Biblical Beasts: Unicorn

Today unicorns have a rather effeminate, placid reputation. One can see this in children's story books but also in the Harry Potter series, My Little Pony and a recent episode of Glee. This image is rather far removed from the ancient and medieval account of the fictional one-horned horse. It was seen as the fiercest and swiftest of all land creatures and could not be caught by any hunter. The only way to catch one was to put a virgin girl in its path. The unicorn, seeing the maiden, comes to her and puts its head in her lap and falls asleep. This fierce imagery is also used in the bible. In the Book of Numbers, God is described as having the strength of a Unicorn and the ability to tame the beast. The horns of the Unicorn are often used as a symbol of despair and terror in the Psalms and the Book of Job.

It might come as a surprise that unicorns are mentioned in the Bible at all, and this is very understandable. Many English translations of the Old testament translate the Hebrew word רְאֵם (re’em) as Ox. The Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate translated the term as μονόκερως (monokeros) and unicornis respectively. The King James Bible also translates the word as the English "unicorn"(The Douai-Rheims opts for rhinoceros).

Nevertheless the unicorn was seen as a rich symbol of Christ by the medieval Church. One bestiary states that:

The unicorn signifies Christ, who was made incarnate in Mary's womb, was captured by the Jews, and was put to death. The unicorn's fierce wildness shows the inability of hell to hold Christ. The single horn represents the unity of God and Christ. The small size of the unicorn is a symbol of Christ's humility in becoming human.

Just as the unicorn has lost much of its edge in pubic perception, so has the person of Jesus Christ. He was not just a nice man, who told nice stories and told everyone 'just be nice'. He was the Son of God. He was a true radical and a true revolutionary. He came not just to change peoples' attitudes and opinions but to change the very nature of the world. Through His death and resurrection Jesus not only restores our nature but elevates to something so much better.

Biblical Beasts: Snake

When one reads the story of the Fall in the book of Genesis, it is of no surprise that snakes have been associated with sin and the devil. In many ways the creature suits this anthropomorphism. For a mammal there is something sinister about it's cold-blooded reptilian ways and mannerisms but I also think that the snake, particularly captures the effects of sin of humanity. The medieval Aberdeen Bestiary declares that "All snakes are coiled and twisted, never straight. It is said that there are as many poisons, deaths and griefs as there are kinds of snakes." The fact that most snakes slither on the ground could also be said to display how through sin humanity has fallen in dignity from its God-given natural elevated and erect state. The snake's lack of true limbs also show how living in sin disables us; it makes us weaker; it limits our ability and opportunity.

Despite all this, the snake also offers a metaphor for solution. Snakes shed their skin by rubbing against rough surfaces, often rocks. We too can "shed our skins" of sins by going to the True Rock, that is Christ. Through him we are made new and freed from the tyranny of sin and death .

28th September: The Dominican Martyrs of Nagasaki

Neh 2:1-8, Ps 136:1-6, Lk 9:57-62

What does it mean to follow Christ? Following Christ could be understood in lots of ways, but in order to come to a proper understanding, we must at the very least consider where He is heading - He’s heading towards Calvary. In today’s gospel, the demands He makes on those who might consider this journey, are really quite shocking. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. He is of no fixed abode and so following Him and sharing in His life means our place in the world is very precarious and insecure. Equally troubling is what He says to the person who wants to bury his father. The Church teaches that burying the dead is one of the seven corporal works of mercy, so can Jesus really mean we have to forgo such charitable works in order to follow Him? And don’t we owe something to our family and friends who have helped us and shaped us? Does following Jesus mean we have to be so transfixed on Him that all our other relationships should be severed without even so much as a goodbye? If there is a degree of hyperbole in what Jesus is saying, we mustn’t use this as a reason to water down what He says. Following Jesus is not ordinary and straightforward.

In the lives of the saints, we can see the extraordinary ways in which people have followed Christ. Today we celebrate the memorial of 16 martyrs who laboured to establish the Church in Nagasaki in the 17th Century. All of these martyrs were either Dominicans or associated in some way with the Dominican family, and the example they set provides a contrast with the would-be followers of Jesus in today’s Gospel. One of these martyrs, St Dominic Ibanez de Erquicia wrote a very moving letter to his father before he died. In this letter we learn that when he went out as a missionary to Japan, he was fully aware of the persecutions that were going on, but during his time there, the level of persecution greatly increased. And so when he wrote to his father, he knew it might be his last letter. In his final words he writes:

my beloved Father, let us so act that we may see one another in heaven for all eternity, fearing no separation here. Let us have no concern for this world, for it is our exile and separates us from God who is our total good. I say to my dearest sister: do not forget to commend me to God. To all my relatives and friends I send greetings. May the Lord keep you until you reach our heavenly homeland.

