By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
“Priests are servants and secretaries of the imagination.” So wrote Baudelaire, the 19th-century French poet. He meant it in a derogatory way, accusing the Church of inventing and perpetuating the myth of God, creation, and a natural order.
The phrase is also suggestive in an entirely different and opposing way. Servants and secretaries of the imagination play an important role by reminding us of the end of human existence. The “end,” by definition, is a constant, a beacon, enabling life’s sojourner to avoid shipwreck. Ends are articulated first in the order of intention, though they remain last in the order of execution. Knowledge of the end renders life’s journey intelligible. The Church is constant insofar as it calls us to a life of virtue, to a life of contemplation, or, in the words of St. Francis de Sales, to a “devout life.”
There is a historical analogy here that can assist us in understanding the proper role of the Church. In the 1760s, the city fathers of the port city of Philadelphia decided that Cape Henlopen on the Atlantic coast needed a lighthouse to protect commercial shipping from running aground on the many shoals lurking just below the surface of Delaware Bay.
They built a fine, tall granite tower, with six-foot-thick walls at the base tapering to a light 69 feet above sea level. It could be seen for many miles out at sea, and was of great assistance to mariners. Unfortunately, it was attacked by some disgruntled British troops during the Revolutionary War, and the light was out for several years. The number of shipwrecks increased.
The light was eventually repaired, and it stayed in service until the 1920s, when its foundation was undermined by ocean currents, and then fell into the sea. Without the beacon as a guide, ships lost their way and ran aground.
Similarly, without the Church as a beacon, life’s journey can be perilous.
Given Europe’s turbulent waters, the Church has never been more needed to prevent the shipwreck of Western culture. As a servant and secretary of the imagination, the Church holds perennial truths concerning the end of life and the shoals to be avoided in the pursuit of self-fulfillment.
If the Church functions as a weathervane that merely reflects the transient flow of alien ideas, it will not serve as the guide that brings the faithful home. A beacon it must be as it has been over the centuries.
Its illuminative power can be traced to antiquity when the fathers of the Church incorporated Greek rationality in the service of the Gospels. A thought is well articulated in the saying, “Christ came in the fullness of time when the intellect of the West was prepared to receive the truths of the Gospels.”
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(Dr. Dougherty is the author of Briefly Considered: From the Mainstream: Notes and Observations on the Sources of Western Culture, available at amazon.com.)
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