DIVINITY: Essay on Faith and Science in Walker Percy’s Fiction and Elsewhere

Christopher Baglow: Walker Percy: Faith and Science in the Ruins. From the Church Life Journal, 1/26/23.

In his masterpiece Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger boldly ventured to identify the place at which contemporary human beings, at least of the Western variety, come to grief in their understanding of God. His compass is the well-known parable of Jesus from Luke 15, the parable of the lost sheep, whose shepherd leaves the other ninety-nine in his flock on the arid, open plain and goes to find it. When he does find it, he rejoices over it more than he does over the ninety-nine that he left in peril. Then Jesus declares that God is like that with any sinner who repents, welcoming them, Ratzinger explains, “like a person who loves, with all the capriciousness of someone who loves.” Such a concept is so foreign to us today, says Ratzinger, that we cannot help but feel that it is a primitive artifact from when the world seemed very small to human reckoning, and to be the center of everything. By contrast,

We think, in an age when we know how infinitely different things are, how unimportant the earth is in the vast universe, how unimportant this little speck of dust, man is in comparison . . . it seems an absurd idea that this supreme being should concern himself with man, his pitiful little world, his cares, his sins and his non-sins.

But the resolution Ratzinger offers to this modern crisis of faith is just as bold—it becomes the interpretive key for everything else in his Introduction, and is also a vantage point to consider the intersection of faith and science in the letters and life of the Catholic novelist and philosopher Walker Percy. Fittingly, it is an aphorism that prefaces a German novel, Hyperion by Friedrich Holderlin; even more fittingly, its original source is not Holderlin, but an unknown Flemish Jesuit who penned it as an epitaph for St. Ignatius of Loyola. It is a definition of divinity that leaves behind the false dichotomy between “Supreme Being” and “Reckless Lover”:

Not to be constrained by the greatest, but to let oneself be contained by the smallest—that is divine.

This deep paradox of transcendence and immanence is the bridge between the parable of the lost sheep and the modern human being informed of and boggled by the vast world uncovered by modern science. In Ratzinger’s own words, “The Logos of the whole world, the creative original thought, is at the same time love; in fact, this thought is creative because, as thought, it is love, and as love, it is thought.” The God of modern science, the God of cosmic mathematics, of Absolute thought, is so only because he is Love, not an unfeeling Idea, but creative of the cosmos for the sake of love, fully allowing himself to be encompassed by the smallest, by the encounters that fulfill or wreck our lives, even the very small loves, the love of a shepherd for his favorite sheep, or an owner for her dog. But first and foremost, he is encompassed by, and therefore encountered in, the love between human persons.

Finding the union between these two seemingly contradictory options—the paradox of a God who loves the smallest, and yet is also the Mind of the Universe, the matrix, the source and condition of the cosmos’ existence because he is love—leads us to the underlying frame of Walker Percy’s novels. For his protagonists, God cannot be found by reaching to the heights, and in their attempts to take a God’s-eye-view of the world, the viewpoint of the theorist, Percy’s characters become alienated from the world, from other selves, and from God. But it is when they go out into that world and encounter other selves for what they are—and in some cases, fall in love with them, or remember love for them, or become broken by their desire for love from them—that they find God in the world, or at least, find God close to them.

In the Moviegoer, Binx Bolling goes on a fruitless “vertical” search for the Supreme Being. He reads Einstein and Schroedinger and others, and has it all explained—the universe, the electron, Einsteinian gravity. “The only difficulty,” he admits, “was that the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over.” So he commences his horizontal search in which he becomes a 1960s suburban New Orleans pilgrim of pleasure, driving up and down Elysian Fields and Robert E. Lee, watching movies, and pursuing women. He does not find love, so much as it finds him. The love of Lonnie and of Kate, discovered through catastrophes, culminating on Ash Wednesday and marriage to Kate, brings him around to face, if not yet embrace, something like peace and the stability of loving commitment, both hallmarks of grace.

Lancelot Lamar in Lancelot is also a theorist, one who sees human sins as phenotypic variations on a psychologically explainable moral genotype—as specimens of a thoroughly explainable and psychologically excusable species of actions. Even Hitler seems to him incapable of real sin, for he “was a madman.” To find a real sin, he thinks, would prove the existence of God. But he will not examine his own conscience as he seeks the Unholy Grail. Remaining a theorist, he conceives and dedicates himself to an insane Stoic New Order that will be “the best of [Robert E.] Lee and Richard [the Lionhearted] and Saladin and Leonidas and Hector and Agamemnon and [the Red Baron] Richthofen and Charlemagne and Clovis and Martel.” That he will be the one to construct this New Order shows how he stands above and outside his theory. The tragic irony is that standing outside allows him to rationalize a horrifying sin of vengeance, and to concretize his alienation from God and his own self.

One of the most powerful expressions of Percy’s literary genius is that, as one reads through the description of the New Order that Lancelot wants to build, one feels (especially if one is a Southerner) the desire for it building within himself. But it is a diabolical lie, and over and over its true nature surfaces, such as when he exclaims to his priest-friend, “You have your Sacred Heart. We have Lee.” It is a new order without love. The presence of grace, and the solution to Lancelot’s despair, exists within that very priest-friend Fr. John, his silent listener whose birth name was Percival, namesake of one of the three to find the Grail in the Arthurian-Grail cycle.

This wavering priest comes and listens to Lancelot and is changed, brought to reconciliation with God, by his patient listening. Fr. John opts for embracing his priesthood, rather than leave it for the Creole girl on the levee, to take a little parish in Alabama and (in Lancelot’s words) “preach the gospel, turn bread into flesh, forgive the sins of Buick dealers, administer communion to suburban housewives.” The Arthurian Holy Grail is not a chalice; it is God and divine love, it is a mercy that causes goodness where goodness is absent; it is one that creates community. It eludes Lancelot but is found by Percival, and even Lancelot seems to sense its nearness in the only verbatim words we receive from Fr. John in the entire novel:

Lancelot: There must be a new beginning, right?

Fr. John: Yes

Lancelot: But? You don’t like the new beginning I propose? You are silent. So you are going to your little church in Alabama and that’s it?

Fr. John: Yes

Lancelot: So what’s the new beginning in that? Isn’t that more of the same? You are silent. Very well. But you know this! One of us is wrong. It will be your way or it will be my way.

Fr. John: Yes

Lancelot: All we can agree on is that it will not be their way. Out there.

Fr. John: Yes

Lancelot: There is no other way than yours or mine, true?

Fr. John: Yes

…

Lancelot: Very well, I’ve finished. Is there anything you wish to tell me before I leave?

Fr. John: Yes

Here we have two Kierkegaardian personae, the genius and the apostle, facing each other, personae that Percy refers to repeatedly in essays and interviews. One reaches arrogantly up towards great things but without comprehension of the smallest and most important things—Lancelot. But the apostle, in this case, Fr. John (after St. John the Apostle), has embraced the smallest, and so has news to share about love, about being loved, that God is love. Consider Kierkegaard’s own words to see the parallel between the genius/apostle dichotomy and the greatest/smallest paradox:

Long before there can be any question of whether the genius will or will not assign his rare endowment to God, the genius already is and is a genius even if he does not do that . . . It is different with an apostle. The word itself indicates the difference. An apostle is not born; an apostle is a man who is called and appointed by God and sent by him on a mission . . . I am not to listen to Paul because he is brilliant or matchlessly brilliant, but I am to submit to Paul because he has divine authority; and in any case it must become Paul’s responsibility to see to it that he produces this impression, whether anyone submits to his authority or not. 

In another section Kierkegaard writes what could be a C.V. for Fr. John:

It surely is true that the apostle exists entirely for the sake of others, is sent out for the sake of others; but it is not the crowd and not humanity, not the honored public, not even the honored cultured public, that is his master or his masters—it is God.

But to me the most interesting—and in the first instance, the most heartbreaking—appearance of the greatest-smallest paradox comes at the end of Love in the Ruins. It does so in two places, both of which occur at the height of the conflict of the novel. In the most important case, we see news about God remembered, and it snatches Dr. Thomas More from spiritual self-destruction. He remembers his deceased daughter on her deathbed:

“Papa, have you lost your faith?”

“No.”

Samantha asked me the question as I stood by her bed. The neuroblastoma had pushed one eye out and around the nose-bridge so that she looked like a Picasso profile.

“Then why don’t you go to Mass anymore?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you don’t go with me.”

“Papa, you’re in greater danger than Mama.”

“How is that?”

“Because she is protected by Invincible Ignorance.”

“That’s true,” I said, laughing.

“She doesn’t know any better.”

“She doesn’t?”

“You do.”

“Yes.”

“Just promise me one thing, Papa.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t commit the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”

“Which one is that?”

“The sin against grace. If God gives you the grace to believe in him and love him and you refuse, the sin will not be forgiven you.”

“I know.”

As he recalls the moment, he realizes the nature of a sin that seems to be what has driven him so far from God and into the false refuge of his own genius—that he might have savored Samantha’s death a little, that he might have feasted on her death, found sweetness in his remorse instead of grieving her. He seeks her forgiveness: “Samantha, forgive me. I am sorry you suffered and died, my heart broke, but there have been times when I was not above enjoying it.” It seems no accident that from here he is able to withstand, and overcome, the diabolical Art Immelman, and then to marry Ellen and find something like peace, to almost become a good Catholic again (although one might wonder if he ever was, or if anyone is).

Dr. Thomas More is—like Binx, like Lancelot—a theorist, a man of genius who, unlike them, retains his faith, truly but badly, who has arrogantly made himself the arbiter of the redemption of humanity with his Lapsometer, which despite his intentions brings the human race to the brink of its extinction. God was not found in his great, ingenious plan to save humanity by neurological stimulation, but in the smallest. Samantha, the apostle from his past, had news for him, and that news brought him to the threshold of salvation.

The second is one of the few places where the issue of conflict between faith and science is ever expressly mentioned in the novels (unless you include Lost in the Cosmos with the novels), and so is a helpful segue to faith and science in Percy’s life. More finds himself pleading for help from two men on the golf course. Moon Mullins is a Knight of Columbus/Holy Name alum/slumlord/golf course greenskeeper/American Catholic Church schismatic, who blames the pending apocalypse variously on Black people and later the abandonment of the Latin Mass. Moon is standing on the golf course with Billy Matthews, an Evangelical chiropractor. Moon is trying to vouch for More’s fidelity to “God and country” with Matthews, and is faring badly:

“I remember when Doc and I were in high school,” Moon tells the chiropractor. “Doc wrote a prize-winning essay for the Knights of Columbus on how there was no real conflict between science and religion. You remember what you said about transubstantiation, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“Transubstantiation is an invention of the Roman popes,” says Dr. Billy Matthews, flipping his flip-up sunglasses down for some reason. “It’s a piece of magic to fool the ignorant and has no basis in the Bible.”

“Whoa, hold on Billy!” cries Moon. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Christ said ‘This is my body.’ Didn’t he, Doc?”

“Yes,” I say, and utter a groan.

“That’s the Eyetalian translation,” says Dr. Billy Matthews. With his flip-ups he looks blind as a bat.

“No it isn’t is it, Doc? Tell him.”

“Later. Oh Lord, what am I going to do?”

In the next scene More is speaking to Max Gottlieb, the atheist/scientist/genius/ivory-billed woodpecker enthusiast who asks More what is bothering him.

“You. And them. That is you four [Max and 3 other scientists] and those two.” I nod toward Moon and Billy Matthews, who are still arguing about transubstantiation.

“What about us and them?”

“You are both right and wrong.”

“What does that mean?”

More does not answer the question, at least not straightforwardly, averting instead to the prospect of the two groups of men killing each other. But it is clear that for Percy, the bifurcation of genius and apostle is not so clear as Kierkegaard seems to make it. The genius Gottlieb stands over and above the world with greatness but without comprehension of the most important things, seeing but not seeing. Wannabe apostles like Moon Mullins and Billy Matthews are prey to their own just-so stories; even real apostles, such as John Calvin as he appears in Lost in the Cosmos, can be undone by the one-sidedness of ideology. This is why, for Kierkegaard, the genius is antithetical to the apostle; it almost seems that to be one you must eschew the other. For Percy, ingenuity and apostleship need each other—we might say, reason and faith, science and faith, need each other. As St. John Paul II, once wrote, “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, where both may flourish.”

I think that this aphorism of John Paul II is a very helpful key to understanding not only Walker Percy’s novels but the very man himself, his life, his own intellectual and spiritual journey, and the way in which faith and science came together for him in a mutually enriching lifelong dialogue. In fact, I propose that it was this encounter of science and faith that led him to the unique perspective that still distinguishes him as an original philosopher of language.

For him, it began quite early. Leaving behind the watery liberal Protestantism in which he was raised, and which seemed to have no discernible impact whatsoever on his spirit, but believing that some truth or truths must be certain and important, he took the route of scientism in senior high, committing himself to the notion that only the elegance and power of scientific method could put us in touch with truth, and maybe even offer some kind of mundane salvation. His encounter with Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells’ The Science of Life offered him a purportedly complete explanation of what it means to be human, dispensing with ideas of life after death and of human metaphysical uniqueness. Consider this passage on the mind-body problem from Wells:

The matter of physics and chemistry and the conscious spirit of the human mind are two aspects of the organisms we call men and women. In the light of such a conception the old question, whether mind determines the actions of matter or matter determines those of mind, ceases to have any meaning at all. Man, in this hypothesis, is not Mind plus Body; he is a Mind-Body.

Far from rejecting this insight along with the scientism in which it came wrapped, this vision of the unity of the human person never left him—he remained an anti-Cartesian like Huxley but found a third way in the Catholic doctrine that the soul is the form of the body, which led him to his own unique blend of semiotics and Thomistic anthropology. “The soul is not the entire man, and I am not my soul,” says St. Thomas Aquinas in his Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15. For a Catholic, Cartesianism cannot be the answer, but neither can Wells’ self-assured reductionism.

For Percy, it was in understanding language—“a natural phenomenon in which energy exchanges account for some, but not all, of what happens”—that he straddled the fatefulmind-body, science-religion rift in the modern mind. The human person is the rational animal that, like the other animals, is not only self-moved but moves in a radically new way, and can, thanks to language, consider all that exists under the perspective of creation. She can ask, “Is this world, of which I am a product and in which I live, an impersonal accident or an incredible artifact?” To be linguistic is to be a speaker about God.

Furthermore, language allows one to be named by God, to discover one’s self authentically. One can find no greater biblical precis of Percy’s view of the healing of the sundered self than Revelation 2:17, in the Spirit’s word to the church in Pergamum: “To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it.” For the unnamed namer that is man, only God can give a name that will do justice to his enigmatic self, what is good about it, what is bad about it, all within the encompassing love of God, found, of course, within the smallest.

We can see in this insight both parts of John Paul II’s aphorism. In the popularized science of Wells, Percy’s religion was purified in advance from error and superstition, above all from the sad idea of the human soul as a separate thing, a mysterious ghost that is the real self. In his Catholic faith, his science was purified from the idea of the human being only as an organism in an environment. He found the nature and uniqueness of the human soul, and the human person as a whole self, body and soul, able to be compared to a lost animal, a sheep, but also able to reach the heights.

And it is here that we can return to the aphorism with which we began our pilgrimage through Percy’s dialogue, in life and letters, with modern science and the Catholic Faith—“Not to be constrained by the greatest, but to let oneself be contained by the smallest—that is divine.” This is what Percy’s imagination captured—here and there, at the moment of recovering consciousness under a chindolea bush, like Binx, or remembering a dying beloved daughter whose tortured face was somehow also a piece of art—a Picasso profile—like Tom More, or encountering one’s own conscience while watching the grief turned into rage turned into theory turned into damnation of an old friend—like Fr. John encountering Lancelot—here and everywhere the divine breaks forth. As Hopkins once wrote,

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Image: came from the journal with the essay: Featured Image: Pieter Brueghel the Younger, The Good Shepherd, 1616; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was originally given as a presentation at the 2022 Walker Percy Weekend, June 4, 2022, at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in St. Francisville, LA. It is offered here without boiled crawfish, barbecue, or bourbon cocktails served under canopies of ancient live oaks dripping with moss, without which it may have lost its greatest merits.

W. S. MERWIN: A PARABLE

Sometimes there is a bit of verse or a piece of writing that truly takes hold of my imagination. I found this wonderful parable in a collection of various kinds of writing in a Norton Anthology, fourth or fifth edition, when I taught an exposition course fifty or so years ago. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was there, I remember. The parable of the Good Samaritan was probably there too, but I don’t remember. I suspect I had the students try their hand at such a genre, but I don’t remember that either. Tergvinder, however, and his boulder I never forgot, for there are days in my life, like today for example, when Merwin’s parable seems to express exactly the quality of my own life.

The Internet is a magical thing, an astonishing thing. I hadn’t thought of Tergvinder in a long time, and I got rid of that Norton text year ago, I think. While I didn’t remember the author’s name, I could never forget Tergvinder’s name or his boulder. I typed in the title and there it was, under, I kid you not, a full screen image of a bright red Swingline stapler; at least I think it was a Swingline. It was certainly large and bright red. I was at first appalled by the image, but then I saw Tergvinder down at the very bottom of the page, in a very tiny font, after all those years. Magical!

There is, of course, one more thing to add:

And I do hasten to add (before my eyes completely give out tonight) that this parable also calls up for me Saint Augustine’s well known line from the “Confessions”: “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” In my mind Merwin’s parable and Augustine’s famous affirmation oddly go together. Sometimes, however, all one seems to get is the boulder. Sometimes, for a moment or two, it’s enough.

Tergvinder's Stone

One time my friend Tergvinder brought a large round boulder into his living room. He rolled it up the steps with the help of some two-by-fours, and when he got it out into the middle of the room, where some people have coffee tables (though he had never had one there himself) he left it. He said that was where it belonged.

It is really a plain-looking stone. Not as large as Plymouth Rock by a great deal, but then it does not have all the claims of a big shaky promotion campaign to support. That was one of the things Tergvinder said about it. He made no claims at all for it, he said. It was other people who called it Tergvinder's Stone. All he said was that according to him it belonged there.

His dog took to peeing on it, which created a problem (Tergvinder had not moved the carpet before he got the stone to where he said it belonged). Their tomcat took to squirting it too. His wife fell over it quite often at first and it did not help their already strained marriage. Tergvinder said there was nothing to be done about it. It was in the order of things. That was a phrase he seldom employed, and never when he conceived that there was any room left for doubt.

He confided in me that he often woke in the middle of the night, troubled by the ancient, nameless ills of the planet, and got up quietly not to wake his wife, and walked through the house naked, without turning on any lights. He said that at such times he found himself listening, listening, aware of how some shapes in the darkness emitted low sounds like breathing, as they never did by day. He said he had become aware of a hole in the darkness in the middle of the living room, and out of that hole a breathing, a mournful dissatisfied sound of an absence waiting for what belonged to it, for something it had never seen and could not conceive of, but without which it could not rest. It was a sound, Tergvinder said, that touched him with fellow-feeling, and he had undertaken - oh, without saying anything to anybody - to assuage, if he could, that wordless longing that seemed always on the verge of despair. How to do it was another matter, and for months he had circled the problem, night and day, without apparently coming any closer to a solution. Then one day he had seen the stone. It had been there all the time at the bottom of his drive, he said, and he had never really seen it. Never recognized it for what it was. The nearer to the house he had got it, the more certain he had become. The stone had rolled into its present place like a lost loved one falling into arms that have long ached for it.

