Part 4
It is easier to drop the counting of years and go outside time. Created will exists, and has power of itself. In part it has made the evil choice, it has turned away from the Creative Will which is both its source and goal. It has become evil. It is at war with good. There is war in heaven. Michael and his angels fight against the dragon; and the dragon fights and his angels, but they prevail not, neither is their place found any more in heaven. “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan ... he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.... Woe to the inhabiters of the earth, and of the sea: for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”
Evil, in itself, must die, since life subsists alone in God. Therefore every existence cut off from him must end. The dragon must perish apart from the Lord and Giver of life, his only hope is to establish an indirect and factitious union with his God in time. This he achieves through the material universe with which he is able to ally himself and which itself is sustained by God. He maintains his life through the elements—he becomes the Prince of the Power of the Air.
He enters the cycle of evolution, and we can follow his trail through natural law—in the cruelty and futility of nature, which we cannot believe formed part of her Creator’s original design. As life develops, becomes more subtle, rich and various, we see the adversary’s growth more explicitly revealed, till at last in animal consciousness, with its capacity for fury and pain, he attains a new power and satisfaction. The world is like a beautiful tree with a worm gnawing at its roots—twisting, stunting, and warping it, so that the fruit shrivels among the wilting leaves. Jömungund gnaws at the root of Yggdrasil.
But a new wonder happens upon the earth. To consciousness is added mind and will. Created will makes a new appearance—in time. Here is a great new opportunity, both for good and evil. If the adversary can obtain power over this new form of conscious will, he can prolong indefinitely his own life and activity—perhaps even obtain once more a holding in eternal things, by means of this new creature which has been made in the image of God. On the other hand, man may by a right use of his free will redeem the world, save nature from her curse of cruelty and futility, and set her free to return to the kingdom of God. Then the evil one and his angels would fail and perish—they would be cast out of earth as before they were cast out of heaven, and be unable to maintain any longer through creation their illicit hold on life.
These were the issues, and the myths of many races tell us how mankind failed to rise to his high calling. Instead of devoting the sword of his free will to the service of good, and assuring thereby the overthrow of evil in time as it had been overthrown in eternity, man, thinking thereby to serve himself, turned it to the service of evil. Thus evil, defeated in eternity, became victorious in time. The adversary’s power, till then bound by the limited consciousness of animal life, was enormously increased by its new hold on human mind and will. He was now the Prince of this World, its ruler and potentate, and would inevitably have destroyed it if the Almighty King of Heaven had not decided that evil should not triumph even in time—that mankind’s lost battle should be fought over again, and won.
By assuming our manhood, God fought our lost battle over again in his own person, and won it for us, redeeming not only ourselves but the kingdom of nature which we had betrayed. The serpent’s head was bruised—he lost his kingdom. He has no more real power even in time—he is bound by time and must end in time. The Prince of this World is judged.
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This is only a dream of good and evil, of the mystery of their conflict. It is only a theory, a guess at the explanation of the apparently distorted processes of nature, and the slavery of mankind to the elements of the world. The eternal issues between good and evil have been fought outside time, by beings of a different nature from ourselves, in that symbolic heavenly war wherein Michael and his angels triumphed over the devil and his angels. In that conflict the victory is already won by the forces of good. Evil is already cast out of the eternal sphere, neither is its place found any more in heaven. There is no dualism in the Christian religion, no setting of Satan against God as Ahriman is set against Ormuzd in the Persian myth. For evil is definitely cast out and trampled under the foot of triumphant Godhead. It has only a secondary and limited existence—in time; whereas good is primary, unlimited and eternal.
In time, the forces of good are in conflict with the forces of evil, though outside time their victory is won. Michael and his angels still have need to succour and defend us on earth, and their power lies in the fact that they also do continual service in heaven. Their power is not secondary and limited by time as is the power of their adversary and ours—it derives from an eternal source, it is the same power that overthrew the Dragon on the plains of heaven—the power of God.
The power of the dragon lies in the life he is able to absorb from creation—from ourselves—just as the meteor owes its light to its passing through our earth’s atmosphere. In one of Dr. M. R. James’s ghost stories there is a spectre which makes itself a body out of some bedclothes, but is unable to injure its victim, as its strength lies entirely in the medium it has chosen, which is merely a bundle of linen. So the harm that evil can do is merely a question of the body it acquires. It rests with us whether it embodies itself in our highest thoughts and strivings or can do no more than frighten us with a bogey made of our discarded primitive instincts. Its most common embodiment is in the elements of our human psychology which we inherit from our animal ancestors—the grave clothes that the risen man has cast aside.
In our fight against evil we fight against what is merely temporary, parasitic and doomed, and on our side are forces which are primary, self-existing and eternal. On our side are the unchanging stars in their order, and our adversary is only the meteor that streaks the sky for a moment of earth-derived brightness, falls and is lost.
