Cultivating the Soil 

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series on Catholic culture.

How to account for the Good News of Jesus Christ? The short answer is the Holy Ghost, who, in the words of the poet Hopkins, “with warm breast and with ah! bright wings,” hovers about a broken world, and in whose fiery descent deigns to give birth to men and women annealed in Christ through the sacrament of Baptism.  

That portal being the obvious point of entry to eternal life, nothing is more important than that initial moment when the Spirit inserts the soul into Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church. “The final mutation,” is how Pope Benedict XVI described it, “in the evolution of the human species”—the launching pad, as it were, for an ultimate rendezvous with God on the far side of death.

But there is also another, no less necessary, work performed by this same Spirit, and that is to assist in giving birth to institutions annealed in an analogous way to a life rooted in Christ. This is done in order that the social order itself might, in some visible way, be conscripted to support and sustain the promises made in Baptism. And because it is an integrated and harmonious life Christ came into the world to share, to spread abroad and communicate, it is not unfitting that even institutions be permitted to participate in that same largesse. 

Such institutions exist, moreover, not merely to ratify the importance of the Good News, since otherwise the world is at liberty to think it not so good, but to try and raise up a culture as amenable to the Good News as our cooperation with God’s grace can make possible.

After all, as Glenn Olsen reminds us in an incisive historical summary of the meaning of Christian culture, a subject to which he has devoted a lifetime’s study as both scholar and professor: 

A full Christian life is one lived out in one’s art, one’s politics, the form one’s city takes, and any check placed on public expression of one’s Christianity is an attack on the possibility of living an integrated life, an attempt to disallow Christian maturation.

In other words, the stage on which the individual Christian is expected to live out the promises implicit in his being baptized mustn’t become an impediment to that life; but rather, it should be an inducement to live it more fully. And while maturation in the Faith can succeed even in a social order that prohibits the practice of virtue—indeed, as the poet W.H. Auden once put it, “legislation remains helpless against the wild prayer of longing”—it is not unreasonable to ask of the social order that it not throw up roadblocks to discourage ordinary Christians from trying to grow in virtue.

But why exactly, in giving an account of the Good News, must there be these two elements? The answer is twofold: because we are neither angels nor animals; we are composite human beings, endowed by God with a psychosomatic unity enabling us to operate on two distinct but not wholly separate planes. Neither flesh nor spirit are to predominate, but rather, an ensemble of the two, exquisitely joined in such a way as to harmonize both body and soul. 

We are, as Pascal would say, the middle term poised between time and eternity, Earth and Heaven; thus, we are not reducible either to pure spirit or crude matter. And how plaintively we cry out for that harmony and integration which only the grace of Jesus Christ can give.  

All of which, incidentally, is of a piece with an understanding of the Church as entirely open to the world, as outward and expansive, driven by an irreducibly exoteric impulse at every turn. She is not the least bit fastidious, as though Christianity were a Gentlemen’s Club to which only those whose hands were never soiled need apply. Her hunger for souls, therefore, will be as wide as creation itself, even as it remains as deep and generous as redemption. 

Not to put too flippant a spin on the matter, what the Church has done throughout her history is to exercise a certain consecrated promiscuity, in which the net is thrown far and wide in the hope of gathering up everyone. Unlike that Groucho Marx quip in which he claims never to want to belong to a club that would have someone like him as a member, Mother Church is eager to embrace everyone, including Groucho Marx. 

What have been her marching orders from the beginning? Nothing less than to go out and baptize the whole blooming world. Leave it to the angels to sort the good from the bad, which leaves her the far less exacting task of simply gathering up everybody, urging everyone to get on the boat. She is less the martinet than she is the mother, evincing endless solicitude for all in need of her ministrations. In this she resembles the great Bernini Colonnade that surrounds St. Peter’s, her arms outstretched to welcome home all who have lost their way.

Could there be any solidarity among men more complete or comprehensive than this? Here is a kind of kinship with others that is both absolute and universal, one that stretches right to the edge of doom. As Joseph Ratzinger tells us in his masterful exposition of the Apostles Creed, Introduction to Christianity, the central and defining formula of faith is not, “’I believe in something,’ but ‘I believe in [Someone].’ It is the encounter with the man Jesus, and in this encounter, it experiences the meaning of the world as a person.” 

If Ratzinger is right about this, and that this truly is the defining experience of what it means to be a Christian, then what happens when this encounter with the human being Jesus is raised to the level of culture? So that not only is man in his interiority captured for Christ but that in belonging to Christ, who is now the ground and mainstay of his life, all of reality—including the public and social sphere in which he lives and moves—belongs to Christ as well. Nothing human may be seen as alien to God, who wishes to sanctify all that touches upon the life of man.  

“Grace,” exclaims the poet Hopkins, “rides time like a river.” It does not merely hover above the flux, nor skim the surface, leaving untouched the depths below. No, grace aims to penetrate and plunge right down to the bottom, filling all things with Christ, which includes all the forms and fixtures of a culture intended by God to aid in the sanctification of men.  

We can only bloom where we are planted. So, our job as finite beings—rooted in the soil of this world while yet being summoned to an infinite and eternal destiny—is to provide the best possible soil—i.e., a culture: a soul rendered so receptive to the seed of the Gospel that when planted it will produce enough blooms to flower an entire world.