A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. On one occasion, Jesus spoke as follows. Father, lord of heaven and of earth, to you, I offer praise. For what you have hid from the learned and from the clever, you have revealed to the nearest children. Father, it is true.
You have graciously willed it to be so. Everything has been given over to me by my father. No one knows the son but the father. No one knows the father but the son and anyone to whom the son wishes to reveal him. This is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father, of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. Well, if you recall in the feast some of my well chosen remarks of yesterday about Saint Bonaventure and his theory of knowledge will certainly make an association with today's reading when here our blessed Lord is speaking and he is explicitly saying how God almighty reveals what is hidden to even the merest children rather than to the learned and the clever. That's not the part that I'm concerned with. The point here is notice how this formal text has to do with some kind of a direct relationship between creature and God almighty, between man and divinity, some kind of a direct relationship.
What that is, I don't know. But you see, this is what impressed Saint Bonaventure. This is what this is what Saint Augustine saw clearly in his theory of knowledge, which made all knowledge some kind of illumination or revelation. Now you will recall, I'm sure, with great bibleness, the point I made about mixing up the natural with the supernatural. Now of course here we're faced with a tremendous problem of the fundamentalists, of those who take their scripture literally, of those who call them by any name you wish, but down the centuries, even from the earliest days of the church, from the Gnostics remember the church you might say the waters of baptism hadn't dried up on the church when you had an ascension of what was called Gnosticism.
Well, what was the basis of Gnosticism? The essence of Gnosticism was see, Gnostic means to know, that's all. Notice how this problem of knowledge is so basic. Anyway, from the earliest days of the church in the very first century, you had this very strong element in the church who insisted they didn't need anything but their own relationship to God Almighty. They were the knowers, the Gnostics.
They had a they had a hotline right with divinity at all times. And this same idea right down in the centuries, Luther picked it up and made a great deal of explicit. But he said, we don't need speak to me. Or the next step, you see, is to eliminate the book and to simply say, God speaks to me. Now, who in the world can deny that God can do that whenever he wants to?
Of course he can. There's no argument about this at all. And the church's liturgy is full of prayers where we beg God to enlighten our minds, to give us light in all that goes on and on. That hasn't anything to do with the ordinary ways of knowing. But what are the ordinary ways of knowing?
See, here's the problem. Here's the problem. To say that God can, at any time he wishes and under any circumstances he wishes, can he do it universally? And the answer, that is, to give in some way or other this is where another little problem, but in some way or other, instill in human beings individual intellects or in their persons truth that God can do this is beyond dispute. But you see, here's just one little problem.
Right away, you think about it. If this is the ordinary way that God reveals truth, and remember, talking about truth on which salvation hangs. You're not talking about a truth which you can accept or not accept as you've seen fit. You're talking here about truth in the most universal sense, in the most profound sense, in the most essential and vital sense, the truth that saves you what we're talking about. Well, the first thing that comes to your mind is a fact of experience.
If the truths of religion come individually to men and women from God Almighty, This is that. As I say, whenever we are inclined to say, let's cut off all this nonsense. Let's get out of this Gordian knot. Let's simply throw ourselves upon God and say, God, you are God. From the dead.
That isn't important. It's the spiritual essence of the situation that counts. You see how lofty all this is. And I'm going back to the second century AD, but you can find something like this in the twentieth century AD right in the holy Roman Catholic church. And so we have this great problem of knowledge.
We have then some way, somehow, to maneuver our way around Now this is where the trouble begins. On the other hand, if we try to differentiate the two, as Aquinas would do, and say, Well, we're dealing with man on a natural even though we admit that this is unreal, because man is not in the natural and order anymore. That's an unreal thing we're talking about. We know that. But here you have then on the one hand natural man.
What is the human ways of doing? What is the human explanation of error? Because remember, when you talk about truth, you've got to be prepared to talk about error. One's as much an effective experience as the other. And you can't divorce the two, not really.
And so the safer course is certainly to make this mistaken. What is natural? What is supernatural? And to insist upon the validity of the natural, that the supernatural supernatural not merely etymologically that the word supernatural means built upon the natural yet in this instance it's extremely true that the supernatural doesn't wipe out the natural. It is built upon, it assumes, it presupposes.
And then we bring in the supernatural and we can then make this we can see clearly the category we're dealing in. This is extremely important, extremely It's really important, important because when all is said and done I know this sounds hardly theoretical to you, but this is it is not in practice theoretical at all. I'm not the one who first said that the great problem of this age is epistemological. That simply means it's a problem of knowledge. And it certainly is.
What can man know, or can we know anything with certainty? Or is everything just a matter of brains? Is there such a thing as truth, or isn't there? See, the everything it depends upon this kind of a thing and the answers you give to it. And answering you must.
That's the point I like to make. You can't wiggle out of it and say, I don't care, I won't bother with it. When you take that attitude, you are already taking sides. You are already making a commitment. So you can't it's something we can't avoid.
The church is here you see, in many instances, these efforts to establish direct relationship between the individual and God almighty as a normal, natural, ordinary thing. One of the consequences, if not one of the motives, is to eliminate the church because that makes the church useless. Had given them, and he would be with them until the end of time. The church is here to stay. The name of God, the Son, and the Earth.
Amen.