Tergvinder says that now on nights when he walks through the dark house he comes and stands in the living room doorway and listens to the peace in the middle of the floor. He knows it size, its weight, the touch of it, something of what is thought of it. He knows that it is peace. As he listens, some hint of that peace touches him too. Often, after a while, he steps down into the living room and goes and kneels beside the stone and they converse for hours in silence - a silence broken only by the sound of his own breathing.


W. S. Merwin

Why Read the Bible? Fa. Peter John Cameron, OP. (Aleteia: 1/21/23)

Fa. Peter John Cameron

This weekend the Church celebrates Word of God Sunday, the aim of which is “to give new life to the responsibility of all believers to deepen their knowledge of Sacred Scripture.”

The priceless gift that the Bible is cannot be overstated. But start with what the Bible is not. The Bible exists not to be a textbook, a history tome, a rulebook, a chronicle, an operation manual, an annals, or an archive. In the words of one prominent Catholic Scripture scholar, “The Evangelists had no intention of providing a shorthand record of what Christ said or a report of his actions such as a police officer might do” (R. Schnackenburg).

Rather, Scripture is the sacred writer’s memory of exceptional facts that happened which the writer re-presents as an announcement so that those saving events might happen to us as well. Through the Sacred Scripture, God wants to communicate his very self with us. Scripture is written the way it is — in literary language as a story, not in dry, technical prose — precisely because Scripture intends to reveal God to us as a person to love. When we read the Word of God, we must approach it the way we would a person.

God speaks to us through Scripture

Scripture itself states that “the Word of God is living and active” (Heb 4:12), and that “the Father willed to give us birth by the word of truth … able to save your souls “(James 1:18, 21). As Paul Claudel put it, “the text breathes.” 

The documents of the Church accentuate this fact: “In the sacred books the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them” (Dei Verbum 21). “Christ is present in the Word, since it is he himself who speaks when the Holy Scriptures are read in the Church…. For in the liturgy God speaks to his people and Christ is still proclaiming his Gospel” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 7, 33).  

St. Gregory the Great points out a mystery that seems impossible: “All Scripture was written for us.” The great spiritual master Fr. Louis Bouyer explains this: 

In the Word of God, it is God who speaks to us, who never ceases to speak to us, in these words. Even though they have been fixed in their phrasing for thousands of years, he who makes us hear them today already had us in mind when he inspired them of old, and he is always present to address himself to us through them as if they were at this instant pronounced for the first time.

Scripture intends to share with us God’s very heart, and to appeal to our heart … targeting its hurts and needs and longings. Scripture is written to move us at the level of our affection, not just at the level of the intellect. “In Scripture,” observed moral theologian Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., “God always approaches us with promises of happiness before speaking of precepts.” Even St. Thomas Aquinas insists that “the doctrine of Sacred Scripture contains not only matters for speculation but also matters to be accepted by the heart.” Which is why “in every Word of God, what matters most is God’s opening his own heart to us in it, and it is by this that our heart should be touched, changed from top to bottom” (L. Bouyer). St. Augustine urges us: “Learn to know the heart of God in the words of God.”

How to read the Bible

This determines the way we are meant to read the Bible. It is never appropriate to dissect or dismantle the Bible piece-by-piece or to try to reduce it to so many propositions, precepts, morals, or maxims. “Scripture will always contain more revelation than is formulated in dogmatic definitions” because “Scripture’s literary ‘modes’ convey the highest truth” (L. Alonso-Schökel). And the meaning Scripture contains is inexhaustible—every time we read it, we unearth deeper riches.

We know this from our own experience. Whenever we want to express deep-felt truths, we resort to literary modes like metaphor. For example, on a couple’s wedding anniversary, a husband might give his wife an anniversary card that reads, “You make the sky blue.” This is not a meteorological statement — it is a poetic device that attempts to articulate the inexpressible depths of love he has for his spouse. We must read the Bible with the same imagination with which the sacred writer wrote it.

When we go to read the Bible, it is important to remember this: God intends to enter into a dialogue with us through his Word.

Something we risk taking for granted in everyday life: the fact that God speaks and responds to our questions…. In this dialogue with God we come to understand ourselves and we discover an answer to our heart’s deepest questions…. The Word of God [is] an openness to our problems, a response to our questions, a broadening of our values, and the fulfillment of our aspirations. All Scripture … challenges our life and constantly calls us to conversion. (Verbum Domini 4, 23)

Something we risk taking for granted in everyday life: the fact that God speaks and responds to our questions …

The Word of God: Consolation in our struggles

St. Ambrose asks: “When does God the Word most often knock at your door? He visits in love those in trouble and temptation to save them from being overwhelmed by their trials.” Sacred Scripture exists to be a consolation — literally, “to be called to someone’s side.” Through the Word of God, the Lord consoles us in our sorrows and struggles and solitude by entering it and sharing it with us. “The hands of the Word of God are stretched out to us when we are out of our depth” (St. Gregory of Nyssa).

If we are faithful in giving ourselves to the Word of God, our participation in Scripture’s wisdom increases as our life changes. St. Gregory the Great instructs us that “the divine words grow with one who reads them. Where the mind of the reader is directed, there, too, the sacred text ascends. For it grows with us, it rises with us. When the reader addresses a question to the text, the answer is in proportion to the reader’s maturity.”

St. Thomas Aquinas identifies other effects of reading the Word of God: “The Bible teaches us the truth; it protects us from falling into error; it keeps us from doing evil; and it moves us to do good, because the ultimate effect of Sacred Scripture is that it brings people to perfection.” A 9th-century monk, Ardo Smaragdus, counsels us that prayerfully reading the Bible “sharpens perception, enriches understanding, rouses from sloth, banishes idleness, orders life, corrects bad habits, draws tears from contrite hearts, curbs idle speech and vanity, and awakens longing for Christ and the heavenly homeland.”

The important thing is just to take up the Bible and read, no matter if all you can manage is a passage or two. St. John Chrysostom gives this encouragement: “Even if the scriptural phrase is short, its power is great.” Bring to your reading all your frustrations, anxieties, searching, confusion, expectation, and doubt. The Word of God is a faithful friend, resourceful and generous, ready to listen and respond. As Pope Benedict XVI said so beautifully,

In the Word of God proclaimed and heard Jesus says today, here and now, to each person: “I am yours, I give myself to you;” so that we can receive and respond, saying in return: “I am yours.” (Verbum Domini 51)

POETRY OF PRAISE (essay) - Anthony Esolen

Let All the Day Be Thine

Anthony Esolen

When I was a boy, many television stations would open their day with a “sermonette,” a five-minute talk by a local priest or minister or rabbi. The idea was clear. The whole day belongs to God, and so it’s good to begin it by giving honor to the very fount of existence, to the God who said, Let there be light, and there was light.

I rise before dawn and cry for help, sings the psalmist in the longest of all the psalms, the great prayer of confident and grateful meditation upon the law of God (119:147). The morning is filled with hope: My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning (130:6). For weeping may last for the night, but joy comes with the morning (30:6). Indeed, morning is itself what God promises to all those he has blessed forever. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright morning star, says Jesus in his last and consummate words to Saint John (Rv 22:16).

Then of course we should pray to God in the morning, but in this we find that people who rose while it was still dark to tend to the cattle had an advantage over us. They rose earlier than we do, but they weren’t rushed. You can miss the bus, but you can’t miss the cow. They went to bed earlier also, with the sun, and their bones were tired from hard work, so they slept more soundly, and rose with more strength. Ask a farmer if you doubt it. But we’ll be stumbling to get some coffee, or hurrying to beat the traffic, and so our prayers can become haphazard and foggy too.

The Morning Offering

It’s a fine thing, then, to have a morning prayer by heart, one that properly dedicates to God the whole of the coming day. There are several I have heard and seen, and all are strong and worthy prayers, but I will choose the one I believe is the most keenly focused on the beginning of the day.

At the back of my old copies of the Saint Joseph Missal, there’s a section called “Treasury of Prayers,” and the title is apt. In those days, a lot of people brought their missals with them to church, to follow the prayers and the readings. That meant that they saw these prayers all the time, and in fact my several copies, one of them in French, are all well-worn. Under the title “Morning Offering,” I find this beautiful prayer:

Most Holy and Adorable Trinity, one God in three Persons, I firmly believe that Thou art here present; I adore Thee with the most profound humility; I praise Thee and give Thee thanks with all my heart for the favors Thou hast bestowed on me. Thy Goodness has brought me safely to the beginning of this day. Behold, O Lord, I offer Thee my whole being and in particular all my thoughts, words, and actions, together with such crosses and contradictions as I may meet with in the course of this day. Give them, O Lord, Thy blessing; may Thy divine Love animate them and may they tend to the greater honor and glory of Thy Sovereign Majesty. Amen.

It’s a true drama, isn’t it, this beginning of a day in the sight of God? We affirm, wherever we may be, that the most holy Trinity, God in three persons, is present, here. He is at your side as you kneel at the prie-dieu, or as you lie quietly upon your bed, looking at the crucifix on the wall, or as you bow your head at the table before breakfast. He is there. And you adore him “with the most profound humility.” That too is a powerful gesture. It is more than a bend of the knee, more than a slight and self-satisfied nod. It is a gesture not of pleasant affability, or of contentment, but of deep and mysterious love. We acknowledge that all we have and all we are comes from God. In its gratitude, the prayer resounds with the glory of creation itself.

Let us be found faithful today

How did we arrive at this morning? The whole of our past is summed up when we say that God’s goodness alone has brought us safely to this moment, this rising of the sun over the horizon. I might have died yesterday. I might have died a year ago. I did not; I am here; and it is all by God’s grace that I am here. Then I must dedicate the day to God.

Notice that the prayer does not encourage me to think about the rest of my life. Somehow it’s a lot easier to do that, to wander off into pleasant abstraction, than to think about this one day, with its duties that we should not defer. It is easy to say you love mankind. It is hard to put up with the next-door neighbor. It is easy to say you want to “make a difference” in “the world.” It is hard to keep your own room clean, let alone someone else’s.

Our Lord too encourages us to think about eternity and the day, and leave the misty interim, the worldly future, to the providence of the Father. He commands us to pray for our daily bread, and he urges us not to be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself, and the day has enough troubles of its own (Mt 6:34). That is another thing I find admirable in this morning prayer. We do not pray that the day will go well for us, in the ordinary way of looking at things. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t, and in any case, there must come a last day for each one of us, the day of our sunset in this life.

Crosses and contradictions

Instead, we offer to God everything we are and everything we are going to think and say and do. The little word “behold” suggests that we are like someone offering a sacrifice before the altar, something that can be seen and touched. And we do more. For we cannot determine what will happen to us today. We do not beg God to spare us all trouble. We expect that trouble will come, for man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward (Jb 5:7). Mister Bluebird is not always on our shoulder! The prayer spares us the bleakness of Optimism, that confidence-man with the toothy smile and the shifty hands. It turns us toward Hope, a true daughter of God.

Only someone filled with hope can say more than “I will believe, even if the day is troubled,” but rather, “I offer you all my troubles, because in you and you alone they are blessings.” And they are more than simply troubles. My French rendition of the prayer reads “les peines,” that is, sufferings, while the English reads “crosses and contradictions.” Again, how quietly dramatic that is!

Today, I may in some fashion, small or great, be called to walk the sorrowful way up the mount of Calvary. Today, I may, as I am a Christian, become, by participating in the suffering of Jesus, a sign of contradiction to the world, because the world wants to go its broad and pleasant way to destruction, and it will not brook dissent. But I may (and I probably will) have to do with crosses and contradictions that are not so dreadful, but that are still occasions for sin, or for slow and steady growth in the life of the Spirit: a difficult child, a disappointment at work, a flat tire, an unexpected bill, an unjust rebuke, an ungrateful friend, even a headache or the common cold. You’ll bear the heavy cross on your shoulders, but not a splinter in the finger?

But it is not up to us to make these things good. We pray that God may animate them with his love. The word is to be understood precisely. Think of the moment when God made Adam from the dust, and then breathed the breath of life into him, and he became a living soul (Gn 2:7). Man, of himself, can make things that move, like windmills or tanks, but only God can truly endow creatures with a soul. Think, then, that without God’s divine love, everything we do and everything we suffer during the day is like dust, inert, lifeless, and subject to every wind that blows. God alone gives life.

Trinity and majesty

The life God gives comes from him and returns to him, so that when we offer the day to him, we pray that everything we do will serve to glorify him and his sovereign majesty. So the end of the prayer returns us to the beginning. For the majesty of God is a veritable plenitude of being, the three divine Persons in one God, the most holy and adorable Trinity, as my English rendition has it, and the très sainte et très auguste Trinité, in the French. As modern man is starved for beauty, and is given the picturesque at best, and the drab or hideous at worst, so is he starved for the beholding of majesty, and is given a worldly impressiveness at best, and swaggering foolishness at worst. But when I consider the majesty of God, I am raised up in humility, and I bask in the sunlight of glory.

If that sunlight comes and goes, the fault is mine and not God’s. And as I pray this morning prayer, I hope to see at last the great morning, the eighth day of the resurrection of the flesh, for which there is only morning and no evening.

Anthony Esolen is professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in N.H., translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House). [Magnificat]

T. S. Eliot: The Journey of the Magi - with Commentary

The Journey Of The Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Commentary: Fa. Michael Rennier, Aleteia, 12/25/22

We see Eliot’s faith in the sacramental nature of how he viewed Christmas.

Around this time of year, my mind always turns to T.S. Eliot’s magnificent Christmas poem, “The Journey of the Magi.”

He begins it by alluding to how the holiday finds us huddled inside the comfort of our homes, stockings hung by the fire, hot chocolate in hand, tucked away from the dark and cold. The Magi, however, are on their long journey to the side of Christ, so they’re outside in the winter frost, footsore and exposed to the elements:

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey …

As the camels lie in the snow and try to keep warm, the Magi dream of warm summer days. Eventually, after traveling at night and bypassing unfriendly towns, they arrive at the outskirts of Bethlehem, which is, “Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;/ With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness.”

Not exactly the way Christmas cards picture it.

Eliot has a unique way of writing.

His poems are full of jarring images and descriptions that don’t quite fit together, like camels in snow. He often collapses the past and the future into the present moment.

For instance, he does this in “The Journey of the Magi” by describing how the Magi set out from a foreign land, reach their destination, and then return home again. In this way, the circle is closed on the journey and those past events continue to affect the Magi. The journey is ever-present in their minds, the encounter with the Christ-child lingering to the extent that the Magi never quite feel the same again. They’re forever restless, almost as if Christ is pulling them into another life entirely.

For Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi,” marked something of a turning point in his artistic career. He wrote it in 1927 at the request of his publisher, Geoffrey Faber. The idea was that the poem would be set to a Christmas illustration and then sold as a popular memento. Although the poem has gained much praise over the years, Eliot at one point was nonchalant about it, saying, “I have no illusions about it: I wrote it in three quarters of an hour after church time and before lunch one Sunday morning, with the assistance of half a bottle of Booth’s gin.”

Later in his life, though, he did take the poem more seriously, commenting that writing it helped to get him out of a creative dry-spell and set him on the path to writing his famous poem “Ash Wednesday.“

More to the point, however, is the fact that around the time he wrote the poem, Eliot was beginning to take his Christian faith quite seriously. As an American who very much admired the English, he converted to a tradition within Anglicanism that imitated Catholic worship and many Catholic beliefs. This group, the “Anglo-Catholics,” was often mocked by other Anglicans for their “Romishness.” In many ways, Anglo-Catholicism is for those who love poetry, good wine, and tasteful dress — perfectly appealing for a man like T.S. Eliot, but underneath all the trappings is a serious faith tradition.

Eliot’s faith comes out in the sacramental nature of how he views Christmas.

Just as the sacraments overflow with superabundant grace, so too does Christmas. It’s a holiday that is ever so much more than it seems. It’s a special time during which everything takes on deeper meaning. You hug your kids more closely. The fire in the hearth burns more brightly. Generosity is in the air, an atmosphere of celebration. The season has a sense of enchantment that we look forward to all year. We can hardly wait to begin decking the halls with holly and putting inflatable Santas and reindeer on the front lawn.

At Christmas, there’s a collective feeling that life is a journey worth making. Like the Magi, we pause at the side of Christ in the manger and then circle back round again. Year after year.

In Eliot’s mind, even though the journey is long and difficult, it’s worth making because it unifies our hearts with that of God. Those images Eliot uses that seem so contradictory actually fold into a unity, the unifying love of God for his children. If, at Christmas, camels are yanked from the desert to camp in snow, it’s equally strange that Man and God should become so overlapped. This is the spark of grace. This is the miracle. God has become Man.

The Magi muse, “This: were we led all that way for/ Birth or Death?” In Eliot’s mind, each opposite contains the other. Our rebirth arises from the death of Christ, which was already foreordained even at Christmas. Our death to self for his sake assures this rebirth.

There is so much mystery here, so much grace. Each year, wherever life has taken us during this past orbit of the sun, we circle around to celebrate Christmas once again. The mystery only becomes more profound.

FAIRYTALE: Original Art by M. Startzman

When Nuts and Bolts Publishing offered to buy the manuscript, having read it on the weblog, they insisted that this artist perform the major illustrations, and while the art is exquisite and impressive, it is a touch darker than the actual story. That being said, the original cover shows Andor, the Wizard King of Ardor, Prince Godric, Philip the crow, and Lilith the temptress. Thus far the back cover uses the same image. They are indeed a severe looking group of formidable figures, none of whom I would want to cross.

There are vast opportunities for arresting images from this FAIRYTALE: a Dragon Lady, a cyclopean River Troll, a blue and golden Gryphon, the evil Demon (whose name I have momentarily forgotten), and of course the Ladies, Primavera and Raissa, as well as the naiad Adriel. We wait in eager anticipation!

FAIRYTALE: CHAPTER 21 continues - LES

Chapter 21 (continues)

“The Final Chapter”

[published but unedited thus far; tomorrow, perhaps, unless I don’t make it through the night]

[Glad to say I made it through the night and made a number of changes as well, for the betterment of fairytales everywhere, I’m certain!]

[Well, well. So Elesandra is an illusion. Primavera is real, but she may also be Raissa, who may also be Primavera. I shall need a better mind than mine to figure all of these women out and untangle these final events.

I also see I am going to end up with 21 chapters (by cheating a little) rather than 20. That’s actually good. 7 x 3 = 21. I like numbers. 21 + 7 = 28. Interestingly, 28 is the middle number in the 6 number mystical set of 142857. Why is it mystical, inquiring minds want to know? The answer is in the multiplication tables, so that if you multiply the 6 digit number by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, you will get the same 6 digits but in a different pattern. (Who says it’s not an ordered universe?) For example: 142857 x 2 = 285714. Isn’t that neat? That I learned in reading about Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland Decoded, and I did the math here in my head. So, next: 142857 x 3 = 428571. Let’s see: 142857 x 4 = 571428. Next (whew; getting harder to do in my head, though I know what the numbers will be): 142857 x 5 = 714285. Last but not least: 142857 x 6 = 857142. What happens when you try it by 7: 142857 x 7 = 999999. And that’s pretty neat too, for we are short only one digit from 1,000,000. Which means it’s time to see whether or not the Prince ends up with the lovely lady. And, if so, how? And even better, who?]

“What business is that?” Philip ruffled his feathers while he waited to see what the Prince was going to say.

Meanwhile the Wizard King looked down on the knight and the bird. The Sprit stood beside him, though oddly only his head was visible. “Stop that, else I’ll turn you into a bird for the next twenty-five years or glue you to a wall with only your head visible.”

“Sorry, Master.” Aventó didn’t look particularly apologetic, though he immediately became wholly present, feet to shoulders, beside the Wizard. “What next do you desire? Can I turn them into giant spiders? That would be entertaining!”

