ANTHONY ESOLEN How the Church Has Changed theWorld
Publisher: Romain Lizé Editor-in-Chief: Rev. Sebastian White, o.p. Iconography: Isabelle Mascaras Layout: Julia Pateu Cover: Gauthier Delauné Proofreading: Janet Chevrier Front cover: Medieval city on the banks of a river (detail), Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), Schloss Charlottenburg Art Museum, Berlin, Germany. © akg-images. Copyright © 2019 by Magnificat Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in 2023 in France by Sepec – 11355220119 First edition: April 2019 ISBN: 978-1-949239-04-1 No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Magnificat, PO Box 834, Yonkers, NY 10702. www.magnificat.com The trademark Magnificat depicted in this publication is used under license from and is the exclusive property of Magnificat Central Service Team Inc., A Ministry to Catholic Women, and may not be used without its written consent.
ANTHONY ESOLEN How the Church Has Changed theWorld Volume I December 2013 – December 2015 MAGNIFICAT Paris • New York • Oxford • Madrid • Warsaw
contents Foreword..................................................................... 7 A Child Enthroned................................................... 9 The Play’s the Thing ������������������������������������������������ 15 Raising a Nation from the Dead �������������������������� 22 X Man, Risen from the Dead ������������������������������� 29 Civilization in the Seed ����������������������������������������� 36 In Praise of Woman ������������������������������������������������ 43 Whatsoever You Do ����������������������������������������������� 50 The Church, the Ennobler of Cultures �������������� 57 The Poet in Love with the Word ������������������������� 64 And God SawThat It Was Good ������������������������� 71 The True History of the World ���������������������������� 78 The Church and the Beginning of It All ������������ 85 Small Enough to Enter the Cathedral… ������������� 92 A Catholic to the Roots ���������������������������������������� 99 Mother of Freedom ����������������������������������������������106 The “Black Gown”… ����������������������������������������������114 For God Is Light ���������������������������������������������������121 The Heavens Declare the Glory of God �����������128 The Church, Mother of Scholars �����������������������136 Forgotten Father ���������������������������������������������������143 The Abbot and the Peas ���������������������������������������150 The Father of California ��������������������������������������157 Here Is Truth ����������������������������������������������������������164 The Church, Mater Dramatis �����������������������������171 The Miracle of Jasna Góra ����������������������������������178
7 Foreword Professor Anthony Esolen is well known for the skill with which he wields his pen, as well as his passion for teaching the great treasures of Western civilization, especially those that find their roots in the Catholic Faith. After several years of regular writing for Magnificat, with different themes and topics from year to year—from the sacraments to the Last Things, from liturgy to literature, including an entire year dedicated to Dante’s Divine Comedy—in December of 2013 Professor Esolen began writing a new column, “How the Church Has Changed the World.” It is a column he still writes, and which continues to garner the interest and appreciation of readers. This volume, which comprises the first two years of that column, responds to a steady flow of requests to make his essays available again. They are back, as the saying goes, by popular demand. In these twenty-five essays—which include the inspiring witness of priests, religious, and laity; which touch on the arts and sciences, civilian life and government, the realm of ideas and practical
8 works of mercy—Professor Esolen displays how the Church is truly the “leaven and, as it were, the soul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation into the family of God” (Gaudium et spes, 40). It is not uncommon to find books and articles presenting arguments that the Church has failed the world. Under Professor Esolen’s tutelage, however, we will enjoy discovering how Holy Mother Church, as she leads us home to where all the angels and saints are gathered around the glorious throne of God, has indeed made our world a better place. Rev. Sebastian White, o.p. Editor-in-Chief, Magnificat Yonkers, New York Feast of Saints Philip and James, 2019
