The Lay Reader
Robinson, Henry Morton
AS AN ex-officio observer of affairs spiritual in a great metropolitan university, I am convinced ^ that growing companies of lay students are seeking in the intellectual tradition of the Church...
...They merely want to know as much of that doctrine as their finite intelligence can comprehend...
...Second, it shows a determination to plumb this inexhaustible sea of poetry and philosophy, and to become familiar with the best that has been thought and said concerning the great mysteries and beauties of the Faith...
...Here, too, we read the sermons uf the social-minded Chrysostom and the casuistries of LIguori, and here we first campaigned with Ignatius on his weary marches across Spain...
...we wanted the solid food of the originals...
...It is the ultimate hope of these young men, who have taken Augustine as their model, to lead the cleansing river of Catholic culture into the stables of modern life, to sweep away confusion and bad odors, and, finally, to bring to the attention of 20,000,000 Catholics the fact that the broadest blade of poetry and the stoutest levers of dialectic are peculiarly and incontrovertibly the property of the Catholic ChurchPossibly these young students who have discovered Catholic literature for themselves are doing nothing that the students of a hundred former generations have not done...
...They are the lay readers, the forerunners, let us hope, of a great Catholic revival...
...No one can say precisely how or when the first stirrings were noticed...
...Infinite in beauty, terrible in truth, the vast stores of Catholic culture must be appraised by the lay reader if Catholicism is to flourish and expand vigorously in America...
...No part of the literature or learning or piety of the Church is outside of their province...
...Because the volumes were not to be taken from the room, we had to read them where we found them...
...AS AN ex-officio observer of affairs spiritual in a great metropolitan university, I am convinced ^ that growing companies of lay students are seeking in the intellectual tradition of the Church an appeasement of the hunger that a diet of cellular philosophy has utterly failed to satisfy...
...so declare these stern young giants who will spare neither themselves nor anyone else in mastering the complexities of this greatest of Truths...
...They are the nucleus of a future laity, a laity that will be savagely intolerant of intellectual sloth, a laity to whom the unexamined spiritual life is the not-possible spiritual life...
...That there Is no opposition between faith and the exercise of the intelligence is, of course, a truism, and in the best Catholic tradition it has always been regarded as such...
...But the total impression one gets from their researches, their discoveries and their "papers" is much the same as one gets from reading accounts of Newton's Oxford or Abelard's Paris...
...Personally, I am best acquainted with that little handful of Columbia undergraduates who used to meet nightly in the ill-equipped library of Newman Hall, and there, without coaching or direction, painfully go over five or six pages of Bernard's De Amori Dei, or pluck a blossom or two along the route of Bonaventura's Itinerarium Mentis...
...Let us then begin with logic, and study the syllogism and sorites until we are familiar with the workings of the scholastic mind...
...From that time forward we laid siege to the Paulist bookshelves, and to the great disgust of the librarian we usually found what we were looking for...
...Standing in the murk of this treasure-vault, we read all of Teresa's magical autobiography, and as much of Peter Lombard's Sentences as we could understand...
...But because we could not speak with the tongues of men and angels, our translations somehow did not carry, and now they he In notebooks, waiting to be rephrased Into spirited English by a younger and better race of Catholic students...
...And I have sat in many classrooms (on the infallible side of the desk) trying to conceal my delight when a Young Catholic would take command of a metaphysical discussion, and proceed to give a lucid and cogent presentation of the classic Catholic point of view...
...And thus it goes, each lay reader being most faithful to himself and his religion by employing such faculties as he possesses in scaling the intellectual ladder that the mighty Aquinas thought it a privilege to ascend...
...Naturally, much exegesis is needed, and this can come only from learned specialists...
...Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Texas—these, among others, seem to be most articulate in their utterance of the renaissance...
...And that idea Is concerned not merely with the past, but with every modern development In poHtics, science and literature as it affects the Catholic Church...