Although in our own society we don’t face the threat of torture and death for our faith, we still need to ask ourselves ‘how willing are we to go with Christ on the road to Calvary?’ It may feel like the way the martyrs followed Christ is beyond us, more than we could possibly endure. But we need to remember that whatever way we follow Christ, we do not go it alone. We are accompanied by the Church here on earth, we are accompanied by the saints in heaven, and of course when we follow Christ, we are with Christ.

from a homily preached by fr. Robert Verrill OP

Ordinations at Blackfriars

On the 17th of September our brothers Haavar Nilsen and Robert Verrill were ordained to the diaconate, and fr. Lawrence Lew to the priesthood by Archbishop Joseph Tobin, secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life . The day was not only a joyful day for the Province but for the brothers' families and friends who had come to support them and share in their joy.

Fr. Lawrence will be working in the University of Edinburgh's Catholic chaplaincy and brs. Haavar and Robert will serve as deacons at Blackfriars, Oxford. Please keep them and their missions in your prayers.

The soundtrack of the video below contains a live recording of the specially composed motet by James MacMillan.  For more information visit the NLM. 

Fruits of Study 7: Esse and Essentia

St Thomas’ second argument in the Summa for God’s existence goes along the following lines: in the universe, everything we sense has some cause, nothing can cause itself to exist and there can’t be an infinite series of causes. Therefore there must be a first cause, and this we call God. This cosmological might at first seem susceptible to some serious objections: if God can exist without being caused, then why can’t other things exist without being caused? Why can’t there be lots of first causes? Aquinas’ argument for the distinction between esse and essentia in his short work, De Ente et Essentia can help us to respond to these objections.

Essentia and esse are rather technical terms for St Thomas, but roughly speaking they correspond to the two operations of the intellect: we can understand what something is, and we can understand that something is. Essentia is that within something by which we understand what it is; the essentia determines the specific manner of somethings existence. Similarly, esse is that within something by which we understand it to actually exist; it is because of a thing’s esse, because of its act of being, that something is actual, real, existing. Everything that exists must have an essentia and an esse.

The fact that we might understand what a unicorn is (its essentia) without knowing whether it exists (i.e. has an esse) suggests that essentia and esse are different. But does this difference in our understanding correspond to something in reality, or is it just the way our minds work which makes us think essentia and esse are distinct? St Thomas says it’s the former - esse and essentia are really distinct. He uses a rather subtle argument to show that essentia and esse are distinct in reality for any essentia that can be in more than one thing. For example, human nature (an essentia) can be in two different human beings, and therefore there must be a real distinction between a person’s essentia and their esse. A corollary of this is that there can be at most one thing whose essentia and esse are identical. Such ‘a thing’, if it existed would be pure existence. In De Ente et Essentia, the question of whether God exists is the same as the question of whether pure existence exists. This is not obvious – after all Aquinas doesn’t believe in pure whiteness or pure heat, so why should he believe in pure existence?

His argument for pure existence is rather like the second way argument in the Summa: everything that belongs to something must depend on its essentia or arise from something extrinsic to it. For example, a person’s tendency to laugh depends on their human nature, but a person’s knowledge also depends on some external reality. Now everything possesses an essentia and an esse, and a things esse cannot come from its essentia because the essentia depends on the esse for its actuality, and so a things esse comes from something extrinsic to it. This extrinsic thing must also have an esse and essentia, and so we can apply the same argument again to show that the esse of this extrinsic thing must also be caused by something else extrinsic to it. Now this argument can’t go on for ever; the argument can only stop if there is something whose esse and essentia are identical. This is the first cause. It is unique, it depends on nothing else, and everything in the universe depends on it. And this is what we call God.

Term is Coming...

Simple and Solemn Professions 2011

Last weekend the Province of England has had much to celebrate. On the 10th of September, fr. Graham Hunt OP and fr. Gregory Pearson OP made solemn profession at Blackfriars, Oxford. In his homily the provincial, John Farrell OP, reflected on the fraternity of the Friars Preachers, which crosses both time and geography.

On Sunday fr. Matthew Jarvis OP and fr. Oliver Keenan OP made their simple professions at the Priory of St. Michael the Archangel, Cambridge. They have since arrived in Oxford and will be joining the Godzdogz team this coming term.