9 A Child Enthroned The Apennines run along the peninsula of Italy like a spine, carved and turned by volcanic action beneath the earth. So it is that abrupt cliffs of fire-founded rock rise up, smoothed a little by the long ages, pitted with grottoes, covered on their gentler western slopes with rich soil for farming, and crowned, often enough, by the walls and tile roofs and spires of a medieval town. And here, in one such grotto, beyond the walls of one such town, a little man in brown rough cloth is working quietly. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he has been in himself something of a volcano, if that word can properly apply to one who, by all appearances, hardly ever raises his voice. He is leading a great lumbering ox and a donkey over to the grotto, to tether them there, in front of a very large trough filled with hay so they won’t grow restless, and a cistern full of water. The animals seem unusually tame, or maybe he just has a way with them. The church of the earth Two other men in brown are watching him. “Brother Rufino, what is the master doing now?” It’s never been easy for the followers to catch
10 How the Church Has Changed the World up with him. It is like trying to hold still the flashing points of a fire. “I don’t know. He said something about the chapel being too small.” “Too small for an ox and a donkey?” “No, Brother Giles. Too small for the crowd that will come to celebrate the vigil with us.” Rufino and Giles approach the master. He is now strewing cedar branches and laurel along the sides of the grotto, as if he were decorating a stage. “My little brothers!” he cries out to them. “Come and assist me. Now is the time when what is great is small and what is small is great.” So they assist him, as if they were trying to transfigure a mountain and deck it as a sanctuary; as if the earth itself could now be a church once more, at the coming of the Lord who made it. At first they don’t know what the task is, but after a while the plan takes shape in their minds too, and they pitch themselves into it with a will. The afternoon soon fades into evening, for the days are short, and in the waning light the people come, most especially children, some of whom the master dresses in white robes, giving them country horns and pipes to play with. Men and women come too, leading sheep, and a frisking lamb or two, just born this summer. Naturally, with the commotion come man’s oldest and most loyal friends, the dogs, wagging their tails and barking, as the good Lord made them to do.
11 A Child Enthroned “Master,” says Rufino, a man who was always a little too touchy about boundaries, “may we do this thing? Have we permission? What will the bishop say?” Rufino is the sort who, if he missed a word while saying his paternoster, would repeat the prayer three times over to make up for it. The master has had to correct him at times for that. “The bishop of all the bishops has had his say. I have asked him, and he has approved. Brother Rufino,” he says, his eyes glinting upon his friend, “when have you ever known me to take upon myself the burden of a priest? You know that my back is too weak to bear it.” A new thing in the world It is now quite dark above, a winter sky with stars like flakes of fire. The master leads a little girl and a little boy by the arm, and instructs them to kneel in front of the feeding trough, their hands folded in prayer. Then he brings a statue of an infant boy, which he had hidden for just this moment. He kisses its forehead, and falls to his knees. All the people, hundreds of them, fall to their knees. What can we hear, in that grotto on the slopes of Mount Subiaco? The earth is not trembling. Angels do not trumpet their songs from the skies. Some of the people are muttering a prayer,
12 How the Church Has Changed the World Magnificat anima mea. One of the lambs gives a shy bleat. The ox and the ass look on, padding now and then in their places, snuffling at the hay, or looking upon the people with their large expressive eyes. Then the master arises to his feet, and begins to sing. Puer nobis nascitur: A boy is born for us! Song after song, some in Latin, some in the Italian dialect of Umbria, rises up from the men and women and children, from the brothers in their coarse brown tunics, and from the angels surrounding the grotto, made all the lovelier by the occasional confusion of the animals, for they too partake of this glory. A few of the grandees of Assisi are present, but in this world, the real world, what is small is great and what is great is small, and not all their gay robes draw the eyes of the people as do the children in white, the ox and the ass and the sheep, the girl Mary and the boy Joseph, and the figure of the Holy Child. Then, after the poetry of praise, and after a time of silence that even the dogs in their sagaciousness observe, the poor man of God, Francis Bernardone, steps before the people and preaches to them of the meaning of this night. “This is anewthing in theworld,” he says. “This is perhaps the only new thing the world has ever seen.” And he speaks to them of the Child in the manger. It is not only that God has deigned to come among us in so humble a guise. It is that he is instructing us
