Reflections upon Entering the Catholic Church
“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!”
– Hilaire Belloc
“The reason that properly belongs to Catholicism delights to hear any objection to its truth. Such objections incite us to clarity and to distinction. Catholicism is a revelation confident in its own grounding and coherence. If someone disagrees or disavows it, or any of its basic tenets, he must give a reason for his disagreement. Arguments against Catholicism can, in turn, be evaluated and examined for their own truth content or lack of it. Such objections are indirect teachers of what is true, of what is hidden, and what is perceived. Thinking erroneously is an occasion for thinking correctly. We owe to error the courtesy to find the truth for which it grasps.”
– Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
________________________________________________________________
One of life’s greatest joys is to share something outside one’s self with someone other than one’s self. I can testify from my experience to the fact that, upon having seen a truth that I have never seen before, there is nothing quite like the privilege of sharing that truth with others so that they can see it too. Doing this feels, somehow, sacred, as if transmitting treasure into the hands of those who will cherish it.
Now this is best done without intending or implying any personal merit in one’s own ability to see the truth, but by instead turning our collectively shared attention entirely towards the substantive merits of that particular truth. It is because we are relational by nature that we naturally desire to share with others what we find to be good, true, or beautiful. Love is meant to be shared. Truth understood equals the desire to share it and appreciate it with others. Of course, this is not always easy.
Others perceive differently than we do and often do not understand what we see. Thus, how to share what we can see is a problem, and it is a problem that in our day and age we now seem to particularly struggle with. Rather than genuinely trying to persuade or to share, we seem more and more often to despise, to look down upon, and to show contempt for those others who do not see what we see, who do not know what we know, or who do not believe what we believe. Even worse is when this kind of contempt is indulged in before we have even attempted to share with these others that which they do not yet have.
So how can we do differently? How do we return to engaging with one another as we look towards that which is worth looking towards? How do we listen to others so that we can see what they see? How do we put ourselves in their shoes, so as to be able to perceive the obstacles that they feel or experience which are obstructing their vision? It is while mindful of these thoughts and questions that I write what follows.
It is with awe, amazement, and gratitude that my wife and I now find ourselves having joined communion with the Roman Catholic Church last Easter Vigil on April 20, 2019. It has now been over a year since I have sat down and written anything that I could finish. I couldn’t write because of the bombshell of a realization that had finally hit me. The bombshell was that the Catholic Church was making claims upon me and my allegiance. And it wasn’t just making claims of external purported authority, but it was making compelling claims as to my soul, my intellect, and my devotion. I finally realized that the truth claims made by all the Catholic writers that I had always loved or respected could not just be chalked up to supporting Christianity, but that these claims fit together in a coherent order to support Catholicism.
This bombshell left me greatly humbled while necessarily faced with the obligation to take an extended period of deep reading, studying, pondering, and praying. I asked myself truly for the first time if the claims that I thought generally supported Christianity logically led to conclusions in support of something far more specific and much less generic than I had thought it was. I asked if my own following of Christ, rather than being a matter of only my own private personal experience and conscience, might fit within a greater and more coherent whole in the here and now. And, I asked whether it might be possible to discover what that greater and more coherent whole, formed by and belonging to Christ, might be.
Further deductions, lines of reasoning, conclusions, realizations, and discoveries then kept homing in on my belief system, and they have altogether shaken and reconstructed everything that I have thought and believed. Know that there is, at the same time, still a great deal that has remained the same. It’s quite true that I still believe the vast majority of what I already believed. But the light has changed. Everything is now differently illuminated. I have found order and coherence where I never dreamed it could be found. I have discovered chains of logic and stacks of evidence in support of what I had always dismissed as superstitious or fantastical.
But how can I explain this to you, reader? How can I share my awakening with you so that you can understand it?
Why I Became A Catholic
Most of my friends, acquaintances, and family, who I know and love, are not part of the Catholic Church. So if you are not Catholic, I likely understand why you are not. Over the years that I have carefully worked my way through the strongest reasons for not believing, I built objections to Catholicism upon the surest foundations that I could find. Thus, it is probable that I know what many of your assumptions about Catholic thinking and teaching are and where they come from. These objections, reasons, and assumptions were mine too, because I had deliberately built up and adopted them in defense against the claims of the Catholic Church.
