Catherine of Siena as pastoral theologian and spiritual director

Approaching Catherine and her thought through the Dialogue may not be the best way of getting to know her. She reveals herself more easily in the record of her relations with others that we find in her letters. We see immediately the variety of individuals and circumstances with which she became involved: prisoners, outcasts, nobles, businessmen, physicians, lawyers, soldiers, hermits, kings, queens, cardinals, popes, men and women immersed in the world. They write to her with all sorts of questions, looking for help in all kinds of situations and difficulties.

Her letters were spoken rather than written – she learned to write only three years before her death – and her vitality, adaptability, fearlessness, and insight are all clearly present in them. They reveal her warm, understanding tenderness for men and women, no matter what the shame or confusion that has come upon them. She shows extraordinary understanding and compassion for the problems that afflict human hearts.

We can sketch as follows her way of responding to people as revealed in her letters:

1) she rarely begins with rebuke striking first a note of humility – she describes herself as ‘servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ’ or some such

2) next comes a meditation on some theme, the wonder of Divine Love, the duty of prayer, the nature of obedience – something to lift her correspondent above the world to remember God and His kingdom

3) then a quick return to the problem at hand, highlighted now by being contrasted with what has just been said about the kingdom

4) but Catherine always goes with her correspondent into that place of dismay or difficulty no longer writing ‘you’ but always ‘we’ – it is as if she feels the sadness and guilt of the sins of others, a strange kind of solidarity with people in their distress and need

5) she is saved from arrogance by identifying herself with the person to whom she writes; she does not pause in reprobation of evil but moves quickly to an impassioned appeal, showing great confidence in people (often misplaced as it turned out),

6) this attitude is sustained by her frequent discussions of charity and tolerance, constantly urging her disciples and friends to put the highest possible construction on their neighbours’ actions

7) she loves the text ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions’: many characters, temperaments and practices coexist in the house of God.

It is all about ‘repentance’, quickening it by a positive method, not by spending too much time analyzing evil or rubbing in the consequences of sin, but by seeking to enkindle in souls the ‘holy desire’ which is not only the watchword of her teaching but the key to her personality.

Let us look at this 'method' of Catherine in her letter to Sr Daniella of Orvieto who, we are told, 'not being able to carry out her great penances had fallen into deep affliction'. There is kindness and wisdom in how Catherine compares her own faults with those of Daniella. She agrees that what Daniella seeks is good but tries to show her a greater good that is even more desirable. What in the hands of another person might have been simply a criticism of Daniella's behaviour and a call to change it, becomes instead a rich theological meditation, referring everything to God and to the ways in which Daniella's relationship with God can be strengthened.

Catherine stands alongside Daniella, they look together towards God and the ways in which God, through our holy desire for him, brings us into sharing God's own love and wisdom. Catherine clearly worries that Daniella's strictness with herself will lead to an unhelpful strictness with others. This will be counter-productive, she fears, leading people into the same despair that afflicts Daniella. Pastoral care does not mean increasing the distress of the other person but rather 'making oneself ill with them', and giving what healing one can in order to enlarge their hope. We need to repent, don't we, Catherine concludes, from our complementary errors, so that we will grow in virtue and be the people God wants, able to guide others.

Catherine wants to see in Daniella ‘the holy virtue of discretion’, which has its roots in ‘the knowledge of ourselves and of God’. As Catherine explains it, discretion combines aspects of prudence and charity. Discretion is ‘an offspring of charity’, she says, whose chief act is this: ‘having seen in a reasonable light, what it ought to render and to whom, it renders this with perfect discretion at once’.  The ‘order of charity’ is God – oneself – others.&

Different kinds of discretion are required of different people depending on their state of life, responsibilities, relationships and commitments. ‘But let us now talk to ourselves’, she says turning to Daniella’s particular indiscretion, and adding ‘we will speak in particular, and so we shall be speaking in general too’.