November _Month of the Holy Souls_
There is a great silence over all the land. The furrows hold in stillness the new seed—brown, bare, and earth-smelling, they keep the secret of the life that has been buried in them. There is darkness too. At night the galaxy has faded from the sky—here and there rarely some greater lamp shines through the mists that veil the zenith, but more often even the moon herself is hidden, fog-wrapped, a mere dim spilling of light into the clouds. By day too the mists hang thick. The earth lies motionless and silent under a veil. Trees and hedges near at hand are hidden away or only loom occasionally through the mists as monstrous, unnatural shapes. There is something terrifying about the familiar barns and haystacks that the mist has blotted into ghostliness. The dimness and the silence bring a sense of fear, as of a land changed. Yet it is only the exhalations of the earth that have given this sinister, mysterious cast to loved, familiar objects. A gleam of sunlight falls upon the mists, and for a moment they part and show us the waiting furrow, and the hedgerows pearled with moisture and bloomed with a soft, spring-like purple that reminds us of March’s brave passional livery of redemption. Though despoiled, and bound, the earth is not dead, and in her already a new harvest sleeps.
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“For thou, O Lord, changest, but takest not away the life of thy people....” They are changed, they have gone from us, the mists of earth hide them from us and give to their loved, familiar personalities a touch of the sinister, of ghostliness. If we would let her, the earth would make them ghosts. But as our prayers strive through the mists that veil not them but us, a gleam of sunlight falls, and for a moment we catch a glimpse of them in their passional livery of redemption, waiting there under the altar, the prisoners of hope. “Turn ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope.”
They are changed. They no longer look into the same mirror as ourselves, the mirror of nature where supernature lies reflected as in a glass darkly. They do not yet see face to face, but theirs is no longer the mirror of the months, where together with divine things strange troubling things of earth are shown, where often Narcissus sees but his own image calling him down into the well of shadows. Their mirror, though a reflector only, is unclouded and cannot deceive. They have escaped out of the deceiver’s power, and can no longer be touched by the evil that preys on the world. They have left that evil behind in space and time, by virtue of him who for their sake assumed space and time that he might bind with them the enemy of eternity.
They are changed. They have entered as it were into a new function as mediators, for they are now a link between us and those unknown worlds whose complexity makes the unity of creation. We cannot limit our conception of life to beings like ourselves. If they live, and we know that they live, they do not live as we do, but manifest themselves in other ways and under other conditions. Spirit and manifestation—the first is always the same, the latter is constantly changing. But spirit shall never be without manifestation—that truth was proclaimed for all time in Joseph of Arimathea’s garden, and is preserved for all time in the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body. We shall not live as the helpless and futile shades of a Greek paradise, but as body and spirit, though that idea of a body need not bind us to the body as we know it now. The body of the springing corn in May is very different from the body of the seed that was cast into the November furrow, but it is as much the corn as ever was the seed—indeed it is more, for in the seed the idea of the corn slept undeveloped, uncertain and incomplete. Nevertheless the body of the springing corn was formed invisibly in the seed, and invisibly in the bodies of our flesh that spiritual body of our glory may be forming itself even now, waiting for the sowing in the ground which shall set it free to grow and lift itself out of the bondage of the earth into the liberty of the sun.
They are changed. They are learning perhaps painfully to develop this new body, from which the husk has fallen away. As yet they have not the new vehicle, though they have lost the old, their spirit fumbles for its manifestation in that Mediatory Kingdom where they wait. They are prisoners, but they are prisoners of hope, for their new faculties and powers are forming themselves in that unknown land. Once again, as it were, they go through the processes of birth, as at the beginning of their earthly life they went through them in their mother’s womb. A new body is forming itself in the shelter of that land we call Purgatory, where evil cannot seize upon the growing form as it seized upon that which was cast off. For those who escape the bondage of the earth, the Old Testament fierceness of natural law, the continual harrying and preying of evil seeking to maintain its life parasitically through ours, Purgatory even if viewed as a place of retribution as well as of cleansing must also be a place of refreshing, light and peace.
For there only good wills move in an orderly growth, an evolution which sin has not corrupted and debased. There the mists of earth can no longer hide from us the stars which are the burning of spirits aflame with the love of God, the angelic hierarchies that fill a universe in which our earth and its humanity holds only a small space. The shelter of the furrow is paradoxically the freedom of the sky. The prisoner of hope is the freeman of love.
December _Month of the Incarnation_
The earth has gone back to the beginning. Her secrets are locked up. The year’s tale is told. She lies at the end of the months as she lay at the beginning—still and frozen, wrapped in the swaddling clothes of frost and snow. The beginning and the ending are the same.
