31.1
The object of this book was the health of the intellect, which is sanity. Sanity involves seeing what is, in relation to our self. It means seeing what we are, where we are and what life is about. Our object was to come mentally to citizenship of the real world, so we might be at home in it and familiar with it, knowing its realities and laws and how to conduct ourselves in it. Not just as something known, so if questioned about it we could answer correctly, but as something seen. A kind of landscape where the mind habitually lives, not something we have to recall on some special occasion, but something we see as a matter of course when we see anything at all. It is evident that the fullest possession of this whole vision of reality, without which no individual section of reality is intelligible, is made possible only when we receive the supernatural virtue of Faith and gift of Understanding. We are now in position to make some summary survey of the reality which now lies before the mind's gaze.
Notice how vast an enlargement of the universe it is. Man has built walls around him, through which no light of infinity can break, much like an eccentric millionaire, after inheriting a mansion, chooses to live in the coal cellar. It is an insanity within an insanity to have built the walls of our own prison. Even without Faith, the powers of the mind were sufficient to blow those self-invented walls away and see something of infinity and eternity, and its own kinship with both. The awareness of the mind could get, a shadow of what the revelation of God lays wide open to Faith. There is an immeasurable increase, beyond the range of things we are aware of, and in the vividness of our awareness.
We are aware of God, Infinite and Eternal. We are in vitalizing contact with Him, loved by Him, and certain that "love is His meaning". If our only deficiency was in being less than He; this awareness would still be a marvelous thing. With an abyss of nothingness at the core of our being, always tormenting us and drawing us towards it, it is vital that we should grasp and use every existent fact of kinship, and possibility of contact, with the Infinite.
We are aware of the spiritual world, not simply the reality under our noses but all that is. We live in a universe, where angels, good and evil, and souls of living and dead are greater realities than the bodies which occupy our awareness, by way of senses and imagination. We are saved from intellectual destitution from being aware of a teeming material world beneath us, and above us only emptiness.
We are aware of the human race, its movement in time and our place in the movement. We are aware of our membership of Christ and of one another. We are aware of our self and the war within our self. Above all, we know that by no effort of the mind, we could have suspected the grandeur of our own nature, which God could take and make His own. We see our life as a road with a beginning and a goal. We know the realities from which, through which, and to which it proceeds. We know the facts of life.
We know not only that spirit is real and valuable, but that matter is real and valuable. No one knowing the dignity of matter, will underrate the dignity of labor. We know totality, not mistaking parts for wholes, giving them a sufficiency, they have not, and expecting a satisfaction which only the whole can give.
31.2
The plain blunt man finds all this complicated. He has a plain blunt feeling that religion should be simple. It would be simpler that way. He does not want to use his mind on religion, only his emotions. His mind being needed for more pressing matters; and even emotion is too strong a word, for an uncertain sentiment turning to vapor. Only in regard to religion do men demand this sort of simplification. In science, mystery and complexity are taken for granted.
However superficially silly this attitude, or the man expressing it, there is great truth in it. Reality is mysterious and highly complex; and science is right to see and say it. The layman is right to find a certain joy in it and a sense that he is the gainer by it. Why then, if science is rightly complex in its explanation of part of reality, must religion’s explanation be simple for the whole of reality? Religion is not something distinct from and unrelated to reality. It is a light to see reality. It is hard that the explanation of the lowest part is praised for complexity; while for the whole, a simple explanation must be found, which calls for no effort of mind.
What we see in science, applies to the natural life of man as a whole. It would be horribly restricted by the simplification proposed for religion. As with vital functions, religion is hard to analyze but simple in operation. Complexity in structure actually simplifies things. Breathing is a simple and satisfying operation resulting from a highly complicated mechanism. Eliminate some of the elements of the mechanism for breathing, and it would cease to be simple to the point of even ceasing. Simplicity is a quality which has suffered from being thoughtlessly praised. One leg is half as complicated as two, but would complicate walking. Explaining life by the principle of spirit or matter only, would be simpler than by two, but would leave life quite inexplicable.
