Francis P. Donnelly, The Science of Theology and the Art of Sacred Eloquence (1911)

[11] The antithesis of science and art has been so often formulated that it would be idle and wearisome to rehearse the details. The title of this article will in itself clarify some ideas and point the way to practical corollaries. Without entering, then, upon the larger question of the contrasts of art and science, it might be well to single out some difficulties the preacher may be expected to meet with in transmuting the substance of his theological science into the material of his sacred eloquence, in translating a thesis into a sermon, in making Aquinas a Lacordaire or Suarez a Bourdaloue. It would seem paradoxical at first sight to affirm any difficulty whatsoever. Truth is one and the same whether couched in a syllogism or resonant in a period. Falsehood may assume a thousand disguises; but truth has but one expression upon its immobile features, one look in its sleepless eyes; eternally fixed upon eternal foundations, with unswerving gaze—the ideal of sphinxes, moored with shiftless fixedness upon the shifting sands of falsehood.

[12] But the difficulty in question does not come from truth. You have the same proportions of hydrogen and oxygen in the glacier as you have in the river, but in some cases it took geological ages, in all cases it involves the expenditure of immense energy, to strip ice of its accidental rigidity and frigidity and run it molten down the valleys of the world, conforming itself to every varying width and every varying depth of its proper channel. There is no substantial change in the truth, but its accidental form must put off the inflexible austerity of science and assume the flexibility and warmth of eloquence. In the famous statement of St. Augustine, which embodies the world-old tradition of oratory, theology puts a full stop after the first member; eloquence, leaving the commas, goes on to the end of the three clauses. "Ut veritas pateat, ut veritas placeat, ut veritas moveat." [i.e. "That the truth be clear, that it please, that it move."]

ELOQUENCE IS UNTECHNICAL.

The technical term is something that must be left in the lecture-room. Science could scarcely exist without the technical term. Such terms constitute the shorthand of science. One phrase in theology is sometimes an index to volumes, condenses ages of church history, expedites scientific discussion and is the gravestone of a thousand heresies. Pelegianism, transubstantiation, hypostasis, circum-insesssion, and all the terminative's and formaliter's of the theological disputation are absolutely essential to science, very nearly fatal to eloquence. The reason is not, because shallow thinkers or careless students make the technical term a substitute for knowledge and think they have theology because they have mastered its language, as though the mere murmuring of x, y, z, entitled one to a degree in algebra. A terminology is the scaffolding needed to erect the temple of truth. A certain amount of acrobatic skill will enable one to scale its bare boards or tread securely its precarious rafters, but while irresponsible youths are playing hide-and-seek on the scaffolding, the builders, resting on that necessary structure, lay the stones of the temple in solidity.

It is not, therefore, because of its abuse that terminology is unserviceable to eloquence; it is precisely because of its [13] scientific utility. Technical terms constitute a language, and a very difficult language. It is a language which saves valuable time for the teachers. It is comprehensive, precise, severely intellectual, but it is a foreign language to people who listen to sermons and scarcely serviceable for even a congregation of theologians. Its very condensation makes it indigestible within the brief time given to the spoken word, and even the Bread of the Lord must be leavened, though not with the leaven of the Pharisees. Sometimes the very terms of ascetical theology likewise need leavening before being dispensed to the multitude. Mortification and the spiritual life and the interior spirit and supernatural motives, these and many another term that has come to us from the good books we read, are stereotyped formulas of asceticism and may be idle words for many hearers.

The sacred orator must melt down the stereotyped and run his language into new molds for his audience. He must leave the glacial period of science where "froze the genial currents of his soul" and thaw out in the pulpit. Estimate, if you will, the energy of heat required to convert a world of ice into a sea of fire, and you will have some idea of the labor required to change a small quantity of theology into the palpitating flexibility of a sermon. Modern inventions have been able by high-pressure machines to force air bubbles into baking dough and so shorten the leavening process by dispensing with the slower release and permeation of yeasty vapors. The work calls for time and energy. If you shorten the time, you must increase the energy. Sometimes it is only after years of thought and familiarity with the solid truth of theology that it has become light and wholesome for public consumption in the pulpit; sometimes the intense application of special study will force at once technicality and density into freedom and grace; but always either by expenditure of more time or more energy in the mastery of thought, must the prime matter of truth be made to doff the form of science and assume the form of art.