I know the objection based upon corruption. Indeed, the Catholic Church has a long, intricate, and twisted history of deep corruption and abuse. Many people in history, including some prominent war criminals, and many people still living today, including some sexual predators of children, have committed great evils and great crimes either in the name of the Catholic Church or by means of their authority which was given them by the Catholic Church. These evils constitute great tragedies, and they cannot be brushed off, dismissed, or ignored. The very existence of all the many victims of this abuse cries out of justice and rectification, and I believe that justice ought to and will come.
I know the objections based upon theology and doctrine. Poor Catholic teaching has led many to believe in a completely works based idea of salvation, cobbled together by the notion that you can earn you way to heaven by doing good deeds, saying rote prayers, giving the Church money, giving signs of reverence to relics, performing religious rituals, or giving nice things to the poor. Impoverished Catholic teaching has also led many Catholics to not have even an elementary understanding of Scripture or Church History or the doctrines of their own Church. This monumental failure has turned many who go to church out of custom and habit into nominal believers who cannot even articulate what Christianity consists of or what their hope for salvation is based upon. Misunderstandings and ignorance of history has caused many, both believers and nonbelievers, to assume that most distinctively Catholic doctrines are based upon made up traditions that arose only hundreds of years after the New Testament Church was first established. This has led to an increased ignorance of Scripture on both sides.
I know the objections based upon authority. The Church claims, not only to have authority over every local church parish, but in fact, claims to be a single, united, universal church with an ordered hierarchy to which obedience and allegiance is due. The potential for abuse in such a system is very great, and it is against many of the liberty loving sensibilities and innate suspicion of political power of my own proud Scottish and American ancestry. I understand the value that many believers place on private conscience and their resistance to any encroachment by any outside power of their right to private conscience. I also grant that the Catholic Church makes a certain number of authoritative claims upon the individual’s private conscience.
I know the objections based upon the obscuring of the gospel; the taking away of focus on Jesus Christ; the devaluing of Scripture; the impoverishment of teaching and preaching; the danger of submission to a foreign power; the idolatry and worship of saints, angels, or idols; the misuse of money for superfluous and unnecessary luxuries rather than for helping the poor; the turning of spiritual devotion into meaningless going through the motions; and the embedded prejudice against minorities. All these objections have been frequently made, in many different forms and variations, against the Catholic Church across history by many intelligent, thoughtful, and honest men and women.
Some see the Catholic Church as no longer even Christian, arguing that it has obscured the Christianity of the New Testament by gradual accretion of man-made rituals and traditions. Some see the Catholic Church as claiming authority that belongs only to Christ. Some see the Catholic Church as the perpetrator of great evils, whether actively or complicitly. Some see recent scandals and the covering up of abuse by the Church’s leaders as evidence of the true nature and spirit of the Catholic Church. Some see the Catholic Church’s emphasis on the performing of good works as a corruption of the Christian understanding of God’s grace and a distorting of the fact that it is the Lord, not the works of man, that effects our redemption.
I readily and freely acknowledge all these objections, their weight, their seriousness, and their gravity. And yet. If you look closer and you look deeper, many of these objections are not what they first appear.
Let’s grant that all of these objections merit careful and in depth attention, and deserve book-length treatment and discussion. Some are valid objections to any church or to any denomination, not to the Catholic Church in particular. Others are objections to abuses which are directly contrary to explicit Catholic dogma. Others are objections to usurpations of Church authority, and to what is pretended authorization when there really was none. Other objections are completely right and need complete and full rectification. But if these right objections are rectified, or if they can be remedied, what then? If abuses can be stopped, if corruption can be cleansed, and distortions can be reformed, then what is left of the Church’s claims?
It turns out that everything is still there, that cleansing and reform from within has been needed in different historical ages of the Church, and that it has happened. It turns out that the Church itself contains a number of strong voices for justice such as John Chrysostom, Benedict, Dominic, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Clare of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Desiderius Erasmus, and Ignatius of Loyola who all spoke out and worked tirelessly for reform and cleansing of the Church from within.