Biblical Beasts: Raven

The raven has a rather sinister reputation. Throughout history it has been used as a symbol of the macabre. One has to only think of Poe's poem The Raven, Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta and more recently the Omen trilogy. This association is not limited to the West. In the Koran it is the raven that teaches Cain how to bury his murdered brother Abel and amongst the Inuit people this scavenger is viewed as a 'trickster-god'.

The raven's character in the Judeo-Christian tradition however is far more varied: They are condemned as unclean in the Book of Leviticus; they are Noah's failed scouts at the end of the flood; and one of Kings of the Midianites defeated by Gideon is called "Oreb" (עורב) which means "Raven". On the other hand they also are sent by God to aid and bring food to Elijah. There are further examples within Christianity of the raven acting in a caring and protective way: A raven is said to have protected Saint Benedict by taking away a loaf of bread poisoned by jealous monks after he blessed it. The legend of St. Vincent of Saragossa, the 4th century martyr, states that after St. Vincent was executed, ravens protected his body from being devoured by wild animals, until his followers could recover the body. His body was taken to what is now known as Cape St. Vincent in southern Portugal. A shrine was erected over his grave, which continued to be guarded by flocks of ravens. When the Portuguese king transfered St. Vincent's relics to Lisbon the ravens followed. An event still commemorated on the Coat of Arms of the city

Fruits of Study 6: Suffering and Love in St Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena (1347-80) was very practical and focused and on how to help people be saved and sanctified in the concrete situation of their lives. For her, suffering was a daily reality and one that can be crushing and an obstacle to a life of faith. She wanted people to see suffering in the light of God’s truth and goodness and then use it positively to produce a life of love and other virtues. As with other themes she relates this to the Crucified Christ, the centre of her thought.

In the Dialogue, chapter 14 (D 14), she explains Christ’s saving work through an extended medical metaphor. We are wounded, indeed have puss in us which is deadly, and God steps in as the divine healer. She makes it clear we are too weak to suck out our own poison (the roots of our sin) and so heal ourselves. She draws on a medieval view of medicine that considered that some medicines are too strong for a baby to take. (‘Bitter’ is her own word which may be selected in view of the application she is going to make of the practice.) However, if the mother or wet-nurse (again a common practice in her day) is willing to endure the bitterness of the medicine then she can pass it on to the baby in a less bitter form along with the nourishing milk from her breast. She specifically says that God joined the divine and human natures together in Jesus to ‘drink the bitter medicine of his painful death on the cross so that he might heal and give life to you [us] who were babies weakened by sin (D 14)’. She sees God feeding us in this way as we come to the Crucified Christ and feed at Christ’s opened side or breast. (Catherine is applying striking feminine imagery to Christ and his saving work.)

God’s intention in the redemption then is not just to show respect to Divine honour or to declare us just but also and importantly to really heal us from sin and to actually give us life, life that comes from God. But this is done through the work of the cross and it is only the God-Man who is able to endure the bitterness and so feed us with its medicine. To what bitterness is she referring? It seems the bitterness must be suffering and indeed death itself.

The cross of Christ demonstrates both God’s love and Christ’s virtue and very importantly it also allows us to be formed in virtue. According to Catherine, it builds us up on the foundation of Christ’s love, shown in him freely suffering for us. We love God in return for God’s love for us, and so are called to move from a state of selfishness to one of selflessness, that is to a life of real love. A life given over to such love will produce a life of virtues, love being the mother of virtues. And virtues grow as they are tested. Suffering, difficulty and adversity test them and so a human can grow in virtues. Thus patience, for instance, which Catherine sees as being at the heart of charity ‘is not proved except in suffering (D 5)’; ‘Justice is not lessened but proved by the injustices of others … Likewise your kindness and mildness are revealed through gentle patience in the presence of wrath … Steadfast courage is tested when you have to suffer much from people’s insults and slanders … (D 8).’ To love perfectly is to accept anything from God, any adversity, and to do so with a response of love, full of such other virtues as are required to live such love.

(Citations are from Suzanne Noffke’s translation of Catherine’s Dialogue, SPCK, 1980)

22nd July

On Friday the 22nd July an act of terrorism took the lives of 77 people in Norway. 8 people were killed by a bomb in Oslo, but the greatest shock was the terror at Utøya, where 69 people were shot to death, mostly young boys and girls from the ages of 14 to 20 years old. I was participating as a leader in a family camp far from the dramas in Oslo and on Utøya. We were about to start on an overnight hiking trip with 14 children and four leaders. During the evening, news of the shocking numbers of killed struck us like a nightmare. Saturday morning, on the way down the mountain, I stood in front of 14 children and had to explain to them what had happened. It was painful to realize that these children were just like those who were victims on the island of Utøya.