Suppose you should try to bring home to the audience the personality of God. You would have visions from theology of pantheism and agnosticism. You would recall shattered fragments of discussion about hypostasis and the individual. [14] Perhaps half-forgotten heresies would struggle into consciousness with other flotsam and jetsam. All that would be quite unleavened for the audience you have in mind, and you might say to yourself, "I will talk to my good people about going to Mass and confession." But perhaps with longer meditation you would feel that the personality of God might give a meaning to religious life, might comfort a lonely soul, might take prayer out of the region of the clouds, making it, instead of what would be deemed as senseless talking to the air, rather the loving converse with one who knows and loves, whose ear is ever at our lips, as Fr. Farrell puts it somewhere; and moved by these many advantages your thoughts of God's personality would shed its technicalities. Fr. Pardow, who died but recently, was a preacher who had in his life a vivid realization of the personality of God and made many attempts to formulate his knowledge for the pulpit. He often tried to make his hearers realize what he felt. One illustration had some success. "A government," he would quote or say, "is impersonal. 'I cannot shake hands with the United States', was the cry of the soldier. My Colonel is my government for me." But Fr. Pardow's most successful attempt at making his audience realize God's personality was closely allied to one which Christ Himself used for a similar purpose. Not far from where Fr. Pardow lived at Poughkeepsie he saw on one of his walks an incubator whose source of heat was an oil-lamp. His mind was ever alive to spiritual analogies, and one suggested itself at once. The lamp would represent the impersonal idea of God as a force in the universe and would be contrasted with the mother-hen the embodiment of the personal idea. The illustration is crude as here presented, but it was not so in his development of it, and his fine sense of humor was able in a delicate way to make much of the absurdity of an oil-lamp masquerading as a mother-hen. whatever may be the thought of it, it certainly was, with other explanations, effective in securing a realization of God's personality. One good, shrewd Irishman was full of the idea after the sermon, and prayer became for him a new thing. Another person wrote to Fr. Pardow in English which is rude but in enthusiasm which is unmistakable: "Dear Father on Good Friday night Will you please give us the Leture [sic] you gave [15] down at the 16st Collige [sic]. About the Chicken who had a Mother. And the Chicken who had the Incubator for a Mother. Father I am trying to get some of the Boys who do not know what the inside of our church look [sic] like and I know if they was to hear about the Chicken it would set them to think of God in this holy season of Lent." The note is unsigned. 

Assuredly it would seem to be a far cry from the personality of God to an incubator, yet it made the writer of that note think of God and with the zeal of an apostle he wanted the boys to think the same way. Similar but greater enthusiasm was aroused, we may feel sure, by the supreme eloquence of, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the Prophets, and stonest them that are sent to thee, how often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?" We feel the Great Theologian and Sacred orator would not have disdained the incubator with its homely oil-lamp. There are few technical terms in the eloquence of the Gospels.

ELOQUENCE IS IMAGINATIVE.

Scientific truth differs from artistic truth in its presentation. The truths of science are general. Science works from the particular and concrete back to the general and abstract. The truths of art are embodied in the concrete. Contrary to science, art begins with the ideal and works toward a concrete presentation. Geometry will reduce a flower-garden to a blueprint; landscape gardening will turn lines into borders and blank spaces into mosaics of flowers. The architect must have his blueprint to keep him from going wrong, but art finds its realization in the cathedral. Science gives an anatomical chart; art produces a statue. Principles, deductions, conclusions, classification, systems, these are processes of science and valuable they all are for art, but all these operations are facing the abstract and general. Art faces the concrete and particular, and after its survey of heaven and earth it is not content until it gives "airy nothings a local habitation and a name." Science is ever climbing up the tree of Porphyry; art is ever climbing down it.

[16] Apply all this now to theology and preaching. Anyone can see the two opposite processes exemplified in such works as Corluy's Spicilegium Dogmaticum, and in most commentators who are looking to the essential truths of Scripture. The sermon on the Mount is reduced to a series of general propositions where everything local, particular, and concrete is set aside to arrive at the essence, to classify the product and codify a system. Take again the sermon on prayer (Luke 11). "Lord, teach us to pray", said one of His disciples. The first part of the sermon advises the recitation of the Our Father; then follows a famous parable, a picture with all its details, local, actual, and contemporary; the perfection of the concrete. In the crucible of science these details are all swept away. "Friend, lend me three loaves," is generalized into "prayer". "If he shall continue knocking," is the artistic expression for the scientific "persevering". So with the rest: the midnight hour, the shut door, the children in bed, the continual knocking, the reluctant rising, the triumph of the visitor, all disappear, and this piece of eloquence becomes a theological conclusion asserting "the efficacy of persevering prayer; for if selfishness and indolence yield to importunity among creatures, how much more is this true of God?" 

