Off the Shelves 8

For our next extract we are pleased to introduce Hilda Graef (1907-1970), best known for her translations of the Church Father and works on Christian mysticism. In Modern Gloom and Christian Hope (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959) she examines the literature of those who "portray the dark sides of life and stress the meaninglessness of existence" such as Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Osborne and Mauriac. This extract is taken from the final chapter, contains some thought provoking lines on reason and human existence.

We are living in an age of wars and rumours of wars, under the threat of H-bombs, horrifying dictatorships, and general uncertainty. Yet, except for the wider technical powers for destruction, is our time so very much more insecure than other ages, do we have more reason for gloom and despair that former generations? There have always been wars, and they have by no means always been restricted only to the actual combatants- rape and arosn, murder of women and children, famine and disease have always been their horrible accompaniments. Even in he Europ of the Middle Ages, so often regarded as a paradise of Christian life and virtue, the daily life of the citizen was most insecure, the traveling merchant was always in dagner of being robbed and murdered, and the absence of medical knowledge made epidemics far more dangerous and widespread than they are now: In the midst of life we are surrounde by death," says the author of a medieval hymn. So it has always been and so it wil remain to the Last Day.

It is not therefore the greater insecurity of modern life that produces the pessimistic outlook of contemporary thinkers- and we must remember that the "Father" of existentialism and all its melancholy offspring lived in the extraordinarily secure atmosphere of nineteenth century Denmark. No. Political circumstances have little to do with it, and not even personal material circumstances- for nearly all the outstanding exponents of gloom are highly successful authors. The spiritual situation of these writers is similar to that of the ancient pagans before their conversion to Christianity, of whom St. Paul says in his Letter to the Ephesians that they had no hope and were without God in the world. For hope is inseperable from God; if we have lost belief in God, there is nothing left to sustain us in the trials and difficulties of our life. Yet it is true that there have at all times been many unbelievers who have not held the utterly black, despairing view of life which is prevalent in our own times, and, on the other hand, some of the pessimistic authors analyzed in thes epages such as Kierkegaard, Mauriac, Graham Greene, are believing Christians. There must be something that custs across even the demarcation line that separates believers from unbelievers. Here, too, we can trace the roots of "modern" pessimism back to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard had been disappointed in reason, which he more or less equated with the system of Hegel, and he had also been disappoined in love, in his broken engagement with Regine Olsen. Besides, his relationship with his stern, unbending father had had a very unhappy influence on his own life. That is to say the principal factors in human existence had gone wrong for him. Human Fatherhood is a reflection of the divine Fatherhood, human reason the created image of the Word of God, the Logos, Himself the image of the Father, and human love the earthly image of the Holy Spirit, the divine Person who is the bond of love between the Father and the Son. If all these become distorted in one way or another, the human mirror which was meant to reflect the divine life is broken, and what it reflects is not an image, but a caricature.

Perhaps the most serious distortion was brough about by Kierkegaard's depreciation of reason. Man is traditionally defined as the "rational animal", for his reason is the trait that distinguishes him most radically from all other living things. True, reason can be overestimated, as was done in the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century which resulted in the dethronement of the "goddess reason" in the French Revolution of 1789. In this case God will be denied, because He can never be fully comprehended by reason. But the human being will still be respected and the world will be seen as subject to man, this part of the creation account in Genesis will at least still appear to be valid. Nevertheless, rationalism carries the germ of its own destruction, because this is a fallen world, its subjection to man is no longer complete, and man himself is subject to death and suffering. This is why existentialism is so horribly plausible to our contemporaries, especially as the fallacy of an optimistic rationalism stands out very forcefully against a background of suffering and irrational destruction brought about by the social and political upheavals of our time. For, as Camus and Sartre have rightly seen, man's reason revolts against death and suffering, and as life necessarily ends in one, and contains a goodly amount of the other, they feel that it is governed by absurdity- as indeed is only to be expected if human existence is a "being thrown" from nought to nought, as Heidegger has it.

