Conservative 
Search
Trending
Current News
We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.
There are few twentieth-century intellectual figures to whom one might apply the adjective “essential.” One of the earliest is Paul Elmer More, perhaps the last century’s greatest Christian apologist.
The final appeal of the humanist is not to any historical convention but to intuition. —Irving Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay at Definition” in Norman Forester, Humanism and America
The simple truth is that the effort to create pure art is nothing more than idolatry to a fetish of abstract reason—unless you prefer to ticket it as empty conceit—and could never engage the practical interest of any but a few witless cranks.—Paul Elmer More, “The Humility of Common Sense” in Norman Forester, Humanism and America
I. Some Personal Notes
There are few last-century intellectual figures to whom one might apply the adjective “essential.” One of the earliest is Paul Elmer More, already well known to the readers of The Imaginative Conservative.
And a one-time colleague of Irving Babbitt, the two having become professors of Sanskrit. Good to imagine them sharing office space, comparing notes on the Rig Veda.
At issue, however, is his stature today; there’s difficulty in finding his several books of Christian apologetics written during the last fifteen years of his life, which will offer substance for discussion below in this essay.
But we know Kirk judged him the last century’s greatest apologist; others were happy to argue that More lacked the authority of the more orthodox Lewis and Chesterton.
And there is good concern as to whether More’s “Christian Platonism” is too exotically conceived, too circa 17th century, with that century’s explosion of interest, followed by striking absence over the following centuries, leading us to ask “Where is Lady Ann Conway now that we need her?” [1]
*****
I have in my library Arthur Hazard Dakin’s “authoritative” biography of More and six volumes of More’s Shelburne Essays. I’m missing five, and I’m also missing the three volumes titled New Shelburne Essays.
I have a hard cover copy of Christ the Word, the 1927 edition. It seems to have been withdrawn from Brigham University Library in 2022 perhaps because the book had no activity since 1986.
Alas and alack.
*****
More’s volumes on the Greek tradition, especially with what he calls “true Platonic ideas,” acquaint the reader with a philosophical process that in a formative manner of thinking will eventually hold a profound influence on Christian thought.
The key word here is “eventually.”
The two can be reconciled but not as if completely balanced. There had to be a faith in something other than the chilling sphere of Platonic ideas alone.
II. Pages From An Oxford Diary
Turn we then briefly to some “confessions” in his slim 1937 volume, Pages From An Oxford Diary, where he informally—if not prayerfully— explores the role of faith in culture and the self and is something of a final word on his embrace of Christianity.
The book appears a mere three months before his death which suggests an interesting poignancy to the pages.[2] Delicately personal and deeply human, this small book needs to be read as a coda to earlier More books: Christ the Word in 1927 and The Catholic Faith in 1934. By doing so, the reader can chart the processes by which More moved to a full acceptance of the Incarnation, the consequence of a certain religious hunger.
In an openly natural manner, he writes that his life’s quest led him to a belief in a personal guide, a consoler, or what he called “a majestic Spirit and an eternal home.” [3] And for him Oxford is a place where one can set one’s heart on God’s peace but also where the Dons might quarrel about the cook while at table professing questions of the faith while also setting out the traditions of the faith.
Cardinal Newman’s spirit is ever present.
It’s a slight book, something of a confessional as one would expect of a diary and where one finds almost private passages like the introduction to Book VI: “I see now that through all the changes of belief and interest the old flame flickered within me, the hidden fire of religion which was kindled in my soul at birth and will still be burning when my heart is too dull to feel any heat.”
Or this passage which introduces Chapter XV: “Perhaps in the end one has to fall back on the comfortable word faith. Perhaps I cling to the notion of purpose in the world and in the corollary notion of a personal God, because without that the whole sum of things becomes to my mind horrible beyond endurance.”
And in Book XXII, where in the manner of spiritual book-keeping he “journals” that the inference he draws from “the Epiphany is that it reveals God not only as a person… but as a person implicated, morally at least, in the consequence of His acts.” He adds that the “Incarnation would [thus] be no accident in the divine economy, but part of the eternal hidden purpose, a deliberately accepted condition of imposing order upon chaos.” [4]
And in XXIII, “And the Epiphany, as it reveals God as a person, implicated in creation, [and] also reveals Him as the redeemer.”
