The Personality of Christ by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapters IX and X

THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB

CHAPTER IX

HOW COMPLETELY OUR LORD’S HUMAN NATURE IS DIVINE

ST. THOMAS (second question) asks himself this question : Is Hypostatic Union natural to Christ as man ? One sees the meaning of his interrogation. We have said that Hypostatic Union is nothing else than the personal existence of the Word, being directly the existence of Christ’s soul, and of Christ’s body.

The question, then, of St. Thomas is this : How far is this union between Divine Personality and human nature natural to the human part of our Lord’s Person?

First of all, it could not be natural in the sense of its flowing as it were from the human, the created part of Christ ; a creature of whatever rank could never have in itself the power of such a union.

It all comes from above. There is, however, another point of view. Our Lord’s human part never was without that divine existence ; neither His soul nor His body existed even for one instant in an un-divine way ; and it is on that account that it may be said that Hypostatic Union is natural to Our Lord as man, because as man He never knew any other sort of existence. It does not seem to imply contra diction that an adult human personality should be at a given moment hypostatically united with a divine person. But in that case, Hypostatic Union could not be called natural, as it succeeded a created human personal existence, and the Mother of that hypostatically assumed human nature could not truly be called the Mother of God. Our Lady, on the contrary, is truly the Mother of God, because Her Child never existed otherwise than as the Son of God.

However, we have not exhausted the subject yet. There is one more way for our Lord’s human nature to be naturally divine, more excellent than the mere fact of His never having been anything but divine. It is this. The mode of Our Lord’s formation in the womb of His Blessed Mother was such that the result had to be human nature with divine existence. She conceived from the Holy Ghost, and conception from the Holy Ghost is necessarily the origin of a nature that must have divinity. So Our Lord as man is naturally God, because the way in which He was conceived admits of nothing else.

This is clearly expressed in the archangel’s message to Our Lady. The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the Power of the Most High shall overshadow thee, and therefore also the Holy that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. He shall be called the Son of God, precisely because the Holy Ghost will overshadow her, so that Our Lord as man is God, in virtue of his conception through the Holy Ghost.

It might be said therefore that in Hypostatic Union the human nature is as divine as divine can be, not only because it always has been divine, but it is divine because, through the laws of the conception, it had to be divine.

The grace of the (Hypostatic) Union is natural to Him in His humanity according to a propriety of His Nativity, as He was thus conceived from the

Holy Ghost, that one and the same person should be naturally the Son of God and the Son of Man.

We ought never to think of Christ’s humanity as in any way separable from His Divinity, as prior to it, or as being the object of a predestination by itself. It was always divine, and according to St. Paul’s energetic expression Christ Jesus . . . being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. 2 There seems to be no inherent contradiction in the supposition that a living, grown-up human person might be united with a divine person hypostatically at a given moment. Human personality, then, would be swallowed up by Divine Personality. But such a union would differ in many things from the Hypostatic Union that is in Christ. The greatest difference, a difference which perhaps would constitute an infinite difference, would be this, that in such a supposition the human nature would not be divine by the very laws of its conception and birth.

The hypothesis would safeguard Hypostatic Union, but it would not be Christianity, and the mother of the privileged human being would not be the Mother of God ; she would be the mother of a man who became God, which is a totally different thing. The Church in her struggle with Nestorianism established the doctrine not only of the substitution of Divine Personality for human personality in Christ, but also the title of Mary to divine maternity, because her Son was conceived in such a wise as to be necessarily God.

In my hypothesis the man thus elevated to Hypostatic Union, though truly the Son of God, would owe endless gratitude to God for the favour. In the Hypostatic Union that is in Christ it could not be said that Christ’s humanity owes a debt of gratitude for its privilege. It has Divine Personality, divine existence through the laws of its birth ; Propter proprietates Nativitatis ipsius, as St. Thomas says in the article I have cited.

Nothing short of Hypostatic Conception can give us a complete idea of Christ. His flesh is all divine, and from the very beginning of the Nestorian controversies, the champions of orthodoxy appealed to the mystery of Christ’s body in the Eucharist as an argument in favour of the personal union, from the very start, in Christ. This very fact that we acknowledge that the only begotten Son of God died in His flesh, rose and ascended into heaven, qualifies us for offering the unbloody sacrifice in the Church and, by participating in the holy flesh and precious blood of the Redeemer, for receiving the mystical blessing so as to be sanctified. We receive it not as a common flesh, nor as the flesh of an eminently sanctified man, or of one who has received dignity by being united with the Logos or by divine indwelling, but as the true life-giving and proper flesh of the Word. For since He is, as God is, in His own nature life, and is become One with His own flesh, so has He imparted to this flesh a life-giving power. 1 This profession of faith, formulated in the council of Alexandria A.D. 430 under the presidency of St. Cyril, preparatory to the great Ephesine council, shows how clear and definite the views of Christian thinkers were as to the extent of Christ’s divineness.

There is one more consideration that finds a natural place here : St. Thomas says 2 that Hypostatic Union is something created. This doctrine, strongly emphasised by Aquinas, whilst containing a world of wisdom, might be easily misleading, as implying apparently an inferiority of divineness for Christ’s humanity.

That Hypostatic Union is a created thing ought to be clear to everyone, after a little thought. In Hypostatic Union Divine Personality replaces human personality ; or, what is more to the present purpose, Divine Personality is united with an individual human nature. Now such a union is brought about by God’s creative Omnipotence, uniting the two extremes into the One Ineffable.

If creative Omnipotence did not intervene, a human nature could never have divine existence, Divine Personality, except in the pantheistic sense. Personal being outside God is always the result of a creative act of God. Now the circumstance that personal being exists before namely, the second Person of the Trinity does not alter the case. It had to be given to an individual human nature, and such granting, or such uniting, supposes as much a creative act as the production of personal being ex nihilo. In this sense Hypostatic Union is something created, aliquid creatum. It is the result of a created act, but a result that implies a series of infinitudes. For though Hypostatic

Union be something created, in no sense is it something finite. To be a created thing and to be a finite thing are not necessarily synonymous. Philosophers admit degrees in Infinitude : there are greater infinitudes and lesser infinitudes. In order to explain Hypostatic Union exhaustively, no doubt every kind of infinitude ought to be pressed into service : it is deep calling unto deep. But one thing is certain : it has no finite element, though it be a created marvel. Christ’s human nature no doubt has finite elements, but that thing that makes the nature divine, Hypostatic Union, is all made up of Immensity and Illimitability.

CHAPTER X

THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH

THE commonest theological formula stating the Mystery of the Incarnation is this : God was made man/ We have scriptural authority for it in the words of St. John’s Gospel, first chapter : And the Word was made flesh/

St. Thomas makes an exhaustive study of the various formulas that express the wondrous mystery, in the sixteenth question of his third part of the Summa. It shows amongst other things how various were the aspects of the mystery known to the great thinker.

Now the formula God was made man has his full approval. It is a true statement. His interpretation is this : God is said to have been made man, because a human nature began to have being through the personality of a divine nature that pre-exists from all eternity/ l

In other words, for God to become man is merely the fact of a Divine Personality doing duty of personality for a particular human nature. Such office, Divine Personality did not exert from all eternity, but started it in time, in the hour which had been predestined. So it is both orthodox and grammatical to say : God became man.

Many of us would feel easier in our minds with that other formula, Man became God/ as it expresses better the elevation of human nature through Hypostatic Union, as it seems to contain no narrowing of the Godhead, but a broadening of manhood. Yet St. Thomas rejects the formula as misleading. His reasons are best given in the third article of the thirty-third question, where he treats of Christ’s conception. I give his meaning. We say with great propriety of language that God became man ; but we cannot say with any propriety that man became God. God merely assumed what is human ; but this human element never existed before the assumption. If it had existed it would have had a separate personality. Now it would be against the nature of Hypostatic Union to unite Divine Personality with a pre-existing complete human being having already personal existence.

In other words, the reason why it cannot be said that man became God is this, that the human part of Christ never had a personal existence of its own. The Godhead that created it in Mary’s womb performed the functions of personality in it from the first moment of its existence.

This, and no other, is the reason why the two propositions, God became man, and man became God, are not convertible propositions. Divine Personality existed in Itself from eternity, before it discharged the office of personality to a human nature. But the human nature never existed before it was given Divine Personality. Its creation and its being raised to Divine Personality are not two divisible moments.

But, on the other hand, St. Thomas admits the convertibility of the two propositions : God is man, and man is God. It is the factum est ( became ) the theologian does not like when Christ’s human nature is spoken of in connection with the possession of perfect Divinity. Only a pre-existing thing becomes properly something new, has new relations, new functions. St. John describes in his first chapter the life of the Word before the Word became flesh/ There is no history of Christ’s humanity before it became divine. Its history starts with its being supported in existence by the Personality of the Word.

But man is God, and God is man. For some minds the first formula is more prolific in spiritual consolations ; for other minds the second formula is more delightful. One is as good as the other, from the point of view of theological accuracy. By the first we mean that Divine Personality has replaced human personality ; by the second we look directly at the human element having its existence through Divine Personality. The first is no narrowing down of limitless infinitude, the second is limitless broadening of finiteness.

Excerpt from Walter Farrell, O.P., A Companion to the Summa, Volume IV, Chapter X

CHAPTER X -- CHRIST THE VICTIM

(Q. 46-52)

Men and the mysteries of suffering and death: The place of suffering and death in human life



TO THE superficial observer, suffering is obviously an interruption of the motion of life, while death is its end. Naturally, then, men have felt keenly about suffering and death; they have felt even more keenly about their inability to understand them. When the two are thrust full force upon the attentions of men, as when the world is subjected to a siege of severe suffering and violent death, philosophies of protest spring up like mushrooms to mark the soil made fruitful of doubt by the flood of mystery. From the early nineteen-twenties, for example, philosophers rebelled at the idea of a providence, of a good God, of an orderly world because men had just been through a World War. No doubt in the nineteen-fifties, if human reason is still recognized, a whole new crop of protest-philosophies will rise up and set themselves against eternal truths because men by the millions have suffered and died.



