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Three Sketches,
Some Outlines And Additional Notes
Leonard
Feeney, S. J. Sheed
and Ward, 1939
You
said: “Write a treatise on the Blessed Trinity, and
explain it just to me!” You
know very well that there are many realizations of the mystery of the Blessed
Trinity which you have already arrived at, and which are more valuable than
any I can present. Nevertheless, I accept your challenge. 1) Because I have
obeyed you in so few things; 2) Because a relish for the mystery of
personality — and the contemplation of the Blessed Trinity prompts precisely
that — can never be in two persons quite the same, not even in two who were
nourished in one womb, suckled at the same breasts. You see, I overpower the
original mystery by presenting another one. Mystery solves mystery! Do you
like it? . . . Diamond cuts diamond! If
I am to go on, I must allow myself some privileges. The first is to omit what
I care to omit; the second, to include what I care to include. I shall be a)
repetitious, because the mystery is infinitely simple; b) original, because
it is infinitely fecund. Our parents produced two boys, and there are
resemblances between us which even a passing policeman can notice. But there
are differences, and that is why I am explaining to you a subject to which
you have given considerable thought of your own. Be humble enough to hear
things repeated which you know very well. But also, be independent enough to
honor my independence, my originality. Let us Not interfere in the
least with each other’s light, No matter how murky the
mist, how dismal the night, Or whether the clouds
conceal or reveal us right. First,
let me rid myself of an annoyance: the statement so often made that because
the Blessed Trinity is a mystery, therefore we can know nothing about it.
Being, furthermore, the profoundest mystery in God, it is assumed by many
preachers and teachers that it is the one phase of God we must dismiss
without discussion. All this I deny. God would not have revealed the mystery
to us if this were so. The awareness that there is a trinity of personalities
in the Deity, all outflowering from a single all-perfect nature, was not
dispensed to man to torture him with its intellectual indigestibility. (That
last was a horrid phrase, but I meant it to be horrid.) The Blessed Trinity
is not a puzzle. It is not a trick. It is an innocent, profound statement of
how life exists in Him who is Life. A mystery is not a fact about
which we can know nothing. It is a fact about which we cannot know
everything. But the deeper we plunge, the more we learn. The ultimate veil
will be removed from our minds only in the Beatific Vision. But veil by veil
we can go tearing and plunging in the direction of that sunlight which is
dimly, but surely, seeping through. It is a thicket we are in, not a maze.
Not by devious guesses and conjectures, but by a single straight line do we
forge out of the forest, crashing down the branches, pushing the leaves out
of our eyes. We will not find the open glare of day until we are no more of
this world. But we will be nearer the edge of the woods when we finish than
when we began. Do you care to follow? If so, stalk in my footsteps; but give
me two free hands. Now,
here is the second important thing I have to say. We have hidden experience
within ourselves of the reality of the Blessed Trinity, for we are the images
of God non tantum Unius sed Trini. In the intensest region of our
souls — that area of us which is always unconsciously cooing around the
essence of our Creator, receiving continuation from Him as mysteriously as it
received existence — we are being perpetually warmed by the exquisite
temperature of the eternal Substance, and continually illuminated by the
light from three lovely I’s: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Granted that it is a borrowed light; do we not have what we borrow? Oh, I
agree that it all happens down in the mysterious depths of us, at the
vanishing point of us, at the verge of our non-existence, where we shriek our
pitiful “Keep me, keep me!” to our Creator, as we gaze into the yawning
eternal void, anxious again to receive us, from which we came, and to which
we can never return . . . not even by the route of Hell! But it is
we, it is you, it is I, who are there in that strange basement, clinging to
existence by the delicate hinge of God’s will. It is a cellar in us too deep
from which to call to our upper selves, a chasm too fathomless from which to
send up skyrockets to our imaginative and discursive minds. For to be a
creature is to be annihilated in an undone nothingness that crawls; it is to
be buried in one’s own grave — alive! But this life receives, and becomes
vibrant with, the sound of three voices encouraging us to go on existing. And
the message from these three voices is this: I am Life, I am Truth, I am
Love. We are set ablaze with a triple searchlight, streaming from eternity
and making concentric circles at our core! When
one of our children in the Sisters’ School is told: There is one God in Three
Divine Persons, he does about it only what a child should do. He says: In
the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, beginning
his prayer; and Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy
Ghost, ending it. And then he goes about his play. Prayer is the child’s
little aside; play is his profession. He throws a tiny rosebud of adoration
into eternity — not yet blossomed, but a real rosebud, not a false one — and
forgets it. He does not know that the Beatific Vision of the Triune God is