Discretion regulates not only charity to one’s neighbour but also prayer and the desire for virtue. It rules and orders the creature physically, withdrawing the body from indulgences, luxuries and the conversations of worldlings, and giving it conversation with the servants of God. It imposes restraint on the members of the body that they be modest and temperate: eye, tongue, ear, hand, and feet.

But all this is to be done not indiscreetly but with ‘enlightened discretion’. How? By the soul not placing its chief desire in any act of penance. Penance must be used as a means and not as a chief desire. Why not? So that the soul may not serve God with a thing that can be taken from it and that is finite but with holy desire which is infinite through its union with the infinite desire of God and with the virtues that cannot be taken from us unless we choose. ‘If I build my chief principle in bodily penance, I build the city of my soul upon the sand’, but if I build upon the virtues, ‘founded upon the Living Stone, Christ sweet Jesus, there is no building so great that it will not stand firmly, nor wind so contrary that it can ever blow it down’.

Penance easily becomes a matter of self-will, making us weak and inconstant whereas ‘the love of virtue and endurance through Christ crucified’ makes us strong and persevering. The soul then ‘finds prayer in every place’ because ‘holy desire prays constantly’ in the house of our soul. The beginning of so great good is discretion. Discretion seeks to present to others the foundation it has found, the love and teaching it has received, and to show these by its life and doctrine. It ‘comforts the soul of its neighbour and does not confound him by leading him into despair when he has fallen into some fault; but tenderly it makes itself ill with that soul, giving him what healing it can, and enlarging in him hope in the Blood of Christ crucified’.

Therefore ‘I summon thee and me to do what in past time I confess not to have done with that perfection which I should’. I have been over-lax and easy-going compared to you, Catherine says to Daniella, but it seems now that your strictness is out of all bounds of discretion, indiscretion making you feel some of its results and quickening your self-will. ‘I am very much distressed at this and I believe that it is a great offence against God’.

Let us love virtue, then, and kill self-will, undertaking a regular life in moderation but not intemperately, that we may hasten on the road of virtue and guide others. Catherine concludes: ‘Forgive me should I have talked too presumptuously; the love of thy salvation, through the honour of God, is my reason.’

THE SCHOOL OF LOVE

The most startling moment in Mel Gibson’s film about the passion. was when the soldier pierced the side of Christ and, as we are told in St John’s gospel, ‘immediately there came out blood and water’ (19.34). I had always imagined it as a trickle but in the film it was a shower, bursting out to wash the faces of those standing at the foot of the cross. It is the saving fountain spoken of in the prophecy of Zechariah (13.1), what the liturgy refers to as ‘the fountain of sacramental life in the Church’ (Preface of the Sacred Heart), presented in the film in the tradition of Baroque art.

                                                                                                        

The early Dominicans were not afraid of the physical aspects of the passion of Christ. When they prayed their preferred icon was the crucifix. We see this, for example, in the 14^th century illustrations of the ways of prayer of St Dominic. Many of the frescoes of Fra Angelico show the blood of Christ flowing from his side in great abundance and pouring down the trunk of the cross to wash and irrigate the earth.

St Catherine of Siena directed her prayer to Christ crucified and had much to say about the power of his blood. The ways in which we dispose ourselves physically in relation to the crucifix express different moments or aspects in our relationship with Christ, she says. We may kneel to kiss his feet in the attitude of the creature and sinner, fearful and still anxious, bowing before her Creator and Lord. Or we may stand to kiss his side. This is the position of one growing into the ‘perfect love which casts out fear’ (1 John 4.18) but still looking to the gifts Christ can give and not yet simply at the giver of those gifts, Christ himself. Kissing the lips of Christ crucified expresses the love of friendship, Catherine says, that we are no longer servants but friends (John 15.15). It represents maturity in the Christian life, when we come to love God no longer out of fear and no longer for what he can do for us, but simply for God himself.

Catherine teaches that if we wish to learn how to make this journey then the school we must attend is prayer. ‘We learn every virtue in constant and faithful humble prayer’, she says. Thomas Aquinas said that he had learned more from gazing at the crucifix than from all the books he had read. In one of his conferences on the Creed he says that ‘the passion of Christ is sufficient in itself to instruct us completely in our whole life’.

