CHAPTER 22 - THE MYSTICAL BODY OF CHRIST

WHAT we have now seen is the Church at the first level of our understanding—the Kingdom, a society of men to which we come to receive God's gifts of truth and life through the Holy Spirit, a society in which we are in the company of Christ since He is with it. If the Church were no more than that it would still be glorious; but it is in fact much more than that and we should come to a deeper level of understanding, for it would be a shame for a Catholic to live out his life in the Church without the fullest realization of the magnificence that is his.
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I

This deeper level is bound up with the meaning of Our Lord's words

I am with you.

Go back to the words Our Lord used of Himself in answer to St. Thomas's question at the Last Supper:

I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.

We have already used these words as headings under which to examine what Our Lord came to do.
But Our Lord used them to describe not His work but Himself.
They apply to His work only because they already apply to Him.
Once we examine the phrase exactly as Our Lord said it we are struck with its extreme strangeness.
What makes it strange is the word "am",
particularly as followed by the words "truth" and "life".
We might have expected Him to say: "I have the truth", and "I have the life";
but what He says is "I am the Truth"
and "I am the Life".
The difference between what He said and what we might have expected makes an enormous difference to us. Had He said "I have the truth", we could have asked Him to fill our minds with it, since truth is the mind's first need.
But He said "I am the Truth",
so that we must ask Him to fill our minds with Himself,
we must ask Him, not to enlighten our minds,
but to be the light of our minds.
Likewise if He had said "I have the life", we could have asked Him to give it to us.
But He said "I am the Life",
so that we can only ask Him to live in us.
The gifts are not distinct from the giver.
We take possession of the gifts only by taking possession of the giver.
The gifts and the giver are the one same Christ.
The Church in which we are to receive His gifts is now seen to be the Church in which we are to receive Him. The union with Him which is ours as members of the Church is now seen to be a union as intimate as that of truth with the mind and love with the will.

As the key to an understanding of this new concept of the Church, take the statement just made that since Christ is the life, we cannot have life unless He lives in us.
This precise thing He has Himself said.
In particular it is the recurrent theme of His long discourse at the Last Supper.

We have already noticed the phrase of Our Lord in His prayer to the Father for the unity of His Church

that while Thou art in Me,
I may be in them,
and so they may be perfectly made one.

In them.
This is the truth which St. Paul puts so grandly:

I am alive;
or rather not I;
it is Christ that lives in me. (Gal.ii.20.)

But parallel with this there is another idea which at first sight seems to introduce a complication.
Christ is to live in us;
but also we are to live in Him.
Thus we find Our Lord saying at the Last Supper:

It is only a little while now, before the world is to see Me no more;
but you can see me, because I live on and you too will have life.
When that day comes, you will learn for yourselves that I am in My Father and you are in Me and I am in you. (John xiv.19-20.)

He makes this double in-living even more explicit in the parable of the Vine and the Branches.

You have only to live on in Me, and I will live on in you.
The branch that does not live on in the Vine can yield no fruit of itself;
no more can you, if you do not live on in Me.
I am the Vine, you are its branches;
if a man lives on in Me, and I in him,
then he will yield abundant fruit. (John xv.3-5.)

This double necessity that He should live in us and we should live in Him brings us to the very heart of the truth about His Church. It is only in a living body that the verb "to live in" can be used both ways. So Our Lord had shown by speaking of the living body of a vine. St. Paul has worked out the idea still more fully by the comparison of the living body of a man. I can say of the cells of my body that I live in them, because it is by my life that they live; but equally I can say that they live in me, because though it is from me that their life comes, it actually does make them alive. If we are to live in Christ and He is to live in us then there must be some such relationship between us and Him as that between a person and the cells of his body. It is in this sense that the Church is the Body of Christ.
It is not merely an organization,
something to which we resort for the gifts our souls need;
it is an organism,
a living body with its own life-secret and its own life-stream.
But He Whose Body it is is Christ, so that He is the life-secret;
and the life-stream flows from Him to every cell in the Body,
so that, in so far as we are alive, it is with His life.
We are living in Him because He is living in us.

