32.1
Considering the Catholic life and vision, the plain Catholic is something of a shock. Illumined by the truths and fed by the food, we look like everyone else. Living within one split second of the judgment seat of God, we are intent on other matters. Taking part in an action of inconceivable wonder in mass, our problem is to keep our minds on it. These and other similar things, puzzle the unbeliever. The Catholic is clearly the principal argument against the Church. Not bad Catholics, the members of the Church, who do not listen to her teaching, receive her sacraments or obey her laws. Rather it is the Catholic, who does generally listen to the teachings and receive the sacraments, who stands more clearly between the unbeliever and belief. He hears the immensities of our beliefs; and feels believing such things would make his life radically new. We do not look new. For instance, after our receiving Communion, he finds the Real Presence of Christ in the communicant harder to believe than the Real Presence of Christ in the Host. Before communion the bread does not look as if Christ were really present in it, and after communion the Catholic does not look as if Christ were really present in him. The unbeliever feels certain that he could not believe things that appear, so little affected outwardly or inwardly. He can account for it, by assuming that we do not really believe the things we say. This comforts him in his own aimlessness, or helps keep him in it. The unbeliever is troubled, and this is tragic, but It is not his puzzlement but ours that is concerning. We puzzle ourselves, when we stop to contemplate ourselves. Unless we see the key to this puzzle, we may easily get a mistaken view of the vital realities which seem to vitalize us so little.
The truth about us, is that grace is working in a nature that fell in Adam. Grace is as glorious a treasure, as we have described it. In St. Paul's phrase we carry that treasure in earthen vessels; and the vessels are ourselves. Theologians say that grace does not supply us with a new nature but works in the nature it finds. Grace is a super nature, but does not supersede nature. It sets a new principle of life in the very core of the nature we have, giving it new and greater powers. It does not directly improve it as a nature, but is more like electricity giving a wire the power to light up a room. The electricity does not correct any defects in the wire, but grace does bring aid to the nature. It brings aid, but not by direct action on nature's defects. Grace is necessary for the healing of our nature, not by itself, but with our help. All Christians inherit natures tainted and vulnerable from Adam, and every ancestor since. It is probable that we have contributed our own share to their worsening.
Grace has to work in a damaged nature. Consider the clouded intellect in which the theological virtue of Faith, the moral virtue of Prudence, and the Gifts of Understanding, Knowledge, Wisdom, and Counsel have to operate. Vast and luminous realities are spread out before our gaze, but our intellect is defective at three levels: the truths it does not know; the truths it knows, but does not advert to and the truths it knows and adverts to, but does not realize.
For a variety of reasons, a great number of Catholics have made almost no study of their religion. They believe it, would probably die rather than deny it; but are not interested enough to find out much about its meaning. They accept that knowledge is not the most important part of religion, and proceed to a sort of working theory that it is not important to them. They know that they can be saved with a minimum of knowledge, and don’t grasp that more knowledge might help. Catholics do know that Sanctifying Grace is necessary for salvation. They have been urged to seek an increase in Sanctifying Grace; but they hardly know what Sanctifying Grace is. They believe that their destiny after death depends on being in sin, rather than the state of Sanctifying Grace. They think of salvation as getting into Heaven and thus avoiding Hell. They have not grasped the degrees of glory in Heaven, dependent on the intensity of the life of grace in the soul at death. As a result of this mixture of light and darkness in the mind, one adopts as a practical rule, the question: How much can I have of this world without losing Heaven? The practical question of: How little of Heaven will I get by this system, does not arise at all. There is no awareness of degrees of glory in Heaven; nor of glory in Heaven at all. The motive of such a life is not desire for Heaven, but desire to avoid Hell.
In truths not known, there is a failure to grasp the whole truth about sin. A Catholic can hardly fail to know that the moral law is a command of God. He may fail to realize the other half of the truth; that it is a statement about reality, like instructions for operating an automobile. Given that God made us all of nothing and continues to hold us in existence, it follows that our existence depends entirely upon the will of God. Sin is an effort to gain some happiness for ourselves against the will of God. Against the one thing that is holding us in existence. How ridiculous? We are kept from God by our attachment to things, wholly of God. A reminder of this defect in the intellect, is our tendency to take the part for the whole. We try to get total satisfaction from the part, which can only come from the whole. The trouble is that our minds have not the muscles for totality, but can grow them.