“No. Definitely not. Testing the good Prince’s quality is one thing. Bedeviling him is another, and he has done admirably well thus far. I approve of my daughter’s choice!”

[I had almost forgotten! One of the two lovely ladies is the Wizard King’s daughter? I had indeed almost forgotten. I wonder which one and what the Wizard’s relationship is to the Gryphon, as well. I may soon need a genealogical chart just to keep track of who is related to whom, and how. Let’s figure out the Wizard King’s next move, now that Godric is fresh out of the hall of mirrors]

“What next then, Master?”

“Turn his horse loose so that it might return to the Aspen grove and Adriel. Once you have done that, make certain the Prince looks into the mirror!”

“Like a bee that buzzes nigh,

Swifter than a butterfly,

I shall make the ladies cry,

Laugh and sing and finally sigh,

For a puckish Sprit am I!”

With a song and a mystic swirl the Sprit zoomed down the long castle hall, released Aspen and guided her off the island, and swiftly returned, invisible now, to where Godric and Philip were talking. Aventó flew into the mirror, vanished, made himself visible in the shape of a celestial Angel, all eyes and wings and shining light. Godric saw the light shining from the creature in the mirror, moved a step closer and looked. Immediately he was swept into the light and vanished.

The Prince closed his eyes against the brightness. When he opened them, he was no longer in the Wizard’s castle, but in a lush green and flowery meadow. Philip was shaking himself at the Prince’s feet, looking as bewildered as a crow can look.

“Now you see me,

Now you don’t;

First an Angel—

Now a demon-goat!”

With those words the Sprit suddenly appeared as a red-eyed shaggy creature with sharp horns and a grey-white beard, half the size of a man. It looked as if it were about to eat Philip, but when Godric started to draw the sword of fire, the demon-goat disappeared.

Philip flew into the air and called out, ”Where did that monster go?”

“I don’t know. Either we are in the wrong place or it is. Maybe that’s why it vanished. I think it was from a place I visited earlier. A nasty desert place. Maybe it went back there. The question is where are we, and what happened to the castle?”

Godric looked around the flowery meadow and saw a grove of Aspen trees, as well as the Wizard King’s castle in the distance. There appeared to be no one else around. “Let’s check out the Aspen grove; it might prove promising.”

The Prince and the crow set off across the flowery meadow on a path that led them to the trees. Ahead of them Godric saw a blue, red and golden shape slip among the trees. At least the Gryphon appears to be here already, thought the Prince. He and Philip followed the path into the grove of Aspen trees until they came to a softly flowing stream, much like the one in the place where he had met Primavera and Raissa. Philip landed on a sturdy tree branch close to where Godric stood.

Suddenly with a flash of lightning and a loud clap of thunder Andor the Wizard King appeared on the other side of the stream, dressed in a robe of purple with two dark, fur-lined strips down the front. His hair was black though sprinkled through with grey; his eyes were bright and dark. Next to him stood a large black dog, slowly wagging its tail. Like the eyes of the demon-goat, the dog’s eyes were red.

The Wizard King looked across the stream at Godric. “Forgive the dramatic entrance, Prince, but I understand you wish to meet my daughter,” he said. “I am here to arrange that.” His dark eyes seemed almost to twinkle.

“Your daughter? I—yes, if your daughter is who I think she is. I would very much like to meet her.”

“Are you willing to fight the Dragon of the Purple Mountain to win her hand? That is the test all suitors must take.”

“Father, you mustn’t tease the young Prince.” The voice came from the lovely woman who stepped from the trees beside Godric. “I think you have tested him enough!”

Godric turned toward her. “Raissa?” he said, as she walked up to him, dressed in a green dress that stopped just above her knees. Godric looked into her dark shining eyes, eyes like her father’s, and smiled. “Fifty dragons,” he said. “Though I think I have already fought a very nasty demon for you.”

“Yes. And you were wounded in the process. I trust your arm is fully healed?”

“It is indeed. Thank you. Sometime you must tell me how you ended up in that predicament. And after dressing the wound, you disappeared in the night. I thought I might have dreamed that whole adventure, except that the wound was real enough, and your care.”

“Some day I will be glad to, but for now it’s time to meet my father.” She looked across the stream and waved at her father, the Wizard King, who walked across the stream to where the couple were standing. The dog obediently followed him. Neither sank beneath the surface of the water.

“Father, may I formally present Prince Godric of Nodd?”

“Prince Godric, may I present my father, Andor, the Wizard King of Ardor?”

“Young man,” he said, “I am pleased to meet you. You have proven yourself to be a worthy person, and I welcome you.”

“Thank you, Sir.” The Prince bowed and the Wizard King nodded his head just enough. Both of them looked at Raissa, who was looking across the stream at the Gryphon who had come slightly out from within the trees. When Godric looked into her eyes, he could see the Gryphon reflected there. Curiouser and curiouser, he thought, but then the Gryphon disappeared and Raissa turned to him. He thought how beautiful she was, in every way, and how fortunate he was to have found her.

[This would be a good moment to explain that in reading a commentary on Psalm 23, I came across a definition of metaphor that could be relevant: “Psalm 23 begins with a metaphor: The LORD is my shepherd. In a metaphor something is said to be something else that it obviously and literally is not. A word used as a metaphor brings all that it denotes and connotes in ordinary language to the explication of that to which it is related. A metaphor used for theological purposes is very serious business. It does not simply describe by comparison; it identifies by equation. A metaphor becomes the image as which and through which something or someone is known and understood. It conveys more, and it speaks more powerfully than is possible to do in discursive speech. A metaphor is not as precise and limited as discursive speech. It draws on varied experience and evokes imagination. It is therefore plastic in meaning, capable of polysemy.”

“Plasticity,” a delightful concept, one thing perhaps molded into something else. All art is in some sense plastic, transformational; something to which the reader might attend?]

The Wizard King then looked up into the nearby tree. “Philip,” he called, “I know who your are. Would you like to be more than you currently are?”

“I don’t understand,” said Philip from his perch in the tree.

The Wizard turned to the black dog who had stayed by his side throughout. “Come, Aventó, let them see your real form.” The dog in a flash of black fur and a wag of the tail revealed himself as the mischievous Sprit he truly was, an apparently thin young man wearing tights and a tight-fitting shirt. His ears were pointed and he had a large grin on his puckish face. “Greetings all,” he said. “Welcome to Wonderland!”

“Now,” said the Wizard King in his deep somber voice, “if you would like an upgrade, I can change you from a talking crow into such a creature as Aventó, a Sprit; that would be a serious transformation, so to speak, but, however, non reversible, so think carefully.”

While the Prince and Raissa had been holding hands and talking softly, the Prince turned from her and looked up at Philip and grinned broadly. “Well,” said Philip, “that sounds wonderful, if not a little scary, but I have a mate, whom I have missed and whom I love dearly, more even than Tessa, and she’s one lovely bird whom I could not possibly leave. Her name’s Sophia.”

“We could work a transformation there too, if she has no objections. I can send Aventó swiftly to find her and bring her here. Would that be acceptable?”

“Indeed, Sir Wizard King, but she is back in the land of Nodd where I left her to come on this adventure. How will you find her?”

“Leave that to me,” said the Sprit, “I have long-distance connections”; and with a song and a flourish he vanished, leaving only the song in the air:

‘O what a wondrous Sprit am I

Off to the land of Nodd I fly

To fetch the mate of yonder crow.

Off in a flash I sing and go!’”

He returned in no more than 21 seconds later carrying a flustered and disgruntled female crow. She looked up in the tree and saw Philip. “Philip, is that you? What in the name of the great I Am is going on here?”

“Sophia, calm down a bit; we have a chance to become something more than we are, something better. The Wizard here can transform us into Sprites, like the one who brought you here. He would change me, but I said not without you. So, what do you say? I think we should. We will never have another opportunity like this, though it is apparently a permanent transformation.”

“Who wouldn’t want to be like me!” chirped the Sprit, “for,

“I found her in an Aspen tree,

Sitting with a dusky band

Of blackbirds in a distant land!

Scooped her up and brought her here,

Much to her chagrin and fear!

“A crow can’t be a songbird, but a Sprit can sing and crow. Bow wow, bark bark, caw caw!” Aventó swiftly became the black, red-eyed dog, a small, leafy tree of oddly shaped yellow leaves, a large black bird with yellow eyes, busting out as Himself again, grinning broadly.

Sophia looked at Aventó who was still grinning happily, obviously pleased with himself. “So, we would be like him? Flitting, changing shape, flying and singing if we so chose? We would have magical powers as well?” She had flown to the limb where Philip was perched. The Wizard King nodded and said yes. “Besides,” he added, “this Sprit has gotten a little too pleased with himself lately and needs some practical discipline, perhaps stuck in the bole of a tree for twelve or so years!”

“O Master, that wouldn’t be nice! I promise I’ll behave in the future, more less!” he added in a whisper.

“Good,” said the Wizard King, winking at his daughter and the Prince.

“What about us, Sir? Will we be servants too?” Philip asked.

“No. You will be free to enjoy your new status and revel in your new powers. The only condition is that you use them for good and not evil and not selfishly, though some pranks are permissible; use them selfishly or for evil and they will turn and destroy you. In any case you might also wish to come and work for me from time to time too. Nothing arduous. Just errands that require speed and some dexterity and intelligence. As Aventó lives with me, you might wish to live with my daughter and, I suspect, her soon-to-be husband. They seem to be delighting in one another’s company, don’t you think?”

The Prince, hearing the Wizard’s words, asked him whether he had his blessing for their marriage, and the Wizard King and proud father, of course, said yes. Having given them his blessing, he cast two spells, intricate in design and in a strange and foreign language; the first spell called up a dark feathery cloud that seemed to inhale Sophia and Philip, swallow them whole, then spit them out as shapely Sprits, dressed in tights like Aventó ; the second spell, equally intricate, produced a lavish banquet on the lawn of the floating island, the magical place they had gone to once they left the Wizard King’s castle. And with those transformations, marriages and feasts, the fairytale comes to a boisterous, full and happy ending.

Except, it should be said that for the marriage of Raissa and Godric, the Bridesmaids were Primavera and Adriel with Su Linn, the Dragon Lady in attendance, and undoubtedly the Godmother to-be of any children born to the loving couple. Godric’s father, King Bolt of Nodd, and a small entourage of nobles and their wives, made the trip from Nodd to Ardor for the wedding. Godric, the shining and very handsome Prince, would have no one except Philip as his best man (best Sprit, as it were). The Prince insisted that Sophia stand with them, for by the time of the wedding, Sophia had become fast friends with both Godric and Raissa. Their gift to the young lovers was an incredibly expensive silver and metal samovar from the other side of the world. Some people even drank tea at the wedding.

One other note, the Demon that Godric had bravely fought and killed stayed dead, and the severely wounded, cyclopean, “hungry” River Troll, thanks to some powerful magic on the part of the Dragon Lady, recovered and apparently learned his lesson and controlled his river’s behavior in the way in which the creator had intended. He was, however, not invited to the wedding.

Finally, the Bride and Groom met the mysterious, twy-natured, blue, red and golden Gryphon in the woods on the castle estate where we understand that he gave them his blessing, as well as some relevant instruction for the marriage to prosper, which the happy couple were glad to receive. In fact as they returned from that meeting their faces and bodies fairly glowed with what could be called celestial light!

Image: It’s Christmas: celestial light in the stable, you will notice. The Imp, or something, or someone wouldn’t print my wonderful image of the Gryphon! Thus it had to be the nativity scene; I suspect secondary causes at work here! And, in fact, everywhere!

FAIRYTALE: CHAPTER 21 - LES

Through the third door, Godric saw before him a colorful garden of various and profuse flowers, roses, tiger lilies, day lilies, chrysanthemums of myriad colors, and numerous flowers whose names he didn’t know. There were trees growing throughout the garden, and in the distance he saw a young woman gathering flowers. Godric thought she seemed oblivious to his presence; he was mistaken, for the woman looked up from her task, put her bouquet of flowers down, and walked to where Godric was standing.

“Welcome, Prince Godric. It has taken you some time to get here.” It was not a question but a statement. She brushed some pollen off her green dress. Her eyes were also green, her lips a kind of perfect red bow. She smiled fetchingly at him. “I shall be your guide through this garden, if that is acceptable to you.” Her golden brown hair fell about her shoulders.

Godric found himself speechless before the beautiful young woman and simply nodded.

She laughed a gay laugh and turned toward a small grove of trees. Voices singing in a complicated harmony echoed softly from the trees while a light breeze caressed his face.

“I’m to guide you to the one you have come to see. She awaits you on the other side of the stream that waters this garden.”

“Elesandra?” Godric managed to ask.

“No. She’s not the one? The Princess on the other side of the mirror was only a reflection of your desire, an image of your own making. Like the Siren on the mountain.”

[Whoa now! Hold on here. Sorry to interrupt, but we have just spent 20 chapters following Godric as he worked his way toward the courtship of that lovely Princess, Elesandra, whom we all saw in that distant castle tower. Now we find out that she is not real, only a projection of the Prince’s desire. I’m not certain I would have embarked on this ship if I had known the truth about the port we were moving toward.

Out of the lovely music playing in my head, a voice sounded: How can you know the truth about this story without sailing to the proper end? You know only one thing, and you would ignorantly ground you vessel without reaching the real end, the proper port to use your analogy? Just because this moment displeases you? Please!

Who said that? Where’s that voice coming from? I am beginning to think that telling a tale is a dangerous undertaking. Who knows where it might lead eventually? There are other forces at work here, and I don’t mean the Wizard King and his sidekick! I’m not sure I like that!

Whether you like it or not, your time is up!

And so I found that it was, for the moment!]

“What Siren on the mountain? I don’t remember a Siren.”

“She’s from a distant place, but you have met her; only you almost failed to recognize her.”

“The picnic?”

“Indeed, though she usually only appears when you are the most tired and inattentive.”

Godric followed the lady toward the trees, wherein he saw a brief flash of color, blue and white and gold, slip deeper into the grove of trees.

“Did you see that?” The Prince asked, slowing down a bit. “It looked like a beast of some sort!”

“Yes,” said the lady. “He’s the owner of this land. All lands, actually.”

“Is it safe to enter among the trees?”

The lady laughed again, and this time it sounded like bells in the distance, ahead of the music.

“Safe to enter here. Yes, it’s safe to enter, depending mostly on your attitude.”

“But is the beast safe?”

“That’s almost another matter precisely. I would say he’s good, but he is definitely not safe. Not at all safe.” The voices in the air grew more complicated and more intense. It sounded to Godric as if they were singing hallelujah.

“Will we be safe?” Here the lady stopped and looked directly into his eyes. “That depends on you primarily; he knows our names.”

“Our names? You know my name. What is your name?”

She smiled at Godric, whose heart nearly melted.

“I thought you would never ask, Sir Prince. My name is Primavera. Vera, if you wish. In one of the languages that you know, “Vera” means truth. So, can you trust me or not? Again, that depends on you.”

If she is as beautiful within as without, I shall have no trouble trusting her, thought Godric. But how to know for certain. Beauty has betrayed me before.

Godric responded: “I have no trouble trusting ‘truth.’ Thus, I have no trouble trusting you in this time, no trouble at all. However, I’m a not so certain about your beast, though. He sounds rather scary.”

“He’s not my beast,” said Vera. “It would be more accurate to say I am his. In fact, that’s why I am here. He sent me to the field of flowers.”

“To gather flowers?”

“He sent me to gather something. He didn’t actually specify. He said I would know.”

“I see. And here I am, being gathered I suppose?”

They had reached the edge of the grove of trees. Godric looked ahead and saw a glint of gold disappearing further up and further in. He shook loose his apprehensions and walked beside Primavera into the grove. She extended her hand to him; he took it and thought how how soft and yet strong it felt. He thought he would probably follow her anywhere.

“The stream is about a hundred yards ahead. If you listen carefully, you can hear its gentle voice in the music.”

Godric listened, but he wasn’t sure he could tell the sound of the flowing stream in the music echoing through the trees. As he concentrated, he saw an old man with a fairly large book and a pen in his hands cross the path in front of him and Vera. The old man looked at them, smiled, but kept going. Godric saw a faraway look in his eyes, as though the old man was seeing things that only he could see.

“Who was that? How many others are here as well?”

“That was Jacob, one of the keepers of this land. He’s like a prophet, a visionary. He sees distant things and records them in his book. There is one other whom we are likely to see as well. His name is Peter, the gatekeeper; I’ve found him to be rather severe, good but severe. If you meet him and he asks you a question, answer quickly and honestly.”

“I always try to respond honestly, truthfully. I think one of the greatest evils in our time is the lie. The lie conceals us, hides our real self from others and even from ourselves.”

The hundred yards went by quickly, Godric thought, as he and Vera reached the stream in amongst the trees. As the sunlight shone down on the stream through the trees, the gently flowing water scattered the light into myriads of tiny bright reflections like the numerous stars in the skies. He still held the lady’s hand and thought he might never let go. Just as he had that thought he saw the vision on the other side of the stream. Stepping out of a circle of light was a young woman who looked exactly like Primavera, except instead of golden brown her hair was black, but it also fell about her shoulders.

Godric saw slight movement to her right and a glimpse of gold among the trees. He looked again at the young lady who smiled at him. “She looks as though she could be your sister,” he said.

“She is my sister. You’ve met her before in your journey, though she wasn’t quite the same as you see her here.”

“It’s Raissa,” said Godric. “I thought she was a dream figure, demon-haunted. She’s real. She healed me from the wound and the fever. Why is she on the other side of the stream?”

“Because you and she are not there yet.”

“Not where? Where do we have to be?”

“This is the most real place there is, but it’s not the place where you and she are meant to be just yet. You glimpsed the Gryphon in the trees. You and she must eventually find your way back here through him. I am she here and out there; she is me over there. Confusing, I know, but I will show you the way to that reality. For now, it’s time to go. Be safe!”

Still holding his hand, the lady Primavera turned him around. Godric glanced over his shoulder, trying for a last look at Raissa, but it was not to be. There was a vision blue and white and gold before his eyes; then he found himself alone in the hall of the Wizard’s castle; well, not exactly alone since Philip was there too, perched on a large mirror at the end of the hall.

“Hi, Boss! Glad you made it out! I think it’s time to eat. I’m so hungry I could eat a River Troll and not feel full.”

Godric laughed. “Good to find you too, but first we have business to take care of.”

Image: Raissa? One hopes!

FAIRYTALE: CHAPTER 20 - LES

[The problem is that I get interested in different aspects of story, so off I go interluding my way to the grand total of 7. Worse yet, I was lying in bed last night when an interesting idea struck me about the stairway; it even raised a bump on my forehead. However, my wife decided I didn’t need to have my iPad available during sleeping hours for various and sundry reasons; thus I couldn’t write them down. And now I have forgotten. At least unlike Milton I still haven’t gone blind. [The Imp got “blind” in two letters! He’s so clever. Or she, of course.]

Godric, you remember, had struggled through the heat of the flaming doorway and stood at the bottom of the asymmetrical spiral staircase. When he looked down, he saw an odd sign before the first step: Is rift or meddle? What on earth does that mean? He tried to step over it, but his legs would not obey his will. Then a mysterious voice whispered in his ear: it’s an anagram! An anagram? That means those letters need to be transformed into other words that presumably make more sense. Hmm. Meddle could easily become “riddle.” That would leave “i-s-f-t-o-r-m-e”; “I see “for”; that leaves “i-s-t-m-e”; Aha! “times for riddle”? His feet and legs still wouldn’t move; then what about “time for riddles.” Good grief! he thought.