This then is the reality of the Church,
men bound together into one
by the one life-stream flowing from the Head
which is Christ.
So St. Paul can say to the Romans,

We, though many in number,
form one body in Christ. (.5);

and to the Ephesians,

God has put everything under His dominion,
and made Him the head to which the whole Church is joined,
so that the Church is His body,
the completion of Him
Who everywhere and in all things is complete. (i.22-23);

and to the Galatians,

All you who have been baptized in Christ's name
have put on the person of Christ;
no more Jew or Gentile;
no more slave and freeman;
no more male and female;
you are all one person in Jesus Christ. (iii.27-28).

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II

St. Paul's Epistles indeed are alive with the doctrine.
And not unnaturally.
For the first word Our Lord said to him—in the vision on the road to Damascus which converted him—announced it:

Saul, Saul,
why dost thou persecute me?

Persecuting Christ's church,
persecuting Christ,
it is all one,
for Church and Christ are one.

Everything that we have learnt about the Church must be retranslated into this new language of organic union with Christ.
Baptism, as we have just seen,
no longer means merely entry into the Church,
or even merely rebirth into the supernatural life.
It means rebirth into Christ.
By our rebirth in baptism we are incorporated with Christ as by our birth in the natural order we are incorporated with Adam. By our incorporation with Christ we share alike in the satisfaction that He offered for sin, and the super-natural union with God that He merited.

Redemption was won for all men on Calvary;
it is made actual in each man at baptism.
By baptism we die, as He did, and rise again, as He did.

You, by baptism, have been united with His burial,
united, too, with His resurrection ...
in giving life to Him,
God gave life to you too,
when you lay dead in your sins. (Col.ii.12-13.)

St. Paul gives the same teaching to the Romans (vi.3-7):

We who were taken up into Christ by baptism, have been taken up, all of us, into His death. In our baptism we have been buried with Him, died like Him, that so, just as Christ was raised up by His Father's power from the dead, we too might live and move in a new kind of existence. We have to be closely fitted into the pattern of His resurrection, as we have been into the pattern of His death; we have to be sure of this, that our former nature has been crucified with Him, and the living power of our guilt annihi-lated, so that we are slaves of guilt no longer.

Our incorporation with Christ is so real that, in the phrase of St. Thomas, "His sufferings avail for us as if we had suffered them ourselves" (S.T. IIIq. 69): the words are the natural development of St. Paul's phrase (Gal.ii.19): "with Christ I hang upon the cross". Thus, the satisfaction He made is ours because we are in Him. The supernatural union with God which is the purpose and crown of redemption is likewise ours because we are in Him.
We have seen why Our Lord said I am the Life.
We can also see why He said I am the Way.
He not only opens the way for us and points the way to us:
He is the Way.
What we must do is enter into Him and abide in Him.
That is salvation.
United thus organically with His sacred humanity,
we are united with His Person,
that is to say with the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity,
and so with the Triune God.
In our life in Him, the breach between man and God is healed and the relation of oneness restored. It is the formula of restoration He had uttered at the Last Supper:

I am in my Father,
and you in Me,
and I in you.

Redemption, then, finds a new statement in terms of the Mystical Body;
so does the work of the Holy Ghost.
We have already seen how the Holy Ghost was sent to the Church to do for the Church as a whole and for all its members the work of supernatural sanctification and illumination which He did for the human nature of Christ.
Now we are in a position to see deeper into this sending.
The Holy Spirit comes to us because we are inbuilt into Christ in whom He is.
The life which is Christ's—and ours because His— is the operation of the Holy Spirit in His human nature. Therefore we may speak of life in the Body as Christ living in us: or the Holy Spirit living in us. Our Lord speaks of both in-livings and so does St. Paul. In one passage (Rom. viii. 9-11) he has them both—"Christ lives in you", "the Spirit dwells in you", "a man cannot belong to Christ unless he has the Spirit of Christ". Just as both live in us, both operate in us: "All this is the work of one and the same Spirit" (i Cor..11): "So effectually does His [Christ's] power manifest itself in me."