13 A Child Enthroned even now. Even from the manger does Christ preach, saying, “If you would enter the kingdom of heaven, you must become as I am, you must become as little children.”The child has nothing; the Son does nothing but what he sees the Father do. And therefore the Father has robed him in splendor. “See the swaddling bands that wind him about,” says the master. “Whose hands wove the cloth? It was Mary, in the quiet house in Nazareth, who wove those bands for the child she was going to bear, along with her dearest friend and my beloved, the Lady Poverty, and she and Mary spoke of many things as they worked, and no one but God beheld them.” So for an hour and more did Saint Francis preach, and the people there at the second crèche in the history of the world—for the first was at the stable-cave in Bethlehem—listened, as they always did, as if his clear and boyish voice swept them from that hillside into the land where the boy Christ looks upon his own, and makes the lion lie down with the lamb, and, more remarkable than that, the rich man to bow in homage to the poor, and leads them to streams of living water. The whole world a grotto And in the rushing of Francis’ words, the people for a time forget themselves. They forget to lift the chin and throw back the shoulders and strut like foolish
14 How the Church Has Changed the World peacocks in a cage. They forget to be great, and seem as if they had returned to childhood themselves, their eyes bright with delight and their lips parted in that happy look that children have when they are all wonder and no self. For the whole world, from the stars above to the rock beneath their feet, is a grotto for just this moment, to which the people have been invited, if they would but bow their heads and become small enough to fit into the universe. The Evangelists tell us that the earth shook on the day when Christ died upon the cross. But that was the great after-tremor of Jesus’ first act of love, when in the silence of Mary’s house he became flesh and dwelt among us, and then, on the night of the Nativity, first showed to Mary and Joseph, then to the humble animals, and only then to mere shepherds, his sacred face.The earth shookwith the fire of love, and from that day unto this, wherever men and women still remember the name of Jesus and how he was born in a lowly stable, they will feel that tremor, and know, somehow, even if they have forgotten the words, that the meek shall inherit the earth, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and that all the pomp and glamour of the world will pass away, all its capitols and senates and universities and towering dynamos of business leave not one scorched stone upon a stone, but the Child born in the manger will remain, and he alone can tell us the secret of who we are and where we must go
15 The Play’s the Thi The Play’s the Thing Two women are in the fields outside of Wakefield, tying bean seedlings to stakes. It’s a clear and sunny day, with just enough of a breeze to bring to their ears the bass voice of a man, raving: Heard I never quirk so quaint that a knave so slight should come like a saint and rob me of my right! Nay without—nay without—refrain, no—remain—restraint Nay without restraint, I shall kill him downright! “Dear me!” cries one of the women. “Are they brawling at the public house again?” “Nay, not indeed,” says the other, laughing. “It’s my good husband, Will. He’s playing Herod again this holiday. Twenty-two years has he done it, and still he will drop a rhyme or two, so he gives his lungs the airing whilst feeding the pigs.” “Ah, the mysteries! Fool that I am, I had forgotten. I hear that the brave lad of the Waters will be the Christ this year. He has not the look of a priest about him.” “Not if the bailey’s daughter has anything to say about it! They are to be wed this Lammastide. But listen!”
16 How the Church Has Changed the World My guts will burst out If I hang not this lout; If my vengeance he flout, I may live no longer. “Aye, there’s a voice of a man indeed! He does so enjoy playing that murdering rogue of a king.” “So long as the Lord not mistake him for Herod when he shall stand before him!” A shy creature, drama I imagine such a conversation between two wives, in the little English village of Wakefield, in the merry old days of Catholic England. They’re talking about their village plays for the three-day festival of Corpus Christi. It’s something the people of Wakefield have known and loved for many generations. We who go to the movies may suppose there’s always been such a thing as drama. It isn’t so. Drama is the most erratic of the arts, like a wild sweet fruit that grows only in a sheltered place, when the sun and rain are just right. They were just right in Athens, five centuries before Christ, when the old religion of Greece met a new thing called democracy, and the poets invented the play—meditations on man and the gods, complete with dance and song, and what we’d call a civic liturgy, to celebrate all that they revered as holy.