It is plain that the divine model of human living could not ignore these two spectres that dog the steps of every man. An extremely rare few may escape physical suffering; no one escapes death. Christ had come that all men might know by a glance at His life what they were to do at any moment of their own. To make sure there would be no mistake about these two crucial periods of man's life, He merged the two in a gigantic climax to His own life that the attention of these two thousand years might be focused on that part of His life. He did not minimize the importance of a knowledge of the meaning and technique of suffering and dying.



Their significance for human life: Meaningless catastrophes



In one way or another, every man must meet these supremely hard facts of suffering and death. The way men have met them is an indication of what they have learned of the business of living, how much they have known of the meaning of life. To some men, stopping short at a superficial view of life, suffering was a thing of horror, a meaningless catastrophe which interrupted work, love, pleasure; the mystery, finality, the corruption, and inevitability of death were terrifying, it was the complete end of the only life, the only value they knew. In the face of these threatening unknowns, they fled; but of course they did not escape They are still trying to escape by pushing the suffering of others from sight, by legalizing any means to avoid suffering of their own even though this demands the coining of such high, sounding names as euthanasia, therapeutic abortion, mercy killing, and so on for the dastardly act which has always been known as murder. Obviously, there is little of nobility or mercy in this sort of thing when death means what it does to these modern champions of escape -- the end of everything.



Inhuman events inhumanly met



Other men could find no human meaning in suffering; it was an inhuman thing and they met it inhumanly. Sometimes the weapon of defense was the perversion of sadism and masochism, a perverted wringing of pleasure from pain from which nature itself shrinks in revulsion. In their flight to an ecstasy of passion to block out all reason, these men faced suffering by digging down to a level beneath that of the animal. Still others met this inhuman thing by brutalizing their own sensibilities, by animalizing man. They submitted to suffering stolidly, like dead things, not because suffering had any reason to it, but in a kind of stupid endurance that was a denial of the individual's own nature.



Means to ends worthwhile



Men who saw beneath the surface of life met suffering and death humanly. They saw that the motion of life was not merely the movement of arms, legs, lips, or eyes, but also of mind and heart. Life was, above all, a spiritual race to a spiritual goal; it was not to be held up by a physical impediment, any more than an angel is to be thrown by a stalwart football player. These men left suffering and pain intact, not denying them, not meeting them with brutal indifference, not twisting them into a horrible pleasure; rather they ordered them to the soul's high purposes which are not to be interfered with by any created force. They destroyed nothing of man, neither his higher nor his lower nature; rather they subordinated the lower to the higher in all reason, thus perfecting the whole man.



A divine prescription for success: The way of the cross and its interpretations



In His death on the cross, Christ gave the full human meaning of suffering and added to it the rich flavor of the divine. He was not merely submitting to suffering, making a virtue of necessity; He embraced suffering. So the graphic symbol of His last moments became the universal symbol of all His doctrine and His Life. Those who watered down His doctrine in later centuries quite logically stripped the body from the crucifix; those who revolted against Him, trampled on the crucifix or made it a mockery. They were quite right. For on Calvary, by His cross, Christ gave the full statement of His way of human living, the full details for life to those who would come after Him. If we are to abandon His way of life, we should destroy the cross.



The friends of Christ and His gifts to them



He Himself has said that the only way to follow Him was to take up the cross; and this has been astounding advice to human ears. It is strange to men that divine wisdom, in mapping out the best way for men to live, could hit upon no better way than that of the cross. This was not mere theory, even divine theory, for God took that royal road Himself; it was not a drastic exercise to round the spiritually flabby into shape, for He gave it to the most perfect of His friends -- to Peter, James, John, Magdalen, and His mother. His methods have not varied. The very special gift to the followers of Christ has always been a full cup of suffering; their response to His gift has always been as astounding as the death of the Author of life on the barren hill of Calvary. To them, suffering was not a thing to be cringed from in terror; it was not a brutal dose to be taken in dull stupidity; rather, it was a share in and a completion of the works of the Master to be joyfully embraced, a vital help to others, a safe, sure, short way to heaven. Above all, it was an opportunity for the concrete expression of love, for sacrifice.



On Calvary, Christ's way of dealing with suffering and death was mocked as evidence of effeminate weakness by those whose god was brute strength. The hedonists of the time, whose norm was pleasure, recoiled from it. The intellectually proud, who could not see beyond the walls of the world, looked on with pity or indifference.



Paradox of eager suffering and instant charity



The men of the world have not changed much since then. The Cross of Christ is still seen as an exhibition of weakness, a shocking, revolting thing, or a needless, useless loss. This paradox of a suffering and dying God is not to be understood by the world. The initial paradox was bad enough, that He Who had come that men's joy might be full should leave a prescription of suffering. The consequences of it have been positively bewildering: for the most joyous people in the world are those who most eagerly embrace suffering for themselves; yet these willing victims are the most thoughtful, the most kind, the most pitying towards suffering in others But, then, isn't this a fairly exact correspondence with the Model Who had time and heart, even in His agony, to continue the work of healing the sick, comforting the distressed, forgiving sinners, and providing for the lonely hearts of the world?



The secret of this paradox, as of all the paradoxes of Christian action, is to be found in the union of the divine and the human. Those of Christ's own life flowed from the substantial union of human and divine nature in the Person of the Word of God; those of the twentieth century's Christian life take their rise in the participation of divine life by men through grace. Of course Christianity is a puzzling phenomenon to those who know nothing of God and little of man. The full implications for human living of the crucified Christ are gathered only by one who knows both God and man and spends a lifetime of contemplation, with divine assistance, of both.



It is certainly true that any appreciation of the paradox of Calvary depends upon a humble study of the union of the human and divine in that tragedy. A whimper of pain immediately awakes some pity in us, for pain is well within the field of our own experience; when we have traced it down and found that a man and not a dog is suffering, our appreciation of the pain is deeper, our pity more profound, for we know how much more it means to a man to suffer than to a mere animal. On Calvary, we are trying to understand something of the sufferings of God. The work of this chapter is to look at the passion of Christ in itself, to see what it means for a God-man to suffer.



The suffering of Christ: The passion itself:

The necessity and manner of it



Obviously Christ did not have to suffer as the sea has to roar in a wild wind; He did not have to suffer as a man is forced to stand upright because he is lashed to a post. Had Christ not passed through the hands of His enemies untouched when they tried to seize Him earlier in His life? Even there in the Garden of Gethsemane, the crowd that had come roaring out for His blood fell down at the mention of His name. On His own word, He could have had twelve legions of angels when God knows one alone would have been more than enough. His word had called the world into being; and men came to reduce Him to helplessness with swords and clubs! What stupid weapons for a battle with God!



It is essential that we see clearly that Christ was not forced into His passion. What necessity was involved was that of a means to an end, the necessity a man is under to walk across the street if he is to get to the other side. Man was to be freed from sin, the humanity of Christ was to be exalted, the prophecies of Scripture to be fulfilled; and the passion and death of the Savior were the means by which these things were to be done. This is not a denial of the possibility of other means to attain these ends; the point is that this is the way that had been decided on by God, and God's are not changing plans accommodating themselves to last-minute information pouring in from the ends of the earth.



His choice, then, of the means to the end of the Incarnation was a supremely wise, eternal choice. The passion and death of the Son of God were the best ways to obtain the things for which the Incarnation took place. The point is worth stressing. Perhaps we can understand it by a glance at the reasons for the superiority of the modern transparent, compact, extremely light raincoats for women over a raincoat made, let us say, of sheet-iron. The latter would certainly keep out the rain and so attain the chief end of a raincoat; but it would be folded into a hand-bag with extreme difficulty, would hardly be beneficial to the clothes beneath it, and might easily wear off a few layers of skin. It would certainly be no help to the disposition in hot weather, and be an irritating thing to find draped over a chair. The modern raincoat contributes many more things by which the end of all raincoats can be more fittingly attained. The Christ-child might have glanced around His stable nursery, given one baby smile, of infinite worth because He was God, and then returned to eternal glory. This would have been more than sufficient to redeem men, to attain the principal end of the Incarnation. But would that divine smile have produced all the other things which pertain to the salvation of men over and above the forgiveness of sin?



Would it, for example, have given them that unanswerable protestation of limitless divine love that would stop their human hearts and start them off again in a rapid, eager beat as they attempted to respond to that love? Would men have had that terrifying estimate of the price of their souls, with its consequent conviction of the grave necessity for avoiding sin? Would it have flashed before men's eyes the living examples of humility, obedience, constancy, and justice that were struck out from the flint of the cross? Would it have sent men down the ages with their shoulders a little straighter, their heads a little higher, their step a little firmer in the knowledge that man, who had been conquered by the devil, had turned about and given his enemy a beating; that man, who had merited death, had conquered death by dying on a cross?



That cross against the sky with its arm flung out to the world was not a beau geste. It was not the exaggerated declaration of love from a cavalier professional in these matters. Hung between the earth and the sky, the blood that edged slowly down its rough surface to the earth beneath it consecrated the ground men walked on, while its arms purified the air as if to say a new world had been made. It stood there on the brow of the hill in a bold, challenging rebuke to the fears of men. This was the worst men could do and it could not stop the triumph of a Man; what, then, is to be feared from men? By the fruit of a tree, men had met defeat; by the bitter fruit of this tree, they conquered. Here was the new Moses with arms outstretched, praying. Here was a new rod, striking not the living rock but the very gates of heaven to swing them wide and loose a flood of grace upon the hearts of men.



