SPIRITUAL MEDITATION 2 - THURSDAY IN EMBER WEEK

This is the second of Dr Cullinan's papers. Please see the notes at the top of the previous post.

THE WORD 

We’ve left the cloakroom now. Smartened up, perhaps, and calmed down. Ready for the next room of our grand dinner. The anteroom. Where we meet our host and some of the other guests. 

The Liturgy of the Word. That’s what it’s called in the New Rite. When we listen to the scriptures. To readings from the scriptures. And chants from the psalms. 

Listening isn’t at all easy. I don’t mean casual listening but serious, attentive listening. The sort policemen, lawyers, and juries have to do. And counsellors. And members of parliament, sometimes. 

Have any of you sat on a jury? Or on a panel to decide someone’s future? I’ve never sat on a jury. And I wouldn’t want to. But once a year I have to sit on a panel listening to presentations by students for their final degree exam. Our validators from Paris actually call it a jury. Listening for 12 minutes and then 15 minutes for questions. Twice over for each student. With maybe ten students over two days. 

It’s very tiring work. A lot of attentive listening, when you don’t want to interrupt or show that you haven’t heard. 

Of course most of the time in ordinary life we don’t listen. If we’re careful we hear what is actually said rather than what we imagine was said – you’d be surprised what a difference there often is between what you say and what a person hears. But most of what we hear just floats past us. 

I’m sure it’s a very good thing that the Collect of the Mass can now usually be heard in English. And, in for the last few years, in quite an accurate translation. But how many of us would be able to repeat it five minutes afterwards if we were asked to? 

We might do better with the Gospel. 

But what of the Epistle? How many marks for recall would we get there? Not too many, I fear. 
And what of the Old Testament? In the Old Rite it’s very rarely heard on Sundays. It’s read at Matins instead. But it’s many centuries since people went to Matins outside monasteries. And even in the New Rite, where it’s read every Sunday, how much is listened to, how much is understood? 

When you enter the anteroom of a huge dinner, you greet your host, perhaps. Usually very briefly. Then you talk to the other guests. If your host is really someone, perhaps the other guests spend a lot of time talking about him. Perhaps they know him much better than you do. So perhaps it’s worth listening. 

In the Liturgy of the Word we are, in a sense, in the anteroom. Before we enter the banqueting chamber we listen to our host and what other people say about him. The authors of the sacred texts. Evangelists, apostles, patriarchs, and unknown chroniclers, poets, and sages. 

When designing an examination system, or even an academic course, one of the points to be born in mind is what do we expect the student to take away with him. After he leaves. 

A lot of education forgets this. As far as I can see, most of what was taught in the grand schools of England for centuries was pretty useless. Hours were spent on Latin and Greek, but most of the pupils don’t seem to have learned enough to derive any pleasure or benefit from in later life. Some did, of course. Wellington could read Latin and understand accounts. Harold Macmillan was once asked what good ancient philosophy had been to him. His reply was, ‘It taught us to tell when a chap was talking rot.’ But then he was Eton and Balliol, and so, of course, doubly exceptional. 

There is a place in Rome called the Biblicum, where you can do a Licence in Sacred Scripture. They make you learn Greek, Hebrew, and one other ancient language. Plus Italian and two other modern languages. They pound the Greek and Hebrew into you in the first year, using fairly old-fashioned methods, and they throw you out if you don’t learn. A sort of academic boot camp. 

When I was studying in Rome I went to some lectures at the Biblicum. Given in English by a visiting American professor I needed to discuss something with. 

I felt too ashamed to take along an English bible. ‘They’ll all be using Greek’, I thought. So I brought a Greek-Latin version. Most of the students were American. And most of them were using English bibles. Even though they’d had the Greek pounded into them. What a failure of an educational system, I thought. All that pain inflicted for nothing. 

I hope there isn’t too much pain at the moment. I’m hoping my talks may help you a little on this retreat. But I’m at least as much concerned with how I can help you after you go away tomorrow. 

