"Thought it Natural to be Rational, Reason's Factual..."

Quail

We find two references to Quail in the Old Testament: first, in Exodus chapter 15, and then again in Numbers chapter 11. In both instances God provides the people of Israel with meat in the form of these birds in response to their grumblings and complaints about the hardships of the desert. Yet the two accounts are subtly and interestingly different.

In Exodus Israel is only just beginning its wanderings in the desert. As the people begin to feel the pangs of hunger and thirst they begin to regret their leap from slavery in Egypt to freedom with God. To strengthen them and encourage them on their journey, God provides his people with Manna, bread from heaven and a 'type' of the Eucharist. In addition, he also provides Quail, he provides his people with flesh to eat in the desert. In Exodus, then, the Quail appear as a sign of God's providence and generosity, and also a foreshadowing of the Eucharist and the Incarnation. In the Desert, God gave his people bread from heaven and flesh from the sky in the form of Quail. In the Eucharist, our bread from heaven is the Body and Blood of Christ himself, this is our food for our journey with God.

In Numbers Chapter 11, however, the context is slightly different. Here the people have already received the gift of the Manna, they have already received the bread from heaven, the food for the journey - and they are sick of it. They are bored of this food and once more long for the variety of their diet in Egypt. The sacrifices of freedom are too high. The consolations of slavery much too alluring. Once again God provides responds to the complaints of his people by providing meat in the form of Quail, but this time he promises Israel that they will grow tired of this meat too. He tells Israel: ' You will eat it [meat]....for a month until it comes out of your nostrils and sickens you' (Numbers 11: 20).

Here the Quail represent all the sensual, intellectual and emotional consolations that we turn to in order to avoid the cross of Christ, in order to avoid the sacrifices that love of God and love of neighbour demand. Eventually these consolations become revolting and we must search for another 'fix'. As Augustine puts it, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. This is the hard lesson that the Israelites learnt by enduring the privations of the desert for forty years. It is a lesson that we too must learn if we are to fully embrace our freedom as children of God and finally dispel all thoughts of returning to the slavery of sin.

Fruits of Study 4: The Development of Doctrine

Blessed John HenryNewman wrote his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1848) against the backdrop of a multiplication of Protestant sects and chapel congregations in nineteenth century England. These protestant groups rejected the elaborate liturgy and theology of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches, dismissing these developments as a corruption of the pristine teaching and practice of the early Church. Instead, these reformers claimed a lineage of praxis with the apostles arguing that their simplicity of life and doctrine represented the distilled essence of the faith, free from the later dilutions and contaminations of 'tradition'.

For Newman, this notion that the history of the Church from the end of the apostolic age onwards was a sorry tale of degeneration and decay until finally the light of the reformation freed us from the dark tyranny of tradition, was contrary to the very notion of revelation itself. Newman argued that whilst God's revelation to Mankind at the Incarnation was perfect and complete, our capacity to receive and comprehend this revelation was and is decidedly imperfect and finite - at least in this life. We receive the Gospel not as an easily digestable package of propositions that can be clearly demarcated and defined, but as a truth that transcends us. This transcendence means that whilst we can make some true statements about the coming of God as man and the implications of this Incarnation for each one of us, we can never say everything that is true about this Good News, this Gospel.

Rather than being a clear and distinct idea that we possess and comprehend, then, the Gospel is more like an active principle within us that comes to define who we are and how we live. As we go through life, the Gospel, this 'active principle' that organises our lives, is continually re-applied and re-expressed in the new contexts and situations that we face. In this process of re-application of the Gospel in the lives of Christians and Christian communities, the doctrinal and liturgical tradition of the Church is deepened as new perspectives on the Incarnation of Christ are uncovered.

For Newman, then, doctrinal and liturgical development is not a sign of contamination or decay, it is a sign of life. We do not live our Christian life in a vacuum. We live our Christian lives in a world that is continually changing. Fidelity to the unchanging content of the Gospel, then, means developing and changing ways of expressing and articulating that same Gospel. As Newman himself puts it: 'To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often'. To put this same point another way, Newman is offering us a quasi-organic understanding of doctrinal and liturgical development. The Catholic Church is the tree that grew from the mustard seed. Whilst it may now look very different to its first manifestation, there is a direct correspondence between its primitive state and its contemporary state. The Protestant sects and Chapel congregations of Newman's day, in contrast, whilst they may have superficially looked more like the early Church than nineteenth century Catholicism, were in fact fundamentally as different from the Church of the apostolic age as a mustard seed is from an acorn.