Another defect in the mind concerns the truths it knows, but does not imply. Our intellects are harassed and often dominated by our imagination. The thing seen close has greater power than the greater thing on the horizon. We are obsessed with the immediate. Having considered this, concerning our reaction to suffering. Under the impact of pain, we tend to think why does not God intervene, implying that we know better. This is ridiculous and unfair. It is the almost automatic reaction of a mind which sees the part and not the whole. It is all anxious with the realization of what it does see, and so not affected by what it does not imply. For example, the tendency to be unduly affected by the appearance of unworthy conduct in a priest. It means that his personal conduct which is immediately under our gaze holds our attention, while his office as the channel of God's gifts does not.
Then there is the effect concerning things known and implied, but not realized. An unbeliever is wrong when he thinks that we do not really believe the immensities we profess. We do believe them, but do not always realize them. There is plain historical evidence that Catholics will die for the Mass; and would not die for something they did not really believe. The majority of those same Catholics were likely distracted at every Mass they attended, and may have spent more time thinking of other things. The test of belief is willingness to die for a truth. The test of realization is ability to live by it. It takes time for the mind, and an effort of habituation, to live at the level of our new knowledge. Realization requires muscles, which the ordinary conduct of life has never called on us to use. They will not instantly come to full power and functioning. We are not dazzled by the immensities we believe, simply because the mind can hardly cope with them, much as a man does not stagger under a weight that he has not the muscles to lift.
More serious, than the damaged intellect is the damaged will, where lies the issue of salvation or damnation. It is the will that loves, and can fix its love anywhere between nothingness and God. Ultimately, we are saved or damned by what we love; and at present are made or unmade by it. We were not consulted about our creation, the act of God bringing us into existence. But creation will not be fully accomplished in us, without our consent. It is by no act of our will that we are men, but as to what sort of men, our will is decisive.
Just as the continuing action of God is necessary for our existence, it is also necessary for us to act. It is possible that beings, whose very existence results from God's action upon nothingness, could be able to act without God's concurrence in their action. The same God Who lends us the energy to exist, also lends us the energy to act. Without God, there is nothing in ourselves for action to proceed, but as a result of the freedom that God willed us to have. God will concur in the actions our will chooses, even if these actions are not the best for us. If the will insists, God will give it the energy, thus allowing it to damage itself. God will lend our will the energy to act against His will, if that is what our will chooses. This choice is sin.
The Church lists the seven capital sins, from which all sins flow, Pride, Envy, Avarice, Anger, Sloth, Gluttony and Lust. They all are in the will, as sin is always a defect of the will. Its act may be in the intellect or the body; but the sin itself is in the will. No action can damn us, but the will with which we do it. The will can damn us without any action. It is by the will our deepest relation of harmony or disharmony with reality, that is with God, is established.
Sin is always assertion of self against reality. Pride is the worst sin, for it is positive assertion of self, and positive choice of self in place of God, as the supreme object of our love and our actions. In order to set oneself up in place of God, one must borrow from God the energy to do it. And if we insist on defying God, God lends the energy to defy Him with. No sin is its own contradiction, more instantly and obviously. No sin means a more total break with reality.
Where Pride is a positive assertion of self against God, the others choose creatures in place of God, without making any explicit assertion about the nature of God or themselves. There is always an assertion of one's own desires, as against the reality of things. It is always an assertion that negates. This always involves choosing less than we might have, less than we need. It never pays full dividends.
Why then do we sin? For sins of the mind, there is the plain uncomplicated pleasure of egoism. There is an appearance of autonomy in asserting self with the appearance of impunity. There is a disease in the will, which can find some sort of pleasure in the assertion of self. A disease even where, the appearance of impunity has vanished away; and the wretched inadequacy of self in the face of reality is altogether obvious.
For sins of the body, the position is different. They are the lesser sins because they affect the lesser part of us, yet can still damn us. They are more a yielding of weakness than an assertion of strength, because the temptation is fiercer. Our bodies are made that a clean joy can be got through their senses, a splendid joy, meant by God. It turns to total evil in the extreme case when we are able to get joy from nothing else. Short of that extreme, the body can urge its desires on the will with altogether disproportionate effect. There is an intensity, exquisiteness, immediacy and vibrancy in bodily pleasure, which for most of us is not in the pleasure of the mind. Serving God does not give us the same kind of here and now pleasure that sin gives. To eyes as little trained to reality as ours, there is a color and energy in sin by comparison with which virtues look pallid and half alive.
