Bright Flashes
(Three moments of METANOIA in my recent life)
Ben Mann – July 2007

1. It is the middle of November in 2004. The season has set in hard, with a blizzard that knocks out power across our college campus. Our seminar’s assignment is the ‘Confessions’ of Saint Augustine. The sun is setting, and soon there is no light to read. I prop up a flashlight on the windowsill and strain my eyesight to continue reading. As I do, the dark and cold become easier to ignore: I am transfixed by this book.

It is more honest than any other book I have ever read. It is more honest than any person I have ever met. Its author sees through me, and through everyone around me. His insight into humans and their world is uncanny. I have never read such a book. But its very brilliance upsets me: it is a Christian book –a Catholic book— from first to last, and I want no part of that at all. I reject this kind of faith; I reject the whole idea of unseen salvation through a mystery.

Augustine becomes a strange friend of mine, through this book of his. Where he diagnoses man’s maladies, I acclaim every word. I feel profound kinship with his passion of heart, desire for perfection, and acute consciousness of failure. But where he offers his prescription, I shake my head and sputter insults, then argue with him in the margins till the book is frayed and filled with my exasperation.

A feeling, quite contrary to immediate experience, persists: that the author of the ‘Confessions’ is very much alive, and that I am actually the dead one.

Closer to the surface, there is a dread that I will someday run out of arguments against him. This ancient Christian is clearly very much more wise than I am, even if his religion is false; so, might his religion really be true?

The following spring, I write my sophomore thesis: an atheistic account of the manifest truth of the doctrine of Original Sin. With Augustine, I concur that there is a human disease beyond all human cures, a deformity of spirit with which we enter the world and which we cannot remedy. Against him, I say that there simply is no cure. I do not yet realize the consequences of this view.

*

2. It is the end October of 2005. Desiring a break from formal philosophical inquiry, I have left college, found work at a coffee shop, and moved into my first apartment. Four books are preoccupying me.

The first of them is ‘The Prince,’ the famous work of Niccolo Machiavelli, who claims to demonstrate that the peace and prosperity of nations can only be maintained by occasional acts of great evil. Can this be true? Are work, family, and leisure all sustained by this ‘devil’s bargain’ to which we tacitly consent, and in which we are complicit?

The second of them is Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy of Morals,’ whose author takes Machiavelli’s notions even further. Where Machiavelli merely said that cruelty was required to keep the peace, Nietzsche claims that the very idea of justice originates in brutal retributive killing. And from this, he says, comes our category of justice. I cannot side with him; yet I have no better account of morality’s origins by which to challenge him.

The third disturbing book is C.S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’. Lewis offers an answer to the question raised by the first two books; but I choke on Lewis’ answer just as I choked on Augustine’s. His claim is that man’s conscience, claiming sovereignty over his actions, cannot conceivably be a product of those very actions; rather, it is “from on high,” and points us to its Originator. The existence of a perfect and benevolent God would destroy Nietzsche’s brute-force view of morality’s origin, and Machiavelli’s cruelty-for-convenience; but can I really believe in such a being as Lewis describes?

The fourth book is the most disturbing. Called ‘Out of America’, written by the journalist Keith Richburg, it describes firsthand the condition of several African nations in the early 1990s. There is a particular focus on the tribal atrocities done in Rwanda during those years. As the book opens, Richburg watches a corpse-choked river as it literally turns red with blood. I know –good ‘Augustinian atheist’ that I have become—that their killers are not unlike me, or anyone else.

This fourth book brings the crisis. I can no longer live with the notion of a fully incurable and universally terminal spirit-disease. If no cure exists . . . then this is all utterly futile, and the world will be never be more than a hospice— and that at best. If there is no cure for our condition, then cruelty’s advocates are right—and worse still, it doesn’t even matter that they’re right. At last, I realize the consequence of my view: eternal hopelessness for every soul. Good and evil both simply swallowed, indifferently, by death.

That cannot be true. I must affirm life and justice— despite Machiavelli, despite Rwanda. I cannot, unless there is hope in God—God whose grace is salvation, God deigning to save man.

Can the love of God Himself, through death itself, conquer death? I am scared to say yes; it will change life forever. It will change everything.

But I cannot say no: that is to blaspheme all things by rejecting all transcendent hope. If Christ is not our King and God—then time, death, and decay rule all things.

That cannot be. It follows that He is the Lord and is risen. Whether I’m comfortable with that or not.

*

3. It is the 28th of August, 2006. I am standing in the office of Travis Cook, Ph.D., my junior seminar tutor. Mr. Cook is a modest but uncompromising Roman Catholic; and I am a recently-baptized Christian, of no firm affiliation—“protestant by default,” respectful of the Roman church, but much more interested in Eastern Orthodoxy.

There is –I have known all along— no “mere Christianity” (much as some may want it). The conservative Protestantism into which I have wandered, post-conversion, is totally untenable, and I know it— no denomination can claim to be the Church as professed in the Nicene Creed. The Greek and Russian Orthodox are most appealing to me; their tradition draws the soul to God, undeniably, through the heart and the senses. But my head keeps raising objections.

I am in this professor’s office because I do not want to become a Catholic— and because I suspect I will have to. The Vatican claims are like Christ’s claims, either terribly wrong or terrifyingly true. I recall Kierkegaard’s statement, that true Christianity always offends the world. The “sign of offense” must be present.

And this is very offensive, unless it is true: "They could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it, or to remain in it." Likewise, those charisms claimed by the Pope. Likewise, the Church’s countercultural insistence on the Natural Law in all areas of life whatsoever.

These are the signs of offense, unmistakably. I outline my dilemma to Mr. Cook, who concurs. “It’s true. She’s either the Bride of Christ or the Whore of Babylon.”

Indeed. And yet—will I put this off for years as John Henry Newman did, testing the spirits through long inquiry before acting? Will I manage, as Jaroslav Pelikan did, to respect Rome from the other side, saying “perhaps” or “not quite” to the man who says he is Peter and holds the Keys? Can I possibly postpone this, or be a Rome-tolerant “lower-case catholic” among the Eastern Orthodox?

I stammer my fears to my professor, seeing only one resolution. He is cool-headed: “No, you’re not wrong to see the dilemma. The claims should be answered. And it sounds like you’re on your way. Still, give it time. Think through whatever you do. Be sure that I’ll pray for you as you decide . . .”

There is a lull in the conversation –what is there to say?— and he looks up at the wall. He looks up at a calendar of historic Catholic art and architecture that hangs in the office. He says out of nowhere, very casually: “It’s Saint Augustine’s feast day today.”

And in an instant, by this offhand remark, I’m undone. Almost involuntarily I begin to laugh aloud, looking away from my professor and toward the ceiling, saying repeatedly: “I give up! That’s it, I give up! I give up!”

Mr. Cook, who knows nothing of my history with Augustine, is not sure why I am saying this, or to whom. For my part, I am not even sure whether my words of surrender are directed to God Himself, or to His servant Aurelius Augustinus—evidently my intercessor, indeed more alive than myself. Both, I suppose. It is all happening suddenly—not gradually at all. And henceforth, there will be no putting it off, no reasoning around it. “I get it! Alright! I give up! I give up!”

*

I will enter the Catholic Church through Chrismation on the Easter Vigil of 2008, as a member of the Russian Byzantine Catholic Community of SS. Cyril & Methodius. Glory to Jesus Christ!