17 The Play’s the Thi Conditions were right again when my mother was a little girl, when quite a few Catholics directed movies that were brilliant works of art. How did that happen? Men like John Ford and Frank Capra didn’t graduate from film school. There wasn’t any such. They had their hard education in human joy and suffering. They and their comrades knew what it was like to go down a coal mine, or sweat ten pounds a day in a foundry, or haul freight on the docks. They also knew what it was like to fall to their knees in worship. Even if they strayed from the Faith, they felt in their bones that only a holy day can ever really be a holiday. Back in my mother’s time, there was a tiny theater on Main Street, called the Grand, a few blocks from the church, Saint Thomas Aquinas. I like to think that Thomas would have gone to a movie once in a while, especially if, as in You Can’t Take It with You, we see love and merry folly defeat avarice and self-regard, or, as in Sergeant York, we see a humble and peace-loving farm boy become a hero in wartime, putting his life on the line for his fellows in the field. But did Thomas ever see a play? Sure he did. A new holiday for an ancient truth In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church re-affirmed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Body, Blood, soul, and divinity. It was a cause for great rejoicing, and to mark
18 How the Church Has Changed the World the event, Pope Honorius declared a new holiday: Corpus Christi. The feast was celebrated on the Thursday before Trinity Sunday. That was a deft theological move that Pope Honorius made. We were meant to think of the three great Thursdays in the history of salvation: the Thursday of the Lord’s Supper, the Thursday of the Lord’s Ascension, and now the Thursday of the Lord’s presence among us in the sacrament of the altar, until the end of time. The feast was held for three days, too—echoing the three days commemorating Christ’s Passion and Death, before the triumph of Easter. But these three concluded with the Sunday that celebrated the most profound mystery of God, that he is both One and a Communion of three Persons. Overnight the holiday became immensely popular. It didn’t have the sweet merriment of Christmas, or the solemn joy of Easter. It had the boldness and breadth of summer days filled with light. So, some priest, somewhere—call him Francisco Capra—got an idea. Why not celebrate the holiday by putting on stage the whole of the cosmos, the whole of the history of salvation? Not just one play, but a whole series of plays, rejoicing at the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and drawing near to the Blessed Trinity? With the swiftness of a wildfire and the rush of a mighty stream, drama swept across Europe, and
19 The Play’s the Thi for once the slang held true, that everybody got in on the act. It wasn’t professional. Each of a town’s guilds would commit to the play nearest their hearts; so that the carpenters might stage the one about their hero, Noah the ark-builder. The plays would be performed on wheeled platforms, what we’d call floats, moving from station to station through the town, from chapel to chapel, over the three days. Imagine it! Fifteen or twenty or thirty plays, and who are the actors but your neighbors? Who built that “special effect” spring-action Gate of Hell that Christ bursts open with a finger-touch? You did. Who prepared the bread and meat and sweets for the crowds? You did. Who stood a-tiptoe in the audience, mouthing the words you knew your boy had to say, and laughing inside when he got them right? Who could sit at a fireside forty years later and recall with your friends the words of Jesus to Pilate, or how the big-bellied miller was “struck” in the forehead by the stone that David slung? You could do that, you and your neighbors, from Prague to Lisbon, from York to Rome, for almost four hundred years. What happened then It was a rollicking, bumptious theater, smelling less of the schools than of the grocer’s. Look at the plays from Wakefield. A sheep-stealer named Mak tries to “hide” his theft in a manger, pretending that
20 How the Church Has Changed the World his wife has given birth to a boy child in the night; while the true Lamb is born that same night nearby, as the good shepherds will see. Noah’s got his ship all stocked, but he still can’t budge the most reluctant creature to get into it while the rains are coming—Mrs. Noah. Your friends aren’t fooled by any fussy limitations of time or space, so that a boy, cheering the defeat of Pharaoh and his charioteers, gives praise to “the Lord Emmanuel,” as is right and just. Many of these plays, from here, there, and everywhere, still survive, and we can see, behind the plain language and the popular stage action, a way of thinking about the world that informs the greatest Christian artists. We don’t see time as a line from one point to another. All of salvation is reflected in each moment; the shadow of the cross falls upon the stable at Bethlehem; in the very curse upon Eve is the blessing that she will be the Mother of One who will crush the serpent’s head. Saint Thomas must have seen them when he was little, and his Grand Theater was the vault of the summer sky. But the greater drama to which he gave his heart, and for which he composed his own beautiful hymns, was the drama that the holiday commemorated. That drama was held every day, before every tabernacle in the world. We know its climax: for this is my Body.