Sin is always a following of the line of least resistance, towards the deficiency of life. There is less of a man after sin. It is a going with the stream of one's inclinations. It takes no vitality to go with the stream; a dead dog can do it. There is quite enough in ourselves to account for our sinning. There are also other men to urge us on, along with the Devil. What the Devil gets out of it, is hard to see. There is a futility in all that he does. His own sins, along with the sins he leads others to commit, serve only to illustrate the durability of God's law. The Devil is the supreme example of the assertion of self at all costs and with no gain. Pure rejoicing of self in self. The world well lost for love, self-love. God allows the Devil to tempt man, as we have already seen. But how does the Devil go about it? He has no direct power over our souls. Not even a power to read our souls. He can form extraordinarily good guesses, as to what is in our mind, but they remain guesses. His power relates to the matter of our bodies. All angels, as a consequence of their superiority in being, have a power over matter. They cannot create it or annihilate it, but can move material things in space, and redistribute the elements within material things. They cannot exercise this power without the permission of God; but God does give permission to the fallen angels to make a certain use of their power as part of the testing of man. The Devil can stir the flesh of man at its most sensitive points. He can move the eye of man to see what otherwise might not have seen. He can produce certain images in the bodily organism, the brain for example, which man will find at once distracting and soliciting.
Under the impulse of his own desires, other men's urgings and the Devil's tempting, man is in constant peril of sin. None of us can feel that our own performance is very impressive. Baptized or not, we all sin, some less than others, certain Saints, probably only venially, and only Our Lady not at all. Leaving out the Saints, the rest of us are a pretty unimpressive lot. The Church knows it, as expected, after hearing our confessions for the best part of two thousand years. If you want realism about the weaknesses of Christians, read the Missal carefully. The worst things, charged us by our enemies, the Church has already mentioned on Her own account in Her official prayer book. Right at the beginning of Mass, for instance, the priest, the minister of God, beats his breast and says: I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. This same realism is to be found on almost every page, making us sometimes wonder if we are that bad. We are.
32.2
How is this to be reconciled with the presence in our souls of Sanctifying Grace. How can a man with the virtue of charity act cruelly; and a man with the virtue of temperance get drunk? For an answer, we must return to what was said earlier about Sanctifying Grace, and the theological and moral virtues as habits. A natural habit is acquired by a constant repetition of certain acts, and results in a facility in the performance of these acts. A good habit of speaking English, a bad habit of drinking too much alcohol and a dubious habit of playing the piano, are illustrations. The supernatural habits are not acquired by the continuous repetition of acts, but are given to us in one act by God. They do not give the same facility in action that the natural habit gives. But they are habits, truly as our natural habits. They are a real change in our nature, giving us the power to act in a special way. Along with the Gift of Sanctifying Grace, we get supernatural habits, and do not lose our natural habits. We have two sets of habits in one person. With Sanctifying Grace, a naturally cold man gets the virtue of charity, and remains cold; a naturally lustful man gets the virtue of temperance, and remains lustful; likewise a naturally timid man gets the virtue of fortitude, and remains timid.
This is curious, but there is no contradiction. This is why the Missal can tell us to pray. May the energizing of the divine gifts take possession of our minds and bodies, so that its effects and not our own impulses may prevail in us. (Postcom 15th S. after Pentecost). Grace gives us a power to act supernaturally - for example to be temperate or courageous for the love of God. It gives us the power to act supernaturally, but does not remove our natural power and desire to act sinfully. It inserts a new desire to act for the love of God, creating a new war in our powers.
A man with the virtue of temperance may find it very hard to act temperately and often fall. The virtue of temperance is a real power all the same, like a great pianist with a bad piano. His power to produce music is truly real and objective; but his piano makes it all but impossible to produce music. This illustration may throw light on another problem. The Church teaches that in a state of grace, we have all the supernatural virtues at the same level of intensity. No man has more prudence than fortitude, yet it seems, that a given Christian has more of one virtue than another. Suppose a man who could play all the instruments in an orchestra equally well, but if the piano is good, the violin less good, and the oboe hopeless, the listener might conclude that he had a greater gift of playing the piano than the violin, and no gift at all for the oboe. We need to remember that the instruments, on which grace must make its music, are our natural faculties of soul and body, not distinct, but part of ourselves. Grace does aid in their repairing.
