| Editor : Abbé Georges de Nantes | N° 83 – August 2009 |
|
THE CHURCH ATTACKED FROM ALL SIDES: 1966-1978
CONCLUSION
MYSTICAL AESTHETICS
In French, the word for “error” rhymes with “ugliness”, and “Truth” rhymes with “beauty”.
During this camp our goal has been to fight against error; we have studied the evangelical Preaching, under its name of kerygmatics (He is Risen n° 80, May 2009), and Christian theology through the great historical conflicts (He is Risen n° 79, April 2009) that led it to its present development.
This knowledge of Catholic Truth led us to rediscover how to reach God in Christ through the Church’s sacraments and sacramentals. (He is Risen n° 77, February 2009)
Thus do men receive the grace which gives them « power to be made the sons of God » (Jn 1:12) becoming in reality adoptive children of God « partakers of the divine nature » (2 Pt 1:4). The completion of this sacramental initiation and progression is the holiness of a perfect union with and assimilation to God in love. It is the mystical life.
The privileged way of gaining access to this mystical life is through beauty. Our Father endeavoured to demonstrate this in his lectures entitled “A mysticism for our times” (1978), after having observed that « mystical writings, properly so-called, and studies bearing on the essence of the mystical life are cruelly missing in our day ». He applied himself to filling this want 1° with his mystical Pages, 2° with his treatise that appeals to aesthetics.
Our modern world seems in fact to have lost the sense, the secret and even interest in beauty. Only aggressive ugliness attracts it; it has no art but one that degrades everything it transforms. Since the Church has opened to that world this ugliness has invaded the sanctuary. It can be said that all our churches are afflicted with it, except those protected as Historic Monuments by the State. It must be said that the example came from above. It is enough to see the new museum that Paul VI had built to extend the Vatican museum: it is a hideous concrete building, a row of completely inhuman blockhouses in which Roman statues are hung on grey steel tubes. The white marble Roman statues are hanging – a head here, a body there! It is a horrendous sight. Upon seeing this, one thinks: really, even from an artistic point of view, we have come into line with the modern world, the worst one!
Where may we recover the sense of beauty? Along the way that leads from the gracious beauty of created beings to the all gracious goodness of God, of which created beauty is the sign.
How? By passing from the sight of things to the contemplation of their mystery, which is entirely contained in that of the Cross.
I. FROM GRACE TO GRACE
What is beauty? It is the reign of grace.
Beauty cannot be defined either by philosophy, which grasps the exact essence of things, or by science, which analyses the laws of phenomena in order to control the forces of nature. It cannot be even defined by religion, which submits its faith in revealed mysteries to the preparatory control of reason through apologetics.
« A woman is arranging a bouquet of flowers in a vase.
“What are those flowers, Mummy?
– They are roses”, my darling.
« And the child smelling their perfume and opening wide his eyes, exclaims:
“Roses? Oh, but they are beautiful these roses!” »
The elderly Marshal Pétain, who had just been taken from Fort de la Pierre-Levée on Ile d’Yeu, to be transported to Port-Joinville, where he was to be nursed, heard bells ringing:
« Oh, bells! How beautiful the sound of bells... »
I love the “French” overture of Brother Henry’s oratorio. A musicologist will explain to you its characteristics, which are illustrated in different works of Brother Henry, who began by learning the technique and then used it several times. But to say why “it is beautiful” is another matter altogether. What is beauty?
« A “grace”. Even in nature beauty appears to be an effect of art not as the subjective impression of the one who discerns it but as the chosen expression by some mysterious Artist of the Beauty He knows. But which artist ever passed by these woods clothing them with beauty? » (CCR n° 104, pp.10-11) It is the reminiscence of a poem of St. John of the Cross who sings the beauty of the creation that Christ, the Word of God the Creator, left, a beauty that is the reflection of the adorable Face of God made man.
« It can be scenery, a melody, the sea with the tang of the wind, the pounding of the waves, iridescent reflections in the mist... What is captured for an instant through the encounter and the composition of a great number of beings who are, moreover, completely unfamiliar with one another, and whose beauty explodes like a cascade of sparks, is very quickly lost. It was only a chance composition, but man received a lasting imprint from it, that of beauty! »
THE DECOR.
« Beauty is an apparition of sensible splendour which delights our sensibility, from where it is communicated to our heart and mind, holding them in suspense. In its manifestation, experience and definition, therefore, beauty is bound up with corporeal being in its sensibility. » (ibid., p. 12)
But what is this message, this mystery which dumb beauty half transmits to us? « If the beauty of the world delights us, where does it take us? Bound as it is to the corporeal creation in which we live, it affords us free access. And since it is not a simple effect of matter or of its arrangements, will it not carry us, not beyond itself, but within itself, to its source, its cause, to Him whose messenger it is? »
A first answer consists of saying that « beauty is a gift that comes to us with being, with existence and which we receive gratuitously, almost effortlessly. From whom? From Him, whoever He may be, whose good pleasure it is to please us with the beauty He gives us. Might this beauty be a revelation, a word, a gift, an act of love of God for us? If this is so then the mystical life, far from consisting in an attempt at disincarnating beauty and the terrible, inhuman ascetic way of spiritualisation, is in fact a work of contemplating incarnate Beauty. And perhaps by chance we may meet God incarnate therein... We may meet God Himself become sensible Image – the infinitely beautiful and perfect image of His own ideal Beauty – who knows? »
A lily, a rose in the garden of the Carmel at Lisieux were enough for the mystical delight of our young Carmelite:
The flower is God’s smile.