already in his mind, packed there in the form of Faith, as the flower is
packed in the seed. The flower is not another reality from the seed; it is
the seed fulfilled. So, the child’s prayer. It is, in seed form, the
adoration of vision which the Blessed bestow upon God in ecstasy everlasting. Threeness and Oneness The
first simple step towards an appreciation of the Blessed Trinity is to become
aware that threeness and oneness can somehow be reconciled. Of
course, if one insists on the fact that threeness must have no
association whatsoever with oneness, — if one forbids that it should,
on the score, let us say, that such things do not happen in one’s social
circle, in one’s pantry, on one’s dining-room table — naturally we encounter
a mind completely closed to an appreciation of the mystery of God. And, as
you know very well, an approach to a sublime thought can be effectually
outlawed in sophisticated conversation by a yawn, by a “Why bother?” or by a
sudden need to hurry and catch a train. I have had, times without number, to
surrender the most innocent effort to lift a dinner conversation out of the
realm of soup and strawberries and into the region of the immutable and
eternal, in the face of such a witticism as: “Oh, goody, goody! At last we’ve
found someone who knows all about God!” . . . Heaven immediately
clouded before our eyes, and we went back, after an appropriate pause, to a
discussion of the unsociabilities of detail in a surrealist’s painting. When
St. Patrick picked up the shamrock, as the Irish say he did, and pointed to
it as an illustration of the mystery of the Trinity, he chose a most wretched
symbol, as we know. For the unity of persons in the Blessed Trinity is not
that of three leaves clinging to a stalk. Yet St. Patrick advanced, I
declare, by however tiny a trillionth of an inch, nearer to the truth of
God’s multipleness than one does who points to no symbol at all. For St.
Patrick at least opened the minds of his disciples to the startling fact that
threeness and oneness can somehow be reconciled in a single being. The
reconciliation of these opposites in a poor little shamrock is about as
pitiful an illustration of God’s paradox as I can imagine. But it is better
than no illustration at all. And it creates a generosity of mind more
salutary than the obstructionist attitude which hangs on the portals of human
intelligence a sign: Let no amazement enter here! St.
Patrick used the shamrock as a symbol of the diversity of identity in God.
Let me use a better one. I shall take water. There
are three expressions of “self” in a single substance that is now ice, now
water, now vapor. And even when the symbol breaks down — and it is part of
the Catholic intelligence to know just how far a symbol does serve and how
far it does not — for the substance of water has not the permanence,
perfection, intelligence, freedom, infinite intensity of the substance of
God; and the “selves” of water in solid, liquid and gaseous form are “states”
rather than varied supposital expressions of an identical substance —
nevertheless, there still remains a vestige of the mystery of God imbedded in
water which will never be solved by physics or chemistry. If you have no
Blessed Trinity to which to refer in adoration and praise the eternal
expression of the mystery you have seen reflected in water, then water will
become your God, and your God will very soon vanish like water. I can
understand the pagan who worships the elements: fire, sun, water, who wants
everything to be a deity, confuses a state with a self, and who
creates a lovely lore of legend for everything which is mistaken to be
divine, makes a mythology (the twilight of theology, just as superstition is
the twilight of faith) and gives us gods, good and bad, for every phase of
our experience and builds up from the unexplained antics of these deities a
literature as rich as that of Homer or Omar. But I detest the coarseness of
mind of the de-Christianized scientist who pounces upon innocent water as
though it were unprecious enough to be a problem, and who blasphemously
believes that when he has split the ultimate atom of H2O, he will
have exploded the Nicene Creed. We
must have mysteries in order to keep sane, even the sublime mystery of a
single nature in the Blessed Trinity of God, and if you do not accept this
truth in its divine pattern and under its divine guarantee, it will keep
shrieking at you in the iceberg, torturing you in the torrent, stifling you
in steam, and I am Water, always Water is all it will tell you
. . . and you won’t get much comfort from that; nor much
explanation. Thinker, Thought and Thinking The
symbol of the shamrock will take the mystery of God only in the most glancing
and trivial manner. The symbol of water involves a complexity and coarseness
of idea from which the Eternal Innocence shudders. Let me therefore descend
(or in this case, ascend) to a simple, abstract statement in which there is
concept but no picture, idea with no sensible image. Sensible images get in
the way of God when we try to apprehend Him in His spiritual, undimensioned
Beauty. Let me say that God the Father is the Thinker in God; God the Son is
His Thought; and God the Holy Spirit is the Thinking that proceeds from the
Thought and the Thinker. Before we attempt to discover how unfathomably far
away we are from the Divine Processions in this statement, let us first
observe a few points in which it becomes perilously near to being the truth
of Him. A
thinker craves a thought, and a thought craves to be thought of by a thinker.
