Paradoxes of Catholicism | Page 3

of Mary as the better
part that shall not be taken away from her. Here at one moment He
turns with the light of battle in His eyes, bidding His friends who have
not swords to _sell their cloaks and buy them_; and at another bids
those swords to be sheathed, since His Kingdom is not of this world.
Here is the Peacemaker, at one time pronouncing His benediction on
those who make peace, and at another crying that He came to bring not
peace but a sword. Here is He Who names as blessed those that mourn
bidding His disciples to rejoice and be exceeding glad. Was there ever
such a Paradox, such perplexity, and such problems? In His Person and
His teaching alike there seems no rest and no solution--_What think ye
of Christ? Whose Son is He_?
II. (i) The Catholic teaching alone, of course, offers a key to these
questions; yet it is a key that is itself, like all keys, as complicated as
the wards which it alone can unlock. Heretic after heretic has sought for
simplification, and heretic after heretic has therefore come to confusion.
Christ is God, cried the Docetic; therefore cut out from the Gospels all
that speaks of the reality of His Manhood! God cannot bleed and suffer
and die; God cannot weary; God cannot feel the sorrows of man. Christ
is Man, cries the modern critic; therefore tear out from the Gospels His

Virgin Birth and His Resurrection! For none but a Catholic can receive
the Gospels as they were written; none but a man who believes that
Christ is both God and Man, who is content to believe that and to bow
before the Paradox of paradoxes that we call the Incarnation, to accept
the blinding mystery that Infinite and Finite Natures were united in one
Person, that the Eternal expresses Himself in Time, and that the
Uncreated Creator united to Himself Creation--none but a Catholic, in a
word, can meet, without exception, the mysterious phenomena of
Christ's Life.
(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