So what is it exactly to which I have been persuaded? It is difficult to summarize because it encompasses everything. The only way that I can think of is to start with existence itself. At the elemental level, there are dimensions to our existence which the Catholic Church makes particular claims about. I have become convinced that these claims are true. There is a distinctive Catholic view of being, of thinking, of reasoning, and of reality.
I have become Catholic because every single physical thing in the world, from earth to sunlight, from wind to water, from leaves to colors, from a single human body to a billion galaxies, has more value and more meaning than I suspected was ever possible. Every single real idea, bestowing form to the formless, has more reality and substance than I thought was available to mere ideas. Every symbol is more literal than I thought it could be. Every literal thing is more symbolical than I thought it could be. Every true metaphor signifies more than the sum of its meanings. The phenomena of the created order contains elements of both the material and the immaterial. Therefore, body matters. Form matters. Indeed, matter matters, and it is imbued with the teleological in ways that far transcend anything Intelligent Design advocates have in mind.
I have become Catholic because I have found the claims to authority made by the Catholic Church to be ultimately compelling, persuasive, and conclusive. I have found these authoritative claims to have the weight and witness of countless generations of believers, and to have the strength of demonstration contained within the most beautiful works of poetry and architecture. I have found this because the God in whom I believed as a Protestant has turned out to be more active, more physically present, more involved, more related to us, more inherent in our daily lives, and more imminent within the daily particulars we experience than I was ever taught in church. There is a great deal more of our Lord’s work that we are invited to participate in than I was ever led to believe. There is a great deal more of grace which is available, present, and working all around us. I believe in the Kingdom of Heaven and I believe in the Kingdom of David to which there will be no end. I believe that the Church is one, holy, universal, and apostolic and that each one of these words matters. And I believe that this same Church is present here on earth as it is in heaven, and that it is visible as it is also invisible.
I have become Catholic because as a matter of ontology, understanding the nature and ground of the existence of reality, I have found that I believe in ontological realism, rather than idealism or materialism. Moreover, rather than the either/or schools of epistemology which argue that knowledge derives only from sense experience (empiricism) or that knowledge derives only from reasoning (rationalism), I believe in the both/and of epistemological realism, that knowledge derives from both sense experience and reasoning. It is only by studying intellectual history that you find that realism in both ontology and epistemology is advanced by the Catholic philosophers. I have further found that I believe in metaphysical realism, rather than in the extremes of solipsism or nominalism. I have been persuaded that mind and matter are not separate, that literal and metaphorical are not to be strictly distinguished, and that reality was created to be symbolical rather than to be diabolical. I am convinced that materialist metaphysics, Cartesian dualism, nominalism, and voluntarism are all false and distorted views of the world. Therefore, I am a Catholic.
I have become Catholic because I have finally been persuaded that our answer and our hope is in the Logos, a person of the Trinity who was incarnated in embodied form as the most important character in all of human history, who then died for us on a cross, and who rose again from the grave, and who is presently and actively working around us and within us. There is an awe and a wonder that these convictions produce when you believe that the Creator and the Logos are one and the same. The poet, Helen Pinkerton, tries to describe this wonder in her poem, “Metaphysical Song”:
First principle,
Being’s pure act,
Infinite cause
Of finite fact,
Essential being,
Beyond our sight,
Without which, nothing,
Neither love nor light,
Only through You
Love’s infinite power
Brings into being
Atom and flower.
I have become Catholic because I have been persuaded that there is great deal more interaction, influence, and interpenetration between the spiritual and physical spheres, both good and evil, than is measurable by mere empirical method. This is an important point. The boundaries between the material and immaterial spheres are porous boundaries. This means that there is a great deal going on behind the scenes, and that there are no spaces, no places, no relations, and no objects which are safely only material and physical. Spiritual powers and consequences are constantly and continually acting and being enacted, and this is not happening without affecting and interacting with the physical world in which we exist.