From this moment, something happened in me, and something happened in the soul of the Norwegian people. The first reaction came immediately: State leaders, especially the prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, our king Harald V, and the government stood together with the same message: This act of violence provokes fear and anxiety. We are not going to let our minds and our decisions be driven by this fear. This public signal found its echo among the people. Two days after the killings I was crossing Oslo city by bus. On a wall surrounding a Kindergarten there was a sign: "We must stick together". This is what the Norwegian people have done. We have stuck together, wept together, talked together. 200,000 people met in front of the city hall in Oslo on Sunday the 24th, everyone carrying flowers in their hands.

The open acceptance of our human reactions, and the embracing attitude of fellowship and love have marked Norwegian society and the media. All this is quite different from what has been the reaction to similar events in some other countries. The public debate has often been marked and driven by fear, defense, with restrictions and more intense supervision of the society as result. This may be justified and necessary. Still, there are important questions a society must ask itself: Fear and anxiety or fellowship and solidarity? I believe that our national leaders have managed to stop or at least limit the evil spinning wheel that always follows fear: Anxiety engenders anxiety, violence engenders violence. The open manifestation of a tolerance and peace as the foundation for the political and democratic future has been a true blessing for our nation, and stands as an example for all in time to come.

In an article written in The Telegraph one week after the killings (29^th August), Anthony Browne claims that it is time for Norway to 'confront its racist demons (like GB has)', and he explains us that 'this tragedy marks the end of Norway’s innocence'. Yes, innocence is lost. But is this about racist demons? I do believe that it is about something worse. Finn Skårderud, a psychiatrist and well known Norwegian author says in an article in Dagbladet Magasinet on the 30th July that it is time to draw the attention to what’s going on in the lives of children. We see into their rooms and blindly trust the child when they assure us that everything is ok. Reality can sometimes be quite different. Here Skårderud touches a pathology engendered by our modern western society: Isolation. We have become a society that in its concern for welfare risks losing the basis of all human growth: Humanity. For humanity to grow we need both social contact and responsibility. Every human being needs to live in a human context. Without social interaction we become ill in mind. Anyone who enters such a condition will not be able to carry the social obligations that every human is to take, and may risk entering into an illusionary world where fundamental human ethical understandings are lost. This is what happened to Breivik a long time ago.

After 22nd July everybody demand that the government take action to prevent such horrors happening again. But we also, each one of us, are challenged. We all carry a responsibility to fight these pathological patterns. By engagement in our local society, and by confronting hateful attitudes, opinions and actions, we may take responsibility for the society we live in. If we don’t, we ourselves risk becoming responsible for the violence that surrounds us. We may not be able to save the world, but we are called to do what we can. Only through real relations can we create the humanism necessary for our common wellbeing. If we search for demons as Browne tends to do, we may easily spot the diabolic side of internet in this disaster. Breivik entered into a web of people he thought where his allies. He lived in false fellowship with catastrophic outcome. One of his inspiration sources, 'Fjordman', and many with him, will have to consider how their own statements have become part of the tragedy of the 22nd July.

One month after the tragedy another event took place that may be seen as reverse image of what happened in Norway. I'm thinking of the World Youth Days in Madrid. On an airport, almost 2 million young people met to pray and praise. This Catholic meeting based on love, respect and peace shows us that true fellowship is possible, and that it can reach all around the world. At the final Mass a group of about 200 Norwegians participated with black bands tied to their flags in solidarity with the memorial ceremony taking place in Norway the same day. It was a breathtaking celebration, showing the world how Catholics from all over the world commit themselves to the same God, carrying to the world a gospel that holds love, peace and truth as the foundation for our existence.

Flowers still fill the Church gates and the streets of Oslo; roses are often laid down with tears. The Norwegian people are still mourning. In a small, peaceful country, love has been challenged. And with it presents a challenge for the nation, and for each one of us. May God give us the strength to stand up for true human values in our society.

Fruits of Study 5: Creation Ex Nihilo

The much referenced 'science versus religion debate' has at its root a timeless question which we humans feel compelled to answer: where do we come from? Philosophers, natural scientists, theologians, to name but a few, have all quite rightly grappled with this tantalising issue. In recent years it seems to have become more polarised. Creationists and secular Darwinists look across a spectrum of other positions with the Church somewhere in the middle but broadly speaking you're seen to either be with the science crowd or the religious.