...But unfortunately there still persists in some quarters the remnants of a prejudice against the exploring layman, the private citizen whose lean intellectual flank shows that he "thinks too much...
...it has no recognized leaders, and its members are still too young to be completely articulate...
...Languages must be learned, to understand the genesis of forms, concepts, institutions...
...They have determined to examine for themselves the gigantic superstructure of ethics and metaphysics resting upon the foundations of revelation and faith...
...The neoPlatonists and their Logos came in for a good doing, to prepare us for Aquinas on The Word...
...Dialectic is needed...
...The Young Catholics, the shrewdest body of lay readers that has yet come out of America, would destroy the last tendril of this prejudice...
...Young Catholics at the universities are dedicating themselves to the task of rediscovering the literature of the Church, mining it out of obscure theological libraries, translating it when necessary, discussing it excitedly in their clubs and dormitories, and distilling from it an effective antidote to the poisonous folly now streaming from the contemporary press...
...Perhaps it was the influence of a great Catholic-minded instructor (then slowly feeling his way from Canterbury to Rome) who used to meet a few students in his room and read to them from some intricately illuminated Book of Hours, or open a midnight conversation with a provocative comment on Augustine's treatment of the Will...
...I only know that I, among others, felt at Columbia the glowing presence of a new-old Catholic culture whose rays revealed the warped ugliness of much that was neither culture nor Catholic...
...Anselm, the great Albert who made Aquinas's work possible, and the pious Ambrose—we laid them all under contribution, and resolved to translate for posterity anything that seemed to us of striking beauty or truth...
...But the first vibrations of a gestating force are being recognized by a few delicately membraned teachers and by the most sympathetic of the clergy, who regard this return to the golden age of Catholic literature as an important and salutary adventure in education...
...One day Father Riley, the chaplain of Newman Hall, told us about the excellent library of the Paulist community on Fifty-ninth Street...
...It is not a boom, and the young men who are most deeply interested in it are not boosters...
...Animated by a robust spiritual energy, these young men are familiarizing themselves with the source material of Catholic culture...
...From sore need, often in great spiritual anguish, they have been obliged to make their way slowly, in libraries and seminars, as well as in chapels...
...The movement is characterized, first of all, by a lively enthusiasm for Catholic literature, as such...
...But we eschewed mere commentary...
...My friends and I ransacked the Butler library (the gift of Nicholas Murray Butler) and found It rich in Catholic reference works...
...Perhaps these earnest translators of mediaeval hymns and patristic philosophers are only meddling with matters that were best left uncontaminated by the modern touch...
...But actually something had been accomplished, and that accomplishment is only the beginning of a Young Catholic idea which is at this moment spreading over the United States...
...resolving in the quietness of their souls to understand, as far as the human intelligence is able, the beautiful, organic mystery that is the Catholic Church...
...These young men realize that Mencken sounds ludicrously tinny after the eloquence of Lacordaire...
...There are, on the quadrangles of American colleges, literally hundreds of students who will tell you that the pathology of Freud, Adler, and Jung cannot prevail against the calm of Thomas a Kempis, and who know intimately the ramifications of Mercier's great labors In Thomistic psychology...
...And their ratio studiorum is nothing more or less than a word-for-word perusal of the patristic, scholastic and modern literature of Catholicism, None of these young men feel that they have any particular vocation to the priesthood, nor have they any desire to make Christian doctrine a speculative or controversial matter...
...This lay renaissance cannot yet be called a movement...
...And lastly, this band of Young Catholics seems to have a fresh realization of the priceless heritage that the Church confers on her humblest aspirants— a heritage not only of sacramental grace, and of superb liturgical poetry addressed to the eye and ear, but a concrete body of culture as well, sufficient to sustain the most active intelligence and efficacious to soothe the most turbulent spirit...
...What this embryo movement will lead to, who can tell...
...And so the great man, lay or cleric, comes to put his finger on the difficulty and to state the position of the Church...
...Let us have in the speciaHsts, then," cry the students...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 1