Fighting men returning from war usually bring back a full quota of strange and interesting stories. It is to be noticed, however, that the stories revolve around the comic side of army life, the strange customs of foreign peoples, the compelling beauty of strange lands. These men have practically nothing to say of suffering and death. It is hard to go into the details of these things. It is much harder when the subject of the suffering is not merely a companion in arms but a companion in heart. Thomas, for all his reputation as a cold-blooded metaphysician, showed this same reticence when he came on slow feet to the very cross itself and looked at the divine Victim. He makes no attempt to detail every suffering of Christ; indeed, what human word could contain them, what human heart hold them? Rather, Thomas adheres to a generalization of Christ's sufferings, to a classification rather than a description of them.



Its degree



Looking at the cross through the eyes of Thomas, it is evident to us, as it was to him, that there is no question of Christ facing the evils which affect the soul directly, such evils as sin or the loss of grace. Nor could there be question of such intrinsic evils as sickness or the corruption of the body. What Christ suffered was brought upon Him from extrinsic sources. In this sense, Christ underwent all suffering.



Not that Christ underwent every individual suffering. Even the ingenuity of hate has its limitations. The officers of Elizabeth had to work fast to complete the sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering. Had a few more details, such as drowning, poisoning, shooting, scalding, and overeating been added, their complete obedience would have been impossible. Add a few modern touches, such as airplane crashes, train wrecks, plunging from skyscrapers, and it is fairly easy to see that no one man can possibly undergo every individual suffering. What Christ suffered was every kind of suffering. His passion was the work of Jews and gentiles, of men and women, of princes and their officials, of priests and people, of friends and enemies. What can a man suffer? Well, he can be deserted by his friends. He can be stripped of his reputation, robbed of respect and honor. He can lose his possessions, even his very clothes. His soul can be weighed down by the weariness of distaste, by fear, by sorrow. His body can be beaten and wounded. It was in this sense of a man utterly stripped that Christ hung naked on the cross.



A man's body can be made to suffer in a great variety of ways. His head, for instance, might be crowned with thorns, his hands and feet transfixed by nails, his face beaten and spit upon, his whole body torn by lashes. He might suffer in his sense of touch, in his sense of smell as by dying in a place long used as a depository of dead criminals, the place of skulls; his ears might be assailed by insults, obscenities, blasphemies; and his eyes might reveal to him the course of the tears streaming down his mother's face as she watched him suffering all these things. All these could happen to a man; all of them did happen to Christ.



He suffered every manner of suffering and His sufferings were greater in intensity than any other the world has seen. Understand, we are still viewing the Victim under that merciful light of generality. It is quite possible that some other man be crowned with sharper thorns or carry a cross a greater distance; the question here is not of this or that suffering but of all these sufferings taken together in a subject Who was the Son of God. We have some notion of the intensity of Christ's sufferings even if we stop at their universality and the slow, exceedingly painful relief that comes through death by crucifixion.



A more penetrating light is thrown on this intensity of suffering if we keep in mind the interior sufferings of Christ. It must be realized that He was bearing the sins of all the world, bearing them with a wisdom and charity that brought the full horror of sin, every sin, directly before His eyes. We must appreciate something of the torment of His soul when we remember that He could look into the very souls of His executioners and disciples as they sinned; and He was God to whom nothing is more hateful than sin. This last point, the subject of these sufferings, brings out fully the length to which God will go in search of love from men. Knowing that this man was God, we can know with what suffering the Man Christ saw the slow approach of death, the loss of this life which was above all other lives, the life of God. The wine at Cana had astonished the master of the feast for, like all things miraculously produced, it was perfect. So was this miraculously produced body of Christ endowed with the keenest of senses, the sharpest responsiveness of appetite; it was most perfectly fitted to respond thrillingly to the lightest touch of joy and, by that very fact, to shudder with the utmost of agony under the brutal blows of pain.



In other men, pain may be assuaged by reason; the martyrs, for example, in their ecstasy could be insensible to pain, or a woman in labor be joyful in her pain thinking of the child who will soon be in her arms. A child might even rejoice a little in the misfortune of having to have a sliver removed from finger, considering the reward promised for submitting bravely to the process. There was none of this in Christ. He would not permit it; rather, He insisted that every faculty operate to its fullest for the redemption of man. All this suffering was in the most complete sense voluntary. He took upon Himself the amount and degree of suffering proportionate to the fruit that suffering was expected to bear -- nothing less than the redemption of all men from all sin; proportionate, that is, to the sins of all the world. That He should have died so soon, after only three hours of agony, could be a surprise only to those who did not know what suffering He was undergoing, only to those who did not understand that this was the perfect Son of Mary Who was redeeming the world.



In insisting on the universality and supreme intensity of the suffering of Christ, Thomas is not forgetting that Christ enjoyed the beatific vision, the joy of heaven. This in no way interfered with or lessened the tragedy of Calvary; rather, the very absence of its resonance in the body of Christ is just one more word in the long recorded testimony of divine love.



The superior reason of man is not a direct subject of sorrow; its object is truth. It becomes involved only in the suffering of the whole man. And it was by this superior reason that man sees God in heaven. Christ on the cross did not suffer directly in this superior reason; but intolerable suffering came to it indirectly from the suffering of the whole man. At the lame time, the limitless joy of the vision was in Christ's will, but damned up lest one trickle of it relieve the suffering offered for men. In heaven, the flood of that vision to the body is such as to spiritualize the material, to glorify the body with the radiance that was seen in the transfiguration of Christ; but on Calvary, this played not the smallest part in relieving the suffering of the body of Christ.



Its circumstances



Death seems so far removed from the young that it is particularly hard to watch a young man die. Christ died a young man, in His early thirties. There was this comfort in His dying: since he surrendered that life in the name of love, there could never again be any question of the unconditional character of that love. The perfect age of thirty is a sad time to die. But it is the right time to bring out the full, deliberate offering of a life for love.



The hill upon which Christ died is just outside the old walls of the city of Jerusalem. It rises sharply from the very foot of those walls to a height that is just about level with the top of the old walls, and so close that a man could easily throw a stone from the wall to the brow of the hill or, peering a little, could read the inscriptions over the crosses of the criminals dying on the hill. Jerusalem was the place for Christ to die, for Jerusalem was a royal city and He was a king; Jerusalem was the killer of the prophets and He was the greatest of the prophets. According to St. Thomas, Jerusalem was the center of the world, the navel of the universe; and this is certainly true if we are speaking of the world of the spirit. It was a fitting place for Him to die Whose death was to have repercussions to all the ends of the earth. He died outside the walls as the scapegoat of humanity, rejected and outcast by His people.



He hung on the cross between two thieves. Perhaps that special touch of disgrace was added in the hope that the people whom He had loved and healed, comforted and forgiven would identify Him with these criminals; if so the hope was vain. Ever since, the world has talked of His cross with hardly a word for the other crosses; kings have searched for and found and carried His cross, particles of it are still adored throughout the world. The others? They have played their part. They clustered around that central cross as around a judgment seat and heard a divine sentence passed. They showed to all men that suffering can be a soaring flight direct to heaven, or a weight pressing us down deeper into hell; for it was from the vantage point of a cross that one criminal recognized the throne and royal robes of the King, while the other saw only a dying criminal who could be safely mocked.



The cause of the passion: The part of Christ



Christ, dying on the cross, was a willing victim but He did not kill Himself. It was not Christ Who stripped off His garments, drove the nails into His hands, or the spear into His side. His enemies could and did kill Him; but only because He submitted to them. He could have rendered them impotent or, submitting, He could have brought His body unscathed through their feeble, human gestures of attack. He did neither. Life was not so much being taken from Him as being laid down by Him. Not envy, not hatred, not the power of His enemies, but the obedience and love of the victim tells the real story of His sacrifice; He was obedient even unto death. An unwilling sacrifice is no sacrifice at all; surely, it is not the means of such a sweeping reconciliation as Christ planned. Man had lost God by disobedience; here, God was regained by the obedience of a Man.



Christ laid down His life in obedience to the command of His Father; the obedience, like the command, was inspired by an infinite love for men. That obedience brought out the terrible severity of divine justice's refusal to forgive sin until the penalty had been undergone; at the same time, it revealed the infinite goodness of God Who sent His only-begotten Son into the world to die that men might escape the penalty of their sin. With the help of His own people, Christ was handed over to the Gentiles to be put to death; salvation follows the same course, from the Jews to the Gentiles, not for the destruction of God but for the happiness of man.



The part of His executioners



Strictly speaking, there were very many who had a part in Christ's death, but their roles were vastly different. His Father gave Him over to death moved by justice, goodness, and love for men. The Son surrendered to death from that same goodness, and from obedience. Judas betrayed his Master from greed; the Jews betrayed Him from envy. Pilate handed Him over to the mob because of a cowardly fear that made him tremble at the name of Caesar. The surrender of the Father and the Son will be praised for all eternity; the acts of the others will be condemned without end.



True, there was some little excuse for the Romans. What did they know about the Messiah and His coming? What interest did they have in the rumors they had heard of the wonders worked by Christ? There was even some excuse for most of the mob that hooted at the heels of Christ up to Calvary; and then dunk away in terror to their homes. They had none of the expert knowledge of the Scriptures that would enable them to judge of Christ independently; even though they had been impressed and enthusiastic about His life and works, it was the function of their leaders to approve and dis approve. They themselves were easy subjects of deception.



But the leaders of the people -- there is a different story. They had the Scriptures and they knew them. They had followed the works of Christ in detail and had examined them with expert eyes. They had the norms of discrimination between the works of God and the works of men. Like all the others gathered on Calvary to kill Christ, they did not know He was the Son of God; but they, above all others, should have known. They could have known only by faith; but they did not receive the faith that would allow their eyes to pierce the veil of His humanity because they did not want that faith. They put the impediments of hate, envy, arid deceit in the way of faith; and only those of good will can see the things that belong to the eyes of God.



On them, as they wished, rests the blood of this innocent Man. Theirs was the greatest sin, a sin in itself greater than any other that can be committed. As we pass down the line of the executioners, the sin becomes less, for the norm of gravity in sin will always be the malice of the will; that malice lessened definitely after Judas and the princes of the people, coming down in a steadily decreasing degree to the common people, Pilate, and the Roman soldiers.



