What we are talking about is, of course, that eloquence which is effective enough as a vehicle of grace to bring about the conversion of souls and lead them to virtue. We have already treated of it in an incidental fashion. We will only add a few words to these considerations here.
In the Office of St. John we read this responsory: “reclining on the breast of the Lord, he drank in from the sacred fountain itself, of the Heart of the Lord, the fluency of his Gospel, and he spread the grace of the word of God over the whole world.”
Supra pectus Domini recumbens, Evangelii fluenta de ipso sacro Dominici pectoris Fonte potavit et verbi Dei gratiam in toto terrarum orbe diffudit (Monastic Breviary, R. xi, Third Nocturn). The Roman Breviary, R. viii, Third Noct. of Matins has part of this quotation: sc., Fluenta Evangelii de ipso sacro Dominici pectoris fonte potavit, but that is all.
What a profound lesson is to be found in these few words for all those whose duty it is as preachers, writers, or catechists to spread abroad the word of God! In these powerful words, the Church reveals to the priests the source of all true eloquence.
All the Evangelists were equally inspired. All had their providential purpose. And yet, nevertheless, each one has an eloquence all his own. St. John, more than all the others, has the power to reach our wills by filling our hearts with the grace of God’s word, verbi Dei gratiam. His Gospel, together with the Epistles of St. Paul, is the favorite book of souls for whom life here below is meaningless without union with Jesus Christ.
Where did St. John get an eloquence of such power? In what mountain is the source of that great river whose life-giving waters spread their bounty over the whole earth? (Fluenta in toto orbe terrarum diffudit.)
The liturgical text tells us: he is one of the rivers of Paradise. Quasi unus ex Paradisi fluminibus Evangelista Joanne.
What is the use of so many high mountains and glaciers, in this earth? Some people who know nothing might perhaps come to the conclusion that it would be much more profitable if all these vast mountainous areas were nice fertile plains. But they would be forgeting that without these high peaks, all the plains and valleys would be as barren as the Sahara. For it is the mountains that give the earth its fertility, by means of the rivers for which they serve as reservoirs.
This great peak of Paradise, where springs the fount by which is fed the Gospel of St. John, is nothing else but the Heart of Jesus: Evangelii fluenta de ipso sacro Dominici pectoris fonte potavit. It was because the Evangelist, by his interior life, was able to detect the beatings of the Heart of the Man-God, and the immensity of His love for men, that his word is the vehicle of the grace of the divine Word: Verbi Dei gratiam diffudit.
In the same way it can be said that all men of prayer are in a way rivers of Paradise. Not only do they draw down from heaven, upon the earth, by their prayers and sacrifices, the living waters of grace, and deflect or mitigate the chastisements which the world deserves, but ascending even to the height of heaven, they draw from the Heart of Him in Whom the inner life of God resides, the floods of that very life, and distribute it in great abundance upon souls. “You shall draw waters out of the Savior’s fountains.”
Haurietis aquas de fontibus salvatoris (Is. 12:3).
Called to give forth the word of God, they do so with an eloquence of which they alone possess the secret. They speak to the earth of heaven. They bring light, warmth, consolation, and strength. Without all these qualities together, no eloquence is quite complete. And the preacher will only be able to combine them all if he lives in and by Jesus Christ.
Am I really one of those who depend upon their mental prayer, their visits to the Blessed Sacrament, above all upon their Mass or their Communion, to put real moving power into their preaching? If I am not, I may perhaps be a loudly “tinkling cymbal,” or even give forth the more pompous din of “sounding brass,” but I am not communicating to others any love, that love which makes the eloquence of the friends of God impossible to resist.
A preacher endowed with learning but of only mediocre piety may be able to paint a picture of Christian Truth that will stir souls, bring them a little closer to God, even increase their faith. But if one is to fill souls with the life-giving savor of virtue, he must first have tasted the true spirit of the Gospel and made it enter into the substance of his own life by means of mental prayer.