Thinker and thought in severance leave the function of intelligence
unfulfilled, whether in Divine or human form. If a thought could survey
itself on the brink of existence, it would look about yearningly for the one
requisite needed to lift it out of nothingness: a thinker to think it. A
thought is in very truth the child of the thinker, bursting into being
by a genuine act of generation, more generative indeed than a procreation of
flesh and blood, more firmly rooted in the status of childhood than an infant
is towards father and mother, because an infant achieves in birth the
principle of division from, rather than of subsistence with, its parent. Not
so thought as a scion of the spirit. For a thought and a thinker in the
precise duration of the act of thinking are identified in substance. Each is
the one thing in that brief ecstasy in which they commune. I am not I, and my
thought something abroad in mid-air. And yet my thought achieves an otherness
right within me, which, if I do not honor, precisions of statement about
what is I and what is mine become impossible. For I do speak of
my thought as somehow distinct from myself. I praise and admire my good
thought, disown and belittle my bad one. Who is criticizing whom in this
stand-off? Why am I so proud of my infant if it is only myself, why do I
scold it if it is not other than I? The
explanation is simple. Our thoughts are other selves, but selves by way of
accidental, not substantial nature. In thinking, my intellect submits itself
to a form with which it is momentarily identified, and this explains the
unity of thinker and thought. But the two made one have in themselves not merely
a principle of opposition (which is delightful) but also a principle of
abandonment (which is disastrous). All our intellectual children are ghosts
of real babies. They do not geyser forth into an I-ness as real and permanent
as the thinker who begets them. My thought is a would-be self, not a real
one. I speak of it as though it were another, and there is a necessity in
that “as though” from which I cannot escape. My thought would be really,
truly, everlastingly, blazingly a new self within my nature — would be a
second person authentically begot by me — if three requirements were
fulfilled: 1) if I were thinking the same thing all the time; 2) if it were
the perfect thing to think; 3) if the infinity of its perfection were derived
from a survey of my own nature, wholly given yet wholly retained in the act. But
alas, in our vintage of being, such a perfection of performance is
impossible. There is in man only one person and one nature. Little pretenders
to the dignity of personality constantly arise within him in the form of
thoughts: fakers that put on a good show at being somebodys while they last,
like pumpkins blinking in a window at Halloween. But no thought I have is
perfect or exhaustive of an all-perfect nature, and so it dies. And no love I
have is rooted in a substantial wedding of thought and thinker, and so it
dies. And I go on forever being, in the total assemblage of what I am, one
nature and one person, defeated at every instant from being a Blessed
Trinity. When
a thinker can leap at the thought of all truth, as God can, and all truth
surrenders itself effortlessly to be thought of by the fortunate thinker,
there proceeds from this alliance the function of thinking*
— in an act of infinite goodness, infinite
delight. This Thinking will go on as long as there is no possibility
of distraction, as long as Thinker and Thought are fixed in an ecstasy of
mutual affection than which no greater can be conceived. The Thinking,
obviously, will be as substantial and immutable as the Thought and the Thinker
from whom it proceeds. Its boast is to be all goodness; and its name is Love.
There must be two for love; though, speculatively, there need be only one for
thought. Love cannot be called a child, because there is no principle of
furtherance in it, only of repose and fulfillment. Love languishes in its own
leisure. It is a terminal beyond which nothing can reach. It does you no
good, simply stares at you in a sacred silliness and asks you “What more do
you want, now that I have arrived?” In its temporal pattern it broods
strangely in a contingent heart, unworthy to support it, asking of it that
thing which it abhors: an explanation. As doled out for our experience, I
call it The Oppressor: Love makes one weak, Is hard upon the heart, Merciless on the meek If once you let it
start; A pressure is, a pain, A burning in the brain From which one would
not part; And though of one’s own
choosing And none of one’s
refusing, Undoes one day and
night, Is neither wrong nor
right, Nor bloom, nor blight, In sum: A dull delirium And wild delight. In
its eternal pattern, Love is a Comforter, not an Oppressor. In the Blessed
Trinity it is called the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit. And we bless ourselves
now with new reason: In the Name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost In the Name of
Life, Truth and Love In the Name of
the Thinker, the Thought and the Term of Their Repose . . . or,
as you, Thomas Butler, put it in one of your most poignant poems: In the Name
of God the Weaver, God the Wool, and God the Weave. Communicability and Incommunicability Let
me now, with the impudence of the moth assailing the flame, attack the
mystery of the Blessed Trinity from a new angle. Oh, the Flame will be sure
to win, and I be burned. I shall plunge forth to absorption, not to victory,
and the quiet light of the Eternal Candle will burn serenely after I have
futilely tried to disentangle its beams. Even so, some spark of me may veer
off as I disappear into the conflagration and may lend a momentary luster to
your eye. If so, I shall have been well devoured. A moth is like a mind — and
better to die in a dazzle than rot in a decay. You
may well complain that I have not as yet explained to you the difference
between a nature and a person, and that there is no dealing with the Blessed
Trinity until this has been done. You
