Paradoxes of Catholicism | Page 4

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.)
I. (i) Just as we have already imagined a well-disposed inquirer
approaching for the first time the problems of the Gospel, so let us now
again imagine such a man, in whom the dawn of faith has begun,
encountering the record of Catholicism.
At first all seems to him Divine. He sees, for example, how singularly
unique she is, how unlike to all other human societies. Other societies
depend for their very existence upon a congenial human environment;
she flourishes in the most uncongenial. Other societies have their day
and pass down to dissolution and corruption; she alone knows no
corruption. Other dynasties rise and fall; the dynasty of Peter the
Fisherman remains unmoved. Other causes wax and wane with the
worldly influence which they can command; she is usually most
effective when her earthly interest is at the lowest ebb.
Or again, he falls in love with her Divine beauty and perceives even in
her meanest acts a grace which he cannot understand. He notices with
wonder how she takes human mortal things--a perishing pagan
language, a debased architecture, an infant science or philosophy--and
infuses into them her own immortality. She takes the superstitions of a
country-side and, retaining their "accidents," transubstantiates them
into truth; the customs or rites of a pagan society, and makes them the
symbols of a living worship. And into all she infuses a spirit that is all
her own--a spirit of delicate grace and beauty of which she alone has
the secret.

It is her Divinity, then, that he sees, and rightly. But, wrongly, he draws
certain one-sided conclusions. If she is so perfect, he argues (at least
subconsciously), she can be nothing else than perfect; if she is so
Divine she can be in no sense human. Her pontiffs must all be saints,
her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is
Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest
movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no
self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, since
she is Divine?
Such are his first instincts. And then, little by little, his disillusionment
begins.
For, as he studies her record more deeply, he begins to encounter
evidences of her Humanity. He reads history, and he discovers here and
there a pontiff who but little in his moral character resembles Him
Whose Vicar he is. He meets an apostate priest; he hears of some
savagery committed in Christ's name; he talks with a convert who has
returned complacently to the City of Confusion; there is gleefully
related to him the history of a family who has