Coming from a Protestant background, I understand, remember, and sympathize with the fear, even with the repugnance that is viscerally felt when one believes that one is in the presence of idols, or even when one believes one is witnessing a misconceived worship of the demonic. The misconceptions and misunderstandings that lead to such a view are the fault of both sides, but they lead to real and honest wariness and skepticism. What I have found, however, is that Protestants are willing to believe in evil supernatural forces using physical objects, images, signs, symbols, and rituals. Catholics believe in this too, but also believe the good supernatural forces can do the same – that, in fact, objects, images, signs, symbols, and rituals are originally meant and intended to be good. That is, in fact, their proper use, and this proper use is found in the Church. This is all, of course, a simplistic and rather roundabout way of describing what is commonly known to be a sacramental view of the world of physical phenomena.
All these things that I have tried to describe are things that I have become convinced are actually true. Richard John Neuhaus, himself a Lutheran convert to Catholicism in his 50s, wrote that the question of truth is one that has led many into the Catholic Church:
[T]here are many reasons why one might become a Catholic, some of them very attractive reasons. But … the only consideration that “will stand up when the foundations are shaken [is] whether something is true or not.” Is the Catholic Church what she claims to be? If the answer is yes, then that answer changes the question. The question is no longer “Why should I become a Catholic?” but “Why am I not a Catholic?” When, after many years of wrestling with it, I could no longer answer that new question in a manner convincing to myself or others, I became a Catholic.
Like Neuhaus, I have become Catholic in my late 30s because I have been convinced that what the Catholic Church teaches is true.
Understanding Those Who Are Not Catholic
To my Protestant and evangelical family and friends, I can say that I know, not only your dismay at religious rituals which you believe to be based within either doctrinal falsehood or demonic influence, but I also know the respectable objections to be made against the use of icons, against the Catholic veneration of images, against corrupt or tyrannical authority that would presume to dictate how one thinks, and against what feels like a diminishment and lack of preeminence given to Christ’s person and work. Moreover, I share your love for the reading and study of Scripture; your zealousness for sharing the gospel; your cultivation of sound preaching that plumbs depths of Biblical interpretation and application; and your tradition of hymnody which contains such a large treasury of theologically rich verse, harmony, and song.
To my Anglican and Orthodox friends and readers, I can say that I genuinely and deeply love your churches, your domes and cathedrals, your liturgies, your music, your prayers, and your traditions. I understand the abiding attraction that led you to be where you are. I’ve studied many of the arguments that provide the reasons for staying where you are, and I feel their appeal. I’ve read of the tragedy of different agents from history who committed great evils against your people in the name of the Catholic Church. And I feel the goodness and beauty in the distinctiveness of your cultures, your nationalities, and your traditions that has formed the close-knit communities of your churches.
But, most of all, I feel the wrong of not being united with all of you in the one, holy, apostolic, and Catholic Church. There is, and there ought to be, room in the one universal Church for both Latin and Greek liturgies, and for both Latin and vernacular music and poetry. We are not meant to be apart. We ought to transcend (and include) all languages, all peoples, all nationalities, all diversities. I might have joined one of your communions were it not for the Doctrine of the Universal Church. Every time believers have split from the Church, the Church has suffered great loss – culturally, communally, aesthetically, intellectually, and spiritually. “Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” wrote St. Paul in I Corinthians 1:10, “that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms among you; but that you be perfect in the same mind, and in the same judgment.” When Christ prayed in John 17:21-23 “that they all may be one,” I do not believe He meant this in only a spiritual, only an invisible, or only an “end times” sense (see also I Corinthians 12:25).
Henri de Lubac wrote that “[w]e would be more indulgent with one another, indeed, we would have more mutual love and admiration, if from early on were inculcated in us the principle of the division of labor and all its consequences: division of talents, of tastes, of vocations, of orientations, of habits and all sorts of other qualities.” If all beauty is God’s beauty, then there is room for every diversity and multiplicity that contains it. If we could include the variations of difference in all particular peoples and places, then the resulting unity would only be more whole and more true. “We would then see that the Creator’s gifts to human nature are in practice irreconcilable in individual members of the human race. And we would find beauty in this in spite of all the questions, uncertainties, mutual difficulties and conflicts involved, because we would also have mutual respect and trust with an eye to richer, subtler, and really rewarding harmony.” Diversity is a fundamental part of God’s creation, and it is intended to be a fundamental part of the Church.