know, of course, the impeccable scholastic definition of nature; namely that
which acts, in an essence (that by which it is what it is), in a
substance (the principle of permanence in the agent). You change your wording
for this one reality accordingly as you change the focus of your interest in
it . . . and then to Boethius we give a bow for his classic
definition of person as: naturae rationalis individua substantia. But
these definitions are too tight for our purposes. Let me loosen them a little
by a few illustrations and considerations that will be more alive and less in
formula. You
yourself will do for experiment, and I shall consider two phases of you which
can be known and treated, talked about and loved. There is first, your
communicability — and that is you as a nature. There is, second, your
incommunicability, and that is you as a person. Your Communicability Your
qualities of body and soul, your stature, height, ability to think, breathe,
pray, read, laugh, eat, cry — the things that make you human, sociable, a
man, a priest, a poet, a dreamer, one of St. Ignatius’s disciples, and one of
our mother’s children. These aspects of you (and countless others that are
similar) touch your nature. Your Incommunicability There
is your uniqueness, your aloneness, your mystery, your private experience of
yourself as distinct from others — the phase of you to which you cater when
you close your eyes, make a gesture of supplication, a gesture of defense;
when you accuse yourself of sin, take responsibility for some good or evil
work; when you sign your name, or indelible some revelation of yourself to
the outside world with your peculiar flash of eyes or tone of voice,
inimitable and unvicarious . . . You have undergone those moments
of human experience when you have been in the presence of a loved one and
could not speak — when the very fullness of your self could not be crushed
into words or even expirated in a sigh. You have said, and I recorded, “I am
most unhappy when I am with those I love.” You did not need to explain this
paradox. I understood it. The statement derived from that outlook of yourself
upon yourself which we call personality. Communicability
and incommunicability are two terms that will serve to set our thoughts
gyrating around those mysteries of nature and person that are at one within
us. Other terms will also help. Our sameness with
others is our nature. Our difference from
others is our person. Our likeness to others
is our nature. Our unlikeness to
others is our person. Our dependence on
others is our nature. Our independence of
others is our person. The
most dependent creature in all the world is a small child. For food,
clothing, shelter, care, cleanliness, protection, it depends constantly on
another’s charity. And yet it is marvelous to see what a cast of independence
“nature” establishes in a child, even in infancy, to assure it of the
ultimate function of an unruled selfhood. For outside of its human
necessities, a child is the most independent little moppet that could
possibly be. It does what it pleases, laughs and cries when it pleases, runs
to whomsoever it pleases, puts on its little antics, smiles, entertains or
annoys the company, just as it pleases, and will repose unpredictably on
whosoever’s lap suits it, whether it be friend or stranger. It is totally
devoid of human respect, a little tyrant in the kingdom of tantrums and
tendernesses. When
a child grows up, the balance swings entirely the other way, so marvelous are
the adjustments of human nature in keeping its dual requirement of person and
nature in poise. As a man, a child is now independent of its parents, nurses,
teachers, and can feed, clothe and protect itself. But these larger liberties
are bridled by an extreme curtailment of personal whim and of the private
enjoyments of autonomy. A man is predictable, bound by conventions unknown to
the nursery. He will usually go where he is coaxed, and you can be morally
sure of what he will do in given situations. He does not go toddling around
the parlor, putting his head in various laps, unburdening himself of
ceremonies of friendship or disdain that are sometimes disconcerting to the
point of being a fright. Likeness and Unlikeness Beauty
is the likeness of unlike things. So you see, within the essential structure
of every human being, because of his likeness-principle (his nature) and his
unlikeness-principle (his person), there are justifications for unlimited
contemplation, if we would only look innocently into the eyes of our friends,
into the unemancipated aloneness of each puzzled human heart, forever needing
companionship and sympathy, and forever wanting not to be annoyed by the
bothersomeness of others. Beauty
consists in the unlikeness of like things! . . . What must be the
unthinkable beauty of a triple, eternal unlikeness in an identical thing,
O God! O Adorable Trinity! On
a trip back from Italy some years ago, I stood one night outside the ballroom
window on the boat, and watched a beautiful young boy and girl (in their late
teens or early twenties) collaborating in a dance. Their differences before
they became partners in the dance were as complete as though a chasm had made
them. In size, quality of voice, gender, clothes, strength, — in every bodily
and spiritual endowment, they were as divided as only boy and girl can be, in
the strange pattern of male and female that sets the human race apart into
that twoness that will, in Beauty’s name, emphasize the likeness of their
differences. She
was dressed in a long, flowing, white robe, with a band of blue in her hair.
He was dressed in faultless, black evening-clothes. She was a dressmaker’s
dream. He was a tailor’s job. Her antics preparatory to the dance were light
and fluttersome, bristling with a butterfly independence. He was quiet,
strong, stolid, with no nervous pre-excitement in a single movement. The
off-flash from her, in hair, in hands, in eyes, would seem to be telling us: I
am complex and unconquerable. I am all diffused. In me there is no surrender.