Throughout the Diary More smiles at himself for his arrogance but grateful to for the Lamb of God about Whom he writes liturgically takes away the sins of the world. And a wise man will always trust in Providence. And in the mean time, he writes that he will sing and wait in patience and serenity—for the end which is no end. He will turn over in his mind the various possibilities but only of this is he assured: “that some time in some way, his spirit will face to face meet the Lord of life, and, falling before Him, will tell Him gratitude for all he has done, and implore pardon for all he, [More], has left undone.”
The Diary ends with these three lines, again a coda, and assurance of More’s bona fides:
For thou wilt not abandon my soul to the grave;
In thy presence is fulness of joy,
At thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.
*****
And if I can be forgiven the sin of pride:
I also have Norman Foerster’s contentious Humanism and America, deplored even to these days as an advocacy of social and aesthetic conservatism. I suspect the book’s thesis and reputation have over the decades become sadly negligible. Hardcover can be found on Amazon but there are no ratings. But after Professor Foerester’s preface, the reader will arrive at an essay by More titled “The Humility of Common Sense,” which follows the defining essay by Irving Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay At Definition.”
The two essays side-by-side offer the reader a prescient synonymity.
*****
Professor Dakin’s biography appeared in 1960 as a Princeton University press imprint. True to his subject, Dakin remarks that More owned a catholicity in learning and taste evident throughout his Shelbrne Essays. Dakin, however, and again in 1960, notes how there’s difficulty in conveying to generations following More’s death the substance of his ideas, when few of his books in 1960 were then in print, meaning again difficulty in obtaining and reading.
True this very day.
*****
I have been browsing the second volume of the Shelburne Essays, usually in the morning with coffee and on the screened porch. It’s my version of a Platonic moment listening to the wakening birds, the Barred Owls hooting in the woods, the morning light arriving like a soft suspiration.
My attention has been taken up with his essay”Nemesis, or the Divine Envy.”
His argument?
The Greeks formulated a law of conduct, simple in expression, but far-reaching in application. The Delphian aphorisms, “Nothing too much” and “Know thyself,” which More argues are the refined quintessence of their practical wisdom and moral philosophy, summing up briefly man’s duty to himself and society without reference for the most part to any supra-mundane legislative power.
One might paraphrase with some frank assumptions drawn from the religious sphere. Learn moderation in dealings with your fellows and humility under the unceasing gaze of God’s divine powers.
And by the way: fear the impressive words coming from the mouth of the serpent which proclaim a divine jealousy in the human heart.
All true, of course.
More was, however, part of my graduate study “lo” years ago, and largely an independent part. I enjoyed his idiosyncratic Christianity for which he was an apologist. I might add that it’s enjoyable to return to More after nearly a half-century.
I’ve been neglectful but then so have many others.
Forgive me, forgive us.
More on that in a bit; God willing . . . .
We know him to be broadly traditional for at least the first few decades of the last century but changed as the century changed although his consistent intellectual tendency always favored classical values and always with a Platonic appreciation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, those and other Eternal Verities.
And in time, and after age 60, with his Platonism intact, he arrived at an acceptance of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation which made complete the incompleteness of Platonic thought especially its concentration of myth.
With such concerns in mind, More’s apologetic argued that to make sense and to find reasons for living well, faith in a purposely ordered world must be accepted which is in serious contradiction to the prevailing winds of modernism and naturalism against which More’s humanism is unyielding in principle. Vouchsafe that!
Against which enters the wrath of the young moderns who voice nothing other than complaint and antagonism.
What then were his principles?
III. Christ The Word; not the Word of Christ
Which begs the question as to what’s in a title, albeit More is very precise in why the title is Christ The Word and not the Word of Christ.
In the background to his 1927 Christ The Word are some earlier, book-ending works: Platonism in 1917, The Religion Of Plato, 1921, Hellenistic Philosophies, 1923, and The Christ Of The New Testament in 1924. The whole can be found gathered together in the five volumes which make up The Greek Tradition From The Death Of Socrates To The Council Of Chalcedon, 399 B.C.-A.D. 451.