When considering the broad range of diversity in churches and denominations which are outside communion with the Church of Rome, Catholics do not consider their church better or superior to the churches of others. Instead, Catholics simply believe that there is only one Church, and that all believers belong to it whether they know it or not. It is also important to emphasize that Catholics do not hold that you are not a believer if you do not attend a local Catholic parish. As Scott Hahn writes to his fellow Catholics: “We can assume in almost all Christians a firm belief in God, a reverence for Jesus Christ, a sense that the world is tainted by sin, and a conviction that Jesus has somehow saved us from that sin. We also hold in common our faith in the Bible as a divinely inspired, authoritative text. According to Catholic doctrine, all non-Catholic Christians share with us – though imperfectly – the one faith of Jesus Christ.” Neuhaus, in his forward to Thomas Howard’s conversion story, explains this doctrine further:
According to the Second Vatican Council, the Church of Jesus Christ “subsists” in a unique way in the Catholic Church. She is the most fully and rightly ordered expression of Christ’s Church through time. The Catholic Church readily recognizes that the saving grace of God is to be found also outside her boundaries. Indeed she teaches that all who are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “truly but imperfectly in communion with the Catholic Church.” For the non-Catholic Christian, becoming a Catholic is the completion of what he already is. All the grace and truth of God to be found anywhere, says the Council, gravitates toward unity with the Catholic Church. Dr. Howard as a Fundamentalist Protestant and then an Anglican, and I as a Lutheran knew much of the grace and truth of God. In becoming Catholic, nothing of this is rejected; all is fulfilled.
So know that for those of us who are Catholic, we do not look down on those of you who hold to the faith as we do without sharing our communion. Indeed, we believe that the full communion of the one universal Church is always open to you as long as you are willing to walk through the door of the Church and join in the apostolic fellowship that has existed unbroken for over two thousand years. I, for one, look on the Protestant and Orthodox churches with both gratitude and reverence. Your churches and your preachers have taught me a great deal about the Bible and about our faith. I will continue to read and study the greatest works of Protestant and Orthodox theology and commentary as long as I live. And I will always be happy to answer your questions, to listen to your objections, and to give an answer for the faith that was once deposited with the apostles.
Upcoming Essays Upon Entering the Catholic Church
To the end of explaining the Catholic Church’s teaching, communion, and fellowship, and why I have joined it, I will be writing and publishing a tetralogy of essays. This essay series will be more personal than anything that I have written. They will be personal essays because they will be essentially telling a conversion story, and the only conversion story that I have to tell is my own. I tell it because I want to share it with you. I want you to ask me questions. I want everyone I know to understand why I have joined those who have learned that they were obligated to become Catholic. I want anyone to be able to question, to ponder, and to have deep conversations about these things. And I want readers to understand why the Catholic Church exists and what its very continued existence throughout the history of time means for each and every one of us.
As these essays are published, I will also post their links below as follows:
1 ) Hermeneutics: My First Step into the Catholic Church – Part I, On Preunderstanding
Hermeneutics: My First Step into the Catholic Church – Part II, On Metaphysics
Hermeneutics: My First Step into the Catholic Church – Part III, On Tradition
2) Sacramental Realism: My Second Step into the Catholic Church
3) Church History: My Third Step into the Catholic Church
4) The Eucharist: My Fourth Step into the Catholic Church
The first essay in this series will explain how it was that by studying the interpretation of Scripture, and by studying the rules for how to properly interpret Scripture, I found that the only way many passages of Scripture can be reasonably interpreted or made any sense of was as traditional Catholic theology interprets and explains these passages.
The second essay will explain how, out of all the different philosophical schools of thought, the Catholic worldview of sacramental realism is the only one that is ultimately coherent and intellectually defensible. All the doctrines of Catholicism fit coherently together, and once you accept some of them, the only way to be consistent is to accept all of them because they are all connected.
