The music was Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli and the priest giving the sermon was Fr. David Clemens. 'An ancient philosopher,' he said at one point, speaking of Our Lady's Heavenly beauty, 'once wrote that we become that which we contemplate.' Struck by the profundity of Fr. Clemens' thought, I popped down to Manchester Central Library the next day and found out that the philosopher was Plotinus.
It was an epiphany which I wasted in many ways, but I'll never forget it - the clear sense I had as he spoke of the continuity and relationship between classical thought and the Christian revelation. C.S. Lewis does something similar at the end of The Last Battle with Professor Kirke's references to Platonism.
What moved me most about the sermon was that it wasn't motivated by an abstraction but by beauty, by 'the woman clothed with the sun', who shines with the light of Heaven and whose love for us is at the same time deeply human and personal. Maternal, in a word.
'A terrible beauty is born,' wrote W.B. Yeats in Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, and sometimes we can't handle that beauty and we hide from it and turn away from it. I certainly did. But that doesn't matter. What counts is that it exists. That it's there. That She's there. That He's there. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Beautiful post John! Thank you for sharing your reflection on such a profound experience.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Michael
Thank you Michael for taking the time to respond. I'm delighted the piece struck a chord.
ReplyDeleteGreat post.
ReplyDeleteAs you mention, and as Lewis points out in The Last Battle and “Transposition,” Platonism can only enrich Christianity. Rather than reducing Heaven to an abstraction and Nature to dross not worthy of bothering about, Platonism makes Christianity more concrete. All good things on Earth come from things more concrete, more real (“as above, so below”). Thus, the beauty of Nature is a window through which we can (sometimes) catch a glimpse of the glories of what lies Above.
Thanks NLR. Only just seen this comment now, over a year after you wrote it! I completely agree. Even as a boy of 10 the ending of The Last Battle and its explicitly stated Platonism struck me as a a clear and obvious statement of how reality works. The big shock for me in later life was discovering how few people, particularly 'educated' people, Shae that view!
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