Some one has defined the efficiency of modern transport as the ability to get us a long way quickly so that we can start back sooner. This is really more than jest; it is an epitome of the fact and the vanity of our worship of activity. We have actually come to the irrational stage of seeing positive virtue in rush, hurry, aggression. As a corollary of that, there is pity in our hearts for the poor people who are condemned to live their lives in one place, particularly a small place. To our minds, what a man does with his hands, his feet, or even his brain, are all important; we do not at all appreciate what a man can do with his heart. To the thorough modern, then, Christ on the cross is a picture of utter helplessness, of complete frustration; He could not go anywhere, could not get anything done. A religious-minded modern might ponder sadly on what those helpless hands of Christ might have done, what words the swollen tongue might have spoken, what sinners might have been sought out by the transfixed feet. As a matter of fact, it was when Christ was so helplessly fixed to the cross that He got the most done.



Mode of operation of the passion -- merit, satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption, and efficient causality Divinity has certainly gone to extreme lengths to bring us to our senses, to a realization that in rushing around the world we are only circling back to the place from which we started. We move in circles, inevitably, unless it is our heart that moves. All that Christ had done in those busy three years in which He had not so much as time to eat, was as nothing compared to what He accomplished on Calvary. Just when the full causality of the God-man was unleashed, men stood mocking or pitying His helplessness. From that cross, Christ's divinity operated as the efficient cause of all the wide effects produced by the passion of Christ in the lives of men; Christ's human will, from the deep roots of grace and charity, merited all those effects; His flesh satisfied for the punishment due to our sins, freed us from the slavery of sin, and was the means of sacrifice by which we are reconciled to God. The efficient, the meritorious, the redemptive, the satisfactory, and sacrificial causality of the redemption of men flowed out from a man dying on a cross. This was God's way of getting things done.



Effects of the passion: Negative



A modern true to his training would immediately object that as far as could be observed, all that Christ did on Calvary was to die in disgrace and tear out the hearts of His friends. Just what did Christ get done there? To understand the difficulty of answering that question to the satisfaction of the twentieth century, as well as to appreciate how far we have drifted today from the goals of men, it is only necessary to reflect for a moment on how little the revolutionary effects of Christ's passion mean to the modern world. What do these things mean today: liberation from sin, freedom from the power of the devil, release from the punishment due to sin, reconciliation with God, the opening of the gates of heaven, and the exaltation of the God-man, Christ? What a snicker such a litany would win in Union Square! What reasons for a man to die!



Positive



Yet, it is only by these effects that a man can win the fight of his life. Indeed, it is only the thoughtfulness of divinity and the divine respect for the powers of man that still keep every man's fight his very own. These effects of Christ have been won for us; but we must allow their application in our own lives. The life of man is a battle he must win himself, one that is worth winning for himself as an individual, but one that he can win only because God died on a cross. And the world shrugs in indifference!



The death of Christ: The fact and its effects:



When Christ bowed His head and died, His life ended, as every man's does, by His soul leaving His body. But it is a serious mistake to see that dead body in the arms of His mother as so much human wreckage, a mass of matter destined for corruption. The soul of Christ was not a tow-rope hooking His body to divinity any more than His flesh was a chain tying His soul to divinity. There was no intermediary of that union of God and human nature; the union was immediate and by reason of the Person. As He was taken down from the cross and during those three days of death, the Person of the Son of God and His divinity were still intimately united to that body, still intimately united to that soul, even though soul and body were separated. This Person did not result from the union of body and soul, nor from the union of human and divine nature; this was an eternal Person, not to be destroyed by the destruction of the union of body and soul. What God took, He kept. That grace of union; like all grace, could be lost only by sin; and there was no more sin is the dead Christ than in the living one.



The burial of Christ: Its reasons



In this light, the care and love given to the dead body of Christ, the courage of Joseph of Arimathea in demanding it of Pilate, the sorrow of His mother receiving it from the cross, were more than the reverence that springs from loving memories. Everything suffered by that dead body, even though it were only the caress of love, had infinite value for the souls of men. It is true, of course, that during those three days, Christ was dead; that is, He was no longer man, for man is not a body, neither is he a soul, but a composite of the two. Here that composite had been dissolved. The dead body of Christ was a body without a soul; but otherwise it was exactly the same, still possessed by the same Person, still united to divinity through that Person. Christ had not merited death, but He took it; He had not merited corruption of the body, and this He would not take lest there be any slightest doubt of His divinity.



Its effects on the body



Indeed, it was not at all fitting that that body should suffer corruption; the fact that it did not has ever since been a serene comfort to men and an unanswerable refutation of Christ's enemies. It was a foregone conclusion that men would doubt Christ's death; even though Pilate sent a spear through His heart, and His tomb was sealed and guarded day and night. Precautions such as these cannot stop the doubts of men when doubt seems so much more comfortable a thing than belief; even though it may be necessary to stoop to stupidity by hiring sleeping witnesses to testify to events happening during their deep, such men will have their doubts. Either Christ's death or His resurrection must be rejected under penalty of accepting every single detail of His life and doctrine. For us, who have no doubts, there is comfort in watching Christ placed in the tomb; from that time on, men could watch those they loved placed in a tomb and remember that the doors of every tomb are not eternally locked, that every tomb has an exit as well as an entrance, that it is a gate rather than the end of a road.



Its duration



Perhaps, too, the burial of Christ was to remind us that we are to die to sin by Baptism, to be buried from the world, and separated from the inordinate passions of men. Christ was in that tomb for two nights and a day that we might know it is a double death, the death of sin and the death of the body, that we escape by Baptism and its full consummation.



The descent into hell: Its fittingness



As His body drooped on the cross with the breath of life gone out of it, the soul of Christ descended into hell; not to the hell of the damned, but to the hell which we call Limbo. There was already confusion and despair enough in the devil's kingdom as the knowledge of His victory became more apparent; in Limbo the souls of the just awaited the opening of the gates of life by the death of the Author of life. It is not at all strange to us that Our Lord's first thought in death would be for others, as all the thoughts of His life had been. Only God knows how long the centuries had seemed, waiting there in Limbo; perhaps that was why He hurried so. Surely, only God can tell us of the hilariously joyful reception given the Savior of the world by those who tasted the first fruits of His sacrifice.



Recipients of its benefits



When the short visit was over, there would be a little note of sadness such as perpetually dogs the steps of sin. For there would be souls in Purgatory who had not yet satisfied for their sin and these could have no part in His triumphant possession of His kingdom until the last farthing had been paid; the souls in Limbo would still bear the stain of original sin, and so could never enter that kingdom. As for the damned in hell, He had not come to them, He had nothing to bring them, not the slightest bit of their punishment was relieved. They had chosen, and held fast to their choice; not even the Conqueror, the Master of the universe, the God of all, forces the human will to change even so stupidly disastrous a choice as this.



Mary, on the arm of John, went down from the hill and its sepulchre into a city empty of Christ; but she carried with her the secret that would change forever the view of men on suffering and death. To Mary and John, the mystery of death and suffering was cleared up by faith: its finality was done away with by the knowledge that it was the beginning of a new life; its corruption was more than matched by the glorification of the body that was the ultimate goal of death; death's inevitability was more than made up for by the certitude of immortality.



Conclusion. Philosophies of suffering: Philosopy of joy



In other words, they entered that empty city in full possession of the Christian philosophy of suffering and death. They had learned from the dead Christ that suffering was to be joyfully embraced yet to be mercifully and constantly relieved in others. They knew now that suffering would be their lot in order that their joy might be full; that the way of the cross, for all its sorrows, was a joyful road leading to fuller, and perpetual, joy.



Philosophies of suffering: Philosophy of gloom



In sharp contrast to this, the materialistic philosophies of their age still shuddered before the sight of suffering and the terror of death. To them, suffering and death still remained mysterious, something for the most part hated, yet, paradoxically, something that is quite willingly inflicted upon others. Those philosophies were then, as they have been ever since, apparently dedicated to pleasure and to flight from pain; yet in actual fact, they were philosophies of gloom and pessimism not only to the victims sacrificed to their ends, but to the very champions of these philosophies.



Double basis of difference: The sufferer a victim or a sovereign master



Mary and John, and all who would come after them, faced suffering and death, not only as men and women, but as men and women who had been made partakers in the life of God. Their materialistic contemporaries, and ours, faced these mysteries of pain and death, not as participators in the life of God, not even as men and women, but in a fashion worthy only of something less than a man. Really, it should have been so; the basic differences of the two views clearly would allow nothing less sharply contrasted to the Christian, the victim, the sufferer who dies, is in reality a sovereign master, wielding even such terrible weapons as his own pain and death for his own high purposes, rising above the material and what the material can inflict upon him, always carrying within himself that spark that gives him independence of all that is less than the spirit. In the other view, the sufferer is simply and solely a victim of superior forces; he is beaten, vanquished. There is nothing within him to give him title to independence of the forces that crash upon him to his destruction; he is the slave of obviously superior forces; his outlook is one of hopeless despair.



The goal of great worth



In fact, the materialist has no reason for fighting against hopeless odds. He has no place to go, no goal worthy of suffering, nothing worth the price of death. The one thing he knows is the life he has in his hands, and he knows precious little about that; to preserve it, he should logically go to any lengths, scruple at no means however base. On the other hand, the follower of Christ along the way of the cross aims at goals that are not only worthy of a man; they are goals proper to God, goals so far superior to anything material as to make the loss of any material things, or all of them, a mere trifling price to pay. The Master's question still remains unanswerable: "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?" His incredible promise still holds: "He that shall lose his life shall find it." For there are some things worth the price of all the suffering a man can endure, even of all the sufferings that the God-man could endure; and there are some things to which death is not a threat but a gateway.