The distant echo of heaven,
The sound released by the lyre
Held by His Eternal hand.
This melodic note
Of the Creator’s goodness
With its mysterious voice wants
To glorify God the Saviour.
Sweet melody,
Gentle harmony,
Silence of the flowers,
You sing of the grandeur of God!
This poem by Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus is not precious. On the contrary it is of an extreme boldness through the immediacy it affirms between the expression of natural sensible beauties and the intimate sentiments of God manifested to the young poetess and mystic through these natural creatures. (CCR n° 105, p. 13) She conveys them further on in her poem:
I know, Jesus, that beautiful flowers
Are your friends.
You come from Heavenly prairies
To fetch souls, your sisters.
A soul is the flagrant flower,
That You, Child Jesus would like to pick.
Jesus, the beautiful lily of the valley,
For the sake of a flower, You want to die!!!...
Ineffable mystery,
The Adorable Word
Will shed tears
When He picks His harvest of Flowers.
« We pass from grace to grace that is to say from the gracious beauty of created beings to the all gracious and gratuitous goodness of God, of which created beauty is the sign, the proof and the image. That is our way and on this way we shall encounter Christ, the Word of God in human flesh, the beauty and Splendour of the Father, the bodily face of the Godhead. » (CCR n° 106, p. 2)
« This vision of all things in the enchanting radiance of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity does not dispense us from going to the Mystery of the Incarnation; on the contrary it leads us there. It diverts forever from the platonic evasion and allows us to interpret the divine discourse of the Book of the Universe in the language of creatures.
« God is compared to the printer », drawing from his word processor all sorts of letters of different sizes and fonts in order to compose a beautiful and wise Discourse that his readers may read and understand.
« God has no need to reveal Himself elsewhere when, by His Word and by His Grace, He has already created so many treasures of such variety: hills, torrents, clouds, fish, birds, bread, wine, man, woman, birth, poetry, intelligence and all the works of the spirit... Our Divine Printer has enough characters in His “case” [this word was used in ancient letterpress printing when the printer composed his text with lead letters] to compose His entire Discourse and to make His sublime Word to be heard. He has prepared all in this world for that end, for the Incarnation of His Eternal Word. » (CCR no 105, p. 13)
God is also compared to a painter who mixes his colours in his palette and spreads them over the canvas with art in order to achieve « an immense natural world and then drawn from all its possibilities, a supernatural order, a masterpiece speaking to every human soul in a sublime language. The masterpiece is the Revelation of the definitive divine Discourse.
« If the beauty of the block letters or the colours mixed by the artist are in themselves beautiful, how much more beautiful will be the completed composition or work! »
THE MASTERPIECE.
He is the completed work, He, « the unique God-Man, Jesus Christ ». If God is compared to a printer, a painter, an artist, « the universe is like a theatre, a vast, superb edifice comprising an auditorium and a stage: here are the spectators and there the actors will unfold their drama... The armchairs of the spectators, the decor, accessories and costumes of the actors, the applause and the play, the sharing out of roles among leading actors and young beginners and if, at a certain moment, each one introduces himself into the play and from spectator becomes actor, then that is a good representation of the spectacle afforded us by the creation of the world and its redemption.
« Everything is from God, but each individual can only make his beauty manifest in the play of the actors and the play can only receive meaning through the revelation of the principal person. Thus God’s creative Word and Action among men can only be clothed in all their completed beauty in the work of Christ, Son of God made man. That is to say that aesthetics can only be deployed in certain mystical contemplation by placing the object actually admired in relation to the central Object of all God’s work, Jesus Christ.
On the right, the photographic negative reveals a perfectly beautiful portrait of Our Lord with His eyes closed.
Our Christian, Catholic religion, therefore, is mystical in the very use of all its paraphernalia marked with the Christian sign, all the Church’s sacristy bric-a-brac which the spiritually minded would too readily dispense with but without which the natural world becomes enigmatic and our human world ugly. « Christian signs of all sorts, statues, images, crucifixes, incense, Gregorian chant, rites and sacraments, all liturgies, are not just extras to the beauty of the world but are indispensable signals of its transcendence. Any natural scenery is given meaning and value by a human presence; in the same way a Christian sign will effect the aesthetic encounter of actual being with the Mystery of Christ and through Him, with the invisible Glory of the Father. » (CCR n° 106, p. 8)
FROM THE SIGHT OF THINGS TO THE VISION OF THEIR MYSTERY.
In separating the domains of faith and reason, « we have banished the object of faith, the divine mystery, the Christian mysteries from our known world, from the sensible universe and we are amazed that we should have reaped modern incredulity! » (CCR n° 106, p. 8) On the other hand, apologetics has pointed out to us: « Before even believing, before even being Christian, the mystery of all enveloping being is there before us. It is the created world; it is the fact of Jesus Christ, the history of the Church, the life, example and word of the saints... This whole paean of beauty assails our senses, touches our minds and invades our hearts with a powerful, incomparable, limitless aesthetic feeling and it brings with it a sense of decisive meaning laden with mystery. » (ibid., p. 9)
God is everywhere and allows Himself to be seen in His creation.
Christ is present and working in His continued work of redemption, down to us.