It is because of the indwelling and operation of the Holy Spirit in Christ Our Lord that we cannot be incorporated in Christ with-out having the same indwelling and operation. "Your bodies belong to the body of Christ," says St. Paul (i Cor.vi.15); and a few verses later "Your bodies are the shrines of the Holy Spirit."

For this twofold presence, the Church has found various phrases:
Christ is the Source, the Holy Spirit the operative principle:
Christ is the Head of the Body, the Holy Spirit the Soul.
There is one lovely variant of this last phrase used by St. Thomas and again by Pope Leo I (Divinum illud Munus):
the Holy Spirit is the Heart.
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III

By birth in Adam we are Jew or Gentile, slave or free, man or woman, by our rebirth in Christ we have put on the person of Christ. The second incorporation is immeasurably more living and intimate than the first. By birth we are members of a family, by rebirth of a body. At its very best the unity of the members of a family is only a shadow of the organic unity of the members of a body—to be brothers of one another is as nothing compared to being members of one another. And the human family into which we enter by birth is by no means the family at its very best, but a widely scattered family, which has largely forgotten that it is a family: for its head, Adam, died in a dim and dateless past and most of his children have never heard of him. Adam com-municated life to his son, and he to his son, and at last in its long winding it reached us, so that we owe our life to him and in that sense he lives in us; but only in that sense. By countless inter-mediaries he gave us our life, but he can do no more about it: if our life weakens and dwindles, we cannot turn to him for renewal. But in the Body, we are in immediate and continuing contact with our Head, Christ, and the flow of His life through us His members never ceases, but is always there for our growth and renewal.

Thus our relation to Christ is closer than the natural relation of brothers to a brother or even of children to a parent. It is that of cells in a body to the person whose body it is. It is therefore closer than any natural relationship that one human being can have with another. By membership of the Mystical Body we are more closely related to Christ Our Lord than Our Lady is, simply as His mother in the natural order. Motherhood, even her motherhood, is not so close as membership of Christ's Body, which involves living from instant to instant by the selfsame life that He is living by. Needless to say. Our Lady is also a member of the Mystical Body, living more totally and intensely by His life than we shall ever live. But it remains that her relation to Him as mother is less not only than her relation to Him as a member of His Mystical Body, but also than the relation of every one of us to Him as members of His Mystical Body.

There is a lesser consequence of this which can startle us a great deal more: our relationship to one another as members of Christ's Body is closer than any possible natural relationship. Each one of us is more closely related to every other member of the Church by this life of grace than to his own mother by the life of nature. "And you are Christ's body, organs of it depending upon each other." (i Cor..27.) This is easy enough to say. But if we were ever to let ourselves look squarely at it and really try to live by it, its immediate effect would be a remaking of our-selves so thorough that nature shrinks from it; and the ultimate effect would be to renew the face of the earth.
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IV

Guided by the same Holy Spirit, through the same world, under pressure from the same Devil, one would expect the Mystical Body to relive the life of Christ, produce actions like His, stir the reactions that He stirred.
And so it is.
To take some of the reactions first, we see that there is not an accusation hurled at Him that has not been hurled at His Church. And notice that She is most bitterly hated not for what is most human in Her, the faults—sometimes the appalling faults—of Her members, but for what is most clearly the operation of Christ. Her insistance on the primacy of the spiritual is twisted into the same accusation that was brought against Him that She is setting up a kingdom to dominate the kingdoms of men; She is hated as He was for both of Her teachings on the body—that it is subordinate to the spirit, and that it is capable of sanctification; for Her assertion that divine truth and divine law are absolute, not to be modified by human circum-stances; for Her assertion of infallibility; for Her claim to judge the world. She is hated for Her claim to be unique. She is hated for being in fact unique.

