Séamus Ahearne: Nagasaki and Hiroshima (1)
I came into the airport in Nagasaki from Korea over 30 years ago. The blue plastic coverings over many buildings struck me (after bad storms.) As we drove into the city, I was shocked to see many familiar American Stores and restaurants. I wanted the Japanese world to speak to me and not a foreign power. My time in Nagasaki was very special. The hill of the 26 martyrs. The story of Christianity in Japan. The Museum after the Bombings. The Cathedral Bell intact when everything else was shattered. The Hot Springs with the sulphur baths; Very refreshing even if the smell took some time to dissipate. I rather enjoyed being different walking the streets. The young people swirled around to look at this strange creature with wild ginger hair!
Nagasaki and Hiroshima (2)
I was reading at the time ‘The Song of Nagasaki’ by Paul Glynn. It was the story of Takashi Nagai, a scientist who became a Catholic. The journey up to Tokyo stirred up a big history. The ‘pushers’ on the trains and the arrivals in the stations, at precisely the right time, was worth more than a smile. During the past week, I was remembering. It was of course, the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the Bombs. The 6th and the 9th August 1945. ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man.’ Some of us knew Captain Leonard Cheshire, who was a deeply religious man, linked to our monastery at Clare Priory in Suffolk. His home was in Cavendish. Cheshire was one of the official observers of the Bombing of Nagasaki. Having witnessed such devastation, he was full of conviction that nothing should ever happen like that again. At present, in the chaos of our time, Leonard Cheshire should be listened to.
Daniel O’Connell
Daniel O’Connell was remembered during the week. It was 250 years since his birth. There was a Commemoration at his ancestral home Derrynane House. The Liberator was celebrated. Catholic Emancipation was recalled. His work on the abolition of Slavery was mentioned. He had spoken too of walking the streets and knowing people were Catholic, by the fact that people didn’t look him in the eyes. Another phrase used at the time was that the people were on the knees. Patrick O’Donovan, (Minister for Culture), spoke very well on the heritage from O’Connell; I didn’t see or hear the others.
The Lost Heart (O’Connell)
What rather amused me was the ‘search’ for the lost heart. Daniel had asked as he was dying (in Genoa) – that his body would go to Ireland; his heart to Rome and his soul to heaven. O’Connell was flamboyant. He was an orator. He apparently liked the sound of his voice. And that voice was needed. His Monster Meetings were a feature of his political life. I know very little but would dare to suggest that people took him too literally in regard to his heart! It makes total sense that he would wish to be taken back to Ireland. His heart too belonged to Rome but hardly needed to be extracted or his soul didn’t have to look like the Ascension or the Assumption!
The Orators: Augustine and Daniel O’Connell
I would even suggest for a little moment that we might compare him to Augustine. So many misinterpret Augustine. They take every word seriously. They forget that he was an Orator. Like O’Connell. The search is always for the heart of what is said; the message and not the literal meaning. We have suffered over the years in our miss-use of Scripture. We forget the flamboyance of the storyteller. We haven’t got the breadth of mind and imagination to let words soar in poetry. The message is the message. The decoration of the telling is only to attract and hold attention. Liturgy too is too often flat-footed. It gets lost in words and forgets where it might be going or trying to achieve. Anyway there is a thought.
That Court Jester
I can’t end without mentioning the buffoon Donald Trump. We surely are all on tenterhooks as Trump is about to meet Putin. Poor Donald hasn’t a clue of how stupid he is. He isn’t only ‘economically illiterate’ as Michael O’Leary said, but he also lives in a fantasy world. What have the Americans done to us and to the world?
The man of the match (The Ladies All-Ireland)
Did I hear it correctly last Sunday? The Dublin girls did rather well in the All-Ireland. There was a mention as one of the stars of the game was interviewed – ‘The man of the match’!!!
Seamus Ahearne osa 8th August 2025.
Nagasaki reminds us how stupid the human race remains — 80 years have passed and we are still clutching at these obscene weapons.
Was Augustine an orator? He was an indefatigable preacher and writer, but in one sermon that turned up a few decades ago the congregation say: “speak up, we can’t hear you.” His writing is always concerned with stating his thoughts lucidly, without rhetorical effects, so I would say he is always to be taken quite literally.
I demur Joe. We cannot neglect his past. It was in the School of Rhetoric that his professional life emerged. He never stopped talking or preaching. He loved his words and always dabbed them with colour, flamboyance and sometimes excess. We cannot understand anything of Augustine if we forget this. Above all, we should never read him literally.
Seamus, I don’t know any sentence in Augustine that is not meant to be read literally. Perhaps you mean some poetic metaphors in the Confessions or taken over from Scripture? His rhetoric is totally at the service of plain truth-telling (and one can see how he renounces the high-falutin diction of his early writing for a more pedestrian style that reaches everyone without ambiguity as he become more and more a man of the church). Perhaps you could give examples of statements from Augustine not to be taken literally?
Oh Joe, you surprise me. Our clamour for tidiness and exactness, has been ever so damaging in our history of faith. Literalism is a form of arrogance, that we can express the inexpressible. Our approach to Augustine (in my view) is about an attitude. We have to contextualise his words. His battles. His fluency. His history. His professional past. His administrative duties. Our journey into an understanding of Augustine – is better travelled through poetry and metaphor. You ask for examples. Everything he wrote is an example. But if you wish; have a look at the introduction to De Trinitate or to The City of God. But anything and anywhere will do. By the way, it is very true that at times, he got upset when he lost his audience. His words then were roughly – ‘I see that you aren’t interested. I must be expressing myself badly, I will come back to this again.’ I rather like that.
