UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

VII. UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

A. ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF THE RELATION OF
UNIVERSAL CHURCHES TO CIVILIZATIONS

I. CHURCHES AS CANCERS
II. CHURCHES AS CHRYSALISES
III. CHURCHES AS A HIGHER SPECIES OF SOCIETY

(a) A REVISION OF OUR CLASSIFICATION OF SPECIES OF SOCIETY
(b) THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHURCHES’ PAST
(c) THE CONFLICT BETWEEN HEART AND HEAD
(d) THE PROMISE OF THE CHURCHES’ FUTURE
3. The Promise of Revealing a Spiritual Meaning in History
4. The Promise of Inspiring an Effective Ideal of Conduct
5. The Promise of Exorcizing the Perilousness of Mimesis


B. THE ROLE OF CIVILIZATIONS IN THE LIVES OF CHURCHES

I. CIVILIZATIONS AS OVERTURES
II. CIVILIZATIONS AS REGRESSIONS

C. THE CHALLENGE OF MILITANCY ON EARTH

VII

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

A. ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF THE RELATION OF
UNIVERSAL CHURCHES TO CIVILIZATIONS

I. CHURCHES AS CANCERS
II. CHURCHES AS CHRYSALISES
III. CHURCHES AS A HIGHER SPECIES OF SOCIETY

(a) A REVISION OF OUR CLASSIFICATION OF SPECIES OF SOCIETY
(b) THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHURCHES’ PAST
(c) THE CONFLICT BETWEEN HEART AND HEAD
(d) The Promise of the Churches Future

5. The Promise of Exorcizing the Perilousness of Mimesis

{VII.A.III.(d).5.p.524} ...when an inevitable failure has bred an inevitable disillusionment, the discredited leader is apt to resort to force in order to retain authority that is morally forfeit. In the Civitas Dei this peril is exorcized by a fresh transfer of mimesis—this time from limitedly and precariously creative human personalities who are the ephemeral leaders of mundane civilizations to a God who is the source of all human creativity and whose own divine creativity is infinite.

This mimesis of God can never expose human souls that devote themselves to it to those disappointments and disillusionments that are apt to attend the mimesis of even the most godlike human beings, and that produce, when they do arise, that moral alienation of a restive proletariat from a now merely dominant minority which is one of the symptoms of social decline and fall. The communion between the Soul and the One True God cannot thus degenerate into the bondage of a slave to a despot, for in each of the higher religions, in diverse measure, the vision of God as Power is transfigured by a vision of Him as Love; and presentation of this Loving God as a Dying God Incarnate is a theodicy which makes the imitation of Christ immune against the tragedy inherent in any mimesis that is directed towards unregenerate human personalities.

In the story of Christ's temptation in the wilderness at the beginning of His Ministry,² and of His Passion at the close of it,³ He is presented in the Gospels as refusing, at the price of the Cross, to exercise a spiritually sterile option of imposing His divine will by an act of power. Let the renegade Dionysus indulge an ungodlike lust for human glory by conquering all the Kingdoms of the World,⁴ and an unedifying animus against his pitifully unsuspecting human persecutor by dealing him, out of the blue, a blasting blow. A divinity who subjugates India and takes revenge on Pentheus⁵ demonstrates his power of taming men's bodies at the cost of alienating their feelings, while a God who suffers death on the Cross draws all men unto Him.⁶

'The story of the Temptations is, of course, a parable of His spiritual wrestlings....It represents the rejection, under three typical forms of all existing conceptions of the Messianic task which was to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. Should He use the power of which, as Messiah, He is endowed to satisfy the creature wants of Himself, and His human brethren, so fulfilling the hope of a "good time coming" which prophets had presented in the picture of the Messianic Banquet—(cf. e.g. Isaiah ix. 6,7)? Should he provide irresistible evidence of His divine mission, appearing in the Temple courts upbourne by angels, so that doubt would

² Matt. iv. 1-11. Mark i. 12-13; Luke iv. 1-13.
³ Matt. xxvi. 53; John xviii. 36; xix. 11.
⁴ Matt. iv. 8; Luke iv. 5.
⁵ See V. vi. 265-6
⁶ John xii. 32.

{p.525} be impossible—(cf. e.g. Daniel vii. 13, 14 and Enoch)? Every one of these conceptions contained truth. When men are obedient to the Kingdom of God and His justice, everyone will have what he needs for food and clothing (St. Matthew vi, 33). The Kingdom of God is the realm of the perfect justice where God's righteous will is done (St. Matthew vi, 10). The authority of Christ is absolute and can claim the support of the hosts of Heaven (St. Matthew xxviii, 18; xxvi, 53). Yet, if any or all of these are taken as fully representative of the Kingdom and its inauguration, they have one fatal defect. They all represent ways of securing the outward obedience of men apart from inward loyalty; they are ways of controlling conduct, but not ways of controlling hearts and wills...and the Kingdom of God, who is Love, cannot be established in that way.' ¹

