by CCW | 7 August 2023 04:00
It is unum necessarium, the one thing necessary. One of the most remarkable figures of the disturbed and disturbing 20th century, the legacy of which is our own disordered world, is the philosopher and social activist, Simone Weil. Her essay, ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’, begins with the astute observation that “prayer consists of attention,” and, indeed, attention of the highest order, namely, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God”. This complements Richard Hooker’s observation that prayer signifies “all the service that ever we do unto God”. For him, as for Simone Weil, the connection between learning and prayer was ever so obvious. They belong to our relation to God’s truth and goodness.
As teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.
We might add that God is for us ‘most beautiful’ and so completes the triad of Plato’s transcendentals, ‘the true, the beautiful, and the good’, which belong to the intellectual and ethical structure of reality and our lives. The good, αγαθος, and the beautiful, καλος, are virtually interchangeable in Greek. Beauty belongs to our seeking truth and the good. “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (Ps. 96.9), as the Psalmist bids us.
I want to reflect on our commemoration of St. John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, and on the readings from Ezekiel and Matthew, about our priestly vocation as “watchmen unto the house of Israel,” sent by Jesus “to teach, to preach, and to heal,” by way of the story of Martha and Mary, read in the daily office this week. Martha and Mary represent action and contemplation respectively in what is a long and rich tradition about the forms of spiritual life which are, I think, crucial for the life and fellowship of the Society of the Holy Cross. It is implicit in the Society Prayer about the saving power of the Cross “impressed inwardly” and “expressed outwardly.”
Following Plato and Aristotle, contemplation is the highest form of human activity, an inner activity of spiritual and intellectual reflection, but not at the expense of outward activity which belongs to our lives physically and socially with one another. There is, after all, something spiritual, intellectual, and ethical about our interactions with one another, even necessary. At issue is the interplay between action and contemplation; in short, between Martha and Mary.
Augustine encapsulates the idea nicely in a phrase in ‘The City of God’. Otium sanctum quaerit charitas veritatis, negotium iustum suscipit necessitas charitatis. “The love of truth seeks a holy quiet; [yet] the necessity of love accepts a righteous busyness”. I have carved these words on panels of wood which hang in my house. They are a reminder to us about our priestly life of prayer in relation to the true, the beautiful, and the good; a reminder of what Augustine calls the vita mixta, a mixed life, which belongs to our journey, via ad patriam.
The story of Martha and Mary turns on the question of attention. Martha, you will recall, “was distracted with much serving” and complained to Jesus about Mary “sitting at his feet, listening to his word.”
There is no greater contrast than between ‘being distracted’ and ‘being collected’, being attentive, as it were. “The faculty of attention, directed toward God,” Simone Weil says, “is the very substance of prayer.” She connects this to studies because seeking to learn means a commitment to ‘truth’ in all of its various forms in accord with our varying capacities and situations. Yet no genuine effort of attention is ever wasted. “It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.” For “there is real desire when there is an effort of attention” even if “our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result.”
What does this have to do with St. John Vianney and us in SSC, you may be wondering. Well, she notes, as an example, that “the useless efforts made by the Curé d’Ars, for long and painful years, in his attempt to learn Latin bore fruit in the marvelous discernment that enabled him to see the very souls of his penitents behind their word and even their silences.” There is hope for us all, poor students that we are! Being attentive to the true, the beautiful and the good means seeking the true, the beautiful and the good in each other and in calling each other to these abiding principles which belong to our spiritual life together. We are not the measure of the truth, the beautiful or the good; rather they are the metaphysical or theological principles that measure and define us spiritually and ethically.
There is another wonderful story about the Curé d’Ars, famous as a confessor of souls and for the miracles that resulted from his ministry. In a story which Austin Farrer tells, a cripple was pestering the Curé incessantly for a cure. The Curé exhorted him time after time to be reconciled to his condition, to bear his burden as a daily sacrifice and as a way of bearing the burdens of others and so fulfilling the law of Christ; things no doubt which we would all say. But all to no avail, the cripple could not accept this advice. “‘Very well,’ the Saint said, with tears in his eyes. ‘Put your crutches in the corner, and walk out.’ And he did.”
As Austin Farrer observes, miracles are, in a way, a concession to our condition; “but then the whole work that God did in Christ and still does for our salvation is a concession to our condition, extorted by our need for his compassion. Every line, every page of the Gospel records the concession of divine wisdom to human folly.” As such “we have every reason to rejoice, and to thank the mercy that has no end.” That, too, is about a kind of attentiveness, attention to God in his truth and goodness which is so beautiful, “the mercy that has no end.” Without that quality of attention, there can be no healing, it seems to me. It is about our attention to Christ who “when he saw the multitudes, was moved with compassion.” It is our attention to the compassion of Christ that properly defines our gathering as brother priests. That attention to his compassion is our faith in his love.
