In this article we shall examine (1) the essential function of the Christian preacher; (2) the two modes of communication which this function involves; (3) the main problems confronting the preacher today with regard to these two aspects of his task; and (4) suggestions for solving these problems.

(1) Christ, the Word, said of his own preaching that the words he spoke, the message he bore, were not of his own coining, but that he spoke only as the Father had bidden him speak (Jn. xiv, 10); in this he is obviously a model for his own messengers (apostoloi), the original disciples whom he commissioned to teach whatsoever he had commanded them, and their successors down through the ages. In ancient Greece the pedagogue (paidagogos) was a slave whose duty it was not to teach the boy but to lead the boy safely to school, to his teacher; similarly the office of the Christian preacher is to lead the faithful to the Word who is their teacher, to prepare them as best he can for their schooling in the words of the Word. So St. Paul declares in his first letter to the Corinthians that it was Christ who sent him to preach, and to preach only the Gospel. He had no concern with " any high pretensions to eloquence, or to philosophy," but only with " God's message to you "; he would have nothing to do with " an orator's cleverness," with rhetoric, " for so the cross of Christ might be robbed of its force " (I, 17; II, 1-5): his only purpose was to speak " of Jesus Christ, and of him as crucified " (II, 2), i.e., to help his hearers to enter with minds and hearts into God's wisdom, hitherto hidden and secret (II, 7) but now made known through and in the Christian Mystery of the Tree.

(2) In present-day colloquial language we use the word " mystery " in the sense of a baffling problem to be solved by detection. Here we must think of it as meaning a profound, vital, religious truth: the Truth which is the eternal Word, communicated to us principally through the words of the Scriptures, the words spoken, the events described; but these words and events, because of the profundity of their meaning, need to be explicated if we are to understand them rightly and assimilate them fully. The explication is the essential function of the preacher who represents the teaching authority of the Church as " opening " to us the Scriptures.

But the Church has two ways of opening the Scriptures and communicating the truth; and both ways are necessary to us since each provides the necessary complement to the other. The language of the Bible is essentially the language, not of scientific or reasoned prose, but of poetry in the wide sense of the term: of imagery, of parable and paradox, of the Johannine paroimiai or allegories, of symbol. The Church opens the Scriptures to us (a) by making use of this same language of symbol, e. g., in its sacramental ritual, and (b) by re-stating the Biblical message in " prose ": in the formulas of creed and catechism, in the technical language of theology, and in the elucidation of formulas and theological propositions in everyday terms.

Christ spoke to the multitudes in parables and indeed did not speak to them without parables (Mk. iv, 34); and the purpose of this method of teaching was not, as has sometimes been supposed, to hide his meaning from them but on the contrary to communicate his meaning through an idiom which simple, unlearned people could easily understand and which appeals to, and evokes a response from, not merely the mind but the heart, the whole personality. Moreover, symbol-language can take us deeper into mystery than the language of conceptual thinking can, precisely because it is the property of symbol to communicate realities for which no concepts -- and therefore no reasoned formulas -- exist. But this very profundity involves a danger of misunderstanding. Scientific prose seeks to prevent misunderstanding by excluding ambiguity and being clear and distinct and univocal; symbol is deeply significant precisely because it is of its nature ambiguous (ambivalent or polyvalent). Christ speaks to us in paradox -- finding life by losing it, being rich by being poor, attaining peace through the sword, being reborn through death and finding light in darkness -- and there is always the danger that we may either fail to see how the two apparently contradictory sides of the paradox meet and fuse in a creative unity, a coincidentia oppositorum, or, in our desire to have everything neatly and tidily defined and distinct, may concentrate on one aspect to the exclusion of the other, thus distorting the truth and missing altogether the meaning of the mystery.

The formulas of creed and catechism, then, are an essential complement to, and explication of, the scriptural message since they give definition to our thinking and so prevent us from misinterpreting the message. But they are no substitute for the message; they are not sufficient of themselves to communicate the Word. A formula cannot express the Inexpressible or define the Infinite. We believe not in a creed but through a creed; we believe in the Reality about which the creed tells us things which are true indeed, but finite and therefore partial. Furthermore, definition implies limitation: a formula makes static what is of its nature dynamic, vital; it turns the living, concrete reality into an abstraction. There is a world of difference between the formula H2O and the elusive, mercurial reality of water. Thus, if the ambivalence of symbol involves a danger of misinterpretation, the clarity of abstract formulation involves a danger of aridity and unreality. The twofold function of the preacher is to help us to think theologically lest we misinterpret symbol, and to keep us constantly and ever more deeply aware of symbol lest our theologizing become arid and perhaps in the end meaningless.