The mind, enabled by faith and its own activity to see reality as it is, is not impeded by over complication, but is able to move freely about reality. In the realization of the Infinite, there is a sense of growing and confidence. It is increased by the resultant awareness of our own finiteness; as finiteness is not a constraint to a being trying to be itself. The mind is not forever baffled by the multiplicity of things, once it sees them related to God, whose meaning is love, and to each other. A heap of human features, tossed on a table or arranged in some arbitrary order, would be very baffling; but in their proper order, they form the human face.
Just as the mind finds freedom, not confusion in the complexity of things, so life and action find freedom, and not frustration. The key movement of life is the going towards God, with the logical end being sanctity, or towards self and denying God, to an end of damnation. Everything in human life is related to this single simple principle. In the light of natural justice, we see men as exploiters or exploited, with the result that our duty is the overthrow of the exploiters and the relief of their victims, or as the Church sees them, saints and sinners. Her job being to turn sinners into saints and saints into greater saints. The practical consequences of this are enormous and frequently disturbing. Where the world sees a man triumphant in tyranny, one to be put down, the Church sees a poor stunted soul in peril of damnation, and who must be saved. To the world, arrogance is provoking and to be raged against. To the Church arrogance is a disease in the soul, arousing compassion and a loving desire to heal, unless interventions, like the good of souls endangered, leads the Church to resist. Even then Her action is still guided by the principle, that what matters is the movement of souls toward God or away from God. This is the principal question so it is not left among the myriad motives for which men act.
31.3
The vision of reality involves seeing not only what is, but how we should conduct ourselves in this now seen universe. Reality has laws, and we can know them. God did not make a chaos, in which any cause might have any effect. We must see laws as statements of cause and effect. Primarily they are statements, secondarily commands. As statements they explain the relations between one reality and another. Reality is so. As commands, they order us to act in line with the reality shown to us. Reality being so, do so.
In the moral law, it is a law of reality that marital fidelity is right for the kind of being man is. It follows that by committing adultery, we must suffer damage to our soul. We are dealing with a truth about man, understood by the intellect. God has made a command of it, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” This is addressed to the will, so disobeying it is sin. Our intellect sees it right, as an instruction from our Maker on how to best live. To ignore it is folly. Our obedience to the command is aided by our awareness of the reality about ourselves, on which it is based.
Considering law as statement rather than a command, says that a particular course of conduct is best for man, because he is what he is. Acting otherwise always damages man, by some positive damage, by a real wound in his nature, or by stunting his development. Though there is no actual wound, he is not growing as he could. This is obvious in material bodies, because in the disordered state of our nature, bodies are quite visible. Some elements in man are more difficult to see than his body, as are laws governing them compared to say, the law of gravity. They are laws, for there is no chaos in this nobler part of reality; and they are more vital, precisely because this part of us is nobler. We need to know them in order to be ourselves. Knowledge of law is a condition of freedom, material or moral. This knowledge limits our freedom to guess, but increases freedom to act and to think. There is no such thing as freedom from law, only freedom within the law. We cannot frustrate God's law at any point. We can ignore the law of gravity, but literally cannot break it, as it can break us. There is no such thing as breaking the law of purity. We can disobey the command, but the law is not broken, we are. The common fear is that religion, with its insistence on acceptance, shackles the mind, while in fact it shackles the mind, no more than knowledge of the law of gravity shackles the body.
If the moral law is always a condition of our freedom, it is not always a convenience, nor is the material law. From a high cliff, seeing a man below drowning, the law of gravity may result in his drowning, as you cannot reach him in time. Jumping, as a short cut, would destroy you and not help the drowning man. Immorality also represents a short cut, but always damages and may destroy us. Man finds a short cut almost irresistible. A clear view of reality helps us to see the moral law. Considering cases, especially instances where the sin is tempting and does not seem to damage another person, it is to our credit to shrink from sins that will hurt others.