Biblical Beasts: Pig

Pigs do not appear to have a very high standing in the Bible. They were regarded as unclean. Leviticus 11:7-8 spells this out: “You will regard the pig as unclean, because though it has a cloven hoof, divided into two parts, it is not a ruminant. You will not eat the meat of these or touch their dead bodies: you will regard them as unclean.” It is interesting that the reason given is not based on the animal having dirty habits – like wallowing in mud, or grunting, or as linked to any parasites or medical conditions coming from eating them. It is, of course possible, that these lie in the background but it is presented as a divine commandment.

Observing such laws helped to set the Jews apart as distinct from the people about them and thus in a unique relation to a unique God. Such ritual purity laws were to point to holiness, the holiness of God and of how a person needed to become holy (clean) to enter God’s presence. It is all of this that is picked up in the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). The son has moved so far from the moral and ritual commitment to his Jewish faith, he is so far outside of it and so unclean, that he is reduced to herding pigs. This means he is working for a Gentile as Jews had no use for pigs and would not keep them.

More importantly, clean animals are those that can be offered to God in ritual worship, i.e. as animal sacrifices. Unclean ones cannot be so offered, and this was commonly because neighbouring peoples offered them to their own gods. The Hittites were known to sacrifice pigs to their gods. Such use of pigs lay at the heart of the infamous Abomination of Desolation and the persecution of the Jews linked to it as narrated in the Books of the Macabees, around 165 BC. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the (Greek) Seleucid king of the area sought to impose pagan worship on the Jews: he erected a statue of Zeus in the temple on the Jewish altar and offered sacrifices of pigs to it (1 Macc 1:47). Jews were then made to eat the flesh of pigs - and most probably of such sacrificed pigs - or lose their lives. This image of sacrilege – the Abomination of Desolation - is recorded also in the Book of Daniel, and the accompanying history was still very potent in the time of Jesus, and this image featured in Jesus’ own apocalyptic teaching (Mk 13:14). Thus another foreign power, usually seen as the Romans in the first place, would seek to impose a false religion on God’s people and to punish non-compliance with death. Jesus assures his disciples that he has power over such forces.

The other famous pig incident in the New Testament may have some connection with this. It concerns the exorcism of a man and the casting of his demons into a herd of 2000 pigs that rush into the sea and are drowned (Mk 5 and parallels in Mt 8 and Lk 8). The devils recognise the holiness of Jesus – calling him Son of the Most High – and name themselves as Legion, a term specific to Roman military use, and meaning a fighting group of 6000 men. Jesus will not tolerate their presence but they hope to stay in the area and ask that he will allow them to go into the unclean pigs. But this does not work out and the demons end up in the sea, a realm under God’s authority, and something over which Jesus has specifically exercised his authority in the previous chapter.

There are a number of military allusions in the story and these suggest that the authority and power of Jesus is not just over evil spirits but over the military forces, and forces which may serve such spirits and even the devil. In addition to ‘legion’, the word used to describe the ‘herd’ is often used of military groupings. They ‘charge’ down the hill and thence into the water. Their drowning brings to mind the drowning of the Egyptian army which pursued Moses and the Israelites across the Red Sea.

But what of the pigs? The demons do not want to destroy the pigs. So it seems better to consider that the pigs cannot tolerate the presence of the demons within them. They end up assisting the plan of Jesus to overcome the demonic powers. The demons were wrong in calculating that the pigs, perhaps because they were unclean, would tolerate their presence. As such the pigs serve the purpose of Jesus, not that of the demons. This again shows the scale of the authority and power of Jesus in comparison with the ultimate powerlessness of the demons. Their destruction perhaps points to a goodness in the pigs, a natural resistance to evil, given they are not moral agents.

It is interesting to note that not long after this (Mk 7), Jesus declared all foods clean, stressing the spiritual and moral foundation for real holiness and cleanliness. All of creation is good and serves God’s purpose. Until Christ came and revealed and made available the full means of holiness, some animals had been declared unclean to help the Jews separate themselves from the evil around and within them. It does not reflect the moral or ontological state of the animals as such. Now that era is past. In the end the pig is declared clean. It has always served God’s purposes and one can assume or at least hope that it will find its place in the new earth at the end of time.

The Angelicum

We share with our readers the following video recently produced for the Dominican-run Pontifical University of St Thomas, Rome (The Angelicum), where a number of brothers of our Province have studied for licences and doctorates in Theology and Canon Law.