(3) But today each part of this double task is beset with difficulties. We live in an age of psychological impoverishment: rationalism and scientisme have taught us to rely solely on strictly rational, logical, scientific thought processes and to ignore or repudiate as valueless all other modes of psychic experience and avenues to reality. Thus the language of symbol is for us, to a great extent, a " forgotten language "-- the Catholic believes in the efficacy of the baptismal ritual, but to what extent is the ritual itself meaningful for him? -- or, if it is not forgotten, it is suspect, and suspect precisely because imprecise. The Catholic today tends to be Cartesian in his thinking, in the sense of demanding that everything be formulated in terms of clear and distinct concepts. The task of the preacher, therefore, is interpreted, so far as dogma is concerned, simply in terms of instruction, and of instruction simply in the sense of imparting to the hearers the exact wording of doctrinal formulas and definitions. Where morals are concerned, the preacher's task is seen either in terms of the pious generalities and windy rhetoric of the fervorino (for while " feeling" as one of the elements in total, personal awareness of reality is misprized, the value of an appeal to the emotions pure and simple is often grossly over-estimated), or else as again a question of the imparting of neat and tidy rules, tabulating the various types of virtuous or sinful behaviour and fixing the exact degree of guilt involved in this or that sin, always viewed in terms of objective standards, of general laws, with little or no regard for particular circumstances or the psychological conditions and attitudes and stresses of the individual. The Catholic, cleric and layman alike, tends to be influenced by the climate of opinion in which he lives; the fervorino closely resembles the rhetorical verbosities of the political demagogue, the moral instruction too often betrays a mentality closely resembling the impersonal or anti-personal and procrustean categories of the bureaucrat. Msgr. Ronald Knox, in an article in The Month (March 1959), quoting the words " Did not our hearts burn within us when he talked with us on the way? " (Luke, xxiv, 32), described what in his view the Catholic " apologist" ought to do but in fact often fails to do and his words are relevant to the work of preaching in general.


Whether the preacher likes it or not, the fact is that God wrote his book in the language of poetry, of symbol. The tragedy is that for the most part preachers do not like it, and therefore fight shy of symbol-language and in effect repudiate it. The Church does not, and cannot, repudiate it; it speaks through it daily, constantly, in the Mass and the other sacraments; but to the faithful, conditioned by the world they live in and deprived of an adequate pedagogy, it becomes of necessity more and more obscure till in the end it is simply a meaningless hieroglyphic.

But if the language of symbol is meaningless because its idiom has been forgotten, the language of doctrinal definition and theological statement is often meaningless because to the layman its idiom is a technical jargon which he has never really been taught. Whether from laziness or illiteracy or the fear of departing by a hair's breadth from the safe orthodoxy of the Latin formulas he has culled from his textbooks, the preacher will probably make no effort to express doctrinal concepts in contemporary language. Indeed, to put it bluntly, he will fail to talk English. But to transliterate when one should be translating is not merely illiterate, it is to invite a double disaster. Almost certainly what is said will sound remote and unreal; it may also be positively misleading, for a living language is precisely living and therefore constantly changing, so that in course of time words sometimes come to convey the exact opposite of their original meaning. If, for example, we always speak of matrimony instead of marriage, of nuptials instead of a wedding, of spouses instead of husband and wife, and (crowning infelicity) of the marriage debt instead of physical and sexual union, we inevitably give the impression that the sacrament of marriage has nothing to do with the realities of human love. We do not adequately convey the realities of the life-renewing sacrament of repentance if we always call it the sacrament of penance and speak not of sorrow but of contrition, and of the oddly inappropriate " satisfaction." We cannot blame our hearers for going to sleep if our sentences are a relentless succession of ponderous latinisms; nor can we blame anyone but ourselves if we create an atmosphere of unreality by clinging doggedly to difficult polysyllabic terms when perfectly adequate simple, homely words are at hand. It is not helpful to talk of nativity and regeneration when we could perfectly well say birth and rebirth; we do not encourage realism if we can never speak of the sinlessness of Mary except in terms of Immaculate Conception; we are guilty not merely of illiterate infelicity but of crude error when we refer to the " descent" from the cross or -- an ultimate in stupidity -- to the " invention " of the true cross; and we do not help but hinder by speaking of the sacrament of extreme unction, since " extreme " seldom means " last," and " unction " nowadays is less suggestive of anointing than of oleaginous insincerity.

