The Eternal Priesthood/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV.
THE PRIEST AS PREACHER.
The Council of Trent teaches that preaching is the chief duty of Bishops.[1] S. Paul said of himself: "God sent me not to baptise, but to preach the Gospel."[2] For what is preaching? It is speaking to men in God's Name. It is to declare the Word of God.[3] It is to be ambassadors for Christ.[4] It is "the ministry of reconciliation,"[5] the offer of salvation to men. "For whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. How shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? or how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach unless they be sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, of them that bring glad tidings of good things."[6] How beautiful are the feet of the messenger coming "upon the mountains," as the prophet writes—that is, coming down with a message from the eternal hills.
In the beginning it was the Bishops alone who preached. The needs of the faith compelled them to delegate this, their chief office, to the priesthood. Dionysius the Areopagite calls them therefore illuminators. They were then preachers, messengers, and evangelists. They were not pulpit orators.
1. The preaching of the Apostles was the voice of their Divine Master prolonged in all its majestic simplicity. The people "wondered at the words that proceeded out of His mouth." Surely "no man ever spoke like this Man." And yet a child could understand His words; they were as transparent as the light; they were few and persuasive. It was the intelligence of God Incarnate speaking to man in human speech. It was the Truth Himself in articulate words penetrating the intelligence of men. For brevity, simplicity, plainness, the words of Jesus are an example to preachers, as His life is an example to the pastors of His flock. We cannot conceive in our Divine Master the studied efforts of rhetoric or gesture. Calmness, majesty, and the might of truth were the attributes of His words to men.
The sermons of S. Stephen, S. Peter, S. Paul, in the Book of Acts prolong His divine voice. It may be truly said that in them He fulfilled His own promise. "He that heareth you heareth Me." So, again, in the Epistles of S. Paul, S. Peter, and S. John. The character of each comes out in their writings, but the brevity, simplicity, and plainness of their Master's teaching is still maintained. The absence of all art, of all self-conscious effort for effect, came from the consciousness of a divine message. The necessity that was laid upon them cast out all unworthy reflection upon themselves. S. Paul distinctly tells the Corinthians that he would use no arts of their rhetoricians, no imposing subtilties of their philosophers. There is an unspeakable power and grandeur in his few and simple words: "And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not in loftiness of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of Christ. For I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my speech and my teaching was not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in showing (demonstration) of spirit and power: that your faith might not stand on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God."[7] The weakness and fear and trembling arose from the consciousness of a divine mission of life and death. And his fear of human persuasion came from the intuition of faith, which told him that divine faith must stand on divine truth, and that the wisdom of man is not the word of God. Human oratory may generate human faith. Divine truth has a sacramental power which converts the soul to God.
2. The Apostles spoke out of a fulness of light and of fervour which was special and incommunicable, and that fulness had two causes. The first was that they had seen the Incarnate Word. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."[8] "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life. For the life was manifested; and we have seen and do bear witness, and declare unto you the life eternal which was with the Father, and hath appeared unto us."[9] "We have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, but having been made eye-witnesses of His majesty."[10]
This gave to them a spiritual condition of mind which we call reality. What they declared they had seen: what they taught they had heard from His lips. They could not doubt, or hesitate, or qualify, or draw back before any contradiction. As S. Paul said, "If God be for us, who is against us?"[11] Their personal converse with our Lord, and their direct commission from Him, gave to their words and their life a momentum which nothing could arrest. Their preaching was the outpouring of their unchanging consciousness. Their whole soul, intellect, conscience, heart, and will went with every word. Their preaching was the testimony of an eye-witness and an ear-witness. It had in it a force beyond all words. Words rather hinder than help the directness and the power of truth when simply told by those who believe what they say. Men just delivered from some great danger, or coming from some terrible sight of death, use few words. If they use many, we feel that they have but little sense of what they have seen, and of what they are saying. They who had stood on Calvary and watched through the three hours, and they who saw Jesus after He rose from the dead, and S. Paul who saw Him till he was blinded by His glory, so long as life lasted must have been penetrated in every faculty and sense and fibre with the presence and the Passion and the love of Jesus. It must have been hard for them to hold their peace. They must have desired a hundred languages and voices and tongues to declare all day long the Passion on the Cross, the glory of the Resurrection, and the peace of the kingdom of God.