Fruits of Study 3: Re-enchanting Education

The following review, by Fr Vivian Boland OP, was published in Faith magazine in January 2011: 

Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2009, 156pp, £12.99

In their struggles with Christianity, the pagan philosophers of late antiquity presented Pythagoras as their answer to Jesus: here was a good and spiritual man whose knowledge and wisdom became foundational for all later philosophy. In this fascinating manifesto on the re-enchantment of education, Stratford Caldecott also appeals to Pythagoras, but to a baptized Pythagoras, his thought about mathematics and music transposed into a Christian key, something already underway in writers such as Boethius and Augustine.

Taking as his starting point Benedict XVI’s appeal for a liturgical understanding of human existence, Caldecott shows how the rationalism that has reduced western education to something purely utilitarian, will be overcome through a fresh appreciation of the transcendentals of truth and goodness, but only where the neglected transcendental, beauty, is allowed to work its influence. The perception of form is fundamental if the elimination of meaning is to be reversed.

A first chapter considers how the medieval quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, became separated from the study of philosophy and theology, as if the quadrivium was an end in itself rather than the way in which a person was made ready for the study of philosophy and theology. A true appreciation of ‘liberal’ education was thus lost, as was a strong sense of the rootedness of the higher disciplines in the study of number and its relationship to physical time and space. The Pythagorean inspiration of the vision proposed is clear and so too is the liturgical destination of education, where time and space are made holy in the worship of God. Caldecott is not making a romantic or antiquarian proposal: ancient and medieval understandings need to be adapted to where we find ourselves now in the story of human understanding.

A second chapter argues for the education of the heart and imagination not just to feel but to know. This is crucial for science too as C.S.Lewis, Charles Taylor, and others, have argued. There follow two chapters developing this theme of the reintegration of science with the poetic mode of knowledge. This requires appreciating anew the nature of symbolism, the analogy of being which it presupposes, and an alternative vision of mathematics, what Caldecott calls ‘the lost wisdom of the world’. He speaks about the symbolism of numbers, the ‘golden ratio’ or ‘golden section’ that is found throughout nature, and symmetry, in which complexity and unity converge. Mathematics connects directly with theology, he continues, showing (following Augustine) how pointers to the Trinity are to be found everywhere. Much of this is inspiring and convincing though some of it feels contrived: Caldecott acknowledges that some of the speculations he records may appear forced.

The fifth chapter considers harmony, another element in the classical definitions of beauty, and he reflects on it in music, architecture, ecology, and astronomy. There are many beautiful thoughts and applications here as he sketches a Christian cosmology whose principles and values are at once scientific, practical, moral, aesthetic, and theological. He is happy to call the one who subscribes to such a vision a ‘Christian Pythagorean’ (p. 115).

A final chapter considers ‘the liturgical consummation of cosmology’. The philosophical and theological roots of ‘secular modernity’ continue to be exposed and examined, and Caldecott calls on many contemporary thinkers in support of his diagnosis. The way forward, he believes, is in recovering a sense of revelation and worship, in particular in recovering the ability to pray. This cannot be done willfully, of course, but emerges spontaneously from a particular way of appreciating the world: as an objective and beautiful thing, a symbolic reality whose fabric reveals, in a great variety of ways, the forms or archetypes of the world’s order (pp. 13, 125). A sense of the sacred, celebration of the liturgy, wonder and gratitude: these are the things in which we need to be re-educated not just for the joy of living in an enchanted ‘Liturgical City’ but because it is the only way to keep our education humane and our life civilized.

Like all manifestos this book is relatively short but clear in its diagnosis and in its prescriptions as well as being pregnant with many suggestive lines of thought. Anyone concerned about the condition of the perennial philosophy, or the future of Christian civilization, ought to read it.

"To send them out two by two..."

Wednesday night was a bit of a "curate's egg" for the community at Oxford. Two of our brothers, Fr. Vivian Boland and Br. Lawrence Lew, were packing up for pastures new. Fr. Vivian, the Master of Students, has been appointed The Master of the Order's Socius for the region of North-West Europe and Canada and Socius for Initial Formation and is moving to Rome. Br. Lawrence is moving to the Priory of St. Albert the Great, Edinburgh, where he will be joining the Catholic Chaplaincy team.  He will return to Oxford to be ordained to the priesthood later this month.

Their departures are of special significance to Godzdogz. They are the last remaining friars who have been with this blog since its inauguration. Fr. Vivian has been the dedicated editor since the beginning, and Br. Lawrence has used his considerable talent to build up and drive the blog. Please keep these brothers and their work in your prayers.