Vision of Eternal Joy

...but after moral purgation, a divine tide ran through the purified channel...

...and the silent, humble, inconspicuous wife of Patricius...

...There is no need to exaggerate the peril...

...But here both Aristotle and Plato are teachers who have found their masters...

...So we draw near the end, and behold a Being marvelously fair, for whose sake all previous labors have been undergone, almost unaware: One whose pulchritude can never be born nor perish, nor imagined after the fashion of all witcheries of corporeities and knowledges, since He dwells in naught but in Himself...

...In his great recent encyclical, Ad Salutem, the Holy Father observes that instead of employing the discoveries of modern science to enlarge the reign of Christ and promote our own spiritual advancement we are building up an epicurean civilization in a spirit of indifference to our final destiny and even to our true happiness on earth...

...silence in which creatures confess: "We have not been our creator, but have been created by Him who abides forever...

...I still remember with what emotion I heard Mass, years ago, at Bone, the new city almost on the site of Hippo, in the church possessing the relic of the saint's arm—the arm which wrote so much for the betterment of mankind...

...It is worth noting that the expression "Beatific Vision" is potentially included in the words, "in that vision and beatitude...

...and still, as Augustine said in his book, On the Trinity: "Why do we go forth and run to the heights of heaven and to the lowest parts of the earth seeking Him who is within, if we wish to be with Him...

...ethical abnormalities are far from being abhorred...

...After a pause they attempt a new ascension, meditating not upon the power of silence, but the way opened to the Divine Word, by universal silence—silence of the flesh, of the earth, of thought itself...

...youth openly repudiates ideals...

...Now in an era of Christianity, thinkers pretending to be progressive, but nevertheless retrogressive, are trying to promote the libido, as the fountain of a chaotic life, which shall not have as an excuse ignorance of the glad and pure tidings from Nazareth...

...repression is held to be a mistake, causing degenerative illness...

...Monica and Augustine are together before a casement, which offers to their view a garden of flowers and fruits and wafts to them perfumed breath from the aged Italian soil...

...A new man appeared in whom God really abided—magister intus est—and Augustine, now despising a fame he had so greedily sought, nevertheless obtained it to such a degree that he is eminent even now in the opinion of men...

...From visible things, she says, we have to rise to the invisible...

...It is great enough...

...The foreign seeress, as daring as a suffragette...

...and if there be any man who is immortal, that man is he...

...The "interior man" has almost disappeared...

...Never was the time more opportune for recapitulating the fundamental principles underlying the Christian faith...

...It is, of course, no mere coincidence that the Eucharistic Congress met this year at Carthage, where the son of Monica studied and taught, and near which lay Hippo, his episcopal see...

...Now we set sail with Plato on the ocean of sciences, and if we wax strong and become experienced mariners, we discover that the ocean is one, though the waves are many...

...Their sense of mystery in things," said James, "their passion, their goodness irradiate about them and enlarge their outlines while they soften them...

...After "conversing alone very pleasantly," they inquired between themselves "of what nature the eternal life of the saints would be, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard...

...And the chain itself is visible in the glorious transformation of Augustine, the "saint of so many tears...

...Since the close of the war ignorance seems to prevail...

...What they drink is only their tears...

...Then the fluttering of this silence itself being hushed, both Monica and Augustine hear "the still and small voice," starting from the Infinite and alone able to satiate the inexhaustible aspiration of the soul, the soliloquy without tongue, the sound without resounding, but the Word essential, the Word of words...

...It is no wonder that the Orient, from which Manes and Manicheanism issued, now sends us apostles of wild superstitions which are but species of agnosticism hiding under the cloak of inexact science and mendacious thaumaturgy...

...Strange it is that in the Platonic fiction, as well as in Christian experience, woman plays a most important role: Diotima and Monica...

...These Augustine had indicated with the courage of the lion and the gentleness of the lamb...

...And begetting and rearing virtue as his child, he must needs become the friend of God...

...She does not impose on her son the precepts of a proud wisdom, as Diotima did on Socrates, but only admonishes him to lead a pure and Christian life...

...The same errors attempt to profit in their assault by a similar restlessness...

...This malefic present from our perverted nature, Plato advises us to drop into the hands of our senses (so to say) and when we have done this he bids us then break away from the senses themselves, meaning that we may use them, but should not live in them...

...machinery tends to render our life more and more materialistic...

...Let us compare them...

...then: How greatly must creative souls desire that partnership and close communion with other souls as fair, as they may bring to birth a brood of lofty thoughts, poems, statues, institutions, laws—the fitting progeny of the soul...

...In the same manner as Aristotle is constantly quoted in the Summa of Aquinas, Plato appears in the philosophical treatises written by the author of The Confessions...

...The actual development of psychology is consistently toward a naturalistic view of human behavior...

...Monica's sobs have been heard by God...

...a "new morality," which is equivalent to organized demoralization, is widely preached by men and women sophists...

...No strain, a dignified simplicity...

...Though a heathen, Plato lays as the foundation of his philosophy the elimination of the libido, product of original sin, not yet named in his time but well realized...

...Naturalism is at the gate, if not in the heart of, the city...

...To them this is no longer a thing of words but a fact experienced...

...Good will is not lacking in contemporary life, but men live too much according to their senses and in the external world...

...Masked by other names, the heresies Augustine combated again lift up their perfidious heads...

...Through him the highest human wisdom speaks, purified and illuminated by the Holy Spirit...

...Usually silent, when she speaks it is not before an audience and her main eloquence resides in her hidden virtues...

...Or deemst thou not that alone it will be possible for this man, discerning spiritual beauty, to beget no shadows of virtue, since that is not shadow to which he clings, but virtue in very truth, since he has the very truth in his embrace...