I was asked to help you with the kind of lives you lead as religious living actively in the secular world. I’ll say more about that tomorrow, but I want to mention one thing now. Prayer. Regular, daily prayer. Time alone with God. Meditative, contemplative prayer. 

And one of the best ways of doing that prayer is to use the scriptures. To learn to listen to God in the scriptures. 

So although I’ve begun to talk about the scriptures in the Liturgy, I also want to say something about using the scriptures in prayer. But first we have to learn something about how to understand and interpret the scriptures. So as to listen better at Mass, and to listen better at prayer. 

We’ve made rather a mess of Catholic education in this country. Perhaps the problem is that there is so very much to teach. The doctrine of the faith has slowly developed into a massive body of knowledge. Partly in reaction to false views. And it’s understandable that in the centuries following the Reformation, we concentrated on refuting some of the false views. And since some of those false views were based on particular interpretations of scripture, we got a bit defensive about scripture. 

It wasn’t always so. When St Dominic went preaching, he carried with him St Matthew’s gospel and the Epistles of St Paul. When St Thomas Aquinas was training as a theologian he would have been made to spend years studying scripture before ever being allowed to do any doctrine. Even a century ago Cardinal Gasparri’s Latin Catechismus Catholicus contains an Appendix on the history of salvation. 

I went to a Catholic Primary school. But I didn’t learn much scripture there. I learnt quite a bit of the Penny Catechism, and it stood me in very good stead for years afterwards. But I learned much more scripture at the local County Primary School when I was five and six. And from children’s bible stories sent to me by my aunt. 

But the doctrine of the faith is based on scripture. And our religion makes no sense if we think it began at Pentecost. In the first centuries of the Church, only the baptized were allowed in the banqueting room. The catechumens, the listeners only got as far as the anteroom. And their catechesis was based heavily on the Old Testament. 

So we have to begin to understand the scriptures with the Old Testament. The stories and the wisdom of our people – the people of God. Then we can go on to the Epistles and the Gospels. 

It’s actually not too difficult to start understanding the Old Testament. What you need is a timeline. A timeline of history to hang each book on. Medieval churches used stained glass. To teach the illiterate the stories of our people and the history of salvation. 

Adam and the Fall. Noah and the Flood. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Joseph sold into slavery in Egypt, then rising to become Prime Minister. The coming of his brothers to Egypt. Then the enslavement of their descendants. The coming of Moses and the Exodus into the desert. The coming into the promised land under Joshua. The period of the Judges. Then Samuel and King Saul. The story of David the great king and great sinner. Solomon in his glory and the building of the First Temple. The splitting of the kingdom into North and South. The prophets. The destruction of the North and then later the sack of Jerusalem and the Exile. The return and the rebuilding of the Temple. The Persian period and the writings of the sages. Then Alexander the Great and the Greek period. The persecution and the desecration of the Temple, provoking the Maccabean uprising and independence. The rededication of the Temple. Sadducees and Pharisees. The coming of the Romans. Herod. 

So the first thing we need is a good history. Then we can put each book into its place in the story. 

In fact there are some good histories with pretty pictures in the best children’s bibles. But they are usually Protestant and leave out the Greek period, which is a real pity. 

I’m talking about scripture. But there’s an elephant in the room that I’m trying to avoid. The historical critical elephant. I don’t think it would be honest not to confront that elephant. Actually he’s not as wild as you might think. At least for Catholics. And facing him allows us to say something about the scriptures that opens us out from a purely academic approach to something useful for preaching and prayer. 

The Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library of books. Each with its own history, its own style, and its own meaning. 

Biblical criticism isn’t new. People have always asked about what the texts are, what their context is, and what the words in the mean. St Augustine knew there were discrepancies in the gospels, for example on whether the Last Supper could have been a Passover meal. The Greek Fathers were quite prepared to argue that the ‘days’ in the story of creation weren’t literal periods of exactly 24 hours. The Fathers of the Council of Trent knew there were textual problems with the New Testament and thought it would be relatively easy to resolve them. 

What was new was asking the question of where a text came from. Who produced it and when? Was it produced from more than one existing text and where did those texts come from? Did some of it come from oral tradition and how reliable could that be? 