The sense of unreality is intensified when to these infelicities and falsifications are added the pious clichés which are usually found to accompany them: if a preacher can never refer simply to God, to Christ, to Mary, to the Church or the Pope, but must always unfailingly speak of Almighty God, our divine Redeemer, the blessed Mother, and so on, he should not be surprised to find that his words have a markedly narcotic effect; nor is that necessarily their worst effect since here too falsification is not uncommon, as when chastity is referred to as " the holy virtue " (which implies " holy par excellence ") in plain defiance of the New Testament teaching that the supreme virtue is caritas, love.

It should perhaps be added that the dice must inevitably be adversely loaded, the work of training young men to become preachers inevitably start from a lethal basic assumption, as long as that work continues to be referred to in the jargon of the seminaries as a training in " sacred eloquence."

It is not surprising, then, if nowadays the laity often feel, and sometimes voice, a profound disquietude concerning the preaching of the Gospel. If a sermon is made up partly of technical terms which, though legitimate in themselves, have become worn away into meaninglessness by over-usage like the inscription on an old coin, partly of illegitimate technical jargon, and partly of the pious clichés which make Christianity and the Christian ideal of holiness seem sectarian or even subhuman, the sermon will be in effect not a homily but a bromide; it will not open, it will effectively close the Scriptures. So it is that, as Milton expressed it, " the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."

(4) What then can be done to remedy this state of affairs? What are the main tasks, the main challenges, confronting the preacher in our contemporary world? The first task is to restore to the Christian his rightful heritage: to help him to recover the lost or forgotten language of symbol, the language of the Bible in general and of the Word himself in particular.

It is sometimes argued that though symbol in general has its uses there is nothing to be gained by attempting to revive interest in the biblical symbols since these were the product of an agrarian society and must be meaningless to our modern industrial-urban civilization. How can one hope, it is asked, to communicate the realities of the Christian mystery in terms of tree and water and wine and fire when those one addresses have no knowledge of wood except in industrial artifacts, or of water except in pipes controlled by faucets, no real awareness of fire since the hearth has been rejected in favor of central heating, or of wine since they drink only beer or spirits?

The argument, though specious, will not survive any but the most superficial scrutiny. There are indeed some minor symbols which were popular at some period in Christian history but which would now seem " dated," lacking in significance or even ludicrous. The pius pelicanus is perhaps a case in point. But there is an essential difference between " invented " and therefore transient symbols, however rich in meaning and indeed sublime these may be for certain peoples or at certain epochs, and the symbols which are so universal, geographically and historically, that they must be regarded as "innate," as part of the very structure of the human psyche. The basic Christian symbols are of this kind, and indeed it is surely unthinkable that the eternal Word would couch his universal message in symbols which he knew would be meaningless to future generations. The " forgotten " language is in fact not so much forgotten as repressed: it was not destroyed by the arrogant repudiations of positivism and scientisme, it was merely driven underground, so that today, if it is still excluded from the highest spheres of expression, it will be found -- as has often enough been demonstrated -- manifesting itself in the spheres of fiction and fantasy, and of course in everyman's world of dreams. And even in the most completely industrialized and urbanized communities today there must be few indeed, if any, who are utterly impervious to the quickening, freshening, youth-renewing qualities of water, the warming, strengthening, liberating therapy of the golden sun, the jubilant evocations of the wine of feasting and fellowship in human history and song and story. A man may never have watched the baking of bread, the making of wine, the catching of fish, the sowing of a field, but he would have to be worse than a moron if when these things were described to him he failed completely to sense their profound and profoundly simple significance.

To open the Scriptures then means first of all to help one's hearers to sense the significance, the implications, the evocations, of the biblical word-symbols which are also the universal lingua franca, the Ur-woerter, of mankind. This universality means that a prudent and informed mind can find endless -- and endlessly thrilling and enriching -- sidelights on the scriptural symbols in the art and literature, the myth and folklore, of humanity. Even when these present a picture of reality which is in some way or degree distorted, still we can derive from them a quickening of interest in, and perhaps a new insight into, the biblical pattern or process of rebirth and transfiguration or one or other of the symbols included in it.)

