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Page 3
(ii) Turn now again to the mysteries of our own limited life and, as in
a far-off phantom parallel, we begin to understand.
For we too, in our measure, have a double nature. _As God and Man make
one Christ, so soul and body make one man_: and, as the two natures of
Christ--as His Perfect Godhead united to His Perfect Manhood--lie at the
heart of the problems which His Life presents, so too our affinities
with the clay from which our bodies came, and with the Father of Spirits
Who inbreathed into us living souls, explain the contradictions of our
own experience.
If we were but irrational beasts, we could be as happy as the beasts;
if we were but discarnate spirits that look on God, the joy of the
angels would be ours. Yet if we assume either of these two truths as if
it were the only truth, we come certainly to confusion. If we live as
the beasts, we cannot sink to their contentment, for our immortal part
will not let us be; if we neglect or dispute the rightful claims of the
body, that very outraged body drags our immortal spirit down. The
acceptance of the two natures of Christ alone solves the problems of the
Gospel; the acceptance of the two parts of our own nature alone enables
us to live as God intends. Our spiritual and physical moods, then, rise
and fall as the one side or the other gains the upper hand: now our
religion is a burden to the flesh, now it is the exercise in which our
soul delights; now it is the one thing that makes life worth living, now
the one thing that checks our enjoyment of life. These moods alternate,
inevitably and irresistibly, according as we allow the balance of our
parts to be disturbed and set swaying. And so, ultimately, there is
reserved for us the joy neither of beasts nor of angels, but the joy of
humanity. We are higher than the one, we are lower than the other, that
we may be crowned by Him Who in that same Humanity sits on the Throne of
God.
So much, then, for our introduction. We have seen how the Paradox of the
Incarnation alone is adequate to the phenomena recorded in the
Gospel--how that supreme paradox is the key to all the rest. We will
proceed to see how it is also the key to other paradoxes of religion, to
the difficulties which the history of Catholicism presents. For the
Catholic Church is the extension of Christ's Life on earth; the Catholic
Church, therefore, that strange mingling of mystery and common-sense,
that union of earth and heaven, of clay and fire, can alone be
understood by him who accepts her as both Divine and Human, since she is
nothing else but the mystical presentment, in human terms, of Him Who,
though the Infinite God and the Eternal Creator, was _found in the form
of a servant_, of Him Who, _dwelling always in the Bosom of the Father_,
for our sakes _came down from heaven_.
(ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN
_Blessed art thou Simon Bar-jona; because flesh and blood hath not
revealed it to thee, but My Father Who is in heaven.... Go behind me,
satan, for thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things
that are of men_.--MATT. XVI. 17, 23.
We have seen how the only reconciliation of the paradoxes of the Gospel
lies in the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. It is only to him who
believes that Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect Man that the
Gospel record is coherent and intelligible. The heretics--men who for
the most part either rejected or added to the inspired record--were
those who, on the one side, accepted Christ's Divinity and rejected the
proofs of His Humanity, or accepted His Humanity and rejected the proofs
of His Divinity. In the early ages, for the most part, these accepted
His Divinity and, rejecting His Humanity, invented childish miracles
which they thought appropriate to a God dwelling on earth in a phantom
manhood; at the present day, rejecting His Divinity, they reject also
those miracles for which His Divinity alone is an adequate explanation.
Now the Catholic Church is an extension of the Incarnation. She too
(though, as we shall see, the parallel is not perfect) has her Divine
and Human Nature, which alone can account for the paradoxes of her
history; and these paradoxes are either predicted by Christ--asserted,
that is, as part of His spiritual teaching--or actually manifested in
His own life. (We may take them as symbolised, so to speak, in those
words of our Lord to St. Peter in which He first commends him as a man
inspired by God and then, almost simultaneously, rebukes him as one who
can rise no further than an earthly ideal at the best.)
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