6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions, Burns, Oregon; February 11, 2024

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. (Rm 12:2)

In case you hadn’t noticed, this world seems to have lost its mind, so these days conformity to this world seems to be a sure path to insanity. Perhaps that is one reason there is so much mental illness. When I was young the inability to tell the difference between a boy and girl was regarded as a sure sign of someone who was out of touch with reality, yet today denial of the difference is rampant among the elites of our society. Nevertheless, the present insanity is the fruit of a centuries long process that has shaped all of us, conforming us in one way or another to thinking of the world.

It might also come as a surprise that St. Paul calls for a renewal of the mind; these days Christians tend to reduce everything to the “heart” and each one has their private “heart”; very few seem to think that the mind has anything to do with the faith, but the mind by opening us to reality, makes it possible for us to live together in a common world.

St. John Paul II opened his Encyclical on faith and reason with these words: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself.” (Fides et Ratio)

During the course of the history of the Church there has always been a strain of anti-intellectualism; there have even been “anti-intellectual” saints, fools for Christ, but in this they are not to be imitated. There has also been a lot of harmful and dangerous stupidity perpetrated in the name of “love”. At the same time, the Church has been served by men of great learning, outstanding in their times, saints like St. Athanasius (4^th century), St. Basil the Great (4^th century), St. Jerome (4^th to 5^th century), St. Augustine (4^th to 5^th century), St. Isidore of Seville (6^th century), St. Anselm (11^th century), St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Albert the Great, and St. Bonaventure (13^th century), St. Robert Bellarmine (17^th century) to name a few among those who are counted as “Doctors” or “Teachers” of the Church.

Still, when St. John Paul II speaks of faith and reason as two wings on which the human spirit rises, many think of “reason” as being identical to modern “science”, which far from “rising” tends to remain very much earthbound. Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech given at the University of Regensburg in 2006 addressed the reduction of reason to modern “science”.

He observed that because of this reduction of the scope of reason the only certainty allowable is that which results “from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements” and this is what is “considered scientific.” This “by its very nature … excludes the question of God.” Further, “if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by ‘science’, so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective [or personal and private].” Consequently, “We are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.”  (Meeting with the Representatives of Science, September 12, 2012)

The Pope spoke with an awareness of the historic and providential role played by ancient Greek philosophy in relation to the development of the Catholic faith. The ancient Greek understanding of reason or logos saw it as a capacity to know reality in its totality; there was nothing, in principle, that was beyond the scope of the human mind, but there was always the temptation to reduce reality to the measure of the mind. There was also a failure to account for the degree to which the human mind had been weakened and darkened by the heritage of sin.

Nevertheless, this confidence in the human mind, in the human logos, met with the proclamation of the Gospel, summarized by St. John, echoing the opening of Genesis, In the beginning was the Word (logos) and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … through him all things were made. (Jn 1:1,3) St. John thus confirmed the fundamental insight behind Greek philosophy, namely that the highest reason, divine reason, lies at the origin of the universe. Then, beyond all hope and expectation, this divine reason or logos, reaches down to us to lift us up to himself, The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (Jn 1:14) He makes known to us truths that indeed, except they be revealed by God, exceed the reach of any created mind, angelic or human.

This divine reason, the divine Word that has come to us, becoming flesh and being born of the Virgin Mary, has established also the path of return, through reasonable worship. (Rm 12:1, ‘logike latreia’)

Before talking about breaking our conformity with the world and being transformed by the renewal of our mind, St. Paul wrote, I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your reasonable worship. (Rm 12:1)

The Creator, the origin of reality, comes to us in reality, and leads us back to himself in conformity with reality, the whole of reality. The heart can only get to reality by way of the mind. If the mind is cut off from reality, then the heart goes astray.

Now, what does all this have to do with today’s Gospel and the cleansing of the leper?

Today real leprosy is very treatable, but in the ancient world it was a dreadful disease, slowly disfiguring a person’s bodily appearance and impeding the sense of touch, causing numbness and weakness especially in the hands and feet, making a person to become very clumsy. It is also mildly contagious, apparently through prolonged contact with someone who is infected. The tremendous social stigma of leprosy arose from the combination of contagion and ugliness.  In sum leprosy caused ugliness, loss of touch, and clumsiness. According to the law of Moses it also rendered a person unclean, excluding him thereby from the public worship offered by the people of God.