Let us repeat once more that only the Holy Spirit, the Principle of all spiritual fruitfulness, can make converts and impart the graces that determine men to flee vice and follow virtue. The preaching of the apostle, when it is filled with the unction of the sanctifying Spirit, becomes a living channel which holds back nothing of the divine action. Before Pentecost the apostles had preached almost with no result at all. After their ten-day retreat, given entirely to the interior life, they were overwhelmed by the Spirit of God, and transformed by Him. Their first attempts at preaching were miraculous draughts of fishes. It will be the same with the sowers of the Gospel. Their interior life will make them true Christ-bearers. They will plant and water their seedlings with great success and the Spirit of God will always give them increase. Their word will at the same time be the seed that is sown and the rain that waters. There will be no lack of the ripening sun, giver of growth.
“It is vain merely to give light,” says St. Bernard, “and it is but little merely to burn; but to burn and give light together is perfection.” Further on he adds: “It is in a particular manner to apostle and apostolic men that are addressed these words: Let your light shine before men. For such as these ought to be ardent, yea, very ardent.”
The Saint is commenting on the text. “He was a burning and a shining light,” applied to St. John Baptist in a Sermon for the feast of the Great Precursor—a model for all apostles. “Est tantum lucere vanum tantum ardere parum, ardere et lucere perfectum.—Singulariter apostolis et apostolicis viris dicitur: Luceat lux vestra coram hominibus, nimirum tamquam accensis, et vehementer accensis.”
This eloquence in preaching is to be drawn, by the apostle, not only from a life of union with Jesus by prayer and custody of the heart but also from the Sacred Scriptures, which he will study with great zeal, and in which he will take a genuine delight. God’s every word to men, every word fallen from the lips of Jesus, will be treasured by him as a diamond; and he will admire all its facets by the light of the gift of wisdom, which has reached a considerable per fection in him. But since he never opens the inspired book without first having lifted his mind and heart to God in prayer, he not only admires but relishes the teachings he finds in it, just as if they had been dictated by the Holy Spirit for him personally. With what unction, then, will he quote the word of God in the pulpit, and what a difference there will be between the light that he draws forth from it and the ingenious and learned applications worked out by a preacher with no other resources than reason and an abstract, half-dead faith. The former will show us truth as living, surrounding souls with a reality that desires not only to enlighten them, but to give them life. The latter is only able to talk of truth as of a sort of algebraic equation, possessing, of course, certitude, but cold and unrelated to the inmost realities of our life. He leaves it in the abstract state, a simple record, or, at best, something that may touch our hearts by virtue of the so-called esthetic aspect of Christianity. “The majesty of the Scriptures fills me with astonishment; the simplicity of the Gospels goes straight to my heart,” the sentimentalist, J. J. Rousseau, admitted. But what difference did these vague and sterile emotions make, to the glory of God?
The true apostle, on the other hand, knows how to bring out not only the truth of the Gospel but the actuality of that truth, and the fact that it is ever renewed, and (because divine) ever active in the soul that enters into contact with it. And without stopping to move the feelings, he goes on, by the word of divine life unil he reaches the will, where correspondence with the Life of all takes place. The convictions that he produces are of a kind to arouse love and determination. He alone knows how to preach the Gospel.
No interior life would be complete without devotion to Mary Immaculate, the most perfect of all channels of grace, above all of those special graces that make saints. The experienced apostle is always having recourse to Mary, a fact which St. Bernard could never conceive as being lacking in a true disciple of that incomparable Mother; and the apostle, when he sets forth the dogmas on the Mother of God, and of men, will find himself speaking with a warmth that not only interests his hearers and deeply moves them, but also excites in them a similar need to fly, in all their troubles, to this Mediatrix of all the Graces won for us by the Precious Blood. Such a one has only to let his experience and his heart do the talking, and he will win souls for the Queen of Heaven, and, through Her, cast them into the Heart of Jesus.
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