. . . The aura that poured from him would seem to be saying: I
am my own quiet, assured strength. I am rounded, harmonized, finished. For me
there is nothing left to conquer. The
orchestra leader struck his baton against the podium. The boy walked
languidly across the ballroom-floor and gathered a white parcel of fidgety
loveliness in his arms. And the music began. And
then, for ten minutes of faultless co-ordination, encouraged by every shade
of sound and note the instruments of the orchestra could supply, the
extravagant differences of boy and girl melted into an identity of movement.
Every gesture, twirl, advance, approach, glide, hesitation, revolution and
recovery were performed, so it seemed, by two human wills fused into one. The
separateness of their selves was whelmed in an identity of rhythm, showered
and re-showered with melody for a breathless interval in which there was only
oneness between them. The
music stopped. They separated again into black and white, walked to opposite
corners of the room. He was once more a boy and she a girl, and they resumed
the manners of strangers. Your
awe-struck brother closed the curtain of the ballroom window through which he
had been eavesdropping, went over and leaned on the railing of the ship, and
looked up blinkingly at the mystery of the stars — each at its appointed post
in the Heavens, each shining with the same patient radiance, undifferentiated
in kind, yet sundered by unfathomable spaces, millions of light-years apart! Asceticism and Mysticism These
two phases of the spiritual life are founded on the requirements of nature
and person. Asceticism is the law of restraint: it forms us into one nature
with others. Mysticism is the law of abandon: it leaves us free in those
stratospheres of the spirit that lie above the rules of perfection.
But there can be no stratosphere until there has been an atmosphere,
perfectly blended, upon which it can rest in its fragility, and from which it
can draw up its airy independence. As regards our own Religious Order, there
can be no mystical Jesuit (left free in the wild liberties of his
contemplations, favoritisms and prayers) until there has been first an asceticized
Jesuit (one who has obeyed his rules). The ascetical features of our training
are those molds of conduct, discipline and restraint that give us the title
to be called Jesuits at all (our nature), and which privilege we little
deserve at any price. The mystical features of our life are those titles
which permit us each to sign a separate name before the S.J. of which we are
so proud, and which require the personal government of a living superior to
counsel and direct us, rather than a cold formula of rules. For each of us
remains unique within the fold, and we require the personal attention a
shepherd would give a lamb, rather than the offhand supervision he bestows
upon a flock of sheep. Asceticism
establishes a salutary slavery within us (nature) in order to give us a
trustworthy independence (personality). At the end of the Spiritual
Exercises, that long drill in asceticism, St. Ignatius introduces the
marvelous Contemplatio ad Amorem, the Loyolan passport to liberty. St.
Ignatius makes us ascetics in order to turn us into lovers, and don’t you
forget that. He harnesses our nature with suitable restraints and bridles so
as to give us the pace of those thoroughbreds of God, each steed with a
different canter, clocked in a different time in the race to eternity. We
are, in addition, an apostolic Order, striving as much for the salvation of
souls as we do for personal holiness, and there is no lovelier interchange of
chariness and charity than this. Transcendentalism and Immanentism You
have noticed that even among the professional mystics (which is not our
vocation) there are those who emphasize the personal element and those who
emphasize the element of nature in the attainment of their spiritual heights.
The first group are the Transcendentalists. They stand off from God. God is
too much for them. They grovel before the awfulness of His majesty. They
approach God, as it were, by repelling Him, by making themselves nothing so
that He may prevail. Their overture is a personal realization of the extreme
differences between creature and Creator, between themselves and God. The
result is, as you can see, a surrender in which personality is almost
extinguished, not because it was not sure of itself, but because it was
shocked at its own nothingness in relation to the transcendant surety of
God’s own Being. St. John of the Cross is a Transcendentalist. The
second group are the Immanentists. To them God is altogether too near. They
are frightened at the fact that they cannot get away from Him. The nature of
God in its omnipresence is emphasized rather than the person of God in His
Lordship of the world. Instead of rushing toward nothingness in order to hide
from the greatness of God, they succumb to the greatness of God in order to
lose their own nothingness. St. Teresa of Avila is an Immanentist. She became
so over-flooded with Grace she floated to the ceiling. The Transcendentalists
concentrate on the Infinity of God. The Immanentists
concentrate on the Simplicity of God. God is too much for the
Transcendentalists (personalists) to take. God is too easy for the
Immanentists (naturalists) not to take.* St.
John of the Cross, appalled by the person of himself, ends up by talking
about nothing but God. St.
Teresa of Avila, fascinated by the nature of God, ends up by talking about
nothing but herself. St.
