The Mystical City of God

The book called The Mystical City of God contains an account in four large volumes of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, said to have been revealed to a seventeenth century Spanish nun, Mary of Agreda.  I first heard about it some fifteen years ago.  At the time I was extremely cautious, partly because the person telling me about it, while not stupid, seemed a bit fanciful; partly because of some of things which this person said it contained (see below); and partly (if truth be told) because of a certain prejudice on my part against Spain and the Baroque.

(When he was about six years old, C.S. ‘Jack’ Lewis had this precocious conversation with his father:

Jack: ‘Daddy, I have a prejudice against the French.’  His father, amused: ‘Why’s that, Jack?’  Jack: ‘If I knew why, it wouldn’t be a prejudice.’)

However, I filed the book’s title in my memory, especially as the authoress was a ‘Venerable’, and I was reminded of it not long ago by seeing it taken seriously in a scholarly compendium of Mariology published in 2007 with a foreword by Cardinal Burke.  A few months ago I started investigating it for myself.  I am still a long way from having read the whole work, which is monumental.  But already I can say that it is one of the most astonishing things I have ever come across.

Venerable Mary of Agreda, in religion, Sr Mary of Jesus, and before that, Maria Coronel y de Arana, lived from 1602 to 1665, being of Jewish ancestry on her father’s side.  She, along with her sister and both her parents, entered religious life when she was 16; becoming abbess in her twenties, she governed her community for most of the rest of her life.  She wrote out the life of our Lady not once but three times, having obediently burned the first two manuscripts when told to do so by temporary confessors at her monastery.  Her own advice was regularly sought by King Philip IV of Spain – her surviving correspondence with the king contains more than 600 letters.

The Mystical City of God certainly contains things which at first sight are startling, and which may sound like pious exaggerations or even doubtfully to be within the bounds of orthodoxy.  Among these things are that our Lady at her birth was taken bodily into heaven to be brought before the throne of God; that she received the beatific vision several times in the course of life; and that she had the use of reason from the first moment of her existence.

Mary of Agreda herself was concerned about the first of these statements, asking how it was compatible with the Church’s belief that the gates of heaven were opened only after Christ’s death.  She says that our Lady told her that while this is indeed the law that applies to mankind in general, she was herself exempted from it in virtue of the foreseen merits of Christ; and that as regards the possibility of human beings entering heaven bodily before death, she reminded her of how St Paul says he was taken into the third heaven, and that he does not know whether it was in the body or not, thereby leaving open the possibility that someone might so enter.

Again, as regards the possibility of receiving the vision of God in a transitory way in the life, St Augustine and St Thomas both favour the opinion that St Paul experienced this too (see Summa theologiae, 2a 2ae 175, 3).  Suarez likewise holds that our Lady possessed the use of reason from the first instant of her conception – he argues that St John the Baptist possessed it even before birth, since his ‘exulting’ in his mother’s womb is not understood by the fathers as a mere metaphor, and that it was fitting that Mary should possess a higher privilege than he.

Yet the book is also remarkable in the other direction, in the emphasis that it places on our Lady’s abasing herself before God.  For example, Mary of Agreda writes that it was the custom of the Blessed Virgin to prostrate herself before the child Jesus at the beginning and end of each day, asking pardon for any faults of which she might have been guilty in His regard.  That is startling: but if she had not received the revelation at that point of her own impeccability, it would I suppose have been the right course of action, since no one can know without revelation that he is not guilty of some fault in God’s sight.

(Reflecting on how the book might be criticised from opposite sides, both for unduly exalting and unduly abasing our Lady, I was reminded of Chesterton’s remark that when you hear some person or institution criticised for diametrically opposite reasons – he was thinking of the things that he had heard in his youth about the Church herself – then you have good ground for assuming that that person or institution has it right.)

The book is rigorous and precise: there is a section in volume one on our Lady’s possession of the cardinal virtues which could serve any professor of ethics for a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics.  It throws additional light on the gospel: for example, there is a psychologically plausible description of how Judas went from being an enthusiastic follower of Christ to a traitor.  Above all, it is a supernatural book, by which I mean that it is interested not so much in the material details of our Lady’s earthly life – here it contrasts with Anne Catherine Emmerich – as with the state of her soul, and with the relevance of her life for the spiritual lives of Christians.

Extraordinary claims require very strong evidence.  As regards the authenticity of this book, good evidence is furnished by the facts of Mary of Agreda’s own life.  It seems certain that she evangelised the Indians of New Mexico without ever leaving her convent – see this series of short articles (this link is not necessarily a general endorsement of the entire site.)  She was declared venerable by Pope Clement X less than ten years after her death.  It appears that French Jansenists, hostile to what they deemed the book’s excesses, succeeded by some interpolations or mistranslations in having it put briefly on the index, and perhaps as a result her cause for beatification stalled.  Her coffin was opened for the first time in 1909, and the body was found incorrupt.  A second investigation of the body, in 1989, found that no changes had occurred in it.  It is venerated in the conventual chapel in Agreda, in the north east of Spain.