The third essay will explore how it is Catholic teaching that explains the most important event in all of the history of mankind, and that by reading and studying over two thousand years of Church history, it is a matter of course to conclude that the visible universal Church is present, both on earth and in heaven, across all of time, as the Lord Himself is – and that it still has work to do in which are are asked to participate.
The fourth essay will describe what Scripture teaches about the Eucharist, what the Church has taught and practiced regarding the Eucharist across history, and what I have found in the liturgy of the Catholic Church and in the practical experience and application of the Mass. The Lord’s presence here on earth has been manifested in different ways since Old Testament times. He himself has taught that we are to do things in relation to His presence, and I am now convinced that I ought to obey what He has said. The Eucharist is a sacrament that we are told to practice regularly, and it is a practice that we cannot afford to do without.
In another sense, this tetralogy of essays will explain why I have become Catholic after working through the different areas of (1) Scripture Interpretation; (2) Theology & Philosophy; (3) History; and (4) Worship, Prayer, & Liturgy.
Intellectually, I have become Catholic because I have been convinced of Catholic epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics. Emotionally, I have become Catholic because I have found that beauty matters and affects and shapes the deepest parts of us. This means beauty in things such as music and architecture, not just abstractions. Relationally, I have become Catholic because I want to be as close to the Lord Jesus Christ as I can be, and I want my daily prayer and worship to be both Trinitarian and shared with the cloud of witnesses. Spiritually, I have become Catholic because I believe that there really is one universal church that contains the kingdom of God, which exists on both earth and in heaven – and my only hope for redemption lies in the Lord as shown to us through His Church, the pillar and ground of the truth (I Timothy 3:15).
The Catholic Answers to the Big Questions
of Evil, Redemption, God’s Will, and God’s Grace
Finally, I have become Catholic because I have found that the teachings of the universal Church meet and answer, to the extent that such answers are possible for us, the biggest and most important questions that we can ask. Indeed, there are some questions that I have personally had reason to wrestle with most deeply. And the distinctive Catholic view of these questions seems to me the most complete, the most wholesome, and the most coherent.
Therefore, I have become Catholic because I have found that I reject the Calvinist/Determinist god whose version of sovereignty is such that he cannot be sovereign unless evil is a part of his will or intent. The God that I know and believe in is not, and never has been, a “Might makes Right” sort of god. I believe in the God who is powerful and sovereign enough to create creatures in His image and in His likeness who are truly free in the old sense of “free,” and thus in the God who is powerful enough to allow that which is outside His will. In doing so, He is still both omnipotent and sovereign. In other words, I believe in the God who can still take that which He has not willed, redeem it, and turn it back into the harmonious whole that still ends in the Good.
This is the Catholic view, and perhaps the most beautiful expression of it ever written in literature can be found in J.R.R. Tolkien’s introductory chapter to The Silmarillion called “The Music of the Ainur.” In this telling, Tolkien retells the Creation story in which the Creator, Eru Ilúvatar, begins the music of the spheres. He then takes the discord and corruption caused by the most powerful fallen angel, Melkor, and bends and turns that discord towards His own good and harmonious ends.
Then Ilúvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that he smiled; and he lifted up his left hand, and a new theme began amid the storm, like and yet unlike to the former theme, and it gathered power and had new beauty. But the discord of Melkor rose in uproar and contended with it, and again there was a war of sound more violent than before, until many of the Ainur were dismayed and sang no longer, and Melkor had the mastery. Then again Ilúvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that his countenance was stern; and he lifted up his right hand, and behold! a third theme grew amid the confusion, and it was unlike the others. For it seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds in delicate melodies; but it could not be quenched, and it took to itself power and profundity. And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Ilúvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.
In the midst of this strife, whereat the halls of Ilúvatar shook and a tremor ran out into the silences yet unmoved, Ilúvatar arose a third time, and his face was terrible to behold. Then he raised up both his hands, and in one chord, deeper than the Abyss, higher than the Firmament, piercing as the light of the eye of Ilúvatar, the Music ceased.
Then Ilúvatar spoke, and he said: “Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”
Then the Ainur were afraid, and they did not yet comprehend the words that were said to them; and Melkor was filled with shame, of which came secret anger. But Ilúvatar arose in splendour, and he went forth from the fair regions that he had made for the Ainur; and the Ainur followed him.
