27.1
One is at first startled to be told that only in the Mystical Body can man be fully himself. The real difficulty about the doctrine of the Mystical Body, is not to grasp it but to believe that the Church really means it. It is not hard to believe in the Catholic Church, as an organization established by Christ, whose members seek Christ's gifts of life and truth. The idea of the Church as an organism into which we are built, so that we may live in the full stream of Christ's life as members of Christ, is seemingly totally out of scale with us. The ordinary Catholic feels not only that it is beyond his powers, but beyond his desires. This meagerness would have been satisfied by something less.
Man must grasp that he is extraordinary. Extraordinary like all creatures, being held in existence from our native nothingness by the continuing will of Omnipotence; but more extraordinary than other creatures, both by what God made him and by what he has made of himself. We are made from nothing, but are not for nothing and will never return into nothing. Without God we should be nothing, but without Him we will never be. He made us not only into something, but into something like Him. Not only like Him, but something He could Himself become, and thought enough of to die for. Spiritual and immortal, made in the likeness of God, redeemed by Christ, we are clustered with splendors. Consider man's glory as we know it, against the dreariness or man as the atheist thinks. We have nothing as our origin, but eternity as our destiny. The atheist has a cloud about his origin, but nothing as his destiny. We came from nothing and he is going to nothing. Eternity will have surprises for him, too.
Man is a mixture of matter and spirit, resembling no other creature in the universe known to us. We are the only beings who die and do not stay dead. It seems an odd way to our goal that as the last stage, all of us, saint and sinner, should fall apart. We are the only beings with an everlasting destiny who have not reached their final state. There is something cozy and settled about angels, good and bad. Men are the only beings whose destiny is uncertain.
There is an effect of this in our consciousness. We are the only creatures who can choose and change their side in this battle. We are the only beings left who can either choose or refuse God. All the excitement of our universe is centered in man. For we human beings started extraordinary, and from extraordinary have grown monstrous: body rebelling against soul, imagination playing the devil with intellect, passion storming will. Men with their intellects under their imaginations and their wills under their passions are startling. The only reason we are not startled is that we are more sensitive to the shape, and as such to any misshapenness, of body than of soul. Whatever reasons we might have or think we have for rejecting the doctrine of the Mystical Body, let us not think of ourselves as too ordinary for so marvelous a context. No context could be too extraordinary for creatures like men.
27.2
At every point in the nature of man the Church fits it. We may summarize the truth about all men in two pairs of facts: first, man is at once spirit and matter; second, he is at once an individual person and a social being. In each the Church sees both elements. She makes such provision for the needs and powers of the soul, as are undreamed of elsewhere. The body is fully realized, too, by way of asceticism fitting it for full partnership with the soul, by way of sacrament and sacramental fitting it to the furthest point the soul can go. Within the Church there is a consecration of soul and body, an awareness of sacredness in soul and body.
Secondly, the Church has turned the social element in man's nature to the uses of religion beyond any other church, seeing man united with his fellows in relation to God, uniting with his fellows in the worship of God, receiving God's gifts of truth and life through the fellowship. The person remains himself, not merged in the human society here or in the divine nature hereafter, under God an end in himself. Nowhere can a man more fully feel at once his kinship with all men and the worth of his own personality.
In relation to both key facts, two tides have beaten on the Church in these last centuries, Protestantism and Secularism. The Church preserved both components, while each assailant chose one component. Protestantism stressed the soul and individual. Secularism stressed the body and society. Protestantism opted for the soul, largely ignoring the body, or making no provision for it. It ruled out asceticism, most of the sacraments and all the sacramentals. It produced a religion for the soul only, which would suffice, if man had been a soul only, but was no religion for man. Secularism focused on the body, ignoring the spirit as Protestantism did the body. Its primary aims are for the body's comfort and security, assuming that, if man has a soul, it too will be satisfied by improved material conditions. The result is the starvation of the spirit.
Protestantism focused on the relation of the individual soul to God, regarding any cooperation of man as an intrusion. There is some truth in this. There is an element in man beyond the reach of his fellows, something incommunicable, having its own unshared relation with God. This element is not the whole of man. An effort to build the whole of religion on it, means ultimately that it does not reach its fullest achievement. Within the Catholic Church mysticism has reached its most marvelous point, as the spiritual non-Catholic shows by reading the works of our mystics over his own. This is also revenge of the ignored element. Secularism came, betting on the social order over the human person. We see this at its extreme in Communism and Nazism, where the collective is everything and the individual no meaning and destiny apart from it. Though these two have gone furthest, the same tendency runs through all modern sociology. The only home left for personality is the Church. Only for the Church is everyone someone. Both Protestantism and Secularism maim man by treating him, as half of himself. The Church alone treats man, as the whole of himself in the whole of his context.
27.3
If the Church gives the whole truth in perfect balance, there is a danger that we may not use our own minds sufficiently. It is a great thing to preserve truth, but less if it is unexamined. A subtler danger is thinking one's mind active on the truth, when one is merely exercising it on words. The danger to the Catholic is stopping at the definition, as if it was knowing man. Man, says the philosopher, is a rational animal. As a definition, the phrase is perfect; but inadequate, as a description. The object of a definition is to define, or make a statement that will apply to that thing exclusively. It points to one single thing, the thing it defines. The phrase "rational animal" points at man and at nothing else within our experience. The word "animal" cuts out every being that is not animal; the word "rational" cuts out every animal that is not man. After the definition can exclude every other thing, adding anything would be superfluous. This means that there is far more in things than its definition tells. The phrase rational animal or the alternative phrase "union of spirit and matter" are a sort of blackboard diagram on which they proceed to base their thinking on the affairs of man. In fact, either phrase is too meager a foundation. It leaves out too much - the fact, for instance, that man is fallen.
