— Fr. Ronald Knox

— Comments —

Stephen Ippolito writes:

Father Knox does us a great service by urging us to look beyond the merely superficial sensation of love to its origins in order to discover what we can of its true nature and meaning. It’s a very catholic approach, it seems to me: placing God at the fore. (And all too rare).

Graham Greene takes the very same point a bit further, I think, when in his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory, he reminds us that as beautiful, intense and moving as God’s disclosed truths seem to us, we humans are necessarily limited in our ability to comprehend them fully. He does it very effectively:

“Oh, the priest said…God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognise that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us – God’s love.

It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”

What an exciting prospect heaven seems when one considers how amplified its joys must be. What seems unsurpassable bliss to we mortals is only a shadow of the divine reality.

Surely this is where we in the west, as a civilisation, have lost our way. Wherever people live just for themselves they thereby make the imperfect and the transitory, rather than the transcendent and the perfect the measure of all value. Embracing the shadow rather than the substance is a foolish and unedifying way to live, no?

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