21 The Play’s the Thi And when plays from classical Greece made their way west in the Renaissance, and when a new world was discovered hiding behind the western sea, poets didn’t have to invent the drama all over again. They already had it, vibrant, popular, and deeply theological. The man of muscles was ready for action. So the Church revived the drama, and gave the world the greatest dramatist who ever lived, a man from a Catholic family, who saw those rough and tumble plays when he was a boy, and learned from them, even as his poetry soared beyond what heights the villagers could attain. That boy’s name was William Shakespeare. ••
22 How the Church Has Changed the World Raising a Nation from the Dead When Jesus came down from the mountain of the Transfiguration, he met a crowd with the rest of his disciples, surrounding a man whose son was possessed. The disciples had tried to cast out the spirit, but failed. And Jesus, disappointed by their weak faith, turned to the man and said, “If you can believe, all things are possible.” “Lord, I do believe,” said the poor man, overcome by love and sorrow. “Please, helpmy unbelief.” Then Jesus rebuked the foul spirit, and when it departed it left the boy senseless upon the ground, as if dead. But Jesus raised the boy by the hand and led him home. There the disciples took Jesus aside and asked why they could not cast the spirit out. “This kind,” said Jesus, “comes out only by prayer and fasting.” Life in the ruins Father John treasured these words. They had been his anchor of hope. Not that there wasmuch visible turmoil in the village to which he had been sent. It was not, there, as it had been in Paris some years before, when the people rose up in revolt against their rulers, and then against the very leaders of
23 Raising a Nation from the Dead their revolt, and runnels of blood ran fresh from the Place de la Concorde, as the national barber, the guillotine, did its swift and efficient work. For a while it seemed as though the very seasons had been sent to the scaffold, and men no longer could reckon time by the great works of God, but by foolish and ugly names invented by the new deities, names like the month of Thermidor. And in their madness they had removed the statue of the Blessed Mother from her cathedral and replaced her with a harlot to whom, without irony, they gave the name of Reason, and honored her as a goddess. No, it was not like that here. In some ways it was worse. It was not the whirlwind. It was the wreckage after the whirlwind. The sun shone and the rain fell and the land yielded its fruit, and men and oxen worked the fields, and children ran about and got into trouble, but it was as if the village had been thrown to the ground by a deaf and dumb spirit. The church on Sunday was empty but for a few old widows in their black country lace. The miller cheated his customers, young men kept knives under their shirts, several men had taken women to their beds without bothering about marriage, every morning saw someone in a drunken sleep in a ditch; and far from the joy of the Faith, there was not even human mirth, but the hard cynical laughter of people who have given up on life. “Let us eat,
24 How the Church Has Changed the World drink, and be merry,” they said, but their eyes were dull and their lips hard. To this place, then, Father John had been sent. It seemed that the whole of France had heaved itself into apostasy, and what could one frail priest do about it? “If you can believe,” said Jesus to that desperate father, “all things are possible.” A holy simplicity Perhaps a more learned man would have been desperate. What could one simple man do against the witty slashes of Voltaire, who had cried out against the very Church to which he owed his humane education, Ecrasez l’infâme! Tear down the unspeakable thing! What could he do against the still deadlier poison of Rousseau, that urbane fellow who, having abandoned his own children, dared to write about the natural goodness of man, seeming to praise the teachings of Jesus while dismissing him to oblivion? What could he do? Everywhere he turned, he found mockery. If he went to the city, some sour old revolutionary would spit upon his soutane, or some young epicure would do it, not out of spite, but from sheer boredom and irreligion. In the seminary it was little better. Father John had struggled for years over his lessons. He stammered. He knew what he thought, but his thoughts had the greatness and simplicity of a mountain; and it was hard
25 Raising a Nation from the Dead to put a mountain into French words, let alone Latin. His fellow students and his teachers thought he was stupid. “And I am stupid,” he said to himself. “I must keep that always in mind. On my own I can think nothing true, say nothing that anyone will understand, and do nothing that will last.” But if John was often at a loss for words, it was for a reason which the other seminarians did not suspect. He was granted visions. They came to him after many miles of walking in the hills, and the earth seemed no longer earth but the paradise of God, and every moment was like a thousand years of his providing. At those times the greatest mind must gaze in stupor, in wonder. It was as when the brilliant Thomas said to his brother Reginald that he would write no more, because the grandeur of what he had witnessed made all that he had written seem as straw. John could hardly fight his way through a few pages of Thomas. Those were almost the only words of his that John really understood. But he understood them well. To this village of Ars, then, he was sent, to be the Curé of Nowhere. He doubted he could win anyone over with rational argument, not because reason was his enemy, but because, when the people had lost their faith, they lost their reason too. They were like drunken men who argue for the sake of arguing. They had given over the quest for truth.