While all our powers are not equally apt to manifest our supernatural virtues, our supernatural virtues are equally powerful. They all go with the Life. It is to that, not to any single effect of it, that God gives increase. God does not give us an increase of faith, as distinct from hope and charity. He gives us an increase of Life, which means an increase of all the Virtues and Gifts that flow from Life. When we pray for an increase of faith, as against a particular temptation, our prayer is not for more faith, distinct from the other virtues. Our prayer is for an increase of Sanctifying Grace, and a strengthening of our nature that it not be prevented, by its own natural skepticism for instance, from acting in harmony with the supernatural virtue of faith.
Our problem is to bring our natural habits into harmony with our supernatural habits. Grace has to operate through our faculties. We have to work for the destruction of habits that make our faculties bad instruments for grace; and for the development of habits that make them good instruments. Good instruments to the point where the super nature has become a sort of second nature, and the supernatural habits give the same facility as natural habits. This can only be done by the steady repetition of action against the bad habit and tending to form a good habit. This is the law of our nature for the formation of natural habits, and the supernatural life does not supersede it.
You may wonder, how grace and the virtues fulfill the second part of the definition of habit. A habit is a change in a being, disposing it to act in a particular way. How can grace and the virtues be said to dispose our nature to act according to them? First there is the truth that by grace we have real powers, even if our nature is too damaged to act in harmony with them. Grace helps us in the effort to acquire good natural habits. It sets this new energizing of divine life in the very center of our being, and shows us God closer and clearer, stimulating action that will please Him and bring us to Him. This gives us a supernatural power to act in relation to God, seen close and clear, and a stimulus that our nature can respond to. It brings not only God close to us, but the rest of reality as well, especially the truth about ourselves. It analyses sin for us, telling us about the war within ourselves. It tells why man is unsatisfied and must go on being unsatisfied with things less than God, because the central fact about man is that he is capax Dei, capable of being filled with God. Grace helps nature in its long own job of remaking itself.
There are now two sets of habits at conflict within us. This is an improvement on our earlier stage when the natural habit invariably won. Now from that first effect, disturbing our peace and ruining our previous joy in our sin, to the initiating of a new conflict to the successful finding of peace at a new level, there is a long way to go. It is vital that we should understand just what the struggle involves. The precise problem is the healing of our nature as nature. This cannot be done without grace or by grace alone, but by developing natural habits in harmony with grace. As with people, one will find less resistance in his nature than another, his passions less stormy or his sins less a delight. In all men there is some resistance, or some sort of warfare. First, we must use every means of increasing the supernatural life in us. We also must work on our natures with toil and pain that may amount to agony, as we fight against bad habits and persist in forming good habits.
We must remember that grace alone is not the answer. We often deceive ourselves trying to make the supernatural do the work of the natural, and fall into despair because it does not. We apply communions against a particular temptation, with the only result being an increase in our strife, and without producing the virtuous act or preventing the sin. The charity of God troubles us, but does not seem to aid us. Grasping the real nature of the struggle, we will no longer be in danger of being led to despair, least of all to despair of the supernatural. The supernatural was never promised for this. God could root out the bad habit or the tendency by one act of His power, but He has not promised to do so. If He did, it would in the nature of miracle. By all means pray for a miracle, but do not be discouraged if you do not get it.
The direct work on our nature has to be done, with labor and pain. In our damaged state, and the wrongness of our relation to reality, we are not able to be healed or treated without pain caused. Immediate enjoyment is almost invariably incompatible with healing, and without healing there is no permanent enjoyment. Part of healing is bringing back our powers into their proper relation to one another. The body must be made subject to the mind. This means that when the body wants something, which the instructed mind knows it should not have, the body's claims must be denied. The mere keeping of the commandments tends to bring on the body a good deal of very unpleasant pressure, which may amount to real pain. All who have had any success in bringing their body into proper subjection to the mind, testify that there must be definite unpleasantness caused to the body or pleasure refused to the body. This is not simply for the avoidance of sin, but as a direct training of the body for its proper part in the human compound, not only for the soul's good, but ultimately for the body's, too.
