The Four Marks of the Church | Ronald A. Knox | From "The Hidden Stream: Mysteries of the Christian Faith" | IgnatiusInsight.com
The Four Marks of the Church | Ronald A. Knox | From The
Hidden Stream: Mysteries of the Christian Faith
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2007/rknox_fourmarks_may07.asp
When we have come to the conclusion that our Lord founded a Church, we have
still to ask a further question, Which Church? That need not surprise or scandalize
us; it's the good things in the world, not the bad things, that produce a crop
of imitations--people imitate Keats, they don't imitate Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
This good wine that Christ has given us-it is only natural, in an imperfect
world, that there should be some confusion about the labels. In order to keep
our heads, when we start out to look for the true Church, we remember that in the
Credo at Mass it is qualified by
four distinguishing marks, "I believe in one, holy, Catholic, and
Apostolic Church." Those four marks must be present in the body we are
looking for. And this is worth observing; we must be content if we find that
they are there at all, we must not expect, necessarily, to find them in an
eminent degree. That is a common experience when you are dealing with
definitions. The usual definition of Man is that he is a reasoning animal; he
is Homo Sapiens. And that is
true, you see, even of lunatics; they reason, in fact they often reason with
great acuteness, like the mad don who thought the don underneath was trying to shoot
him through the floor, and consequently always sat on the table until at last
he grew to believe that he was a tea-pot. At the same time, when you reflect on
this definition of man, and realize that sapience is his characteristic
quality, it makes you examine your conscience a bit, and wonder whether, having
matriculated at a University, you ought not to trying to become a little more
sapient. And so it is, as I shall try to point out, with these four marks of
the Church. They show us what it is, and at the same time they encourage us, our
small way, to try and make it rather more so.
To prove that the Church is, and is meant to be, visibly one, is pretty easy
going. You've only to read St Paul epistles to be struck by the enormous
importance which attaches to the unity of the Church. It's quite true that will
talk about the church at Corinth, say, and the church Thessalonica, but never
with the smallest suggestion that they are two separate entities. No, it's just
like talking about the air at Brighton and the air at Blackpool; the Church,
for St Paul, is the atmosphere in which a Christian moves and has his being;
even when some half-dozen slaves in some rich person's household had been
converted to Christianity, St Paul used to speak of the Church in So-and-so's
household. And heavens, how he is always going on and on at those early
Christians, even then, about unity; telling them to be built up into one
another, to grow up into a single body, and so on. For St Paul, the Church is
at once something wholly united, and something wholly unique. The Bride of
Christ, how could there be more than one Bride of Christ? The building of which
Christ is the cornerstone; what more compact idea could you get of Christian fellowship?
The Body of which Christ is the Head; how could there be more than one such
Body, or how, outside the unity of that Body, can a man have a right to think
of himself as united to Christ?
Of course, you may object that St Paul perhaps wasn't thinking of what we mean
by the Church; he was thinking of the invisible Church, as it has sometimes
been called-not a society of people distinguishable here and now by possessing a
common faith and a common organization, but simply an ideal concept, the sum
total of those souls whose names will, at last, be found written in the book of
life. Only, you see, that won't do, because our Lord himself doesn't think of
the Church in that way. The kingdom of heaven (which was his name for it is
like a mixed crop, part of it wheat, part of it cockle, only to be separated at
the final judgement; it is like a net cast into the sea, which brings up fish
for the dinner-table and fish which are of no use to anybody, not to be separated
till the net is brought in to land. The Church, then, as Christ himself
envisaged it is a visible Church, rogues and honest men mixed; not all members
of the Church are bound for heaven by any means.
And if you look round, today, for a visible Church which is visibly one, there
is hardly any competition, is there? I mean, Christians who belong to other
denominations don't even claim, as a rule, that their denomination is the Church. Church unity is something which existed in
the early ages, which will, it is to be hoped, come into existence again later on;
it doesn't exist here and now. Anybody who has reached the point of looking
round to find a single, visible fellowship of human beings which claims to be
the one Church of Christ, has got to become a Catholic or give up his search in
despair.