Creation would then seem to be the pivotal issue. However, we would be wrong to think that this debate is somehow new: we just have very short or very selective memories. When Thomas Aquinas was penning his Summa in the thirteenth century the same controversy was very much apparent in the new universities. Indeed, a scientific revolution was under-way across Western Europe as the works of the ancient Greek natural philosophers and mathematicians became available in Latin for the first time. Specifically, many held that there must be a fundamental incompatibility between the claim of the Greek naturalists that something cannot come from nothing, and the Christian teaching of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing.

Aquinas couldn't conceive that there could be an incompatibility between the two positions – what we now may call science and religion. Christian doctrine maintains that God is the author of all Truth; the aim of rigorous scientific investigation is to find the Truth. Why should one side fear the other? In fact, are we not on the same side if we believe in Truth at all? Well, it wasn't to be that clear cut then and it doesn't seem that much has changed. In straightforward terms, the problem would appear to be complete confusion by what we mean by the nature of creation and natural change.

Thomas, when speaking of creation, is not pondering how one thing came to be from another thing but what is common to all things in the universe, namely existence. But what is the cause of all existence? Is it a cause in the sense of a natural change or of some kind or an ultimate bringing into being of something from no antecedent state whatsoever by Divine Agency? Here lies the fundamental conflict; there is simply a major misunderstanding in the use of the term creation. By seeking to ground it solely in the realm of the natural sciences and being unwilling to admit it has a place in metaphysics and theology we will continue to grope blindly in the dark.

The Greeks were in fact correct, nothing comes from nothing, if we understand rightly that 'comes from' implies a change. Change from one natural state to another requires some pre-existant material reality. A possibility for change must lie in something, there must be potentiality. Creation on the other hand differs as it is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever there is in existence. We can see the difference if we look at how being the cause of something's whole existence must in fact be different from causing a change in something that exists. In other words, we are not talking of God taking a bit of this and a bit of that and putting a universe together. Creation then, is not a change in matter but a cause; God produces existence absolutely ex nihilo. This act of creation may also be seen as one of conservation, that is God did not simply create in one distant moment and exit the next. Creation is a continual action by which he gives existence as he upholds the world in being.

Without God, the Cause, there can be no effect. The ability that creatures have to act only comes by virtue of their existence. So yes we can make some things, change some things and observe change in other existing realities but we cannot create. Creation accounts for the very existence of things not for changes in things. Only God can create, he is like the ultimate power source that if it were to cease then out would go the lights – only there would be no lights!

Biblical Beasts: Tortoise

Someone commented that Godzdogz is 'scraping the bottom of the barrel' in having a summer series on Biblical Beasts. Well if that's true we are at the very bottom of that barrel in looking for a biblical beast whose name (in English) begins with the letter 'T'. There are no toads or turkeys and one mention of a tiger (Job 4:11) though most translations render it 'lion'. No tigers in Africa - no tigers in the Bible, perhaps. We have to wait for William Blake's wonderful poem before we meet the tiger as a symbol of divine power although the 'lion of Judah' has a long history even before C.S.Lewis's Aslan appears on the scene.

The tortoise gets a mention (in some translations) in Leviticus 11:29-30. It appears on a list of unclean animals named as follows in the Revised Standard Version: 'these are unclean to you among the swarming things that swarm upon the earth: the weasel, the mouse, the great lizard according to its kind, the gecko, the land crocodile, the lizard, the sand lizard, and the chameleon'. The first 'great lizard' is sometimes translated as the 'tortoise after its kind'. They are the small Leviathans, we might say, lizards and hard shelled creatures that creep along the earth. This family of creatures is fascinating and can be unsettling: there are some beautiful lizards and some startling ones, some tiny tortoises and some enormous ones.

There does not seem to be anything of spiritual or theological interest here although much to interest animal lovers and natural historians. (But that such creatures exist is, of course, a wonderful aspect of creation: they represent some aspect of God's glory.) Chinese mythology imagined the world resting on the back of a great tortoise but no noble task or symbolism is assigned to it in Jewish or Christian tradition. The symbolic ways in which the tortoise has been used are easily understood: his slow and careful progress, as well as his longevity (the oldest recorded lived for 188 years), make him seem like a creature whose approach to life is eminently wise and prudent. He paces himself well, lives temperately, seems to conserve his energy, is discreet and modest in his public appearances - all characteristics that make him a suitable representation of the virtuous person. Modern fantasy stories and films often use the tortoise in this way, as a wise guru who helps the searcher to stop, and think, before proceeding to the next stage of the journey.