There is a movement for euthanasia, the painless killing of patients suffering agonies from an incurable disease. The case for it is put very persuasively, making a very powerful appeal. As Catholics, we know by the plain command of God, that it is murder. This settles the matter, but with an unsatisfied feeling. Apart from the command of God, there are certain plain facts of reality making it difficult. The argument for it, uses the suffering dog that we would put out of his misery. The cases are not parallel, as putting the dog out of his misery ends the matter, but not for the man. If he is in a state of unrepentant rebellion against God, then he is caste into hell. While we cannot know, and because we cannot know, we should not take an action involving a possible catastrophe so final. Only in this life can repentance be made, grace gained or regained. Even if the sufferer is in a state of grace, it is only in this life that grace can be added for the soul's capacity to grow. It is in the agony of that suffering, that the soul might grow; and in death would enter heaven with a greater capacity to live the life and receive the joy of heaven. By sending a man, either to hell or a lower heaven, to avoid bodily pain, however great, might do credit to our heart but none to our head. It can only be foolish to kill a man for his own advantage. A man's life may be taken for the good of others; because, while we risk doing him great harm, the possible danger to others forfeited his right.
There can and are also effects in this world, not on the man but on the whole structure of society. A society lives or dies by the values it holds. This truth is almost always omitted from modern discussion of problems, that used to be called moral. Our tendency is to count the number of people benefited by a proposed line of conduct and the number of people harmed by it, and if there is a clear majority of people benefited, that line of conduct is justified. This statistical simplification of morality will not do. A society which values life and will not sacrifice it, except for values indubitably higher, is a healthy society. To allow a man's life to be taken, even with his own consent, in order to save him from bodily suffering, is to reduce the value of life. The whole of society lives in the shadow of that diminished value.
A man marries a woman whose husband has left her, which is not one of the worst breaches of the law of God. We assume that neither party is Catholic. The parties concerned do not know of God's positive law against their act, and the modern conscience is no longer very lively on the point. There is no question of a deliberate setting of their own will against God's will, which is the really destructive element in sin. The law of monogamy is as real a law as the law of gravity; and knowing it or not, breaking a law of reality is to suffer damage. To the persons concerned, there is not much positive damage, compared to a wound in the body. They have missed the development they would have received by living by the law of morality, which is the law of reality. Because the law is God's law, God sees to it that those who live by it will grow by it. The absence of knowledge may mean that there is no guilt, or sin. Still by this law, they might have gained something and have not. To allow a particular marriage to be dissolved, is to assume that marriage is dissoluble; and everyone's marriage is weakened.
Summarizing thoughts on the law, we observe that the will of God is a reality. The rational thing to do, is to learn it and live by it. There is no great harm in wishing a different reality, provided we do not act as if it were; for that is to act in unreality. The first point of maturity is to accept law. The highest point of maturity is to be in love with law: for law is the will of God and God is love. Between this first and last step lies the acceptance of law not because we fear the consequences, but because we love the Lawgiver: “If you love Me, keep My commandments.”
We have already seen the frenzied effort to read personality out of the universe: and with personality gone, will goes, and law is only a mechanism. The universe we are in is an expression of will, and the will it expresses is love.
31.4
The vision of life and law is splendid, but there is mystery in it. A higher mystery that we have already discussed. A mystery about the great realities: all that we cannot see about the Blessed Trinity or about the soul of man and his free will for example. Being bothered by questions we cannot answer is to be irked at not being God. We must not be bothered by the darkness ringing our circle of light, so that we cannot enjoy the light. The mind may be tormented by irreconcilable truths, if it cannot see why it cannot see. Knowing the great things with which we are dealing, we see why we cannot see further. Our very darkness is a kind of light.
