The Divine Romance: The Divine Equation
Love tends to become one with the one loved: This was the Incarnation in which God became man. Love knows no limits in its giving: This was the Redemption through the merits of Jesus Christ, accomplished through the Person of God taking upon Himself a human nature, like unto ours in all things except sin. Thus far we have progressed in our unfolding of the Divine Romance.
Now we go on to inquire: What did Christ do with the human nature, which He assumed and united to His Divine Person? What did He do with that body, which He took from the Blessed Mother Mary, and which in its physical state lived from the crib to the Cross? He did many things with it, but they are all reducible to three: He taught, He governed, and He sanctified.
First, He taught, not as the Scribes and Pharisees, but as one having authority. Conscious that He was the Eternal Word of God that illumined every man coming into the world, He taught not as a searcher of truth but as one communicating it from its very source and Fountain Head: "I am . . . the truth." Desiring that others should share in that truth, He gathered men about Him and bade them go out and teach the nations of the earth to observe all things whatsoever He had commanded.
Secondly, He used His body not only to teach but also to govern and found a Kingdom. All government is based upon power. Conscious of His union with His Heavenly Father, He could say: "All power is given to me in heaven and in earth." Gathering the elements of His First Kingdom, consisting mostly of ignorant men, He chose one from the twelve of them as their Chief and Guide — Peter the Rock, on which He said He would build His Church, and to whom He committed the supreme power of feeding His lambs and feeding His sheep.
Thirdly, with His body He sanctified: "I am come that they may have life, and may have it more abundantly." Through the instrumentality of that body He opened blind eyes to the light of God's sunshine, unstopped deaf ears to the music of the human voice, forgave penitent Magdalen, sanctified the woman at the well, and re-made Nicodemus as one born anew. But as He sent out His Apostles to teach His Truth, to establish the government of His Kingdom, He now sends them out as His Father had sent Him, to forgive sins, to cast out devils, to renew His Sacrifice in commemoration of Him, and to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
In other words, the human nature or the body of Our Blessed Lord was the conjoined instrument by which He taught, governed, and sanctified; by it He communicated His Truth as Teacher, His law as King, and His Life as Priest — for He was the Truth, the Way, and the Life.
The remarkable thing about His earthly life was the fact that He often spoke of it continuing after His death, for He who laid down His life could take it up again. He reminded His Apostles over and over again that after His resurrection He would assume another body, not a body like unto the one which He took from the Blessed Mother, but rather a kind of social body which would be made up of all those who become incorporated into His Kingdom. He said that this union between Himself and this body would be organic, vital, and life-like, like a union of the vine and the branches; and just as the branches could not live without the vine, so neither could this new body of His live without Him. He promised them that He would not leave them orphans but that He would remain with them all days even to the consummation of the world, and that when two or more were gathered together in His name He would be in the midst of them. Finally, He told them that He would become so much identified with the poor, hungry, persecuted members of this new body, that whoever would do a kindness to any one of them or even give them drink, would be doing it unto Him; that this body would not be like an institution but like a mustard seed that would grow from small beginnings to fill the whole earth, and that between it and Himself there would be something of the unity that existed between Him and His Heavenly Father — "Thou, Father, in me, and I in thee."
He did say, however, that His union with this new body would not be complete until the day of Pentecost, for He would not "assume" this new body until He had taken His own from this earth. He left the elements of this new body on earth, when He ascended into Heaven, namely, His Apostles. But this little group of men gathered about Him were as yet wanting a soul for their corporate unity, fighting as they were for first place in the Kingdom of Heaven, and even returning to their nets and their boats after the Resurrection. They were like the chemicals that exist in a laboratory, which could make up the physical constituents of a body, and yet cannot make a living body, because they lack a soul or vivifying spirit. The Apostles were as yet a kind of organization; but they were to become an organism under the influence of the spirit of Christ that would come on Pentecost. Ten days after the Ascension of Our Blessed Lord into Heaven, the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles gathered in the upper room of Jerusalem, baptizing them with fire, gave them a soul, made them one, signed them with a sign and sealed them with a seal — and at that precise moment the new body of Christ was born. The body of Christ is His Church. In the fiery glow of that Pentecostal gift, the small and scattered rays combined to form one great radiance, and they who before had been but men of little faith filled with childish egotism now went into the world conscious that they were the beginning of that new body of Christ which would grow as the mustard seed even to the consummation of the world.
Am I teaching a strange and novel doctrine when I say that the Church is the body of Christ? Recall to your mind an incident that happened within twenty years after the day of Pentecost, within which time the new body of Christ had grown and expanded to fill much of the then known world. The incident to which I refer concerns Saul of Tarsus, the fiery Hebrew of the Hebrews, who hated Christ and things Christian as much as any man could hate. Armed with letters from the Synagogue of Jerusalem, he set out for the City of Damascus to seize and persecute the Christians there who belonged to the Church of the body of Christ. While on the way, suddenly a great light shone round about him. He falls to the ground and hears a voice saying to him: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" The heat of the oriental sun gives him strength to speak and nothingness dares ask the name of Omnipotence: "Who art Thou, Lord?" The answer comes back: "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." Saul is persecuting the Church of Damascus and the Christians of Damascus, and Christ says to Saul: "Why persecutest thou Me?" Christ and the Church, are they the same thing? Precisely, the Church is Christ and Christ is the Church — such is the Divine Equation.