He looked up, and the spiral stair seemed to wind its way up into darkness. He looked down and saw that the next step read, Once upon a time! If I have to solve a riddle for every step I shall never get to the top. Godric thought for a moment, put his foot on “time,” and moved up. He was half afraid to look down. The step said, Hurry up, please, it’s time. Godric grinned and stepped lively. The next step read, Time’s up! Thank goodness, Godric thought and started up. He counted 21 steps to the first landing. The stairs led to another door. Since he could no longer proceed up, he stood on the landing and pushed against the door. Then he saw the sign: Stop! Eve lives here. Complete a palindrome and enter! Eve is actually a palindrome, thought Godric, but to make the entire sentence a palindrome would mean saying, “Here lives Eve. Stop!” He pushed against the door and watched as it slowly opened on to a meadow and forest.

An exquisite woman came towards him out of the woods and across the meadow. She was naked except for a short skirt and bra of leaves. She had long golden hair that fell to her waist, a golden brown complexion on the visible flesh, and intense blue eyes the color of deep summer skies. Her tanned face had pronounced cheek bones, soft red lips and bright white teeth. Godric was not certain where to look and thought perhaps he ought to bow. She certainly was spectacular.

“Have you seen the serpent here?” she asked. “Or Adam, for that matter? Time seems to have gotten away from me, for I was to meet them by the two trees in the center of the woods behind me. There’s a lovely fountain too. I picked an apple from the fruit tree there and bit into it, but it tasted like ashes in my mouth. I couldn’t swallow it and had to spit it out. And it had looked so delicious too. Well, you must come with me and help me look for Adam and the wise serpent. Certainly you have time?” She concluded.

“No, I don’t think I do.” Godric looked into the woods and saw what looked like a large snake weaving through the trees. Once it swung its head around a tree and looked at Godric, who shivered and said to the woman, “I need to be on my way up, I think. Do you know where I can find the stairs again?”

“Why yes,” she said. “It’s right behind you a few steps and through the tree.”

“Did you say through the tree? The tree is a doorway?”

“Yes. At least I think so. I’ve tried it several times but it won’t open for me. Still, if you have time, you are welcome to stay here with us.”

“Thank you, my Lady, but I don’t think so. As far as I know time’s up.” Having said that, he bowed and turned toward the tree. When he approached he could see the outline of a door on its large trunk. He put his fingers into the seam and pulled. The door opened toward him. He had to duck some to enter, but he did and soon found himself back on the landing with the stairs again spiraling above him. When he glanced back, he saw that tree, meadow and Eve had vanished. He looked at the spiraling stairs; there was no writing on the steps that he could see as he started to climb once again.

After another 21 steps he reached the next landing, which led to another door. The sign on this door appeared to be a quote, a warning that said: Edom—No Kingdom There:

“Wildcats shall meet with hyenas,

goat-demons shall call to each other;

there too Lilith shall repose,

and find a place to rest.” Isaiah 34:14

Who is Lilith, he wondered. There seems to be no way up without going through this door, though I would rather not enter. At least there doesn’t appear to be a riddle here. Goat demons? Ah well! Godric pushed the door which swung open easily, too easily.

When the door closed behind him this time, there were no meadows or forests but a vast desert spread out before him with only one tree visible, an olive tree with no fruit and a small pool of water near the base of the tree. An owl sat on one of the branches with its large saucer eyes open and fixed on him. Above the owl sat a raven. At first Godric thought the black bird was Philip, but no such luck. Growing near the pool were a series of nasty looking plants, weeds, more likely, thistles, nettles, a thorn bush. Godric stood his ground, uncertain about what was required of him.

When he looked away from the strange oasis, he saw an ostrich coming to drink; in the distance he heard the cries of jackals; their yelping and whining reminded him of dogs. From somewhere behind the oasis he saw a figure approaching, a woman with shining black hair. The woman was tall; her hair fell about her shoulders; her eyes seemed to be silver. She was beautiful like Eve though Godric sensed there was something unsettling about her.

Godric bowed slightly, feeling at a loss for words in her presence. She was indeed, like Eve, a statuesque beauty. She stood across from him, wearing a long diaphonis black robe, her sandals shifting sand as she restlessly shuffled her feet. “I am from the Nephilim, an outcast. I was the first wife of Adam, though that relationship did not work, and I was banished to this God-forsaken desert place, Edom it is called, though there is No Kingdom here. Have you come to live with me, lie with me, or perhaps release me? I know all the arts of love-making and could make you happy and satisfy your every wish and desire. I would no longer be lonely. Nor would you.”

“Well,” said Godric, trying to be polite, “that is very kind of you to offer, though I am only looking for a way through this desert and back to the spiral stair. Can you help me with that?”

The silver in her eyes grew more intense and two very long sharp fangs descended from her mouth. “I am a goddess and not to be trifled with, not your servant. If you will not stay or release me, find your own way out.”

When she took a step towards him, Godric put his hand on the hilt of his sword. She looked at his hand and took another step. Godric drew the sword from its sheath. The sword immediately burst into flame. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I am leaving one way or another. I need you to show me the way out of this desert.” Godric pointed the sword at her; she retracted the teeth, and glared at him. She looked quite strong; however, Godric raised the sword and took a step towards her. The flames rippled up the edge of the sword and seemed ready to leap towards her.

“Wait!” she cried. “Don’t let the fire touch me. Your blue flame would consume me, send me to a worse Hell than Edom! I would rather be alone than be there where there is no hope at all and no time.”

“How then can I leave?”

“Not through wood, nor fire, nor air, but through water.” She glanced at the pool of water under the olive tree. The owl and raven watched Godric, intently. The ostrich stepped back from its drink. The jackals cried in the distance. Godric kept the point of the fiery sword pointed toward Lilith as he walked to the pool. When he looked into the blue water he saw nothing but blue water as far down as he could see. He looked up at Lilith who smiled at him.

“Are you frightened Prince? Afraid to take a chance on my word? Afraid you might drown? Afraid that when you sheath your sword I might come in after you and follow you out?”

Godric stood at the edge of the pool, sword still in hand. “I think that if you could follow me out you would have gone long ago. I’m sorry I cannot help you but you have nothing I desire, and I have no time to waste.” That said, he thrust the sword into its sheath, took a deep breath and jumped. The blue water turned startling white as he descended, revealing strange forms and shapes, creatures and persons, some of the persons showing wings. When his feet hit something solid, he took a deep breath and found himself on the landing with the spiral stair circling up into light.

He started to climb the next set of steps. When he was close to the next landing, the steps had changed color from the brown polished wood to white, black and red. He looked at the white step and saw himself reflected there. On the black step he saw nothing except darkness swirling in the blackness. He put his foot down carefully, half afraid the nothingness would pull him in. He quickly moved to the red step. When he looked down, he saw an image of himself bleeding from the arm where he had been wounded. He felt his arm and found it still healed. He stepped onto the third landing.

The sign on this door read,

“But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” Isaiah 44:1

Godric pushed the door open and entered.

FAIRYTALE: INTERLUDE 7 - LES

[At this point in the narrative, it should not surprise anyone that I didn’t end up with Chapter 20 here after all. Chapter 20 thus metamorphosed into “Interlude 7.” Climbing the stairs will have to wait until yesterday again, for time being what it is whatever that is. After all anyone who listens will hear, at his (or of course, her) back, “Time’s winged chariot drawing near.” Tick rock.”]

[Assuming I make it through this chapter, that will make the total 6 Interludes and 20 Chapters., and 1 asymmetrical spiral staircase, leading up to the climax of this adventure, or perhaps the denouement. (I’m relieved that the Imp knew what I was going for there; my spelling is atrocious, though I have discovered that “Hey Siri” usually gets me the correct spelling of the word I am looking for. The only word she failed with was Nietzschean). So, since I have a headache and am almost out of Haribo “Gold Bears,” the best gummy bears in the whole world, I am almost certain that I can’t make it up the asymmetrical spiral staircase today;; Godric said that he couldn’t either; therefore, I shall stop momentarily, time being what it is, and resume yesterday if I am able. For some reason the Imp thinks that Nietzschean ought to be written in Spanish, Nietzscheano. I suspect a conspiracy of some sort at work here].

[That was one beginning, but now it occurs to me that at or near the end of things, other aspects of Art ought to be dealt with here as well. For example, Art is about Images and the meaning of Images. To clarify my concern, an Image has three qualities: 1. it exists in its own right [each of us is thus an Image]; thus an Image has identity; 2. an Image points to a reality beyond itself; 3. an Image participates in the reality to which it points. In this story Godric is an Image; that is in the story Godric has identity as the Prince of Nodd; primarily though his identity consists in the fact that he is the character going on the Quest. What does Godric “point to”? He is first a man as well as a warrior. Thus masculinity, courage and goodness are three of the primary qualities, especially in his relation to the women in the story. He helps the woman and child in the war-torn City in Ukraine, he stands up to the Cyclopsian River Troll; he stands against the village citizens in their desire to kill the woman and he fights the Demon. Admittedly, the story does not do a wonderful job regarding depth of character, but it is trying. He can “point to” those three virtues or qualities because he exhibits them in his actions.

The most interesting characters in the story are the women and what they reveal because that is always what or who Godric is seeking. Again I would say no one of them has enough substance to be a good substantial Image of anything beyond Beauty, and with Su Linn perhaps Wisdom. In our present day culture, or, to put in a slightly different context, where in the modern City do we find Images of Goodness, Wisdom, non-toxic Masculinity, real Beauty that actually points beyond itself, etc.? That is not to say they aren’t present in the modern City, but frequently the Images of Beauty there are Idols, Images that want you to see them as an end in itself. I said that each of us is an Image. In the Biblical sense, taking Genesis seriously, each of us is an Image of God. How can that be understood given what happens to that human self in the modern City, the way in a sense it is like Osiris and simply torn to pieces, or decorated with metal and ink that remind us more of our kinship with animals rather than with angels. An extreme example of the metal “decoration” is the nose ring. An extreme example of the other is the way women are frequently used in advertising. Do you want to sell a necklace? Show the lower half of her face, her neck and shoulders. It is ironic that an advertisement for a “miraculous medal” on the Christian website Aleteia does just that.

In relation to these ideas about Image is the matter of Derivation. Most of what I know about Images as defined here I learned from Charles Williams [and Dante]: especially The Figure of Beatrice, on her meaning in The Divine Comedy, as well as his 7 novels, especially All Hallows’ Eve, and his book on the theology of Romantic Love. Paul Tillich, another “Teacher,” defines Image the same way as Williams in his work, The Dynamics of Faith, which, as far as Derivations go, is the work that led me to becoming a Christian, much as Virgil, the Image of right reason, leads Dante through Hell and Purgatory. C. S. Lewis is the second author who in effect sealed my fate in that regard. Lewis would in an important way be analogous to Beatrice in the Comedia, for through Lewis I came to see and understand the nature of Grace, of Goodness, and of God. With Dante that central Image is Beatrice (see Chapter 19 in La Vita Nuevo); with Wordsworth the Image is “Nature” (see The Prelude); for me, as far back as I can remember, Lewis would be that Image (see especially The Narnian Chronicles). The second Image for me I would reveal as Tolkien who led me to see the nature of Courage, the value of the individual self, the nature of Goodness and Grace in his Lord of the Rings novels. He reveals what is at the heart of reality in his idea of the Eucatastrophy, the good happy ending, as the resurrection is on Easter morning.

Other authors that have moved me for their revealing capacity are Shakespeare, especially in the comedies, but really in any of his works, John Milton in Paradise Lost and Comus, particularly, and the Metaphysical Poets, so called: John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw. Two more modern writers who for their influence belong with Lewis are Dorothy Sayers and Flannery O’Connor.

Art involves then the Affirmation as well as the Rejection of Images, and those two words also signify the two ways in Art [I think] as well as the two ways in life. The maxim that indicates the nature of the two ways is essentially: “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.”

{Since my eyesight has gone for the night, I shall go gentle away until yesterday or today, of course.}

Having stumbled through my own explanation of Image, I thought it best to conclude with the Williams’ paragraphs that best and most coherently explain his grasp of Image in relation to Dante. I highly recommend, if not the entire book, at least the rest of the Introduction:

“The image of Beatrice existed in his thought; it remained there and was deliberately renewed. The word image is convenient for two reasons. First, the subjective recollection within him was of something objectively outside him; it was an image of an exterior fact and not of an interior desire. It was sight and not invention. Dante’s whole assertion was that he could not have invented Beatrice. Secondly, the outer exterior shape was understood to be an image of things beyond itself. Coleridge said that a symbol must have three characteristics (i) it must exist in itself, (ii) it must derive from something greater than itself, (iii) it must represent in itself that greatness from which it derives. I have preferred the word image to the word symbol, because it seems to me doubtful if the word symbol nowadays sufficiently expresses the vivid individual existence of the lesser thing. Beatrice was, in her degree, an image of nobility, of virtue, of the Redeemed Life, and in some sense of Almighty God himself. But she also remained Beatrice right to the end; her derivation was not to obscure her identity any more than her identity should hide her derivation. Just as there is no point in Dante’s thought at which the image of Beatrice in his mind was supposed to exclude the actual objective Beatrice, so there is no point at which the objective Beatrice is to exclude the Power which is expressed through her. But as the mental knowledge or image of her is the only way by which she herself can be known, so she herself is (for Dante) the only way by which that other Power can be known—since, in fact, it was known so. The maxim of his study, as regards the final Power, was: ‘This also is Thou, neither is this Thou.’

“I say ‘the only way’, but only to modify it. There were, in his mind, many other shapes—of people and places, of philosophies and poems. All these had their own identities and were each autonomous. But in his poetry Dante determined to relate them all to the Beatrician figure, and he brought that figure as near as he could to the final image, so far as he could express it, of Almighty God. It is, we all agree, one of the marks of his poetic genius. But it is something else also. It is the greatest expression in European literature of the way of approach of the soul to its ordained end through the affirmation of the validity of all those images, beginning with the image of a girl.

“It is an accepted fact that there have, on the whole, been two chief ways of approach to God defined in Christian thought. One, which is most familiar in the records of sanctity, has been known as the Way of Rejection. It consists, generally speaking, in the renunciation of all images except the final one of God himself, and even—sometimes but not always—of the exclusion of that only Image of all human sense. The great intellectual teacher of that Way was Dionysius the Areopagite… [Williams quotes the extensive paragraph from Dionysius here, which I have omitted].

“The other Way is the Way of Affirmation, the approach to God through these images. The maxim of this Way is in the creed of St. Athanasius: ‘Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God.’ That clause was primarily a definition of the Incarnation, but, being that, it necessarily involved much beside. Other epigrams of the sort are, no doubt, scattered through the history of the Church. But for any full expression of it, the Church had to wait for Dante. It may be that that Way could not be too quickly shown to the world in which the young Church lived. It was necessary first to establish the awful difference between God and the world before we could be permitted to see the awful likeness. It is, and will always remain, necessary to remember the difference in the likeness. Neither of these two Ways indeed is, or can be, exclusive. The most vigorous ascetic, being forbidden formally to hasten his death, is bound to attend to the actualities of food, drink, and sleep which are also images, however brief his attention may be. The most indulgent of Christians is yet bound to hold his most cherished images—of food, drink, sleep, or anything else—negligible 10 beside the final Image of God. And both are compelled to hold their particular Images of God negligible beside the universal Image of God which belongs to the Church, and even that less than the unimaged reality. Our sacred Lord, in his earthly existence, deigned to use both methods. The miracle of Cana and all the miracles of healing are works of the affirmation of images; the counsel to pluck out the eye is a counsel of the rejection of images. It is said that he so rejected them for himself that he had nowhere to lay his head, and that he so affirmed them by his conduct that he was called a glutton and a wine-bibber. He commanded his disciples to abandon all images but himself and promised them, in terms of the same images, a hundred times what they had abandoned. The Crucifixion and the Death are rejection and affirmation at once, for they affirm death only to reject death; the intensity of that death is the opportunity of its own dissolution; and beyond that physical rejection of earth lies the re-affirmation of earth which is called the Resurrection.

“ As above, so below; as in him, so in us. The tangle of affirmation and rejection which is in each of us has to be drawn into some kind of pattern, and has so been drawn by all men who have ever lived.” (The Figure of Beatrice. Introduction. Kindle, page 4.)

REAL PRESENCE: Fa. Cantalamessa

fourth Lent 2022 homily discusses how the presence of Christ is revealed through the Eucharist.

After our mystagogical catecheses on the three main parts of the Mass – the Liturgy of the Word, Consecration and Holy Communion – we shall reflect today on the Eucharist as the real presence of the risen Christ in the Church.

How can we deal with such a deep and incomprehensible mystery? Memories of the numerous theories and discussions on it, the dissensions between Catholics and Protestants, between the Latin and Orthodox Churches, which filled our theology books at one time, assail us. All of which makes it seem impossible to add anything to this mystery that might edify our faith and warm our hearts, without inevitably slipping into interdenominational polemics.

It is a question of bringing together the positive aspects and authentic values in every tradition so as to form a “mass” of common truths that will gradually lead us to unity.

And yet this is the wonder being worked by the Holy Spirit today among all Christians. He is prompting us to admit to what extent our Eucharistic disputes were based on the human presumption that this mystery could be enclosed in a theory, or even in a word, and on the will to prevail over our adversaries. He is prompting us to repent for having reduced the supreme pledge of love and unity left to us by Our Lord to our favorite topic of discussion.

The way to Eucharistic ecumenism is the way to mutual recognition, the Christian way of agape, or sharing. We are not asked to ignore the real differences that exist or to break faith with any point of authentic Catholic doctrine. It is a question of bringing together the positive aspects and authentic values in every tradition so as to form a “mass” of common truths that will gradually lead us to unity.

It is unbelievable how some Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant points of view on the real presence appear to be so divergent and destructive whenever they are seen in contrast or as alternatives, and how they appear wonderfully convergent when they are carefully brought together. We must therefore set about making a synthesis. We must, as it were, sift the great Christian traditions to take out what is not good and, as St. Paul exhorts us to, “hold fast what is good” (cf. 1 Thess 5:21).

The Catholic tradition: a real but hidden presence

In this spirit, let us now take a close look at the three main Eucharistic traditions — Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant — to be edified by the treasures they contain and unite them in the common treasure of the Church. As a result we shall find that our understanding of the mystery of the real presence is richer and more vivid.

Jesus is truly present and not simply through image or form, he is really present, and not only subjectively through the faith of believers; he is substantially present …

In Catholic theology and liturgy, the consecration is the indisputable heart of the Eucharist, from which we have Christ’s real presence. At the consecration, Jesus himself acts and speaks. St. Ambrose wrote:

The bread is bread before the sacramental words are pronounced. . . Which words make the consecration effective and whose words are they? They belong to the Lord Jesus! Everything said before that moment is said by the priest who praises God, prays for the people, for the king and others. But when it is time for the venerable sacrament to be effected, the priest no longer uses his own words, but Christ’s. Therefore, it is the words that work (conficit) the sacrament. . . . See how efficacious (operatorius) are Christ’s words. The body of Christ was not present before the consecration but after it the body of Christ is present. For he spoke and it came to be, he commanded and it stood forth (cf. Ps 33:9).

From the Western Catholic viewpoint we can talk of a Christological realism. “Christological” because attention is centered on Christ seen both in his historical and incarnate state and as the Risen One. Christ is both the object and subject of the Eucharist, and that is to say, he is fulfilled in the Eucharist and he fulfills the Eucharist. “Realism” because Jesus is not seen as present on the altar simply in a sign or symbol but in truth and in his reality. 