One of the traditional practices of Lent is to meditate on the passion and death of Jesus by following the way of the Cross. It is a simple and time-honoured technique, a bit like the Rosary, as we move from station to station meditating on the moments of the journey from his arrest to his burial.

Any wisdom that is worth anything will have something to say about suffering and for us there can be no reflection on suffering, just as there can be no reflection on evil, that by-passes the suffering and death of Jesus. I am sure we will all want to go further and say that there can be no useful reflection on suffering or evil that does not place the suffering and death of Jesus at its centre.

This can be a difficult one to get right. The Christian way at its best is not interested in pain and suffering in a way that is perverted, queer or odd. And yet the Christian way accepts that growth in love can only be by way of the Cross. Very often though, perhaps always, our personal experience of suffering does not seem to fit neatly into the story we preach about it. What I mean is that the cross never comes in exactly the way we anticipate. If it did, it would not be the cross. So we really suffer deeply because we do not see the point of suffering in this way or in that, or because we do not see the point of it going on so long, because it seems wasteful and meaningless, and so on. It never comes in the way we would have chosen for ourselves and often attacks those aspects and qualities in ourselves that seem most valuable.

Jesus suffered for us and left us an example that we should follow the way he took. It is a way that is not in the first place about suffering. In the first place it is about love, but love necessarily entails suffering. To love is to be tender and vulnerable. To love is to be open to the presence of another, giving priority to their concerns. To love is to share the burdens and difficulties of another. And so to love means to leave oneself open to the possibility, the likelihood, we must say to the inevitability of suffering.

If ‘love’ is the first word that discloses the meaning of Jesus’ sufferings then ‘sin’ is the second. The career of Jesus follows the way of the cross not just because it is love but because it is love in a sinful world. It is universal human experience that the wise and just person excites envy, and perhaps hatred and violence in this sinful world. The third chapter of the Book of Wisdom paints a prophetic picture of envy and rejection:

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.” Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned the prize for blameless souls (2:12-22).

We believe that Jesus, out of love and obedience, exposed himself to all this and gave his flesh for the life of this sinful world. Any share in the mystery of his sacrificial love is a strange joy for those who believe in Him. Far from setting us one step back from human experience, the following of Christ in his suffering, our attendance at the school of his suffering and death, brings us straight to the heart of human experience, straight to the heart of God.

ORDERING OUR DESIRES

What if we were to pray as follows:

Our Father, who art in heaven,

Deliver us from evil

Lead us not into temptation

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us

And give us this day our daily bread.

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Thy kingdom come,

And hallowed be thy name.

It is of course the Lord’s Prayer recited upside down. Although we continue to recite the prayer in the order in which Jesus taught it, perhaps if we are to be honest the real ordering of our desires and so the order in which we actually pray to God is as I have just presented it: the Lord’s Prayer but upside down.

The thought came to me over the weekend when I was looking through some things written by Vincent McNabb about prayer. He speaks about the centrality of the Lord’s Prayer, its frequent use in the Divine Office, and the fact that it encapsulates not only every request that we might want to make to God but also the order in which those requests should be made. St Thomas, in a lovely phrase that I’m sure I’ve quoted for you before, says that prayer is desiderii interpres, the interpreter of desire. The human heart desires and prayer, oratio, is the articulation of its desires. The words of prayer on our lips give form to the desires in our hearts, Thomas says.

What McNabb adds to this is that in reciting the Lord’s Prayer we learn not only what we ought to pray for but also the order in which we ought to pray for it. So it is not just an interpreter of our desire but also a teacher of our desire, a school in which we learn the right ordering of human desires. If it is, as we call it, the Lord’s Prayer, then perhaps it is only Our Lord who can sincerely say it in the order in which nevertheless we continue to say it. Jesus is the one whose heart is, without qualification and without reserve, placed at the disposal of the Father’s will. He is the one whose life is simply and completely about giving glory to God’s name. He is the one whose life is simply identified with the coming of God’s kingdom.

