36 GOD THE ONLY PERFECT PERSONALITY be found only in God, while in all finite spirits there exists only a weak imitation of personality. The finiteness of the finite is not a productive condition of personality, but rather a hindering barrier to its perfect development."1 St. Thomas again, says "Person' expresses that which is most perfect in nature, subsistence in a rational nature. As, then, we should predicate of God all that is most perfect, since His Essence contains every perfection of creatures, we must predicate personality of Him, not as of creatures, but in the higher sense in which attributes of creatures are applied to God." 1 Mikrokosmus, vol. iii., p. 576. 2 Summa, Pt. I., Qu. xxxix., Art. 3. See these and other notes on the subject in Hettinger's Natural Religion, pp. 170-171. CHAPTER II JESUS CHRIST: GOD AND MAN BROWNING teaches that man knows God, but chooses to ignore Him. The child, the savage, the natural man recognize God in some form or other. "All know, none is ignorant,”1 of this fact at least. "But man Ignores-thanks to Thee Atheism implies, therefore, either a defect in the reasoning power, some hypertrophy of one side of the thinking capacity which obscures the faculty by which we apprehend God, or the affectation of a superior intellect which puts us above the " common herd," who are content with the generally-accepted teaching about the Supreme Being. Such persons, by the misuse of the reasoning faculty God has given them, ignore the Creator of the reason, choosing to say there is no God. Probably few, if any, dogmatic Atheists exist; Agnosticism is the fashion of the 1 Parleyings with Fust and his Friends. 2 Ibid. 38 GOD REVEALED BY CHRIST day. Merely to know God intellectually, though it may prove that we possess sound reasoning faculties, will not satisfy our hearts. We may believe in the existence of a God, and deny that He has revealed Himself to us; we are then Deists. We may believe in a personal God, and then we are called Theists. "Theism may be as serious an obstacle to the reception of the Christian Gospel as Atheism; for the God of many Theists is a God so remote from man that it is inconceivable to them that He should have become Man at the impulse of an infinite love for our race, and should have lived a life of conflict and of suffering, and died a death of shame and horror for our salvation." 1 The belief that this Personal God has revealed Himself to us in the Person of Jesus Christ constitutes a belief in Christianity, and this was the faith which Browning held. The poems Christmas Eve and Easter Day are meaningless if they do not express their author's belief in the divinity of our Lord and His atoning sacrifice. Christ is no fable or myth to Browning; for the Göttingen professor who taught that doctrine he prays "May Christ do for him what no mere man shall, And stand confessed as the God of salvation ! " 2 1 Dr. Dale's Christian Doctrine, p. 40. THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 39 Christ Jesus, very Man and very God. The Christian belief concerning the Natures and Person of Jesus Christ is that He is "God the Son made man for us." He has, therefore, two natures: that of God and that of man. Is this the creed of Robert Browning? Undoubtedly it is. If from the many passages in the poet's works in which he speaks of our Blessed Lord we take this one or that, it is possible to urge that Browning is not speaking in his own person, but dramatically through his characters, and it is undeniable that this or that particular quotation may not express the poet's religious belief. But if we go through his whole works, and note down all the references to the Person and work of Jesus Christ, it is, I think, impossible to come to any other conclusion than that Browning was a believer in the divinity of our Lord. In Pauline, which, as I have explained, was the poet's first work, he addresses our Lord in the most impassioned and devout terms— "O thou pale form! . . Oft have I stood by thee Have I been keeping lonely watch with thee In the damp night by weeping Olivet, Or leaning on thy bosom, proudly less, Or witnessing thy bursting from the tomb." In The Ring and the Book, which was published when the poet was fifty-six, we have 40 LOVE COMPLETES THE IDEA OF GOD his mature utterances, and in the character of the Pope it is impossible to doubt that Browning speaks his own thought, just as he does in Rabbi Ben Ezra. The Pope, communing with God, reflects that the Infinite chose this one earth out of all the multitude of peopled worlds for stage and scene of His transcendent act, beside which even creation is but a puny exercise of power. This story of the redemption of man by Jesus Christ he loves with his heart, and finds it not contrary to his reason. The conception of God as only all-powerful and all-wise is "an isoscele deficient in the base." "What lacks, then, of perfection fit for God Limitless is the power, boundless the intelligence, let love be unlimited in its self-sacrifice— "Then is the tale true, and God shows complete," the Pope says. Beyond the tale of this transcendent love he reaches into the dark, feels what he cannot see, and still faith stands. Whether the Incarnation be a fact, absolute independent truth, and not merely truth reverberate made to pass into the mind of man, the same truth in a new form, "what matter so intelligence be filled?" He is not perplexed by the difficulties raised by 1 The Ring and the Book: "The Pope," ll. 1395-70. |