John of the Cross is the man, the real man, because in man’s nature the
transcendental element, the personal element, is the stronger. St. Teresa of
Avila is the typical woman. Man is the go-away person in the sexes, the
surrendered one in all farewells, as he departs to sail the seas, discover
new lands, fight a war. Woman is the stay-at-home. The stay-at-home element
in us is nature. The go-away element is person. When
there is marriage, the stronger personality (man’s) prevails. Woman cancels
her own name to write a man’s in place of it. Woman is the loved one, man the
lover. When there is a child from such a union, I always look for the personality
of the father to be reflected, and the nature of the mother. The little boy
has his father’s walk and his father’s talk; but his nature and all his
sensitive endowments are much more from his mother, since he was housed in
her for nine months and first fed at her breasts. This complement of the
sexes in procreative love is charming, indeed sublime, a~1 would to God it
might restore sex to some of the dignity the word once possessed when
love was a mystery that lent fragrance to a conservatory courtship, not a
problem that added an odor to a laboratory experiment. I
might also mention that woman, knowing man’s personality is the stronger, is
constantly annoying him by telling him what he should do. “Tie your tie! . .
. Put a pillow behind your head! . . . Please be on time for supper! . You
forgot this! You forgot that!” etc. A
man who teases a woman in this way is a scoundrel. A man who cannot bear to
be teased in this way is a sissy. Agreement and Disagreement Nature
is the principle of our agreement with others. Personality is the principle
of our disagreement. One who agrees with you in everything is either your
lover or your liar, incapable, one way or the other, of giving a tang to the
relaxed intercourses of friendship. One who disagrees with you in everything
is your foe, perhaps terribly truthful, but can never be your friend. Communism and Dictatorship The
paradigms of nature and person could be profitably applied to politics by
someone schooled in the latter science. I have no knowledge of politics, and,
it may be censurably, no interest. Except that it cannot escape me that in a
Communistic system the exaggerated claims of what is common in man’s nature
obliterates the personalities of all; and in the Totalitarian scheme the
exaggerated claims of what is singular in the personality of one despot
obliterates the natures of all. Russia’s night is a bedlam where all the dogs
bark. Germany’s night is a graveyard where a lone ass brays. Charity and Chastity These
two moral virtues have deep metaphysical roots. I am convinced there can be
no intelligent moral charity and chastity until there has first been
intelligent intellectual charity and chastity. Charity is the warmth
within us we share with others (nature). Chastity is the coldness within us
(personality) that keeps us from dissipating into an over-possessed thing.
Chastity is not merely the safeguard of physical purity; it is the safeguard
of spiritual independence. Charity is the tempering of spiritual pride. The
world will never understand the Church’s high championship of virginity
because the world will not understand the Church’s high championship of the
rights of personality. In chastity our personality is most established. In
charity, our nature. Our
Lady was a Virgin-Mother. She has all the mystery, aloofness, independence,
inviolateness of a maiden, and all the generosity, warmth and tenderness of a
mother. Never in the world’s history have the mysteries of person and nature
in woman shone so beautifully in one human face. No wonder every artist in
Christendom has wanted to go to his canvas and paint our Madonna. She is the
matchless mother-maid, virginal and maternal. Among our other women
personality and nature are honored in distinct vocations, in separate
careers. Nuns emphasize the singular beauty of woman, each unwedded,
unpossessed, attached to an eternal mystery, yet living in community so as to
give balance to this distortion. Mothers emphasize the beauty of nature in
woman, fruitful with child, heavy with milk in the breasts, her separate destiny
engulfed in a stranger’s name — yet emerging in her own little household, not
as a subject, but as a queen. A
nice study of the exploits of woman in the territories of nature and person
can be made by a study of the two parallel phases of her fourfold career.
Woman is a daughter, a sister, a bride and a mother. She is complemented in
these vocations by man in the rôle of father, brother, husband and son.
Father and brother set off the personal dignity of herself as a self; husband
and son explore the depths of her surrender to others. A woman is most a
person in being a daughter and a sister. She is most a woman in being a bride
and a mother. The Hardship of Personality The
hardship of being a person does not derive from the selfhood it bestows on us;
— this we would not and could not surrender, not even to God Himself. Our
nature can be sacrificed to our Creator in the last detail. But our selfhood
can be undone only by annihilation. The hardship of being myself is that my
nature has not enough perfection in it to support me in unrestrained delight;
and second, because it is a created person that I am, and though a permanent
thing now, I can look back with fear and trembling to my non-existent past.