The Victim Who conquered and His book of the cross



The world of our time, or of any time, gazing on the Son of God dead on the cross, looks at a willing Victim who conquered, at a Man who died and, dying, conquered death, at a Man who wrote in the indelible words of infinitely precious acts a fundamentally important lesson for all men to read. There it is written, never to be erased, that the spiritual is superior to the material, that all things in man's life, even life itself, are to be ordered to the good of his soul. In the crucifix, the universal symbol of the life, doctrine, and death of Christ, He has left us the whole book of divine wisdom for human living. It is a compact thing, readily scrutinized by the most ignorant, though it is never exhausted by the most wise and the most holy. It has been the book of the saints. In that book there is the answer to the enigma of suffering and to the horror of death. There is the ultimate chapter on human living by the divine Exemplar of human life.

The Personality of Christ by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter VIII

THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB

CHAPTER VIII

AMEN, AMEN, I SAY TO YOU, BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS MADE, I AM. (John VIII, 58)

THE text that I chose for the title of this chapter is one of the many passages of the Gospel narratives that show how even medieval theology, with all its high metaphysics of the Incarnation, never goes beyond the theology of the Evangelist himself. It may state the matter in terms different from those of the inspired writer, but it does not state anything beyond the inspired writer’s expression.

The above text is quite clear; its authority is undoubted; the Jews saw the purport of Christ’s solemn asseveration: He gave Himself the age of the Deity itself. They pick up stones to punish the blasphemy there and then.

The declaration of His having unchanging divine existence, implied in the words Before Abraham was made, I am, was not, humanly speaking, directly intended by Christ, but was brought about by the allusion of the Jews to the death of Abraham and to Christ’s comparative youth. It was the Jews, not Christ, who introduced the subject of Abraham. The unexpected turn the controversy took shows how clear to Christ’s consciousness was the realisation of His own superiority to time and space. I now quote a casual remark of St. Thomas, which he makes in connection with something else, but which shows that the mind of the great theologian habitually moved in a sphere which I might call the sphere of St. John’s Gospel. The doctrine contained in the remark is an intellectual consequence of the metaphysical principle laid down by St. Thomas for the understanding of the Hypostatic Union. Yet intellectual consequence though it be, it is a natural commentary on the Gospel text quoted above. Although the human nature in Christ be something new, nevertheless the personality of that human nature is not new, but eternal. And as the name "God" is predicated of the man (Christ) not in virtue of the human nature, but in virtue of the personality, it does not follow that in the Incarnation we introduce a new God. But such a consequence would follow, if the man (in Christ) had a created personality, as those who put two persons in Christ (Nestorians) would be compelled to speak. Before Abraham was made, Christ is, because eternal Personality has replaced created personality. The thing represented by the term is belongs to personality.

Christ had eternal Personality, therefore He is eternally.

Christ’s human nature did not exist from eternity; it was formed in Mary’s womb. But it exists in virtue of an eternal existence, the Divine Personality. Suppose a man had lost his eyes or his hand; suppose the eyeball or the hand to be restored to him by Divine Power it is certain that the eye or the hand would be much younger than the man’s main organism. At the same time the new members would share the age of the whole organism, as they share its general vitality and power of existence. This comparison is used by St. Thomas in order to express how there is oneness of being, oneness of existence, and therefore oneness of age in Christ’s Personality, though there be in Him the human element inserted at a given period of history into the vitalities of Divine Personality.

The seventeenth question, from which the comparison is taken, is what may be considered the sublimest height of the metaphysics of the Incarnation. It contains two articles, and the second article is the climax of speculative thought: Whether there be only one "to be" in Christ. The answer is in the affirmative.

The replacement of personality which I have spoken of is the definition of Christian councils. It would be a sufficient formula to enable us to state the mystery. St. Thomas has drawn all his conclusions from that great ecclesiastical definition. All our views of Christ, all our love for Him, are not only modified by it, but actually born of it. But when St. Thomas begins to raise the question whether there is only one existence, one to be/ in

Christ, he evidently dares a high thing, more than seemed to be originally authorised by the language of the councils. Yet an affirmative answer to the question is the only thing that does justice to words like those of the text: Amen, Amen, I say to you, Before Abraham was made, I am. That human organism that speaks, IS, exists, has being in virtue of the existence that is Eternity itself, just as the miraculously restored eye lives in virtue of the life of the old organism. For St. Thomas, the conclusion that eternal existence is the existence of the nature formed in Mary’s womb seems to offer no difficulties. He arrives at it as calmly as you arrive at the conclusion that you want food when you are hungry. Existence follows personality, he says; for it is only a personality that makes a rational nature exist finally. Now, Christ’s human nature has Divine Personality; therefore it has Divine Existence. It is God, because it exists through God’s existence. Such is the meaning of that wonderful second article of quest. 17. Its calmness is as surprising as its speculative sublimity. Like the Divine Master who thought it no profanation to utter the words, Before Abraham was born, I am, in spite of the uproarious tumult it raised amongst the Pharisees, St. Thomas, the great master of theology, thinks it no exaggeration to say that Christ’s humanity has the same existence with the eternal God. After all, it is a smaller truth than to say that it has the same personality with the eternal God.

Excerpt from Walter Farrell, O.P., A Companion to the Summa, Volume IV, Chapter IX

CHAPTER IX -- CHRIST THE MAN

(Q. 40-45)

THE improvement of communications aroused a persistent and increasing curiosity about peoples on the other side of the globe by shrinking the world. A desperate world war with ultimates at stake changed that curiosity into a consuming interest that set everyone peering over the back fence into the most detailed affairs of the family just around the world. It was to accommodate this curiosity, to satisfy the urgent demands of this interest, that newspapers adopted a steady policy of presenting this or that particular international back yard in the form of daily maps.

These maps were small, simple, easy to follow and were particularly appreciated by those who had come into contact with much larger, more detailed maps. Thus, for instance, the contrast between the newspaper map and a federal survey map of a rural district is almost like the contrast between the finite and the infinite as far as detail is concerned. The news paper map is better for our ordinary purposes, perhaps, because it is so much easier, simpler, much more helpful. But it will stand only a first glance; by it, one cannot even follow the account in the same newspaper of the military moves the map was drawn to make clear. On the contrary, the federal survey map is so detailed as to be almost frightening; it will, however, stand a second scrutiny. In fact, the more we study it, the more we appreciate it: every road, every creed, even every house is plainly located. With such a map, a stranger can safely pass through this territory.

The Way of life: Stages marked by the divine Exemplar of human living

Christ, as the divine model of human living, gave us a map of life. It is a perfect one, because it is divine; as perfect, it cannot be obvious or easy, certainly it cannot be dismissed as completely absorbed in one glance. Rather, the more deeply it is studied, the more it is appreciated. We may examine it any way we like: we may take a corner of it, study that intently, weighing every line of its detail; or we may stand off a bit to see the map as a whole, with a resulting view of the whole terrain comparable to an aerial photograph.

Looked at in this latter way, three quite different types of countryside are easily distinguished bordering the road a man must take home. There is first of all the space between birth and adolescence, a quiet, carefree, happy time; this time Christ passed principally in Nazareth. This is ordinarily followed by the period, long or short, that is taken up with the prosaic work of living, a time when a man meets only the ordinary obstacles that enter into a human life. Thus, in the years of the public life of Christ, in spite of petty persecutions, the nagging of the Pharisees, the dullness of the apostles, and the unappreciative stubbornness of those He was helping, He was engaged in the business of living. It is only later, toward the climax of His life, that He faced the bitter territory of suffering and dying which, quickly or with agonizing deliberation, brings every man's life to a close. This is the large scale map of man's life: living, suffering, dying. The path is plainly marked by the feet of Christ, indeed, in the last stages of the journey, the footsteps are drenched with blood.

It is not without importance that Christ, the divine model, spent some thirty years of the thirty-three He had to live at the business of living before plunging into the last two stages of suffering and death. In this, as in other things, Christ took the hard way. Living is a preparation for suffering; above all, it is a preparation for death. It is the long, slow, patient hours of preparation that gall the heart of a man; yet it is only a master in the art of living who knows how to suffer, and only those who know the meaning of life can know something of the art of dying, for that s the art of plunging into another life.

In a sense, suffering is an intensified course in the perfection of living. If at the start of our suffering, we do not know very much, we must learn shortly for suffering plunges us into the Master's role. We make some curious mistakes, do some incredible fumbling, but we catch on because we have to. When we have learned the lessons of living and suffering, then we are ready to die; for then we are ready to try a greater life.

Reasons for the order of these stages

Thomas treats these three stages in the life of Christ as distinct chapters, going easy on us with the knowledge that our minds must learn slowly, step by step. To plunge into a consideration of suffering, by-passing living, would be like plunging into calculus before having learned the meaning of numbers. In life itself, there is always the fear that suffering, coming too soon, may result in cowardice, bitterness, self-pity, ands ultimately, despair. The conclusion would seem to be that only the old, and therefore wise, should suffer were it not for the easy grace and masterly perfection with which a Christian child suffers. Since Christ came, you see, even a child can be wise, can taste of the fullness of life.

In this present chapter, we shall limit ourselves to the first of these three stages of human living: the prosaic business of ordinary living as it was carried out by Our Lord, Jesus Christ. If we isolate this spot on the map of life left us by Christ, standing back a little to get the whole view of this little section, several high points immediately stand out. There is, for instance, His converse with men; then His doctrine; His temptation; His miracles; and His transfiguration. Remembering that this was the divine Exemplar of human living, we can understand that these outstanding activities of Christ are a model for the activities of every man; a truth that is immediately seen when it is translated into the language of ordinary life.

