Keep Left for the Church—I

Extract

There must always be a tension in Christianity between the demands of the world and the demands of the Kingdom of God. By her very nature the Church must be forever reminding herself that it is part of her vocation to be potentially subversive of any worldly order of things: and she must also be forever reminding the world of this fact too. But the definition of where this tension ought to fie, in the twentieth century, is not easy. We are still mainly influenced in our conception of it by late medieval and Jansenistic ideas. The spirituality of the Imitation of Christ lingers: ‘Fly the tumultuousness of the world as much as thou canst: for the talk of worldly affairs is a great hindrance, although they be discoursed of with sincere intention ... we are quickly defiled and enthralled with vanity’ (I. 10). The trouble is not that this kind of thinking is in itself bad, but that it is no longer taken seriously. The result is, I believe, catastrophic. Just as D. H. Lawrence was right to criticise the modem world - the product of the cold northern spirit of the Reformation and of the narrowing Catholicism of the counter-Reformation - for being obsessed with ‘sex in the head’, so we are right to criticise Catholicism for being preoccupied with a ‘spirituality in the head’ which is equally false. The essence of this parody of proper spirituality is to think of other-worldliness in terms of a future heaven of disembodied souls, instead of thinking of it as a new heaven which is to grow out of a new earth. Corresponding to this false spirituality is a false morality, according to which the main purpose of the sacramental and prayerful life of the Church is to give us help in living according to the moral law. We are to try to live fully in the body of Christ in order to be able to live according to the code.