This approach did set the cat among the pigeons. At its best it revealed much more to us about what the texts meant. But at its worst it cut up the sacred scriptures into scraps of dead texts lying around on the floor. 

So much so that some of the critics rebelled and asked could we please appreciate the texts we have for what they are. They’re not all legal enactments, they’re poems and hymns and love songs. So we mustn’t interpret every word as if it’s in a legal document. There’s a lot of truth in this too: Genesis and Exodus are much more like lore than law, much more stories than statutes. But the theologians are right to get nervous when traditional scriptural teaching is relegated to the category of mere poetry. 

The real damage that this higher criticism did was not so much that it let loose some very strong tools on the texts, like paint strippers applied to an ancient fresco, but that many of the people who used these tools were children of the Enlightenment who had lost any belief in the supernatural. 

It’s one thing to argue that the infancy narratives in Matthew were put in to show how the Old Testament was fulfilled. It’s quite another to argue that the story of the star and the wise men can’t be true because things like that simply don’t happen. 

By now, the smell of paint stripper is probably making you feel a bit uncomfortable. ‘Why do we need all this modern rubbish’, you might be asking. 

This isn’t an academic course, so I won’t say much more about modern criticism. But I have to say something. Because we have to ask what a verse in the scriptures can mean. And modern criticism has to be part of finding that out. 

I promised that the elephant wouldn’t be as wild as you thought. The elephant of modern criticism. Not as wild as all that, at least for Catholics. 

In fact modern criticism hasn’t been nearly as much of a problem for us as for the Protestants. For two main reasons. One is that we have the Church. We know that the Church produced the scriptures. The scriptures didn’t produce the Church, even if they are normative within it. Whereas the Protestants appealed to scripture against the medieval Church, only to see the seemingly solid bastion of the Bible crumble into a mass of doubtful and contradictory voices. 

The second reason I’m talking about this is more important. Vital if we are to use the scriptures not just for theology but for preaching and prayer too. 

Have you seen hell? Or Gehenna, as I should call it? In the old days, one of the more effective retorts after a long gruesome sermon on fire and brimstone was to ask how the preacher could say so much about hell when he hadn’t been there. 

But I have been there. To Gehenna. If you go to Jerusalem you’ll see a nice garden. In a fairly built-up city. If you ask why it’s there, they’ll tell you the British made it during the Mandate. There’s your answer. A nice piece of park to relax in. Our Empire doing one of the things it did best.

But that’s not the whole answer. You might ask how the spare land came to be there, amidst all that building. Three thousand years of building. Well, you might be told, it wasn’t built on in biblical times. Actually it was the rubbish dump in Our Lord’s time. Gehenna. Where the rubbish was burned. Which is why Our Lord uses the word Gehenna for hell. There’s your answer. An interesting piece of biblical geography. 

But now suppose your young child does one of the most exasperating things young children often do and ask ‘Why?’ again. Why was the land used as a rubbish dump? Well, it was cursed, you see. Its older name was Tophet, and it was cursed because it was where children had been sacrificed before David captured Jerusalem. 

So hell is a garden. All explained away. But why do I still have this nagging sensation that this might not be the whole truth, at least in our ultimate futures? 

The second mistake made at the Reformation was the idea that each verse of scripture has only one meaning. One clear meaning. That’s why some modern translations don’t translate literally. The translators assume they understand the meaning and prefer to give it to you in clearer language than the text. 

But what does Gehenna mean? Like the garden in Jerusalem, a word or a phrase can have layer upon layer of meaning. 

Or look at the mess they’ve made of translating ‘Abraham et semini eius in saecula’. ‘To Abraham and his sons forever.’ Oh dear. That gets the feminists in a lather. In traditional English it used to be ‘To Abraham and his seed forever.’ So could we say ‘descendants’ or ‘children’? Surely that’s what it means, isn’t it? 

No. That’s not all of what it means. St Paul makes it clear that the seed of Abraham is Christ. Not just his descendants. So it means two things. Two important things. Not one. 

