“To think with the Church is to think with the Church,” somebody said to me recently, finger-wagging, as if I were reluctant to do so, as if I’d spent the last thirty years, and most of my career as a writer, not doing so.
To think with the Church requires that you think, because what the Church teaches is meant to appeal not only to our will but to our reason. I do not mean that when the Church commands something we do not understand, we must withhold our obedience until we understand it. The reverse is true. For the Lord himself says that if we love him, we will obey his commandments, and then the Father will give us light.
To obey, then, is to be open to the light. “Faith comes by hearing,” says Saint Paul, and I take it that he does not simply mean “hearing about,” as if you needed merely to be apprised of something. It means to hear and to heed, to take the message into your heart. “Let him who has ears to hear, hear,” says the Lord.
Still, the matter of faith is not a set of arbitrary commands and isolated theological data, and to enter more deeply into it is to enter more deeply into thinking about reality. Fallen man, however, has a boundless capacity for turning away from reality.
His usual pattern is to substitute for reality some less demanding object of his imagination, made up of some truth and a great deal of passion, good and evil. The object will not bear close analysis. It will be fragmentary, incoherent, at odds with itself.
It will also be a kind of Potemkin village. If you peek behind the main thoroughfare, if you go behind the houses to the outbuildings, if you look at the fields rather than the front gardens, you will see confusion, disillusionment, corruption, and even madness.
Let me apply the lesson to our current controversies in the Church. She teaches, and the Lord says outright, that fornication is wrong. It is not merely “less than optimal,” as another interlocutor of mine described an even more serious sin in the same category. It is, says Jesus, who employs a startlingly bodily metaphor, among the things “that come out of a man,” like theft and murder, to render him unclean.
But why is that so? It is not bad because the Church teaches it is bad; the Church teaches it is bad because, in fact, it is bad. The Church has no power to declare the bad to be good, or even neutral.
God Himself has not the power to declare the bad to be good, because He Himself is the good, and such a declaration would be a self-contradiction, as if He had declared that He was not God.
Self-contradiction is a weakness, a falling away, not a power, and therefore not to be predicated of God.
Now the question is, why is fornication wrong? That question appeals to our reason and our intellect: our ability to recognize first principles and draw correct conclusions from them; and our ability to see what is good and true and beautiful, in one immediate glance.
And here I find among many Catholics a determined refusal to think. We will hear instead that other sins are far more serious. That is, of course, not at all to the point, and in our time, it is culpably irresponsible. Cholera is not the worst disease in the world – but in a cholera epidemic, it may as well be. Still the question presses.
It is a shame that we should have to learn a lesson from a poet whose Christian faith was often tenuous and strained, but here is Alfred Tennyson, describing what his ideal ruler, King Arthur, sought from the knights who swore loyalty to him:
I made them lay their hands in mine and swear
To reverence the King, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God’s,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds,
Until they won her; for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
That is what Arthur says to Guenevere after her adulterous affair with Lancelot, and the ensuing treachery that has destroyed the fellowship of the Round Table.
“The maiden passion for a maid” – those are words we can hardly understand now. Why did Jacob labor for seven years, to win the hand of Rachel? Fornication makes that into nonsense.
But Jacob’s “maiden passion for a maid” was not for some part of a body, or a body detached from the person, or a person but detached from that relation to time and eternity without which we are no persons at all.
It was for Rachel the woman as a woman, thus as made for a man as a man, who would become that one-flesh union that binds each one of us, in fact and by the causal power of example, to the first of mankind and to the last who are to come.
Indeed, fornication as the assumed action of a young man and woman together has not just spoiled the high spiritual romance. It has left cynicism in its wake, and a refusal to entertain the possibility that things could be otherwise. And that is not even to touch the immense social harm the sin has done.
Yet we are to ignore it all now, to “think with the Church”?
Think?