More then surveys the literature from the Fourth Gospel to the Council of Chalcedon to make the point that the early Christian Fathers were concerned as to whether or not the Incarnation was the most important basis for Christianity. On one hand, there is the understanding that the Incarnation is the consummation of Hebrew prophecy. It’s only one “thing,” however, to understand that consummation by thinking that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of Man. [5]
Such does not stand alone but when interpreted through the Hellenistic philosophy of the logos the inference broadens to “Christ the Word” which then converts “logos” to “Logos.”
Here’s More in the first chapter of his 1927 Christ the Word, “The Early Church” where his concerns are not only Christian but Greek.
More makes the argument that with Plato the starting point of the religious life was philosophy, which albeit was not to become antagonistic to the faith of Christianity but would own elements that would in time fall bodily into the Christian “scheme.” More so (pun intended), from reading the dialogues, especially Timaeus, it could be “surmised that Plato himself was dimly aware of a theophany to come” and of which the “allegories were a prophecy.” But ironically it could only be “dimly.”
More arrives at such a statement by arguing that Socrates had warned the Athenians in the Apology of other witnesses to the soul who should appear after him and would voice a more full truth which one might find in the parable of the cave where a redeemer, also a suffering man, descends into the darkness to bring forth a vision of light, a vision of salvation.
More then remarks that this Platonism was more fully developed by Christianity since both traverse the “ground of similarity” which justifies “us” in taking them together as a single body of religious experience.
Is this, however, a too slavish regard of Platonism (as in a conflict with the truth) or is it possible to argue that when Christianity gives primacy to revelation the best available instrument for understanding the teachings of Christianity is indeed Platonism?
And since truth cannot be in conflict with truth More’s argument that Platonic philosophical speculation is in accordance with Christian theological revelation albeit imperfect.
Of course, when the book appears in 1927 it runs aground with the younger generation, modern antagonists for whom More’s classicism is a too antiquated model. Interesting to consider, however, and according to More, that with the disappearance of a belief in Platonic ideas comes the disappearance of any everlasting truths which leads to a decline in morals.
When More, however, and to add to his argument, surveys the Fourth Gospel and the Council of Chalcedon he does so with the following purposes in mind:
He makes the point that much of what we derive from the Hebrew prophets is that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of Man and the consummation of centuries of prophecy, which if I might add, is in and of itself truly, truly amazing but without the dogma of the Incarnation.
With the early church Greek fathers, however, who interpret scripture through the Hellenic philosophy of the “logos” we are concerned more with a single issue: the dogma of the Incarnation and Christ the Son of God.
More kindly notes that we are immediately confronted with difficulty in translating the term “logos.” More so since we have grown accustomed to use the term as if it were the same as “word” and thus the word of Christ and not Christ the Word.
So many notions to be concerned with here since heresies can begin to abound if the argument becomes a belief that “logos” means spirit and that spirit and material merge, which leads to numerous grandiose confusions in human thought.
Pantheism comes to mind.
Darkened as his own times may have been when writing Christ The Word, More returns to his discussion of the Incarnation by arguing that the philosophy of the “logos” has to become the theology of the “Logos.”
With that in mind, More writes that the inheritance from the Hebrew prophets introduced into history the idea of a then undefined Messiah and Old Testament theology referring to the coming of that Messiah.
From that, however, More then suggests that the Incarnation is the “closing event” of that Messianic idea introduced into history which he calls the living “Logos.” The Son of God is the Son of Man, and the two merge but with the notion that Christ and the Word are one, and which results in what More calls the compulsion of Spirit upon spirit, Christ’s Spirit upon man, and with the soul in a discourse with Christ’s Spirit and with the disposition of the gracious influence we own a “conjunction.” It’s also not just a fanciful aberration filtering into a mass of superstition.
Another word for “conjunction” is “redemption.”
And for sure that scurrying shadow is Satan beating a fast retreat, muttering sophistic bitterness upon sophistic bitterness.
What I’ve offered here is a hasty survey limited by space but believe More is due for a “freshet.” Here, though is encyclopedic learning, “elevated by such [an] historical vision as is given to few men.”