At the same time, if you get arguing with non-Catholics about the unity of the
Church, you will find they have a complaint to make about it. Isn't yours (they
ask) rather a nominal kind of unity? Why did the German Catholics allow Hitler
to invade Catholic Poland? Why do the Catholic Italians persecute the Catholic
Jugo-Slavs? And so on--you know the kind of thing. Well, here we have to go
back to the principle I was laying down just now; we said unity, not perfect
unity. There have been times at which Pope and Antipope reigned side by side,
dividing the sympathies of Europe. But even then, there was only one Church.
Part of Christendom followed the true Pope; part of it in good faith, materially
but not formally in schism, followed the Antipope. A man suffering from
schizophrenia is still homo sapiens.
A Church united in doctrine and in ecclesiastical theory is still one Church,
although its energies are being dissipated in schism.
Meanwhile--this is the other side of the picture--we Catholics ought to be a
jolly sight more careful than we are about unity. It's quite true we have got a
central executive in Rome which can, at a pinch, dispose of any controversy;
but that is such an awfully bad reason for spending our whole time running
controversies among ourselves, nation against nation, one religious order
against another, one set or clique of lay people against another, the whole
time. I've never yet been able to understand what it is that leads Catholics to
savage one another so fiercely, the moment there is any difference of opinion.
That is something we can do something about.
But I mustn't go on about that; we must consider the second mark, the holiness
of the Church. Here we are in a somewhat more embarrassing position when we
start arguing with our friends outside the Church; they're so apt to expect rather
too much, aren't they? The usual explanation the books give of this second mark
is that "holiness" in the Church is proved partly by the continuance
of miracles within her fold, and partly by the existence of the religious orders,
with their special cult of perfection. The Church (we are told) has her ups and
downs, her bad patches here and there, but we've still got Lourdes and we've
still got Carmel. I've no quarrel with that explanation, but I think you can
put the thing rather more simply in this way--Christians of any other
denomination, if they describe that denomination as "holy" at all
(which they very seldom do), are referring in fact to the individual holiness
of its members. Whereas when we talk about the Holy Catholic Church we aren't
thinking, precisely, of the holiness of its members. We think of the Church as
sanctifying its members, rather than being sanctified by its members.
Sanctity--what a hard thing it is to define! There is a kind of bouquet of mystery about Catholic ceremonial, there is a
kind of familiarity about the attitude of Catholics towards death and what lies
beyond death, there is a patient acceptance of little oddnesses and
inconveniences about the practice of religion, which you don't find outside the
Church itself, except perhaps among certain High Church people who have been at
pains to imitate what is to us a natural attitude. That's all very vague, and I
haven't time to analyze it more particularly; but I think the reason why atheists
usually say, "If I was anything, I'd be a Catholic", is that there is
a something about her; and that
something is really her sanctity, a quality which belongs to the institution as
such, not to you and me.
And that something is not affected, really, by all the mud-slinging which
starts, among the more embittered kind of Protestants, the moment the sanctity
of the Church is mentioned. Immoral popes and worldly bishops, and priests in odd
parts of the world who aren't any better than they should be, and the massacre
of St Bartholomew and a dozen other incidents which recall to us the dictum
"Happy is the nation which has no history"--well, yes. All that we
can admit, and regret, and refuse to extenuate, and still say, "Yes, I
know, but I'd sooner be a Catholic than anything else, because I'm not much of
a chap really, and somehow being a Catholic means feeling that you get
something out of it, whereas being any other kind of Christian means feeling that
you've got to put something into it." All that's true, and it's fine. But,
mark you, the real reason why Catholic propaganda doesn't go down better than
it does, is our individual unholiness. I don't so much mean the way Catholics are
always appearing in the police-courts and so on; there's a lot to be said about
that, and it's not all to our discredit. No, I mean rather our terrible
second-rateness, our determination to get to heaven as cheaply as possible, the
mechanical way in which we accept our religious duties, our habit of thinking
about every problem of conduct in terms of sin and of hell, when we ought to be
thinking much more about generosity in our treatment of God. "Nor knowest
thou what argument thy life to thy neighbour's creed hath lent"--it isn't
logic, but that's the real mark of the Church the world is looking out for, all
the time.