In the imitation of Christ, this God who is Love draws the Soul towards Himself by evoking a love that is a response to His; and because, in this communion of loves, there is no alloy of coercion, a travail on the Soul which begins as an exercise of mimesis bears fruit in a reception of grace, through which the Soul is enabled to partake of the inward spiritual qualities whose outward visible manifestations it has taken as its rule of life. Instead of ending in frustration, disillusionment, and strife, 'imitation' (μίμησις) here flowers into 'assimilation' (όμοίσιως) of Man's nature to God's.² The 'light caught from a leaping flame', which was imparted to Plato's disciples 'by strenuously intellectual communion and intimate personal intercourse' with the master,³ now reappears as the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost;⁴ but, instead of being an esoteric initiation within the sanctum of an Academy which none but a properly qualified mathematician may enter,⁵ the pentecostal fire is a grace that God can give to any human soul that truly seeks it.⁶

¹ Temple, William: Readings in St. John's Gospel: First Series, Chapters i-xii (London 1939, Macmillan), pp. xxvi-xxvii.
² See Plato, Theaetus, 176-E, quoted in V. vi 165, n. 6, and Athanasius, De Incarnatione, chap. liv, § 3, quoted on p. 513, n. 2, above.
³ Plato's Letters, No. 7, 341B-E, quoted in III. iii. 245.
⁴ Acts ii. 1-4.
⁵ Μηδεις άγεωμέτρητος ε εισίτω is said to have been inscribed over the entrance to Plato's institute of philosophy at Athens (Tzetzes; Chiliades, Book VIII, 1. 973).
⁶ See V. vi. 165-6.


B. THE ROLE OF CIVILIZATIONS IN THE LIVES OF CHURCHES

(1) Civilizations as Overtures

{VII.B.II.p.530} One of the features of the Christian liturgy was a recurrence of its ritual in both annual and weekly cycles. The Christian liturgical week was modeled on a Jewish prototype; and, though the Christian copy had been differentiated from the Jewish original by making the first day of the week the holy day instead of the seventh, the Christian adaptation still followed the pristine Jewish dispensation in retaining the Jewish name for the eve of the Sabbath. In the Greek Christian vocabulary, Friday continued to be called 'the preparation' (παρασκευή)—in accordance with a Jewish usage in which this elliptical term explained itself. In the psychological atmosphere of a post-Exhilic Judaism, in which a stateless diasporà maintained its esprit de corps by a common devotion to the keeping of the Mosaic Law, 'the preparation' sans phrase could mean nothing but 'the preparation for the Sabbath'. By analogy it is evident that the inevitable connotation of the word would be, not a liturgical, but a political one in the psychological atmosphere of a pre-Alexandrine Athenian sovereign city-state whose citizens worshipped their own then still potent corporate political power under the name of Athena poliûchus. In the usage of Thucidides, writing for an Athenian public for whom politics were the breath of life, and whose political-mindedness was being accentuated in the historian's generation by the military ordeal of the Great Atheno-Pelopennesian War, the word παρασκευή could be used as elliptically as it was afterwards to be used in the Septuagint to convey, just as unmistakably, an entirely different meaning. Thucydides uses the word to signify what a generation of Englishmen, overtaken unawares by a world was in the year A.D. 1914, learnt ruefully to take to heart as 'preparedness' when they found themselves within an ace of defeat owing to their pre-war neglect to emulate the Germans in building up a stock of armaments to stand them in good stead in a fight for their national existence.


(2) Civilizations as Regressions

{VII.B.II.p.534} The Christian Holy Communion, in which the communicants experience their fellowship in and with Christ, had been implicated in a struggle for equality of rights which, in itself, had been a legitimate quest for justice, but which, at each successive stage in a history that had now run through many chapters, had been waged in ever grosser terms for an ever more material stake. In Bohemia in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era the battle for equality had been opened on sacramental ground; the issue had been between the laity and the clergy; and the stake had been communion in both kinds, which the Utraquists had demanded for the laity as against a clergy which had come to reserve the cup as a privilege for clerks in holy orders. In Holland and England in the Early Modern Age of Western History, and the Western World as a whole after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the battle for equality, which by then had long ceased to be fought at the altar rails, had found a new field in a political arena, where the bourgeoisie now demanded a share in the political power that had been exercised under the ancien régime by oligarchies, aristocracies, and monarchies. In the twentieth century the industrial working class of a Western Society that had now become literally world-wide was demanding equality in the distribution of economic wealth of which the lion's share had been appropriated by the middle-class authors of an eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century industrial revolution. In the twentieth-century class-war, which was being fought for an economic stake, the militant movement on the anti-bourgeois side had adopted the name 'Communism' to signify that it was fighting for a 'commune' in which there should be a community of world goods. Communion in this kind, not communion in the body and blood of Christ, was the connotation that this Latin word had come to have in secular twentieth-century Western minds. The twentieth-century Communists had travelled far indeed from their battle-ground of the fourteenth-century Utraquist forerunners. And, though, in their obsession with a legitimate struggle for economic justice, they had raised the emotional temperature of a political 'ideology' to a religious heat, the authentic leaf that they had torn out of the book of Christianity¹ was as unedifying out of its context as it was salutary in itself.


C. THE CHALLENGE OF MILITANCY ON EARTH