The first way of opening the Scriptures therefore consists in helping one's hearers to appreciate, to see into, the idiom of the Scriptures and so to enter into the mystery expressed and revealed through that idiom, rather as a connoisseur of painting or poetry can help us to grasp the idiom of the artist and so enter into his creation. This in turn means encouraging the hearers to gain, and then to enrich, develop, deepen, an insight into individual symbols; but it also means helping them to penetrate the inherent ambivalence of the symbols and, in the case of the Gospels, the paradoxes in which the Word presents his message, whether in the form of picture-language (e. g., parables and paroimiai) or in explicit and seemingly contradictory statements.

The parables have sometimes been " allegorized " for preaching purposes (e. g., by St. Augustine), and some of Christ's parables are in fact a mixture of parable and allegory (e. g., the sower); but in its pure form the parable is a picture which presents one single truth or lesson but a lesson which may well be paradoxical and therefore requires, for a true understanding of it, not merely a penetrating but a unifying vision. It has been said of the parable of the prodigal son, for instance, that it might well be called the parable of the prodigal father: the story is a paradox-picture because it portrays for us the mystery of God's mercy, the mystery which can be stated in theological terms by saying that in God justice and mercy are one.

The obvious " difficulty " in the story is the apparent unfairness with which the elder son is treated; the task of the preacher or pedagogue will be not merely to draw out the implications of the details of the story as a portrayal of mercy (e. g., the fact that the father saw the prodigal " while he was yet a long way off " [Luke, xv, 20] implies that he was not merely willing to welcome him back but was anxiously looking out for him) but still more to show how this mercy is not an arbitrary abrogation or dilution of justice but is itself justice. The miserum cor, the pitying heart, which is implied in misericordia is correlative to the miseria, the state of wretchedness, of the one pitied: the greater the miseria, the greater the misericordia; and this relatively is itself just, is the divine justice which is thus revealed as differing toto caelo from the unrealistic, arbitrary rule-of-thumb " equity " of the legalist.

Again, the theandric reality of the Incarnate Word, which the theologian describes in terms of hypostatic union, is presented in the Gospel through the paradox-picture of the simultaneous total divineness and total humanness of Jesus, a picture painted most vividly by St. John with his genius for fusing together the sublime and the homely, as in the final chapter of the Fourth Gospel where the might and majesty of the Word, the grandeur and universality of his message, the absoluteness of his demand for love and obedience usque ad mortem, are manifested in the homeliness of human love and fellowship, the catching and counting of the fish, the humble breaking of bread together and the sharing together of the food cooking on the fire.

The second main task of the preacher is to present to his hearers the theological implications of the Word of God, doctrinal and moral, in an idiom which will be meaningful for them and grip their attention because it is contemporary, vital, concrete and vivid; and also in a manner which, because it springs from a keen insight into and sympathy with the realities of their own immediate and pressing problems and difficulties, will arouse in them not the sense of unreality produced by vague generalities or diatribes which betray a total incomprehension of their situation, but a sense of immediacy, of a here-and-now enlightening and encouraging message, a manifesting of the law -- the law which is Truth and Life and Love, for " our law is Christ"-- as indeed " a lamp for [their] feet" (Ps. cxviii, 105) and a lamp which, as the message strikes home to them, they will recognize as what their hearts have been looking for.

All this implies much more than the mere acquiring and memorizing of a new vocabulary. It involves, first, a constantly renewed thinking-out of timeless truths in terms of contemporary situations, problems, mental attitudes; secondly, a constant re-appraisal of the shifting nuances of current speech in general; and thirdly a constant alertness in particular for the changes which can and do befall traditional Christian words or phrases not so much in their dictionary-meaning as in their overtones and evocations.