Saul learned the unforgettable lesson that day which he afterwards taught as Paul: The lesson which Christ Himself had taught to His Apostles, the lesson which is taught to us now, namely, that the Church is the body of Christ, and that Christ Himself sitting at the right hand of the Father is the Head of that body. This new body, sometimes called a mystical body, is to be understood after the analogy of the human body which is made up of many members performing different functions and yet all cooperating toward the harmony of the whole. The hand is not the foot, the eye is not the ear, the heart is not the lung. So, too, the priest is not the layman, the apostle is not the disciple, the Vicar of Christ is not the deacon — and yet all are one in the same spirit. As St. Paul puts it: "As the body is one, and hath many members; and all members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also is Christ."
The Church then, in the language of Sacred Scripture is the body of Christ; not the physical one that was born in Bethlehem and crucified in Jerusalem, but rather a mystical one in which He continues to live and to act and to think (though in another sense than He did in Judea of Gailee). And He, Christ in Heaven, is the Head of that Body. As He took a body from Mary who was filled with the Holy Spirit, with which He lived a physical life of thirty-three years, so He lives today His mystical life in a new body taken from humanity but likewise overshadowed with the Pentecostal Spirit, which we call the Church. As His Incarnation was made up of a visible and an invisible element, a human and Divine, so too His continued Incarnation in His Church is made up of two elements, human and Divine. The human element in it is poor weak humanity, and the Divine element is the life of God. With this new body taken from humanity and filled with His Spirit, Christ is re-living His life at Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, and Jerusalem. He is doing with this new body three things, as He did three things with His physical body: With it He teaches, He governs, and He sanctifies.
First of all, He teaches. But how does He teach? He who is invisible teaches through the instrumentality of His body. A teacher in a classroom, for example, wishes to communicate a spiritual truth, such as love of duty. That spiritual truth is something, which has no matter, no size, no weight or color, and yet it is communicated materially by writing, by words, or by examples. It does not become a different truth when it is communicated visibly or audibly. So, too, when Christ teaches He teaches through the visible head of His mystical body who is His Vicar on earth. Just as His own physical body had a visible head, so, too, His mystical body has a visible head. This visible head is the successor of His first Vicar on whom He built His Church and to whom He promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. Two conclusions follow: The first is that the truth, which is communicated to the body through its visible head, the Vicar of Christ, is not a spiritual truth distinct from the truth existing in the invisible head of the Church, which is Christ Himself, any more than the spiritual truth of the teacher became another truth when articulated. The Truth of Christ and the truth of His Vicar are one and the same, and such is the meaning of the words: "He that heareth you, heareth me." Secondly, that truth will be necessarily infallible, or free from error, for it is essentially the truth of Christ; and hence the infallibility of the Vicar of Christ is only another way of saying the "infallibility of Christ." Infallibility is an endowment of the Body with which its Visible Head thinks and speaks the Mind of Christ. And to deny that Christ can communicate His truth as He communicated it centuries ago, is to limit the truth of the Son of God to Palestine as a space and to thirty-three years as a time. To the members of that body Christ speaks through the Peter of our own day as He spoke through the Peter of the first.
Secondly, Christ not only teaches through the instrumentality of His body, which is the Church, but He also governs through it. The supreme legislative, executive, and judicial decisions of the Vicar and those under his authority are the decisions of Christ and therefore binding with the authority of Christ. My will, for example, may direct that my hand be moved. The decision of my will is invisible, but the manifestations of the will are external and visible. So, too, the will of Christ and the government of His Church are expressed through the visible head of His body and those joined to him as the other Apostles were joined to Peter. This alone gives the key to the childlike obedience, so incomprehensible to the outsider, which we give to the Church, an obedience whereby we submit to it as the will of Christ expressed in the action of His Vicar. It is for us no slave mentality, no corpse-like servitude, but a profoundly religious act, an absolute devotion to Christ paid by His children who are enjoying the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Finally, Christ does a third thing with His body; and that is, He sanctifies with it. The body of Christ is continually receiving, through seven mysterious physical signs, the Energy of the Divine Life and the liberating touch of His Precious Wounds — for each Sacrament is a kiss of God, a material thing used as a means of spiritual sanctification. And the true minister of every Sacrament is none other than the Supreme and Eternal High Priest — Christ Himself.
