THE ROSARY AND THE MODERN MIND From “Within That City”, Arnold Lunn, 1937, Sheed and Ward, London ABSENT-MINDEDNESS is a joke to the friends of the absent-minded, an affliction to his relatives and a curse to himself.
Among the things which I lose on my travels there are some which are returned to me because the world still contains more honest than dishonest people. I remember leaving behind in a German sleeping car a fountain pen which was at once handed in to the Lost Luggage Office in Berlin to which I returned an hour later. I filled in an elaborate form giving the sort of particulars which are asked for on these occasions, signed the form with the fountain pen which had just been returned to me, and, leaving the fountain pen on the desk, I sallied forth in search of Berlin. A few seconds later a panic-stricken official streaked down the platform after me, panic-stricken, for though they provide forms for most eventualities in Germany there is no form provided for those who leave in Lost Property Offices the articles which they have just recovered from the Lost Property Office in question.
Other things are returned to me with reassuring regularity because they have no value to anybody but myself. Nobody, I am glad to say, covets a large square bag containing cylinders for my dictaphone. We travel down together from Charing Cross, but whereas I get out at Chislehurst, my bag usually refers to spend the night with friends at Sevenoaks. On the last occasion when my secretary applied at the Lost Luggage Office to reclaim the prodigal bag the bored official in charge turned his head and asked the man behind him, “ Is the Lunn bag in again this morning ? ”
My pocket book, which I simply dare not lose, is draped round my person and attached by a chain to my top trouser button. A smaller wallet and my Rosary, which has the appeal of antiquity, since I have kept it for three years, travel round my neck and are concealed from public view by my shirt.
On entering a Swiss hotel at the end of a recent journey I met a friend who greeted me with the expression which I see on people’s faces when I come down to dinner with no tie, or, as happened on one occasion, with two.
“ Are they worn outside this year ? ” she asked.
My hand went to my collar, and I blushed a deep red. I wish that I could explain my embarrassment solely by the fact that a few beads of my Rosary were protruding beneath my left ear, but I am afraid that there were less creditable reasons for my discomfort. It was the fact that I had been discovered in possession of a Rosary rather than its position outside my collar which accounted for my confusion.
Every convert brings to the Church lingering prejudices which he discards; and of my prejudices none was more persistent than the prejudice against the Rosary.
“Surely the Rosary is a sort of extra,” a friend of mine once remarked. “You haven’t got to use it, have you ? It’s for Italian peasants, isn’t it ? ”
I remembered that remark as I tucked away my Rosary below my collar, and I thought with resignation of that great dogma to which Protestants tenaciously cling, the dogma that Catholic converts deteriorate intellectually after their reception into the Church.
My friend, who had seemed both amused and slightly shocked by the protruding Rosary, is characteristically modern in that she accepts with unquestioning faith beliefs which the world is beginning to reject, and rejects with unquestioning contempt beliefs which the world is beginning to re-examine. And, like most modern people, she is contemptuous of dogma but has an implicit faith in superstition.
Thus she attaches immense importance to an unsavoury mascot, a fragment of rope which hanged a man in Cairo. This mascot, she assured me, brings luck to everybody who comes into contact with it, with, of course, one unfortunate exception.
I challenged her to produce some evidence in favour of this superstition, and she replied that the man from whom she had bought it had told her that the potency of this mascot was recognized all over the East.
One day she mislaid her piece of rope and hunted for it everywhere in great distress, and was greatly comforted when she found it.
Let us compare the case for the Rosary with the case for mascots in general, of which my friend’s rope-fragment was a particular, and a particularly unpleasant, specimen.
The Rosary has been the favourite devotion not onIy of the great saints but of men of outstanding intellectual attainment. The mascoteers, to coin a useful word, are for the most part neither particularly holy nor conspicuously intellectual. The Christian religion, which has given us the Rosary, is founded on the impregnable basis of historical facts and valid philosophic argument. Faith in mascots is unsupported by a shred of evidence. The Rosary, which consists of beautiful prayers; would still be beautifil even if Christianity could be disproved. The rope mascot would still be squalid and disgusting even if faith in mascots could be proved to be rational, and yet, snob that I am, I was covered with confusion on being discovered in possession of the Rosary, and my friend was entirely unembarrassed in her anxious hunt for the rope.
On a recent cruise a lady confessed to me her surprise that any intelligent man could believe in the infallibility of the Pope. The next day I said to her, “When you re-embarked yesterday you stepped on to the gangway with your right foot first. That was a very rash thing to do. Any sailor will tell you that it is most important that the left foot should be the first to come into contact with the ship.”