Changes of this latter kind can be of extreme importance, so much so that it may be necessary to discard the old terms altogether and invent new ones; for nowadays the changes often involve a loss of strength, the sort of etiolation which comes of substituting soft sentimentality for the tough realities of deliberation and volition. The tragic deterioration which is revealed in the contrast between the Christ of the Byzantine mosaics or of Giotto or Michelangelo and the saccharine Sacred Heart of present-day popular piety is equally revealed in the contrast between the primitive or medieval and the present-day connotations of many of the great Christian words. It just is a fact -- and a fact which we cannot ignore without incurring the catastrophe of falsification -- that " charity " no longer conveys the fiery immensities of caritas or agape but suggests either almsgiving, perhaps impersonal or even condescending, or else a mild and vague emotional benevolence; that " temperance " means not temperantia but merely abstention from, or an attitude of cautious timidity towards, the bottle; that " purity " no longer suggests integrity, wholeness, the quality of being " all of a piece " and free of all base alloy, but has become equated with the (largely negative) idea of sexual continence. Negativism has made " prudence " the equivalent simply of caution and the cult of safety-first; sentimentality has emasculated " meekness " and " mildness "; " humility " has been so grossly misinterpreted that instead of meaning an acceptance of the truth about oneself it now means a complete self-denigration which in fact is deliberate falsehood.

For concepts such as these, therefore, the preacher today needs a new vocabulary unless he is prepared, every time he mentions them, to begin with a laborious correction of misapprehensions concerning the old. Once again, it is not a question merely of finding new words for old but of seeing and stating timeless truths in the context of the immediate here-and-now problems and pre-occupations of his audience; and this in turn involves a great deal of imaginative sympathy. The priest has his own personal problems, but one of his main tasks as a preacher is to identify himself with the quite different problems and mental attitudes of his people: his message will never seem real to them or get under their skins unless he can think himself into their skins. If he treats of the theology of God's providence he must explain how the Father's loving care is compatible with the frustrations, the tragedies, the derelictions which his people experience; he cannot speak convincingly of the motherhood of the Church unless he first faces with courage and compassion the widespread feeling of the laity that the Church is far more severe and impersonal than Christ. It is useless to expound the ideals of Christian justice or sexual morality unless he really understands the problems of how to be honest and yet survive in our rat-race world and how to be chaste in spite of all the economic, social, emotional and psycho-sexual stresses which pull, sometimes so overwhelmingly, in the other direction; and to speak of deep-rooted sinful habits as determining an eternal destiny, without having a vivid awareness (whether experiential or sympathetic) of the psychological factors whereby the culpability of such habits is itself determined, is not merely useless but positively harmful.

But even here we return in the last resort to the question of words. A preacher who had taught himself to understand and to feel his people's problems would still be unable to reach them unless he had also taught himself to speak of these problems in their own language. And if he is to undertake this task, or even be aware of its necessity, he must first acquire a deep feeling for words. He is not required to be an orator, and he is definitely required not to concern himself with the pomposities and verbosities of empty rhetoric; on the other hand, he certainly will not achieve his objective by the pitiful expedient of injecting a few ill-chosen colloquialisms into his discourse. Cor ad cor loquitur: he must know in his own heart, in his bones, the words which will not just skim the surface of other minds but dig down deep into minds and hearts alike. What a tragic irony, when those who worship the Word and whose office it is to proclaim the Word betray a complete lack of awareness, appreciation, love and reverence for words. The words of a living language are themselves living things: mutable, fragile, fugitive; and their loveliness too (when they are lovely) is fragile, easily marred by the accretion of ugly overtones or the arrosions of misinterpretation or the destructive effect of drab associations. The office of the preacher is to lead his hearers to an epopteia, a beholding, of the Word through his use of words: with what love and reverence, therefore, with what care for clarity and simplicity, for vividness and vitality, must he use them! He must open the Scriptures, and to open the Scriptures is to open a door and the door is Christ (Jn. x, 9) . When the reading of the Gospel is announced in the Mass we cry Gloria tibi Domine: not " Glory be to the Lord" but " Glory be to you, Lord, here and now present in our midst," for the Gospel means not merely a promise for the future but a present beholding. The events it records are, as events, in the historical past but as symbols are timeless and therefore contemporary; and as we are the widow's son, the demoniac boy, the cripple, the blind man, the prodigal, so Christ is here and now for us the vine and the wine, the living bread, the living water, the shepherd and the door of the sheepfold, the living and life-giving Word.

We live in a world in which multitudes are filled with despair because they find life meaningless. But Logos means " meaning "; as Peter declared, the Word has the words which give life, the secret of life (Jn. vi, 69) because he is himself the meaning of life. It is for those who are the Word's messengers to learn to use words lovingly, carefully, creatively, so as to heal the despair of a world without meaning; and to make sure that their words are truly pedagogic, truly life-bringing and light-bringing, because leading their hearers to that epopteia in which blindness is forever healed in and by the sight of the Life and the Light.