But the similarity of the world's reaction is a small thing compared with the similarity of the actions She produces to the actions of Christ upon earth. She lives the very details of His life: His public ministry is continued in the active work of the hierarchy and the missionary; His hidden life at Nazareth in the lives of the contemplative orders of men and women. The Church has the same alternation of fasting and feasting, the same sudden inter-vention of God by miracles, the same glorification of virginity, the same fruits of virginity. It is hardly too much to say that if we had no Gospels we could reconstruct the whole picture of Christ from studying the daily life of the Church—the whole picture, not excluding His redemptive suffering.
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V

There is light for the understanding both of the Church and of our own lives in this truth that the Church as a whole and we its members have some kind of share in the redemptive suffering of Christ. This truth, like almost everything else relevant to membership in the Mystical Body, may best be studied in relation to Christ's mother, because she is the one perfect member of the Body. Every element in the life of the Body will be seen at its most intense in her.

The Church has always had a sense of the enormous love of Christ for His mother.
But if we confine ourselves to the Gospel record,
it is very difficult to find any concrete evidence of it.
The Gospels do not record a single word of tenderness.

It is possible that at the very moment of His death,
when He gives her St. John to take His own place as her Son,
there is profound tenderness,
yet the actual words of it could hardly be briefer or more objective:

    Woman, behold thy son.

The word, woman, is a term of honour,
with none of that offensive implication which the progress of the English language has fixed upon it;
but it is a term of honour, hardly a term of affection.
There is no record in the Gospel that He ever addressed her as mother.

All this, of course, may have no significance.
The Gospels are the briefest possible record of a life fuller than any other man ever lived.
Following upon the description of Our Lord's infancy, there is complete silence upon the next twelve years; then a single incident; then silence upon eighteen years.
The main concern of the evangelists is with the three years of the public ministry, and even here everything is so compressed that nothing can be argued from the absence of anything from the record. And it would take a great deal more than the mere silence of the Gospels to persuade anyone that the perfect Son did not love His mother with perfect love.

But we have not only silence to puzzle us: there is a certain note of remoteness in what is actually recorded. And the Church, in her doctrine of the Com-Passion of Our Lady, explains in marvellous combination both the apparent remoteness and the immeasurable love. Let us begin with that episode of Our Lord's twelfth year, told in St. Luke's second chapter, when His parents, returning from Jerusalem, find that He is not with them, search for Him for three days, and find Him at last in the temple asking the doctors questions and proposing solutions at which the doctors marvel.
Our Lady said to Him:

"My Son, why hast thou treated us so?
Think what anguish of mind thy father and I have endured, searching for thee."

He answered:

"What reason had you to search for me?
Could you not tell that I must needs be in the place which belongs to my Father?"

The answer, coming from a boy of twelve to a mother who has had three days of anguish through his action, is startling. Here is remoteness to the point of bleakness. No word of regret or sympathy. We need not be surprised that we are puzzled, for so were Mary and Joseph. These words which He spoke to them were beyond their understanding. In any event the strange episode came to its close. He went back with them to Nazareth.
But

"His mother kept in her heart the memory of all this".

Remember how Simeon had said that a sword should pierce her heart; these words of her Son, kept in her heart and pondered, may have been part of the turning of the sword.

Examine them closely.
Her question to Christ is

"My Son, why hast thou treated us so?"

What exactly had He done to them?
Gone away from them.
It seems possible that this cry of Our Lady is an echo long in advance of a more famous cry yet to be uttered:

"My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

What she cries to her Son in her anguish is so very close to what He cries to His Father in His anguish. So theologians have seen it, and seen it not as a mere chance, but as part of the very design of our redemption.

