Mortal Remains
Some Words on the Church
by S. M. Hutchens
As I age, the impression intensifies that one's best work has never been original, even that there has never really been such a thing as true human originality, for what is good, true, and beautiful originates in God, so that artful, kairotic recapitulation (even in technology, for every functioning use is imitative) is really what we are about, and is in fact the chief element of theosis. The rage for originality is a kind of spiritual sickness, for the more one tries for it, the more the attempts seem to produce the ugly, irrational, and inhumane—whatever good may be found in the oeuvre usually turns out to be an accidental and unacknowledged tribute to the timeless and transcendental.
I bring to witness the generality of modern art, music, architecture, theology, and every field of endeavor in which novelty is regarded as a virtue—for new goods, that is to say, goods well-recapitulated, are only produced in synthetic harmony with the Timeless Good from which they are derived. That all human art is procreative, all invention imitative is, I believe, the insight that separates conservative from liberal. This is why the "liberal," who believes himself to be the master of his own spirit and ground of his own being, does not believe in God—or at least in any God he hasn't invented himself.
What Screwtape Sees
I confess these remarks were composed because I needed an excuse for having this issue's Mortal Remains consist of work that is other people's, but for the borrowing of which I am far less apologetic than I might have been formerly, originality being impossible and all. First, from the second Screwtape Letter:
I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed, in your better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we must make the best of the situation. There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.
"The Church as [immortal spirits] see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners."
Professor Mascall Agrees
This we follow with a harmonious account of the Church from the Anglican theologian Eric Mascall (1905–1993), whom I consider a spiritual progenitor of this journal, excerpted by Fr. John Hunwicke, a Catholic priest, on his blogsite Mutual Enrichment on June 18, 2019. Fr. -Hunwicke's reason for citing Mascall was to instruct Catholics in particular that
questions such as those about marriage and sexuality are . . . not matters for individual local Churches to make decisions upon, nor even just for the whole state of Christ's Church now militant here in earth. 'Tradition' is the expression of this understanding. A shame [Cardinal] Kasper and his like have never read Mascall. They would have understood, poor things, how obvious it is that the Church Universal, the Body of Christ throughout Space and Time, is ontologically [in the order of Being] prior to individual Particular Churches.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on church history from the online archives
33.1—January/February 2020
on a Saint's Charism That Cures Toxic Perfectionism by Colleen Carroll Campbell
more from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
19.4—May 2006
The Culture War Is Between Religious Believers on Both Sides by Howard P. Kainz
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