This Christological realism is clear, for example, in the hymn “Ave Verum,” composed for the elevation of the Host. It says:

Hail to thee! true body, sprung From the Virgin Mary’s womb!
The same that on the cross was hung,
And bore for man the bitter doom.
Thou whose side was pierced and flow’d
Both with water and with blood. . . .

Later on, the Council of Trent gave a more precise explanation of this approach to the real presence. Three adverbs were used: vere, realiter, substantialiter. Jesus is truly present and not simply through image or form, he is really present, and not only subjectively through the faith of believers; he is substantially present, that is, in his profound reality, which cannot be seen by the senses, and not in the appearances which remain that of bread and wine.

It is true that the risk of falling into a “crude” or exaggerated realism existed. The remedy to this risk is to be found in tradition itself. St. Augustine made it clear, once and for all, that the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is “in the sacrament.” In other words, it is a sacramental and not a physical presence, mediated by signs, and precisely, by bread and wine. However, in this case the sign does not exclude the reality but makes it present to us, in the only way in which the risen Christ, living “in the Spirit,” can be present to us as long as we are on this earth.

Another great master of Western Eucharistic spirituality, St. Thomas Aquinas, says the same thing when he talks about Christ’s presence “in substance” under the species of bread and wine. In fact, to say that Jesus is substantially present in the Eucharist, is to say that he is present in his true reality which nourishes us only through faith. In the hymn Adoro te devote, attributed to the same St. Thomas, we sing:

Sight, touch, and taste in thee are each deceived;
The ear alone most safely is believed.

Jesus is therefore present in the Eucharist in a totally unique way. No single word can suitably describe this presence, not even the adjective “real.” The word real is derived from res (thing) and means, as a thing or an object. But Jesus is not present in the Eucharist as a “thing” or an object, but as a person. If we really want to name this presence, it would be better to simply say “Eucharistic” presence, because it occurs only in the Eucharist.

The Orthodox Tradition: the action of the Holy Spirit.

The Western theology is very rich but it is not, nor could it be, exhaustive. In the past, at least, the importance due to the Holy Spirit and essential to an understanding of the Eucharist was neglected. And so we turn to the East to see what the Orthodox tradition has to offer us. However, our attitude today is different; we are no longer worried about the differences but grateful for what is offered to help complete our own views.

In fact, the Orthodox tradition has always given great importance to the action of the Holy Spirit in Eucharistic celebration. Since Vatican Council II, this sharing has already shown results. Up to then, the Roman Canon of the Mass only mentioned the Holy Spirit incidentally in the final doxology: 

“Through him, with him, in him … in the unity of the Holy Spirit . . . .” Now, instead, all the new canons have a double invocation to the Holy Spirit: one on the gifts before the consecration and another on the Church after the consecration.

Oriental liturgies have always attributed the actual real presence of Christ on the altar to the particular action of the Holy Spirit. In the “anaphora of St. James,” in use in the Antiochian Church, the Holy Spirit is invoked with these words:

Send forth upon us and upon these gifts, your most Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life, who reigns with you, God the Father, and with your only Son. He reigns con- substantially and co-eternally; he spoke through the law and the prophets and the New Testament; he descended in the form of a dove upon our Lord Jesus Christ in the river Jordan, he descended upon the Apostles on the day of Pentecost, in the form of tongues of fire. Send, O Lord, your thrice Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts, so that by his holy, gracious and glorious coming, he may sanctify this bread and make it into the sacred Body of Christ (Amen), and sanctify this chalice and make it into the precious Blood of Christ (Amen).

This is much more than a simple addition to the invocation to the Holy Spirit. It is a wide-ranging and penetrating look at the history of salvation that opens a new dimension on the Eucharistic mystery. Starting with the words of the Nicene Constantinople Creed which define the Holy Spirit as “Lord and giver of life . . . who spoke through the prophets,” the perspective then widens to outline a real “history” of the action of the Holy Spirit.

The Eucharist brings this series of wonderful events to fulfillment. The Holy Spirit, who at Easter bursts into the sepulcher, touches Christ’s Body and gives him life again, repeats this wonder in the Eucharist. He comes upon the dead elements of bread and wine and gives them life; he makes them into the Body and Blood of the Redeemer. Truly, as Jesus himself says of the Eucharist, “it is the Spirit that gives life” (John 6:63). Theodore of Mopsuestia, a master of Eastern Eucharistic tradition, wrote:

By virtue of the liturgical action, it is as if Our Lord were risen from the dead and pours his grace on all of us, through the Holy Spirit. . . . When the priest declares that the bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Christ, he affirms that this has come about through the Holy Spirit. It is the same as what happened to Christ’s natural body when it received the Holy Spirit and his unction. At the moment the Holy Spirit comes, we believe that the bread and wine receive a special unction of grace. And from then on we believe they are the Body and Blood of Christ, immortal, incorruptible, impassible and immutable by nature, like the Body of Christ at the resurrection.

However, we must not lose sight of one fact which shows that also the Catholic tradition has something to offer to the Orthodox brothers. The Holy Spirit does not act independently of Jesus; he acts within his words. Jesus says of the Spirit:

“He will not speak on his own author-ity, but whatever he hears he will speak. … He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:13-14). That is why we must not separate the words of Jesus (“This is my Body”) from the epiclesis (“May the Holy Spirit make this bread into the Body of Christ”).

The call to unity, for both Catholic and Orthodox faithful, springs from the very heart of the Eucharistic mystery. Even if, for obvious reasons, the memorial of the institution and the invocation to the Holy Spirit take place at two distinct moments (mortals cannot express the mystery at just one instant), their action is, nevertheless, simultaneous. Its effectiveness undoubtedly comes from the Spirit (and not from the priest or the Church), but it works within and through Christ’s words.

I have said that the effectiveness that makes Jesus present on the altar does not spring from the Church but neither does it take place without the Church. The Church is the living channel through which and with which the Holy Spirit acts. It is the same for the coming of Jesus on the altar as it will be for the final coming in glory: The Spirit and the Bride (the Church) say to Jesus: Come! (cf. Rev 22:17). And he comes.

Protestant spirituality: the importance of faith.

The Roman tradition highlights “who” is present in the Eucharist, Christ; the Orthodox tradition highlights “by whom” this presence is effected, the Holy Spirit; Protestant theology highlights “on whom” this presence is effective; in other words, the conditions that make the sacrament really effective in those that receive it. The conditions are many but they can be summed up under one heading: faith.

Let us not concern ourselves immediately and exclusively with the negative aspects which have been criticized at certain times in the Protestant principle that the sacraments are only “signs of faith.” Let us forget misunderstandings and controversies and we shall find that this energetic recall to faith is beneficial to saving the sacrament and preventing it from becoming just another “good work,” or something that works mechanically or magically as it were, almost without human knowledge. In the end, it is a question of discovering the profound meaning of the exclamation that re-echoes in the liturgy at the end of the consecration and which was once placed at the center of the consecration formula, as if to emphasize that faith is intrinsic to the mystery: “Mysterium fidei,” mystery of faith!

The Eucharist brings this series of wonderful events to fulfillment.

Faith doesn’t “make” the sacrament but it “receives” it. Only Christ’s words repeated by the Church and rendered effective by the Holy Spirit “make” the sacrament. But what would a sacrament “made” and not received avail? Concerning the incarnation, men like Origen, St. Augustine and St. Bernard said: “What advantage is it to me that Christ was born of Mary in Bethlehem if he is not born through faith in my heart too?” We can say the same of the Eucharist; what advantage is it to me that Christ is really present on the altar, if to me he is not present? Faith was necessary even when Jesus was physically present on this earth; otherwise — as he himself repeated many times in the gospel — his presence was of no use, if not to condemn: “Woe to you Chorazin, woe to you Capernaum!” (Matt 11:21f.).

Faith is essential to make the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist not just “real” but “personal,” a one-to-one presence. “Being there” is one thing, “being present” another. Presence presupposes someone present to someone else; it presupposes reciprocal communication, an exchange between two free persons who are aware of and open to each other. There is much more involved, therefore, than simply staying in a given place.

Such a subjective and existential dimension of the Eucharistic presence does not annul the objective presence that precedes human faith, it actually presupposes it and gives it value. Luther, who raised the role of faith to such heights, was also one of the staunchest defenders of the doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. In the course of a debate on the subject with other Reformers, he stated:

I cannot interpret the words ‘This is my Body’ differently from how they sound. It is up to others, therefore, to prove that, where the words ‘This is my Body’ are said, Christ’s Body is not present. I do not want to hear explanations based on reason. In front of such clear words, there can be no question; I refuse logical reasoning and plain common sense. I totally refuse practical demonstrations and analytical argumentation. God is above all kinds of mathematical certainties and we must adore the Word of God in wonder.

This quick look at the wealth of riches contained in the various Christian traditions is sufficient to see the immense gift that unfolds for the Church when the various Christian denominations accept to unite their spiritual assets, as the first Christians did, who “had all things in common” (Acts 2:44). This is the true agape, encompassing the whole Church, which the Lord makes us want to see realized, for the glory of our common Father and the good of his Church.

The sentiment of the presence

We have now terminated our little Eucharistic pilgrimage through the different Christian denominations. We have collected a few baskets of crumbs from the big multiplication of bread in the Church. But we cannot conclude here our reflections on the mystery of the real presence. It would be like collecting the crumbs and not eating them. Faith in the real presence is a wonderful thing, but it is not enough; at least, faith taken in a certain way is not enough. It is not enough to have an exact and theologically perfect idea of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Many theologians know all about the mystery, yet they do not know the real presence. In biblical terms you “know” something only when you have experienced it. To know fire, you would have to have been, at least once, so close to a flame to risk being burnt.

St. Gregory of Nyssa left us an amazingly profound expression of this higher kind of faith; he speaks of a “sentiment of the presence (aesthesis parousias) . This happens when a person is seized by God’s presence and has a certain perception (not just an idea) that God is there. It is not a natural perception; it is the fruit of grace. There is a strong analogy between this and what happened when, after his resurrection, Jesus appeared to someone. It was something sudden that unexpectedly and absolutely changed the person’s state of mind.

One day after the resurrection the apostles were fishing in the lake; a man stood on the beach. He started talking from a distance: “Children, have you any fish?” and they answered him, “No!” But then, in a flash of understanding, John cried out: “It is the Lord!” Everything is different after this recognition and everybody hurries ashore (cf. John 21:4f.). The same thing happened, even if in a quieter way, to the disciples of Emmaus. Jesus was walking with them, “but their eyes were kept from recognizing him”; finally, when he broke the bread, “their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Luke 24:13ff.). The same thing happens when a Christian, who has received Jesus in the Eucharist numerous times, one day, finally, through grace, “recognizes” him.

It is not enough to have an exact and theologically perfect idea of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist.

From faith and the “sentiment” of the real presence, reverence must spring spontaneously, and, indeed, a sense of tenderness for Jesus in the Sacrament. This is such a delicate and personal sentiment that words might even destroy it. St. Francis of Assisi has something to tell us at this point. His heart overflowed with the sentiments of reverence and tenderness. He was overcome with pity before Jesus in the Sacrament, just as he was moved before the Child in Bethlehem. He saw him so helpless, so entrusted to humanity, so humble. In his Letter to all the Friars he writes words of fire that we want to hear now as addressed to us at the end of our meditation on the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist:

Consider your dignity, brothers, priests, and be holy because He Himself is holy… It is a great misery and a deplorable weakness when you have Him thus present to care for anything else in the whole world. Let the entire man be seized with fear; let the whole world tremble; let heaven exult when Christ, the Son of the Living God, is on the altar in the hands of the priest. O admirable height and stupendous condescension! O humble sublimity! O sublime humility! that the Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that for our salvation He hides Himself under a morsel of bread. Consider, brothers, the humility of God and “pour out your hearts before Him, and be ye humbled that ye may be exalted by Him. Do not therefore keep back anything for yourselves that He may receive you entirely who gives Himself up entirely to you.

~

1.De sacramentis, IV, 14-16 (PL 16, 439 ss).

2.Cf THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa theologiae III, q. 75, a. 4.

3.THEODORUS OF MOPSUESTIA, Catechetical homilies, XVI, 11 s.

4.Cf Acts of the colloquy of Marburg of 1529 (Weimar Ed., 30, 3, p. 110 ss).

5.GREGORY OF NYSSA, On the Canticle, XI, 5, 2 (PG 44, 1001) .

FAIRYTALE: INTERLUDE 6 - LES

[Chapter 20! I made it! But then I changed it into an Interlude. However, this train has several tracks! Time to wrap it up, perhaps? A burning bush? We may have two growing in our yard. A tunnel of fire? Where’s Johnny Cash when you need him? I’ve had “Ring of Fire” playing in my head for two weeks, at least. Well, at any rate (ha), we are almost home, almost. Sigh. A lass in the grass! Language is so much fun; poetry is so delightful. If only I were capable of making better use of the poetry and prose: “Come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove…”. I guess I shall have to look them up: his offer and her rejection; I know the shepherdess turns him down. The first is Marlowe; the second is Sir Walter Raleigh [who may have been executed for treason, for Heaven’s sake]. Both poems are delightful, and of course absolutely relevant here.

Come live with me and be my love

by Christopher Marlowe

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of th purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

by Sir Walter Raleigh

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten
In folly ripe, in season rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

The Dionysian offer, the Apollonian response, or so it seems to me: here’s the brief Wikipedia entry on these two modes of being, or perhaps two perspectives on reality, though the authors of the entry go on to discuss or define the Nietzschian view of the two modes in his Birth of Tragedy, worth reading as far as I remember. I think I was about 22 when I read it carefully, only 60 years ago. Whew! In any case the basic distinction is enough (though my friend Fred tells me there’s a good and important book on the subject by a Jesuit priest, Fa. Lynch.)

“In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo, son of Leto, is the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity and stands for reason. Dionysus, son of Semele, is the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, representing passion, emotions and instincts. The ancient Greeks did not consider the two gods to be opposites or rivals, although they were often entwined by nature.”

Perhaps one way to think about the Dionysian is to see that it celebrates the particular, the details as revelatory, while the Apollonian contemplates the universal. The passionate shepherd breaks the world down into particular places in order to enjoy the presence and pleasures he imagines the shepherdess will bring in all these particular places: “valleys, groves, hills, and fields/Woods or steeply mountain.” In true Dionysian fashion his emphasis is on pleasure. Moving her mind with delights is certainly the main effort of his seduction attempt.

The passionate shepherd uses every particular he can think of to woo her. The second stanza, for example, involves the senses, sitting, seeing, hearing. Pseudo stability is imaged in his having them sitting on rocks, then the apparently harmless viewing of the shepherds at their occupation; finally listening to the choirs of birds singing “madrigals,” presumably secular love songs, though one might wonder why the birds are singing to the water falls, unless I am misreading the image. The use of “shallow” for the rivers, as well as “falls” has a touch of the ominous, since his desired relationship involves a shallow basis, only pleasure, and for a virtuous, chaste shepherdess, that relationship would be a fall. I’m only suggesting the subliminal here, though the same element appears throughout the poem.

The next three stanzas, for example involve his, first, making her “beds,” which of course is where he would truly like to have her, but the suggestion is scattered, buried in the numerous particulars he brings to bear on making the beds of roses and a “thousand fragrant posies.” His next ploy is to dress her in all the particular elements of nature available in that setting: a cap, a kirtle (essentially an undergarment), “embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.” Again the decoration is the thing celebrated thus far, the least substantial. Pretty no doubt, but for how long? The gown is next given particular attention though the manner of gathering the raw material is a bit ominous: fine wool, “which from our pretty lambs we pull.” The prettiness of the lambs, the appearance, doesn’t keep them inviolate, from having the fleece violently removed.

The remaining elements of dress are also somewhat superficial: a”belt of straw with ivy buds,” then a list of the particular semi-precious and precious elements that make up the last items of dress: gold buckles for the slippers, coral and amber for the straw belt. The passionate shepherd is quite brilliant in the way in which he brings the particulars of nature to seduce his lady into what, of course, is a natural act.

In true Dionysian fashion the final stanza offers a pastoral dance and serenade in the spring time, May, emphasizing pleasure (next to the last stanza) and then “delight”/“delights” used twice in the last stanza. Throughout the poem then he has managed to reduce the mystery of human love down to the purely natural level of sexual procreation. Unfortunately youth in our current culture are likely not to see anything wrong with that. Alas! The young lady, however, is not so easily taken in.

We notice first that she immediately concerns herself with the universals: he shattered nature into places, particulars; she reunites them in the universal: “the world,” and then adds “love” and the all important “truth.” And of course the primary universal she defines is what we have learned to call the second law of thermodynamics: things fall apart; everything dies sooner or later. Where is stability? The shepherd’s springtime song and dance turn to fall and winter in her response, and the consequences of the full natural cycle.

While it seems unnecessary to list how she undermines or negates all his particulars to demonstrate what nature also truly means, there are several that are worth exploring. In the second stanza, for example, she introduces the effect of the universal, time, on all the natural details he has offered. There are no “pretty lambs” here, for she understands the effect time has on all the shepherd’s “offerings.” “Time drives the flocks from field to fold/When rivers rage and rocks grow cold/And Philomel becometh dumb;/The rest complains of cares to come.” Whereas the shepherd had a choir of birds singing madrigals, she has one, the nightingale, who as a women was betrayed and raped by her sister’s husband, Tereus, who then cut out her tongue to keep her from talking. Transformed into a nightingale she can sing beautifully of her tragic fate, yet in the shepherdess’ verse she is silent, “dumb,” perhaps in reference to her final humiliation, the loss of her tongue, as well as the fact that cold weather must indeed silence her. The “rest,” I assume the shepherdess means the rest of the “birds,” sing of the other problems of suffering in human life: “complains of cares to come.”

The second universal in the shepherdess’ verse response is “the lie,” which she suggests in the second line of her if/then response: “And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,” then proceeds to reduce all his particulars to their superficial value: “pretty pleasures.“ The most telling reference to “the lie” occurs in the next stanza: “The flowers do fade, and wanton fields/To wayward reckoning winter yields;/A honey tongue, a heart of gall,/Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.” The sweet talking shepherd’s “honey tongue” conceals the deeper truth, “the heart of gall,” the bitterness of betrayal. While she uses the shepherd’s rhyme in the first two lines, “fields” and “yields,” and contrasts his superficial springtime with the reality of harsh cold winter in the second two, she also reveals her greater depth and understanding of human nature in the ambiguity of “fall.” While it follows the seasonal references, it also contains the reference to the “fall” of Adam and Eve in the garden where they listened to the serpent’s lie and disobeyed the divine prohibition. The shepherd truly offers nothing substantial in his plea as a basis for an enduring love relationship! She makes that failure perfectly clear in the following two stanzas.

Her good right response reminds me of “Matthew Arnold’s” (the narrator’s) failure in “Dover Beach,” where he never seems to grasp what the shepherdess knows: he says, “Ah love, let us be true to one another…” as a hedge against the loss of faith and the clashing of terrible armies and the oncoming darkness. Human romantic love by itself offers no substantial ground for trust or real stability, especially when anyone might be susceptible to the lie, the gall within: “in folly ripe, in season rotten.” All his offered decorations are like fruit that ripens and then rots! All the things, the particulars he has offered, are subject to decay finally and are therefore valueless in this situation. The “delights” she lists in the last stanza are all impossible, so that he would need either to offer a real substantial basis for their love, or forget it.

In a sense all that’s left is to throw his particulars into the fire and find a substantial basis for a real enduring relationship, other than pleasure. In a traditional sense that would suggest a sacramental marriage ceremony!

Image: “The Rape of Proserpine,” by Bernini (1598-1680). At least I think he did the sculpture.