No book or statement by someone else, can tell us what man is. Only life can do that. Every man one meets can add to our knowledge, provided that we know how to learn. If you want to find out what a rational animal is, study man. Neither animality nor rationality will be the same when the two are wed. The union does strange things to both of them. Rationality functioning in union with a body is not just rationality. Animality is so ennobled by its union with spirit, that any animal would be left confused. The answer is to meet man and focus hard on the experience. The phrase itself does not address a union of spirit and matter in man. The union in our phrase is of two beings, one spatial and one spaceless. It is hard to conceive two unlikelier beings in a union. The fact is, these beings are united as one being, one person and one subsistent operative thing.
Previously we used the illustration of a pot of water boiling on a flame. In a union of flame and water, the flame is enflaming every part of the water, making it immeasurably different from water not flamed, both in what it is and can do. In the human compound, the body acted on by a spiritual soul is immeasurably different from a merely animal body. If the water and a flame were so related, that the flame could heat only that water and that water only, we would be a closer example. For the soul of man and the body of man can in the one case give, and in another case receive the life-giving energy only in relation to each other. My soul could not animate your body. In the most literal sense, a man's soul and body are made for one another.
A union, so close, might be expected to affect the soul in its own proper activities, and so it does. There is that border region of emotion and passion, where it is hard to tell which is more in operation. In the activity of intellectual knowledge, the soul's own special affair, the body, having no competence at all, does in fact play a part. The soul receives all that information on the outside world, doing its own thinking and drawing knowledge amounting ultimately to the knowledge of God Himself through the path of the body's senses. While soul and body maintain their union here on earth, the body must play this organic part in the soul's knowing, or the soul not know.
The interrelation of soul and body, in the concrete living of life, is the commonest fact of experience. States of the soul produce effects on the body. What happens to the body produces states of the soul. All this Protestantism chooses to ignore. It will not be ignorable in Heaven. We have observed that the flame can go on flaming even after the water is taken away. The soul can continue in its own spiritual activities even; after the body has reached a point where it can no longer respond to the animating energies of the soul. We have the separation called death, but this is not to be permanent. This immeasurably close union constitutes the fullness of man. Man's ultimate destiny is to live the life of Heaven not as part of himself, even the noblest part, but as his whole self.
27.4
Then there is the union of rationality and animality. Initially, these look less apt for life together than "spaceless" and "spatial". In terms of a union, it seems a most impossible misalliance. Angels and devils had opposing views; but both saw this marriage as certain to fail, and it looked as if it had. Rationality and animality are so oddly assorted in themselves, that ideal circumstances are needed to give them any chance. Ideal circumstances are just what they did not get, at least for a long time. In our own experience we know how bothersome a union it is. An archangel or a cat would be driven mad in twenty-four hours of living in two such various worlds at once. Madness is a pretty good description of the problem man made himself, a madness we have accepted.
The trouble is that animality is much easier than rationality. For one thing it is quite effortless, whereas rationality demands effort. We are good at animality and much attached to it. We find rationality difficult and not immediately rewarding. Making it worse, the soul can enjoy the body's pleasures, yet the body cannot enjoy the soul's pleasures. Things seem heavily loaded in favor of animality, especially our fatigued generation. Still, we also have spiritual needs. The body is on the quest, but so is the spirit. The body quests more clamorously. The spirit is never wholly silent; and its hungers can be as real and even as torturing as the body's. The soul can enjoy the body's satisfactions, but it cannot be satisfied with them.
A conflict exists in man between these two so different sets of needs, resulting in near chaos. Rationality and animality can complete each other, in an exactly right relation, or perturb each other, neither knowing the problem. They tend to fissure, making us two incomplete beings, instead of one. The needs of the body inflame the soul. The needs of the soul torment the whole man, as to mar the perfection of the body's pleasure in its pleasure. The animality is spurred further to provide what it cannot provide, namely satisfaction for the whole man. We get every sort of perversion, a depravity which in our exasperation we call animal. It is not animal at all, and mixed with the perversion and the depravity, are strange streaks of magnificence. Chaos is the only word, and not being aware of the chaos, is to not know man. Chaos roars, mutters or only whimpers, according to the energy of the man, and what he has made of the conflict. It may be only a kind of uneasy shifting or sense of insecurity, but it must always be taken into account.
This conflict within man is one reason not to judge other men. Our Lord tells us not to judge, "lest we be judged". Another reason, for refraining from judgment, is that we have not the knowledge judgment needs. The quick slick confident judgments we are forever making are merely silly. Who can read the chaos in another's soul from his actions? Who can read the chaos in his own soul?
This is simply a sample of what beginners in the study of man can find out for themselves on their way to deeper knowledge. Such a study once entered, must not be allowed to cease. We must keep on studying man. We may not be able to say in words, the new knowledge we gain. There is an intimacy, a new feel and instinct for man such as a good sculptor gets for stone, which will make an enormous difference to our handling of all men, especially the man who is our self. Each must make the study for himself. There are two things that will become always clearer. The first is that man is incalculable. Man is a rational animal, but that does not mean that he is a reasonable animal. It means only that he has reason, and therefore can misuse it. Without reason, he could not be unreasonable. He has, and is. Saying that man is incalculable, you have said that the definition is not enough, or could be enough, and no description enough. We must watch him closely, as he is always liable to surprise us, and himself. The second emerging truth is that man is insufficient for himself. His insufficiency is so essential to an understanding of the religion God made for him.