Distraction is the enemy of attention. We live in a culture of distraction, captive to our devices of distraction, oblivious perhaps of their insidious intent, the intent to distract. Yet however much we might think it is a modern problem unique to our technocratic world, it is not; a point made ever so strongly in Jamie Kreiner’s ‘The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us about Distraction,’ which explores the different modalities of monastic cultures through the various ways in which they address the problem of distraction. There is much to learn from this. But there is a much deeper problem that belongs to the ‘neo-modernism’ of our time.
This is, as the American catholic theologian Michael Hanby puts it, the reduction of “all philosophical and theological questions to political questions.” As he says, ”there is something inherently absurd about the reduction of Catholicism to politics, especially in the age of social media, principally a lack of intellectual seriousness”; in short, it is a failure to attend to truth. “The absolutization of politics is a principal symptom of the crisis of Catholicism in modernity, for the translation of the theological into the political is one of the marks of the modern age.” This reflects, as Hanby observes, “the triumph of scientific and technological order – and thus of power – over the transcendence of God and the givenness of human nature.”
He is mainly raising concerns with “the Synod of Synodality’” within the Roman Catholic Church about a progressive agenda which would overturn classical Christian and Catholic teaching about sex and morality. These turn upon the question of what it means to be human. What he identifies concerns all of the forms of catholicity in our times. It is a question about truth which is denied in the negation of the transcendence of God, in the negation of human nature, and thus, too, in the negation of the real nature of the Church. Such are the politics that belong to the metaphysical rejection of ‘essentials’ while at the same time demanding the recognition of ‘essence’ for itself in whatever claims are made about identity.
This was recognized by Joseph Ratzinger long before he became Pope Benedict XVI. “The notion of truth … gives place to the notion of progress: the ‘true’ is whatever serves progress, that is, whatever serves the logic of history.” He asks “is there a human ‘nature’? Is there a truth that remains true in every historical time because it is true?” And from these questions arise the question about the catholicity of the Church. Is the Church “fundamentally an ontological and sacramental reality, or a sociological and political one?”
Sociologism, as the French Philosopher Michel Henry calls it in ‘Barbarism’, is a kind of shallow sociology which supplants philosophy and theology both in academia and in our churches. Our technocratic culture, as Henry suggests, “puts out of play the transcendental life that constitutes the humanity of the human being.” The claims to truth are reduced “to their historical, political, and economic conditions and thus to expressions of ideology,” and often, as Hannah Arendt recognized, in totalitarian ways. It is not ‘what is true’ but what ‘works’ from the standpoint of the technocratic elite; in short, the will to power trumps any concept of truth, and, in the case of the churches, any meaningful form of Catholicity. This has been the Anglican tragedy of decades upon decades of impaired communion inter and intra the national, provincial and diocesan churches, and, sadly, with respect to associations which in their truth have a certain independence from such polities. SSC in its 19th century expression and life was faithful to the classical Anglican formularies, seeing ‘Anglicanism’ as an integral part of ‘the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church,’ despite various tensions, I use the term advisedly, with some bishops. Has anything really changed, intra or inter alia ecclesiologically?
But the Church Catholic, in her essential mystery, is ontologically prior to the various historical and institutional churches. It has “a theological and sacramental nature that transcends its location in time and space” and thus includes within the dynamic of its life, the communion of saints. The sensus fidei, the sense or understanding of the Faith, shapes and determines the consensus fidelium, the consensus of the faithful; not the other way around. The reduction of theology to politics is the inversion of this classical and catholic understanding and contributes to our disordered times.
The necessary counter is to reclaim the long-standing catholic principle known as the Vincentian Canon, derived from the fifth century Commonitorium of Vincent of Lérins: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est, “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.”
It looks back to Paul’s emphasis on “that pattern of teaching” (Rom. 6. 17) which we have received and to such Patristic figures as Irenaeus, the great 2nd century apologist, bishop, and theologian. Irenaeus, standing firmly within a profound continuity with the Apostles, articulates wonderfully the underlying principles of catholicity. His work ‘On the Apostolic Preaching’ speaks directly to us as a society of catholic priests. Writing to a certain Marcianus, whom I think may be a presbyter or priest, he provides a summary manual or memorandum through which Marcianus may be able “to understand all the members of the body of truth.” As the orthodox theologian and translator of the work, John Behr, aptly notes: “it is the earliest summary of Christian teaching, presented”, he adds, “in a non-polemical or apologetic manner.” It belongs to Irenaeus’ emphasis upon ‘the rule of faith’ both here (3.6) and in his Adversus Haereses; in short, what comes to be embodied in the Creeds. Irenaeus speaks directly to the confusions of our times about what it means to be truly human and what it means to be a member of the body of Christ.