The other cause of the special power and force of the Apostolic preaching is also incommunicable—namely, the inspiration of the Day of Pentecost. "They were filled with the Spirit." The parted tongues of fire were emblems of the light and ardour with which thej declared the Word of God to men. "Are not my words as a fire, and as a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?"[12] Such were the words of the Apostles, wheresoever they went in all the world.
"We cannot conceive these messengers of the kingdom of God labouring to compose their speech or studying the rules and graces of literary style. The records of their preaching in the New Testament are artless and simple as the growths of nature in a forest, which reveal the power and the beauty of God. Their words and writings are majestic in their elevation, and depth, and pathos, and unadorned beauty, like the breadth and simplicity of the sea and sky. Their whole being was pervaded by the divine facts and truths, the eternal realities of which they spoke. They needed no preparation, no study, not even reflection. They spoke as their Master had spoken before them: "We speak what we know, and we testify what we have seen."[13]
3. But perhaps it will be answered that our state is so absolutely unlike, and so remote from theirs, that our preaching must be the result of preparation, study, and intellectual effort. To this the answer may be both yes and no. And first, in the affirmative. Not only is preparation needed for a preacher, but such preparation as perhaps goes far beyond what the objector intends. By preparation is commonly understood a carefully-written composition, carefully committed to memory. It were well if all priests faithfully made such preparation. But the preparation required for a preacher goes farther back, and is deeper than this. It is the preparation, not of the sermon, but of the man. It is the remote, not the proximate, preparation which is chiefly needed. The man preaches, not the sermon, and the sermon is as the man is. S. Paul says, "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus our Lord."[14] Now they who were full of His mind and presence could so preach, but no others can. Most men do preach themselves—that is, their natural mind—and the measure and kind of their gifts or acquisitions come out and colour and limit their preaching. The eloquent preach eloquently, the learned preach learnedly, the pedantic pedantically, the vain-glorious vain-gloriously, the empty emptily, the contentious contentiously, the cold coldly, the indolent indolently. And how much of the Word of God is to be heard in such preaching? Can it be said that such men "preach not themselves, but Christ Jesus our Lord"? If our sermons are what we are, we must go a long way back in preparing to preach. The boy must preach, and the youth must preach, that the man may preach. It may be answered, S. Augustine was one of the greatest of preachers, but he began late in manhood. S. Augustine, like S. Paul, belongs to a special category, of which we will speak hereafter. The Church, in the Council of Trent, intends that from twelve years—the sacred age of the Divine Teacher in the Temple—boys tonsured, and in the cassock, "the habit of religion,"[15] should be trained up in seminaries. Of these we will speak first; and we may say at once that we need in our proportion what the Apostles had in fulness. If we were full, as we ought to be, of the divine facts and truths of faith, we should never lack the matter; and if we were united, as we ought to be, in heart and will with our Divine Master, we should not lack either light or fervour.
But to return to preparation. If it is the man that preaches, preparation is a life: it must begin early. In boyhood we ought to learn our mother-tongue—no hard task, if those who teach us know it themselves; we ought also to learn early how to use our reason. There is nothing recondite or difficult in logic, nothing that boys could not learn as soon as they know their grammar. This remote preparation is radical and vital. Then in due time comes the knowledge of Holy Scripture, which explains the Catechism; and theology, which unfolds and develops the Catechism into the science of faith. These preparatory disciplines cannot be got up on occasion when wanted. They must have been wrought into the intelligence by a continuous and progressive formation.
