The Two Realities

A few years ago, when I had not been a Catholic for long, I was arguing (unwisely) with a friend about the infallibility of the Pope. And I said: ‘All that I know to be true is that I am holding a cigarette in my fingers. I don’t know that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, except in the sense that I accept that fact directly from the teaching authority of the Church. I don’t know that I have a soul or that the soul is immortal. I accept that also from the teaching authority.’

My friend said: ‘If the Pope said that the moon was made of green cheese, would you believe him?’

And I replied: ‘Yes, I would. He wouldn’t say that, because it’s nonsense. But if he did say it, then I’d accept it, because it would then be part of the Church’s teaching. They could send a moon-probe up there and bring back scientific proof that it was made of volcanic rock. But if the Pope said it was made of green cheese, I’d accept that first, and then try to work out precisely how something could be at one and the same time made of cheese and made of volcanic rock.’

As I recall it, my friend left me in disgust. I don’t blame him. I was doing the Church a real disservice by talking about her authority in that way. But I find it relatively easy to forgive myself when I remember how recently I had come out of the grim desert of absolute scepticism and how full of joy I was to have obtained the privilege of Catholic belief.

My answer was half-right and half-wrong. My mistake was to let my friend get away with postulating two co-existent and contradictory realities – a Catholic reality, and another separate reality of day-to-day knowledge and experience. I should have insisted that the universe comprises a single reality.

For the moon to be made of green cheese would be an idiotic monstrosity. God does not work monstrosities. But He can and does work miracles. I should have said to my friend: ‘Look, Jack, I’m not a moron. Green cheese has got nothing to do with the Catholic Faith. The kind of thing that I believe on the authority of the Church – that bread and wine becomes the Body and Blood of Christ; that the Blessed Virgin went to Heaven bodily as well as spiritually; that Baptism gives people supernatural life; that priests have the page 58 power to forgive sins – this kind of thing is always part of a pattern that makes sense. It may be unfamiliar, but it’s never nonsensical. It has a purpose. If the Pope has anything new to say in my lifetime about what Catholics believe – already believe implicitly, and must now believe explicitly – then it will be in some way or other a necessary development of the things I already accept. It won’t be something that a Catholic would count wholly unexpected. And it certainly won’t contradict the reality of everyday things.’

Nevertheless, on account of a very strong emphasis on scholastic theology in our schools and seminaries, I do think that a sizeable number of Catholics have a semi-conscious feeling of living in two unrelated worlds.

In one world the angels carry messages from God to men; in the other world all messages are brought by the postman. In one world how much one manages to love God is the all-important matter; in the other world the paramount interest is to know what marks one got in a recent examination.

In one world sex is a sacred function of married couples; in the other world sex is what happens clumsily in the back seat of a car. In one world the poor are the ones who will inherit the Kingdom; in the other world the affluent are the ones who will get to the top. In one world theology is the mother of all the sciences; in the other world science is sole king, and theology is an old-fashioned onlooker.

This point of view can lead to a split state of mind. A Catholic male is one man on Sunday; he puts on a religious mood like a special coat and speaks to Our Lord somewhat solemnly. But on Monday he is another man; he climbs into his car or on to his motorbike and roars away into an imagined and wholly scientific future. The split state of mind is dangerous because on neither side of the fence is he a whole man. And the seed of radical doubt is sown as soon as one imagines that the truths proposed by the Church are true only in a ‘special’ context.

For many the Holy Father’s rulings last year about family planning brought this unconscious contradiction to the surface. One heard many people say: ‘Oh yes, I can accept that as an idea; but in ordinary life you have to make adjustments. . . .’ They were assuming that the Faith was somehow true within a radius of fifty yards of any given altar, but outside that radius became progressively less true.

We should be able to understand easily the people in the Communist countries who hold in their minds simultaneously two sets of belief that contradict one another at many points. A Russian Orthodox believer who is also a Party commissar may say to himself: ‘Oh yes, on the other side of the grave I will join my mother and we will both live in the company of the Blessed Virgin; but here and now the ideals of Lenin and Marx are the lights I have to steer by. In ordinary life you have to make adjustments. . . .’

It is not really like that at all. The God of the angels is equally the God of the atom. The God who took Mary bodily into Heaven is equally the God of page 59 labour disputes and social justice. It is not God who is split in half; it is us. And what will do most to join the two halves together again is prayer.

By prayer our souls are gradually strengthened and simplified so that we are able to bear contact with the infinite strength and simplicity of God. When God is present in our hearts the two realities become one reality. Possibly at that point we will find that we are no longer laying such stress on the scholastic distinctions, which were never more than a kind of relief map of the country of the Trinity which we already inhabit on earth and will inhabit with vastly greater joy and knowledge when, by God’s mercy, we reach Heaven.

As Yeats once wrote, those who are able to pluck the trees for bread do not quarrel over ha’pennies. Heaven will make wholly actual to us what we know here only by faith. But the actuality will not be different in kind from what we already know.

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