Illtyd
was one of very few English writers to have embraced
at the outset the great movement in continental theology
that was taking shape after 1945 and which bore such
fruit at Vatican II. As editor of the Downside
Review from 1946 – 1952, and again between 1960 and 1964,
as well as in his own prolific output of articles
and reviews (he was also a fine translator of French),
he gave hospitality and encouragement to many who
found themselves cold-shouldered by Church authorities.
The only book he wrote
on the Liturgy, Christ in the
Liturgy (1951), was
one of his first. It took as its immediate subject
the missal and prayers of the liturgy that were to
be superseded after the Council. Illtyd consequently
used to disavow it as an early piece of writing,
with characteristic self-depreciation. He certainly
regretted some of the later developments in liturgical
renewal that he felt undermined the essentially contemplative
nature of the liturgy, and which may explain his
later silence on the liturgy itself, but the argument
underlying that book was fundamental to all his subsequent
writing on prayer.
Taking up ideas from Henri
de Lubac and Masure – Louis Bouyer was another major
influence on his thought – Illtyd taught that the
Church was the Body in which we find our proper place
in relation to God and to other human beings. We
do not exist as individuals; the purpose of mankind
is to be united in the Incarnate Word. The Liturgy
is the work of redemption continued in the Body of
Christ until the end of time. In it Christ continues
to offer himself to the Father and to pour out on
us the life of the Spirit. In the liturgy, then,
we find our natural place (or supernatural – Illtyd
disliked drawing too sharp a distinction between
the two) before the face of God, and are able to
give ourselves to him so that his will be done in
us. This liturgical encounter is the heart of the
whole life of prayer. For Illtyd, the silent prayer
of the heart is the flowering of the soul that has
been fructified by the Liturgy. The Liturgy nourishes
our hearts and minds, so that we can know and love
God. Most important for Illtyd, this union of mind
and heart in the love of God, which is perfected
in the saints, is the common vocation of all Christians.
For him, the Christian vocation is a call to the
mystical life – whether it unfolds in the enclosed
life of prayer of a Carmelite nun, or the active
charity of someone in the world. What matters in
the end is the increase of charity.
He had been crippled with
polio in his last year at Oxford, but he was a memorable
teacher of Classics, English and Philosophy in the
school, as well as an avid and thoughtful reader.
His physical restrictions made him seem a very private
person; but he loved conversation with anyone prepared
to think, and his dedication to the search for understanding
was an inspiration to cultivate the life of the mind.
Above all because he believed that we could know
God: he believed that in our experience of moral
obligation God was making his presence directly felt,
and that awareness of him was implicit in our most
fundamental human experience.
In his other books, especially
Absolute Value (1970), The
Absolute and the Atonement (1971) and Mysticism
and Theology (1975), Illtyd
writes as a philosopher-theologian and argues for
the kind of metaphysics of awareness that makes sense
of the teaching on contemplative prayer found in
Baker, Chapman and Butler. Themes more distinctive
of his thinking were his reassertion of the role
of the intellect as well as the will in the mystical
life. In line with this, he criticised the blurring
of the distinction between intellect and reasoning
in scholastic theology, and greatly preferred a more
Platonist and Augustinian treatment of the mind.
He deplored the closure to metaphysics entailed by
logical positivism and, just as much, the infatuation
of modern theology with Wittgenstein, who seemed
to him to respond to an excessively restricted account
of what we can know only by giving up on the notion
of objective truth. He was sympathetic to the increasingly
widespread interest in religious experience outside
Christianity, and agreed with Rahner that human beings
could know God and reach holiness independently of
the Church – he took the view that for such as these
the life of prayer sprang from a ‘baptism by desire’.
He also agreed with him that Christianity could no
longer expect to prove its credentials by a claim
to authority; in the modern age people would have
to see for themselves what the Church proclaimed
to be true, and Christians would need to be mystics.
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