Therefore, what we believe is precisely what we see, that is, what we contemplate in the visible world is the invisible revealed to the eyes of those who open themselves to the light. « The Error is to say that it is better to believe without having seen », our Father told us in 1998, in Turin, where we went on a pilgrimage in order to see the Holy Shroud of Turin, and on the Holy Shroud, the Holy Face of the Lord, His authentic photograph!
To oppose Naturalism, faith is necessary. The intuition of beauty cannot lead us of its own movement to the penetrating and immediate experience of the Divine Mystery. That is why Jesus said to St. Thomas: « Blessed are those who believe without seeing. »
But this is quite different from saying that the one who believes has no need to see; that is precisely the error of supernaturalism. One might as well say that the Virgin Mary did not receive Jesus’ visit on Easter morning because She “had no need of it”!
There is no break or opposition between natural aesthetics, which would only reach the outside of things, and faith, which goes beyond all concrete perception, beyond all knowledge that could give one delight, and would offer us mysteries in inassimilable theoretical formulas. This kind of supernaturalism will allow the « great mystics » alone to have access to the mysteries in extraordinary experiences of an intimate and purely spiritual order. No, there is no break!
Theology is a grammar that aids our understanding of what natural beings and biblical, evangelical and ecclesiastical events have to say.
Faith is the profound welcome we give to these beings and deeds from the light they radiate, a sensible revelation of the ultimate mystery of these things, events and persons.
« Looking at the vine, I see the vision of Christ! », who said that He Himself is « the true Vine ».
« The vision perceives a foretaste of the Eternal Wedding Feast in every meal; it sees the sign of the Son of Man, bruised for our sins, every time the grapes are thrown into the winepress; it believes that from the juice of the grape He makes His Blood which we drink in thanksgiving and with jubilation... In every village huddled around its parish church the vision sees the beginning of the New Jerusalem; in every human being it sees a member of Christ, in every spouse a figure of the Church... The vision sees through the wall of appearances a propos of anything or rather it sees therein the ever living Mystery of the same multiform revelation; it thinks and acts in everything in an “anormal” way, as seeing him that is invisible (Heb 11:27). For the Christian this is to appear initiated into secrets which are not commonly accessible. Or else it is to appear mad in the reasoned judgement of those who never get clear of the world of appearances and who place their faith as the wretched servant of the parable placed his talent, in the closed and useless domain of a distant knowledge.
« Yet, nothing could be more false ». (CCR n° 106, pp. 12-13)
Contrary to Gnostic error, « the Christian mystic receives no secret teaching not available to any other Christian but he finds a superabundant sufficiency in the divine, public, Catholic revelation which is open to all alike.
« St. Paul’s great visions of the Cosmic Christ – i.e., Christwho fills the universe – in his Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians, as well as those of the Word made flesh, i.e., the Word of God, who became not only audible, as in the Old Testament, but visible, tangible in St. John’s Gospel and in the Apocalypse, are already in themselves answers given by the first Witnesses to the disincarnation of the Gnostics. Likewise in the second century it was Gnosticism that provoked the great mystical theology of St. Irenaeus. » (ibid., p. 17)
In the twentieth century, faced with the Wojtylian Gnosis, the Abbé de Nantes would answer with the “whole” Christ of his faith, the object of his adoration and of his enthusiastic poem. Like all true mystics, he is eager to show all the ties and relationships going to make a total harmony of the created universe in Christ, showing that it is all one and the same divine Discourse, one single poem of praise to the Glory of the thrice Holy God. How can it be achieved? Through the Cross.
Thus, he has founded our congregation for the praise of the Glory of God.
What, in fact, is this cosmic Christ? Nothing other than « Jesus and Jesus crucified » (1 Co 2:2). Then, through Him, with Him and in Him the whole world was created, redeemed and transfigured in hope, but it is already the object of contemplation, that is, of a concrete vision, the vision of God’s Glory in the beauty of His created manifestation, full of grace and truth.
« The Word became flesh – what does that mean if not that this flesh was “word” and all that Jesus did, showed, said and taught us is supremely true, good and beautiful for us? This Gospel obliges us to look upon it as the most important historical reality, as the most profound and only decisive mystery of faith. » (ibid., p. 17) It is also a saving mystery, for it is a mystery of Redemption.
II. THE AFFLICTION OF GOD
The mystery of the Cross is the supreme beauty:
« The Holy Face of Christ remains the centre and the summit of all human aesthetics. » It is this Holy Face that we contemplate on the Holy Shroud. « Science proves the Shroud using a + b, our Father also said at Turin. But it is true that the science that addresses itself too exclusively to our reason does not produce the expected fruits. What produces these fruits, brethren, is our hearts filled with the love of Christ... We have come here to fall on our knees before the Holy Shroud, to kneel in love before Our Lord who, in order to save us during the universal apostasy, has shown us today His Wounds and the sorrow of His Heart, the Wound in His Heart and the infinite gentleness of His Face. After we have seen Him, we wish to see Him again. The more we believe, the more we will love, the more we will wish to see and finally behold face to Face this Christ, who will show Himself to us at the end of the life of each one of us.
