The Church and Human Progress | Mgr. Ronald A. Knox | From "In Soft Garments: Classic Catholic Apologetics" | Ignatius Insight
The Church and Human Progress | Monsignor Ronald A. Knox
| From In Soft Garments: Classic Catholic Apologetics | Ignatius Insight
http://ignatiusinsight.com/features2010/rknox_churchprogress_sept2010.asp
The two parables of the Mustard Seed and the Leaven are a pair, and are
obviously meant to be a pair. Our Lord seems to have been fond of this method;
partly, I suppose, on the principle that if you give two illustrations of a
moral which you want to rub in, you can make sure of people seeing the real
point, instead of going off on side issues; any speaker will tell you that. Partly,
perhaps, because his audiences were mixed, and an illustration which would
appeal to one set of them would not appeal to others. There were men there and
women; and so you find him asking, "What man is there among you that hath a hundred sheep, and if he lose one of
them ... ", and then, "Or what woman is there having ten groats, if
she lose one of them ... "—he will suit his lesson to both classes.
And so here; the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man
took and planted in his field; or again it
is like the leaven which a Woman took and hid in three measures of meal. It is
part of our Lord's great courtesy, that he will make allowances for everyone.
But at the same time you will find this about the parables which our Lord gives
us in pairs: that the moral is not always quite the same in either case; the
second will give it a slightly different twist from the first. And so it is
here. By the kingdom of heaven our Lord customarily means, as I hope we all
know, not the future life which we shall enjoy in heaven, but his Church on
earth, which is the appointed means of conducting us to it. If there was
nothing else to assure us of that, these two parables would be sufficient proof
of it. Our Lord did not occupy his whole time, while he preached on earth, in
expounding a philosophy of unworldliness, of sincerity, of forbearance, of
loving our enemies and so on. He came to found a Church; and he foresaw how
that Church would develop through the centuries and has prophesied for us,
though it be only in rough outline, its development. And in these two parables,
evidently, he is telling us how his Church is destined to grow. How small it
looked, when he stood there and preached to groups of peasants standing by the
lake of Galilee; or when, after his Ascension, a hundred and twenty souls
waited in the upper room for the coming of the Holy Spirit—just so the
mustard seed is small; just so the bit of leaven is insignificant in size
compared with the three measures of meal which are to be leavened by it. The
influence of the Church grew secretly; people who lived in those early
centuries didn't know what was happening, until they suddenly found that
communities of Christians had sprung up in every corner of the empire; so the
growth of a tree, or the working of leaven, is something hidden from us; we
cannot stand by and watch it happening. The extension of his Church was an
irresistible force; just so, given proper conditions of soil, the seed must
develop; just so the leaven inevitably corrupts the unleavened meal with which
it comes in contact. In all that, you see, the two parables are alike.
But there are other aspects, and very important aspects in which they differ.
And in this above all, that the growth of the mustard seed shows you the
Christian Church as a body which swells in size, whereas the spread of the
leaven shows you the Christian Gospel as an influence which radiates force and
communicates it to its neighbourhood. The tree takes something from its surroundings; takes nourishment from the earth and the moisture
and the sunlight, and so grows bigger: and the Church takes something from her
surroundings, takes the souls of men from the world and incorporates them into
herself. The leaven gives
something to its surroundings,
infects them with its own life; so the Christian Gospel gives something to its
surroundings; communicates to mankind its own spirit of discipline and its own
philosophy of life. Both those processes, then, we should expect to see at work
when we watch the development of the Christian Church in history.
And so far as the first part of the parable is concerned, the lesson of the
mustard tree, there is no great difficulty in recognizing the description. Of
course, it is quite true that the growth of the Church in mere numbers is not a
steady, uniform process; it is chequered, again and again, by schisms and
heresies from within, by persecutions from without, by world developments
generally. But, in a sense, that makes it all the more remarkable; mere
uninterrupted growth would not be so strong a proof of life beating within as
the power to recover from a series of shocks and mutilations. This miracle of
the Church's continual reviviscence is recognized even by outside, even by
unfriendly critics. You probably know Macaulay's almost despairing passage in
the essay on von Ranke, when he is writing about the state of Europe after the
French Revolution: "The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was
built by antediluvian kings, and alone of all the works of men bore the weight
of the flood. Such as this was the fate of the Papacy. It had been buried under
the great inundation; but its deep foundations had remained unshaken, and when
the waters abated, it appeared alone amidst the ruins of a world which had
passed away." That was written a hundred years ago; but the testimony is
true of our own period. You have only to read history to realize that the
mustard seed has grown.