And then, the Catholicity of the Church--there we feel on surer ground again.
It's so obvious, on the one hand, that our Lord meant his Church to be an
assembly of all the nations, in contradistinction to the old church of the
Jews, which was simply the assembly of one nation; it doesn't need proving. And
it's so obvious, on the other hand, that the Church which is in communion with
Rome is a world-wide Church, does transcend merely local prejudices and merely local
ways of thinking; that to be a Catholic does obliterate, instead of
emphasizing, the sense of strangeness which you and I have when we meet a
foreigner. Say what you will, the other Christianities are so hall-marked with
their place of origin, reflect so perfectly a German, or an English, or an American
outlook; even their virtues are so much the characteristic virtues of a
particular and rather modern culture, that you can't think of their missionary
influence, splendid as it often is, as a Catholicizing influence. Whatever else
they dislike about us, men admire, and envy, our international ubiquity.
But don't let's forget that our critics have something to say on the other
side. They complain that our Catholic culture, though on the face of it it is
world-wide, is dominated by the influence of a particular group of nations. In
the Middle Ages, Catholicism was at least pan-European. But now, if you lump
together the Latin races, with Ireland and Poland, you can say roughly that
these dominate Catholic culture; everywhere else the Church is represented by
minorities. And there is a temper, they tell us, about Catholics which is just
the opposite, somehow, of what we mean by the word Catholic. There's a jealous,
a rather timorous attitude about Catholics which makes them look with suspicion
on all ideas which haven't sprung from their own minds; there's a rather offensive
tone of "Here's tae us, and wha's like us?" about a good deal of
their literature; they're all, somehow, rather shut in. If the Church is Catholic in her geographical
extension, is she really Catholic in the field of ideas?
Well, you'd want at least a whole conference to deal properly with that charge.
There can be a lot of danger in the infiltration of ideas--the very word
infiltration gives you, nowadays, the picture of sinister little men creeping
through a jungle. I always remember the last of Dr Caird's famous lay sermons
when I was at Balliol, and the terrific impressiveness, only possible to a
Scot, with which he enunciated the words, "Remember, the man who shuts
himself in shuts others out." I thought at the time, and still think, that
that was a sort of parody of the Oxford Hegelian manner. Because, after all, what
on earth do you mean by shutting
yourself in, except that you are shutting other people out? But let us take his
point, and let us admit for the sake of argument, at any rate, that the circle
of the Church's ideas has been rather narrow, that its culture has been too
much a specifically Latin culture, ever since the Reformation. That, if it is
true, is not altogether our fault; ever since the Reformation, as Ward used to say,
we have been in a state of siege; we have lived under a kind of martial law. If
the Northern-European point of view is not sufficiently represented in the
Church's councils, that is because the nations of Northern Europe, four hundred
years ago, cut themselves off from the Church. It may be that as time goes on
our Catholic culture--I do not say our Catholic faith, I only say our Catholic
culture--will be further enriched by absorbing the thought of other nations;
not necessarily European nations; we may have something to learn from Asia as
well. But the point about the Church is that she has the power to assimilate,
to digest, fresh ideas, instead of merely gulping them down; all her history
makes us sure of that. And in that power of assimilation, she is Catholic.
Have we, as individual Catholics, a lesson to learn, here too? I hesitate to
draw the moral, because as I say there are two sides to this question. And it
may be urged that in England, and especially in Oxford, we Catholics are in
danger of exchanging our ideas too much with the outside world, rather than too
little. Let me only say this, for the benefit of anybody here who may need the
warning; don't fall into the temptation of crabbing everything that's not
Catholic.