« Therefore, this assertion, which decidedly exposes peoples to eternal damnation: “For myself, I don’t need all that in order to believe!” will be transformed in our hearts into an impassioned cry: “I wish to see Him one day, I wish to see Her one day, I am going to see Her one day.” Should He work miracles in the heavens and demonstrate His truth to the unbelievers, then that is their final chance. But for us who believe, we will never tire of beholding this Face of Christ and of contemplating the image of the Virgin Mary in Her Immaculate Heart, in order that we may prepare ourselves even now for this supreme joy of seeing what we will meritoriously have believed throughout our lives. Amen! » (CCR n° 309, May 1998, p. 4)
« The Cross is the ultimate mystical revelation; it is the apex of Beauty. Calvary is the created splendour of the Father’s Glory in the depths of pain and dereliction. What mystery! » This mystery was the object of Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort’s loving contemplation.
« It is not a problem for science, nor an enigma for enquiring minds, nor a myth to feed the imagination; it is a mystery. St. Bonaventure goes straight to the point by stating that the Cross of Christ is the unveiling of the mystery of the Heart, of His Heart, of God’s Heart. »
It is the mystery of the Heart of God who is Love. Thus we are led from love to Love, « and so we recover beauty, the sign of Glory, at the meeting place of Calvary where Francis of Assisi goes out with the ardour of love to meet his crucified Saviour. » (CCR n° 109, p. 8)
« Reason, apparently, finds it absurd that God should thus approach His own creatures in order to save them by revealing His true face, that of love and grief. Well, “the heart has its reasons that reason cannot understand”. The truth is that the solemn or mocking objection of the rationalist or of the aesthete is not human; it is too dry and detached. As soon as we reflect on the History of God with our spontaneous taste for beautiful stories then we shall judge of it quite differently from philosophers of the Enlightenment or the Gnostics of Princeton. Happy people have no history or if their story is told, it fails to move us. They had all they wanted and enjoyed every happiness? Then, they hold no interest for us or else they are pure comedy figures.
« The fate of the wretched on the other hand touches us; we are anxious to learn every detail of their lamentable adventure. A friend recently got me to read the short stories of Tennessee Williams. They obliged me to meditate on Malediction for there I read of the absolute unhappiness of Lucio and of his only friend in the world, the cat with the injured paw who is bound to die. But first, what great interest the author takes in these two poor “accursed” creatures, and what title to posthumous glory! Hundreds and thousands of cats and rich Lucios have come to their death without tomb or epitaph! Yet, the gateway to glory for these two is precisely their misery. Should we therefore grieve over what makes them so touching and so close to us? What, then, is this beauty so closely bound up with their malediction and which touches us so intimately? »
Here is another example: « Why is it that the humble lady of Auxerre is far and away the greatest French poet of the 20th century? » (CCR n° 109, p. 9) Our Father is literally enamoured of her. Listen to this declaration:
« Yesterday one of the brothers brought me a copy of Marie Noel’s poetical works, which had just been published by Éd. Stock. On the cover of the book there was the face of a grey-haired woman, shining through the mist of an old photograph (reproduced on)... I observe the face and allow myself to be captivated by her look. As I am looking at and scrutinising the face, the spirit of prophecy begins to work within me. I identify this face with the author of this great work and soon the one springs from the other. I remember the secret of distress, fear, peaceful renunciation or resignation to God that wells up from such and such a poem and that which reminds me of her, the white-haired face, speaks to me itself now and confesses it deep down as though it had lived the experience... From knowing her so intimately, words of affection will come to my lips and perhaps tears to my eyes: “Poor Marie Noel!” If I pursue my contemplation of this face, of this life, of this mystery, then I must have recourse to my faith in order to enter more deeply into the secret of the dead poetess and so accept it. I shall certainly aspire to the most necessary and glorious resurrection, the happiness of an eternal Love, otherwise my relationship with this face will end in a suicidal absurdity of her, of me and of everything.
« There is no reason to laugh or to speak about sentimentalism or enchantment. Undoubtedly my looking started me on the contemplation of the beauty of this particular visible being. This particular, unique, inexhaustible, precious being has manifested itself to me in proportion to my knowledge of the past, of the future, of the natural, the supernatural, of the human, the Christian. It is this knowledge that enables me to hear her, to see her, to commune in the drama and mystery of this being. It has no limits and only ends in the vision of all this world’s beauty as a faithful expression of the Glory of God, thrice holy.
« And as the fervour of my contemplation increases, so I conceive a sort of discourse, a poem of praise for myself or for others also – a poem of praise to the intense beauty of this face whose secret I have heard.
« Please forgive me. I only wanted to give a simple example but in giving the secret of the lady of Auxerre I have also had to give of myself at the same time. It shows that aesthetics can only be life, self-giving, universal communion, a profound impression and expression of intimate sentiments, poetic force and creation – in a word, the mystical love of one’s neighbour and of God. » (CCR n° 106, p. 11)
THE “LADY OF AUXERRE’S” TRAGIC BEAUTY
The work of Marie Noel (above) « is all so terribly sad and pathetic and yet when we read her our only regret is that she did not write more. This failed life, broken heart and disappointed love will survive as a glorious immortal treasure of the soul of Christian France long after all the happy revelry of the people of Auxerre has been forgotten. Why is it so rewarding to read; what is this stream of virtue that emanates from the confidences of an old maid from whom all joys have fled, which attaches us to her in a flood of useless pity, love and admiration? And why do we look for each of her stories to take us to the bitter end of misfortune, if not because we want the beauty of the drama to be perfect? Our eyes are filled with tears and our hearts are wrung... yet what delight!
