Ripheus Saved

On the day of its release, I watched the third episode of the Chosen, Season Two. The disciples, waiting around the fire, talked late into the night, waiting for Jesus to conclude his day’s ministry, and as they began to argue over Matthew’s place among them—over his past riches and his past betrayal of his people, I was drawn into the drama of their debate. Then the exhausted Christ appeared, and with the disciples I was chastened.

As I scrolled through Facebook and Instagram the following morning, I saw the usual Catholic faces in their YouTube cover frames: the arch-browed inquisitor and the brindle-bearded pundit; the suave expositor and the eloquent mother; the fashionable pilgrim and the quiet Thomist. They are faces, they are people, very much like those disciples around the fire. The Catholic internet has often been a source of consolation, whether for the rural family seeking access to a broader community or the intellectual in secular surroundings eager for spiritual discourse. Nonetheless, in certain quarters, especially these last two years, there sounds more and more clearly a new Pharisaism, an obdurate insistence on a misinterpreted law, whether that law revolve around rejection of the Second Vatican Council or the espousal of the gospel of wokeness. On either hand we see the insistence that discipleship consists in adherence to a certain code.

In this as in many other respects, ours is an age like Dante’s, an age more keen on clever disquisition than on close encounter with Christ. Among the intellectual influencers of Dante’s day, Beatrice tells us that

Each one strains to appear a genius in fashioning
his inventions; and those are drawn out
by preachers while the Gospel sits silent. (Par. XXIX, 94-96)

Today we watch as many of our public intellectuals parse out the threads of Vatican gossip or excoriate political opponents. Often the Gospel sits silent, or if it is called upon, it is to proclaim precisely what Christ would do today rather than to recall what he did during his earthly mission.

Again, there is comfort in recalling those first uncertain days of discipleship so movingly shown in the Chosen. The matters argued at the fire revolve around that same question which so often sparks vitriol on social media today: namely, what does salvation look like? The way people respond to this question established the fault lines along which our modern discipleship is divided. And again, the notes struck seem Pharisaic, whether in the clangor from the right or the keening from the left.

At the moment I’m thinking in particular of the eruption which followed Bishop Barron’s discussion with Ben Shapiro, most notably over the Bishop’s avowal that Shapiro, a Jew, is not simply out of luck where salvation is concerned. The Bishop’s response was nothing new. Salvation, he said, comes only through Christ, though we do not know all the means by which Christ might enter into relationship with someone. The Bishop was roundly ridiculed for referring his answer to the teaching of Vatican II, as though the Council’s view on the matter were something not to be found in the history of the Church.

I have mentioned Dante, chiefly because I have happened to spend some time laboring along in his titanic wake. I invoke him here on the side of the element of mystery in the matter of salvation. In this, no doubt, Dante appears an unlikely candidate. His touch is often pitiless. What reader today can pass through his Limbo, for instance, with all its noble pagans and unbaptized children, without thinking, or at least feeling, this can’t be right? Or who can wander through Hell and Purgatory alongside Dante and Vergil and not feel the pain of the latter’s departure?

Against such feeling, though, Dante holds firm. In Canto XIX of Paradiso, the celestial eagle confirms for him that “To this kingdom / none has yet ascended who didn’t believe in Christ, / neither before nor after he’d been nailed to the wood.” That is that. Dante holds with the Church that only those who believe in Christ can be saved.

Probably Dante imagined what our surprise would be, then, on finding in the very next canto that two pagans have been saved, the second being Ripheus the Trojan. The explanation for his salvation merits quotation at length.

The other, by grace distilled of so profound
a fountain that never has a creature
pressed its eye to the ultimate source,

put all his love there below in uprightness,
so that, from grace on grace,
God spread his eye to our future redemption;

at which he believed in that, and from then
no more suffered the stench of paganism;
and he reprimanded the perverse peoples.

Those three ladies that you saw
on the right wheel were there for his baptism
more than a millennium before baptism began.

O predestination, how remote
is your root from those expectant ones
who cannot see all the first course! (Par. XX, 118-132)

Ripheus, that is, is saved by belief in Christ, a belief which, according to our notions of time and history, he could not have had. His belief—like all of ours—is a gift springing from nothing but the divine largesse. Is such a thing common? Not when Hell is peopled with such hosts as to elicit Dante’s wonder that death had undone so many. No, we ought not presume such graces. And if we are to take such evangelical efforts as Bishop Barron’s to be earnest in even the slightest degree, surely we cannot think that the conversion of souls is anything but a top priority for him. Yet it is one of the marks of wisdom, Aristotle tells us, to demand only such certainty as a given field of inquiry admits. It is part of Dante’s greatness that for all his scholastic learning he does not attempt to leave God pinned and wriggling upon the pages of his poem. He proceeds within the cloud of unknowing to a place which must suppose that on the last day many who looked like saints in life will be found among the lost, while many who seemed beyond the reach of grace have been called into the heart of its mystery.

In practice the temptation which manifests in the new Pharisaism tends toward the weaponization of Christ. Just as the apostles looked to Christ to throw off the Roman shackles, so we—rightly enough—look to Christ to dispel all that would oppress us, all darkness, all discomfort, all tragedy. When we grow impatient, we run the risk of taking Christ’s name in vain, and we do so in all sorts of ways. We do it on the one hand when we belittle those whose sympathies and steps toward social justice seem unsuited to the call of the Gospel. We do it on the other when we set the rites of the Church against each other, acting as though the power of Christ were diminished by the rubrics of the Novus Ordo or the Traditional Latin Mass.

We are so much those men and women around the fire, quarreling while Jesus works in the distant dark. We cannot see all the first course, the profound counsel, of Heaven. We can work tirelessly in the service of Christian doctrine, in the promotion of a Catholic aesthetic, while also hoping and believing that God’s ways are not our ways and that his grace is his to bestow as he wills. Let us pray that whatever our activity we will see him when, wounded, he walks by.