"Thought it Natural to be Rational, Reason's Factual..."

Quail

We find two references to Quail in the Old Testament: first, in Exodus chapter 15, and then again in Numbers chapter 11. In both instances God provides the people of Israel with meat in the form of these birds in response to their grumblings and complaints about the hardships of the desert. Yet the two accounts are subtly and interestingly different.

In Exodus Israel is only just beginning its wanderings in the desert. As the people begin to feel the pangs of hunger and thirst they begin to regret their leap from slavery in Egypt to freedom with God. To strengthen them and encourage them on their journey, God provides his people with Manna, bread from heaven and a 'type' of the Eucharist. In addition, he also provides Quail, he provides his people with flesh to eat in the desert. In Exodus, then, the Quail appear as a sign of God's providence and generosity, and also a foreshadowing of the Eucharist and the Incarnation. In the Desert, God gave his people bread from heaven and flesh from the sky in the form of Quail. In the Eucharist, our bread from heaven is the Body and Blood of Christ himself, this is our food for our journey with God.

In Numbers Chapter 11, however, the context is slightly different. Here the people have already received the gift of the Manna, they have already received the bread from heaven, the food for the journey - and they are sick of it. They are bored of this food and once more long for the variety of their diet in Egypt. The sacrifices of freedom are too high. The consolations of slavery much too alluring. Once again God provides responds to the complaints of his people by providing meat in the form of Quail, but this time he promises Israel that they will grow tired of this meat too. He tells Israel: ' You will eat it [meat]....for a month until it comes out of your nostrils and sickens you' (Numbers 11: 20).

Here the Quail represent all the sensual, intellectual and emotional consolations that we turn to in order to avoid the cross of Christ, in order to avoid the sacrifices that love of God and love of neighbour demand. Eventually these consolations become revolting and we must search for another 'fix'. As Augustine puts it, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. This is the hard lesson that the Israelites learnt by enduring the privations of the desert for forty years. It is a lesson that we too must learn if we are to fully embrace our freedom as children of God and finally dispel all thoughts of returning to the slavery of sin.

Fruits of Study 4: The Development of Doctrine

Blessed John HenryNewman wrote his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1848) against the backdrop of a multiplication of Protestant sects and chapel congregations in nineteenth century England. These protestant groups rejected the elaborate liturgy and theology of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches, dismissing these developments as a corruption of the pristine teaching and practice of the early Church. Instead, these reformers claimed a lineage of praxis with the apostles arguing that their simplicity of life and doctrine represented the distilled essence of the faith, free from the later dilutions and contaminations of 'tradition'.

For Newman, this notion that the history of the Church from the end of the apostolic age onwards was a sorry tale of degeneration and decay until finally the light of the reformation freed us from the dark tyranny of tradition, was contrary to the very notion of revelation itself. Newman argued that whilst God's revelation to Mankind at the Incarnation was perfect and complete, our capacity to receive and comprehend this revelation was and is decidedly imperfect and finite - at least in this life. We receive the Gospel not as an easily digestable package of propositions that can be clearly demarcated and defined, but as a truth that transcends us. This transcendence means that whilst we can make some true statements about the coming of God as man and the implications of this Incarnation for each one of us, we can never say everything that is true about this Good News, this Gospel.

Rather than being a clear and distinct idea that we possess and comprehend, then, the Gospel is more like an active principle within us that comes to define who we are and how we live. As we go through life, the Gospel, this 'active principle' that organises our lives, is continually re-applied and re-expressed in the new contexts and situations that we face. In this process of re-application of the Gospel in the lives of Christians and Christian communities, the doctrinal and liturgical tradition of the Church is deepened as new perspectives on the Incarnation of Christ are uncovered.

For Newman, then, doctrinal and liturgical development is not a sign of contamination or decay, it is a sign of life. We do not live our Christian life in a vacuum. We live our Christian lives in a world that is continually changing. Fidelity to the unchanging content of the Gospel, then, means developing and changing ways of expressing and articulating that same Gospel. As Newman himself puts it: 'To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often'. To put this same point another way, Newman is offering us a quasi-organic understanding of doctrinal and liturgical development. The Catholic Church is the tree that grew from the mustard seed. Whilst it may now look very different to its first manifestation, there is a direct correspondence between its primitive state and its contemporary state. The Protestant sects and Chapel congregations of Newman's day, in contrast, whilst they may have superficially looked more like the early Church than nineteenth century Catholicism, were in fact fundamentally as different from the Church of the apostolic age as a mustard seed is from an acorn.