« Unlike the so-called laws of Reason and Aesthetics, true Beauty demands action and drama: the hero and heroine must be plunged ever deeper into misfortune, betrayal and suffering to the very depth of calamity. When we go to the theatre to see a tragedy that is what we expect; the more the hero is struck down, humiliated and despoiled, the more beautiful, touching and immortal he is. As the hero is crushed by evil, so do we acclaim his glory at the end and in our hearts we demand, in a sort of epic prayer, that a God finally avenge and crown him in His eternity.
« It is no accident that the last page of Marie Noel’s prose works should figure this extraordinary unedited play about her poor modest soul arriving in Paradise so empty of human goods, so forsaken and so naive... and coming after the story of Anna Bargeton’s Path, which is so very very sad, we feel that it cannot but end in Heaven. It must! It is the most universal, the most powerful aesthetic necessity, as though beauty could only flourish in the soil of misfortune. And would you take that from God? » (CCR n° 109, p. 9)
THE SADNESS OF GOD.
« Let us leave poetry, theatre and novels, revealing of the human heart though they are, and turn to the Book of books. What do we find among the epics of God’s Deeds and prophetic oracles? One drama after another in which the Jewish soul has long been forged under the repeated blows of misfortune: from the murder of Abel the just to the pitiable Jeremiah cast down a well, and the martyred Zacharias...
« What feeling and intense beauty there is in the account of Abraham sacrificing his only Isaac! What pleasure in the story of Joseph sold into Egypt by his brothers: it is Joseph who had the beautiful life, not the brothers. What dramatic episodes throughout the life of Samson! David never appears greater than when he crosses the brook Cedron, leaving Jerusalem in flight from his son Absalom, (he wept and took his family with him) … There is good King Josias, innocent and defeated, killed at Megiddo. There is the pitiful fate of young Joakin, led away to Babylon with all his people. Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine and all the tragedians together will never equal the Drama of our inspired Books.
« A life on which God’s blessing rests is marked by the Victim’s sign for some mysterious sacrifice. Job, Jonas, Suzanna, Esther... On their return from Exile, the whole people of Israel found themselves divided between those who were happy and satisfied but insignificant, promptly forgotten and never loved, and those who were of no importance, the little, the humble, the ill-favoured, and the downtrodden, of whom we still sing in the Psalms and whose wisdom serves as a model for ours…
« “Haec est logica nostra” concludes St. Bonaventure. It is so true that the Unknown of the Exile (Is 40 - 55) conceives it as a formal, aesthetic necessity that the Servant of Yahweh should be a suffering Messiah, in the likeness of King Joakin, the captive, humiliated King, tested to the point of death. The Book of Wisdom will portray in advance the wicked combining against the just One as the dramatic form of intense universal grandeur (Ws 1:5)… » (CCR n° 109, pp. 9-10)
The New Testament and the Church’s history do nothing but bring this “logic” to a head: « For in its fifteen mysteries the Rosary is the Christian’s entire philosophy; it is a wisdom far richer than science or reason; this lofty aesthetic nurtures infinitely more souls than any ancient or modern pagan philosophies. The Rosary is the people’s Psalter and in its mysteries are found contained the same treasure as in the hundred and fifty psalms of the Church’s official prayer. The joyful, sorrowful and glorious Mysteries form the most human and divine trilogy there can be. This trilogy is most certainly given us by Heaven as the absolute model of all life and the most perfect curve of Holy Beauty. »
The fifteen mysteries of the Rosary illustrate all the perfections, all the graces with which God has filled the Virgin Mary, our Mother. They organise every form of life, of vocation, of Christian holiness:
Through the joyful mysteries, She prepares for the work of Her Son. Through the sorrowful mysteries, She silently cooperates in the Passion of Her Son. Though the glorious mysteries, She is associated to the glory of Her Son.
« In their devotion to Our Lady the faithful never tire of this wonderful aesthetic which presents Her to them firstly as young and joyful filled with grace and happiness in the infancy of Christ. Then later in the sorrowful mysteries as She tragically accompanies Jesus in His sorrows, Her face grief-stricken, Her movement weighed down and Her eyes wounded by what She sees, the Mater Dolorosa willingly submits to martyrdom of the heart. Finally in the glorious mysteries, She is enthroned next to Her Risen Son and is Herself assumed into Heaven where She is not weighed down beneath Her heavy crown of glory but immensely exalted… I ask, what other religion, mythology or gnosis has anything more grandiose and yet so easily accessible to simple people? What has been better received by all mankind for centuries; what is there more human, more divine; in a word, what could be more beautiful?
« Now, in the two lives of Jesus and Mary, of unique mystery, the secret of their grandeur is found neither in their time of joy nor in their glory but in the Cross. » (ibid., p. 10)
When Jesus said to the disciples of Emmaus: « Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and so to enter into His glory? » (Lk 24:26), He expresses « the fundamental aesthetic necessity of the human condition, as lived by the saints of all ages, explained and magnified by the Scriptures as the highest expression of Divine Wisdom ». He says this even before speaking of the necessity of redemption.
« We could only have a presentiment of what is beautiful at certain moments of grace; it is to descend from glory, intelligence and riches in order to enter renunciation, pain, commiseration and infamy out of service and love and so to surrender one’s life drop by drop or in one single act, leaving it to Our Father in Heaven to raise us up in the end and give us eternal life.