But the leaven—has the leaven worked? There you will not find the critics
of our religion forced into such attitudes of unwilling admission. I think the
criticism which we find it most uncomfortable to meet is when they tell us that
the Catholic Church is all right when you consider it a priori, on paper, as a system, but when you look at its
actual record in history you do not find its effects on human life the kind of
effects which you would expect a supernatural institution to have. The world,
to be sure, has advanced a great deal since the times of our Lord. Slavery has
given place to freedom, savagery to kindness, selfishness to philanthropy; men
are no longer (in the more favoured countries) executed for slight offences, or
tortured when they refuse to give evidence, or killed in duels; some attempt is
made, at any rate, to give working men decent wages, and rescue them and their
families from destitution; and in a thousand other ways it is possible to show
that the world has become a more comfortable place to live in. But how much, we
are asked, has all this to do with Christianity, or at any rate with the Catholic
Church? Is it not true that the improvements which have been made in the
condition of human living have been made, for the most part, without any effort
of sympathy on the part of Catholics, and sometimes in the teeth of theIr
opposition? And if that is so, how can we claim that the Catholic Church, as we
find the Catholic Church in history, is the Church which our Lord referred to
in his parables? How strange that the leaven which has leavened the world has
not, noticeably at any rate, proceeded from her!
The answer to that kind of objection is not an easy one, and I think it is
rather a humiliating one. Perhaps the simplest way to put it is this. During
the period between the Ascension and the Reformation, that charge IS not true.
During the period between the Reformation and the French Revolution that charge
is true, but it was not our fault; in great measure at least it was not our
fault. In our own day, the situation has grown so desperately complicated that
It defies analysis. What seems to emerge from it is that under modern
conditions we Catholics ought, more than ever, to be taking the lead in
enlightening the conscience of the world; that, largely, we are not doing it,
and it is our fault that we are not doing it; and moreover, that in proportion
as we do succeed in our efforts, we shall not be given any credit for it; we
shall be cried down as much as ever by the prophets of materialistic
humanitarianism for not going about it in a different and more wholehearted
way.
It is quite true that the Catholic Church has never made social reform the
first plank in her programme; you might say that where she leavens society she
always does so in a fit of absence of mind. Her message has always been
addressed to the individual soul, rather than to the political community. St
Paul could tell masters to be kind to their slaves, without saying they must
set them free; and it was only gradually that slavery itself or even the cruel
sports of the amphitheatre were abolished. It was only gradually that serfdom
disappeared in the Middle Ages. But these changes did happen, and in the
meantime the world had learned more respect for women, more sympathy for the
poor; education became more general, laws became less harsh in their
enforcement, as the spirit of the Christian religion asserted itself. You
cannot pick out the names of the great reformers, but that was because the
whole process was so gradual and almost unconscious; gradual, yes, and
unnoticed, but that is the way of the leaven when it goes to work.
Since the Reformation, or perhaps you ought to say since the great schism which
divided the world shortly before the Reformation, it has been true on the whole
that the Church was no longer responsible for civilizing the world; but then,
it was not altogether her fault. The Protestants, in the first days of the
Reformation, were not a yard ahead of her; and as late as the middle of the
eighteenth century you could find a man like Whitefield, the great Methodist
preacher, owning slaves. But the point is that the Church was on the defensive,
almost everywhere; she had to consolidate her own position against rival
claimants; and she exhausted much of her strength and of her sanctity in
propaganda or in controversy. Nor were the Popes able, in those days of stress
and contention, to impose their will on Catholic nations. The worst evils of
slavery flourished, in spite of energetic protests; duelling was maintained by
the social fashion of an age, in spite of stringent condemnations of it. Again,
it is to be remembered that the most prominent Catholic nation during most of
that period was France; and France was sitting very loose to its ecclesiastical
obedience; the Pope's word did not run among the French clergy as it runs
nowadays. Catholics were too much concerned over the future of the mustard seed
to notice much what was happening to the leaven.
With the French Revolution, a new phase sets in. In England and in the United
States you could hardly expect Catholics to take any prominent share in the
business of reform, because their numbers were infinitesimal. In the various
European countries where the Church was still strong, she found herself
everywhere attacked by the same people who were using the language of
humanitarianism and of reform. Men were slow to distinguish her, and perhaps it
must be admitted that she was slow to distinguish herself, from those parties
of mere reaction which the new Liberalism assailed. And that difficulty
persists right down to our own day. Only, of course, in our day the issues are
not so direct as they seemed in the last century. The cry for reform has given
place to a cry for revolution; the language of hate has replaced, among the
humanitarians, the language of love. And all over Europe new nationalisms have
grown up, sometimes friendly to the Church, sometimes at issue with her, but
always in their inspiration something foreign to her thought. Meanwhile, both
in our own country and still more across the Atlantic, Catholic numbers have
grown, especially among the more educated classes, and the influences of the
other Christianities has waned, so that men look to the Church, more than they
did formerly, to tell them what the Christian religion really preaches. That
means that we have a greater responsibility than our parents and our grandparents
had for diffusing, in a world that has begun to take notice of us, the leaven
of Christian charity.
