A reflection for Dominica XVII Post Pentecosten — III Septembris, II classis (20 September)
The Collect of this Sunday asks for two things that are really one: Da, quaesumus, Domine, populo tuo diabolica vitare contagia: et te solum Deum pura mente sectari — “Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, to Thy people, to shun the contagions of the devil, and with a pure mind to follow Thee, the only God.”
Note the word the Church chooses. Not the devil’s arguments, not his temptations, but his contagia — his infections, the things that spread from one soul to another and corrupt a body. And note the remedy: not merely resistance, but pursuit — sectari, to follow hard after — of te solum Deum, Thee the only God, with a mind made single. Division is the disease; singleness is the health.
That is the whole of today’s Mass in one sentence. The Epistle prescribes the regimen by which a body stays one. The Gospel names the commandment on which everything hangs. And the last four verses of the Gospel, which the careless reader takes for an appendix, name the Person.
I. Ambulate digne vocatione
Obsecro itaque vos ego vinctus in Domino, ut digne ambuletis vocatione, qua vocati estis (Eph. 4:1).
St. Paul begins by naming himself a prisoner. St. John Chrysostom, in his ninth homily on this Epistle, will not let the detail pass as a biographical note: the Apostle wears his chains as another man wears a diadem, and he mentions them here precisely because he is about to ask for humility. A man in irons asking free men to lower themselves is not making a rhetorical appeal. He is showing them the road he is already on.
Then come the four dispositions: cum omni humilitate et mansuetudine, cum patientia, supportantes invicem in caritate. St. Thomas, commenting on this passage, observes that these are not a random catalogue of amiable qualities but a set of remedies laid against the specific things that tear a community apart. Humility is set against pride, which is the root of every division because it demands precedence. Meekness is set against anger, which breaks charity in the moment. Patience is set against the long delay of a remedy that does not come. And supportatio — the bearing of one another — is set against the plain fact that your brother has defects which will not be cured this year, and perhaps not in this life, and which you must therefore carry rather than legislate away.
Chrysostom presses the point harder than we are comfortable with. To bear with a brother, he says, is not to tolerate him at a distance while cataloguing his faults; it is the work of love, and love is not a feeling that makes the burden light but a strength that makes the bearer able.
Then comes the imperative that governs the rest: solliciti servare unitatem Spiritus in vinculo pacis — “careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Solliciti. Anxiously, with labor, as a man watches something that can be lost. Unity is not the natural resting state of fallen men which we need only refrain from disturbing. It is a thing under constant siege, and Scripture assigns us the guarding of it.
And what is guarded is then enumerated, seven times one: Unum corpus, et unus Spiritus… unus Dominus, una fides, unum baptisma. Unus Deus et Pater omnium, qui est super omnes, et per omnia, et in omnibus nobis.
St. Augustine, treating of the Church’s unity against the Donatists, teaches that the Holy Ghost is Himself the bond — the love of the Father and the Son, given to the Church, so that her oneness is not an agreement reached among men but a participation in the life of God. From which he draws the conclusion the Donatists could not bear: that a man may have the true baptism and the true creed and, standing outside charity and outside communion, have them to no profit. St. Cyprian had said it earlier and more bluntly in his treatise on the unity of the Church: he cannot have God for his Father who will not have the Church for his mother.
Chrysostom, in his eleventh homily on this Epistle, says that to rend the Church is an evil no less grave than heresy, and that nothing so provokes the anger of God. We should let that sit with the Collect. Diabolica contagia. The devil is not primarily a tempter to gross sins; he is diabolos, the one who throws apart. His work is schism in the great matter and estrangement in the small one, and both are contagious.
II. Quod est mandatum magnum in lege?
The Gospel (Matt. 22:34-46) opens on a scene of regrouping. Pharisaei autem audientes quod silentium imposuisset sadducaeis, convenerunt in unum. The Sadducees have just been silenced on the resurrection. Chrysostom, in his seventy-first homily on St. Matthew, marks the perversity of it: they ought to have rejoiced that the truth had prevailed against their rivals, and instead they gather — convenerunt in unum, a bitter parody of the unity the Epistle has just commanded — to try again where others failed.
One of them, a doctor of the Law, asks tentans eum: tempting Him. And the question he chooses is the greatest commandment. There is a terrible fitness in this. A man comes without charity to ask about charity, and receives an answer that condemns the asking.
Diliges Dominum Deum tuum ex toto corde tuo, et in tota anima tua, et in tota mente tua. St. Jerome, in his commentary on St. Matthew, reads the threefold phrase as a closing of every exit: heart, soul, and mind are named so that no faculty is left over which a man might reserve to himself and direct elsewhere. The one who loves God with a part of himself does not love Him with a part; he does not love Him at all, because what is refused is precisely the totality that the commandment asks for. God does not ask for a share of a divided kingdom. He asks to be the kingdom.
St. Bernard gives the rule that St. Thomas afterwards makes his own: the cause of loving God is God, and the measure of loving Him is to love Him without measure. Every other virtue has a mean between excess and defect. Charity toward God has none. You cannot love Him too much, and the only question ever before you is how far short you are.
