The Pope’s Intentions
This month the Pope asks us to pray ‘that scholars and intellectuals, by sincere search for truth, may come to know the one true God’.
Michael Paul Gallagher, S.J.
Anchors in an Ocean of Change
Once upon a time Ireland was an island of saints and scholars, or so we were told. A book of some years ago trumpeted the title How the Irish Saved Civilization and it argued that, for a few centuries in the first millennium, the monasteries of Ireland kept learning and Christian culture alive, at a time when barbarian tribes were running rampant over most of the continent. From that period we have all seen pictures of artist monks lovingly creating illuminated manuscripts of the gospels. But from today’s perspective it appears a totally different world. Everything was slower and simpler and rooted in faith. The scholars and intellectuals of that great age sought for God in the sense of a deeper insight into the foundations of the faith they were living with such dedication. Their intellectual exploring was both contemplative and creative, and above all rooted in a vision of God.
The poet Yeats liked to evoke that older Ireland as having ‘unity of culture’. But today’s world is often described as fragmented and fluid, characteristics of our so-called ‘post-modern’ situation. It is a cliché but true to speak of the incredible speed of change. When I was a child learning to read and write in a village school in the West of Ireland, who could have imagined that one day I would be writing these words on a screen in Rome (no pen, no paper) and that with a flick of a computer key, this article would arrive in a split second in Dublin, ready to be printed in whatever fancy colours the editor decides? It would have taken years of work by those hard-working monks of the Book of Kells to produce similar effects.
How do we picture scholars or intellectuals of today? We see images on television of hooded scientists, working on new vaccines or nuclear power. Or an exceptional man or woman who gets a Nobel prize. Or else pale-faced people in libraries hoping to write a book that could change the world. But our world has already been changed so much. Think of our new life-styles and mechanical capacities. Behind all this newness lie many teams of specialists, inventing new technologies and pushing the frontiers of what is possible. Great positive advances have been made, perhaps most obviously in the field of medicine.
Space for wonder and humility
However, there is a shadow side, a price we have paid. Many of the changes can leave us dizzy with excitement but deeply confused. We desperately need people to translate all this for us, to build bridges between past and future, and most of all, to help us connect the new emerging worlds and our Christian faith. Such a scholar for today would help us to understand ourselves more deeply and not to panic. We need to be led beyond our often pressurised rhythm of life towards spaces of quiet and wonder.
We can get surprising light on this point from Albert Einstein. This celebrated scientist was not a religious believer in the traditional sense, but neither was he an atheist. In fact he became angry with those who classified him as denying the possibility of God. ‘I am a deeply religious man’, he wrote, in the sense of ‘humility’ before the beauty and mystery of existence. And he described this reverence as ‘the fundamental emotion which is the cradle of true art and true science’. In this way this leading intellectual of the last century is, in his own way, an example of a genuine quest for the truth that remains open to God (to echo the words of this month’s intention).
I think there is another family of scholars that we need to remember here. Einstein also remarked that imagination is more important than knowledge. He was thinking of how many breakthroughs in science come intuitively rather than from a process of clear thought. But he would be the first to include poets and artists among those who lead us across new thresholds of wisdom. He would at least understand the claim of Dorothy Soelle, a German Lutheran theologian, that we need both poetry and prayer to put us in contact with our hopes.
Battleground of imagination
When we ponder and pray this month’s intention let us also include those who enrich our field by their creative imagination. About twenty years ago I met an American Jesuit called William Lynch who was spending a few months in Ireland (and who has since died). He had devoted a lot of time to discerning the new culture around us, and in particular the world of the mass media. He wrote several important books on the theme of imagination. All of us live more from images than from ideas, and Lynch saw this zone of ourselves as both endangered and yet a key potential for our growth in faith. On the problematic side, there is the obvious assault on our imagination by the world of advertising. Have you ever noticed that the more expensive the item, the more bored and indifferent the model has to look? You can smile for an ice-cream but not for Dior or Rolex.
Father Lynch described Christ as ‘the Lord of the imagination’ who came to subvert all our unworthy images. Through His parables, and through his whole life, He coaxes us out of smallness and towards a transformed image of ourselves and of God. In this light faith is ‘the prime imaginer of the world’. If this is so, then we have to include poets and imaginative writers among those who rescue our imagination from triviality and awaken us to new possibilities, including the great possibility of faith in God. The poet Emily Dickinson once described imagination as ‘the possible’s slow fuse’, suggesting that it can cause an explosion of new vision.
To end on a more practical note. My friend Michael Warren, an Irish-American theologian, has a provocative question that he puts to young people: who is imagining your life for you? It implies we may be less in control of our self-images than we think; that superficial images can secretly invade and take over like an occupying power. In such a situation, Christian faith becomes an alternative imagination of life, that may need to be chosen against the tide. And anyone who helps us in this direction is nourishing our path towards God.