 

Facial hair, liturgy and the universal call to holiness

St Augustine:

As the ointment on the head, which descended to the beard, to Aaron’s beard, which descended to the fringe of his garment. What was Aaron? A priest. Who is a priest, except that one Priest, who entered into the Holy of Holies? Who is that priest, save Him, who was at once Victim and Priest? save Him who when he found nothing clean in the world to offer, offered Himself? The ointment is on his head, because Christ is one whole with the Church, but the ointment comes from the head. Our Head is Christ crucified and buried; He rose again, and ascended into heaven; and the Holy Spirit came from the head. Whither? To the beard. The beard signifies the courageous; the beard distinguishes the grown men, the earnest, the active, the vigorous. So that when we describe such, we say, he is a bearded man. Thus that ointment descended first upon the Apostles, descended upon those who bore the first assaults of the world, and therefore the Holy Spirit descended on them. For they who first began to dwell together in unity, suffered persecution, but because the ointment descended to the beard, they suffered, but were not conquered…. (in Ps. 132)

 

St Thomas Aquinas:

It is becoming for those who apply themselves to the Divine ministry to be shaven, and to be tonsured in the form of a crown by reason of the shape. Because a crown is the sign of royalty; and of perfection, since it is circular; and those who are appointed to the Divine service acquire a royal dignity and ought to be perfect in virtue. It is also becoming to them as it involves the hair being taken away: both from the higher part of the head by the tonsure, lest their mind be hindered by temporal occupations from contemplating Divine things, and from the lower part by shaving, lest their senses be entangled in temporal things (Suppl. 40, 1).

I’m not sure how to overcome this aporia, unless we think that Hanon in 1 Sam. 10 had the right idea by shaving off one half of the beards of David’s servants. However, Cornelius a Lapide says that this episode represents the Jews plucking off hairs from Christ’s beard during the Passion, or the devil stripping religious men of their courage, so that does not seem promising. I suppose we have to say that per se it is better for a man, especially a Christian, to possess a beard, at least in this life, but per accidens, e.g. because of a particular need to signify something else, it may become better to be shaved (and tonsured). I say ‘in this life’ because Aelianus tells me that the earliest depictions of our Lord present Him as risen and beardless, in token of eternal youth, and suggests that this may be the ‘other form’ which hindered people from recognising Him after the resurrection.

I presume that the historical reason why priests in the west have generally been shaven is Romanitas. Eastern rite priests of course often have beards, and I have a theory that the East-West division here is a providential counterbalance to the characteristics of their respective liturgies. That is, the Eastern liturgies put before us in particular the glory of the resurrection, so it is fitting that their priests be bearded, to preserve some suggestion of the trials and labours of this life as well, lest we float off into unreality. On the other hand, the Roman rite is more stark and sacrificial, so perhaps there is a danger that adding beards as well might make it too much for some people to take. I hope these are not irreverent thoughts.

 

Summa

 

Formal and material heresy (II)

I am still pondering Aelianus’s response to my last post on ‘formal and material heresy’, which was that if Charles doesn’t think there is a reliable way of knowing what God has revealed, even he must be a heretic. I suggested that Charles might not be a heretic, since he believed that the creeds and the bible were such a reliable guide. In fact, this doesn’t seem adequate, given St Thomas’s characterisation of faith, as a disposition to inhere to the first truth as manifested in the scriptures according to the infallible teaching of the Church. If one denies there is an infallible church, then one does not have faith. That certainly seems to follow. The same applies if one formally doubts that there is such a church (as opposed to simply feeling inclined to doubt it).

But what if one thinks that there must be such an infallible, living Church, but does not know what or where it is: can one have faith in these circumstances? Yes, providing one knows some revealed truths. This is the normal situation of those who are brought up in other Christian denominations and who become aware, as Newman puts it,  of the impossibility of having faith in the word of their church.

Such a person has the habit of faith, if he has been validly baptised and has not sinned against the light. Whilst he still imagined, for example  as a child, that the teachers within his church enjoyed a divine mandate, and that his church was an infallible guide to divine truth, then presumably he received actual graces that enabled him to make acts of supernatural faith when they taught him Catholic truths {see the post ‘Was St Thomas a Feeneyite? (part II)} When he becomes aware that they have no such mandate, then he does not by that fact lose the habit of faith.

But the question is, does he go on to say that there is no such infallible guide on earth? If so, then he does lose the faith, even if he continues to profess, for example, the divinity of Christ. If he does not go on to say this, but rather says to himself, ‘God must have given us some way of knowing’, then he retains the habit of faith.

Can he still exercise it? Yes, if he believes that the Church of Christ was acting infallibly at some point in the past, for example at the Council of Nicaea or Chalcedon, or when she canonised the gospel of St John. For in that case he can still ‘cling to the teaching of the Church as to an infallible rule’, even though he is uncertain where that teaching is now.

I think that Charles’ state of mind in the extract quoted in the last post, and no doubt Newman’s own state of mind at a certain period, was that he knew in his heart that his own church was not an infallible guide, that he felt sure that there must be some such guide, and that he couldn’t yet bring himself to suppose that it was the Roman Church.

All this raises the question: how many non-Catholics suppose that there own church is an infallible guide? And of those who don’t, how many suppose that any such guide exists?

 

Newman and St Thomas on predestination

 

Everyone upon earth might, without any verbal evasion, be saved, as far as God’s assistances are concerned. Every man born of Adam’s seed, simply and truly, might save himself, if he would, and every man might will to save himself; for grace is given to every one for this end (‘Discourses to Mixed Congregations’, VII)

God moves the human mind towards the good in such away that the mind can nevertheless resist this motion; and so it is from God that a man prepares himself to receive grace, while if a man lacks grace, this does not have its cause from God but from the man, according the word of Hosea XIII, ‘Destruction is thy own, O Israel’ (‘Quaestiones Quodlibetales’, I, 4, a.2 ad 2)