There is a mystery we have not discussed yet, the mystery of suffering. While it is right to call suffering a mystery, or a problem, it is commonly misconceived. We talk as if we had to explain suffering, and defend God in relation to it. Our real task is to see its meaning and to use it. The chief problem of suffering is how not to waste it. We come to it in full knowledge of God’s omnipotence and love. We seek to understand it, and to help others to understand it, if we can. Our aim in justifying the ways of God to men, is to prevent men from being kept from Him.
Why does God allow us to suffer? He could prevent suffering by preventing us, a cure more drastic than we should desire. This is not flippancy, but the most obvious truth. Given what we are, we can get into a wrong relation to reality. A wrong relation to reality must have an effect on us, and that effect is suffering. The suffering relates to the kind of being we are; to the elements which have got into the wrong relation to reality. We may inherit or acquire bodily defects, or the want of harmony with reality may be in the mind. A man may want something, a woman for example. He may be unable because she is dead, or is married. In the one case his desire has collided with a physical law, in the other a moral law.
This wrong relation with reality may be easily put right. The defect in the body may be healed, the energy of the mind may be directed to something attainable. Relief from suffering, may be sought, if relief is to be had, but we must be careful not to deceive ourselves, if relief was not
to be had. Regarding the man and the woman noted above, he will know that he cannot have her, if she is dead. The physical law does not allow it. In the moral law, he may have an illusion of freedom. Although she is married, he can have her, if she is willing. The law remains a law. He has turned from one wrong relation to reality, by wanting what he should not have; and to another wrong relation to reality, by taking what he should not have. His felt suffering may be relieved; but the damage to him is greater, and not less.
The principle remains. We can get into the wrong relation with reality, and suffer as a result. This is the sense in which God could prevent suffering by preventing us. Another question, since finite creatures with fallible intellects and free will are pretty certain to bring suffering upon themselves, is why did God make us so that we can suffer so much? The reality, to which we belong and cannot leave, has laws expressive of real and knowable sequences of cause and effect. We can collide with these laws by our own fault, someone else's or what seems like nobody's. To suggest that God should intervene every time we come into collision with reality, preventing the causes taking their effects, would mean that we should not be living in a universe of law. In a universe not run by laws, but by special interventions by God, we could hardly live our lives intelligently. God does intervene, and this intervention is His miracle, and is exceptional. This means that the cause does not produce its usual effect, or that the effect has no relation to a natural cause. This is a surprise, good or bad, depending on who benefits by a miracle. If miracles were not exceptional, considered action must cease. We could not master or grow in our environment, exercise our will by choice, or take the results of our choice. Never being sure of the consequences of our choice. It is hard to see how we could reach maturity.
The laws of reality represent real sequences of cause and effect. Some known, some not yet, but these we can live in the effect of them, and may someday get to learn them. We could never learn them, if they were always interfered with by special acts of God. This does not mean that the laws of reality are mechanical as a constant personal will is in operation. It operates even in the most seemingly mechanical laws, making them what they are and enabling them to function. Beyond this there is the possibility of intervention by God. Not only by miracle, due to hearing a prayer, but by a higher law. As part of this higher law, God lavishes men with gifts as a reward, and also punishment, as demanded by justice or healing from His mercy. These mechanical laws function in the framework of the universal law of God's love. A task of mankind is to find the principle of this higher action of God in the universe. There are spiritual laws which set material laws in motion. Even though suspected, if we live by the revelation of God, we shall come to see more and more clearly what these laws are.
What is true of law in the material order, where its operation is most obvious to us, is true also in the order of rational action, our psychological life and our social life. Man's right relation to God is needed, if the world is to go right for man. It is surprising how little this is grasped, even by people who have some general notion of God. Men having the faintest beginning of faith, hope or charity expect God to act, as if they had them in full measure. This sort of strain we are always putting on the reality of things. We make ourselves not as men, and expect God to treat us as men. We would ignore God's laws and expect God is to treat us as if we observed them. Men would be selfish and God is to prevent wars. Men would be sinful and God is to prevent evil. All this is as though men were forever jumping off cliffs and God forever catching them.