Divine lessons in human living: Four activities of man

Thus translated, we see the life of Christ as plainly marking out the four activities of men: the fast hold on human things, which is to say the embrace of other men and the rejection of the devil; the offering to others of the abundance of one's own mind and heart, a task which, of course, supposes both the abundance and the willingness to share it; then the arrangement of the furniture of the soul to make room for divine things, working the wonders that God has given men to work, fitting oneself to be an instrument of divine power; finally, the appreciation of the inner glory of oneself and of all other men. In other words, Christ, by His living, brought special emphasis to hear on the fundamental actions which must find their way into the life of a man. These are the things a man must do if he is to live up to his high destiny; this is the perfect test of success or failure of a life.

Their modern contraries

An age that had failed by this test would look something like this. Instead of embracing other men, there would be a world-wide contagion of hate; rather than shun the devil, such an age would embrace the devil himself if he furthered the purposes of such an age. This, of course, need not be so crudely stated; the same thing could be accomplished by a series of catchwords like "business is business," "ethics is a personal matter," "right is what is good for the party, the race, the class," and so on. Instead of advocating the sharing of the abundance of mind and heart, such an age might urge every man to be a rugged individualist, working entirely for himself whatever the cost to others; again, the thing might be said less crudely by insisting that men were really working for a far distant ideal, like the perfection of humanity, the race, or the party. Such an age, rather than insisting that men make room for divine things in themselves and fit themselves to be instruments of divine power, would ask men to narrow their minds down to the world of the senses and the goals that are proper to masses rather than men. No man would be encouraged to look for enduring glory either within himself or within other men; for that would be completely fatal to the aims and ideals of mass movements since, in that case, all other things would have to serve the individual. A vision of glory man must have; so this age would speak movingly to him of the glory of the state, the race, the group, of humanity.

However, a human way of living is not to be attained by destroying either the group or the individual. That is a modern method of meeting complexities, a method which, if adopted by the medical profession, would result in doctors shooting the patient whose diseases they could not diagnose. These are ways out of a difficulty, surely; but in the first case the humanity of life is destroyed as effectively as the second destroys the life of a human being.

Christ the Man -- His converse with men:

Essentials for social intercourse: justice and charity

Men are made to live together, to associate, to converge. That very word, "converse," contains the whole story; for its original meaning is to turn, to swing about frequently as a star swings serenely in its orbit as in the place where it belongs This is where men belong; in association with other men. The life of a man turns about, around, even within the lives of others; indeed, this is so true that we keep the circle of our lives small enough to make that constant and frequent turning possible. In other words, all men live in a small town because they are men. A New Yorker might be indignant at such a statement, thereby proving it; for his beaten path does not allow him to see much of the city. Anyone else would discover in very short order that New York City is made up of thousands and thousands of small towns. Every man is constantly putting up fences, marking out paths, placing limits to the activities of his days in order that he might swing through the daily orbit familiarly, easily, with a pleasant sense of belonging.

That same rich word, "converse," with its insistence on frequent turning, carries a warning of the difficulties of social life. The frequent contact with men easily brings with it the danger of friction, of heat, of wearing, with the possibility of disintegration coming precisely at the point of contact. Certainly these dangers exist in social life; to an age as mechanically expert as our own, it should be immediately clear that men living together must have a social lubricant of some kind.

The lubricant of society is Justice; for the very least that must be given to men, if they are to live together, is that which is their own. Men's rights must be respected; otherwise there will be, at the point of contact between lives, a disintegration either of the society or of the individuals composing the society. If men are to live together perfectly, living at the intense degree that perfection demands, the added, high-grade lubricant of charity is absolutely necessary. It is charity which brings not only the rights of other men into consideration, but also the very needs of others. Without these, charity and justice, society has no chance for continued existence as human.

Fittingness of Christ's life among men

All the centuries have been surprised that God came down to live in the tenement of human society. He must have known that there His life would be crowded into the lives of others, would bump into them, clash with them, cling to them, bounce off them. Who could have believed that God would live so with men, humanly, familiarly, pulling the walls of His world about Him in a circle small enough to be completed again and again? Yet, in fact, He had His own country, His own city, His mother, relatives, friends, acquaintances. God did indeed come very close.

Its characteristics: Not solitary and austere

He might very well have insisted on the infinite superiority of His divinity and, while taking on a human nature, have lived off to one side, solitary, hidden from the eyes of the vulgar horde, much too good to mix with them. Fortunately, snobbery is not a divine trait or there would never have been an Incarnation. God came to teach men truth and to free them from sin; so He came to the places where truth was threatened and sin flourished. He elbowed His way into the crowded market-place, walked the dusty roads, thundered against the violation of the temple at the very height of a feast. He did not sit back, like the mythical maker of a perfect mouse-trap, content with His perfection and graciously stooping to forgive any sinners who might come to Him. He went out on the highways and byways seeking the sinners, pursuing them like the Hound of Heaven He was, eagerly, anxiously, relentlessly.

He came that through Him we might have easy access to God. We needed His help, for it is not an easy thing to go to God, particularly when we are weighed down with sin; even though we know there is no place else to go, we still have our human pride and our human fear. The enemies of Christ unwittingly made clear to the sinners of all future ages what confidence and courage His familiar life with men had poured into the human hearts of His time by accusing Him of surrounding Himself with sinners and publicans. Sinners ever since have laughed with joy to learn that the men who had the most reason for terror were precisely the ones who came to the feet of the Son of God.

Of course they came to Christ; He had made Himself one with men. He did not embrace the rigid fasting and penance of John the Baptist, for He did not wish to tower above men, striking terror into their hearts; rather He came down among men that they might more easily walk into His divine heart. He gave a perfect example in the absolutely necessary things and among these rigid abstinence from food and drink is not included. Abstinence is not an end in itself but a means by which men might attain to control and continence; the sinless Christ had no need of this means, so He lived as other men, eating and drinking.

True, He slipped off from time to time alone: to a high mountain to pray, into a desert to fast. But that was not to mark Him off sharply from other men or to furnish Him with an escape from social intercourse with men; it was to etch more deeply into the hearts of His apostles the truth that he who would give the fruits of contemplation to others must himself have some physical quiet, some time to pray, to stand off a little from the roar and confusion of life that he might keep his own values safe. For there is always the danger, in such work, of taking personally, and seriously, the honors men pay to an office; not to speak of the danger of starving the appetite for the things of God.

Poor

All through His life, Christ felt the privations and tasted the joys of poverty. On His own testimony, He was hungry, thirsty, and without a place whereon to lay His head. Nor was this a condemnation of riches. It was no secret in Christ's time that riches can be an occasion of pride and offer opportunities for sins that are not open to the poor man; but then neither were the men of that time ignorant of the fact that poverty can be no less an occasion of sin, indeed, an occasion of all those sins a man will commit to seize the riches upon which his heart is set. It is neither riches nor poverty that count; but the poverty of spirit which is a casting aside of the trinkets of the world in the realization of how little they contribute to the perfection of man's life.

Christ's divinely deliberate poverty was a bold declaration that man's life is not one of the body but of the spirit. Too, it was a thundering warning to His disciples. They were to give their whole time to God, not to become involved in the world of business; their teaching must not be open to the suspicion of avarice; their hunger and thirst must be a testimony to the wor1d that they had come, not in search of corporal riches, but to dispense spiritual wealth. They would conquer the hearts of men not by human power, but by divine power through human weakness.

Obedient to law

Men do not need riches for human living; they simply cannot get along without fellowship and law. It is small wonder that Christ insisted so strongly on these two. He came to perfect the imperfect law, yet His observance of that imperfect one was most exact; He came to liberate men from the burdens of the Old Law, but first He carried the burden Himself. None of His contemporaries could accuse Him of sin. He was no lawbreaker; for He would not have us miss the fact that the fruits of sin are degradation, subjection, and tyranny, not the liberty and perfection He came to give us. Even His indignant declaration that the Son of man was Lord of the Sabbath was not a rejection of law but a condemnation of a misinterpretation and a vicious perversion of law. Clearly the law of the Sabbath was not meant to forbid divine works; it did not prohibit the works necessary for life, even for corporal life; above all, it did not prohibit what pertains to divine praise and worship.

Now and then, the commands of the law seem unbearably heavy. If our human nature does not point this out to us, there is an angelic nature always ready to whisper it to us; for our fight for perfection is not only against our own nature but against the princes, the powers, the dominations of the angelic host who lost their own battle long ago. The abstract assurance of divine help against these vastly superior forces is a grand comfort; in the actual heat of the battle, it is a more solidly comforting thing to our human hearts to have before our eyes the concrete story of divinity's own strategies against satanic cunning.

Victorious over Satan -- Christ's temptation: Its reasons

The temptation of Christ was just another of the devil's bad mistakes. He had to guess; and he guessed wrong. Not even an angelic intelligence could pierce through to the divinity of Christ, for that is something to be believed, not seen; the devil could see the sinless life of Christ and suspect the mystery, then remember the infant helplessness of Christ and doubt that God could make Himself so lowly. He could not believe, for belief flows only from a good will. Up to the last minutes of Christ's life, then, the devil was on tenterhooks about this strange Man; was He really God, or was He merely man?

It was fortunate for us that he made the mistake of trying to find the answer to that question. At least, his mistake protects us from foolish pride or smug security in our own sanctity. For sanctity is no guarantee against temptation; it is an invitation to it. The devil hates saints, they approach so closely to God; and, with the stupid stubbornness that has marked all of his career, he continues to batter his head against the divinely protected wall again and again. Really, sanctity and good works constitute a kind of diabolic desert where there is neither shade nor rest for the evil one. Indeed, sanctity is a desert place in another sense, for the corridors of sanctity are seldom crowded and man always faces his greatest dangers alone; so it was that Christ underwent His temptation when He was alone in a desert place. It was His invariable custom to face first the hardest of the things He demanded from us.