FAIRYTALE: CHAPTER 19 - LES

[Gobsmacked! That was how that last chapter hit me. I may have moved from kindergarten to first grade, for there is much going on in Chapter 18. Fortunately elements in my life broke down for a while, giving me even more time to roll it around in my head. I took notes for the chapter on my email documents, sent them to myself, and then made only general use of them. The major image I had considered worked. When that happened the rest fell into place, nudge, nudge, so to speak.

Of course I may now have a problem of a different character. You see, I have just begun Chapter 19. We are near the end, for several reasons. Godric is at the Princess’s castle. Getting to her is thus not that far away. (The imp [of the perverse] doesn’t want me to stop: take him to the moon, first, the imp says; he says he will help. Yes, but who froze our machine for five days? It certainly wasn’t the writer, i.e. me. Either A or B! Not A; therefore B. Well, logic is not my strong suit, but that thinking seems accurate if, I’m aware of if! If the “either/or” is true. Ah, truth. The human mind is built to receive truth, yet it so often settles for the lie! Why is there something rather than nothing? The first philosophical question again. Either the mind of God conceived it (the Cosmic dream/idea) and spoke it into being; or, matter suddenly popped into existence and Bob’s your uncle!

I have read Christopher Dawson’s very fine essay on the age of Augustine and The City of God twice now, and I was astonished at the way my sense of the past came to life. That is, my sense that like our own age these were real people living in real time just as we are. Then too I have memories of events that happened that begin in the forties; I remember the radio announcement that came saying world war two was officially over.

Our kitchen was a long narrow one, counters, cupboards and sink on one side with windows looking out onto our long driveway and toward our neighbor’s windows which were looking toward us. Across from that counter and sink arrangement was the kitchen table and three or four chairs. The refrigerator was at the top of the kitchen between the two sides; the stove was on the chair and table side. My mother—Alice Jane—was washing dishes at the sink. I was sitting on a kitchen chair between the stove and the table and other chairs. I was five that summer, and in my hand I held a sealed plastic bag of margarine that also contained a yellow coloring cube. The idea was to kneed the coloring into the margarine to change the lard-like whiteness of the interior substance into something that at least looked like butter. It was war time. I was kneeding away—great fun for me—when the announcement came, and I remember so well because my mother was so excited, and I grew up learning exactly what that announcement really meant: evil on a monstrous scale had been defeated, done in for a time, though there was Berlin and then Korea to come. Of course, there was also the question of whether or not a great evil had been unleashed to defeat it.

I said something to the effect that there were other considerations too. I can’t in good conscience end a story on a “Chapter 19.” Hmm! 19 is a prime number, so depending on what I wanted to reveal there, i could end with a prime number. At this point though I would rather get to twenty (20). I suppose I could do as the hotels do with thirteen and just jump from 18 to twenty. That’s an intriguing idea, come to think about it. Numbers are important. What I do with them matters (to me, anyway). I suppose, however, a Squarespace weblog is really like a message in the sand on an ocean shore. Tide’s in; message covered. Tide’s out; message gone; the shore’s smooth again. Truth. Actually, truth, beauty, goodness—what I call the fundamentals.

Then, if I was five in forty-five, I was too young for Korea, and also, later, a tad too old for Vietnam, though I did have to take a physical exam at an army base in Columbus, Ohio in 1966, a memorable experience! In the draft lottery in 66 (I think) I was # 366, the very last number. However, another element under consideration is that I am almost ancient in human terms and might die before I get to find out what’s what in the end. You see, at any rate, I have a general idea, but I really won’t know until I write it. What if God made the universe so that he could see dinosaurs at work and play? Or what if he made a number of inhabited worlds to know for certain that a “human” race [i.e., human equals rational; capable of thinking out moral choices, regardless of physical appearance] could ever remain faithful. The point here is that I might die before I get to find out how the story ends. Alas. What is a true pastoral work? A lass in the grass? Alas! Time to leave off tonight as the silly season draws near.]

The problem at this point in the story is how he moved on, though that is not too difficult to understand once you consider what has gone before. Here, however, there was no well to tumble into, no stream to jump over, no door to crawl through, no mirror to touch. Instead, at the end of the hall of weapons and food, Godric saw, not a door or mirror, but a painting on the wall, a mural. Finally ignoring his desire for the food, especially for the scrumptious-looking cherry pie, he walked away from the food to examine the painting which turned out to be a large mural painted in vibrant hues of red, blue, green, yellow and white. The painting was a pastoral: sheep nibbling grass on a gentle hillside, an enticing lake of shimmering blue water in the distance, a lovely green-leaved tree near the top of the hill, a red-leafed bush behind the tree. On a colorful blanket under the tree sat a young shepherdess wearing a blue and white dress, and reading a book of poetry with a black and white border collie standing beside her, watching the sheep. It looked like a warm breezy day. As Godric stared at the young woman, she looked up from her book and returned his gaze with a feminine come-hither look.

Startled by such a move, Godric took a step back, looked down to find that the food and weapons room had vanished, leaving him on the cool grassy hillside. The young maiden held out her hand to him and beckoned him to approach. Godric couldn’t think what to do, so he stood his ground. She was certainly beautiful with long golden hair framing her face, blue eyes or perhaps green, smooth tan cheeks with a perfectly formed nose and chin, and inviting red lips.

“Come sit with me,” she said. “I have food and wine we can share.” She pointed to a wicker basket woven of willow twigs sitting beside her. She opened the basket and removed two clear wine glasses; then she lifted out a bottle of wine, uncorked it and poured some in each glass. Next she removed a loaf of freshly baked white bread, broke off a generous piece and placed it on the blanket beside one of the glasses of wine.

“Won’t you join me?” she asked in such a way, believing that his answer could be nothing other than “yes.”

Godric blushed and mumbled something that might have been “yes” as he walked to the blanket and sat down. He looked at the bread and wine, then at the young shepherdess.

“It’s not fairy food,” she said, sensing his reluctance. “There is no enchantment there. It’s just bread and wine!”

Having resisted the last food enchantment, the Prince decided to trust the young lady. She smiled sweetly as he picked up the fresh bread and bit into it. The bread was delicious and seemed to melt in his mouth. He picked up the wine glass and drank. The wine was cool and semi sweet. He found that both hunger and thirst were satisfied for the moment.

“What’s your name?” Godric managed to ask after a short pause.

“Elesandra, daughter of the King of Ardor. And you are Godric, Prince of Nodd, son of King Bolt. Isn’t that correct?”

“You seem to know already.” If the bread and wine were not the enchantment here, then it could only be the girl, Godric thought to himself. He struggled to become more objective in his consideration and behavior. Nonetheless he took another bite of bread and another drink of wine. “I was looking for a way to leave this place when I stumbled into your mural, I think. Is there a way out here?”

“Of course,” she replied. Then taking his hand, she looked into his eyes and asked, “but why would you want to leave just now? Weren’t you coming to find me? I was the one you moved through the mirror to meet.”

“I” Godric stuttered, “I—you don’t look quite the same, and I seem to have been lost in a purgatory of some sort for the past time and a half.” He shook his head. “Besides, the wine has made me a bit dizzy, for the world seems to be turning.”

“Of course the world is turning! That’s what worlds do; they spin causing time to flow like a river where you can’t step into the same place twice. That’s also why you have memory.” She picked up her wine glass and drank. Putting the glass down she picked up the bread and broke off a small piece.

“Why do I have memory?” Godric wondered whether he was losing his mind.

“Why, so you will remember who you are from fleeting moment to fleeting moment, and so that you can separate illusion from reality and act accordingly, so that you can seize the moment, so to speak.”

“Act accordingly? Seize the moment?”

“Exactly! For example, what would you do if I asked you to kiss me now? Would you lie down with me, put your arms around me, and kiss me boldly and passionately, the way a Prince should kiss a gentle maiden? I would certainly enjoy that. Wouldn’t you?”

Yes, thought Godric, I certainly would though, as in the other instances in this underground world, something appeared to be wrong. The shepherdess seemed to be waiting; she patted the blanket, took a red seedy fruit out of her basket and offered it to him. “Come and taste the pomegranate with its luscious enticing flavor! We can have such fun here, on my father’s lawn!”

Godric felt a strong urge to go to her, take her in his arms. He glanced up the hill as he started to move towards her and saw that the red-leafed bush behind the tree had burst into flame, had become a burning bush. The orange flames shot up either side of the bush, then shot across the top of the bush from each side, joining together so that they formed an arch for a kind of doorway. The center of the bush burned first orange, then blue, then white hot.

Elesandra looked up at the fire. “We’ll, Sir Prince, it looks as though you have your doorway, as well as a choice.” She smiled invitingly. “You can stay here with, and have all the pleasures we will prove, as the poet said, or you can try your luck with the door of fire! Which will you choose?”

Godric got to his feet, looked at the burning bush, looked down at the young woman. She rearranged her dress so that more of her tan shapely legs were revealed. Godric could feel the heat from the fire where he stood. He moved closer to the door and thought he could see a winding stair beyond the flames, an asymmetrical structure. He looked back at the girl. Her beauty seemed to have grown. He had seen people who were burned, but who had escaped death. They were scared for life and lived in great pain. Nevertheless, he knew that he could not stay in this underworld of enticements; that this was not living. While Elesandra might appear beautiful, he knew deep down that she was not real, a mirror image perhaps.

He drew his own sword which he had been wearing throughout, which he had purchased with the naiad’s gemstone. He patted his right side pocket from his leather pants. The gemstone was still there, he discovered; at the same time his sword burst into its characteristic blue flames that rippled up and down the finely sharpened edges. He looked one last time at the woman who called herself Elesandra, turned his back on her and slowly moved toward the bush. The flames were intense; sweat broke out on his face and head, under his arms, until his whole body was bathed in it. I should have spent last night in a chapel undergoing a knightly vigil to carry me through this torment, he thought.

He thrust his sword into the center of the flaming doorway; his hand seemed to burn but it didn’t blacken. He heard the sound of laughter behind him, but he did not look back. Keeping the sword pointed before him, he stepped into the center of the fierce fiery bush and walked into the midst of a flaming tunnel of fire which burned off impurities, but left him unscarred, standing at the foot of the winding, asymmetrical staircase. Oh my God, he thought!

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Proserpine!

JOY: Fr. Peter John Cameron OP

Fr. Peter John Cameron, OP - published on 12/10/22 ALETEIA

Jesus acts to put John the Baptist face-to-face with brand new wonders existing in the world thanks to Jesus’ incarnate Presence. And then the Lord leaves it to the Baptist to do the math.

During the worst days of the Covid lockdown, I was asked to give a Zoom presentation on “Joy in a Time of Pandemic.” I was psyched about the topic because I am a big believer in joy, which proves its mettle most in times of tribulation.

I think I learned this from St. John the Baptist, one of my favorite saints. Because it was while John the Baptist endured his own grueling lockdown—confined in prison by King Herod—that he experienced one of the greatest joys of his life.

The Gospel (Mt 11:2-11) tells us that, from his dungeon cell, John “heard of the works of the Christ.” So he sent his disciples to Jesus with the burning question: Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another? Our Lord could have replied very simply: I am the one. But he didn’t. Instead, Jesus opted for an elaborate answer smacking of a riddle: Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. Why this brainteaser response?

In fact, there is no “the” before these nouns in the Greek version of the text. Which means that Jesus is asserting that it is not merely certain afflicted individuals, but rather blindness, lameness, leprosy, deafness, and death itself that is being conquered in him. The Greek, however, does employ the word “and” five times. “The fivefold repetition of the conjunction ‘and’ gives us the feeling of an unending story” (E. Leiva-Merikakis), implying countless unmentioned sorrows—like the ones in your life—that Jesus promises to conquer as well!

Jesus wants John to be overcome with joy in his imprisonment. St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of joy as “a well-being of the spirit in response to what exists”—in other words, joy wells up in us when we recognize the good things God brings forth. Thus the motive for the Lord’s roundabout response: Jesus acts to put John face-to-face with brand new wonders existing in the world thanks to Jesus’ incarnate Presence. And then the Lord leaves it to the Baptist to do the math.

This is in keeping with the very way that John the Baptist in the desert himself heralded the coming of Jesus. He blesses the people with a new way of looking at the world … of regarding reality. “John the Baptist interrupted what people saw as a life of disconcerting drought” (L. Giussani). The papal preacher, Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, explains:

John helps the people to look past the wall of contrary appearances to make them see the Messiah hidden behind the semblance of a man like others. The Baptist in this way inaugurated the new Christian form of prophecy, which does not consist in proclaiming a future salvation, but in revealing the hidden presence of Christ in the world. 

But so often we remain oblivious to that Presence, giving short shrift to joy. Joy by definition is the gladness, the satisfaction that appears when our will possesses something which leads to our genuine happiness. Joy is the response of the human heart to what it perceives as an authentic promise of life. And Christ’s Presence is just that!

And here is the wondrous thing about joy: Joy can coincide with sadness—because of the promise joy contains. But,joy cannot coexist with fear! Why do we end up becoming manipulated by fear, surrendering our life’s joy? Because we are no longer anchored by The Promise. We no longer have our gaze fixed on The Promise. As long as we are afraid, we are not looking for love. Instead, when menaced by something, we’re on the lookout for power. Keeping our eyes focused on The Promise is what Advent is all about.

The heroic opponent to Nazism, Jesuit Fr. Alfred Delp—locked in solitary confinement by his Nazi captors, tortured, his hands constantly in handcuffs—on smuggled slips of paper wrote from his cell:

The promises of God stand above us, more valid than the stars and more effective than the sun. Based on these promises, we will become healthy and free, from the center of our being. The promises have turned us around and opened life out into the infinite. Even lamentation retains the song of these promises, and distress their sound, and loneliness their confidence.

At the core of the promises stands this fact: “The desire for joy is inherently stronger than the fear of sadness” (St. Thomas Aquinas). That is why Fr. Delp insists that each person “should take joy as seriously as he takes himself. And he should believe in his heart and in his Lord God, even through darkness and distress, that he is created for joy. Such a life knows it is on the right path to perfection.” The philosopher/mystic Simone Weil observed: “Suffering is violence, joy is gentleness, but joy is the stronger.”

Keep this in mind: Joy is the only real enemy to Satan! Who understood this better than J.R.R. Tolkien who went so far as to invent an expression that attempts to capture the invincibility of joy:

I coined the word “eucatastrophe”: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears. It produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth; your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. Just as the hero of a mythical tale is on the verge of a disastrous dead end, with his demise looming before him, terrible and inevitable, the eucatastrophe happens: The good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn”—this joy is a sudden and miraculous grace. It denies universal final defeat, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy. Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

“The source of Christian joy,” wrote Pope Benedict XVI, “is the certainty of being loved by God, loved personally by our Creator, by the One who loves each one of us with a passionate and faithful love, a love greater than our infidelities and sins, a love which forgives.” How can this Love that is coming to claim us not cause a eucatastrophe in us?

“If there is an answer to death, it will make genuine joy possible” (J. Ratzinger). And there is a definitive answer to death. That’s what moves us to rejoice this Gaudete Sunday and to convince us to take our joy seriously.

Nicholas Senz - published on 12/09/22 ALETEIA

Justice and Mercy

St. Thomas notes that in every act of God, both mercy and justice are at work.

Does God have a split personality? We sometimes hear people speak of him as if he did. Indeed, a second century priest named Marcion actually proposed this was true. Marcion wrote a book called the Antitheses in which he placed side by side passages from each Testament that he found contradictory.

Many of the differences center on Marcion’s claim that the God of the Old Testament loved justice, while the God of the New Testament loved mercy. For example, he quotes Exodus 21—“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”—and opposes it to Luke 6—“turn the other cheek.” Marcion attempts to demonstrate that “The Creator God is judicial, harsh, and mighty in war” while “the Supreme God is gentle and simply good and excellent.”

While we know there is only one God, we do sometimes still hear people speak of “The God of the Old Testament” and “The God of the New Testament,” as if they were two different beings. How do we reconcile the sometimes differing pictures we see of God?

God is perfectly simple

Jesus tells us our Father in Heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). God would not be God if He did not contain all perfections. Any good that we can conceive of, God possesses it completely. So, God is perfectly good, perfectly loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing, and more. And since God is perfectly simple—that is, God does not have components or parts—all perfections are one in God. God’s knowledge and power are one, as are his goodness and presence.

Still, there are some goods, like justice and mercy, that we have a hard time picturing together. Justice is a good. It is the virtue of giving to others what they are owed, what they deserve. Mercy is also a good. We often think of mercy as relenting in punishment, or sparing another of the consequences of their actions.

Don’t these two conflict? If we are acting with justice toward someone who has done wrong, will we not make them pay for their deeds, as a matter of retribution? If we act with mercy toward a wrong-doer, will we not release them from their sentence early, or even forego it entirely? Mercy and justice would seem to be opposites. Yet they are both goods in their own right. How can God be both perfectly merciful and perfectly just?

What is the answer?

The answer to this question lies in the Cross, and St. Thomas Aquinas helps us to understand it.

In the Summa Theologiae (III, q. 46, a. 1, ad.3), St. Thomas affirms that God could have saved us in a way other than by the sacrifice of His Son. Though God could have restored humanity to His grace merely with a word, St. Thomas says the Cross was most fitting, because “Christ’s Passion was in keeping with both His mercy and His justice.” The Passion fits with God’s justice because “satisfaction was made for the sin of the human race.” The consequences of sin are suffering and death. By his Passion and death, Christ thus saves us from sin by taking on to Himself the consequences of our sin. Christ does not merely wave away our sins, but pays for them. The satisfaction owed for our sins is made, and thus justice is done.

The Passion also fits with God’s mercy, because “man of himself could not satisfy for the sin of all human nature,” so the Son of God Himself came to give Himself to save us. Because we owed a debt we could not pay, God paid the debt for us, thus showing us His mercy. It is akin to a judge having his own son before him in court. The judge fines his son for his offense, but then takes off his judge’s robe, comes down from the bench, and pays his son’s fine for him.

The judge is just because he demands satisfaction be made for the offense, and merciful because he makes satisfaction himself. This is a greater act than merely dismissing the offense and the fine. In the same way, God shows us his mercy by paying the debt owed for our sins, rather than leaving us indebted forever. Because God saves us not by a mere command but by an act of self-sacrifice, he acts with greater mercy. As St. Thomas says:

“God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a man who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing him only one hundred, does nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The case is the same with one who pardons an offence committed against him, for in remitting it he may be said to bestow a gift.” (ST I, q. 21, a. 3, ad. 2)

Our existence is mercy

The Cross is God’s demonstration to us that mercy is not opposed to justice. The two are not contraries. They are on the same side of the ledger. Mercy is not on the opposite side of the spectrum to justice, but rather a greater form of justice. Mercy does not lay aside justice, but surpasses it.

St. Thomas notes that in every act of God, both mercy and justice are at work. Our very existence is in a sense an act of mercy, because we are not owed existence from God. God creates us from an outpouring of his goodness—in our very being, God gives us more than what we are owed. In forgiving our sins, He does no less. Pope Francis encapsulated this truth well when he wrote,

“Mercy is the fullness of justice and the most radiant manifestation of God’s truth.” (Amoris Laetitia 311)

FAIRYTALE: CHAPTER 18 - LES

[Problems with Squarespace; problems with illness; problems with imagination. I couldn’t open documents here for a week, until my son came over and showed me how to “refresh” the site. Frustrating to be so ignorant. Then I got sick again! But here we are now, characters in suspended animation, ready to be revived. I have two ways to develop them, but my imagination failed more than usual. Nevertheless, I found an interesting quote about mirrors, and since we are about to enter the Hall of Mirrors, I thought I would include it:

Found in “Chapter 13 of MacDonald’s 1858 novel, Phantastes: What a strange thing a mirror is! And what a wondrous affinity exists between it and a man’s imagination! For this room of mine, as I behold it in the glass, is the same and yet not the same. It is not the mere representation of the room I live in, but it looks just as if I were reading about it in a story I like. All its commonness has disappeared. The mirror has lifted it out of the region of fact into the realms of art. . . . I should like to live in that room if I could only get into it.” Yes. There it is, mirrors!

