By Randall Smith
Augustine admits in the Confessions that, when he was young, he didn’t like the Scriptures; he found the language ugly and uninspiring. He preferred Cicero and Virgil. Worse still, some things in the Scriptures made him think that Christianity was ridiculous. Who would be so naive as to think that God has a right hand? God has no body! What a horde of rustics the Christians must have been.
It wasn’t until he grew older that he realized that the Scriptures made use of rhetorical figures, metaphors, analogies, and other poetic devices. Christians do not believe that God has a physical right hand; rather, this is an image that suggests the intimate union between the Father and the Son.
He had been mocking the Christians when he was the ignorant one whose pride had blinded him to the richness of the biblical language and imagery. «My inflated pride rejected its style,» he writes, «nor could the sharpness of my wit penetrate its inner meaning. Truly they were such that they had to grow with the little ones; but I despised being small and, filled with pride, considered myself great.»
It is not uncommon for people who boast of their scientific sophistication to find the Church’s way of speaking, especially in the liturgy, strange, perhaps even childish; something acceptable only for crude people who believe anything they are told, no matter how ridiculous.
I can imagine someone with this mindset asking: «Do you really believe there are choirs of angels ‘flying on high with their wings,’ singing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’?» As an adult convert, I can understand how skeptics outside the Church might see this kind of language. It seems like something out of a children’s book, like talking about Harry Potter’s ‘sorting hat’ or flying on a hippogriff. It’s fine for children, but not for serious adults.
Since we live in what is largely a monotonous and unpoetic ‘information age,’ I understand why the Church’s language may seem this way. But perhaps there are things that simply cannot be said in the ordinary speech one finds in the newspaper or the latest magazine article. Maybe some things simply transcend our normal, everyday ways of speaking and require a different mode of discourse, one that communicates realities that surpass our habitual ways of speaking and writing; like when Robert Frost says:
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people.
Or when T. S. Eliot writes that,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Or when the Psalmist proclaims:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
If you don’t «get» the many ways in which language means—if, for example, you don’t «get» poetic speech and it seems like a bunch of meaningless nonsense to you—then you probably won’t «get» the language of the Scriptures and the liturgy either. Much of it will probably seem as silly to you as it did to St. Augustine when he imagined that Christians thought God had a physical body.
I could say that the phrase «at the right hand of the Father» means that the Risen Christ is intimately united in the unity of Being with Him from whom He, the second «person» of the Trinity, is eternally begotten, being fully and eternally loved and loving fully and eternally in turn. But that is no better.
That language might have a useful role in helping us better understand the language in which the faith has been expressed to us. But after using the most «academic» words to explain those biblical and liturgical words, it is generally best to return to the original words and phrases for being clearer, more beautiful, and probably closer to the truth.
In poetry, it is not wrong to express the meaning of the words with their own words, to «unpack» them, so to speak. But once that «unpacking» has reached a certain point, it is important to read the poem again and simply let those words resonate in your soul.
It is said that Robert Frost was once asked what one of his poems meant, to which he replied: «So you want me to tell you what the poem says in different and worse words.» If there had been a better way to express it, the poet would have expressed it that way. If there had been a better way to express it, God would have expressed it that way.
Therefore, if someone asks me: «Do you believe that there are really hosts of angels surrounding God singing ‘Holy, holy, holy’?», my answer is: Yes.
But by this I mean two things. First, my honest belief is that, if I am lucky enough to experience this reality, I will probably say: «Wow, you know, I don’t think there was a better way to express what I’m seeing. I mean, it’s so far from anything one could imagine, but if you had to put it into words, I suppose this is probably the best you could do.» The second thing I can say is that I believe in the truth of any reality to which those words point, though I have no doubt that the reality far surpasses what my mind can comprehend.
Using images that we know and have experienced concretely in our earthly lives, this is a language intended to orient us toward heaven. Our challenge is to let it envelop us and help propel us on that journey toward heaven, so that, when we arrive, we can say: «Oh, is that how it is? Of course it is! This makes perfect sense of what we read and heard, but that we still could not see or understand.»
About the author
Randall B. Smith is a professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. His latest book is From Here to Eternity: Reflections on Death, Immortality, and the Resurrection of the Body.