He went at that difficult task in a fashion that leaves no doubt in our minds as to the method we must pursue. There is no better preparation for future temptations than present fasting and penance. We know very well that there is no time in our lives when we can depend upon quiet security, rest on our arms idly waiting for the next fight to come up; surely we cannot take any chances on the grounds that we have worn down our strength with laborious good works. It was to a tired and hungry Christ, tired and hungry from fasting and penance, that the devil came. Whatever the cause of the fatigue, it ii just at that time, with our body protesting a bit, that the devil is most likely to make his attack; he was never one to overlook so powerful an ally as our sense appetite.

His diabolic strategy in the temptation of Our Lord is worth noting well. Since temptation must always come from the outside as far as our soul is concerned, it must be by way of a suggestion. Being what we are, suggestion has no chance for infiltration except along n path already made smooth by the journeys of our heart. The devil does not shock a saint into alertness by suggesting whopping crimes; he starts off with little, almost inoffensive things to which even the heart of a saint would make only a mild protest. So it was with the temptation of Adam; so also with the temptation of Christ. These two heads of the race could not be grossly attacked; they were to be subtly fooled. To our first parents, the devil made an intellectual appeal, a suggestion to that element of curiosity in all of us, asking: "Why did God forbid this particular fruit?" With that wedge securely in, he became bolder, appealing to pride and vainglory with a promise that their eyes would be opened; it was only when definite progress seemed to have been made that the full horror of the temptation was made plain in his invitation to the extreme pride of rebellion -- they should become like gods.

Its order and manner

When the devil approached Christ, he used practically the same strategy -- there is, after all, very little room for originality in the line of sin and temptation; he was perhaps a little more subtle with Christ, paying Him the same dubious compliment a bandit pays his victim in approaching him with extreme caution. He tempted Christ first with what even the most spiritual of men desire, the food necessary to sustain the body: "If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread." From there, he went on to that to which even spiritual men are too often victim, ostentation and vainglory: "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down . . ." (from the temple). With inevitable grossness, he advanced a temptation that appealed not to spiritual but to carna1 men, the appeal of the riches and the glory of the world, going even so far as contempt of God: "All these will I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me."

The devil, of course, understood that the desire for food was no sin. By reminding Christ of His hunger, the devil could at least discover whether this mysterious Man were willing to call on God for a miracle instead of taking ordinary means to obtain food; means such as John the Baptist had used, subsisting on locusts and wild honey, or the even simpler means of turning about and going to the nearest town for food. If Christ were willing to do these things, He might be guilty of gluttony in resorting to miracles rather than waiting for His food; there would be an even greater possibility of a taint of pride entering into His life.

The first thrust was not successful. Wisdom in the tempter would seem to indicate a complete change of attack, a search for some even subtler approach. But the devil is not wise, which is one of the reasons why he is a devil; the planned attack had to go forward, in spite of the failure of the first necessary maneuver, stupidly becoming clumsier at every step. It is no sin to trust in God, quite the contrary; but to plunge off a great height in deliberate temptation of God, demanding a miraculous rescue, that is something else again. To desire riches and the honors of the world is not necessarily wrong; but to be willing to abandon God and adore the devil to attain those ends, there s no excuse for that Christ was quite patient with the first two temptations, for, after all, He had come to conquer the devil by justice not by overwhelming divine power; at the third temptation, He lost all patience. He did more than reject the temptation, He dismissed the devil with a brusqueness that must have been gall to so proud a spirit. This was something not to be tolerated for an instant; for this was a direct attack, not on the things of men, but on God Himself.

That outburst of divine indignation sent the devil clinking away, still mystified by the God-man. When he had gone, the angels came and ministered to their Master. We shall read once more of an angel ministering to a tired Christ; then it will be on the edge of His passion, as here He was on the threshold of His public life. Each was a beginning; and it is at just these moments that comfort is needed, for beginnings, particularly beginnings of divine things, are hard. Since then, it is not angels but the Master Himself who brings comfort to the hearts of men courageous enough to begin.

Christ the Teacher: The doctrine of Christ

From the desert, Christ returned to the cities of men and set off on His career of bearer of divine truth to men. Much later, this part of His life would be summed up with a simplicity whose beauty forbids adornment: He had done all things well. He spoke with the appeal and persuasiveness of an orator reading the heart of his audience as plainly as the page of an open book; He denounced evil with the thundering authority of a supreme legislator; He confirmed His doctrine by stunning miracles, even more by the calm, persistent, quiet sinlessness of His life. All this was but the vehicle of His message. The doctrine itself surpassed anything that teachers of men have ever conceived; and it answered the deepest demands of the hearts and minds of men.

Its immediate subjects -- exclusively Jews

Yet, looked at objectively, the actual proposal of this doctrine seems to have been miserably limited. It was strictly held within the narrow limits of Palestine and, even there, was restricted to Christ's own people, the Jews. Why did not Our Lord preach to an men? How could He expect the same results from the lesser teachers to whom He commissioned this world-wide preaching? The point is that the lesser teachers actually achieved greater results, thereby showing more plainly the power behind that teaching. Obviously, it requires more power, not less, to accomplish through other, frailer instruments, than to work from the abundance of one's own expertness and power; only one who possesses an overflowing abundance can safely and effectively share it with others. It was the divine power of Christ that could send His small band of apostles to convert the world -- and have them succeed.

Christ's restriction of His preaching to the chosen people was part of that orderly procedure so perfectly proper to God's action. The promises of a redeemer and a messiah had been made to the Jews, not to the Gentiles; the Jews, then, should receive the fulfillment of these promises. They were the chosen people, they had had generations of preparation; they should be given the first chance to welcome the Messiah. From them, as a final, perfecting preparation, all excuse for rejecting the Messiah should be removed. But why did Christ not branch out in His teaching after the initial rejection by His people? That is not the limit of the patience of God. Seventy times seven was the number He gave Peter, and Peter was only a man. No, God keeps knocking tirelessly at the door of a soul until the rejection is ultimate, hopeless; until God Himself is put to death and an end made to His teaching.

Its characteristics: Not without offense

He came to the Jews in fulfillment of divine promises, in the name of God's love of the race. His love was the strong love of God, a love great enough to be terribly severe. By their malice, the leaders of this chosen people were impeding the salvation of the whole race; they were rejecting the doctrine of Christ which alone held out hope of salvation; their vice. were corrupting the life of the people. This was not the time for a lover of the people and a teacher of truth to tread gently lest he hurt the feelings of some who were considered great among men. Of course Christ roared against them, sparing them nothing; yet there was the full vigor of divine love in that violence, a love that embraced the leaders perhaps even more strongly than the people who followed them.

To curry favor at the expense of truth may serve the disastrous ends of cowardice and selfishness; it can do no good to men or truth, for there is no price at which either men or truth can be sold. It does no cause good to sacrifice men in favor of power, for it is men and God who are the sources of power. On the other hand, it did the cause of Christ no harm to uphold the truth at all costs, to place men before all else. The people of His time, as those of every age, knew well the corruption of their leaders. If Christ had venally won the whole-hearted support of these corrupt leaders, He would probably have lost the few hearts that clung to Him as the sparse fruit of that three years of sowing; He would certainly have lost the millions of hearts that have since come to Him as the full harvest of His labors.

Public

When, in the last days of His life, Christ was called to account, He could say with complete truth: "I have spoken nothing in secret." He had not come to hide divine truth but to manifest it; He was not a miserly Master huddling over His knowledge in dark corners, gloating over His exclusive possession of it, afraid to share it lest He lose His mastery. The things He had to say needed nothing of the garments of sly ambiguity which hide the ugliness of the obscene and allow it to slip furtively into the souls of men. Christ taught publicly: to crowds in the temple, on the sea shore, in desert places, on the high road. To the little group of apostles and disciples, He talked incessantly. He let slip no opportunity to publish His truth. Some things He spoke to the multitudes in parables, giving them the milk of children because they were not capable of the meat of men; clearly, it was better for them to have this than nothing at all. Even these parables were explained in detail to the apostles to whom it was given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God that they might instruct the children of men.

Always oral

Many years after, closing his own attempt to put the teachings and deeds of Christ in the prison of written words, St. John admitted the hopelessness of it: "There are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written." The world could not contain the books, only heaven can; it is quite impossible to contain the sublimity of the teachings of divine wisdom within the narrow confines of words. Christ Himself wrote no words beyond those few He scrawled in the sand to scatter the accusers of the adulteress; how significant that it should have been sand in which He wrote! He did His real writing on the hearts of men and thus forever scotched the petty error that His doctrine was not more than is contained in the written Scriptures.

Writing seems somehow unworthy of the dignity of God. There is, first of all, the slavish character of the labor; then, too, the written word is thrown broadcast with just a faint hope for the best, like the seed of a sower thrown into the wind. Christ reached all men, sending His words carefully, from hand to hand, down the long line of infallible teachers to whom His word was entrusted. The complaint against His lack of writing has no justification. Those who make the complaint would not believe if they were given books autographed by the Son of God, any more than the brothers of the rich man in hell who would not receive Moses and the Prophets would have believed one returned from the dead. For it is not lack of truth, but lack of the courage to desire truth that is truth's chief obstacle. It is hard to see how the autograph of Christ would carry more weight than His summons to Lazarus already dead four days. Yet the result of that miracle was not a complete conversion of all its witnesses; you will remember that there were some who sought to kill Lazarus that the miracle might be denied, as though the second death would be more irrevocable than the first.

Christ the Wonder-worker:

The miracles of Christ: Their reasons

While the written word did not befit the dignity of Christ, His miracles certainly did. There was nothing confining about them; rather, they threw open the vast spaces of infinity to the human mind. Indeed, their whole service is to lift the mind of a man above the limits of nature by bringing him into sharp contact with the Author of nature. A miracle is a wave of divine power that lifts men up to the crest and lets them see the distant shore if only for an instant. More concretely, they are worked either to confirm the truth or to show the presence of God in the man who does the works of God. On both counts, Christ fittingly worked miracles.