Here’s Byron C. Lambert in his introduction to The Essential Paul Elmer More:
At the very end of his life what More longed for was a ‘gift of persuasion’ to bring the world to the truth he had found in himself. He was convinced that by losing touch with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the world was ‘in peril of sinking back into barbarism.’ As a first corrective step he wanted to recover the insight of the early Christian fathers that the logos in man can participate in the divine purpose of the universe, and that all the wisdom of the sages and all true literature has been [and is] the responses in the heart of man to the manifestation of the Logos in the world. The high function of art and letters, therefore, is to build here and now a home for the soul in the world of Ideas…. [T]he true scholar is a logios, a Logos-seeker, who recovers the avenues of communion between God and man.. and the goal of his effort is the harmonious synchronization of spirit and form (21).
Lambert is summarizing a good deal of Christ The Word while introducing the reader to More’s The Catholic Faith.
In much the same way, Dakin offers his readers a three-year biographical survey during which More transitioned “Platonism to Christianity (1922-1925).”
It’s an interesting chapter in Dakin’s biography bringing More and Babbitt together but where More found Babbitt looking old and troubled; still the “spiritual fire burns undiminished.” [6]
A few weeks later More spoke to a group of Princeton undergraduates about the religious imagination, what he called Platonically “the beauty of holiness, the reality of the invisible world, and the light and peace manifested in Christ.” Daken then quotes More who writes that although “he has been feeling tired, and his temper soured and his pessimism deepened, how true it is that the things which really satisfy are simple and easy and that he has a very interesting History of Dogma by a French Roman Catholic to solace him.” [7]
A few pages later Dakin writes that More had announced in another letter to his sister Alice that his great excitement “has been the discovery of Holtzmann” who gives in wonderful form the result of his biblical studies the last fifty years. This would be Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, an exegete of the New Testament especially his writing on the Synoptic Gospels, their origin and historical character. More was intrigued by Holtzmann’s argument that Matthew was derived from Mark and Luke from Matthew.
We can understand this to be a similar rooted hypothesis which More believes beautifully constructed much like his notion of how Platonism to Christianity is understood to be beautifully constructed.
The prospect reestablishes in “large and larger measure the historical validity of the Synoptic Gospels…. It is an exciting pursuit.” The prospect also obliges learners to indulge, which is the word More uses, in an almost beautiful subtlety of thought and interpretation adding to the old-fashioned dogma of Christ’s divinity.
He was on fire he writes to get at this new volume on Christianity albeit he (More) was not an ordained preacher.
But preaching it is as it is with many who style themselves professor. More’s lectures, his sermons, have one purpose, and that is to prove the truth of the Incarnation as pronounced by the fourth ecumenical council at Chalcedon, to the effect that Christ as a person embraced within himself the full nature of divinity and the full nature of humanity.
The supposition is larger he notes and deeply opposed to arguments that one mind find in Renan: for example, that “the eschatology of Jesus,” far from being divine, was simply that of his country and his own historical time. All those old Messianic predictions were erroneous.
Never the end of this fine chapter, and according to Dakin, More personalizes the Incarnation. He does not pretend to fathom the mystery of evil and pain but leaves them as part of a dark Necessity but which may be redeemed by voluntary suffering. [8]
What follows is a brief but poignant declaration of More’s faith: “I believe that on Calvary… the demands of Necessity were satisfied… the debt of creation was paid…. So was the Incarnation for us a work of vicarious atonement. This too I see dimly as part of the terrible Necessity. How else save by this divine condescension should we learn the full meaning of sin and holiness, and see how our deeds reach out in their consequences into the eternal world of the spirit, to the very heart of God?”
What follows, then, and in beautifully simple prose is More’s continuing statement of faith that we
cannot escape the ultimate responsibility of choosing our path, and no true man would wish to do so. But to know that we have a great Friend at our side who voluntarily shares with us the consequences of our faults, who will not abandon us though we err seventy times seven, who shows us that the evil we do is a breach of trust between person and person,—to know that is to gain a new insight into life and death, and to be inspired with new hopes: it may mean birth from above. O Lamb of God that takes aw the sins of the world.
And although these phrases appear in Dakin’s chapter on “Platonism and Christianity, the source of the phrases is from the Pages from an Oxford Diary.
