Christianity is a historic religion; time has always been its fourth dimension. In studying man's relation with God, time is vital. Like a story, His relation to God has a history, a shape, an unfolding and in fact, a plot. It matters enormously when a man was born. The higher world and man have had many changes of relation. Things that have occurred are part of our religion, as well as things that are. Not knowing the story, is not knowing the religion; and not knowing the religion is not knowing reality. The facts of religion are important facts. We have studied our reality. It remains for us to study our own being and our own life in it.
26.1
We see the context in terms of three actors and four events. The actors are God, Adam and Christ. All of them are in us in various ways; and we have no hope of understanding ourselves without understanding them. The events are the Creation, the Fall, the Redemption and the Judgment. Knowing this context, we know where we are, what we are, and what we exist for. In this totality, we can know our place in it, and establish our relation to everything else in it. We can do nothing to alter the context, for it is reality, and apart from it, is only nothingness. The only thing left to our choice is our mental attitude. No choice can be as important as this fundamental choice. Three choices are open to us. We can do our best to understand reality, the context in which we are, and harmonize ourselves with it. We can understand the context and rebel against it. Rebelling against reality, what could be bleaker? Or we can ignore the context and invent one of our own, selecting elements we find appealing, or act in no context.
Maturity lies with the first choice. Maturity is preparedness to accept reality, cooperate with and not fight reality. Remembering that the reality we accept, does not mean any situation that we have the power to change, but only in the vast framework of reality which is by God's will. We are existent in a universe, created by God, held in existence from moment to moment by God. We enter life born in Adam, and enfolded in the results of his fall. We are meant for a supernatural destiny, which can only be reached by entering into a supernatural life through rebirth in Christ, our Redeemer. We are fully ourselves, a condition for us, as members of the Mystical Body of Christ. To be unaware of any element in these facts is to falsify everything; and anything done about the facts, will bring only ignorance, error and darkness in not seeing them.
26.2
In darkness, we cannot get our relation right. The sociologist, for instance, is not DIRECTLY concerned with men's relation to God, but their relation to one another. Men are IN FACT related to God, fallen in Adam, redeemed by Christ and on their way to Heaven or Hell. A novelist or sociologist not knowing this, does not know men. What he sees, is not seen right. Our age is very fastidious about novels, especially their reality. A novel is artificial, when the characters are unreal. Yet, no one seems to mind that their own world is unreal. The novelist is in the absurd position of making laws in a universe, not of his making. He does this, because he does not know the laws of the real universe. Lacking this knowledge, no matter his insight into human character, passion and motive, he is doomed to unreality. A work of art is not meant to illustrate the moral law, as a cathedral is not built to illustrate mechanical laws. Ignoring the laws of mechanics, the cathedral will show its unreality by falling down; and the artist ignoring the moral law, will eventually show unreality in his work.
This is why the theologian finds the modern novel chaotic. In his grasp on the shape of reality, the most solemn, somber and closely observed modern novel seems as grotesque and fantastic as Alice in Wonderland. That masterpiece is obviously fantastic, as that the law of cause and effect does not operate. This nonconnection between cause and effect is at the level of the most superficial of secondary causes. Consider what derangement must follow, if the first cause is unknown. The grotesqueness is not less because the cause ignored is more fundamental; it is only less obvious because the mind has lost contact with its own depths.
If the theologian dismisses the novelist's world as lacking shape, the novelist dismisses the theologian's world as lacking flesh and blood. This counter-charge draws attention to a real danger in the study of ultimate reality. In handling elements beyond the daily experience, one might treat them as abstractions. If so, our philosophizing would be an exercise in getting these abstractions rightly related and in getting the shape of reality right. The universe is not a thing that has a shape, it is something. A student must be conditioned by his examinations; and they are almost invariably about shape. It is difficult to devise examinations that can test how real reality is to a man. It is possible to have a less detailed knowledge of all the relations that exist between all the various elements of reality, yet know reality better. A man who has never heard of some of the subtler truths may have a far better hold upon reality, because of the intensity of his realization. To know all the ins and outs of the diagram of reality is very valuable, but not if reality is in the mind, simply as a diagram. We must never mistake intricacy for depth.
To balance our study of the relations of things, we need a growing intimacy with the very being of things. We must study creation, not just the process. The transition from nothingness to something by the exercise of God's omnipotence, but the result of the process, the created universe. We will come, not only to a better knowledge to it, but of God who created it. Not only because we learn something of any maker from the thing made; but that from the study of created being, we come to an awareness of BEING. This can be applied to our study of the Uncreated Being. The theologian, studying only God, might come to a thin notion of God. The primary truth about God is that He is. The more IS means to us, the richer our knowledge of God. To study IS, a finite being lies ready to our hand, accessible, apt to our habits. Only a shadow of infinite Being, but immense if infinite Being has cast it. Finite language is inadequate to state our knowledge, but all we have, and not to be ignored. A finite being is not infinite, but is the best we have to start, and can yield immense fruit of knowledge.