Their cause

The miracles of Christ, like all true miracles, were worked by divine power, for miracles are such precisely because they outstrip the powers of nature. It is true that Christ reached out and touched the leper to cleanse him, it was His human voice that awoke Lazarus, Magdalen knew from His loving glance long before He spoke that her sins were forgiven; but the hand, the voice, the eye were mercy instruments of divinity, channels which carried the power of God. Christ, even as an Infant in the manger, had both the divine power and the human instrumentality of that power, for He was both God and man. It is, however, an extravagance of unbridled imagination to picture the childhood and adolescence of Christ as a gloriously triumphant journey leaving an uninterrupted wake of miracles behind it. If there was bread in the house at Nazareth, it was because it had been earned by Joseph and his Son; if the clothes were clean, it was because Mary had washed them.

Their beginning

There was no point in miracles until some truth was to be confirmed; until it was time to manifest the divinity of Christ to all men. The first miracle, then, is that recorded as such by St. John, the changing of water into wine at the marriage feast of Cana. It is comforting to remember that this first miracle was worked at Our Mother's request, that it was for such a human end as saving the host of Christ from embarrassment, that it was a benediction of such a holy thing as marriage. I have often wondered what the bridegroom said to the master of the feast in answer to his complaint about saving the better wine until the last. Probably he just smiled knowingly and shrugged his shoulders, hoping Christ would not give him away.

Their purpose

From this beginning to the very end, all the miracles of Christ had the common purpose of confirming the truth of divinity, of manifesting to men the presence of God among them. All were, of course, works transcending natural powers; all were done in Christ's own name. Again and again, He insisted that it was in confirmation of His claim to divinity that He worked miracles; if what He said were not true, then God Himself would have collaborated in a gigantic lie.

The scope of Christ's miracles

Certainly, the scope of the miracles of Christ was a plainly written documentation of His mastery over all the universe, that is, of His divinity. Angelic beings bowed to His command in every expulsion of the demons from their possessed victims; the heavenly bodies offered their homage and submission when they covered their face against the spectacle of the death of God. Most constantly, however, His miracles revolved around His fellow-men; of these, the outstanding ones are the healing miracles, the miracles whose final goal was not the salvation of the body but of the soul. After all, He had come to save men, to enlighten their minds, and relieve them of the burden of sin. That no least doubt of His divinity might remain in the minds of men of good will, all irrational creation gave Him unquestioning obedience.

These were proud days in the lives of the apostles. The simple fishermen of Galilee were living familiarly with the Lord of the universe. Before their eyes, nature tumbled over itself in its eagerness to obey Him, the eyes of faith showed them the greater miracles of grace within the souls of men; they shared His confidence, listened to His patient reiteration of divine truth, even partook of something of His infinite power on that mission where they were told to heal the sick, raise the dead, give freely of what they had freely received.

They returned from that journey bubbling over with enthusiasm, swelled a little with consciousness of self, to be met with the laconic word of the Master: "Let us go apart and rest awhile." That is, let us stop for a minute to think, to remember, to pray; after all, you are the same men you were before, not God. As the days of His life grew shorter, His warnings of His passion and death grew more plain; to the apostles, they were steadily unwelcome, even a little frightening, shaking that confidence and sense of power that had so recently come to them.

The glory of Christ the Man -- the transfiguration: Its fittingness

They had some reason for fright. He was starting them off on a long journey over a road that was rough and steep. His divine wisdom could easily understand that the comforting memories of three intimate years with Him would hardly be enough for them. In the kindness of His heart, He gave them concrete, ocular evidence of some of the joys that awaited them at the end of the journey. For an instant, there on Tabor, Christ unveiled to His beloved three the glory of His human soul shining through His human body.

Nature of its brilliance

Understand, this transfiguration was a revelation of human glory. It was essentially the same brilliance that is a permanent quality of the bodies of the saints after the resurrection, the brilliance that would have been constantly shining forth from the body of Christ had not a constant miracle been worked to prevent what would have overwhelmed men as it did the apostles on Tabor. This glimpse of glory completed the dim sketch of the glory of the human body after the resurrection. Other vague details had been drawn when Christ passed through the closed womb of the Virgin, when He walked upon the water, when He passed unharmed through the hands of the Jews who attempted to apprehend Him before His hour had come.

Its witnesses, human and divine

This apex of human glory was not only for the men who were to come after Christ, but for those faithful ones who had preceded Him. Fittingly, then, Moses and Elias were present at that preview of glory in the name of all who had gone before; Peter, James and John, in the name of all who were to come after. Those five witnesses were really a mighty company: the Law and the Prophets, the Head of the Church, the first of the apostolic martyrs, the most beloved of the disciples and greatest of the evangelists, the Sons of Thunder, and the Rock upon which Christ was to build His Church.

The transfiguration of Christ was really a revelation of the full significance of our position as adopted sons of God. By that adoption, we are made conformable to the natural Son of God, imperfectly now by grace with its glory for the soul, perfectly in heaven with its glory for the body and soul. We enter the life of grace by baptism, the life of heaven by the light of glory. As at the baptism of Christ, go here again at His transfiguration, there is the divine witness to His natural Sonship and a divine promise as to our adopted sonship. As at the baptism the Son was baptized, the Holy Ghost appeared hovering over Him in the form of a dove, while the Father's voice was heard approving; so here on Tabor, the Son was glorified, the Father testified, and the Holy Ghost hovered over the scene in a luminous cloud.

They came down from the mountain a little shaken to set about the business of suffering and dying. But now, what a different task it was, not only for them but for all men; for here was the goal that explained all the hardships and difficulties of the journey -- the vision of glory within a man now, shining through his very body in heaven. Here was the secret of the glory of man: a human sharing in divine life.

Conclusion. Ways of life: Christ's way

These were the high points of the divine lesson in human living. This was the way for a man to live and this was the reason for a man's living as a man: to live intimately with men, holding fast to the roots for respect and love of all other men that reach into divinity itself. For in every man there is a spark of the divine, and the promise of consuming brilliance which is a dim reflection of the reward for human living on a divine plane. This is men's reason for embracing men and for their recoil in horror from the satanic enemy of all men. In this human life of God we can see the inner depths which house the treasures that are to be shared with other men; here is an indication of the part divine things are to play in a man's life and of the wide room that must be left in a man's heart for those divine things. This is the culminating glory reserved for that sovereign being who is a man.

The way of the modern world: The world and men, truth, divine things, the glory of men

Christ's way of living cannot, of course, be the mode of life in a world that has banned the spiritual to give itself wholly to the material. On a material basis there is little to love in men, nothing, certainly, to make us embrace other men; even if there were, it would be quite impossible for us to get out of ourselves. In such a world, the devil is not an enemy if he serves our material wants and goals. There are no treasures to be shared with other men, for in such a world every man is bankrupt of human riches; men must rather grope about in the refuse heaps of the world, increasing their hunger by satisfying only their animal appetites. In such a world, there is no room for divine things, for the divine is not to be encompassed within the material. Here, indeed, there is nothing of glory for man where his nature is distorted, perverted, degraded.

Dangers to social life: Injustice -- met by law

In such a world, human living is impossible. There cannot be social life among men without justice, and justice is impossible if men cannot get out of themselves, cannot see others, their rights, and the obligation to respect those rights. Injustice, then, is the fundamental social threat, a threat normally met by the regime of law; but what law can there be in a materialistic world beyond the law of force?

Familiarity -- met by: Absolute perfection -- in Christ; appreciation of the eternal in man, growth.

A more intimate threat to social life springs from the penetrating knowledge born of familiarity; and this threat can be met only by absolute perfection -- as in Christ where deeper penetration only uncovers greater perfection -- or by seeing deeply enough into man to discover the spark of the divine in him. There is a real danger in familiarity of exhausting the grounds of appeal and coming upon a vast territory of defects and imperfection that drives us in revulsion away from our fellow men. The threat is neutralized if once we see the eternal in man, the spark of the divine life that makes the meanest of men a messenger of the sublime truths of God by his very existence; the threat is extinguished by a steady growth in perfection, a fanning of that divine spark into a flame of charity that will culminate in the holocaust of heaven. In a material world, men can get terribly disgusted with men. Obviously, in a material world there can be no absolute perfection; just as clearly, there can be no perception of the eternal in man by men who deny the eternal; and growth can only be the crass material thing that, in any man, is a constant threat to the life and joys of every other man.

We might say that the human, that is the social, way of living presented a severe test of the perfection of Christ. In the sense that His divinity was His title to superiority, it is not hard to see social life as a test of His divinity. It is not easy for a superior to live intimately with his subjects, yet hold to his dignity and authority; in the human order, his defects will inevitably be discovered. It is difficult for a superior to win the affection of his subjects and keep it, not only because some of his acts will inevitably displease some of his subjects, but also because there will inevitably be some defects in his commands, his laws. Christ, the supreme Lawgiver, lived intimately with men, met this test and pegged it. Strangely enough, His very success in the test was reason enough for men to shun Him. Not that they had found His law defective; the trouble was there was no defect in it. It was not that they found an imperfect superior; but rather one so perfect that subjection to Him was demanded. Men were not anxious to give up the things that the perfection of the Lawgiver and His law demanded. Something of this crops up in the daily life of every age when the pure are mocked by the impure, the just by the unjust, the truthful by liars, the merciful by the pitiless, the wise by the stupid, the industrious by the lazy. Not that these things are not valued; rather, because the recognition of them in others constitutes a stinging and constant rebuke.

A test of divinity and humanity

Social life is a test of humanity, for it is a constant test of our awareness of the spiritual in man, of our own growth in spiritual things, of our straining towards perfection. It is only on the grounds of the spirit and its growth that men can live together as men; for man, you see, is also a spirit. He cannot be made to live as a mere animal, a plant, or a clod of earth; for he is none of these things. He must live the way Christ lived or he must cease, slowly or quickly, to live as a man. He must hold fast to the vision of glory, even though the road be rough and long; for the loss of the vision will not make the road easier, it will rather make the whole necessity of the journey a thing of complete despair.