« Such was the life curve of Jesus Christ. »
Likewise the Christian follows the same life curve through imitation, « the Imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ ». St Joan of Arc’s life offers an incomparable example of complete imitation despite the briefness of her life (1412-1431) :
« With an amazing naturalness, the Shepherdess of Domremy experienced the greatest elevation: she rode at the head of a victorious army through the city of Orleans after its delivery and from there she was associated in an extraordinary manner with the King’s anointing in Rheims, where she was greatly applauded by the people. Then with the same extraordinary naturalness she slowly descends through failure and betrayal and as though by some intrinsic necessity she fails to escape, she is imprisoned, tried before the Inquisition and then finally led to the stake at Rouen. It had to be! Nothing of what she went through could have failed to happen. Then her posthumous rehabilitation, her beatification and canonisation five hundred years later, glorified in the Church and in her country, is but an earthly projection of that same ascent into the light of Heaven, making her life follow so closely and purely that of Jesus her Lord. » (ibid., p. 11)
« This is what is rightly called the Gospel Revolution » by virtue of which « ugliness, suffering, human scorn, martyrdom, even in the most shameful conditions, no longer appear to the Christian as absolute evils ». Quite to the contrary! St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort teaches, and our Father following him, that sufferings and crosses are more than anything else [more than « beauty, reason and virtue »] « divine faces » that reveal a “secret”: « They are the demonstration of the pain of God’s Heart! And so it is no longer in the heights of Heaven, to be scaled by the aid of philosophy, it is in the thickness of the Cross that the creature seeks and finds divine Wisdom, Beauty and the fullness of perfect Love. »
Pay attention: « The Cross is not just a sorrowful, humiliating but necessary passage to Glory, which is something different; the Cross is itself that Glory, it encloses beauty and is the love that we embrace. In the Cross we have already been given everything; it is God’s ultimate Revelation, His unforgettable beauty, the secret of His eternal, unsurpassable love. »
« “Blessed are the poor... Blessed are they that hunger and thirst... Blessed are they that weep... But, above all, blessed are they that suffer persecution and are put to death for My sake… » says Jesus, (cf. Mt 5; Lk 6) Why? Because they will go to Heaven? It has been too often asserted. If we scrutinise Christ’s promises we see that they refer to the Earth, to the promised land here below, which is forbidden to some but open to the poor, the humble and the pure here and now; it is the Church, Christ’s Mystical Body. Those who resemble the Body of the Crucified Christ in His wounds, tears, bruises and shame already belong to His glorious Body. They are hidden in His Heart and in their resemblance to His outraged Face they are beautiful.
« Read what Croidys says of Fr. Conrardy, who in 1888 became Fr. Damien’s helper after Fr. Damien had been struck with leprosy: “Little by little he accustomed himself to looking at the Apostle’s face, and where before he had only seen vile wounds and hideous deformities he now discovered the magnificent stigmata of heroism. For Fr. Conrardy, this hideous head had become beautiful and resplendent and he could only look at it with eyes of admiration.” (Father Damien, Apostle of the Lepers, p. 319) Such is our Christian aesthetic and our Christian mysticism: who could fail to be moved thereby?
« Heed the lesson of our little Carmelite who only wished to savour the bitterness of this world’s consolations and who wished to make a sacrifice of all happiness. What does she have to say of the beauty and the joy to which the human heart invincibly aspires? “Is there a greater joy than that of suffering for your love?” Love, suffering and joy. The most moving holiness embraces within this magnificent trilogy all the possible beauty of the universe, the work of God’s Wisdom which shines from the face of Jesus Crucified. » (ibid., p. 15)
TO COMBAT SIN THAT LEADS TO HELL.
Only one thing is ugly, only one thing is hateful: sin and everything that leads to it, in the first place money, then honours, luxury, injustice and oppression. « Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation! Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry! Woe to you when all speak well of you! » (Lk 6, 24-26)
Sin leads to Hell. But Heaven is mercy.
Hell is not that of Dante, « the most famous of all the “tourists of Hell” » (CCR n° 112, p. 12): it is a very real, concrete fire where souls burn like wood. The children of Fatima saw it on 13 July 1917 because the Virgin Mary showed it to them with infinite « sadness ». But She did so only after having promised to take them to Heaven; otherwise, they would have died of fright. She also taught them a means to prevent souls from falling into Hell: the devotion to Her Immaculate Heart. That is to say that She gives them the means to fight against sin, which is the cause of eternal damnation:
« Pray, pray very much, and make sacrifices for sinners; for many souls go to Hell because they have no one to sacrifice and pray for them. » (19 August 1917)
Such is the retribution for definitive, irremissible sin, sin unalloyed with mercy, sin finally pitted against God and acting as an obstacle to Him, overshadowing and eternally defying Him. Such sin is the history of a drama with a bad ending, which is what we call tragedy. In this tragedy, Judas, a man like us, is the emblematic personality among those cursed ones in many a place, whom Jesus refers to not as unreal possibilities but as real beings implacably fixed in their revolt and their reprobation.
It suffices to see how the tragic dimension of this present life has disappeared from our religion along with the tragic dimension of Eternal life to understand that the Virgin Mary wanted to show Hell to the children of Fatima.
« No one of those who ever saw Hell with their own eyes and realised what it is, can then accept it. » God Himself cannot resign Himself to it! « What we know of God, the Creator of Hell, is that He wants no one to be there and that He begged His Son at the time of the Agony in the Garden to lay Himself open to this cruel Passion and so save all men from Hell. Such is our beautiful God our good God,
« who as Father gave His Son for us,
« who as Son suffered death on the Cross for our salvation, and
« who as Holy Spirit takes our part as Defender and Comforter. » (CCR n° 112, p. 21)
What about us? What are we going to do?