We are still by nature members of the human race, and of the material universe. Each man must live in an environment created by all men. We cannot subtract our self from the human context, and expect God to treat us in total isolation. We do not know what problems the race is causing God. We do not understand how God's treatment of those problems must incidentally affect us. We are members, and the disease of one will bring suffering to another. We must see the conflict of giants in which we are. The perspective of individual suffering is all wrong, if we do not. In the physical order, a tidal wave is not expected to drown everyone but me. Likewise, in the social order the evils, the human race brings on itself by ignoring of God's law, the law of reality, cannot be expected to single out me for exemption from suffering.
It would be unreasonable, as a right, or even as a rule, that God would prevent us from suffering along with our race. We cannot be saved from suffering pain, but we can be from suffering loss. This does not mean that God can only compensate us by happiness in the next life. If it did, this would still be something vast. St. Paul tells us that he counts the sufferings of this world as unworthy to be compared with the glory to come. (see 2 Cor. 11:24-27)
God sees to it that we do not lose by suffering not coming from our fault; but from calamities flowing to us from the material universe and the human race. This does not just the relate to the possibility of eternal compensation, but that our suffering should not be wasted. It is not an unfortunate byproduct of broken-laws, in whose power we unfortunately find ourselves. It is a byproduct involving us, from which we cannot be exempted, but can be compensated. More than that, suffering is constructive, it is building stuff. God uses it. Our suffering can be used by us; and in the solidarity of the human race, it can be used for others, and theirs for ours.
There is a tendency to dismiss any answer to the problem of suffering, which brings in God's action. We can hardly expect God to leave out what He Himself would do, when planning the universe. If we continue to study this problem with an awareness that God is the most important element in it, we will not find the darkness vanishing, but will have a pretty solid increase of light all the same.
Our problem is seeing how suffering may be used and not wasted. Ordinary human experience shows suffering can be maturing, as anyone spared from suffering will never reach maturity. Suffering, as experience shows, can be destructive, too. Whether developing or shattering a man, it is not simply a matter of the quantity of suffering. Of two suffering greatly, the one suffering less may be shattered and the one suffering more may be greatly developed by it. The outcome does not depend on the suffering, but on the will. A positive answer to suffering, at any level of intensity, lies in the will's acceptance as a part of reality, whether seen impersonally as the order of things, or personally as the will of God. This acceptance cuts at the central point of man's profoundest disease. This central point is the over assertion of self. Suffering can come to us in a thousand guises. The element of suffering, common to them all, is something which we intensely dislike. Given our deepest disease, the over assertion of self, the accepting of what we intensely dislike and not impotent rebellion against it, is a healing and strengthening of the will, helping it towards and restoring it to its proper domination of the whole man. Self-control is the first condition of any control. No matter how vast an empire a man may have, if he does not control himself, he does not control the empire either: whatever controls him controls it.
This healing and strengthening effect of suffering operates even as the acceptance of reality; a determination to cope with what is. More still by acceptance of reality as a moral law, even dimly captured in conscience and not seen in relation to a personal lawgiver. It is accepted, if it is a conscious union of the will with God. Initial acceptance is hard as suffering in a universe directed by no mind, is tortured by blind forces knowing and caring nothing for man. This could lead to despair, even in a mind of great vitality. In a mind already devitalized, it likely will. Life is futile enough, without having torture added. If we see the universe directed by a mind, then the suffering might be directed too, for our gain. If we accept the impact of the laws of reality by uniting our will to God's will, suffering can do vast positive work in us. This improvement reaches its peak when, we can unite our sufferings to the redemptive sufferings of Christ. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us: so also like Christ doth our comfort abound. (2 Cor. 1:5)
We are living in a universe, and not a chaos, because the laws of reality, made by a God, are of infinite knowledge and infinite love. We can be sure, that with God's help, no one gets more suffering than he can bear. By cooperation with God's grace, our suffering can turn into profit. It cannot be proven, but is simply a case for trusting God, and who else can we trust.