That reminds me, I’m taking some new medications to prevent strokes, but they also seem to be giving me numerous strange and perplexing dreams. I was asleep only ten minutes the other night when I dreamed I was eating something tasty; I woke to find my fist halfway to my mouth as if I were holding a fork or spoon, though no food. Then I was playing catch with a football, bobbled it, flailed my arms to keep from dropping it and hit the metal tray in front of me, which of course awakened me. Then there were the dreams of falling.]

The Prince followed the music of a flute this time to a door on the right side of the hallway; he pulled the golden ring, and the door opened toward him. Across from him was a full-size mirror with himself reflected. As he took a step towards the image, the counter self in the mirror took a step back. Godric raised his right hand; his mirror image raised his left. Suddenly, without warning, his mirror image began to expand until Godric was looking up at a giant version of himself in the mirror; he rushed forward to see what had happened, only to find himself falling slowly down what felt like a steep well lined with shelves all around. He was falling slowly enough that he could see the things on the shelves as he fell past them: certificates of valor, medals of various kinds of awards, books of his family’s history: The Illustrious Bolts of Nodd; Pride Before a Fall; How to Win a Rich Princess; The Way Up Is the Way Down At that point Godric hit bottom, not hard, but still hard enough to jar some lights loose in his head and send the room spinning…

@ # $ % ^ & * ~ ! / @ # $ % ^ & * ~ ! / @ # $ % ^ & * ~ !.

Amid the blinking lights in his head, Godric rose to his feet. He was indeed at the bottom of a circular well built well lined with shelves. He held his head in his hands till the bottom of the shaft stopped blinking and spinning. He looked up to see where the light was coming from, for it was bright at the bottom of the shaft. The walls themselves seemed to be disseminating the light. He looked down and saw a small golden door at the bottom of the well, a miniature version of the door into the room. The door was about a third of the size of a man.

Godric got down on his knees and pulled the small golden ring attached to the door. The door was locked. He looked around on the bottom self and found a bell jar covering a golden key. He lifted the glass and picked up the key, which he had trouble holding as it, like the door, was small. He finally got it between thumb and index finger and pushed the key into the lock on the door, then he pulled the door open and looked in. On the other side of the door was a formal garden of trees, shrubs and flowers, winding paths and mystery trails.

Godric stretched out on the floor of the shaft, reached through the small doorway, held each side of the door’s arch and pulled himself halfway through, then pushed himself up off a garden walk that started from the door; useful effort expended, Godric stood up. The garden was stunning. He looked around to see if there was a way back to the hall. There was no door out though in the center of the garden, he thought he saw another mirror, perhaps two mirrors. As he tried walking a cobblestone path that seemed to lead to the center of the garden and the mirrors, he found himself moving away from them, back toward the little door that had suddenly vanished.

Godric took a step forward but moved a step back. He thought to himself that he needed Philip for some reconnaissance work, but Philip had vanished like the small door the moment he entered the first room somewhere above him. He thought for a minute, then took a step back and felt himself moving one step forward. Walking backward but moving forward, he saw that he was at least moving toward the mirror or mirrors, or was it mirror of mirrors? He stopped again in the midst of a bed of tiger-lilies, a bed of swirling orange and black spotted flowers. He saw a host of bees building muscles on their sturdy legs from the pollen available on their stamens. He watched them for a time, then walked backwards to the next flower bed, which contained red roses in various stages of bloom, all healthy plants, no stages of rust or black spot. He wondered how a gardener could achieve such perfection, and he felt a tad envious, as he had tried one summer to achieve such perfection in his father’s garden in Nodd, but had failed. For a moment he thought about kicking one of the bushes, but he managed to control himself, laughed at the untoward thought, and moved on.

When he looked up, he saw again his image reflected in the mirror before him. Startled, he moved to one side; there were two mirrors, each reflecting the other apparently to infinity and beyond. He moved back between them and numerous selves moved with him, front and back. He reached out his right hand to touch the mirror before him and watched himself move his left hand in the reflection. When his fingers touched, a blinding white flash of light consumed him, causing him to close his eyes until the redness disappeared. He shook his head, opened his eyes; he was no longer in the luxurious garden, but in a dark wood before a narrow but swiftly flowing stream.

He felt his anger grow. “Stop toying with me,” he yelled into the trees. “Toying with me,” the trees echoed back. “I’m a Prince; I demand to be treated as such.” “Treated as such, Treated as such, Treated as such,” the woods echoed and re-echoed. The sound of dainty, tinkling laughter sounded in the distance, along with the music of a flute. Godric wanted to take out his sword, hew trees, and destroy whatever was continually mocking him. He put his hand on the hilt and started to draw the sword when the silliness of his anger over came him. He started to laugh, sank down on the forest path, when a sudden lethargy overcame him.

Godric closed his eyes, thought how lovely it would be simply to stretch out on the forest path and rest for a minute, or an hour, or a day. Why not a week, he thought? How long had he been at this quest anyway? He deserved a bit of time out. Besides, as far as he could see, there was no way out of the dark woods. Perhaps if he rested for a while something would open up before him. He started to lean back when the sound of some large animal came crashing through the woods. He jumped to his feet, all thoughts of resting vanished as he listened intently. It sounded as though he was surrounded, yet he saw nothing. Perhaps if he crossed the stream…

@ # $ % ^ & 7 ~ !

Godric made certain his sword was secure and jumped. Mid jump, mid stream, what appeared to be a hole in the fabric of the cosmos opened; instead of landing on the other side of the stream, Godric indeed landed on solid ground but solid ground in the midst of a room of weapons before him and tables of food behind him. Light gleamed off the bright steel on the walls and tables; he looked in awe at swords, katanas, scimitars, daggers, knives, throwing stars, fencing foils, shields of various sizes and shapes. On the tables holding the smaller weapons there were also gems of varying sizes and shapes: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, amethyst crystals, tigers eye. The tigers eye gem seemed to call to him. It was attached to a gold chain long enough to form a stunning golden-hewed necklace. He looked around to see if there was a proprietor, then remembered he had no money, only a gemstone of his own, the red veined heart that Adriel had given him. He touched his pocket; the gem felt warm next to his leg. Could he trade that for the tigers eye necklace? His desire for the necklace was overwhelming. He started to touch it, pick it up, then thought better of it and pulled his hand back.

Smelling the food behind him, Godric glanced at the gemstone necklace and reluctantly turned to look at the banquet spread on the other side of the room. Main courses of steak, pork roast, pot roast, with carrots, potatoes, squash, green beans all in plentiful proportions, salads of varying greens with at least nine different flavors of dressings—blue cheese, red catalina, vidalia onion, roquefort, orange catalina and so on, followed by desserts on three tables long—cakes, chocolate, German chocolate, angel food, cherry pie, mince in too many fruit flavors to list. It suddenly occurred to Godric that he was indeed quite hungry.

Godric wondered if the old fairytale caution applied here: if you eat the food of the royal fae, you will remain in their world while your loved ones and friends age and die. Like his desire for the gemstone his desire for the food was overwhelming. He could smell the smoke from the grilled steak, like a stake through his heart, he thought, as the various other smells from the well-cooked food assailed his nose and his mouth; his stomach growled like the wild beasts in the dark wood. It’s too much, he thought again; surely a bite or two could do no harm; yet, he had come all that way to meet and woo a beautiful Princess. Should the fairytale caution be true he would be lost in this land a hundred years. Perhaps a thousand. He had no idea about who found the food (or killed it!), who so expertly cooked and prepared the food, who served it. Suppose it turned to ash in his mouth or turned bitter and he would still have to stay out the lifetimes if that warning were true, a cruel, cruel choice, a cruel, cruel fate. Ignore his desire and move on, and that is what he did!

3 CHRISTMAS POEMS: Milton, M. L’Engle, Donne

The Lord Will Come and not be Slow
                        John Milton

The Lord will come and not be slow,
his footsteps cannot err;
before him righteousness shall go,
his royal harbinger.

Truth from the earth, like to a flower,
shall bud and blossom then;
and justice, from her heavenly bower,
look down on mortal men.

Surely to such as do him fear
salvation is at hand!
And glory shall ere long appear
to dwell within our land.

Rise, God, judge thou the earth in might,
this wicked earth redress;
for thou art he who shalt by right
the nations all possess.

The nations all whom thou hast made
shall come, and all shall frame
to bow them low before thee, Lord,
and glorify thy Name.

For great thou art, and wonders great
by thy strong hand are done:
thou in thy everlasting seat
remainest God alone.

 Into The Darkest Hour

Madeleine L’Engle

It was a time like this,

War & tumult of war,

a horror in the air.

Hungry yawned the abyss-

and yet there came the Star

and the child most wonderfully there.

It was a time like this

of fear & lust for power,

license & greed and blight-

and yet the Prince of bliss

came into the darkest hour

in quiet & silent light.

And in a time like this

how celebrate his birth

when all things fall apart?

Ah! Wonderful it is

with no room on the earth

the stable is our heart.

Holy Sonnet 15
John Donne

Wilt thou love God as he thee? Then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting—for he ne’er begun—
Hath deign’d to choose thee by adoption,
Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath’ endless rest.
And as a robb’d man, which by search doth find
His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,
The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.
‘Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

FAIRYTALE: INTERLUDE 5 - LES

Interlude 5

“Uti and Frui Again”

Here is the St. Augustine teacher/lecturer, Robert Royal, on the distinction between the two loves, uti and frui:

“St. Augustine, for instance, reminds us that whether we have great wealth or little, possess many things or few, are powerful or influential, weak or unknown, isn’t really important. And isn’t good or evil, as such. What’s important is whether we order our lives – all we have and do – towards God. Or not.

The classic way of putting this, which may seem strange at first sight, is that we should be “using,” not “enjoying,” created goods. But wait, you might object. Aren’t we meant simply to enjoy what God made, and isn’t “using” them cold and calculating?

Yes, if that was what the tradition taught. But the teaching is actually the opposite. “Enjoy” in this Christian perspective really means to seek pleasure in things as a final end and to try to increase and hold on to them come hell or high water, which also blinds us from seeing further. (Tolkien called this the “dragon sickness.”) By contrast, “use” means to experience them as the goods that they are. And they are only truly good for us when we see them not as ends in themselves, but as helps towards our ultimate fulfillment.

In De Doctrina Christiana (“On Christian Doctrine”), St. Augustine puts it like this: “For to enjoy (Lat., frui) a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake. To use (uti), on the other hand, is to employ whatever means are at one’s disposal to obtain what one desires, if it is a proper object of desire; for an unlawful use ought rather to be called an abuse.”

[Robert Royal; The Catholic Thing ; Monday, 11/28/22]

The question then for the interlude would be if there was any applicability here for Godric? Godric has a sword, a gem in his pocket, a horse (though not really his), a companion in an odd ontological condition (yes, Philip the crow) and the whole adventure/quest/pilgrimage/journey is toward another: Elesandra, (according to the imp), the ontologically equal other, presumably. In a way, the horse, Aspen, was given to him to use until the adventure was complete. There’s no holding on to the horse beyond its current use; using the horse properly means giving her up once the journey ends. As I understand it, according to St. Augustine letting go ought to be the attitude toward all things. Secure the reins; free the horse to return whence she came.

Since we have a Wizard in this story, he has made me think of the wizard/magician in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero. After recalling all the power he has manifested through his “rough magic,” and that power has been extensive as he describes it, he vows to give it up: he will break his staff, the means for channeling his power, and bury it deep within the earth, and then “I’ll drown my book.” Here he describes how extensive his power has been and still is:

“to the dread rattling thunder/ Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak /With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory/ Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up/The pine and cedar. /Graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth /By my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure; and when I have required /Some heavenly music—which even now I do— /To work mine end upon their senses that /This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, /Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, /And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.”

Prospero had earlier abused his study of magic, attending to it when he should have been attending his political responsibilities as Duke of Milan. His abuse thus led to his political overthrow and his and his daughter’s exile on the island. Recounting the nature and agents of his overthrow to his daughter Miranda, próspero explains:

“Those [liberal arts] being all my study,/ The government I cast upon my brother /And to my state grew stranger, being transported /And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle— Dost thou attend me?”

He has used his time on the island to learn and understand the proper use of time and power. Whereas he had attempted to rest (frui) in the enjoyment of his books and learning, he now understands that they have a use (uti) to achieve the right ordering of both human and political ends, or purposes. Having been so used in the current time of the play, and the desirable ends achieved by Prospero, goodbye wand and book; goodbye enchanted island. Hello Milan and Naples!

Interestingly, the play reveals throughout this perspective on time, that time is also a thing that should be used and not simply enjoyed as if it were all of reality. In other words as Prospero indicates in his history lesson of what took place in “In the dark backward and abysm of time,“ time can be lost, wasted, ill used. But in the play Prospero’s moment to act and rightly order reality is now and the time must be seized and properly used. The entire play is a testimony to that unfolding, from the moment the play begins and we confront the double view of Prospero’s power: in the tempest on board ship, a precarious moment for passengers and crew; in the story to Miranda wherein he provides a second perspective on that storm and meaning itself, and reveals an agitation, a storm of emotion within himself that will need to be properly faced:

“The hour’s now come; The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.     Obey, and be attentive. Canst thou remember A time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not /Out three years old.”

Well, perhaps we have left Godric too long now, but I am interested in thinking about the end of the quest: the woman, whoever the woman turns out to be. Does the uti/frui contrast work there too? Let’s see: in the category of use love, the woman would be an object for him to enjoy, what Buber would define as an I—It relationship, an attempt to rest in the use of the woman for his pleasure, not that she wouldn’t do the same to him, “friends with benefits,” in the current disorder, “recreational sex.”

This is not to suggest that the man and the woman shouldn’t enjoy one another. In their rightly ordered relationship, each would see the other as I—Thou, pointing to and imaging a reality beyond themselves. As Thou each is equal; each manifests a ground of being that contains them both: she for God in him; he for God in her, to borrow a bit from Milton. The sacramental marriage ceremony reveals both elements of the proper love: “to have and to hold from this day forth/Till death do you part. In other words, both having and holding and giving up or letting go.

I mentioned Ferdinand and Miranda once before but it might be good to end in more detail with how the play establishes the right ordering of Eros. Prospero makes it clear in no uncertain terms that premarital sex is anathema; and it is Ferdinand who is so warned, though the warning also involves his daughter:

“Then, as my guest, and thine own acquisition /Worthily purchased, take my daughter. /But If thou dost break her virgin-knot before /All sanctimonious ceremonies may /With full and holy rite be ministered, /No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall /To make this contract grow; but barren hate,/ Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew /The union of your bed with weeds so loathly /That you shall hate it both. /Therefore take heed, /As Hymen’s lamps shall light you.”

Prospero establishes the proper context for the fruition of romantic love, Eros: “sanctimonious ceremonies,” “With full and holy rite.” Should he (and she) violate this injunction the consequences will be devastating: hate, disdain and discord; in other words, terrible sterility both literal and spiritual.

Having, so to speak, rightly laid that upon them, he demonstrates his magic art with a relevant performance about harvest and fruitfulness, wowing and delighting them. Remembering the other plots, Prospero interrupts the show, and goes off, leaving them alone in his cell (also bedroom). From there we do not see the lovers till the end of the play wherein Prospero unveils a surprise for King Alonso:

“This cell’s my court. /Here have I few attendants /And subjects none abroad. /Pray you look in. /My dukedom since you have given me again, /I will requite you with as good a thing; /At least bring forth a wonder to content ye /As much as me my dukedom.

Here PROSPERO discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess.

MIRANDA    Sweet lord, you play me false.

FERDINAND                                                    No, my dearest love,     I would not for the world. MIRANDA    Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, And I would call it fair play.

Fairly obviously Prospero has trusted them and that trust has paid off with Eros playing out on the chess board. The image of chess suggests the rule of Reason over Desire. Therefore, love is rightly ordered in the end, starting with the lovers, but working itself through every level of the social hierarchy. Uti and frui are established in their right relationship.

What a delightful story! And as all good stories are, true.

HE WHO WOULD PRAY - LES

“Microcosm”

Sitting in my lift chair,

Covid perched upon my chest,

I struggle for a healing breath—

Come Holy Spirit be my guest!

Ruthless as a wrestler,

In and out in waves it comes,

I fight each day for breath to pray—

Come Good Lord with fife and drums!

God the Father spoke the Word,

An entire universe unfurled;

I wrestle with this demon strain—

Come, Lord, remake one little world.

“Lord, Teach Me to Pray”

Each day anew I try to pray;

Each day I falter quickly!

My list is short, each person kin;

My inability is sin!

LORD: Help with my distractions!

King of the Universe, today

Help me not lose track and quit

Before I finish half of it!

Before sin rears its ugly head!

LORD: Help with my distractions!

I try to keep my mind alert,

Not think about her bright short skirt;

Lost in details with no bearing,

Everyone one a foul red herring!

I could wear a rough hair shirt,

But then I’d think how much it hurt!

LORD: Help with my distractions!

Our Father who art in the trees

Watching all the churning leaves,

Turning in the lofty breeze—

Lost again in deep distraction!

You alone I’d truly love,

Send down your pure dove from above

To distract me from distractions!

Amen!

ALLEGORY—WILKEN [First Things]

HOW TO READ THE BIBLE

by Robert Louis Wilken

March 2008

Allegory fell on hard times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the charm of beloved works of English literature such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress lies in the imaginative use of allegory, biblical scholars banished the term from their vocabulary. Harper’s Bible Dictionary, for example, published in the 1980s by leading scholars of the Society of Biblical Literature, does not even have an entry under the word.

The neglect of allegory in modern times is not surprising. With the emergence of historical criticism as the dominant form of biblical interpretation, allegory was discredited as a feckless style of medieval exegesis that twisted the words and phrases of Scripture into arbitrary symbols of hidden truths. As one biblical scholar put it: “Where allegory and its variations come into play, the meaning of the text is murdered.” 

In truth, the abandonment of allegory was a revolt against the Church’s tradition, including the tradition that is found in the New Testament itself. The practice of allegorizing the Old Testament—giving certain passages a meaning other than the plain sense—was not an invention of the Church Fathers or the Middle Ages; it was the work of the authors of the books of the New Testament. And in their exegesis of the Old Testament, patristic commentators consciously imitated what they had learned from the New Testament. 

Origen of Alexandria, the first major interpreter of the Bible in the Church’s history, said that “the apostle Paul, ‘teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth,’ taught the Church . . . how it ought to interpret the books of the Law.” In 1 Corinthians, Paul had written that the Israelites in the desert “drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ,” to which he added that these things were “written down for us as types.” 

Paul knew, of course, that the events recorded in the Book of Exodus had taken place centuries earlier. God had delivered the Israelites from the oppression of the Egyptians and led them safely through the Red Sea into the Sinai Desert. While they made their way back to the land of Israel, God sustained them with manna from heaven and water drawn from rocks. Nevertheless, St. Paul says that what happened in the desert centuries ago is not simply past history. These ancient events are dramatic rehearsals of the deeds of Christ, the Son of God. 