An eternal personality, therefore, must be a beautiful thing to behold. Christ
is an eternal person. Since the Incarnation, He has two natures in which to
function, the nature of God and the nature of man. Read through the New
Testament again with this one point in mind. Watch how the Eternal Word
speaks, now out of the sublimity of His Divine nature (“The Father and I are
One.”); now out of the limitations of His human nature (“The Father is
greater than I.”). If you do not closely observe this interchange of
statement in the paradox of Revelation — that arises out of the twofold
nature of Our Lord: the one uncreated, the other created; the one begotten in
the bosom of the Father, the other born of the Virgin Mary at Bethlehem; if
you do not allow Him to speak, just as it pleases Him, either in time or in eternity
— then the whole drama of the God-Man in everything He does and says will be
wasted on you. You will find one text of Holy Scripture seeming completely to
outlaw another. . . . Yet in the two natures marvelously joined in
hypostatic union an eternal and uncreated I is forever speaking. How I
should love to look into the eyes of an eternal person! Imagine how I should
feel if a knock were to come on my door tonight, and in response to my call
“Who’s there?” the response should be: “I Am Who Am!” Strangeness and Intimacy Personality
is the principle of strangeness in us: that in us which makes us blush to
come too close to another either physically or in conversation or in
confidence. It is the part of us which is marvelously disciplined in the Sacrament
of Penance when we must undergo the humiliation of owning up to our sins; and
the part of us which is marvelously refreshed in Holy Communion in the lovely
secrecies of the heart’s own citadel. And yet there is in us an urge to
intimacy which is constantly defeating our snootiness and our pride. It
arises mostly when our strangeness becomes too strange, when we begin to feel
uncomfortable and awkward, when left in a lonely room, particularly if there
is a mirror present. Solitary confinement — marooned on a desert island
. . . there are degrees beyond which such things cannot be borne,
and we run shrieking through a wilderness, wanting the clasp of another’s
hand, thirsting for the sound of another’s voice. So Far, So Good I
trust, dear Thomas Butler, there have been in the considerations I have
presented to you so far, some intellectual irritant that will at least give
you pause when anyone attempts to tell you again that there is no difference
in concept between a nature and a person, and that we are talking a
contradiction when we speak of one God in three Divine Persons; or that we
are embracing an absurdity when we innocently submit our minds to the uplift
of Faith which demands such an intellectual assent to the truth of the
All-Eternal. When
you say, “What?” you inquire for nature. When you say, “Who?” you inquire for
person. We are constantly using these pronouns interrogatively, and there
must be planted in the depths of our clouded minds some inference as to the
difference of their meaning. There is only one What
in God. There are three Whos. Fatherhood and Childhood And
yet, after all my excursions in the field of theological illustration, apt
and inept, I prefer to return to the simple statement of the Blessed
Trinity’s truth as it was given to us in the Sign of the Cross when we were
children. In
God, a Being who is all-perfect, immutable, eternal, absolute and worthy of
the last prostration of the mind in adoration, there is a person who
corresponds in a consummate and ideal way to every notion we have of
Fatherhood. He is Our Father. His prerogatives are power, providence,
justice, underived dominion over all that is. He is a God of Mercy too, and
forgiveness, as behooves a good father. He was generated by no one, proceeds
from no one, is the First Person of the Blessed Trinity, and can be dealt
with in His own right, and can be called You in unique personal
intercourse, not directly affecting His Divine associates. He is not less a
father than the fathers we know. He is more a father. He feeds the sparrows,
clothes the lilies of the fields, arranges the sunsets, regulates the
crescendoes of the storms. From Him all paternity is derived in Heaven and on
Earth. He is the Creator and Conserver of all things. There
is also in the nature of the same, identical God a person who corresponds to
everything we can apprehend in the notion of sonship, of childhood, only
intensified to an infinite degree. He is begotten of the Father in eternity.
He is the exemplar according to which all things visible and invisible were
made. He is the Word of God, vibrant with a self all His own.
Everything the Father possesses in the essential perfections of the Godhead,
the Son possesses too, for the nature presented to Him in His eternal birth
is not an halved infinity, it is the full infinity of the Parent who gives
Him birth. He is begotten in eternity, looks backward to no past, forward to
no future. If you went up to Him and asked, as a child might, “When is your
birthday?” He would answer “Now!” He appropriates the work of redemption of
the Human Race, came to Earth, became man, suffered and died for us, is Our
Saviour. His name in our midst is Jesus, a name picked by an angel, or at
least announced by an angel when it had been chosen in the Councils of Heaven.