There seems to be neither growth nor change nor life in the iron-hard soil, powdered here and there with snow, in the bare hedges and the barren woods, in the ponds that are black under their bondage of ice. Even the sun in the heavens stands still at his winter solstice. The glory and bravery of summer are almost unimaginable—it is hard to remember the changes of the months—the kindling gleam of February, the brightness of the April garden, the whiteness of the May-day hedgerow, the calm, star-lit seas of August, the fruitful golden trees of September. All have ended as they began in this darkness and stillness. The year’s tale is told, and the beginning and the ending are the same.
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The months end as they began—with the Child. In December we meet the Child again, the Child of January, the Child who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord. In this Child the Christian faith begins and ends. All the doctrines of Councils, all the learning of doctors, all the disputations of scholars, all the splendour of creeds, have their beginning and ending in the Child born of the Virgin Mary. The Christian Gospel is simply the Gospel of the Incarnation—of the New Life born of a Virgin into the world, redeeming man from his bondage to the Law which was added because of transgressions—making him a citizen of a new and heavenly kingdom and a partaker of a new and heavenly nature—redeeming through him the rest of creation, of which he was first appointed a mediator, so that there shall be in eternity not only a new heaven but a new earth—an earth set free from the bondage of sin that held her in time, her processes redeemed for mercy, her creatures redeemed for joy.
It is this and nothing less than this that the New Life comes to accomplish—the first life having been corrupted by the enemy, and mankind having failed to fulfil his appointed purpose of restorer and healer. By virtue of the Incarnation of the Son of God, there is now a new power working in the world towards its at-onement with its maker. The Divine Humanity of our Lord, both superseding and containing ours, has already fulfilled the purposes of God for us, and through it we have union with God and are accounted his obedient sons, with power to co-operate in his eternal work.
The New Life works through the old. It uses matter in the way it was originally intended—as the vehicle and manifestation of spirit. Through Christ even the earth knows the glory of the Resurrection of her body. As long ago water gave birth to life, so now water is made the vehicle of the new birth and supernatural life—“Therefore do I hallow thee, O thou gift of water,” says the Priest at the Blessing of the Font on Holy Saturday, “by God the faithful, by God the holy, by God who in the beginning by his word divided the land from thee, by whose Spirit the waters were overshadowed.” As bread and wine have been the bodily food of man, giving strength and joy to his flesh, preserving his body in life, so now they are made his spiritual food, giving strength and joy to his soul, preserving his body and soul unto everlasting life. By natural modes they have been assimilated by man’s body and made a part of his humanity, and now by spiritual modes they are assimilated by God and made a part of his divine humanity. “Hear us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech thee, and grant that we receiving these thy creatures of bread and wine according to thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ’s holy institution ... may be partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood.”
The Sacraments go down to the very roots of creation—they go further down than our humanity, though our humanity is the means by which they descend, thus restoring it to its original mediatory purpose. Water, bread and wine—the elements and our own uses of the elements, inorganic and organic nature—are made the vehicles of supernatural life. Thus we are brought into a wonderful and mystical union between the earth and ourselves and the divine. Instead of remaining a creation at issue and enmity with itself and separated from God, we become a creation working together in mutual love and co-operation in union with God. Thus is the atonement wrought between God and man and the earth.
For our redemption is not only nearer but wider than we believed, and includes not only humanity but the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together.... It is not only in poetry but in truth that the Priest bids nature join in his thanksgiving after every Mass. “Let us sing the song of the Three Children which they sang when they blessed the Lord in the furnace of fire.” And the Song of the Three Holy Children, redeemed from the furnace, is also the song of earth redeemed: “O let the earth bless the Lord, yea let it praise him and magnify him for ever.... O ye mountains and hills bless ye the Lord.... O all ye green things upon the earth bless ye the Lord.... O ye wells bless ye the Lord.... O ye seas and floods.... O all ye fowls of the air.... O all ye beasts and cattle—join to-day with the angels and with the priests of the Lord, with the servants of his sanctuary and the spirits and souls of the righteous, with all holy and humble men of heart, in singing the song of our redemption which we sing in the midst of the furnace of fire, praising and magnifying him for ever.”
“The angel of the Lord came down into the oven and smote the flame of the fire out of the oven; and made the midst of the furnace as it had been a moist whistling wind. Then the three, as out of one mouth praised, glorified and blessed God in the furnace, saying: Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our fathers, and to be praised and exalted above all for ever.”
The heart of the burning fiery furnace has become Joseph of Arimathea’s garden—the garden of the new earth and of the new spring, the blessed country where all the works of the Lord praise the Lord, the home of the children of men, of the holy souls and of the angels, where the risen Christ stands between the sun and moon, and greets the Church of his new creation with “Peace be unto you.”
● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).