Catholic and Apostolic--that is a kind of concealed paradox. This Church which
is to be a world-Church, must therefore, you would think, have a breadth of
outlook which enables it to enter into the mind of each nation, and interpret it
to itself, is nevertheless Apostolic; it is committed to the doctrine handed
down, centuries ago, by a set of working men in an obscure province of the
Roman Empire. The notion of apostolicity is the faithful handing on of a
message. Apostello, to send out,
that is a key word of the New Testament; it occurs about 130 times in the
course of it, quite apart from the frequent use of the word
"apostle". As the Father hath sent me, even so I send you--that is
the start of the whole thing. In the Old Testament, you find the prophets coming
forward in obedience to an inward vocation from God. In the New Testament, it
is not enough to be called; you must be sent; St Paul himself, a called man if
ever there was one, was sent by the Church at Antioch when he began his
travels. And that sending has been going on continuously through the ages; the
Church has always had her own hierarchy of commissioned officials, following
one another in unbroken succession. The other denominations may claim that their
ministers are called; but who sent them? Always, if you examine their line of
succession, there is a flaw in the title-deeds; a human agent has stepped in
and interrupted, by his interference, the unbroken succession of sent
men to whom our Lord made his promises.
Have our critics found a come-back, here too? Do they accuse us of not being
apostolic enough? Well, they haven't the courage to say that we don't try to
impress other people with our ideas; if anything, their complaint is rather the
opposite. But they have managed to put us in our place, by slightly altering
the meaning of the word "apostolic". A funny thing (they say) that
you should boast of direct descent from a set of Galilean peasants, when you
have your sailing orders given you by a man dressed in very expensive clothes, who
talks to you down a golden telephone from one of the few really magnificent
palaces left in the world. What bank balances your religious houses have! Is
that apostolic? How consistently clerical influence in politics tells in favor
of the right, rather than the left; is that apostolic? Well, as I say, they have
taken a certain amount of liberty with the word. The word they really want is
not so much apostolic as apostoloid. But we mustn't quarrel with them over
niceties of language. I don't think we need waste much time in discussing
clerical incomes. In some parts of the world, it may be the clergy do themselves
too well; in others, they are miserably poor. In England, I think we strike a
fair mean; we don't live too well, considering that we are bachelors. There is
more substance, I should say, in the accusation that a clerical party in
politics is usually a party of the right. There is a terrible lot to be said about
that on both sides, and I have allowed myself exactly no time for dealing with
it. Let me only say this; that it is a good rule in life not to show the
weaknesses which people expect you to show--it makes them take more notice. We are
suspected, we Catholics, of having too little sympathy for the poor, for the
under-dog. It is important, I think, for Catholics, whatever their views, not
to justify that impression, sometimes by living too luxuriously, sometimes by thinking
too explosively.
One, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic; those have always been the marks of the
true Church; always will be, whatever we do or don't do about it. But, if you
and I are to be true samples by which the quality of our Church can be judged, we
have to be lovers of unity, generous in our dealings with God, generous in our
attitude towards men who do not agree with us, and, in such measure as
circumstances and opportunities allow, apostoloid.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links:
• IgnatiusInsight.com Author Page for Monsignor Ronald Knox
• Review of The Belief of Catholics | Carl E. Olson
• Ronald Knox, Apologist | Carl E. Olson
• Motherhood of the Entire Church | Henri de Lubac, S.J.
• Converts and Saints | An Interview with Joseph Pearce
• On the Papacy, John Paul II, and the Nature of the Church |
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• Exploring the Catholic Faith! | An Interview with Diane Eriksen
• Understanding The Hierarchy of Truths | Douglas Bushman, S.T.L.
Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was the son
of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester and it appeared that he, being both
spiritually perceptive and intellectually gifted, would also have a successful
life as an Anglican prelate. But while in school in the early 1900s Knox
began a long struggle between his love for the Church of England and his
growing attraction to the Catholic Church. He converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-nine, became a priest, and
wrote numerous books on spiritual and literary topics, including
The Belief of Catholics, Captive Flames:
On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes, The Hidden
Stream: The Mysteries of the Christian Faith, Pastoral
and Occasional Sermons, and many more. For more on the life and work of Monsignor Knox, especially his apologetic endeavors, see
Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter and the Popish
Creed, by Fr. Milton Walsh, an expert on Knox. Also, visit Knox's IgnatiusInsight.com author page
for further info.
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