Biblical Beasts: Pig

Pigs do not appear to have a very high standing in the Bible. They were regarded as unclean. Leviticus 11:7-8 spells this out: “You will regard the pig as unclean, because though it has a cloven hoof, divided into two parts, it is not a ruminant. You will not eat the meat of these or touch their dead bodies: you will regard them as unclean.” It is interesting that the reason given is not based on the animal having dirty habits – like wallowing in mud, or grunting, or as linked to any parasites or medical conditions coming from eating them. It is, of course possible, that these lie in the background but it is presented as a divine commandment.

Observing such laws helped to set the Jews apart as distinct from the people about them and thus in a unique relation to a unique God. Such ritual purity laws were to point to holiness, the holiness of God and of how a person needed to become holy (clean) to enter God’s presence. It is all of this that is picked up in the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). The son has moved so far from the moral and ritual commitment to his Jewish faith, he is so far outside of it and so unclean, that he is reduced to herding pigs. This means he is working for a Gentile as Jews had no use for pigs and would not keep them.

More importantly, clean animals are those that can be offered to God in ritual worship, i.e. as animal sacrifices. Unclean ones cannot be so offered, and this was commonly because neighbouring peoples offered them to their own gods. The Hittites were known to sacrifice pigs to their gods. Such use of pigs lay at the heart of the infamous Abomination of Desolation and the persecution of the Jews linked to it as narrated in the Books of the Macabees, around 165 BC. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the (Greek) Seleucid king of the area sought to impose pagan worship on the Jews: he erected a statue of Zeus in the temple on the Jewish altar and offered sacrifices of pigs to it (1 Macc 1:47). Jews were then made to eat the flesh of pigs - and most probably of such sacrificed pigs - or lose their lives. This image of sacrilege – the Abomination of Desolation - is recorded also in the Book of Daniel, and the accompanying history was still very potent in the time of Jesus, and this image featured in Jesus’ own apocalyptic teaching (Mk 13:14). Thus another foreign power, usually seen as the Romans in the first place, would seek to impose a false religion on God’s people and to punish non-compliance with death. Jesus assures his disciples that he has power over such forces.

The other famous pig incident in the New Testament may have some connection with this. It concerns the exorcism of a man and the casting of his demons into a herd of 2000 pigs that rush into the sea and are drowned (Mk 5 and parallels in Mt 8 and Lk 8). The devils recognise the holiness of Jesus – calling him Son of the Most High – and name themselves as Legion, a term specific to Roman military use, and meaning a fighting group of 6000 men. Jesus will not tolerate their presence but they hope to stay in the area and ask that he will allow them to go into the unclean pigs. But this does not work out and the demons end up in the sea, a realm under God’s authority, and something over which Jesus has specifically exercised his authority in the previous chapter.

There are a number of military allusions in the story and these suggest that the authority and power of Jesus is not just over evil spirits but over the military forces, and forces which may serve such spirits and even the devil. In addition to ‘legion’, the word used to describe the ‘herd’ is often used of military groupings. They ‘charge’ down the hill and thence into the water. Their drowning brings to mind the drowning of the Egyptian army which pursued Moses and the Israelites across the Red Sea.

But what of the pigs? The demons do not want to destroy the pigs. So it seems better to consider that the pigs cannot tolerate the presence of the demons within them. They end up assisting the plan of Jesus to overcome the demonic powers. The demons were wrong in calculating that the pigs, perhaps because they were unclean, would tolerate their presence. As such the pigs serve the purpose of Jesus, not that of the demons. This again shows the scale of the authority and power of Jesus in comparison with the ultimate powerlessness of the demons. Their destruction perhaps points to a goodness in the pigs, a natural resistance to evil, given they are not moral agents.

It is interesting to note that not long after this (Mk 7), Jesus declared all foods clean, stressing the spiritual and moral foundation for real holiness and cleanliness. All of creation is good and serves God’s purpose. Until Christ came and revealed and made available the full means of holiness, some animals had been declared unclean to help the Jews separate themselves from the evil around and within them. It does not reflect the moral or ontological state of the animals as such. Now that era is past. In the end the pig is declared clean. It has always served God’s purposes and one can assume or at least hope that it will find its place in the new earth at the end of time.

The Angelicum

We share with our readers the following video recently produced for the Dominican-run Pontifical University of St Thomas, Rome (The Angelicum), where a number of brothers of our Province have studied for licences and doctorates in Theology and Canon Law.