Again, it is not that Ilúvatar wills the disharmony and corruption caused by Melkor. Neither is it that Ilúvatar needs the discord of Melkor in order to create the good that He intends. It is instead that Melkor cannot create ex nihilo like Ilúvatar can, so that all the works of Melkor all take their source in the good creation, and can only twist it or negate it into something evil. But Ilúvatar is too good to allow Melkor any final mastery, and He promises to ultimately defeat any alteration in His Creation that is meant for evil and to ultimately harmonize any discord within His musical whole. This is really the official teaching of the Catholic Church set down in literary form as heroic mythical legend. The truths here are still the same. As St. Thomas Aquinas writes in his Summa Theologica:
As Augustine says (Enchir. xi): Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil. This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.
It is not that evil is needed or willed by God. It is not that the existence of evil, pain, and suffering can be lightly dismissed or justified because of God’s victory at the end. It is that, without explaining everything so that we can understand all of it in our own human terms, He has not only promised to defeat evil and death at the end, but personally took evil and death upon Himself, took suffering upon Himself, always considering evil and death as enemies to the good that is meant to be.
What I did not understand before is the fact that this truth contains an aspect of participation. Christ has participated in our suffering. We are to participate in His suffering. But, we are also to participate in the fight against sin, death, and evil. We are to participate in justification, rectification, and sanctification of that which has been hurt, broken, and corrupted. This is a matter both of within and without. We are to do what we ought, and we are to do what we can. This does not mean that we save ourselves. This does not mean that God programs us or acts through us as if we were machines. It means that, created in His likeness and His image, we are to enact that which we can to renounce sin and evil. This means having faith, having hope, and having love. This means that what we do matters just as much as (and is evidence for) what we believe and what we say. This is why bodily motions matter. It is why beauty matters. It is why smells and bells matter. It is why practice, habit, ritual, and going through the motions matter.
Our actions form us. Liturgy forms us. Prayer forms us. Habit forms us. Sacraments form us. Faith, Hope, and Love form us. After the Fall, we must be reformed. These things are not the means or ends of our salvation. These things are, for those of us in the darkness, simply what we must do if we are to follow Him who saves. These things are God’s chosen means of Grace – His ways of returning us to form. We do all these things only with His help (Philippians 4:13). Then, at the end, no matter how many battles are lost and no matter how many lost causes have ended in defeat, the Lord has promised that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church and that the King will return when the time has come. Then evil will finally lose and injustice will be rectified. Our vocation is not to understand or know or decide when that time has come. “All we have to decide,” as Gandalf tells Frodo, “is what to do with the time that is given us.”
As St. Jerome wrote:
It is our part to seek, His to grant what we ask;
Ours to make a beginning, His to bring it to completion;
Ours to offer what we can, His to finish what we cannot.
This is why I am a Catholic. I find that we are amazingly asked to follow Him and that we are asked to participate in practicing His commands of mercy, truth, and goodness here on earth. It is by practicing these things that we find life. I therefore find that I believe in sacraments and grace, and I find that nature was intended to contain sacraments and grace. This is the nature, within and without, that only He can restore. In the meantime, it is our part to continue to work towards, as best we can, that restoration that He will accomplish. This, again, is life. It is for all these reasons that every Sunday I will go in to the altar of God, to God who giveth joy to my youth. Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.
References:
– Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 2, Third Article, 1273.
– de Lubac, Henri. Paradoxes of Faith, 1948.
– Hahn, Scott. Reasons To Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith, 2007.
– Neuhaus, Richard John. “Forward to Lead, Kindly Light: My Journey to Rome by Thomas Howard,” 1994.
– Jurgens, W.A. (edited by). The Faith of the Early Fathers: A Source-book of Theological and Historical Passages from the Christian Writings of the Pre-Nicene and Nicene Eras, Volume 2, 1970.
– Pinkerton, Helen. “Metaphysical Song,” First Things, April 2006.
– Schall, James V. “On Being Roman Catholic,” ThomasAquinas.edu, October 3, 2014.
– Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion, 1977.
