A Fable Agreed Upon

Seeing how Church history is written by Holy Spirit

06/27/2020

Matthew 5:13-19 Jesus said to his disciples: "You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.

It is sometimes said that “history is written by the victors.” The great testament to Church history written by Dan Brown called “The DaVinci Code” asserted: “History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash the loser is obliterated and the winner writes the history books – books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said: ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon’.” The implication in that aphorism is that if certain wars and elections and controversies had gone the other way – if the losers had been the winners – then they would have authored the history, and the world would be a different place.

Perhaps that’s partly what lies behind the modern movement to take down statues and monuments that memorialize a part of America’s history. Some people feel history was written by the victors and it was woefully one-sided. That is, history needs to be rewritten. Even though the Civil War was fought to end slavery and the 13th Amendment was passed to abolish slavery, many African-Americans still feel like “the conquered foe” because “history was written by the victors.” Who writes the history books, therefore, is not an abstract question for academics, but a burning question parading through the streets today.

That question must be understood in an entirely different light, however, when we look at writing Church history. That is, we need the light of the Holy Spirit who guides the history of the People of God, like the pillar of fire guided the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt as we read in Ex. 13:21. In other words, the true “author” of Church history is not the human winners or the even the losers but rather God in his divine providence. Church history is not merely “a fable agreed upon” as Napoleon naively thought, but the faith lived out through the centuries, a faith deepened and developed by the hand of the Holy Spirit.

We see a perfect illustration of the hand of the Holy Spirit writing Church history in the feast day we celebrate today of St. Cyril of Alexandria. St. Cyril (376 – 444 A.D.) was the contemporary of St. Augustine and St. Jerome, and the Patriarch of Alexandria in Egypt. He was clearly the victor at the third ecumenical council of Ephesus in 431 that declared that the Blessed Virgin Mary was the “theotokos,” a Greek word meaning “God-bearer.” But like all authentic doctrines of our faith, that title of Mary is rooted in our belief about Jesus. We affirm that Jesus is truly God and truly man, and that if Mary is his Mother, then she must be the Mother of God.

Every January 1, we celebrate precisely this feast of Mary, the Mother of God, thanks to St. Cyril, the winner of the Council of Ephesus. My larger point, though, is that the outcome was not an accident of history, like Lincoln’s winning the election of 1861. Rather, that outcome was an outpouring of the love and light of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church into all truth, as Jesus assured us in John 16:13. The pillar of fire that led the Israelites in the desert still leads the Church today in the desert of this world. In other words, the history of the Church is not written by the winners or the losers, but by the Holy Spirit.

Now let me bring this point a little closer to home, indeed, into our very hearts. Who is writing the history of your life? If we are not careful, we can conclude like Dan Brown, that the winners are writing that history. If my spouse wins the argument, then she writes my history. If I lose my job then my boss writes my history. If I cannot overcome this cancer, then this illness writes my history. If we cannot oust Fr. John as pastor of I.C. then he will write our history! And all that may be true on a superficial level: that other authors write a line or two on the pages of our history. But if we are people of faith, then we can perceive another author who pens the pages of our lives, namely, the Holy Spirit. Our history is not written by winners or losers but by the love of God.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote his masterful autobiography called “Treasure in Clay.” But he readily admitted that his personal history was penned by the Holy Spirit on the Cross of Christ. The Cross of Jesus Christ is the Prologue of our personal history, and it will likewise by the Epilogue and final word. On the Cross, Jesus was both the victor and the vanquished, but the Holy Spirit was the author of his history.

Praised be Jesus Christ!