Fruits of Study 3: Re-enchanting Education

The following review, by Fr Vivian Boland OP, was published in Faith magazine in January 2011: 

Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2009, 156pp, £12.99

In their struggles with Christianity, the pagan philosophers of late antiquity presented Pythagoras as their answer to Jesus: here was a good and spiritual man whose knowledge and wisdom became foundational for all later philosophy. In this fascinating manifesto on the re-enchantment of education, Stratford Caldecott also appeals to Pythagoras, but to a baptized Pythagoras, his thought about mathematics and music transposed into a Christian key, something already underway in writers such as Boethius and Augustine.

Taking as his starting point Benedict XVI’s appeal for a liturgical understanding of human existence, Caldecott shows how the rationalism that has reduced western education to something purely utilitarian, will be overcome through a fresh appreciation of the transcendentals of truth and goodness, but only where the neglected transcendental, beauty, is allowed to work its influence. The perception of form is fundamental if the elimination of meaning is to be reversed.

A first chapter considers how the medieval quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, became separated from the study of philosophy and theology, as if the quadrivium was an end in itself rather than the way in which a person was made ready for the study of philosophy and theology. A true appreciation of ‘liberal’ education was thus lost, as was a strong sense of the rootedness of the higher disciplines in the study of number and its relationship to physical time and space. The Pythagorean inspiration of the vision proposed is clear and so too is the liturgical destination of education, where time and space are made holy in the worship of God. Caldecott is not making a romantic or antiquarian proposal: ancient and medieval understandings need to be adapted to where we find ourselves now in the story of human understanding.

A second chapter argues for the education of the heart and imagination not just to feel but to know. This is crucial for science too as C.S.Lewis, Charles Taylor, and others, have argued. There follow two chapters developing this theme of the reintegration of science with the poetic mode of knowledge. This requires appreciating anew the nature of symbolism, the analogy of being which it presupposes, and an alternative vision of mathematics, what Caldecott calls ‘the lost wisdom of the world’. He speaks about the symbolism of numbers, the ‘golden ratio’ or ‘golden section’ that is found throughout nature, and symmetry, in which complexity and unity converge. Mathematics connects directly with theology, he continues, showing (following Augustine) how pointers to the Trinity are to be found everywhere. Much of this is inspiring and convincing though some of it feels contrived: Caldecott acknowledges that some of the speculations he records may appear forced.

The fifth chapter considers harmony, another element in the classical definitions of beauty, and he reflects on it in music, architecture, ecology, and astronomy. There are many beautiful thoughts and applications here as he sketches a Christian cosmology whose principles and values are at once scientific, practical, moral, aesthetic, and theological. He is happy to call the one who subscribes to such a vision a ‘Christian Pythagorean’ (p. 115).

A final chapter considers ‘the liturgical consummation of cosmology’. The philosophical and theological roots of ‘secular modernity’ continue to be exposed and examined, and Caldecott calls on many contemporary thinkers in support of his diagnosis. The way forward, he believes, is in recovering a sense of revelation and worship, in particular in recovering the ability to pray. This cannot be done willfully, of course, but emerges spontaneously from a particular way of appreciating the world: as an objective and beautiful thing, a symbolic reality whose fabric reveals, in a great variety of ways, the forms or archetypes of the world’s order (pp. 13, 125). A sense of the sacred, celebration of the liturgy, wonder and gratitude: these are the things in which we need to be re-educated not just for the joy of living in an enchanted ‘Liturgical City’ but because it is the only way to keep our education humane and our life civilized.

Like all manifestos this book is relatively short but clear in its diagnosis and in its prescriptions as well as being pregnant with many suggestive lines of thought. Anyone concerned about the condition of the perennial philosophy, or the future of Christian civilization, ought to read it.

"To send them out two by two..."

Wednesday night was a bit of a "curate's egg" for the community at Oxford. Two of our brothers, Fr. Vivian Boland and Br. Lawrence Lew, were packing up for pastures new. Fr. Vivian, the Master of Students, has been appointed The Master of the Order's Socius for the region of North-West Europe and Canada and Socius for Initial Formation and is moving to Rome. Br. Lawrence is moving to the Priory of St. Albert the Great, Edinburgh, where he will be joining the Catholic Chaplaincy team.  He will return to Oxford to be ordained to the priesthood later this month.

Their departures are of special significance to Godzdogz. They are the last remaining friars who have been with this blog since its inauguration. Fr. Vivian has been the dedicated editor since the beginning, and Br. Lawrence has used his considerable talent to build up and drive the blog. Please keep these brothers and their work in your prayers.