Anscar Vonier - The Spirit and the Bride

THE SPIRIT AND THE BRIDE

BY

DOM ANSCAR VONIER, O.S.B.

ABBOT OF BUCKFAST

Assumption Press

2013

Nihil Obstat.

Innocentius Apap, S.Th.M., O.P., Censor Deputatus.

Imprimatur.

Joseph Butt, Vic. Gen.

Westminster

September 17, 1935

The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur agree with the content, opinions or statements expressed.

This book was originally published in 1935 by Burns, Oates, and Washbourne.

Copyright 2013 Assumption Press.

Cover image: Pentecte, Jean II Restout, 1732

Many friends have repeatedly asked me to write a book on the Holy Ghost. A very short period of thought on the subject has convinced me of the futility of treating of the Holy Ghost without at the same time speaking of the Church; it would be tantamount to giving a theological exposition on the Second Person of the Trinity without mentioning the Incarnation. Hence the double name under which this book goes forth. Obviously the passage in the last chapter of St. Johns Apocalypse has suggested the title: And the Spirit and the Bride say: Come (Rev 22:17). The Spirit is the Holy Ghost and the Bride is the Church.

Perhaps more than one reader will complain that he does not find in this book the usual clear descriptions of the marks of the Church, oneness, holiness, catholicity, apostolicity. It has been the writers chief effort to present the Church as the manifest work of the Holy Ghost, nay, even as the evidence of the Holy Ghosts presence. He does not think that having approached the Church theology from this angle he has neglected any of the essential aspects that belong to an orthodox treatise de Ecclesia, though the matter may have a less systematic arrangement.

I have noticed with a feeling of pain how several recent books by Catholic writers of fame make a distinction that is a surrender to Protestant feeling between the ideal Church and the real Church. Being themselves very orthodox Catholics the writers in question abound, of course, in their encomiums of the beauty of the Church conceived ideally. But after that they seem to gloat on the Churchs human infirmities, piling it on and letting the Protestant have it his own way with his century-old fault-finding. Different, indeed, was the mentality of the Vatican Council which considered the Church in her actuality to be a testimonium irrefragibile , a witness that cannot be gainsaid, of her divine mission:

The Church, through herself, on account of her admirable extension ( propagationem ), her exceeding sanctity ( eximiam sanctitatem ), her inexhaustible stability, is a great and everlasting motive of credibility and a witness to her divine mission that cannot be gainsaid (Vatican I, Sess. III, cap. 3, 7).

The Council means, of course, the actual living Church, not an ideal, or a mere system of the means of sanctification. To say the least, it is very bad taste on the part of a Catholic to represent Catholicism as a divine religion and to speak of Catholics as having been the worlds worst sinners. Such flippancy ought not to be tolerated any longer. The eximia sanctitas , exceptional holiness, which the last of the General Councils perceived in the Church is the true portrait of what exists. In this book I have followed the guidance of the greatest Church assembly of modern times.

In any literature on the Church there occurs a difficulty which had better be met at once in this Foreword.

The point at issue is what can be denominated hypostatizing of the Church, that is to say the practice of speaking of her as of a person. She is called the Bride, to confine ourselves to the title of the book. Now such hypostatizings are familiar to human literature and to popular imagination. Countries are given personal names; they are even loved as beautiful figures, chiefly of the female gender. Instances are at hand, but need not be quoted. Is this process of hypostatizing more justified, has it a truer basis than is the case with national affection and racial idealism? It is, of course, evident that with regard to the Church the idealization took place long before it existed in national sentiment: it is as old as Christianity. But whatever may be the psychological explanation of this process in ordinary human life, it is certain that there is in the Church an element which is unique and cannot be found in nature. The Spirit of God, a divine Person, is to the scattered Christian souls of all times and all climes a bond of life and union that is not thinkable elsewhere. The presence of that Spirit amongst the faithful, as I hope to show in this book, is more than the separate sanctification of many thousands, nay, many millions, of individual souls. There is the mystery of the one life: nature has nothing analogous. To give the Church the name of Bride is more than literature. It is a theological necessity. Without such a name or its equivalent we could never know the true relationship between the Church and Christ, we could not express the special operation of the Spirit who came down at Pentecost.

ANSCAR VONIER, O.S.B., Abbot .

BUCKFAST, Pentecost, 1935

When Catholics profess that they are a Church, they assume a very heavy responsibility. It is as if a group of men came together and constituted themselves into a well-defined society with an unmistakable nomenclature and then proceeded to proclaim to the world at large that they were an invincible set of heroes whose corporate existence no power on earth could terminate. In protesting that they are a Church, Catholics are committing themselves to a pretension not less rash, nay, immensely more daring. They say to all men who are willing to listen, and even shout it into the ears of those who are unwilling, that they are a divinely constituted society which is quite proof against any dissolving agency, so that for endless aeons there never will be a hostile power strong enough to pull it down or to sap its foundations.

They go even further and pretend that this society of theirs gives at all times such signs of its excellence that its divine character becomes manifest. To do this, as we have said, is to assume an appalling responsibility. It is to invite trouble, to ask for hostility, to provoke criticism of the bitterest kind and to set all the rest of humanity on a course of merciless fault-finding. Who would not, with a scream of exultation, hold up before all eyes the sins of a society that proclaims itself divine? If Christians had never embarked on this incredible claim to be a divinely created society, how much more comfortable things would have been! Their shortcomings, far from scandalizing the world, would have brought forth from mens hearts the balm of human sympathy; they would have been treated with utmost indulgence. After all, to sin is only human, even in the case of those who have faith in a God Incarnate. But, says the world, if you maintain amongst us the intolerable claim that you are a Church, a society of elect spirits, a corporate power with a right to dictate in the matters of the soul and in the concerns of the conscience, an indestructible association of men with a divine call, then be ready to suffer the consequences of so provocative a pose. Every one of your weaknesses, every sin committed by you, we shall contemplate with pleasure; we shall dance with joy over your moral frailties, because the clay feet of the idol will have revealed themselves.

Let us consider how easy would be the lot of Christians if every one of them were an isolated mystic, a budding idealist following an entirely solitary road. For the Christian who has no brethren in Christ except in the vaguest sense, the scandal of the Cross is greatly reduced; Christ in Himself may be all that the most imaginative Christian can desire. His divinity will create no real objections. His miracles will be taken on their own merits, His resurrection and ascension will not arouse an animus in men, because, after all, if it so happened, why not leave it at that? The Christian, without anyone either on his right hand or his left to be connected with him, will make his best of such a Christ. He may rise to high loyalties towards Him or he may Him most miserably. He may do things in turn. The contests of the spirit, the struggle between Satan and Christ in that soul will not be a concern to alarm the world, though it may be of interest. To such Christians would be applicable the word which Christ Himself spoke of His brethren, His cousins in the flesh: The world cannot hate you (John 7:7). Hatred begins there where power or the pretension to power begins: But me it hateth, because I give testimony of it, that the works thereof are evil (John 7:7). Let there be a group of men to whom the same truths concerning Christ are a bond of unity, are as the breath of life, then the benevolent tolerance of the outsider will suddenly become fierce enmity. It is certain that at no time, even in the days of Nero, would Christians have been persecuted if they had not been dreaded, if they had not stood in the way of someones ambition or folly, if, above all, they had not been suspected of being a band of conspirators, a union of sinister forces. It was not clear at all times to the enemies of Christianity to what degree Christians were constituting one compact spiritual society; but the adversaries of the Christian name knew enough to make them uneasy; they realized that they had to do with an organized force. Persecutions of all times and of every scale of severity were directed against a power, not against the individual and dispersed votaries of an impalpable faith.