But if all of this is taken in context, surely something more (pun intended) is afoot, and with Dakin’s biography in hand, turn we then to More’s The Catholic Faith, and an equally vibrant testament and the epilogue to More’s multi-volume masterpiece.
IV. The Catholic Faith (1930-1931)
Buddhism and Christianity
Following Christ The Word are some interregnum years during which More suffers the loss of Babbitt’s wife in a car accident as well as discordant voices arguing that More is no better interpreter of Christianity than he is of Plato. For the sake of money, also, he began teaching again which led him to groan under the difficulty of students who had no Greek. His fate, he thought, had become a hard one. And he traveled and he lectured and was seldom at home until the middle or so of 1930, when he began a series of essays under the title The Catholic Faith. He was taking great care especially with the first chapter, the first essay, “Buddhism and Christianity. Thus without close reading, this first long chapter might at first glance be in accordance with William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. It’s a long first chapter but on scale More is prescient in understanding Buddhism’s “errors,” especially its atman doctrines. More concludes that with the atman doctrine, if one can call it a doctrine, there is no spiritual reality of any sort. And for him, More, whom he says wants to be saved, the difficulty springs from a conflict of logic within the deeper instincts of the human heart.
Christianity, therefore, is subversive to Buddhism or when paired leads to a certain kind discontent, even sorrow, by which More means a feeling of defeat and irreparable loss.
He was forcing the question most pertinent to Buddhism, usually argued to be one of the world’s great religions central to which is the atman doctrine. More’s point is this and one he insists upon: Something is reborn over and over again and over again such that there would be nothing to be left for rebirth since there is only a stream of cause and effect which does not propose a richer kind of life.
Christianity does, however provide a richer life because Christianity accepts the soul and refuses to advance to an unresolved dualism.
More concludes this first chapter by arguing that Catholic Christianity has produced a richer life than Buddhism because Christianity accepts the soul simply and offers a dogma for that soul to be reborn but not with the doctrine of nirvana which More understands to be a state of ultimate apathy and indifference.
If that’s redemption there surely is no joy and is there is nothing to being reborn which More laments is nothing more, nothing less than a feeling of defeat and irreparable loss.
It’s an important moment in The Catholic Faith and sets the ground work for the second chapter, “The Creeds.”
But first an answer to a few obvious questions: Did More ever become a communing Anglican and/or Catholic? The usual suggestion is that he assumed the same position as that of T.S. Eliot, Anglican-Catholic. What is evident, especially in The Oxford Diary is an intuitive feel for deep wisdom in the Catholic sacramental idea of a divine idea, that of a divine purpose unfolding itself in a continuous process whereby our lives are redeemed into a finer beauty and righteousness and joy. For More that is the essence of the Catholic Faith and perhaps why he seldom used the adjective “Roman” to modify “Catholic” or for that matter “Maronite.”
My sense is that he would have been aware that noun “Roman” was coined in the 16th century. Equally possible is his notion that in the later middle ages the church became less influenced by the spirt of Platonism and more the logic of Aristotle. Professor Dakin makes the point that More was aware, in the best Platonic manner, that religion being both public and private it must ever remain the the delicate task of the worshipper to be diffident of his personal belief and at the same time to judge for himself between the settled deeper conviction and the floating opinions of mankind. There have always been unresolved paradox between the individual conscience and common consent. Thus the Anglican confession seems to hold middle course between the Romanists who accept absolutely the authority of the Church, and the Bible Protestants. Very likely then when he references Catholic he has in mind what he calls the ethos of religion, albeit he is in most favor of a theology closest to the spirit of Platonism, which comes closest in Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, where religion is defined as part of the sense as a law of measure and mediation.
It would be an interesting speculation to wonder what More would say about Vatican II.
The Creeds
The first line in this chapter reads as one might expect as follows: “Belief in Christ as a person manifesting in himself both the nature of God and the nature of man is undoubtedly the fundamental dogma of the Catholic Faith.” He adds that this formulation was first made at Nicea in 325 and then more precisely defined at Chalcedon in 451.
What is it, though?