If we look at our own poor efforts at prayer we will very quickly see, I think, that we do say the Lord’s Prayer but more or less upside down. All the desires are there but their order still requires attention and it is why we must pray constantly as St Paul tells us. Let us have a look and see if what I’m saying is not true.

Deliver us from evil. This will be our first petition in the upside down Lord’s Prayer. It is true, is it not, that we turn to prayer and often return to prayer when we hit trouble. The presence of evil is the strongest incentive in getting people to pray. Famous cartoons show lines of City bankers queuing up to pray where there is talk of war or a stock market crash. There were no atheists in the trenches, people said at the time of the First World War, and it is difficult to imagine somebody who would not pray in some way in an aeroplane whose engines have begun to sound peculiar. When our backs are to the wall, whether through illness, failure, sin, loneliness, or some other evil that has come upon us, we will pray.

Lead us not into temptation. We may like a challenge but there will always be limits to what we can bear. The evil now is not on top of us but something threatening but, in such circumstances, we will want God’s help. For the time ahead, for the homily to be given, for the class we have to give, for the meeting that is coming up. There may be moral or physical dangers in some of the things we are called to do and it is natural to ask God’s help with them. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a legitimate desire that we might do things well with God’s help and not be put, too much, to the test.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Was it one of the Monty Python films that has God appearing and lamenting the fact that people are always moaning to him about their sins? ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m fed up with people telling me they’re sorry. Why can’t someone say they’re not sorry?’ It may not be exactly in those words, and it is a bit irreverent, but it might help us to see something. Another desire that sends us to our knees is the desire for forgiveness when we have sinned but it may be that we are often thinking more about ourselves than we are about God even in asking for forgiveness. And it may be that we forget that this petition, like the great commandment, is in two parts. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Just as our relationship of love with God cannot be understood without reference to our love of neighbour (and of enemies) likewise our participation in the forgiveness of God cannot be separated from our willingness to forgive others – at least to be aware of our need to be reconciled with our brother first before presenting our gift at the altar.

And give us this day our daily bread. There is nothing wrong with this one either. Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened to you. There is a venerable tradition from Tugwell and McCabe back through Victor White and Vincent McNabb that not only does not despise the prayer of petition but actually gives it an honoured place. We are to develop the kind of relationship with God in which we will feel comfortable, as a child with its parents, telling God what we need and asking him to grant it to us. We pray for the needs of the world and of the Church, for the protection of travellers, the comfort of mourners, food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, peace for the oppressed, the healing of the sick, the comfort of the dying, to pass an exam, to see a person again. These are all legitimate desires and appropriately brought to God in prayer.

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Now this marks a change in our desire for it is the first one in which we begin to think of what God might want. The four petitions we have made up to now are all about ourselves and about our needs. The interest in God that we show in them is a genuine interest in God but it does not go beyond an interest in what God can do for us: delivering us from evil, protecting us from temptation, forgiving us our sins, giving us what we need. Here, for the first time in this upside down Lord’s Prayer, we show a real interest in the desire of the other party to this relationship of prayer. Perhaps God wants something. Perhaps God has a will about things, on earth as in heaven. Well we believe He does, don’t we, and so it ought to be part of our desire not only to want the things we want God to give us, but also to want the things that God wants to give us.

Tby kingdom come strengthens this desire. Something new is opening up, for we are no longer simply saying, ‘Hey God, isn’t this cool? I’ve found a place for you in my world. I see reasons (when many do not) for including you in my way of living’. Now we are beginning to realise that it is not so much a question of us finding a place for God in our world as of God having found a place for us in His kingdom. This looks like a relationship that is becoming mature and growing into something stronger than before, where the desire of the one who is praying is becoming aligned with the desire of the one to whom he is praying. I am beginning to want what God wants. But we are not to think that this transition can be made easily. The place where it is most dramatically presented is in Gethsemane where Jesus utters his own prayer upside down: ‘Father, remove this cup from me (deliver me from evil, lead me not into temptation), yet not what I will but what thou wilt (thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, thy kingdom come)’.