“Man,” he says, “is a living being composed of a soul and a body.” Both matter. But he says that “the holiness of the soul is to keep the faith in God whole, neither adding nor subtracting from it.” “The glory of God is man alive and the life of man is the vision of God,” known and lived in the body of Christ, the Church catholic.
This dynamic, catholic sensibility is very much part of the Anglican classical legacy in its refusal, contra the Council of Trent, on the one hand, and the Synod of Dort, on the other hand, counter-reformation and protestant reformation respectively, to add to or to take away from anything that belongs to creedal Catholicism. I think the whole tendency of catholic thought is best captured by John Bramhall, known as Athanasius Hibernicus, a wonderful epithet. He writes:
That which was once an essential part of the Christian Faith is always an essential part of the Christian Faith; that which was once no essential, is never an essential.
This is our challenge where the prevailing winds of neo-modernism are about a kind of anti-essentialism, denying God and our humanity and the nature of our life in the body of Christ. These are our challenges and our distractions, in part because it is so easy to get caught up in the sophistry of social media. We become distracted from the very thing which defines us as contemplative and spiritual beings.
The story of Martha and Mary follows directly upon the parable of the Good Samaritan. That is intriguing and suggestive. Is the story of Martha and Mary the counter or the complement to the concluding injunction of the parable to “go and do thou likewise” towards those in need? We are, it seems, to act with compassion rather than indifference towards those who are suffering. Does that imply the priority of action over contemplation?
Martha, in contrast to Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet listening to his word, is “distracted with much service.” Distraction has to do with going from one thing to another in a kind of frenzy and with a loss of focus. It signals the inability to attend to anything. It is easy to get caught up in the busyness of life and miss out on life itself. In contrast to Martha’s distractedness there is Mary’s collectedness, her attentiveness in sitting and listening to the words of Christ. Don’t just do something, sit there, listen and think! What could be more counter-culture than that in our busyness obsessed culture? We are almost afraid to sit and think. To be collected rather than distracted is good in itself and, paradoxically, in relation to all our other activities. The one informs the other because it is about paying attention to the primacy of an ethical and spiritual principle alive in us.
Sitting and listening means that there is something greater and prior to our activities. It means that our activities really only have meaning when they are for an end, a purpose. In that sense, it is “the one thing needful,” unum necessarium. Jesus responds gently but firmly to Martha’s complaint about her sister: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things; one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen the better part [the good portion] which shall not be taken from her.”
Our modern translations give us the word “anxious”. It is the word used for “careful” in the King James Version, meaning being ‘full of cares.’ This is our busyness and our distraction. It marks a failure to attend to what matters most. It is too easy to get lost in the busyness of our lives. This is why contemplation is seen as primary and necessary in the great religious and philosophical traditions. Sitting and listening is a critical feature of our spiritual lives. And our challenge.
Law is transformed into love, a love of ‘the true, the beautiful and the good,’ to put in Plato’s terms, for the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. The fourth of the Ten Commandments is about the Sabbath rest. It points to a universal need for a time of recollection, of contemplation, over and against work and busyness.
The idea of the primacy of contemplation is not at the expense of action. It is more a question of their interaction. The story of Martha and Mary bookends the beginning of the story of the parable of the Good Samaritan with Jesus’ questions to “a certain lawyer” about “what is written?” and “how do you read?” The answer is “the Summary of the Law,” the love of God and the love of neighbour. The two are inescapably bound together. We forget that our busyness often separates us from any kind of ethical relationship with one another. A time of sitting and listening holds out the possibilities of the redemption of our distracted, mindless busyness. Sitting and listening belong to our being collected rather than distracted even in our busy lives.
It is the twelfth century Cistercian monk, Aelred of Rievaulx, who captures best, I think, the interplay of action and contemplation which belongs to the Catholic Church.
In this wretched and laborious life, brethren, Martha must of necessity be in our house; that is to say, our soul has to be concerned with bodily actions. As long as we need to eat and drink, we shall need to tame our flesh with watching, fasting, and work. This is Martha’s role. But in our souls there ought also to be Mary, that is, spiritual activity. For we should not always give ourselves to bodily efforts, but sometimes be still and see how lovely, how sweet the Lord is, sitting at the feet of Jesus and hearing his word. You should in no wise neglect Mary for Martha; or again, Martha for Mary. For, if you neglect Martha, who will feed Jesus? If you neglect Mary, what use is it for Jesus to come to your house, when you taste nothing of his sweetness?
This conveys a counter-cultural truth about the contemplative activity which redeems all our distracted busyness. The busyness of Martha is brought into the collected restfulness of Mary, attentive and sitting and listening to the words of Jesus. It is the one thing needful. Is it not what is necessary and needful for us as a society of catholic priests? Is it not the unum necessarium of the SSC itself?
Fr. David Curry
Commemoration of St. John Vianney
SSC Quiet Day, August 4th, 2023
Christ Church, Windsor, Nova Scotia
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