It’s a are and sharp statement of the once “indispensable fact fact to which assent should be demanded of all Christians, a military oath of union, so to speak, stripped of emotional accessories and directed to the… intention of defending the final citadel of faith against any possible perversions of heresy or diminution of incredulity.”
And of course it has been contradicted by creeds of different sorts against which the creeds stand as bulwarks.
From that point More turns his discussions to periods in time in which the existence of creeds emerged including allusions and partial quotations to the first decades of the second century and likely even to the baptismal formula of Matthew and confession demanded by all the apostles of all converts: I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and which over time becomes less fluid in content and gradually hardens into the profession of faith as we have it today and called, then, the Apostles Creed.
But one might say, so what?
For More, his argument is that this creed connects those who are confessing to the generation of the apostles, which then places a stamp on a long unbroken continuity of worship while expressing in its most general form that common “element of belief without which the Church as an institution cannot stand.”
There are objections, however, to those who believe that radical changes in knowledge over time make it impossible to retain the precise formula of devotion hallowed by antiquity, and that (spoiler alert), the variety if not the looseness of our present religious confession renders any such dogmatic assertion of faith impractical.
For More to arrive at this at this point in his life has been a quest. He will soon go to be with God….
Together with his friend Irving Babbitt, once again, the two abhorred the lack of spirit in modernism and naturalism, which they further argued had lost the belief in a classical view of man, the belief in a human soul and the loss of an ethical sense which meant loss of moral responsibility.
Who then might especially be to blame?
Well, chiefly Rousseau who had become something of a fetish and a formative influence on the moderns. It’s worth a moment to suggest that there is in Rousseau a religious instinct but far-removed from the conformity of life and mind to what Christ requires. His ideas, however, at least according to More in Volume VI of the Shelburne Essays own a secular creed-like belief in the essential goodness of human nature but are not the product of any classical revival. This nature cult is rather a poisoning of the blood of society and no “true” creed.”
Rather, with those classical articles of faith and with the baptismal formula and the “good profession before many witnesses (I Timothy, vi, 12)” More writes that we arrive at a creed, fluid at first in content, gradually hardened into a profession of faith as we have it today and which contains the substance of apostolic teaching that forms a long unbroken continuity of worship without which faith would seem to be impractical and without which mankind would have nothing to inform the day-in-day-out drama of conscience.
More warms to his argument in the third chapter with a sacramental idea which he takes is the distinguishing note in western religion generally and more particular of Catholic Christianity.
The Eucharistic Sacrament
This sacrament, he writes, points to a divine purpose, which unfolds itself in a continuous process wherein the stuff of existence is miraculously transmuted into an ever-finer medium of order and beauty and righteousness and joy.
By analogy the Eucharistic Sacrament is something like alchemy that transmutes the leaden dross materials of life into a finer element, and of course instituted by Christ Himself and a primary Sacrament of Catholic Christianity (distinguished in kind as the one absolute sacrament), and which was deeply felt by Christ, and again clearly instituted by Christ and for His Disciples, and without which the sacramental life of the faithful would fade away, becoming thin and precarious and thus untenable, especially as with the so-called liberal theology of the nineteenth century—i.e., a cold and religious rationalism or a vapid sentimentalism.
He goes on to examine the sacrament’s theological implications.
More accounts for two “things” that occur when the Eucharist is “delivered to us and for our salvation”:
The worshiper in some manner appropriates to himself the veritable body of Christ which corresponds to the spiritualization of the risen body of Jesus. More so, it’s not just a symbolic act.
Secondly, with this aspect in mind, the Eucharist might be regarded as a sacramental continuation of the two closing articles from the Creed: the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. In the simplest terms, the “novelty,” so to speak, developed from an argument that transubstantiation does not occur until the priest pronounces the words of consecration over the chalice.
More is prescient, however, in surveying the various “definings” of that word that have occurred over time with troublesome implications rationalized in confusing dogmas of transubstantiation the exact term of which was employed by Peter Comestor (understood to be a great bookwork) in two sermons published before his death in 1179. [9]
So what?
Well, how much of this arises from the newly re-discovered Aristotelian canon?
Here More worries that Aristotle, who was important to the medieval mind, had attracted a pretty lively interest in the Eucharist.