And hallowed be thy name. In our upside down Lord’s Prayer this is the final petition. This is the climax of our desire, not something for ourselves but something for the Other who through prayer we come to know and love. May His name be held holy. The high priestly prayer of Jesus in John 17 may be taken as a commentary on this petition. ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee. I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the work which thou gavest me to do. I have manifested thy name to the men whom thou gavest me out of the world’ – and so on. A few chapters earlier, in what seems like John’s transfiguration scene, Jesus uses a phrase very close to what Matthew and Luke give us in the Our Father: ‘Jesus said, ‘Father, glorify thy name’. Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it and I will glorify it again’‘ (John 12).

What if that were to become the fundamental desire of our lives, the desire that controls all the others, that in everything and no matter what God’s name be glorified? Perhaps the whole point of our perseverance in prayer is that we might, some day, be able to say the Lord’s Prayer right way up, our desire for the glory of God’s name having become in fact our fundamental desire. In the meantime it is a salutary exercise, more rewarding than any yoga position, to say the Lord’s Prayer upside down and I recommend that you all have a go at it. There is much to be learned about our desires and what we can honestly say we want from God. Jesus, the only Son from the Father, can say this prayer right way up and so he taught it to his disciples. But this reflection may help us to realise that the disciples were asking for more than a formula of words when, having seen him at it, they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.

HERESIES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 3

Monotheletism is the heresy that says there is just one will in Christ, the divine will. Why did people come to this view and what’s the problem with it? If there is in Christ just one Person then it seems reasonable to say that there is in Him just one will. This is how you know you are up against a person: you meet a will. What sense would it make to think of a person with two wills?

Wills clash, almost inevitably it seems. Again this is how you know there are two wills around, there is conflict, and this we do not find in Christ.

You will think immediately of Gethsemane: this, especially as recounted by Mark, supports the orthodox doctrine of two wills while excluding the doctrine of one will. There seems to be a clear conflict between what Jesus wants and what God wants. It is a dramatic episode, always repaying reflection, particularly in regard to what love means as a ‘union of wills’. The conflict is between natures rather than persons and the wills of Christ are attached to the natures.

My reason for speaking of these Christological heresies is to look at our way of living religious life, to see if the heresy manifests itself in how we are relating the divine and human aspects of our life. Religious obedience might seem to be about will, ‘the greatest sacrifice is that of one’s own will’: this is how some theologies and spiritualities speak. St Thomas Aquinas sees no need for any vow other than obedience because this is the most radical one of all, including all others. It is, after all, the obedience of Christ, an obedience learnt through suffering, that saves the world. The vowed religious follows Christ above all in obedience.

None of us will have any difficulty, I imagine, in the thought of being obedient to God or to Christ, even where such obedience involves suffering. Being obedient to other human beings: there’s the rub! It might seem then that obedience becomes, as Herbert McCabe puts it, ‘a necessary evil’, a mechanism for unlocking conflict: let yet another will intervene that we will all agree to go along with …

In a fairly well known lecture he gave on religious obedience, however, Herbert say it is about intellect rather than will, about understanding rather than power. The vow of obedience is about living in community (and so it is ultimately about understanding God). Superiors always stand for the community, he says, since none of them would be there except the community has asked them. Superiors are first under obedience, we can say, to the community that asks them to take on the task. An Irish Dominican, John Heuston, writing about religious obedience says it allows us to say to superiors ‘you would have no power over me if it had not been given you from below’.

Obedience is more about understanding than about will and is perfect when all have come to share one mind. The good of the community – which in the case of Dominicans is the mission of preaching the gospel – is sought together through an educational process in which the superior plays a central role. That’s still Herbert. And so is this: it is not so much communities that are made up of individuals as it is individuals that are made up of communities. Communities are ‘forms of love’, networks in which we find rather than lose ourselves.