In the natural order, one imagines that Christ must have been like His mother—this was one infant, at least, about whom no question could arise as to which parent He resembled; and she found it, probably, as much of a delight as most mothers find it, that her Son was like her. But that remains in the natural order. In the supernatural order her supreme glory is that she was like her Son.

That she was like Him is for any Catholic a commonplace, yet we may miss certain important elements in the likeness. He was sinless and the Man of Sorrows. She was sinless and we think of her most naturally as the Mother of Sorrows. From the moment other Son's birth, almost all that we know of her is shot through with grief— the flight into Egypt to save her Child from murder, the knowledge of the other mothers' children massacred by Herod, the three days' loss of Christ when He was twelve. His death while she stood by the cross. He suffered; she suffered: but the analysis we have just made of that strange episode in the Temple points to a relation between her suffering and His that we might otherwise have failed to see. Her suffering was related to His, but it was not merely her reaction to His, it was hers. She suffered not simply with Him, as any mother must suffer in the suffering of her son, but in her own right. Before He experienced His desolation, she experienced her desolation. He had His Passion, but she had her passion too. And while His accomplished everything, hers was not for nothing. It was part of the design of the Redemption that while the Divine Person suffered the Passion that redeemed us, a human person should suffer a passion parallel with His.

There is almost impenetrable darkness here,
but St. Paul helps us to penetrate it a little:

"I am glad of my sufferings on your behalf,
as, in this mortal frame of mine, I help to pay off the debt
which the afflictions of Christ leave still to be paid,
for the sake of His body,
the Church."

The Douay Version has:

"I fill up those things that are wanting of the suffering of Christ, in my flesh,
for His body which is the Church." (Col.i.24).

In either translation the words are startling and at first almost stunning.
St. Paul says that something is wanting, something left still to be paid, something apparently not accomplished by the sufferings of Christ; and to make the shock of this more formidable, he says that by his own sufferings he will help to supply what the sufferings of Christ did not accomplish. St. Paul, of course, is not writing to stun but to teach. We may try to sort out what He is teaching.

There is something, needed by Christ's Body, the Church, which Christ's suffering has not accomplished and which St. Paul—and presumably other members of the Church—must help to supply. Obviously nothing could be lacking in what the Divine Person did for the Church. Whatever could be done by God for men has been done. The lack could be only something which in the nature of the case could not be done by God for men, something which in the nature of the case men must do for themselves. In other words there is a part in mankind's redemption—a subsidiary part having no effect at all save in relation to the total effectiveness of Christ's action—that mankind must play for itself.
The thing is very subtle, difficult to say as clearly as one sees it.
Let us try.

Remember that in the redemptive act itself there were two elements, the human nature in which the act was done, and the divine Person by whom the act was done. Because it was an act in human nature, it could rightly be offered for the sin of the human race. Because it was the act of the divine Person, it had an infinite value which no merely human act could have had. That being so, we considered the question why some lesser act in the human nature could not have sufficed and we saw how it accorded with the demand of all that is best in man that in expiating the sin of man human nature should give of its very uttermost, and in the human nature of Christ it did.

In the human nature of Christ it did: but if only there, then human nature has not given of its uttermost, for in that event the rest of men would be merely spectators, the human nature that is in them contributing nothing. The infinite Person of Christ did not need so total a giving in His human nature, yet it was fitting that He should redeem us by that total giving. Similarly our redemption thus effected did not require that humanity as a whole should give what it has to give. But it was in the glorious design of God that human love should not be denied all place in the expiation of human sin, with men condemned to be no more than spectators of their own redemption. Redeemed humanity should suffer in union with Christ, and in union with Christ these sufferings should be co-redemptive. When St. Paul says that in a body the head cannot say to the foot "I have no need of you", he may have been speaking in all strictness of the Body and the Head.

