Being Heard by John Heard
Reading Dante as a younger man, I was transfixed by the descriptions of
Limbo. Having discovered the classical world (its literature, philosophy
and artefacts) at about the same age I loved any news of the virtuous
pagan.
In Dante, my heroes, a collection of people who lived good lives without (indeed, before) Christ, were remembered. They avoided the torments of Hell. It meant something that the things I found good, true, and beautiful in the best of Greek and Roman culture were worthy in Christianity too. Indeed, Dante’s great synecdoche for this idea, the pagan poet Virgil leading his late medieval Christian Everyman through the thicket of despair, a sage guide through Hell and Purgatory, is one of the most generous and humane metaphors in world literature. It speaks volumes about the nature and sensibility of Christianity.
For a serious young man searching for such things, here were proofs in literary form of an understanding as old as the Church: Christianity completes, it does not readily deface.
The mechanism is sublime. Sometimes called, nowadays, inculturation – it is the expropriation by the Church of pre-existing modes and expressions. Christianity, in this cultural sense, is the superlative form of whatever good has gone before. This is also known as conversion and that is a better term. The idea, after all, is that Christians turn the best of pagan culture toward the cross.
So, for instance, the Vicar of Christ (the Holy Father) is also the Pontifex Maximus (the Supreme Pontiff), an ancient title inherited from Roman state religion. Christmas and Easter, the greatest Christian festivals, rest on pagan religious roots. Similarly, instead of destroying the Pantheon (a temple dedicated, literally, to all Roman gods) Christians converted the building. To this day, the Basilica Sancta Maria ad Martyres resounds to the unceasing worship of the One, as do so many other converted temples in Rome and all over the Christian world.
What she does with stone and concrete, the Church extends to purest thought. The Stoic philosophers (Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) alongside the best of the Greeks (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) sought a more humane future. Their ideas were saved, converted and transmitted by Christian scholars. In a sense, these pagan thinkers wrote and reasoned towards cultural Christianity. At the very least, they laid the foundations for systematic Christian philosophy. Reading Epictetus’ Enchiridion, for instance, reveals how much influence the ancient thinkers had on Catholic moral theory. Later, Christianity – via St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas – would repay the favour.
In Christianity, then, a gap is closed between the ancient world and the New Jerusalem. The bridge Christianity builds is active, vivified and holy. This is one of the senses in which the Church is the “sacrament of salvation for the whole world”.
There are ramifications in this for secular modernity, not least because Western culture often betrays a neo-pagan influence. The hallowing of pagan achievement, indeed, demonstrates how Christianity transforms the very nature of man’s work. What we can achieve ourselves is magnified by grace. In that sense, one answer to Richard Dawkins and his type, so enamoured of the gifts of man, is “all of that and more”. Further, the hypersexual “gay culture” is undone, found wanting by comparison. The Catechism’s teachings on self-mastery, for instance, are a rich source that builds on the scala amoris discussed in Plato’s Symposium. Like hapless tourists who stumble into the Pantheon on Pentecost, Catholics awakened to this rich patrimony often find themselves surrounded by tinkling bells and falling roses. Indeed, we happen at times onto things which express an almost impossible beauty.
For, just as the light of Christ edifies a pagan temple and amplifies its beauty, the Gospel can edify modern man and amplify our happiness. No longer is the Pantheon, for instance, just an architectural wonder, the first true dome in history. Now, and forever, in niches where once idols stood, the triumphant cross and statues of saints prove that, in St Thomas Aquinas’ trenchant formulation, “newer rites of grace prevail”. In the same way, we can seek the ultimate achievement of a life lived well.
Anyone who laments the historical fact of conversion should know that he risks preferring the pagan past with all its brutality and bloody spectacle, a past that the best pagans despised.
Christianity does not readily deface at all. Rather, the Church in this creaturely reality is the superlative form of older, worthy orders. The whole mystery is contained in those enduring images: petals streaming from the oculus of the Pantheon at Pentecost and Virgil leading Dante through Hell and Purgatory, stopping short of the beatific vision.
John Heard is an Australian writer. You can read more of his writing on sex, religion, and politics online (http://johnheard.blogspot.com), and on Facebook join the DREADNOUGHTERS Group.