Only, don't think that we are going to get any credit for it. Don't imagine I
am suggesting that we Catholics ought to take a greater share than we do in the
fight for human happiness because it will be good propaganda for our religion
if we do. For the whole of your lifetimes, probably, everything that we
Catholics do or propose to do in that line will be viewed with suspicion, will
be misrepresented; we shall be told that we are only half-hearted reformers,
trying to take the wind out of other people's sails. That is because we cannot
afford to neglect principles, cannot afford to leave out one half of the truth.
We have got to love peace, without despising and belittling man's instinct of
patriotism; we have got to redress injustice without violating essential human
liberties; we have got to work for the relief of human misery without defying
the sanctities of the Divine Law. So we shall always be at a disadvantage
compared with other reformers who can only see one set of principles at a time,
and we shall get no thanks for our interference.
Why is it, then, that we have got to take our part, more than we did, in trying
to make this temporary world of ours a better place to live in? Because the
Gospel of Christ is essentially a leaven, a dynamic force in human affairs ,
and we shall be false to our whole vocation if we treat the imperfections of
human society as if they were something that didn't matter. We shall be tempted
to do so; we are tempted to do so. The world around us is so full of social
experiments and of party war-cries, and the people who are keen on these things
are generally such boring people to meet, that we are tempted to throw ourselves
back on our isolation and say, "Well, there's no room in the world for any
more reformers just now; as long as I live a decent Catholic life in private, I
can afford to spend my time dancing and going to the pictures and getting all
the fun out of life that I can." To do that is to starve the instincts of
your age and period, a dangerous thing to do. Don't, for heaven's sake, imagine
that I am recommending you all to spend your time up here going to meetings,
signing petitions and carrying them round for other people to sign, and
contributing to the kind of book or magazine which is understood to be the
finest flower of recent undergraduate thought. It is quite extraordinary what a
lot of good is not done by that sort of thing. No, what I am suggesting is
that, since you are here to be educated, you should pay some
attention—whatever attention your ordinary work and engagements
permit—to getting some grasp of the problems which are exercising the
modern world, and not merely studying these in the light of your religion, so
that you may be able to give a good account of what the Church teaches, and
why, and why on certain subjects she has no special teaching to offer, although
everybody else in the world has a ready-made solution of his own. I am suggesting
that you should prepare yourselves here for taking a decent amount of interest
in public affairs later on, and making your own contribution to the needs of
your time, according to your opportunities.
One word needs to be added, not less important. Our Lord says that the mustard
tree is to grow out of all recognition; he doesn't say that it is to grow
indefinitely, does not mean us to understand that there will ever be a time at
which the whole of mankind will be even nominally Christian. His prophecy that
his Gospel will be preached in the whole world is sufficiently fulfilled if all
mankind has a real chance of hearing it. Similarly, when he says that the
leaven hidden in the meal spread till the whole was leavened, I don't think we
are necessarily to understand this as meaning that there will be a time at
which the principles of Christian charity towards one's neighbour will dominate
the counsels of humanity. We are to understand that the Christian message will
make itself felt throughout the world which harbours it, not necessarily that
it will triumph. Don't be disappointed, therefore, if it appears—it may
perfectly well come to appear so in your lifetime—as if things were going
backwards instead of forwards, as if the world were relapsing into barbarism
instead of following along the path marked out for it by what we call
civilization. Don't be disappointed, above all, if during your lifetime the
Church, despite her best efforts, still seems to be fighting a rearguard
action, and losing, if anything, in the modern struggle for existence. As I
said before, the social influence of the Church is in reality a by-product of
her activity; it is not her life.
Her business, ultimately, is with the individual soul, and the promises by
which she lives are not limited within these narrow horizons. The leaven is
there, and it does not lose its virtue with the centuries. But whether in our
particular age the time is ripe for its manifestation, that we cannot know.
God's view is longer than ours, and for all we can tell we may be living in the
early Church still; our modern troubles may be only the growing-pains of
Christianity. It will be our fault if we lose heart.
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Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was the son
of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester and it appeared that he, being both
spiritually perceptive and intellectually gifted, would also have a successful
life as an Anglican prelate. But while in school in the early 1900s Knox
began a long struggle between his love for the Church of England and his
growing attraction to the Catholic Church. He converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-nine, became a priest, and
wrote numerous books on spiritual and literary topics, including
The Belief of Catholics, Captive Flames:
On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes, The Hidden
Stream: The Mysteries of the Christian Faith, Pastoral
and Occasional Sermons, and many more. Visit Knox's IgnatiusInsight.com author page for more information about his life
and work.
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