In summary, then, Christ who in His human body taught, governed, and sanctified, now continues to do the same in His mystical body; and her teachings are Christ's infallible teachings, her commands Christ's divine commands, and her Sacramental Life Christ's Divine Life. The Church, then, is the continuation of the Incarnation. It is not an institution like a bank, but a life; not an organization like a club, but an organism; not something horizontal extending from the Apostles as men to us as other men, but something vertical in which Divine Life descends first from God to Christ and then on to us in the Church.
The Gospel, therefore, is being re-lived by the presence of Christ in His new body, which is the Church. Just as His own human body was subject to physical weaknesses, just as it became tired at Jacob's well and had its lips blistered with the kiss of Judas, so I see His own mystical body subject, not to physical weakness, but to moral weakness and scandals, and even to other betraying lips. But I can see no more reason for doubting the Divinity of His mystical body because of its failures and weaknesses than I can see a reason for doubting the Divinity of Christ because three of His Apostles slept in the garden.
Through the lips of the Church I hear Christ speaking, and her words I accept as the very words of Christ. When she lifts her hands in the confessional and bids the sinner go and sin no more I see Christ once more lifting His hands in forgiveness as onlookers taunt Him: "How can man forgive sins?" When I see some of her own children leave her because they cannot accept her doctrine, I see Christ once more permitting His own choice disciples, who found His sayings hard, to leave Him and walk with Him no more. When I see her hold aloft a white Host in the Chalice and say to me, "Behold the Lamb of God," I believe that Christ Himself is as really and truly there as if He should throw open the Tabernacle door and declare unto me His living presence. When I see a priest mount the altar steps to renew the Sacrifice of Calvary, I see once more the bleeding feet of Christ climbing the hill and His wounded hands outstretched on the gibbet of a cross. When I hear the Church call men and women away from the lights and glamours of the world to the shades and shadows of the Cross, where saints are made, I hear once more Christ commending Mary because she had chosen the better part, and that, after all, only one thing in life is necessary, and that is the salvation of a soul. When I hear her misunderstood and hated by the world, I can hear Christ once more reminding us: "Because . . . I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. Know ye that it hath hated me before you." In those moments when she is accused of being unscientific, behind the times, and the Church of the poor, I hear men once more asking Christ: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" In those other moments when the world shouts and acclaims her and would almost crown her King, I see the palm branches of triumph change into spears of threat.
Then, in those moments of sorrow when the Church goes on trial and I hear her condemned for being too dogmatic, I am reminded of Annas' complaint that Christ would not speak out concerning His ministry and His doctrine. When I hear her charged with being too worldly and unpatriotic, I take the charges merely as echoes made before Pilate's palace that Christ was perverting the nation and refusing to give tribute to Caesar. When I hear her condemned for being too unworldly and refusing to compromise, I can almost see Herod once again robing Christ in the garment of a fool because He would not do a worldly trick to gain His release. When the charges are added that she is too dogmatic or too undogmatic, too worldly or too unworldly, I recall that they are contradictory charges and that the only fitting punishment for one condemned on contradictory charges is the sin of contradiction: The cross on which one bar is at variance, in contradiction to the other.
The Church, then, must have her passion days even as Christ must be condemned in three languages, in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, in the cultures of Jerusalem, Rome and Athens, in the name of the good, the true and the beautiful. Now, as then, the representatives of these three cultures pass beneath the Cross and ask that the Church give up and come down. Those who crucify in the name of the good, shout unto her: "Come down from your belief in the spiritual destiny of man; come down from your belief that man has been made to the image and likeness of God; come down from your belief in the sanctity of marriage. Come down and we will believe." Those who crucify in the name of the true, pass beneath the cross and plead: "Come down from your belief that there is such a thing as truth; come down from your belief in the Divinity of Christ and the existence of God; come down from your belief in the continued life and truth of Christ in His Church. Can you not see that there are other crosses on Calvary besides your own? Come down and we will believe." Those who crucify in the name of the beautiful shout: "Come down from your belief that salvation is purchased through mortification; come down from your belief that the only way to save a life is to lose it; come down from your belief that another world is to be purchased by the tempered enjoyment of this one! See the straits to which your philosophy has already led you. Your flesh is hanging like purple rags. Come down and we will believe."
The divinely supreme miracle of the whole life of the Church — like that of Christ's whole life — is that she does not come down. The miracle of the crucifixion is the fact that Christ still hangs there. Divinity in such moments is shown by restraint of power. A human being would have stepped down with the same impetuosity with which weak men answer timid challenges. The miracle is to be able to come down and yet not to come down. It is human to come down, but it is divine to hang there. It would be easy for the Church to come down: To have been Gnostic in the first Century, to have been Arian in the fourth, and to be pagan in the twentieth. It is always easy to let the age have its head, but it is difficult to keep one's own. It is always easy to fail. There are a thousand angles at which a thing will fall but only one at which it stands; and that is the angle at which the Church is poised between Heaven and earth — and from that angle she o'erlooks the passing fads and fancies of the ages and sings over them in deep and sonorous tones a requiem in the language of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, awaiting the day when she shall come down to walk in the glory of her new Easter morn.
The Divine Romance
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