First we must challenge the presumption and pride of modern man, which the Second Vatican Council has canonised. The Council came to the conclusion that since God puts all His Wisdom and Power at the service of His Love, therefore at our service, no law or justice subsist. And therefore no Hell...
« On the evening of Good Friday when Jesus had crossed the veil of this life and left the world’s scene behind, He hastened to the Underworld with the Good Thief, not wishing to be separated from Him, following close behind. And what about the Bad Thief? Did Jesus and the Good Thief come to shake his hand and laugh saying: “Come on now, it is all over, let’s be reconciled!” Inconceivable comedy. Did they let him fall into the Abyss without so much as a look? Or worse: Depart from me, you cursed into everlasting fire! Impossible tragedy. What then? » (CCR n° 112, p. 10)
We must pray that the Name of our Heavenly Father be hallowed, that His Kingdom come, that His Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. And in Hell? Ah! let us struggle against Hell, but let us no longer question God about the work of His First and Eternal Sorrow!
STRUGGLING AGAINST HELL BY MARY.
« There are those who cannot resign themselves to it and those who have simply accepted Hell... the Hell of others. » (CCR n° 112, p. 10)
The overwhelming need and duty to save one’s soul and save the world by sharing in the toil of universal redemption is the source of an apostolic, social, political charity which is expressed in the second petition of the Pater Noster:
Thy Kingdom come, this second petition leads to the third: Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
Now, God’s will is to establish the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on earth. We learned so from the lips of the Virgin Mary, in Her great “secret” on 13 July 1917:
« You have seen Hell, where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart. » How? By the consecration of Russia to this Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays.
In consideration of this, « in the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph, the Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, it will be converted and a certain period of peace will be given to the world. »
It so happens that this revelation from Heaven comes in support of the third part of the series “A Mysticism for our Time”, because “the mystical ascent of the soul” (CCR n° 113, August 1978) is not an evasion in the timeless dimension. On the contrary, it is « the root and the source of this apostolic, social, political charity, which is expressed in the second petition of the Pater Noster leading to the third: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. » (CCR n° 114, p. 3) From this comes a Christian politics that is established on Mary’s universal queenship according to the will of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
III. THE COSMIC GLORY OF CHRIST
It must be said that the message of Fatima is part of an age-old tradition: « Vying with one another, Fathers of the Church, theologians and poets have hailed in Mary the perfect but true, real and substantial ideal of this created Wisdom, of this Sophia, Virgin, Spouse and Mother, the first of all women, but made so by the loving will of God alone, a creative, marrying and fruitful will. »
The creative Will is the will of God, who is Creator of the Immaculate Conception.
The Marrying Will is the will of the Son, of the Word made flesh, who came to espouse this Immaculate in order for Her to share His redeeming Passion and to enter into the drama of the Cross.
The Fruitful Will is the will of the Holy Spirit, whom She receives from Her divine Spouse. He gladdens and fills Her with an inexhaustible fecundity whereby, as universal Mediatrix, the Immaculate Virgin begets an entire sanctified people, a whole saved world born to the divine life of grace.
« It is for the supreme beauty of this threefold and fourfold crown of Virgin, Spouse and Martyr of the heart pierced with the seven swords of compassion, and finally Mother, that Mary is rightly honoured at the centre of our mystical aesthetic, in agreement with Scripture and Tradition and also with the growing phenomenon of popular devotion to Mary, itself in answer to the ever more frequent, beautiful and dramatic apparitions of Our Lady to Her children on earth. » (CCR n° 116, p. 14)
CONSECRATION.
Our Lady of Fatima’s revelations at the Cova da Iria in 1917, then in Pontevedra in 1925, and in Tuy in 1929 are coherent with the “Christian politics” of the Abbé de Nantes... and of Vladimir Soloviev (pronounced Salavioff). The latter went so far as to consider that the primary explanation of all our human ills, of all our Christian sins was to be found in the Eastern schism and that salvation would be what, since Fatima, we call « the conversion of Russia » by means of her consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
« Faced with the twofold error firstly of the mystical East leaving politics entirely to the Emperor until they find themselves in the Gulag, and secondly of the West, so much interested in politics that we make a whole life of it, laicising society and suffocating souls with scientific and secular interests, it was necessary to measure the whole of the historical human reality with the yardstick of both natural and supernatural knowledge. For this purpose Soloviev has proved to be an incomparable guide. » (CCR n° 115, p. 3)
Our Father adds: « I have searched among all the thinkers of the West and in France, of yesterday and today but I cannot find one to compare with him. I leave my readers to tell me who there is. » (CCR n° 115, p. 3) Yes indeed, Father: it is ours to tell you that you are the one who is comparable to him!
It suffices to compare Soloviev’s « Russian nationalism » and the Abbé de Nantes’ « Catholic nationalism » for everyone to see it plainly.
« There would be no end to quoting Soloviev’s words on the grandiose destiny of Russia. » Despite his Ukrainian ancestry, « his love for his country and his magnanimity made him regard Russia as unique; he saw Russia and the Tzar called by Providence to exercise a unique role in the future universal religious reconciliation. » Just as Our Lady of Fatima does! Yet, he was not blind to the sin of Russia, which is that of hating and oppressing all those whom she dominates, especially Polish Catholics, Greek Uniates, Ruthenians and Jews! It is what Our Lady of Fatima called the « errors of Russia »!