The mind is profoundly troubled by suffering, seeming not to bring growth. In intense suffering, the sufferer's reaction seems little more than an animal reaction to torture in which the spirit is momentarily drowned. If a thing seems wildly cruel and unfair to us, it still remains that God loves men more than we do. He has done two great things by their creation and in his death for them. If it really were cruel and unfair, God would know it. We can also remind ourselves of the rewards that God has for us in Heaven. The glory to come, which St. Paul said was incomparably greater thing than any suffering here. Another consideration is how suffering does balance sin.
Acceptance of what we intensely dislike is a direct healing for the over assertion of self, the key to sin. Suffering can replace the energy lost in sin, but as reality is constituted. God can use the suffering of one for healing another, and the suffering of all for the strengthening of all. This is one of the laws of the universe which is not only mechanical. The infant has no sin of his own to be made up for by suffering, but his suffering can be used by God. The infant receives a special privilege of doing something for others. Under God, there is no higher privilege.
We should understand that the answer is not simply something academic, satisfactory for considering suffering in the abstract, but weak in the face of real suffering. Considering the problem of suffering, one should test how firmly the principles suggested hold his mind by reading some classic accounts of human suffering. We may have to admit that these accounts of suffering, do give our principles a pretty thorough testing. They likely will leave us with our theories still standing, if shaken. It may help clear our own mind, if we see some of our own intellectual defects. Defects making the seen fact of suffering a temptation, not only against trusting God, but against those principles which in tranquility, our mind had seen and balanced.
One difficulty lies in the simple fact that we do see the suffering. We do not see the application God makes to the soul now, and even less of the glory to come. Suffering causes a shuddering in the soul, while God causes so tiny a vibration. Often when we think we are seeing the suffering in relation to God, we are only feeling the greater shuddering compared to the vibration. Things that can seize the imagination, loom larger than those that must appeal direct to the intellect. Not only in relation to suffering, but in relation to all things. We must be aware of this defect in ourselves and try to make allowances for it. It is worse still when unbelievers challenge us on suffering. Our answer is to people to whom suffering is real, and God is not. To them God is only a word, and the word carries none of the living implications that it has for us.
Another difficulty is in our almost incurable habit of seeing this life as the whole, and its tragedies as final. One tragedy is making the fundamental choice of self in preference to God, leaving life unfit for what lies ahead. Since this life is a preparation, the ultimate tragedy is to leave it unprepared. Our heart may want to say different or tell us, either by its hopes or its fears, what souls have left this life unprepared. Sanctifying grace, the principle of eternal life, may be no more than a grain of mustard seed in men, but we cannot tell. Grace is like the little leaven that leavens the whole lump. Until it has leavened the whole lump, we can see only a lump, but the tiniest fragment of leaven is sufficient for salvation. We must try to make it a key matter of course, to see this life as a preparation. While we waste apologetic effort trying to "justify" God's action on us in this life, the only justification is preparation, even if we do not see how. One comparison is in the way premarital purity is preparation for marriage. It may have seemed pointless and even painful, but its perfection as preparation is seen after the marriage, as it is with this life in relation to the next. If we reject this answer to the problem of suffering, we have no answer, leaving us with an indignant sympathy with the sufferer, not helping him, and worse, if we are the sufferer. The answer is hard but vitalizing. The alternative despair.
The vision is still the thing. Suffering is a sad problem to one who sees it, but does not the whole context of reality. The believer may find it as confusing as the unbeliever; but is not troubled in the same way, as he has seen, experienced, and has lived so much. His real life is lived consciously in the company of God, the Mother of God and of the gifts of God. A given patch of experience may be dark, but it is a small part of the whole landscape. This is the necessity of seeing reality as a whole, as a preparation for living wholly in it. Seeing it is not the same thing as living wholly in it, but is an excellent preparation.