If we think of leprosy as a disease of the touch, we could think of a sort of spiritual leprosy, the leprosy of a person who is “out of touch” with God, devoid of any sense of spiritual reality. Such leprosy would seem to be very widespread today and can also be connected with the capital vices of lust and gluttony, around which much of our economy revolves, and which profane the temple of God, which is the body, and debase the mind, making spiritual reality incomprehensible.

Yet, we could also speak of a sort of mental leprosy, whereby the mind itself loses touch with reality. This mental leprosy probably goes even deeper in today’s world.

Cell phones, computers, cyber space and virtual reality do not help; quite the contrary, they foster mental leprosy, cutting the mind off from reality, immersing it in a substitute artificial world.

Really, male and female, marriage and family, are fundamental human realities, but the modern mind is out of touch with these realities. It is out of touch with these realities because it has lost touch with the reality of the world as created and governed by God. Climate, for example, is the realm of divine providence, not human control.

Mental and spiritual leprosy are responsible for the ugliness and clumsiness of contemporary life and the social isolation of many of our contemporaries. It is also connected to the general incomprehension of divine worship.

The life of ranch or farm, while it does not train the mind, does help keep the mind anchored in reality and so helps ward off mental leprosy. Nevertheless, mere contact with physical nature is not enough, it must be understood through God’s word, for the Word of God through whom all things were made is more real. We think that physical things are real, but our grasp of them is truncated when they are separated in mind from the word, the “logos”.

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”

Reason, in touch with reality, can prepare the mind for faith.

Mortimer Adler, whose life spanned almost the whole of the 20^th century, was a great thinker who was instrumental in promoting the notion of an education based upon the great books of the western world. Through his immersion in the tradition of western thought he discovered Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, which also means that his mind became immersed in reality. Eventually, before he died, he entered the Catholic Church. His friend, Ralph McInerny, a great scholar of St. Thomas Aquinas, who taught at Notre Dame, said that “he became the Roman Catholic he had been training to be all his life.” It took him almost all of his 98 years.

The path followed by Mortimer Adler is a difficult one and made even more difficult now because the mental leprosy of modernity is much farther advanced in comparison to the world in which Adler grew up. Even so, there always seems to be a steady stream of highly educated men who end up becoming Catholic.

Reason, in touch with reality, can prepare the mind for faith, but faith also can restore the mind to reality. By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from what is invisible. (He 11:3) For faith to restore the mind to reality, the mind must retain at least a minimal grasp of reality and be able to approach Jesus, recognizing something of who is, and say to him, like the leper in today’s Gospel, If you wish, you can make me clean.

Yet, while Jesus cleansed the physical leper by a simple word of command, just as he created the universe, he does not usually cleanse mental leprosy in such a dramatic fashion. He requires a great deal of cooperation on our part; that means that we must recognize that our very way of thinking has been corrupted by conformity to this world, a conformity that we have most likely acquired since our earliest school days, and that we must seek the renewal of the mind about which St. Paul speaks.

Jesus cleansed the physical leper by a simple word of command, he can cleanse us of our mental leprosy through the word of God handed on in Scripture and Tradition, if we are willing to let our mind be shaped and formed by the word of God. The leper said to Jesus, If you wish, you can make me clean. Jesus says to the mental leper, “If you wish, I can cleanse you through my word.” (cf. Acts 15:9)

Notice that Scripture alone is not enough. Indeed, what is Scripture anymore? Does God even know the number of translations into the English language? The sheer multiplicity of translations reveals the conflicting interpretations, adapted to every prejudice. The modern mind twists the words of Scripture to fit its own preconceptions. The modern world even conforms Scripture to itself.

To break out of this trap Catholic Tradition is needed, tradition as it echoes through the centuries in the voices of the saints and especially those saints who are honored as Fathers and Doctors of the Church.

That also means that we need to break free of podcasts and videos and actually read both sacred Scripture and good Catholic books that will lead us into the heart of our tradition.

When the mind is freed from error and given to the truth, then the heart also is set free, and we are able to return to God offering our living bodies, through Jesus Christ, in the Holy Eucharist, as living sacrifices holy and pleasing to God. Then whatever we do we will do everything for the glory of God.