfect prefers (with the exception of Incarnation of the Eternal Word Himself) to use imperfect human instruments to spread His Good News.  We are reminded of this curious feature of Salvation History in all three of this past Sunday's Mass readings, in which we see the Prophet Isaiah and the Apostles Paul and Peter all proclaim their unworthiness . . . and the Lord’s determination to use them as his mouthpieces nonetheless.

    All three use similar language.  Isaiah, after seeing the Lord on his throne surrounded by Seraphim cries out:

Then I said, “Woe is me, I am doomed!

For I am a man of unclean lips,

living among a people of unclean lips;

yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5)

Likewise St. Peter (whom Christ has chosen to be the chief of his Apostles) says, after Jesus has miraculously multiplied his catch of fish: “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” (Luke 5:8)  

St. Paul speaks in the same vein when he tells the Corinthians:

Last of all, as to one born abnormally,

he appeared to me.

For I am the least of the apostles,

not fit to be called an apostle,

because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Corinthians 15:8-9)

    It is quite true, of course, that they are unworthy, but the Lord knows perfectly well what their shortcomings are; he is happy to give them what they need to fulfill his mission.  Jesus shows his power to purify immediately after Peter’s protestation of unworthiness:

. . . there came a man full of leprosy; and when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and besought him, "Lord, if you will, you can make me clean." And he stretched out his hand, and touched him, saying, "I will; be clean." And immediately the leprosy left him. (Luke 5: 12-13)

We see the preparation of Isaiah more directly:

Then one of the seraphim flew to me,

holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the altar.

He touched my mouth with it, and said,

“See, now that this has touched your lips,

your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.” (Isaiah 6:6-7)

As the cleansing with a hot coal suggests, the purging of sin can be an uncomfortable process.  But there’s more: St. Paul goes on to tell us:

But by the grace of God I am what I am,

and his grace to me has not been ineffective.

Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them;

not I, however, but the grace of God that is with me.(1 Corinthians 15:10-11)

God bestows his Grace on those who consent to be tempered into his instrument.  

    

Caravaggio's "Conversion of St. Paul"

There’s a lesson for us here. Suffering comes whether we are willing or not: look at the case of Jonah, who in the course of running from the Lord’s summons undergoes quite a deal of hardship (including being swallowed by a sea monster and vomited up after three days).  God’s Will is accomplished nevertheless, but Jonah is able to appreciate neither God’s great act of Grace in sparing the one hundred twenty thousand plus Ninevites, nor His lesser Grace of sending a shade plant for the comfort of the reluctant prophet himself. The Ninevites has been saved, but we are left wondering about the salvation of Jonah.

    When I heard these readings at Mass yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of them in terms of the upcoming Lenten season. There’s a part of me that resents the (admittedly small) sacrifices and austerities of the Penitential season.  The experiences of Peter, Paul and Isaiah help to put my own life in perspective. The mild hardships we take upon ourselves during Lent are a reminder to us that our sufferings can prepare us to serve God, and that our patient endurance cultivates our hearts to receive His Grace. And as we saw above, St. Paul tells us that God’s Grace makes us what we are: who am I to refuse?

The Geometry Of Faith

“The Catholic Church,” according to G.K. Chesterton, “is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.”  Those of us who have been out and now are in (back in, for some of us) know how true it is.  And it stands to reason: as both a worldly and a spiritual entity, the Church cannot be contained within purely physical bounds.

What is both seen and unseen?     

This sounds like sheer nonsense, of course, to those who are formed in a materialist worldview, because they reject a priori the existence of a non-physical reality.  It may be a decided minority who consciously embrace such a worldview, but many, many more unthinkingly see the world in the same way.  Explaining Catholicism and the Catholic Church under these circumstances (except, maybe, in the most zealously orthodox Catholic schools) sometimes feels like trying to converse with someone who speaks a completely different language.

    Instructing the unknowing, however, is one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy (and for some of us, it’s also part of our employment contract), so we must always search for new ways to communicate the experience of faith.  In another post, for instance (“A Dark Matter: 'Proving' God In A Materialistic World"), I discuss the cosmological theories of “dark matter” and “dark energy”  as a way of addressing the common idea that, because we can’t detect God directly using scientific instruments, it’s unreasonable to believe in him.  Scientist believe that 95% of the matter and energy in the universe in completely undetectable, but they are convinced it is there because of its observed effects on things we can detect; likewise, we can be sure of the existence of God, even though he is beyond this world, because of his effect on things (and people) that we are able to see.

The Faith Postulate

     In a similar way, there are things we can know only by experiencing them; the love of God as we experience it in His Church is a prime example.  The outsider will often dismiss this sort of knowledge as requiring an irrational, unsupported belief, since the proof comes after our initial commitment.  We might ask such sceptics to consider geometry by way of analogy.  Euclidean Geometry, for instance, starts with the parallel postulate, which requires that parallel lines never meet.  It’s not proven, you simply have to take it as a given.  Once you do, of course, you find that the entire system is consistent, which validates your starting assumptions.  More importantly, you find that when you apply it to the real world, for measuring property lines, for instance, it is absolutely reliable.  Likewise the Catholic Faith: once you “step inside” and see the results in your own life, the most “reasonable” response is belief (this is Blaise Pascal's proscription for those who remain unconvinced by the logic of his famous wager).  From the inside we can also see that Christianity yields truer results on a global scale than other systems of belief (as I explain in “What Would Darwin Do?”).

     All analogies are imperfect, of course, and a sceptic might point out that, while the Catholic Church claims to hold immutable truths, we can change the parallel postulate and still come up with other internally consistent systems of geometry, systems which may not work on a plane, but work perfectly well in other contexts.  In spherical geometry, for instance, parallel lines (which are actually lines of longitude) meet exactly twice, at the poles.  This system is much more accurate than Euclidean geometry for measuring on a global scale.  Spherical geometry shows us, for example, that what looks like shortest distance from, say, Chicago to Rome (a straight line from west to east) on a flat map is actually much longer than a route which loops north (or appears to “loop” north) over Greenland. 

United Airlines' graphic showing Chicago to Rome flight path

The Fullness of Truth

     The fact that there are different geometries, however, doesn’t weaken the analogy at all: if anything, it develops it further.  Like Euclidean geometry, which only works on a two-dimensional plane, the scientific worldview is an accurate and quite useful tool for interpreting reality . . . within a certain narrow focus.  It enables us to learn about and work with things that are physical and measurable, but it cannot tell us about things like love, justice, or any other reality that might exist outside of the purely physical realm. Just as a bathroom scale can tell us how much we weigh but can’t tell us our age, it cannot alone tell us anything about things outside of its set boundaries.  The Christian Revelation, on the other hand, reaches beyond the material world and gives us access to a much fuller reality, and once we accept its premises, we can see both its internal consistency and its Truth when applied to our experience.

     Maybe when we look at it in this way, it can help us explain what St. Paul means when he says: “Let no one deceive himself.  If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise.  For the wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19).  He is not rejecting reason, but saying that, to someone who thinks in only two dimensions, three-dimensional reasoning is incomprehensible.  Likewise with Chesterton: those on the outside of the Catholic Church often think they are looking at a plane, while from the inside we can see it in all its three-dimensional fullness.  Finally, one last quote, from one of the greatest of geometricians, Archimedes: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world!”  Everything depends on that “place to stand”, and there’s no firmer ground than the Church founded by Jesus Christ.