There will always be exceptions to every law, even of nature. Among those who see, some are dim-sighted; among those who hear, some cannot discern the distinction of musical notes; so it may be true that among those who know, some may not be able to utter in speech what they know in thought. But these are exceptions, and may be set aside. Nervous agitation, want of self-command, fear, anxiety, desire to succeed, and the like often make men lose their self-possession. Then they stammer and forget. But as a law of our mind we may lay it down that whatever is really known can be surely said. Verbaque prævisam rem non invita sequentur. We think in words, and every thought clothes itself as it arises in the mind. If, then, we acquire the habit of thinking, we should acquire simultaneously a habit of mental utterance in words, and the utterance of the tongue would follow by a law of nature. The chief hindrance to this is the want of thinking. We read or copy the thoughts of other men, which, therefore, are not our own: we appropriate them by memory. But memory is not thought; and to think and to remember at the same time is a feat that few can accomplish. We may trust to memory altogether, or to thinking altogether; but the two mental processes impede each other, and cannot be safely combined. While men are remembering, thinking ceases; and when men think, memory is suspended. What need of memory when a man speaks out of the fulness of his present consciousness? It is a proverb that every man is eloquent on his own subject. Statesmen, lawyers, men of science, poets, soldiers, traders, each in his own craft, is ready and fluent at any time, howsoever sudden. They speak with facility and fulness. The habitual thoughts of each are upon his calling, work, or craft, and without preparation he is ready at any moment to speak correctly and promptly. Why is it, then, that a priest cannot without preparation speak for God and for His kingdom, for His truth and for His law? If we were full of these things, if we realised them and lived in them as the convictions of our reason and the affections of our hearts, to speak of them would be even a relief. We are never weary or embarrassed in speaking of those we love, and of the things that are dear to us. In the measure in which we realise the world of faith, the eternal truths, the nature of sin, the love of souls, their danger of perishing, we shall find no difficulty in speaking on them with sincerity and simplicity. It is the desire to be eloquent and to shine as orators that causes unreality, vain-glory, and emptiness.[16] If we could only forget ourselves and speak seriously for God, we should find less difficulty in preaching; and the people would hear us gladly, because they would believe that we mean what we say. They are very quick to perceive, it may be said to feel, whether a priest speaks from his heart or only from his lips. The homilies of the early Fathers are unostentatious and full of Holy Scripture.[17] S. John Chrysostom might be quoted as florid in style; but it is not the self-conscious and stilted declamation which is praised as pulpit oratory. And S. John Chrysostom speaks in the style of S. Paul; and his mind was so like that of the Apostle that he was believed to write and speak with a special assistance from S. Paul. At all times preachers have been tempted to self-manifestation. We are told that when S. Bernard was preaching his sermon one day Satan said to him, "You have preached most eloquently;" and S. Bernard answered, "I neither began for thee nor will leave off for thee." We read, too, in the life of S. Vincent Ferrer that, having to preach before the King of France, he elaborated his sermon. It failed, and fell flat. The next day he preached again with little preparation. The King said to him, "Yesterday I heard Brother Vincent: to-day I have heard the Holy Ghost." It may, however, be truly said that pulpit oratory came in with the revival of paganism, impiously called the Renascimento. Men's heads were turned with literary vanity. The ambition to copy the Roman orators in style and diction and gesture destroyed the simplicity of Christian preachers, and bred up a race of pompous rhetoricians, frigid, pretentious, and grandiloquent. The evil, once in activity, spread, and has descended. Saints have laboured against it in vain—S. Ignatius with his energetic plainness, S. Philip with his daily word of God, S. Charles with his virilis simplicitas—his manly simplicity. But the flood had set in, and it bore down all opposition. The world runs after pulpit orators. They please the ear, and do not disturb the conscience. They move the emotions, but do not change the will. The world suffers no loss for them, nor is it humbled, nor wounded. We have not, indeed, seen our Divine Master, nor heard His voice; but if by faith and mental prayer we realise His presence, His truth, His will, and our own commission to speak in His name, we shall be filled with a consciousness of the unseen world and its realities, and out of that fulness we shall speak. We shall, indeed, need careful and minute preparation of what we are to say. But having a clear outline in our intellect, words will by a law of our nature follow the spontaneous courses of our thought. But for this an accurate preparation of the subject-matter with pen and ink, analysed and divided logically, with terms and propositions well defined, is absolutely necessary. Then this outline or synopsis must be thought out and impressed, not upon the memory, but upon the intellect, so that the whole, with its parts and its continuity, is present to the mind, not by remembering, but by reasoning. This kind of preparation requires more thought and mental industry than writing out a composition and learning it by heart. The difference between the two processes is this: the written sermon is what we thought when we wrote it; the spoken sermon is what we think at the moment of speaking. It is our present conviction of intellect and feeling of heart: it is therefore real, and felt to be real by those who hear. Happy are they who by such a discipline, intellectual and moral, identify themselves with the Word of God and speak it as their own.