Traditionally there can be four different senses of a piece of scripture. The first is the literal sense. And this is the sense that scholars try to discover. And where modern methods of doing so can help. And it always has to come first. Because, as St Thomas Aquinas says, it is the literal sense that should be used for deriving doctrine. Because in case of doubt we have some academic controls for settling disputes. 

That’s why I’ve inflicted all this theory on you. Because the literal sense should come first. What did the text mean to those who wrote it? What did the Church understand it to mean? And that’s where we ought always to begin. In theology and in preaching. And if this means using commentaries and dictionaries and atlases to understand it, well they are the tools of the trade. Amplifiers for listening to what God is saying. 

But that’s not the whole story. Not when it comes to preaching. And certainly not when it comes to prayer. 

After the literal sense comes the spiritual sense. Or rather three spiritual senses. They are sometimes called the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. Because they are spiritual they are less certain and so less suitable for doctrine. But they come into their own when we are at prayer. 

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and two of their friends were known as The Inklings. They met in a pub in Oxford to talk about literature and to fix the University English syllabus. I suppose Lewis is still best known for the Narnia stories. They are an allegory. Aslan stands for Christ. The stone table stands for Calvary. The Witch for the power of sin. So the fantasy story is a cover for another Christian story. And yet it’s so well done that thousands enjoy the fantasy without even glimpsing what’s underneath it. 

I wonder what Tolkien thought about Narnia. He hated allegory. When The Lord of the Rings was first published, some of the more cynical and modernist critics thought it was an allegory of the Second World War, with the Ring as the Atom Bomb. This provoked a furious riposte from Tolkien which you can read in the Foreword to the later editions. 

I knew a famous Catholic biblical scholar who also hated allegory. He considered it to be an abomination – I actually heard him use that word. Probably because it distracts from the literal meaning.  

But it isn’t as simple as that. Because St Paul, in the Epistle to the Galatians, uses an allegory. Based on the two children of Abraham: one the heir and the other illegitimate. But casting the Jews as the illegitimate branch. 

In fact from before Our Lord’s time allegory was used to explain the scriptures. And it was used by most of the Fathers of the Church. The idea is that things in the Old Testament foreshadow better things to come. They are types: patterns or models, perhaps. So Moses is a type of Christ, leading the people out of slavery to the Promised Land. Isaac is a type of Christ bearing the wood for his sacrifice. The manna is a type of the Blessed Sacrament. The Tent of Meeting is a type of the Temple and both are types of the heavenly liturgy. And so on. 

All fine so long as the allegory doesn’t replace the literal meaning. 

That’s the first spiritual sense. 

Then there’s the moral sense. ‘These things were written for our instruction’, as St Paul says. So that we might act rightly. 

So the ups and downs in the history of Israel are repeated in the ups and downs of our own moral lives. We have our exoduses, our exiles, the destruction of our temples. And also our victories, our returns, our rededications. 

And the history of Israel also allows us to draw messages for the society in which we live. We have our national victories and also apostasies, our national complacencies and corruptions. 

The last sense is the anagogical where we look forward not back. So the Church, and the liturgy, are a type of the heavenly Jerusalem. 

The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith; The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny. 

I’m not going to say much more now. I’m aware that you’re supposed to do lectio divina every day. And so far I’ve said nothing about the gospels. Or even the epistles. I’ll come back to this in my last talk. But it’s time to stop now. 

A few years ago, in the journal of the Association for Latin Liturgy, there was a wonderful article entitled ‘The Elephantiasis of the Liturgy of the Word’. It bemoaned how in the New Rite the readings, homily, and bidding prayers can grow so extended that they loom over the rest of the Mass. St Josemaria warns priests against preaching for too long and then rushing through the shortest Eucharistic Prayer so as to finish Mass on time. And most of us priests have sometimes done this, and it is wrong. 
We’ve spent a long time in the anteroom. Listening to our host and what the authors of scripture are saying about Him. Preparing for the next room. The banqueting chamber. Where we meet him properly. 

© Michael Cullinan 2018