Think a moment of all the great truths of our faith which have been embodied in exact terms and defined and made perspicuous by reason and authority; and set them aside by side with the gospel which is sacred eloquence and from which these great truths arose; and you will understand the marked difference between the scientific and artistic form of the same truth. The providence of God and the lilies of the field, the papal supremacy and the keys, the infallibility and the rock and the sheep, unity and the one fold, grace and the wedding garment, charity and the Good Samaritan, humility and the little child, perfect contrition and the prodigal, torments of hell and unquenchable fire without a single drop on a parched tongue—there is no need of prolonging the catalog. The parable, the example, the story, the similitude, the epigram, the brief description, these are rarely employed in the textbooks of science, where clearness of truth is looked for: "ut veritas pateat". These, however, always enshrine the truths of eloquence where the charm of truth is sought for: "ut veritas placeat".

[17] ELOQUENCE IS EMOTIONAL.

Finally, scientific truth is unemotional. Earnestness may galvanize a chapter of Suarez into momentary life, but that life is only galvanic and extrinsic. It comes from flashing eye and thrilling tone and vigorous gesture, but the truth itself is unemotional. Science wants it so. It excludes emotion as distracting and out of place. Imagine a professor of geometry tearfully and exultantly announcing in tremulous tones his Q. E. D. Science does not amplify, does not enforce its truths with emotional vehemence, does not perorate. If you do not understand, it gives another proof, or another exposition. When you catch the fact or principle, the work of science is done. The mind is equated with objective realities; it is vested with the truth. You have a perfect mental fit. It is no part of science to comment on the beauty of the vesture or its goodness. It has already passed on to fit your mind with another truth. Ah, but art does not pass on. In its mental vestures, art dwells upon their beauty and is attracted or repelled by their goodness or evil. The truth of art is transfigured by the imagination into a thing of beauty and is shown to be stained with evil or flowing with goodness, because in eloquence the truth must pass from the mind through the imagination to the heart: "ut veritas pateat, ut veritas placeat, ut veritas moveat".

One glance of the opened eye sees the flash of truth; the gaze must be riveted to behold its beauty; the looks must be fascinated to thrill with truth's emotion. "Veritas stat in indivisibili", our philosophers tell us, but "pulchritudo non stat in indivisibili nec malitia nec bonitas." So the orator amplifies and is diffuse. He deepens the dark shadows of the picture that you may hate it more and more; he emphasizes the light areas that you may like the picture more and more. He will never be content with your merely seeing it. In a sense, therefore, the sacred orator must know theology better than the theologian. He will not be content with a surface knowledge but will feel the pulse of truth and listen to its heart-beat. He will get down below terms to realities. Before his imagination general truths will marshall [sic] the multitudes of their individuals, and disclose the significant individual which will best represent the class. His knowledge [18] of theological truths will widen out into the myriad relations and analogies in history, art, and nature wherein the profoundest theology may be presented and illustrated in the simplest object-lesson familiar to every audience. Part of Chesterton's success consists in his power of bringing his philosophy, as much as he has, down to the lowest common denominator. He sees philosophy in the veriest [sic] trifles of life. I know, too, a chemist who has so mastered his science that I really believe he could give a complete course in chemistry with experiments and illustrations from the stains and paints and what not of his room. So must the preacher have mastered his theology for the pulpit. He must be able to see sermons in everything, discern the great round orb of God's truth reflected in countless shades and tints from all the creatures in God's universe.

His truth will be apostolic, will become all things to all men to save all, will avoid the scientific language which appeals to the expert and the trite language which appeals to no one, will keep its language from degenerating into mere symbols, and so will be ever on the lookout in realms of the imagination for new forms in which to body forth the old thoughts. The truth of the orator must be apostolic; it must win its way by beauty and charm and ensure its progress to its destination, the human heart, by filling itself with emotion, by manifesting its goodness or evil. "Ut veritas pateat, ut veritas placeat, ut veritas moveat".

Francis P. Donnelly, S.J.

St. Andrew-on-Hudson, N. Y.

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Source: Francis P. Donnelly, "The Science of Theology and the Art of Sacred Eloquence," Ecclesiastical Review 45, no. 1 (July 1911): 11–18.