Even yet Augustine’s obvious misuse of Luke 14:23 in Letter CLXXIII cannot be ‘outed’ as probably the most catastrophic exegesis in the history of the church:
https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=/Synchronized-EN/Augustine.000017.LettersOfStAugustin.LettersofStAugustin.html&chunk.id=00000173
In Luke 14:23 Jesus was obviously simply reiterating a warning against the presumption of salvation by the Jews as God’s chosen people – but Augustine forced upon this parable a justification for state coercion of the Donatists – and horror upon horror followed, bending even Thomas Aquinas into aquiescence to the torture of heretics in the 1200s.
Repudiated – but not explicitly – in the Vatican II principle that the true belief cannot be coerced (Dignitatis Humanae 1), this misuse of the Gospel was reiterated again and again in the Middle Ages to justify physical coercion of religious dissidents. It was therefore also the original source of Enlightenment and secularist reaction against the Creed as unavoidably intolerant.
Can it never be admitted that even a doctor of the church can get things horribly wrong?
Joe. Thanks. But that wasn’t the issue. Of course Augustine was often wrong. Of course he misused Scripture and twisted it to suit his argument. Of course his many arguments were exaggerated at times. (The flourish of Rhetoric!) However, that doesn’t change the obvious need not to be literal in our interpretations. I must change a wheel now and have to abandon our discussion. The End.
I agree that Augustine made terrible mistakes, and I wish we could say that he did not mean them literally. He saw miserable humanity as a massa damnata, except for the elect who would fill the spaces left vacant by the fallen angels. Msgr Patrick Corish said this dark vision was understandable in view of Augustine’s experiences of human wickedness (striking an unwelcome bell just now in light of Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine). There was a 14th century disciple of Augustine, Gregory of Rimini, who was called the “torturer of infants” because he held that unbaptised infants would be burnt forever in Hell. I remember when I first stepped into the library of the Institut Catholique de Paris in 1967 I saw a sister checking out a book on the eternity of the pains of hell according to Augustine. If we must correct Scripture boldly in light of the evil fruit of some “Satanic verses” like those quoted by Netanyahu, certainly Augustine needs a radical sanatio in radice.
Seamus, you say: “have a look at the introduction to De Trinitate”. Well, this is the good Augustine (and my favorite theological work). The beginning of reads as follows:
1. THE following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought
to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries
of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and
perverse love of reason. [he has neoplatonist theologians like Marius Victorinus in mind] Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer
to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural human wit and
diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. [He is playing on a passage in Plotinus which distinguishes materialist, Stoics, and Platonists, giving the prize to the latter.] Others, again, [Stoics] frame whatever sentiments they may have concerning God according to the nature or affections of the human mind; and through this error they
govern their discourse, in disputing concerning God, by distorted and fallacious rules. While yet a third class [the Platonists, whom unlike Plotinus, Augustine here treats as the most erroneous of all] strive indeed to transcend the whole creation, which doubtless is changeable, in order to raise their thought to the unchangeable substance, which is God; but being weighed down by the burden of mortality, whilst they both would seem to know
what they do not, and cannot know what they would, preclude themselves from entering the very path of understanding, by an over-bold
affirmation of their own presumptuous judgments; choosing rather not to correct their own opinion when it is perverse, than to change that which
they have once defended. And, indeed, this is the common disease of all the three classes which I have mentioned, —viz., both of those who frame
their thoughts of God according to things corporeal, and of those who do so according to the spiritual creature, such as is the soul; and of those
who neither regard the body nor the spiritual creature, and yet think falsely about God; and are indeed so much the further from the truth,
that nothing can be found answering to their conceptions, either in the body, or in the made or created spirit, or in the Creator Himself. For he
who thinks, for instance, that God is white or red, is in error; and yet these things are found in the body. Again, he who thinks of God as now
forgetting and now remembering, or anything of the same kind, is none the less in error; and yet these things are found in the mind. But he who
thinks that God is of such power as to have generated Himself, is so much the more in error, because not only does God not so exist, but neither
does the spiritual nor the bodily creature; for there is nothing whatever that generates its own existence. [The last words are a paraphrase of Aristotle, directed at Plotinus’s notorious thesis in Enneads VI 8 that the One brings itself into existence and at Marius VIctorinus, who held that God was causa sui — a thesis rejected by mainstream Christian thought.] All of this is perfectly literal, but I think Seamus is referring to the next paragraphs where we are told that God uses these different levels of discourse pedagogically, so that when he says he is a rock or that his soul is grieved he is not to be taken literally. And this teaching of Augustine has to be taken literally.
The opening paragraphs of the De Trinitate are indeed an utterance of classical lucidity about the nature and limits of language about God. It can be repeated today without changing anything much and it still makes perfect sense.
Sadly, Augustine is equally lucid and rhetorically powerful when he talks about “compel them to come in” and the “massa damnata” and Original Sin transmitted by generation, etc. His critics, from Julian of Eclanum to Rousseau, have got short shrift. An Irish bishop asked me once: “Is it your friend St Augustine who got us into this mess — or is it St Paul?”
To change the focus a little, Yeats` statement, “Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it” places the emphasis on the importance of living right (ie. in full integrity) rather than on abstract thinking as expressing the best of which we are capable. Of course, many questions immediately arise from that.
Chat GPT: This line comes from a letter by Yeats to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, dated 4 January 1939. In full, the passage reads:
“When I try to put all into a phrase I say, ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’ I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Experience.”