If the body must be brought into right relation with the mind, the mind must be brought into right relation with God. The obvious method is prayer. Prayer, more directly than suffering, tends to correct the disharmony between ourselves and reality. It asserts every element in the relation that ought to exist between the creature and God, and it brings the soul into that sort of contact with God in which He is closest and clearest. If this is true of prayer in general, it is most true of prayer at its highest point, the Mass. The harmonizing of the two wills, man's will and God's will, must be brought about by shared life. This is not simply by effort on the wills part, but by a loving cooperation with God's action. In the Mass there is precisely this coaction of man with God, with no sense of effort or strain. The richness of that experience falls back on those other areas of life where the cooperation is most difficult.
The cooperation is not simply a matter of our acting as God wills, but of God acting with us. When St. Paul said “I live, yet now not I, but Christ lives in me” he was speaking a precise truth, not simply giving us a stimulating figure of speech. The same truth that our struggle to live the life of grace is not ours only but God's, too: “Only, as before, the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; when we do not know what prayer to offer, to pray as we ought, the Spirit himself intercedes for us, with groans beyond all utterance.” (Rom 8:26) St. Paul sees our prayer and the Holy Spirit’s part in our prayer, so interwoven that he hardly bothers to distinguish them. We are praying, but it is the Spirit praying in us and with us. To the Spirit, St. Paul attributes the unspeakable groanings which are ours, because He has given us the power to utter them.
32.3
In the ordinary Christian life, the struggle is for life. The victories go one way or the other; but the oscillation grows less. With all sorts of defects, the Christian's nature does come into something like harmony with grace, and his natural habits into a sort of correspondence with his supernatural. Temptations may remain, but his power over them grows. If he falls into sin, his repentance comes more quickly and certainly. This tends to be the story for the Christian who makes a real effort to grasp the Church's teaching, use the sacraments and obey the laws. Even if the oscillation does not cease, it does grow less violent.
This oscillation does cease in the Saint. His nature has been brought fully into harmony with his super nature. If temptation remains, it can only solicit him and not conquer him. The Saint is the man who has made a total success of man's prime job of being a man. What makes him a Saint is the union of vast supernatural love of God, and a nature by which the supernatural love can manifest itself without flaw or discord. This correspondence of nature with grace, which he has attained and we still toil towards, may or may not have been for him a matter of hard striving. The notion, that the greatest sinners make the greatest saints, is an error, but contains certain truths. Men who begin life with strong passions may actually be aided on their way to sanctity by that very fact. Men of strong passions are more likely to be driven to actions which will shock them into the realization of their sinfulness and the need of aid from God. There is a certain danger in weak passions. A danger that one may mistake the absence of any spectacular sin for virtue. A danger that one may see himself as a good enough sort of man, because he happens to be temperamentally incapable of doing anything bad enough to force one to realize its badness. Sanctity does not mean the absence of sins, though it will result in that, but the right direction of energy. There is no particular virtue in not committing sins for which one has not the taste or the temperament. It is in this sense that St. Teresa of Avila said that chastity is no bad preparation for purity. If this is for the love of God, it is a virtue; but not if it is only because one is afraid of women, or has no natural inclination to women. Purity means the direction of energy to God with no admixture of self. Given that sanctity is the right direction of energy, then great natural energy taking the wrong direction that runs into sins of passion, will turn it to the right direction producing the heroic virtue of the Saint.
The Saint is the successful man. Even by natural standards, for he has found peace, and peace is what all men are seeking at all times. They would say that they are seeking happiness, but peace is happiness and nothing else is. Peace is not the absence of activity, but the absence of discordance. It is not the beginning of our life in the Church. Anyone who joins the Church to find tranquility will soon begin to wonder what he has found: not tranquility certainly, but struggle. Peace is not given along with faith, as the Missal shows when it begs God on those to whom Thou hast given faith, lavish also peace.
We shall find peace at the end, if we persevere to the end. The danger is, that in seeking peace, we may be led away from the road to peace. The struggle to harmonize our will with God's, and our body with our will, seems to bring so much discord into our very being, as we want happiness so urgently. “If thou couldst understand the ways that can bring thee peace”;
so cries Our Lord, and it is the heart of our tragedy. The Saint's tragedy is resolved. This book is not about sanctity, only about sanity, and sanity points straight towards sanctity.