But man cannot deny reason with impunity. When he drives it out by the front door, it will return by the backdoor and play havoc with his most cherished beliefs- or unbeliefs. For the Genesis story about Adam, who was told by God to give names to the animals He had created, contains a profound truth. The earth was made for man, man can understand and use it, because he has been given reason; if he could not do so, if the world were wholly absurd and closed to all reasoning, man would long have perished, for he could never have subjected it as he has actually done. But there is, indeed, an irrational element in the world, there are powers that play havoc with man's labours, though far less so than our professional pessmists would have us believe. Christianity has never denied this- quite the contrary. The reason for this element of "absurdity", for man's very incomplete mastery of nature, for suffering and death, is Original Sin; that is man's failure to submit to God. Ma's revolt is the cause of nature's revolt and of death itself, of all the "dread " which henceforth is part and parcel of human life; precisely because man was not originally made for death and decay, but for eternal happiness.

The Christian is far from denying thes enegative elements in human existence; they are there, and they have their own part to play. But this does not invalidte reason nor does it permit us to consider human life and the world in which it is lived as absurd. And if the existentialists call for engagement, if they try to better the lot of the human race- however mistaken the means they may often adopt towards this end- does not just this make nonsense of all their assumptions? Sartre says "Hell is the others" (L'enfer, c'est les autres), and proceeds straighaway to join the communist party which has no room for the self-sufficient isolation expressed in this dictum. The old pagans, who, in St. Paul's words, knoew not God and were without hope in the world, would not have dreamt of engagement, and devotion to the betterment of the human lot. For how can despair and the belief in total absurdity lead to such an engagement, except to prove that the cult of the absurd is itself absurd; that man simply cannot live without a meaning to his life? We can deny reason on paper, in "clever" books and novels and plays- we cannot deny it in our own lives. Reason belongs inescapably to our human existence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born of Jewish and Protestant ancestry, she abandoned her faith as a child and became immersed in the political and social upheaval of her native Germany. At seventeen she visited a Catholic church, where she felt an immediate attraction to its ceremonies and devotions but she was still very much an unbeliever. After finishing school she studied English and religion at the University of Berlin, with hopes of becoming a fashion journalist, but her mother did not approve and she settled on becoming a teacher. The ascendancy of the Nazi party forced her to emigrate to England, where she was employed at a private school until offered a bursary to study Anglican theology. In her second year while studying the teachings of the Church Fathers she discovered the reasonableness of Christianity and absurdity of her German Lutheran teachers.

Taking her examination in 1940, she graduated with a first class degree, conferred by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, but owing to her nationality could not find any work. Forced to live off charity, she found plenty of time to immersed herself in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John of the Cross, GK Chesterton and RH Benson, interspersed with the Spiritual Exercises. Naturally such reading led her to accept the Catholic faith and she was received into the Church in 1941. To support herself she began writing articles on mysticism in Blackfriars and on German affairs in The Tablet. Her knowledge of Greek also led to an appointment as assistant to the editor of a lexicon of Patristic Greek.

Approached by Mercier Press to submit a manuscript for publication, she edited and expanded her articles in Blackfriars, which was published as The Way of the Mystics. This was followed by yet another request to write on the stigmatist, Therese Neumann, who had recently been in the news. At first sceptial about Neumann, she agredd to the work and to assist in her research made a trip to Konnersreuth. There she interviewed her but was unable to observe the stigmata owing to the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Returning to Oxford she worked on her first translation from the Church Fathers, St. Gregory of Nyssa's sermons on the Beatitudes and Lord's prayer. While working on the translation she received two letters, one from a Dominican nun, the other a Capuchin priest, enquiring if she knew of Edith Stein. This led to yet another pilgrimage to places associated with the future saint and the result was The Scholar and the Cross.

At the prompting of her mother, who had joined her in England, she wrote her autobiography, From Fashions to the Fathers, and a few years later her monumental two volume history of Marian doctrine and devotion. However her greatest interest continued to be mysticism and she explored it in greater depth in her works Mystics of Our Times, The Light and the Rainbow, and The Story of Mysticism.