There is then a co-redemptive activity of the whole Mystical Body, deriving the whole of its effectiveness from the redemptive action of Christ; and in this co-redemptive activity every member of the Mystical Body plays some part insofar as he unites his sufferings with Christ's: human nature is privileged to repeat in the persons of men what it has completed in the Person of Christ. But what all of us may do according to our imperfection. Our Lady did perfectly. Even St. Paul could not make all of his sufferings available for the Church, since some at least must be set against his own sins. Our Lady had no sins, and whatever she suffered could be wholly for the sins of mankind. But how could she suffer? She could suffer like any other mother to see her Son suffer, and more than any other mother because she was better than any other and had a Son more worthy of love. But for the completion of suffering, she must have sufferings other own, and at their highest these must be in the soul. Her Son chose for her and she chose for herself the suffering that would lead to the uttermost increase of her sanctification, and give her the most to contribute to the spiritual needs of all of us. Her Son loved her supernaturally, as God loves all who have His sanctifying grace in their souls, and more than all others because no spirit of man or angel has ever received and responded to so vast a measure of His grace. Her Son loved her naturally, as a human son loves a human mother, and again more than any other because of His perfection and hers. It was a wonderful thing for her, this second sort of love, but it was still second. So vast a thing is supernatural relationship, that every one of us in the state of grace is more closely related to her Son supernaturally than she merely by her natural relationship as His mother. And if our relation by grace is closer than hers by nature, how immeasurably closer still was her relation by grace.

It does seem at least possible that for the increase of supernatural love, she denied herself not, of course, any tiniest degree of His natural love, but some of the intimacies and consolations that normally flow from the natural relation of mother and son. At first approach we find the idea almost unbearable: and so must she have found it in its actuality. But seeing as clearly as she saw, immeasurably more clearly than we can see, she would have realized the thing we half glimpse, that all the external accom-paniments of natural love are not in themselves of the essence of it; and that self-denial in their regard would lead not only to a growth of that which matters most, supernatural love, but thereby to a growth of natural love, too.
She could see that this is so, and could act by it;
but that would not diminish the suffering that flowed from the denial.
Like us all she had to deny herself in order to follow Christ.
What else had she that she could deny herself?

We may carry the doctrine of Our Lady's suffering one stage further.
We all have a share in the co-redemptive suffering of the Mystical Body by uniting our sufferings with the sufferings of our Head.
But when Our Lady did perfectly what we must do in our own fashion,
she was suffering not simply as one of us,
even as the best one, the one closest to Christ,
but as our representative.

We shall not see her clearly if we do not grasp this representative function of hers.
And not only here.
When in answer to the angel's message that she was to bear the world's Redeemer
she said

"Be it done unto me according to thy word",

she was uttering the consent of the whole human race.

When she died, she was taken up into Heaven, body and soul,
and there till the Day of Judgment she will be the one human person complete with soul and body standing before the throne of God.
So here God allowed that the suffering of the divine Person should be accompanied by a wholly human suffering, as earnest of the suffering of redeemed humanity that was to be spread throughout the ages.
As Christ represents humanity in the Redemptive Act,
she represents humanity in the co-redemptive act.
His suffering was the essential thing,
and hers valuable only by derivation.
His was the Passion, hers the Com-Passion.
He was the Redeemer
but the Church loves to call her Co-Redemptrix.

As we look back over what we have so far seen of the Mystical Body of Christ, we realize that it is a difficult doctrine, but that the difficulty is of a special kind. It is not difficult to grasp what the Church is saying, as it is for example with the Blessed Trinity. In that sense it is a comparatively simple doctrine. The difficulty is to grasp that the Church really means it, that a thing at once so simple, and so glorious, and so glorifying to us, is actually so. It is the hardest thing in the world to realize that we are what this doctrine says we are. We feel that we are not upon the scale for such magnificence. But we must become reconciled to our own magni-ficence as Christians, not deluded by our meagreness as men. "Agnosce Christiane dignitatem tuam "—Learn, O Christian, thy dignity. This is what St. Leo meant.
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