26.3
We must study being, not as a philosophical concept, but as a reality expressed in everything that exists. It is better to arrive at our own mental relation with being from our own experience, than from books expressing the experiences of others. It is folly to think that we would get a better notion of infinite Being by ignoring finite being. It bears at its lowest the imprint, and at its highest the likeness, of its Maker. It would be a singular aberration to think one could learn nothing about God from the things He has made - from the heavens, for example, which show forth God's glory.
The mind, truly aware of the splendor of creation, cannot but accept the eminence that must be the infinite Being, making this out of nothing. God is communicating with us, telling us something, by way of his universe. There is something verging on monstrous about knowing God; and not being interested in the things His infinite power is energizing. It would be so strange an attitude to love God so exclusively that we could not love men, which He has forbidden. We have to love our neighbor because God loves him, and love demands knowledge. We cannot love our neighbor and ignore him. We have to love the world, as God loves the world. Knowing the world, we are knowing God better. If we keep the balance right, our relation to God is better and richer by using our mind, will and body, on what He has made.
The created universe IS, and it gives a real notion of what IS means. Growing in knowledge, we are conscious of a two-way effect, by a growing sense of the wonder and awareness of the nothingness in it. Opposed to not-being, nothing compares, but opposed to Infinity, it barely is.
The created universe has to be studied. There is no one set way. Once one has the shape of reality, there is almost no way of NOT studying it. Once one has the main elements of reality clear in the mind, everything can add to the richness. A great deal of the enriching process will be spontaneous and not meditated. Direct study of the universe is a must, but it will not be the whole of the mind's action or the best part of it. Any living activity will assist. There is an immense amount to be learned about being, and about God, if one knows how to apply it, like having a cold plunge on a winter morning.
26.4
There is much to be learned by sharing the experience of others, by reading the works of men especially gifted to react to reality. The theologian may gain something from the novelist. For the novelist may have vague or no notion of the total meaning of life, but likely has a highly developed awareness of the flesh and blood of it. Far more than this, the theologian might gain by reading the poets. The awareness of reality that is so vital, the poet has something to give the theologian. Wordsworth's “The moon doth with delight, look round her when the heavens are bare.” The poets cannot be happy with the idea that nature is dead. They feel the life in it, not always knowing what the life is. The Christian is the reverse, knowing what the mystery is, but mostly not feeling it. As a fact of Christian doctrine, he knows that God is the very center of all things, sustaining them above the nothingness from which He drew them, but he does not experience things that way. What the Christian knows as a truth, the poet sees as a living fact. By his gift, he can also communicate his experience, so that we see them. The poet can help many knowing more about creation than him. He can make creation come alive to them.
There is need for direct study of the created universe. The natural sciences serve a lesser purpose by making the world more habitable; and the greater one by increasing knowledge of it. We have the electric light, not because scientists wanted to, but from wanting to learn more about the nature of light and electricity. Scientists discover by a passionate desire to know.
Theologians expect to learn about God from the things God made, including material things. The scientist has information to give the theologian, which the theologian can turn to gold. The scientist deals with causes, arrangements and relations less fundamental than the FIRST CAUSE and the FIRST PRINCIPLE OF ORDER. He keeps within the field of material things. He can know an incredible amount about the things he specializes in, but from science cannot learn the totality of being. He cannot know the full meaning, or a large part, as he knows it out of its context. The pure scientist is in the position of a man, who should have made a detailed study of a human eye, but had never seen a human face. The scientist is dealing with the relations of material things to each other, valid and valuable knowledge, requiring its own sort of asceticism and devotion. Confining it to himself exclusively is very bad. For a scientist is also a man with a man's need to know; and a man's capacity to know the meaning of his own life. All things made by God have value, but what the scientist studies are lowest in value. Apart from their relation to God and the higher things of creation, which their lowness completes, they are of no value. Being engaged so closely in their study, larger realities remain unseen, thus neglecting the better part of his own humanity. No amount of excellence, as a scientist, can compensate for the shortcomings as a man. Still these brilliant workers on the lowest things may be rewarded, by the good God, for the blindness so many of them have inflicted on themselves.
The scientist loses more, not learning from the theologian, than the theologian does, not learning from the scientist. The theologian has never ignored the stuff of the universe, as the scientist has the mind behind the universe. The theologian cannot help knowing that bread nourishes, poison kills and sex perturbs. If one loses less than the other, both lose. The loss of the scientist is not our concern, but the theologian's is, as we are taking our first steps along his road. We can both learn from all the things bearing God's imprint; and more from higher things made in His likeness - angels and the souls of men. More can be learned from studying angels, but not by us. Studying man is more convenient than the angels. He can be studied, not only in psychology or history classrooms, but in the workshop, the bus and the shaving mirror.