Secundum autem simile est huic: Diliges proximum tuum, sicut teipsum. Similar — not identical, and not a second and lesser business added on. St. Augustine, in the first book of De Doctrina Christiana, gives the order that keeps the two from collapsing into each other: God is to be loved for His own sake, the neighbour for God’s sake, and oneself in God. Disturb that order and charity becomes either a cold religion that despises men or a warm philanthropy that has forgotten God, and both have been tried in our own century with the results one would expect.
St. Gregory the Great supplies the test, in his thirtieth homily on the Gospels: the proof of love is the showing of the work. We are permitted no private certainty about our love of God that our conduct toward our brother does not confirm. St. John had already said it — he who loveth not his brother whom he seeth, how can he love God whom he seeth not? (1 John 4:20).
In his duobus mandatis universa lex pendet, et prophetae. St. Augustine draws from this the hermeneutical rule that governed the Fathers’ whole reading of Scripture: whoever thinks he has understood the divine writings, and whose understanding does not build up this twofold love, has not yet understood them. And St. Thomas gives the metaphysical reason why the law can hang on charity at all — because charity is the form of the virtues, the thing that orders every other act to the last end, so that without it the virtues are not merely incomplete but unfinished in the way a body without a soul is unfinished (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 23, a. 8).
III. Dixit Dominus Domino meo
And now the Lord asks His own question, and the Mass turns.
Quid vobis videtur de Christo? cujus filius est? They answer correctly and insufficiently: David. Then He sets Psalm 109 before them: Dixit Dominus Domino meo: Sede a dextris meis. If David calls Him Lord, how is He his son?
St. Hilary of Poitiers and St. Augustine give the answer the Pharisees would not give. He is David’s son according to the flesh and David’s Lord according to the Godhead; the same Person, two natures, and the verse of the Psalm holds both without contradiction. Chrysostom observes that Our Lord does not ask this to humiliate them but to raise them — He has been leading them, step by step, from the Law to its Author, and this is the last step, at which they stop.
Et nemo poterat ei respondere verbum. No man could answer Him a word.
Here is why this is not an appendix. The doctor of the Law had just recited, flawlessly, that a man must love the Lord his God with his whole heart and soul and mind. And the Lord his God was standing in front of him, asking a question, and he had nothing to say. He knew the commandment and did not recognize its object. It is possible to hold the entire content of the faith in the memory and to be a stranger to the Person the faith is about.
And so the Gospel returns us to the Epistle. Unus Dominus. The one Lord whom Ephesians names as the ground of the Church’s unity is the Lord of the Psalm, seated at the right hand, David’s son and David’s Master. The unity of Christians is not a policy, a sentiment, or an achievement of goodwill. It is a Person, and men are one insofar as they are in Him. Which is why the Collect asks not for harmony but for singleness of mind toward te solum Deum: the cure for the contagion that throws apart is the One who holds together.
IV. A word for practice
The Communion antiphon of this Sunday says: Vovete, et reddite Domino Deo vestro — “Vow ye, and pay to the Lord your God” (Ps. 75:12). The Mass does not end in admiration. It ends in an obligation contracted.
First, examine yourself on the bond of peace, and do it concretely. Not “do I love my neighbour,” which is answered too easily, but: from whom am I withdrawn? There is likely a name. A relative not spoken to, a colleague written off, a parishioner whose faults you have catalogued with some care. Chrysostom’s point stands: the Epistle does not command you to feel differently about him. It commands you to bear him.
Second, practice supportatio this week in one specific instance. Choose a single defect in one person near you — a slowness, a repetition, an irritating habit — and carry it for seven days without correcting it and without mentioning it to a third party. This is a smaller thing than it sounds and harder than it sounds, and it is the exact matter of Ephesians 4:2.
Third, since charity toward God admits no measure, give it a measure of time, which is the only thing you can actually offer. Fifteen minutes of mental prayer, at a fixed hour, that is not asked to produce anything. Vovete, et reddite. Resolve a small thing and keep it; a kept resolution of five minutes is worth more than a broken one of an hour.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day, or the traditional Act of Charity — Deus meus, amo Te super omnia, et proximum meum propter Te, quia Tu es summum, infinitum, et perfectissimum bonum.
Suggested devotion: the Litany of the Sacred Heart, or the First Friday. It is fitting for this Sunday: the God whom we are commanded to love with the whole heart has taken to Himself a human Heart, and the Gospel’s last question is precisely about how that can be.
If you wish to go deeper, this Sunday opens onto two of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up charity as the form of the virtues and the precepts of charity in St. Thomas — why love admits no mean, how the order of charity is rightly kept, and what it means that the Law hangs upon it. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Sundays after Pentecost as a single course of instruction, in which the Church, having given us the mysteries of Our Lord from Advent to Pentecost, now spends the long green season teaching us how to live in them.
Dixit Dominus Domino meo: Sede a dextris meis.