...Mother's and son's spiritual argosy pierces the cloud of corporeal things, soars above the sky, above the sun, moon, stars, and arrives at their own minds, hovering beyond them, up to the feet of that Wisdom, by whom all those things are made, but who is not made—He always was and shall ever be...

...When the film fell from his spiritual eye, his genius took on the splendor of inspiration and truth...

...How human and divine they are 1 Augustine at first declares that the purest and the brightest satisfaction of the senses appears—by reason of the diaphaneity and sweetness in the life of the saints—worthy not even of mention...

...The eternal Wisdom speaks to His favorite children without the instrumentality of human or angelic language, without the obscurity of similitude...

...According to her consistent doctrine, she begins by advancing "the absolute inadequacy of the satisfaction of our most profound desire," regarding the objects offered us by the senses...

...The saintly Bishop of Hippo was a demonstration of his own doctrine anent grace cooperating with free will...

...Saints are saints because they realize it...

...Of the other, of Diotima, we do not know the deeds and the whereabouts...

...modern psychology is naturalistic...

...subservience to brutish instincts appears to have become the fashion...

...Being now refreshed by its waters, they can travel higher...

...Thus they begin their spiritual uprising from the elevation attained by Platonic wisdom, but with past experience and with new wings...

...But we know, even in her venial faults, the pious and sober existence of the motherly saint...

...On the other hand many have substituted prejudice and hypocrisy for stalwart faith...

...Even the fair form has given precedence to the noble mind, till the student is stimulated to recognize that the beauty inherent in all souls is akin...

...In Book IX, Chapter 10, of Augustine's Confessions, we are not sitting at a banquet, among emulating orators, aroused by the applause of the convives...

...we see only a mother and a son, Monica and Augustine, in a little Italian town...

...Thus the colloquy on Eternal Blessedness had been anticipated by Plato's Symposium...

...That virtue, but speculative and verbal, in which Diotima's discourse culminates, Monica especially had long practised, and both she and her son know repentance and atonement, facts natural and supernatural unknown by the Greeks...

...His work still abides, winning over the heart of the sinner and even making an impression on the obdurate...

...Each new encyclical of the Holy Father is an answer to some spiritual need of the epoch and this last is no exception...

...she thunders from a cold, clear intellectual sky...

...The reason why this is so begins to be perceived dimly by those who have studied the superconscious with the "sense divine," to use Gratry's phrase, the superconscious in us which is the human channel of eternal grace...

...His age and ours have in common an almost universal unsettlement...

...Consequently, he detaches himself from a personal choice, to cherish everywhere the Beauty transcendent and unique...

...They stimulate our mental apathy and guide us to the light...

...At the Ninth International Congress of Psychology, recently held in an important American university, a professor declared that behaviorism and Freudianism are the two principal forms of modern psychology, and he was almost unanimously approved...

...Augustine on the occasion of the fifteenth centenary of his death...

...Slightly touching the hem of His robe, they sigh and leave bound, as too precious a harvest, "the first-fruits of the Spirit," and "return to the noise of their own mouth" where the word uttered has both beginning and end...

...Station by station, the pilgrimage through the "within" has been accomplished...

...And yet, more than Ambrose and Athanasius, more than Plato, she renewed the mind of the one who was, thanks to her tears, to become a doctor and saint...

...In the Symposium, Plato attributed a poetical outline of spiritual advancement to a mysterious foreign woman, Diotima, a Mantinean, he said, but perhaps a Druidess wandering from a Borean country under the Hellenic sun...

...virtue is without much positive meaning for a supposedly scientific era...

...On the contrary, Plato, at the incipiency of the journey through the beyond within and above us, advises us to liberate our being from the "evil wish," ugly addition to our personality, which we must reject if we want to be sound...

...However it may be, "the Kingdom of God is within...

...Prior to his conversion, Augustine's superconscious self, as we say today, poured out upon the world troubled though sparkling waters...

...The great bishop, Bossuet, alluding to the two verities of grace and free will which sometimes appear to us difficult to coordinate, declared, "I firmly hold the two ends of the chain...

...Freud, Jung, Watson and their disciples deify our passions through a decree of false science...

...Then, anew, they sigh, because all this has been but for a moment And, eager to regain it, they cry, "Was not this, 'enter thou into the joy of the Lord?' " William James would have called this a supreme "religious experience...

...The Mantinean suggests to Socrates: Could man's life be poor and low in that vision and beatitude...

...Our pastors are vigilant...

...VISION OF ETERNAL JOY By H. A. JULES-BOIS PIUS XI, uniting in his person the authority of the papal office and high competence as an historian, has invited the world to reconsider St...

...And since we have evoked the testimony of by far the best scientist of recent years, let him have here the final word and express our reverence for the saints...

...Diotima has detected that beauty and truth are made only to drive our intellect and heart to Goodness, and so she may solemnly ascertain the primacy of ethics and the imperative obligation of virtue...

...From the first moment they had "opened wide the mouth of their hearts," to drink at "the fountain of life...

...Such is the first degree of the initiation...

...What a difference between the eloquent Manichean rhetorician still enslaved to his senses, and the heroic doctor of the Church he later became, thanks to virtue and grace...

...They are like pictures with an atmosphere and background...

...paganism struggles to reappear...

...they have begotten Augustine a second time, to the life eternal...

...The twice-born son, a man of thirty-three, has gone through hard trials of passions and heresies to reach the truth...

...and this Voice is life in superabundance, limitless knowledge, bliss...

...and placed alongside of them the strong man of this world and no other seems as dry sticks as hard and crude as blocks of stone and brickbats...

...From physical beauty to the splendor of ideas, from ideas to the ideal, up to Being itself, which is the Good...

...He had grown by the divine gift superadded to his personality...