« With great lucidity and as a true prophet of Our Lady of Fatima, he preached repentance to his people. Out of fidelity to her great vocation among the Slavs, Russia was urged to renounce her inordinate ambitions and to return to a true, worthy and Christian concept of her destiny at the heart of the only international organisation capable of guiding her path, Catholicism, understood by Soloviev as Roman universalism. » His precise geopolitical views enabled him « to recognise the place of other nationalisms in the European concert of nations and in the international order. What he says of Poland, whose role as the “Christ of the nations” he refused to accept, is right and true, similarly his affirmation of the need for the international order of a vast Austro-Hungarian empire, etc. »
« Is it necessary to point out, our Father also writes, that these ideas are in perfect agreement with ours, showing how much the Catholic idea makes the various nationalisms compatible with one another and mutually co-operative and how it can promote the various nationalisms whilst imposing interior restraint on them.
« Against the imperialism of one dominating nation, against the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, for example, posing as master of the world, the French Capetian monarchy stood out for a thousand years and never did the France of the French Kings make such a claim on its own behalf. To illustrate the idea of the rightness of the individual nation and of Christian renunciation of all imperialist immoderation we have the incomparable lesson of St. Joan of Arc whom Soloviev admired profoundly.
« Consecrating French nationalism with a divine blessing, of which the French can be proud, the first message of God’s envoy was in fact that there is no political mystique except in submission of the national and royal idea to the universal sovereignty of Christ and of His Holy Mother, whose sovereignty is extended to all nations bringing them all prosperity and salvation. Thus with strong nationalisms it is possible to build a true and peaceful international community.
« It is the opposite view to the universal political empire of Dante […]. It is that of Maurras but transfigured and illumined by a true and prophetic Christian faith. » We are very far from the « Jacobinism into which Peguy unrestrainedly plunged in order to counter his Socialist friends of yesterday, Jaures in the first place. » In a word, it is incomparable...
Our Father then makes the brilliant comparison that is imperative: just as Our Lady of Fatima ends Her “Secret” with this promise that will bring a remedy to what She calls « the errors of Russia »: « “In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, and she will be converted, and a certain period of peace will be granted to the world”, Soloviev, after having referred to the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution that Dostoievski had described in advance, concluded: “But when healed by faith, Russia will bow before her Saviour.” »
How will this healing, this conversion be wrought? Through the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary that the Pope and all the bishops in communion with him will pronounce. On this point, too, Soloviev’s thought precedes the Holy Mother of God’s will with the place he assigns to the Pope.
« The idea animating Soloviev in this immense effort of renovation in that of the reawakening of the Slav peoples which will follow their return to the Roman fold and the single Shepherd. And if it is certain that “Russia will be converted”, as Our Lady of Fatima prophesied, then Soloviev’s almost dreamlike ideas will appear to be of an extraordinary supernatural realism. » In fact, the miracle of this conversion will be the fruit of a “consecration”.
Against the false mysticism of Tolstoy who advocated flight from effort and contempt for the real demands of social justice and political order, « Dostoievski’s on the other hand was quite different: it went, by virtue of Christ’s Cross, to sacrifice accepted out of charity, in which climate all the economists’ and politicians’ reasonable solutions can be practicable and fruitful. » (CCR° 115, p. 14).
« Soloviev - Dostoievski truly put their finger on the wound there: secularism. As did Pius IX in condemning Catholic liberalism, as did St. Pius in wanting “to restore all things in Christ”, and I add at the risk of surprising and scandalising his enemies and even a number of his self-styled disciples, as did Maurras in admiring, from outside alas (!), Catholic Order as expressed in the Syllabus and in praising it for claiming rightly to embrace all in its faith and in its law. Was this the evil of the Middle Ages and of the classical era as Soloviev thought? It is the evil of the stupid nineteenth century, transmitted to and aggravated by the twentieth century, to make of religion a purely clerical affair or a matter of private conscience but never a social or political affair.
« If religion is not everything and fails to govern the whole of life, it is nothing, it governs nothing, and everything far from religion necessarily goes adrift. » (ibid., pp. 14-15)
If it is by Mary’s sweet mediation, who would not consent to this “totalitarianism”?
« The Columbian newspaper El Tiempo revealed last Holy Saturday that the crisis that should have ended in a conflict between Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela had been avoided thanks to the Columbian president Álvaro Uribe. In fact, the latter had entrusted the outcome of this critical situation to the patronage of the Virgin Mary under three of her titles. The crises began following the Columbian army’s air attack on the territory of Equador during which Raul Reyes, the number two of the farc narco-terrorist guerrilla force, was killed. This crisis prompted President Uribe to organise reciting the Rosary in the Presidential Palace. This Rosary was offered to the Virgin Mary under three titles that are dear to the three countries concerned: Our Lady of Chiquinquira, the Patroness of Columbia, Our Lady of Coromoto, the Patroness of Venezuela, and the Virgin of Las Mercedes, who is venerated in Equador.
« This took place on 5 March 2008. On 27 March, the three presidents renounced their grievances and agreed to put an end to the conflict. » (in Ave Maria, July 2008)
It is indeed what She promised: « In the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph [...], and a certain period of peace will be given to the world. » Amen!