26 How the Church Has Changed the World “This kind,” said Jesus, “comes out only by prayer and fasting.” Laboring in love So that is exactly what Father John did. He retired to his small room. He prayed, he fasted. In doing so he immersed himself in the sufferings of the people of Ars. To pray for them, to fast for them, to beseech God to turn his privations to their blessing, was the most powerful form his charity assumed; and it flowed forth in many more visible acts of charity. He ate little, some days only a bit of bread, and yet that little sustained his wiry form, and he would go miles on foot to visit a sick old woman in the countryside, then back to the village for vespers, without rest; and eventually people noticed it. It didn’t happen right away. Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. That seed is hard to see in space; it is also hard to see in time. Those first years at Ars, Father John fasted and prayed, he served his people in simple and unswerving duty. And, one person here and one person there, the church began to look more like a house of worshipers instead of a cavern; and they sat and heard him preach. How do you put a mountain into words? Father John still did not know how. He was not eloquent, yet the words came. The deaf and dumb spirit began to retreat.
27 Raising a Nation from the Dead The people listened For hours they listened. They heard the great elemental truths of the Christian faith, that God is holy, and man a sinner, and Christ came to suffer and to die for us, worthless as we are, because we are dearer to him than is all the rest of creation. Father John’s devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was extraordinary. Helvetius and Diderot and all the others who mocked were dead and buried, but the Eucharist was still the one truly living thing in the world, because the Lord of life made himself present in it—God with us till the end of time. And when Father John Vianney raised the Host at the consecration, it seemed to the people—who now crowded the church so that there was hardly a spot left to kneel—that there never had been any moment but this, here. Miracles came too, though John, overcome by the greater wonder, seemed never to be surprised by the lesser. Why should God not work healings to stun a philosophe into stony silence? Why should the Bread of heaven not provide a miraculous bounty in the granary during a famine? Why should God who searches our inmost hearts not whisper something of them to a poor confessor? And God did that; and a mighty river of visitors came to Ars, curious, despondent, zealous, guilty. And Father John Vianney heard their sins day and
28 How the Church Has Changed the World night, stopping to say Mass and the daily office, sometimes with hardly a break for food or sleep. He raised Catholic France from the dead. Saint John Vianney is the patron of parish priests. He might well be the patron of all the faithful who dwell in a land of madness. I imagine him present at the base of the mountain of the Transfiguration, and a child called France is bound by a spirit that ties the tongue and stops up the ear, that keeps her from hearing the truth and speaking it. “Why could I not cast out the spirit?” he asks. We might ask the Lord the same question now. “This kind,” says Jesus, “only comes out by prayer and fasting.” ••
29 X Man, Risen from the Dead X Man, Risen from the Dead Dionysius passed through the open door of his ancestral home, a modest structure of stone and wood situated beside a small stream in the village of Colonus. Old olive trees arched their boughs overhead, almost past bearing any fruit. Grapevines planted by Dionysius’ grandfather’s grandfather had matted two whole walls of the house with dark green. In the garden stood a small statue of Apollo, the god who shoots from afar, the god of healing, and so also the god who in Homer’s Iliad sent a deadly plague among the Greeks for Agamemnon’s brutish treatment of his priest. Dionysius knew many passages of that poem by heart, as any learned Greek would, though he and they hardly believed a word of them anymore. Everywhere Dionysius turned, he saw the vestiges of a world that had been, and was no more. He looked up and saw, a few miles away, the jutting outcrop of the citadel of Athens, the Areopagus— the Hill of Ares, god of war. Dionysius shook his head. The god of war indeed. The god of war had long ago abandoned Athens, and now she was nothing but an appendage of the great empire of those disciplined, shrewd, and efficient louts, the
30 How the Church Has Changed the World Romans. Long ago, the free men of Athens had transacted their state affairs on that hill. That was where Pericles had delivered his funeral oration for the first casualties of the great war against Sparta and Thebes. But the plague arrived then, too, and soon Pericles was lost. Then the war was lost, then freedom was lost, and now it seemed that even being a Greek was lost. And what did people climb the Hill of Ares to do now? They went there for the same sad reason why Dionysius, a judge of the court that met on that hill, had gone there today. They went there to pretend that they still had life in them. They went as intellectual shoppers at a bazaar, where all the idea-hucksters of the world stopped to sell their wares, magi from Persia, drug-toking mystics from India, would-be philosophers who claimed, though they were not certain about it, that we could not be certain about anything. And then the men would take sides, with noise and a show of passion but no real conviction. And then some would get drunk. And then they would go home, as Dionysius did. A new thing in the world He sat down upon his couch, without saying a word. His wife, Calonice, came over to him, bringing him a small dish of dates and honey. “My dear, you look as if the city had been destroyed!”