Accordingly, Origen believed that Paul, by his example, had provided a “rule of interpretation” for understanding the Old Testament. “Take note,” he writes, “how much Paul’s teaching differs from the plain meaning. . . . What the Jews thought was a crossing of the sea, Paul calls baptism; what they supposed was a cloud, Paul says is the Holy Spirit.” And what Exodus calls a “rock,” Paul says was “Christ.” Christian interpreters, says Origen, “should apply this rule in a similar way to other passages.” In other words, Paul has given the Church a model of how the Old Testament is to be interpreted, and it is the task of later expositors to discern how other passages are to be understood in light of Christ’s coming. Augustine made precisely the same point on the basis of the passage from 1 Corinthians. How Paul understands things in this passage, says St. Augustine, “is a key as to how the rest [of the Old Testament] is to be ­interpreted.”

Following St. Paul, the Church Fathers argued that a surface reading of the Old Testament, what Origen calls the “plain” meaning, missed what was most important in the Bible: Jesus Christ. The subject of the Scriptures, writes Cyril of Alexandria, is “the mystery of Christ signified to us through a myriad of different kinds of things. Someone might liken it to a glittering and magnificent city, having not one image of the king but many, and publicly displayed in every corner of the city. . . . Its purpose is not to provide us an account of the lives of the saints of old. Far from that, its purpose is to give us knowledge of the mystery [of Christ] through things that make the word about him clear and true.”

To drive home the point, the Church Fathers also cited the passage in Ephesians where St. Paul interprets the famous words about the institution of marriage in Genesis as referring to Christ and the Church. The text in Genesis reads: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

Paul comments, “This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.” In Paul’s interpretation, the words from Genesis do not simply signify Christ but are speaking about Christ; that is to say, marriage takes its meaning from the mystery of Christ. At the beginning of his Literal Commentary on Genesis, St. Augustine cites this passage from Ephesians and the text from 1 Corinthians 10 to show that the Old Testament cannot be understood in a strictly literal or historical way. “No Christian will dare say that the narrative must not be taken in a figurative sense. For St. Paul says, ‘Now all these things that happened to them were symbolic.’ And he explains the statement in Genesis ‘And they shall be two in one flesh’ as a great mystery in reference to Christ and to the Church.”

The customary term for this kind of exegesis is allegory, a word first introduced into Christian speech by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians: “It is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. Now this is an allegory; these women are two covenants.” The root meaning of allegory is that there is another sense, another meaning, besides the plain sense. Sarah and Hagar are not simply names of the wives of Abraham; they also signify two covenants, one associated with Sinai and the other with the Jerusalem above. The rock in the desert that Moses struck and from which water flowed is not simply a rock; it is also Christ.

Allegory is not distinctive to Christian exegesis of the Old Testament. It was used by Greek literary scholars in the ancient world to interpret the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, and it was employed by Jewish thinkers—for example, Philo of Alexandria—to interpret the Pentateuch.

Christian allegory has similarities to this kind of allegory, but what sets it apart is that it is centered on Christ. Allegory in Christian usage means interpreting the Old Testament as a book about Christ. St. Ambrose wrote: “The Lord Jesus came and what was old was made new.” Everything in the Scriptures is to be related to him. As a medieval commentator put it, “All of divine scripture is one book, and that one book is Christ, because all of divine scripture speaks of Christ, and all of divine scripture is fulfilled in Christ.”

Allegory (or, if one prefers, “spiritual exegesis”) is interpretation of the Old Testament in light of the new reality of Christ. In the words of Henri de Lubac, the distinguished theologian and historian of early Christian exegesis: “The conversion of the Old Testament to the New or of the letter of scripture to its spirit can only be explained and justified, in its radicality, by the all-powerful and unprecedented intervention of Him who is himself at once the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last. . . . Therefore Jesus Christ brings about the unity of Scripture, because he is the end-point and fullness of Scripture. Everything in it is related to him. In the end he is its sole object. Consequently, he is, so to speak, its whole exegesis.”

For most of the Church’s history (the early Church, the Church during medieval times, and the Reformation era), the Old Testament was read in this way—as a book about Christ and the Church. As the historical study of the Bible gained ascendancy in the twentieth century, however, the Old Testament came to be understood chiefly within the framework of ancient Near Eastern history, culture, and literature.

The books of the Old Testament were, of course, written before the coming of Christ; one task of interpretation, therefore, will always be to set them within the context in which they were first composed. The first Christians, however, recognized that these books were not simply documents from the past but living testimonies to the marvelous things that happened in their own time and continue to happen. St. Jerome said: “Isaiah is an evangelist and apostle, not only a prophet. . . . This book of the Bible contains all the mysteries of the Lord and proclaims him as Emmanuel born of a virgin, as a worker of glorious deeds and signs, as having died and been buried and rising from hell, and, indeed, as the Savior of all the nations.”

In calling Isaiah an evangelist and apostle, Jerome reflects the practice of the New Testament. As the Book of Acts relates, after Christ’s Ascension Philip met an Ethiopian who was returning home from Jerusalem. The Ethiopian was reading the Bible and came to the passage in Isaiah that read: “As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is dumb, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken up from the earth.” When the Ethiopian read this passage, he asked Philip, “To whom do these words refer, to the prophet himself or to someone else?” Philip said they referred to Christ, and, beginning with this Scripture, “he told him the good news of Jesus.” The Book of Isaiah spoke with uncommon clarity about Christ.

It was not only Isaiah, however, that spoke of Christ; the books of Moses, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, the Minor Prophets, the Psalms, and the wisdom books also spoke clearly of Christ. According to Luke, when Jesus met two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus he instructed them in the Scriptures “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” and “interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”

The Epistle to the Hebrews begins with seven quotations from the Psalms and other books of the Old Testament and applies them directly to Christ. “To what angel,” he writes, “did God ever say, ‘Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee’? To whom did he say, ‘I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son’? Of the angels he said, ‘Who makes his angels winds, and his servants flames of fire,’ but of his Son he says, ‘Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever.’” Both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John interpret the words of Zechariah “Lo, your king comes to you, humble and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass” as a depiction of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.

The Old Testament is a large book, and it is not obvious how everything in it derives its meaning from Christ. Just as St. Paul’s letters gave early Christian commentators examples of how to interpret the Old Testament in light of Christ, so the Church Fathers stretch our exegetical imagination by showing how other passages can be read in that way. Consider Isaiah 63:1-3: “Who is this that comes from Edom, in crimsoned garments from Bozrah, he that is glorious in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his strength? ‘It is I, announcing vindication, mighty to save.’ Why is thy apparel red, and thy garments like his that treads in the winepress? ‘I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with me.’”

In the early Church, this passage was understood to refer to Christ’s Ascension. The words “who is this that comes from Edom” were spoken by the angels who received Christ in heaven after his Ascension, and “crimsoned garments” referred to his garments stained by the blood of his passion. In answer to the questions of the heavenly host, Christ says, “I have trodden the winepress alone.”

In his commentary on Isaiah 63, Cyril of Alexandria writes: “His appearance was altogether strange and foreign to the powers above. They were astonished at seeing him come up, and said: ‘Who is this that comes from Edom?’ Edom can be translated either ‘of wheat’ or ‘of earth,’ Bozrah as either ‘of flesh’ or ‘fleshly.’ So they are asking, ‘Who is this one from the earth, this earthling?’ And the crimsoned garments from Bozrah mean that his clothes were reddened from flesh, or, rather, from blood. He is glorious in his apparel. The heavenly powers, strong and wise and filled with heavenly glory, were looking upon Christ, even in the flesh, as a mighty one, thoroughly invincible, who manifests his divinity as well as his humanity to them.”

Although this interpretation of Isaiah 63 may be foreign to current readers, it was almost universal in the early Church. Just as the “suffering servant” in Isaiah 53 was interpreted in reference to Christ’s passion, so Isaiah 63 was an oracle about Christ’s Ascension.

Adifferent kind of example can be found in an ancient paschal homily preached in the second century by Melito, bishop of Sardis in Asia Minor. Melito was a gifted orator who used his rhetorical skills to open the Scriptures to his congregation: “If you wish to see the mystery of the Lord, look at Abel who is similarly murdered, at Isaac who is similarly bound, at Joseph who is similarly sold, at Moses who is similarly exposed, at David who is similarly persecuted, at the prophets who similarly suffer for the sake of Christ. Look also at the sheep which is slain in the land of Egypt, which struck Egypt and saved Israel by its blood.” Here specific moments in Christ’s suffering and death are seen foreshadowed in the lives of great figures in the Old Testament.

Some books—Proverbs, for example—do not yield readily to allegory. The passage “If one gives answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame” stands quite comfortably on its own. Likewise, there is much in the historical books of the Bible that is spiritually and morally applicable in its own right, such as the story of Joseph in Genesis or of David in 2 Samuel. Such books as Leviticus and Song of Songs, however, cry out for spiritual interpretation if they are to be read profitably by Christians. Leviticus, taken only in its literal sense, is more of an obstacle to faith than a means of exhortation or edification, as Origen once observed. It is ­surely significant that Leviticus and the Song of Songs are seldom read in Christian worship today. Without alle­gory, a spiritual interpretation related to Christ, they ­languish.

The early Church read the Old Testament as the Word of God, a book about the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God who “was and is and is to come.” What the text of the Bible meant when it was written, as far as that can be determined, is part of interpretation, but it can never be the last word, nor even the most important word. A historical interpretation can only be preparatory. A Christian understanding of the Scriptures is oriented toward the living Christ revealed through the words of the Bible and toward what the text means today in the lives of the faithful and what it promises for the future. God spoke once, said St. Bernard, “but he speaks to us continually and without interruption.”

Song of Songs uses the phrase “well of living water”; in its original literary setting, this image is crowded in with others and seems rather innocuous. But the phrase “living water” also occurs in Jeremiah 2:13 (“they have forsaken me, the fount of living water”), in Zechariah 14:8, and in Jesus’ discourse with the Samaritan woman in John 4:7-15. All of which suggested to Christian commentators that the expression “living water” called for a deeper understanding than the plain reading would allow. Accordingly, Gregory of Nyssa takes “living water” to be an image of the divine life, which is “life-giving.” In his homilies on the Song of Songs, he writes: 

We are familiar with these descriptions of the essence as a source of life from the Holy Scriptures. Thus the prophet, speaking in the person of God, says: ‘They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water.’ And again the Lord says to the Samaritan woman, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ And again the Lord says, ‘If anyone thirst, let him come and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, “Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.”’”

By relating what is written in the Song of Songs to other passages from the Old Testament, and especially to the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, Gregory is able to interpret the phrase “living water” as life flowing from the divine Word of God like water to refresh the soul.

Once a deeper significance of a word or phrase or image is discerned, texts from the Old Testament resonate with a fullness that could be found only in Christ. The Bible becomes a vast field of interrelated words, all speaking about the same reality: the one God revealed in Christ, whose work was confirmed by the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church.

The task of an interpreter is to help the faithful look beyond the surface, to highlight a word here, an image there, to find Christ unexpectedly, to drink at the bountiful spring whose water is ever fresh. Though early Christian exegesis may on first reading appear idiosyncratic and arbitrary, it arose within the life of the Church and was practiced within a tradition of shared beliefs and practices, guided by the Church’s faith as expressed in the creed. Exegesis was not about novelty but about finding the triune God in new and surprising places within the Scriptures.

Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia. This essay is adapted from The Church’s Bible (Eerdmans).

FAIRYTALE: CHAPTER 17 - LES

Chapter 17

“Castle and Book“

[Well, for everyone waiting with bated breath to see what happens next, I’m rather there myself. What happens next? Godric enters the castle; that’s pretty certain. But as I was thinking about it this morning, I heard what sounded like mice in the woodwork; turns out the sound was simply my stomach, or something lower track. I so missed taking part in the universal, debilitating illness, that I thought I would give it a try. The Covid pandemic did not pass me by, and I can testify that it is not pleasant, especially not when combined with another serious infection. What’s going on, I ask? That’s no way to treat an old man!

Anyway, so far it hasn’t killed me, unless this is me being dead, and death is having to tell the same story over and over. That would be Hell! Heaven would be a constantly new story where the redeemed sinner gets, as someone once said, “to praise God and enjoy him forever.” Someone else wrote that “joy was the serious business of Heaven.” The imp (of the perverse) is getting upset with all the talk about Heaven and threatens to undermine the fairytale if I don’t quit. His threat at the moment is that he will quit correcting my atrocious spelling. That would be serious since sometimes even the word I am trying to write or even think of is beyond his capacities. Ah! I hear the mice again and had better stop to investigate even though the autobiography was going so well. It seems that today’s modicum of energy is just about shot. In any case we still have Godric and his faithful bird, Philip, about to enter the mysterious castle of Ardor.]

Godric walked to the castle while Philip flew above him, a dark shape in a bright sunlit afternoon. When the Prince arrived at the castle entrance, he saw a sign above the wide wooden doors, hanging from chains attached to two sturdy iron hooks. The sign said, Castle Ardor. Godric tied his horse to a rail in front of the castle.

A small sign to the right of the doors said, “Say the door and enter!”

“What?” cried the Prince. “That sign makes no sense. If I say ‘the door’ the doors will swing open? Let’s see.” The Prince tried to push the door open though, of course, nothing happened. He couldn’t move them, even though he put his shoulder against the thick wood of the door. Philip looked up at him from the ground.

“Hey, Boss. Why don’t you do what the sign says? After all this seems to be an enchanted castle.”

“That’s silly!

“Maybe the owner has a sense of humor,” replied Philip. “Ardor, the door? Close anyway. At least give it a try since you can’t get in otherwise.”

“All right. I’ll give it a try! The door.” The doors didn’t budge and the distant sound of laughter echoed around them. “See nothing! It makes no sense! Someone is mocking us as well!”

“Okay Boss, but you didn’t do exactly what the sign says. After all, the sign says, ‘say the door and enter.’” The instant Philip spoke the words, the doors slowly swung open revealing a dimly lit hall-like corridor. The walls of the corridor were lined with hands holding burning candelabras, three candles to each. On each side of the corridor there were doors, all securely closed, each with a brass ring hanging from the side of the door that opened. At the top of each door was a sign, for the moment all the nearest ones were unreadable. Above the corridor and almost disappearing in the dim light ran a balcony. Standing on the balcony though invisible to those below was the Wizard King of the castle and land. He wore a grey beard and blue cape filled with familiar images of the universe, sun and moon and distant stars, as well as with esoteric images of swirling galaxies and cosmic dust. His name was Andor! He appeared to be laughing. Next to him stood his spirit servant, Aventó, dressed in form fitting tights and looking much like a tall, thin man.

“Events are unfolding well, my clever servant, though it took him longer to arrive here than I expected. A naiad can be quite distracting, and I didn’t see that coming.”

“Nor did I, sweet Master, though had she not helped he would have been even longer!”

“Yes, I suppose you are right, though I shall not give up my daughter without putting him further to the test. Have you made the rooms ready?”

“Indeed I have. Where shall I send him first, with his pet bird?” Aventó grinned, pleased with the reduction of another creature to a status below his own.

“Careful,” said the Wizard King, narrowing his gaze. “Don’t underestimate the power of a wise companion, regardless of his present form. As for the Prince, lead him first to the Library. All of the best adventures, after all, begin with a book!”

“Consider it done,” said the spirit, making himself invisible, and disappearing with a rustle of feathers down to the corridor, near to the Prince and Philip. Once there he began to whistle a catchy tune, the kind that gets into your head and stays there all day, if not all week.

“Listen,” said Godric to Philip. “Do you hear music of a rare kind? I think its coming from the first room on the right. Sounds like a flute. Can you read the sign above that door?” As he asked that, the strange word at the top of the door, Barrily, rearranged itself to spell Library.

“I thought at first it said ‘Barely’ but now it’s readable: it’s Library.”

“Good catch, Boss,” said Philip, looking up at the Prince. Had he been able to roll his eyes, he certainly would have. Instead, he used one of his long sharp claws to scratch his beak. “Are you going to try the door. Things can hardly go wrong in a library, unless monsters in books escaped and caused havoc in this world.”

“Yes, we’re going in, and let’s hope all the monsters stay in the books,” he said, thinking especially of the hungry River Troll and the Demon. “I don’t suppose there’s any danger there.” With that said he followed the music into the library.

The library consisted of three large rooms, all of them accessed from the front vestibule, one to the right, one to the left, one in the center. The music now seemed to be coming from the central room; Godric allowed the music to lead him into the room where he saw vast walls with shelves filled with numerous books. In the center of the room was a polished wooden lectern with a large book, bound in red leather and opened to be read, with a fine silver chain running down the center, holding the book to the open pages, as well as to the lectern.

The Prince looked around, awed by the magnitude of the collection. He looked at the shelf just inside the room. The first book he came to was entitled, Slaying Dragons for Fun and Profit. The next was, The Monster Within and How to Slay It. The Prince shuddered slightly and turned to the lectern and the book there. He walked to it while Philip flew up to the top of the stand and looked down at the text. The letters were again jumbled. However, when the Prince looked down, he found readable print.

“What kind of book is it, Boss?”

“It’s a book of magic, a Grimoire; it tells you how to cast spells, cast protective spells, spells to summon demons. Etc. The owner of the castle must be a very powerful Wizard to have such a book and to leave it open in full view where anyone could read it.”

“But the letters were jumbled until you looked at it. It looks as though it was meant for you. You had best be careful.”

“You’re right. But let’s see what it says, first.” The book had three columns on each of the two opened pages. The Prince ran his finger down the page. “Ah,” he said. “Here’s a spell for wealth untold! That could be dangerous. Something can’t come from nothing. What would wealth untold cost in the long run? There are no real shortcuts to wealth.”

Farther down the page he found a spell for invincibility in arms. “That would be handy, Philip. A protection spell, invincibility! We’re always finding creatures that want to hurt us.” He remembered the image of the awful war-torn world he had wandered into earlier in the quest and the woman he had helped there.

“You would do better with an invisibility spell. Then you wouldn’t have to fight anything!”

“Right you are, little guy,” he chuckled. I guess I will indeed skip that one.” As he looked at each spell, the words for casting it became visible where before they had been gibberish. When he moved on he found a spell that almost stopped his heart. “Okay, Philip. Here’s an interesting spell for winning your true love’s heart. Let’s see what it says. If your true love you would win/bind her heart with this sharp pin: love of mine these words I say/ will bind your heart to me this day!”

The Prince looked up from the book for the music that lured him into the room had suddenly stopped. He looked down at the page again. “A spell book is a tempting thing. Magic is an attempt to shortcut reality, Philip. No matter how much your heart’s desire was in her, who would want a woman who wasn’t free to choose or reject. I think we should leave this room.”

“Good idea, Boss! That reminds me of Tessa anyway.“

“Who is Tessa?” asked the Prince.

“Was,” said Philip. “She was my true love, I thought I was hers, but one day she just flew off and never came back. She left a great emptiness in my heart. You sure you don’t want to copy that spell? Love is risky, you know. In any case I now have a true mate; her name is Sophia. Love however is still risky.”

“I know,” said the Prince. And I’ll risk it! Let’s go!”

Godric turned and walked out the library door. Philip flew after him. The candles on the corridor next to that door had gone out.

Meanwhile the Wizard King’s spirit helper, Aventó, flew up to the balcony and made himself visible.

“That went well,” said the Wizard. “There’s hope for our young Prince after all is said and done.”

“What next, Master? The Grave Yard? The Monster Maze? The Plague Town?”

“No. Calm yourself, my trusty spirit. You need to lead the Prince to the Hall of Mirrors. We shall see there how much he’s learned and how wise he truly is.”

“Coming up, Master. On the double. Faster than a hummingbird’s hustle.” And with that the spirit resumed his invisibility and left the balcony for the corridor floor and the Prince.