This is not just liberal neo-Marxism. Thomas Aquinas says, on the virtue of obedience, that friendship makes us want and not want the same things (amicitia facit idem velle et nolle) and Augustine speaks of the gravity that accompanies love and draws it towards the good (amor meus pondus meum): I go after my love and am obedient to it, and I do not experience it as offensive to my will that it be overcome by the good.

We are people of our time and have become accustomed to speaking (and therefore thinking) as the world speaks (and thinks). So the language of ‘informed choice’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘rights over against one another’ finds its way also to us and inevitably colours our thinking about obedience and authority, freedom and power. Such things conspire with what Vincent McNabb calls ‘psychological reasons’ to make obedience difficult, pushing us back towards thinking that wills must clash and that only one will must prevail.

This is then a monotheletistic view of religious life and of Christian life instead of the alternative: a shared vision, a common task, a fraternal life, ultimately a union of wills in love.

HERESIES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 2

Arianism is the most famous and seems to have been the most resilient of the Christological heresies. One of the reasons for its resilience seems to have been the way in which political figures became directly involved in managing it, in the first place the Emperor Constantine who summoned the Council of Nicea but also his successors throughout the fourth century, not all of them on the same side of the argument. You will recall Germain Grisez’s comment that moral theology must now face its fourth century and this aspect of it is certainly true: political leaders nowadays will not become excited about differences in Christology or sacramental theology where they will become very exercised about issues like abortion and homosexuality. These have a real political edge that many other matters no longer have although they did in earlier times.

Another reason for the resilience of Arianism, however, must be its reasonableness. Can we say that heresies will be more reasonable than orthodoxy? At least at a superficial level they seem to be. They are easier to present and understand because by definition they exclude some of the story, reducing the mystery of the faith to something that seems more coherent and acceptable by the standards of human thinking. Not that orthodox faith is irrational – that’s a very common and persistent modern error – but that the truths to which faith introduces us are beyond the capacity of the unaided human mind to understand.

Arius’s difficulty was in seeing how you could at the same time speak of a difference between the Father and the Son while saying that they were ‘consubstantial’ or ‘of one being’ which he understood to mean ‘they are one and the same being’, they are ‘the same thing’. It seemed to him like a form of Sabellianism where there is just one God who presents himself at different times in different forms. He was right to recognize this as incompatible with what the Christian faith teaches and there are scriptural texts that seemed to support his view that the Son is not therefore equal to the Father. Only the Father is unbegotten. This is a quality that is not shared in by the Son, and so they cannot be absolutely equal. And because ‘unbegottenness’ is a divine characteristic, it seemed as a consequence that the Son could not then be God, at least not in the same sense in which the Father is God.  The Son had a beginning whereas the Father did not. The Son is the first of creatures, perhaps a special kind of creature, the one on whom all other creatures depend. Again there are scriptural texts, in the wisdom literature for example, that seemed to support this.

This is not the place for a lecture in Christology however brief. What I’m doing is recalling these heresies to see if there are analogous ways in which we might be erring in understanding and living our Christian, Dominican life. Of course none of us is claiming to have a human nature hypostatically united with the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, so what we are about is very clearly at the level of analogy: how are we to live our Christian, Dominican life in a way that is true to the divine and human vocation that it is?

For Arianism, Christ is neither truly divine nor is he truly human. He becomes a third reality, between the uncreated and the created, a human God and a divine Man, something in between true God and true humanity. It was a kind of rational compromise that, instead of struggling with what the faith required, resolved tensions by coming up with a new category. This is something we might be tempted to do, to live a style of life that will be ‘in between’ rather than being fully one and fully the other, fully focused on humanity and its needs and at the same time fully focused on God and His demands.

We might wonder how we can be fully focussed on two things and the fact that we are seeing them as two things is precisely the problem. This is the form the mystery of faith takes in regard to our living a life that is simultaneously human and divine. We tend to think that the divine and the human must be rivals to each other, that they are natures sharing the same world or field of forces, so that to allow more say to one must imply allowing less say to the other. And this is, of course, quite wrong.