We shall not indeed be inspired, but we know of no limit to the light and grace that God will give to those who ask it. He will give to us os et sapientiam, a mouth and wisdom in speaking for Him to the world. He is working His own purposes by us. We do not know to whom the message is sent. It often happens now that many years pass, and we know for the first time that on such a day and in such a place some word of ours has stung a conscience, or stirred a heart, or moved a will, and brought a soul to God. But we shall never know in this world all that God may have done while we were unconscious. Therefore, "Cast thy bread upon the running waters, for after a long time thou shalt find it again."[18] When we have made all such preparation as I have said, the last preparation is to kneel before our Divine Lord in. the Blessed Sacrament, and to make the sign of the Cross upon our lips in honour of the Sacred Mouth, which spake as never any man spoke; offering to Him our confusion, if He be pleased to humble us by failure; and praying Him to work His own will by His own word, even though in our mouth. "He that heareth you heareth Me" gives us a share in the promise made in prophecy to Himself. "My Spirit that is in thee, and My words that I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, from henceforth and for ever."[19] Therefore, "In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening let not thy hand cease; for thou knowest not which shall rather spring up, this or that; and if both together, it shall be the better."[20]
With these words before us, what shall we say of a priest who catches up an old sermon, it may be, upon the Incarnation for Trinity Sunday, or on evil speaking for Christmas Day, or on heavenly joys in Lent; or, still worse, who goes to the pulpit without preparation, remote or proximate, without meditation and without prayer; who chooses his text at the moment, trusting to a fluent tongue and a string of pious commonplaces? In the soul of such a priest can there be holy fear, a sense of the sanctity of God, of the account he must give for every idle word, or a love of souls, or a desire for the glory of God, or a consciousness that he is grieving the Holy Ghost?
- ↑ Sess. xxiv. De Ref. c. iv.
- ↑ 1 Cor. i. 17.
- ↑ S. John i. 1-3.
- ↑ 2 Cor. v. 20.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Rom. x. 13-15.
- ↑ 1 Cor. ii. 1-5.
- ↑ S. John i. 14.
- ↑ 1 S. John i. 1.
- ↑ 2 S. Pet. i. 16.
- ↑ Rom. viii. 31.
- ↑ Jerem. xxiii. 29.
- ↑ S. John iii. 11.
- ↑ 2 Cor. iv. 5.
- ↑ Pontif. Rom. De Clerico faciendo.
- ↑ "Conturbatus quia siccatus: siccatus quia exaltatus."—S. Aug. Serm. 131, tom. v. p. 642.
- ↑ S. Jerome says: "Sermo Sacrarum Scripturarum lectione conditus sit. Nolo te declamatorem esse et rabulam."—Ep. ad Nepot. tom. iv. p. 262.
- ↑ Eccles. xi. 1.
- ↑ Isaias lix. 21.
- ↑ Eccles. xi. 6.