Fr. Leonardo Castellani: an introduction, Page 2

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  On being shot: providence or doom?

  We have already seen - the Gospels show this easily enough - that Christ gives second place to his miracles. From his point of view they are merely illustrations and confirmations of his doctrine, managed with circumspection and great precaution owing to the fact that miracles tend to mean everything to the crowds. God performs miracles reluctantly.

  Hence Christ accepts Destiny: and when he breaks its laws by introducing exceptions, he does it with full argument and reason. The pagans believed that Jupiter came under the sway of Destiny; Christ shows that God is above Destiny, but that, all the same, Destiny does exist.

  “If Christ really had the power to cure the sick and to resuscitate the dead - if he were God - and didn't cure all the sick in the world, he must be a criminal.”

  These words by an impious Englishman remind me of those others by a fellow countryman of mine: “Oh Virgin of Itatí, if you have healed my pig, and healed my donkey, why don't you heal me also, seeing that I'm from Corrientes too?”

  The first act of common sense is to accept reality. Christ accepts human reality just as it is and above that promises Salvation, the Kingdom of Heaven. Miracles are like glimpses or flashes of insight into this Kingdom; but they do not profess to be the abolition of Destiny, or as it were, the immediate recovery of the Garden of Eden with a wave of the wand.

  Destiny exists; it is made up with the laws of nature, heritage, the place where I was born, the education I received, the country where I acted, the time at which I lived, the sins I have committed, and, in fact, everything I have done... things that if and when I did them, were willingly done, but once done, became necessary. If I have an illness, contracted or inherited, it is part of my Destiny and with this and through this I must obtain my salvation. If a thaumaturgist comes along and cures me, lucky me. If not, I must learn to get on with it. A time will come for it to be cured... if I am saved.

  If Christ accepted the Destiny of Humanity, with all its ills and misfortunes, it is obviously because he could not have done otherwise, even if he was God – or rather precisely because he was God. Here we are faced with an indestructible fact, a reality that has its own laws: Jews and Christians call it Original Sin. Oriental religions such as Buddhism recognize it without trying to explain it... Plato did the same, probably under oriental influence, plastering one of his myths over it. The mythology of all peoples contain myths that are remnants of this mystery.

  It is a divine reality related to God; that is why it is a mystery and surpasses the boundaries of human reason; but the reality is there.

  Christ accepts the Destiny of Humanity and accepts his own Destiny as a man. This is the capital fact. If Christ had carried out his miracles for his own benefit - excepting himself from the common Destiny - Butler's and Thomas Payne's objection would be valid. If “the doctor cured himself” he would be very much obliged to cure everyone else also as long as he were to bear the name of Saviour. But Christ did not perform a miracle for his benefit except the Resurrection which was, of course, for the benefit of everyone else. As a sick man, Kierkegaard said with bitterness: “the worst illnesses are where body and soul meet, such as melancholy, and Christ had this illness.” We might add that in his Passion he underwent all the illnesses together: a leper, the man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief as he was described by the Prophet.

  Of course, the godless have an easy game for they supress the reality of Sin. If sin is an unreal concept, imaginary, a relationship of man with social laws invented by other men, then it is obvious that they are right. The existence of physical ills becomes a scandal and it becomes impossible to reconcile them with the existence of an all-powerful and paternal God. But physical ills are the result, the mirror, and the image of all moral ills. And the extreme resistance of man to this is a reflection of his soul's divine origin.

  Bernard Shaw included my Correntino's objection in his Major Barbara. In art terms it is one of his weaker comedies, but one of his best as a pamphlet which was of course Shaw's main concern. It is a socialist tract on religion; the characters, rather than real people, sound more like dialectical puppets. Scandalised by the world's illnesses, which he summarises as poverty, he calls on the religions to reform themselves and do away with it and he expresses his disappointment with the Salvation Army that appeared at the beginning to be on the right path. Barbara, the leading character, is a brave girl, a major in the Salvation Army; she gets weary of her army “that has not saved anything” and finally becomes a capitalist.

  “Cursed are the poor...”. Poverty is the supreme evil. One must have money... and money to count on. But the Churches, all of them, rely on the ill-earned money of the rich. There is a true christianity based on pardon and the renunciation of vengeance... and justice. There is a false christianity –Crosstianity - based on the adoration of the gallows. The solution is to have money (Shaw had it) well earned (Shaw earned it by poisoning the English public with his sophist ingeniousness as a pseudo-prophet) and more or less morally distributed: “I save a soul with a salary of 38 shillings a week” says the cannon manufacturer. And in the last resort, even if the money is not well-earned, it is still money; and as poverty is the greatest evil, well, of course, logically.... Such is the theory of the English buffoon.

  Your socialist is a capitalist who has no capital... yet. Born religious (Irish) Shaw in this work of his youth is moving from religious agnosticism to the vague modernism of his maturity.

  What is interesting in his comedy-tract is the fact that it naïvely reflects the attitude of the ungodly towards creation: the impious man seizes the world and makes it his own; then he wants to fix it; for that purpose he appeals to religion, and if all is to be said, to a new religion. But the world belongs to God, it is not mine, I am not the Creator.

  Shaw candidly believes himself to be the Creator of the world. He doesn't start by submitting to reality, but instead believes himself to be the lord of reality.

  The first reality is man's limitation; but man's reason is in a certain sense unlimited and so he can deify himself. The first reality with which man is faced is Destiny; but man is destined in the last resort to become the master of Destiny; and the false step that can be taken by reason in a spirit of pride is to make him feel the master of Destiny before his time: now. On the basis of the idea that man can see how things should be - according to his taste and convenience - he begins to lecture the fates. But the fates laugh at his teaching... If I suddenly want to become a capitalist, like Major Barbara in the comedy, I can't; Destiny laughs at me. This is easy enough in comedies and novels; but in Argentina it is only possible for sophists or dishonest writers. I know from experience that for me it is out of the question.

  To submit to reality is to submit to God. The non-believer tries to free himself from reality and so he makes himself God. Once he is God, to fix the world on paper is quite easy: you can save souls on a 38-shilling weekly salary.

  The saviours-of-souls-with-salary-increases are well known to us.

  The blasphemy of those who demand of God the immediate establishment of the total miracle of putting the world in order (in other words the maximum disorder) crystallised in Stendhal's well known phrase, which was a delight to Nietzsche: “Fortunately God doesn't exist, because otherwise we would have to shoot him.”

  They have already shot him. That is is the irony of it. God became man and was shot by all that is high in the name of law; the Roman Law, nothing less, with all that it stands for, by the representative of public order in the most legally minded and juridicial Empire that has ever existed. What more can be asked for? Christ lived and was shot. Tutti contenti.

  Stendahl's blasphemy is an imbecility and God's consent to being shot - or crucified which is worse - is Christ's greatest miracle. They complain that we adore his scaffold: that Gallows in itself is the Universal Miracle that they are asking for.