Much contemporary new age spirituality seems to work with a kind of Arianism in the sense that it prefers to speak about ‘the divine’ than to speak about God, as if ‘divinity’ were a kind of in-between category, a nature that can be parcelled out to different degrees among different levels of being. It might even regard this nature as dwelling in us as some kind of spark of the great divine. This takes us a long way from the radical distinction between the uncreated and the creature, a distinction that is crucial if there is to be love between them.

We can compromise in all sorts of ways, some of them obvious and some of them not so obvious. Sometimes the compromise is at the expense of our humanity and sometimes it is at the expense of our divine calling. What I am thinking of are those ways in which we might feel we need to justify ourselves to the world, either in how we speak or in how we live, but which have the effect of turning us into something ‘in between’ our twofold focus, neither fully one nor fully the other. Our celibacy, for example, cannot be explained simply in terms of our human experience. We may try to do that, to say how it gives us freedom for the mission, mobility, readiness to be available, and so on. But we know in our hearts that this cannot be the full motivation for religious celibacy, that it has something to do also with our love for Christ a well as our understanding of how His kingdom is being realised in our lives and of our place within that realisation in the lives of others. Of course that can be difficult to explain, not only to people who do not share our faith. A more easily understood explanation, something more accessible rationally speaking, might seem more sensible but will not do justice to how we truly understand things.

The alternative is to head off into a pious or spiritualistic understanding of celibacy (to stay with that example), one that loses contact with human experience and begins to feel unreal even to ourselves. We might do the same for poverty or obedience or other aspects of our lives. It is difficult to say all that needs to be said, whether in words or in how we live, in order to do justice to the human and divine character of the life we are living.

Let me quote two Dominicans in support of what I am trying to say. Jordan of Saxony speaks very well about it in his encyclical letter to the Order of 1233, speaking about the humanity of our lives but also the way in which that humanity ought to be being transformed by divine grace, by charity in other words. Let me quote from him [Tugwell, Early Dominicans, page 124].

"How often do the sordid, aimless meanderings of our affections lead us along crooked paths, not directed in the way of truth and with no eye on our proper goal. We say a lot, we do a lot, we endure a tremendous lot, which would make us so much richer in virtue, so much more fruitful in merit, if only charity abounded in our hearts, directing and ordering everything towards our proper goal, which is God. But as it is, our minds are too often occupied with futile thoughts, our feelings drawn by futile desires; we do not carry through to its end the sifting and purging of our hearts' purposes, so it is hardly surprising that we are so slow to accomplish anything, so sluggish is our ascent towards perfection."

The other witness I want to call is Herbert McCabe. In a wonderful essay simply entitled ‘God’ he distils the fruits of his lifetime’s contemplation of the mystery of God. Most striking – to return to Arianism – is the conviction he expresses there that to say ‘God is love’ is another way of saying ‘God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. This is the crucial concrete significance of the victory of the Nicene faith over Arianism. The way of Trinitarian faith is the only way of taking absolutely seriously the statement in the first letter of Saint John that ‘God is love’. If the Father has no equal to love, and to return his love, then what the Father shows cannot be love in the full sense of the word. It might be compassion and kindness but it is not love. Out of many things Herbert says there I quote just one – [God Still Matters, page 7].

"To say that Jesus is divine and to say that God is capable of love is to proclaim one and the same doctrine. Any unitarian view of God, or Arian view of Christ, immediately destroys the possibility of divine love - I mean divine love in the serious adult sense. ... It is only the doctrine of the divinity of Christ (and thus the doctrine of the Trinity) that makes possible the astounding and daring idea that God can after all genuinely love. He is in love with the Son, and the exchange of divine love between them is the Holy Spirit."

The implication is that if we are Arians then we do not really believe that God can share His own life of love with us. Of course we recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday, but that does not mean that our words are always borne out by our actions, by the ways in which we actually live out the faith we profess.