His temporal generation occurred in the womb of the Virgin Mary, by the power
of the Holy Spirit. There
is also another self in God, no less real than the Father and the Son,
proceeding from them in an eternal spiration of otherness which it is
wonderful to think about. He is identical with them in power, majesty and
perfection of nature, but different from them when He uses the pronoun of the
first person singular. He is called the Holy Spirit. He is the mutual love of
the Father and the Son, deriving from the Divine reality so that He may
commune with them in an own-ness which is truly His, but for which they are
responsible, and He grateful and delighted. He corresponds to all we can
conceive in the way of sacredness and holiness, blowing, as it were, like a
breath from God’s own Being. He appropriates the works of sanctification,
organization and comfort towards the created world, broods over it with
infinite compassion. Because of some strange prerogative, not fathomed by our
minds, it is demanded that we call Him also The Spirit of Truth. Wherever the
image of God is implanted in the likeness of the Son, there He rushes to find
a temple, and insists on dwelling. He is represented to us in symbol by two
beautiful rebuses: First,
a fluttering white dove, suggesting gentleness, peace, repose; second, a
flaming tongue of fire, representing Love’s raging devouring power. In
the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. A Tie-up Unexplained And
yet, despite all the distinctions between person and nature which I have been
at such pains to point out to you, there is a tie-up between the Persons of
God and the Nature of God which it requires a master-hand to express with the
proper exactitude. I give you, as such a master-hand, Saint Athanasius,
Doctor of the Universal Church, that skilled spokesman of the Divine
challenge, ruthless in reconciling what would seem to be opposed in the
Blessed Trinity, ruthless in keeping distinct what would seem to have been
identified. His exposé you will find under the heading Symbolum
Athanasium,*
in Prime of your Breviary, in the most beautiful
blend of dogma, poetry and prayer I have ever read. The echoes of the phrases
are always with me: Fides
autem catholica haec est: ut unum Deum in Trinitate, et Trinitatem in unitate
veneremur . . . Neque
confundentes personas, neque substantiam separantes . . . Alia
est enim persona Patris, alia Filii, alia Spiritus Sancti . . . Sed
Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti una est divinitas, aequalis gloria, coeterna
majestas. Qualis
Pater, talis Filius, talis Spiritus Sanctus. Increatus
Pater, increatus Filius, increatus Spiritus Sanctus. Immensus
Pater, immensus Filius, immensus Spiritus Sanctus. Aeternus
Pater, aeternus Filius, aeternus Spiritus Sanctus. Et tamen non tres aeterni,
sed unus aeternus . . . And
so, on he goes, in forty-one stanzas of such frightening, solemn, confident,
incessant exactitude that you would almost know from the very rhythm of the
piece that it was stimulated by a beatific beat that always keeps time with
it in eternity, whenever and wherever it is spoken on Earth. Good Night It
is now well beyond midnight. I have worked hard all day trying to finish
these thoughts which can never be finished. I have tried hard to explain the
unexplainable. The defect is not in God; it is in the clumsy comprehension of
my defective intelligence. I
have wandered a great deal, repeated the same things over and over again
until you have perhaps grown tired of hearing them. Well, one little elusive beam
from the Eternal Truth would be worth it, if you can find such in this
outline. But I fear you will not find it. Everything slipped through my
fingers. But at least I could hold up my fingers tonight and show you that
they were poised for the clasping of some beauty beyond this world if God
could only be apprehended by any of our human devices of capture. God
is a very blinding light. The experience of gyrating around Him in thought,
of sensing Him to be near, yet never finding Him, is a dizzy adventure. And
yet the experience is not all dizziness. There is an unexplained delight, an
allurement, that draws me back again and again to the same search. God has
the human mind trapped. There are only two things worth thinking about:
Heaven and Hell. Heaven is hard enough, but a man must go on thinking. Hell
is both hard and horrible. One of the hallmarks of the unhallowed in Hell is
that they gave up. I shall not give up. Tomorrow I shall give a conference on
the Blessed Trinity to the very old men at the home of the Little Sisters of
the Poor. You intellectuals are not the easiest people to explain things to. There
are also fruits to be derived even from a fruitless quest. I seem to be a
little more aware than ever, at the end of this long day, of the uniqueness
of myself, precisely because I have been pondering the uniqueness of the
selves of God. Most
of me I can never share with you. So do not expect it. If you love the
Blessed Trinity, as I know you do, think and pray for yourself, and forget
this “explanation.” I
am on the fifth floor of one of our community houses in New York City. I am
the last of the wakeful, gone past a midnight which is advancing into
morning. Window by window I have seen the lights go out in the apartment
houses that surround us here. I continue to tap very lightly on my
typewriter, for others below me are asleep. At least I imagine they are. But
what’s Hecuba to me or I to Hecuba? Sometimes,
one takes refuge from the relentlessness of a frightening thought by turning
to rhyme. It is the foolish way of the poet. He writes for his own relief
much more than he does for the delectation of others. I shall make an ending,
therefore, with a little verse, which I shall not attempt to explain, and
which you do not need to bother to understand. Let us give the little verse a
name. I shall call it: Resignation at Midnight Sleep
has already come to other eyes, Dreams
are not driftwood tangled in their thickets; Nobody
else is left without allies To
count the clock-ticks and applaud the crickets. But
self is self, assignment without appeal, — However
restlessly one plays the part. Out
of another’s slumber my soul would steal Home
to its ache in this accustomed heart. |