“Heavens,” she exclaimed, “ I must remember that.”
She did remember it, and on the only occasion on which she came near to forgetting it she tried to change her foot in mid-air between the boat and the gangway and all but tumbled into the sea.
Towards the end of the cruise I asked her why she had followed my instructions with such fidelity.
“Naturally I did,” she said, “you told me that it would bring bad luck if1 didn’t, didn’t you ? ”
She had accepted without question my statement, though I had offered no evidence in its support. She required no evidence for superstition but would have been prepared to reject all evidence in favour of dogma. As an enlightened modern she found it easier to believe in an infallible Lunn than in an infallible Pope.
The prejudice against the Rosary is, as I have said, due in the main to intellectual snobbery. My own prejudice was largely overcome by a passage which I discovered in the works of one whose intellect must be respected by intellectual snobs. Just before 1 became a Catholic I had read Dom Cuthbert Butler’s Life of Bishop Ullathorne and his History of the Vatican Council. Dom Cuthbert combined profound scholarship with literary talent, and as a result his books are not only learned but readable. Here is a passage from one of his books, the Religion of Authority and Religions of the Spirit, which I recall with very special gratitude.
“The more that educated and intellectual Catholics in their practical religious life throw themselves into the great stream of living Catholicism, and partake with simplicity of heart - each one according to his individual spirit, bent, or attraction - in the ordinary devotions and pious practices of the poor and the lowly, the higher will they rise in the Religion of the Spirit ; for in spiritual things, too, is the promise verified, ‘ he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.’ And holding this as a fundamental religious truth, I pray before relics and images, and use holy water, and say the beads; at Lourdes I bathed in the holy well and burned candles in the Grotto ; in Rome, in the Jubilee year, I made the ’visits’ to the Basilicas, and kissed the Holy Door among the throngs of peasants who had come together from the whole Catholic world : and all this in the belief that by such acts may be gained some insight into those things that have been hidden from the wise and prudent, but revealed to little ones ; - that by such acts may the commandment be obeyed, to become as little children, of whom is the Kingdom of God.“
The prejudice against the Rosary is due not only to intellectual snobbery but also to systematic propaganda. But for this propaganda every Christian would naturally desire to pay honour to the Mother of God. The alleged abuses of mariolatry are no excuse for refusing honour to one whom God honoured above all mankind.( Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit. Dom Cuthbert Butler, P. 45 (Sheed and Ward))
The enemies of Our Lady did not stop short of deliberate falsification in their efforts to create prejudice against Our Lord’s mother. No mistranslation has been more deliberate and more mischievous than the mistranslation which I have heard quoted again and again by devout Christians as an excuse for their unwillingness to give due honour, to the mother of Our Lord.
In the Authorized Version the second chapter of St. John opens with the following verses:
“And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there:
“And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.
“And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. “Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what
have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.”The word gunam translated “ woman ” should more properly be translated “ lady.” “Vocative gunam, a term of respect, mistress, lady.”
I take this quotation from the Greek Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, who were not, so far as I know, in the pay of the Pope.
“What have I to do with thee?” is a deliberate mistranslation. The correct translation is, “What is that to me and to thee?”
It is clear from the Greek that Our Lord intended to reassure his mother. “Lady, that is no cause for anxiety to you or to me.” But the translators in their eagerness to dishonour Mary convey the impression that Our Lord in effect meant to say, “Mind your own business.” (see additional notes below)
Catholics have often been accused of mistranslating the Bible in their own interests, but no such accusation has ever been substantiated. It is, on the other hand, easy to show not only that Luther took the strangest of liberties with the text, but also that other reformers were equally guilty of such impious forgeries. Dr. Moffat has carried on this great tradition in his New Testament in Modern Speech. He translates “ Take and eat this. It is my body ” as “ Take and eat this. It means my body.” This is indeed modern speech, the speech of modern heretics.
It is not surprising that the Church should have discouraged Catholics from reading Protestant versions of the Bible. That the Church strongly encourages Catholics to read approved translations is a fact that anybody can discover for themselves by reading papal encyclicals on this subject.
II
The Rosary might be described as a plain song chant on three notes, these notes being three very old prayers, the Our Father, the Angelic salutation, and the Glory be to the Father.
It is not necessary to prove that the Our Father is not a popish accretion, but it is less generally realized among Protestants that the Angelic salutation is the oldest of Christian prayers, older than Christianity, since it was first uttered before Christ was born.
“ Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Protestants who pretend to appeal to primitive Christianity may be reminded that they will find these words in the first chapter of St. Luke.
To the Hail Mary the piety of later ages has added, “ Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” To the Our Father the Anglican Prayer Book has added a doxology not to be found in the original text of the Our Father.
Those who may be prepared to concede that there is nothing particularly popish in a devotion which consists of three primitive prayers, may still object to the reiteration of those prayers, and quote against us, “ But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.”
Vain repetition . . . yes, but ,the operative word is “vain” Surely what Our Lord condemned is the prayer wheel type of prayer, the belief that there is virtue in the mechanical repetition of a given prayer. The prayer wheel turns and every revolution, so the pious Thibetan believes, is marked up to his credit. This is a magical conception of prayer which is in direct antithesis to the Christian conception.
The Rosary has no analogy with the prayer wheel, since no Catholic believes that the mechanical repetition of the Rosary mechanically achieves a magical result. The Rosary is a method of allocating intervals of time for particular meditations. Each decade of the Rosary takes slightly more than two minutes to say, and each decade is employed in meditation on one of the mysteries associated with Our Lord and his Mother, the Five Joyful Mysteries, the Five Sorrowful Mysteries and the Five Glorious Mysteries. The Rosary thus serves the purpose of an hour glass.
“The objection so often made against ‘vain repetition,’ ” writes Father Thurston, “ is felt by none but those who have failed to realize how entirely the spirit of the exercise lies in the meditation upon the fundamental mysteries of our faith. To the initiated the words of the Angelic Salutation form only the sort of half-conscious accompaniment, a bourdon which we may liken to the Holy, Holy, Holy of the heavenly choirs and surely not in itself meaningless.”
The contemporary world is slowly beginning to rediscover the value of meditation and the power of thought. I count among my friends a young man who begins the day by taking ten deep breaths and repeating ten times “I will succeed.” Other of my acquaint-ances make use of the Coue formula, “ Every day and in every way I get better and better.” Another friend meditates for twenty minutes every morning under the guidance of an American philosopher who has discovered that thoughts are things, and who has yet to discover that silly thoughts are silly things.
The therapeutic value of concentrated thought is universally recognized in the modern world. Health and wealth are recognized as appropriate themes for that scientific meditation which will ultimately replace superstitious meditation on spiritual health.
I have no doubt that before long a modern thinker will adapt the Rosary to the needs of the modern mind. Indeed, I am assured that Coue has already done so. A friend of mine writes, “He recommended a piece of string with twenty knots tied in it. I remember knotting up pieces of string after hearing him lecture.” A decade of Coue salutations might be profitably employed in meditation on the five joyful millionaires.
The Rosary has been the favourite devotion of great saints, but it is also the natural refuge of the unspiritual. It has a valuable disciplinary effect upon the mind in so far as it induces those who use it conscientiously to spend a certain amount of time on their knees, and to make some effort, however feeble, at meditation.
And for those who find it almost impossible to meditate along the prescribed lines, the Rosary has other uses. If one is woefully conscious of the inadequacy of any words of one’s own in formulating one’s own petitions or one’s own thanksgivings, one can say one or more decades of the Rosary for a particular intention, for a friend, for, a cause which one has at heart, or for a benefit received. Or one can say other prayers to the Rosary, sentences from the penitential psalms or phrases from the Mass.
The Church is, indeed, the natural home of those who pray with difficulty, for in her profound understanding of the human heart and human psychology the Church recognizes and provides not only for those who are not naturally religious, but for periods of aridity which occur even in the lives of the most saintly. In these dull intervals the Catholic, as Tyrrell has so wisely said, is still guided by habits formed and deepened in the course of his Catholic life. “ When the mind is barren and feeling is dead, mechanical prayer and religious practices are not so merely and utterly mechanical but that they are also exercises and acts of conscience and freewill-earnests of ‘ the better ’ we fain would offer if we could, in ’ the day of small things ’ when the flax smoulders without flame and the bruised reed cannot lift itself upright. Catholicism refuses to despise ‘the half because it is not the whole, or to confound little with nothing. In the bare-walled conventicles of pure reason, if the soul cannot do her best, she can do nothing. In a Catholic temple she can do her second best or her third. There are altars to visit, and candles to light, and beads to finger, and litanies to mutter, and the crucifixion to gaze on, and a hundred little occupations not less good because others are so much better. . . .”