But explaining the Eucharist by using Aristotle, who distinguished between the “substance” of a thing and its “accidence,” would require mastering the elusive phantom of Aristotelian metaphysics, which would mean making the sacrament satisfactory to reason.
Is it possible, he wonders, that the medieval theory of transubstantiation is Aristotle turned topsy-turvy and metaphysics gone mad, or scholasticism veering itself into an abyss?
Regardless, he writes, the mystery remains, and the word mystery is synonymous with sacrament. He adds that for the true Catholic the Eucharist is all that and something more, which is hope and faith in a future implicit in the Incarnation, and the Logos where in the same manner as the Spirit of Christ descending upon a Son of Man the two are conjoined; thus by the same token and conjoined in the Eucharist the bread and the wine impart to the soul of man the same Real Presence.
The difficulty occurs when he who worships as a Catholic finds himself confounded by the church theologians, who have imposed upon the sacrament this or that explanation, and such perhaps better lost in the labyrinths of dialectic.
And he wonders whether Aristotelianism can be brought to the to Christianity in the same manner as Platonism, albeit neither to the whole of Christianity’s scheme.
He offers an answer in the closing words of this chapter
When the host is elevated comes an elevation of mind and spirit and religious thought, which neither Aristotle nor Plato were able to tread.
But the Eucharist, besides showing dramatically how the Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection were a recapitulation of that cosmic drama which Plato knew only dimly, well for Christians such is a sacrifice representing that a very special price Christ suffered and laid down that the willful souls of men might be embraced in the circle of divine purpose.
Christian Mysticism
In this concluding chapter More notes that the word “mysticism” has been taken loosely and variously. It still owns a usefulness with a proper definition.
He does by citing Abbé Bremond, who “adroitly states that beyond and outside of the knowledge properly called intellectual which ends in abstract concepts, does there not exist a real knowledge, a direct intuition which offers a kind of immediate contact with the idea of God, which imposes itself in the depth of the soul taking possession of the soul purifying and sanctifying it?” [10]
More prefers this defining but only if this mysticism is obtained and we hold that the soul may, and does, lose itself in the object of its intuition. He worries, however, that such begins to sound much like the consummate religions in the Orient, especially India.
And once again he turns to what he calls the teleological aspects of Plato’s doctrine of Ideas, in which Ideas are imposed upon formless substance or moulding formless substance into a form, and which he the suggests is almost a sacramental adjuration at the close of the Timaeus.
He asks his reader to think of things this way: He notes that the underside of Platonism is superstition. Such, however, weakens the moral cogency of ideas and restraining laws and also dissolves the notion of a creative deity into a vague belief in some unaccountable power speeding through he world as in, say, animism which would account for he says in passing the pseudo-mysticism of Rousseau.
What, then, is Christian Mysticism and which does not surrender to religions apart from Christianity but retains the simplicity of the faith?
Is it a rhapsody or a dry scholastic habit of analysis?
Well, for More the former is very much a form of paganism.
As for the dry scholastic habit, well, he writes that such goes hand in hand with what he calls the pleasure of contemplation and/or the “new” mysticism,” which he notes is especially what we owe to Bonaventura who introduces us to the notion in turn of the spiritual intellect which concerns stages or ways of the approach to God: purgation which leads to peace, illumination which leads to truth, perfection which leads love. [11]
And what is this triple way but the mystical approach to a spiritual intuition of the Trinity and its efflorescence of mysticism.
More goes in great detail in this final chapter to his The Catholic Faith which also includes mystical reactions to Christ on the Cross and why we picture to ourselves Christ on the Cross and with meditation that is not always tranquil but still a loving contemplation.
Interestingly More seems to contradict himself when he writes that the mystical path is not the highway to Christian salvation. In fact, it could quickly fall into the quick sands of heresy and/or the pits of spiritual presumption.
There is, however, what he calls the question of quietism, which has become troublesome in dealing with mysticism. Referencing St. John of the Cross, however, one might find a possible solution by remembering what our Lord requires at our hands: “Be still and see that I am God. Learn to be interiorly empty of all things and you will see with delight that I am God.”