31 X Man, Risen from the Dead “Yes,” he said, absently. “I think I have heard of the only really new thing in the world.” Then Dionysius recounted to her what had happened. It was a day like all others. Then a smallish ugly Jew with a hoarse voice, having waited his turn, ascended the portico to speak. A knot of Epicurean philosophers gathered at one side, they who believe that the world is a poor wreck of a place. They retreat from public service, and indeed from anything that might disrupt their days. Their great hope is not for joy, but for the absence of pain; a short life of philosophical chatter by the riverside, with the spring flowers in bloom, and some bread and cheese and oil and fruit. Their bodies may be young, but their spirits are old, and they have nowhere to go. Another knot of philosophers gathered at the other side, the Stoics. They thrust themselves into public service, not because it brings them joy, but because it is their duty. They too hold the world in scorn. “Your son has died,” someone might say to the staunch Stoic. “And when did I ever say he was immortal?” the Stoic was to reply. They too were old, and had nowhere to go. Then the Jew began to speak. Saint Paul upon the Hill of Ares “Men of Athens,” he said, with a trace of irony, “I see you are religious people indeed! While I was
32 How the Church Has Changed the World walking about your city and looking at your objects of worship, I found one for every god imaginable. I even found an altar with this inscription: to the unknown god. So it seems that you do not know whom you worship—but I will reveal him to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth. He does not dwell in man-made temples, nor does he need our service. Rather, he himself gives to all men their very life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations spread abroad over the earth—even yours. He it was who brought them high and low, who made them great and small again.” At that some of the Athenians glared; others looked to the ground. “Why has he done so, you ask? So that they would seek him and reach out for him and find him! But he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being. One of your own lovers of wisdom has said so! And we are his children—so says one of your own poets. “Men of Athens, it is time to give up your ignorance. Since we are the children of God, we should not think that he is like gold or silver or stone, which we have fashioned by our hands. It is time to turn toward the truth, and life! For God once overlooked that ignorance, but now he commands all men to repent. He has set a day when
33 X Man, Risen from the Dead he will judge the world with justice, by the Man he has appointed—the Man whom he has raised from the dead.” “Raised from the dead!” cried a man from the audience, a follower of Plato. “You mean that his immortal spirit came to dwell in another form, perhaps in one of the heavenly bodies?” “I mean no such thing,” said the Jew. “I mean raised from the dead, in the flesh.” Laughter and mockery. For people who have grown old do not really wish to be made new. “But I followed him,” said Dionysius. “Light of my eyes,” he said, taking his wife’s hand in his, “I have invited him to our house. He is coming tonight.” The old world is always passing away Dionysius and his household welcomed Paul into their hearts. They welcomed Christ into their hearts. And this is a new thing in the world; the only really new thing the world has ever seen, and ever will see. For the world of man is sometimes a pathetic ruin, and sometimes a glorious ruin, but always old, and passing into death and oblivion. Athens had fallen into the shadows. Babylon was but a name. The Roman Empire, so grand, was already riddled with termites; it was already like a great hulking engine, without a soul, and rotting within. Every
34 How the Church Has Changed the World single nation that has ever existed and that ever shall exist must pass away. Man, on his own, has devised only two ways of confronting the age and death about him. One way is to pretend not to care, to cultivate the “virtue” of apathy, and to derive what pleasure one can from the hours remaining. The other way is to trust in a guiding providence, of vast power, but also distant from the human heart; to do one’s duty, and resign oneself to whatever fate may bring. In neither of these ways is there any joy, or anything new. Let Easter not grow “old” to us! Let us never lose the shock of that first morning of the new world, greater than the first morning when God saw the light and said that it was good! Nothing like Easter has ever occurred in the history of the world, or ever will—because it comes from outside of the world like an invader, to remake the world and man in it, like leaven in the lump, like a contagion of health, like youth spread by word of mouth and the laying on of hands. The world without Easter is doddering. Nothing is solid; all is like a marble and gold façade over a yawning emptiness. With Easter, and, God help us, not some “spirit of Easter,” not some foolish weakling revival of springtime, but the frighteningly real Resurrection of the flesh of Christ, the whole world is made new again. In Christ, even the Greece of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, Bishop
35 X Man, Risen from the Dead of Athens, lives. Even our own nations now can come to life again. Easter is not one day among the rest. It is the only day. “Behold,” said the One seated upon the throne, “I make all things new.” ••
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