More adds that the Christian apologetic for a mystical thesis arises from the great commandment of the Old and New Testament. Love God and love your neighbor and such will beget a kind of likeness and this kind mystical contemplation when expanded gives all of us a new hint to a new perception of the world in which we live.
And for this “knowledge” we must render thanks to St. Therese. [12]
And with that in mind, More concludes this strikingly beautiful but long chapter by arguing that it’s not enough to abide within the limits of traditional orthodoxy with no passion, but tending to restrain an immediate mystic vision God within the limitations of reason. Such is a lowering of one’s religious and philosophical courage:
Rather let him be assured that in this voluntary inhibition lies the act of heroic faith and noblest endeavor. To believe seriously in the otherworld of God and Ideas, to lift the mind habitually to the contemplation of supernatural realities until it learns of a certainty that its home is there, to live in that realm whole-heartedly, yet without shirking or denying the claims of nature, to centre the distracted will upon God as the King of righteousness, to see in this maze of gliding phenomena… [is] to see the obscured presence of veritable justice and beauty [and is] to retain faith in a divine purpose at work within the world [and] that is not a light choice or feeble task.
Kirk writes that More’s voice was lonely and likely because he was a fierce critic reacting agains the ferocious clutch of ideology and amorphous humanitarianism, notions of perfectibility promising a world of sweetness and light.
All in error . . . .
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
Notes:
[1] Lady Ann was one of small contingent of 17th century philosophers opposed to Descartes. One can still read her surviving treatise Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy from which the reader will find her interest in Platonist metaphysics. The argument is that Lady Ann’s system is not just an otology but a theodicy. I first learned something about her from Dame Sarah Keith in a conversation as to whether one “species” can transform into another to which the answer is “no.” I also learned that pain is purgative.
[2] See Byron C. Lambert’s superb introduction, The Essential Paul Elmer More.
[3] I should mention that I’m quoting from a text one can find on the Internet Archive, a wonderful source, and inexpensive in as much as editions of The Oxford Diary run into the hundreds of dollars. See also Professor Bradley Birzer’s “The Christian Humanism of Paul Elmer More: From Plato to Chalcedon” in the March 9, 2011 edition of The Imaginative Conservative.
[4] More will use words like epiphany, incarnation, eucharist, and so on with good familiarity.
[5] As is the usual purpose for a council, the Council of Chalcedon was convoked to condemn a heresy. Dorothy Sayers is on point here when she argues that the drama is in the dogma. In this case, the “Monophysites” taught that the divinity of Jesus swallowed up his humanity and thus no “son of man.” The sticking point was that there was no person of God who could of or had become man and thus a denial of His full divinity and the full humanity of Christ. For More, the central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which the relevance of Christianity stands or falls, the dogma of both Son of God and Son of Man and the Greek “logos” converted to the Christian “Logos.”
5 A Good deal of Professosr Dakin’s source materials is drawn from letters to Alice More, Paul Elmer;s sister, and date in the earl months of 1922.
[7] It’s unclear to whom More is.referring
[8] The theological notion of “Necessity” is not the same as determinism. The early Greek fathers exalted the fact of liberty and freedom of the will but following the Council of Nice a theory of necessity was conceived in which a theory of grace was conceived as working only in the sphere of freedom. Also, and as a result original sin and the necessity of certainty of sinning, salvation would necessarily depend upon God necessarily providing mankind with a savior.
[9] Comestor was at one time chancellor of the Notre Dame theological school and a professor. It’s not hard to imagine the theological topics that would have been discussed, written about, then discussed more, and then written about again.
[10] This would be Henri Bremond, 19th- and 20th-century scholar, likely best known for a biographical treatise on Cardinal Newman.
[11] Perhaps not a household name but understood to be a “true” Franciscan. Simply stated his mysticism begins with faith the idea that Christ is the one true master Who offers us a certain knowledge that emerges through faith. That faith, then, with study, is developed through our rational understanding albeit we give assent to certain truths without physical evidence. The result is that this mystical process is perfected by a mystical union with God.
[12] More is not making an oblique reference to St. Therese often sentimentalized but whose life did show all the hallmarks of being a mystic, especially in the depths of her spiritual visions.
The featured image is a photograph of Paul Elmer More (taken no later than 1904), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
