Category Archives: God’s Will

Why Suffer?

God's Will, Redemption, Suffering, , , ,

As discussed in the last post, suffering is a tragic part of the human experience. It is a reality that we all must face. It is uniquely human. All animals can feel pain, but only we can suffer. As John Paul II points out in Salvifici Doloris,

“Nevertheless what we express by the word “suffering” seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man. It is as deep as man himself, precisely because it manifests in its own way that depth which is proper to man, and in its own way surpasses it. Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense “destined” to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way.”

Suffering is not merely the experience of pain. It is an awareness of a deficiency. The man who suffers does not suffer merely because of the pain, but because that pain is a reminder of what is lacking in himself and in the world. Suffering arises from the experience we all have of looking at ourselves and the world, and thinking “it should not be this way”.

So, what are we to do with the fact of suffering? Many have tried to run from it in the pleasures and comforts of the world only to find that these things are vanities. Ultimately, we are left with two options to deal with suffering. There is the Way of Mephistopheles, or the Way of the Cross. A middle ground does not exist. Everyone suffers, there is no choice in the matter. However, each person can choose how they will respond to it.

Suffering and Resentment

The Way of Mephistopheles, is named after the demon in Faust, and his line: “for all that comes to be / deserves to perish wretchedly”. This response is characterized by its bitter resentment. This resentment fills a person with rage, and is a quick path to misery. And, as they say, misery loves company. Those who suffer may become envious of those they perceive as suffering less. This envy, prodded by their resentment and misery, forms the basis of the justification to inflict suffering on others. Not so that they may suffer less, but so that all will suffer as they do and “perish wretchedly”. While this is certainly a grim outlook, we would be foolish to deny that our own hearts do not have the capacity for this kind of resentment. We have all seen it in small forms, like losing our cool with a family member because we are having a bad day, or maybe even in larger forms like celebrating murder. This approach to suffering ruins lives and relationships. Despite what our culture says about the compassion behind abortion and euthanasia, it is this view of suffering that drives these things. Abortion pits a mother against her child, and justifies the evil done to the child in light of the suffering or potential suffering of the mother. And with respect to euthanasia, in Canada for example, it did not take long before assisted suicide was offered to those who are suffering and did not ask for it. The contempt for suffering can drive us towards moral abominations. Indeed, in the final analysis, there may be no real difference between resentment towards suffering and resentment towards those who are suffering.

The Death of Suffering

Now that we have seen the bitterness of the Way of Mephistopheles, let’s take a look at the Way of the Cross. The path is characterized by the acceptance of suffering. Rather paradoxically, this is the only path out of suffering. Any athlete or musician knows this. In order to be excellent at something, one must suffer through long and grueling hours of practice. However, once a sort of excellence is achieved, the suffering decreases even if the practice is just as long and grueling. The symbol of the cross itself shows us the truth of this paradox. The cross has gone from a symbol of suffering so severe that it struck fear into the heart of every Roman to a symbol of hope for untold numbers of people throughout history, and all because of Jesus’ willingness to accept suffering. In the end, the problem of suffering cannot be solved without Jesus. Yes, as is laid out in this article, there is good reason to take the Way of the Cross without an explicit appeal to religion, but suffering itself cannot die unless we are willing to unite ourselves with Christ and accept the will of God the way He did in Gethsemane. As St. Paul explains in Philippians 3, by sharing in the sufferings of Christ, we can also share in his resurrection. When we learn to fully accept God’s will, suffering becomes a gift. There is no longer a reason to say, “it should not be this way”. Suffering takes on a whole new character. It becomes redemptive. Perhaps the truth of suffering is that it is destined to become either the means of our salvation or of our eternal ruin.

In Defense of Honor

Culture, Faith, God's Will, Virtue, , , , ,

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke comments on the loss of honor that came as a result of the French Revolution. Concerning Marie Antoinette, Burke writes,

Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Honor once lost, like any other virtue, is not easily regained. It is especially hard to regain in a culture that is actively hostile to it.

Honor, as St. Thomas Aquinas defines it, “is the reward of every virtue… it follows that by reason of its matter it regards all of the virtues” (ST II-II Q. 129 Art. 4). Thus, it is clear that honor comes from virtue. In order to be truly honorable, a man must be virtuous. Our culture has, in large part, rejected the traditional idea of virtue. There is much talk about rights and what we are owed, but little discussion about duty. Men are encouraged to extol the virtues of kindness and inclusivity, and women, on the other hand, are told that expressing traits like “nurturance” and “family-oriented values” are just mere preferences and not virtues. As always, the devil is in the details. A man should be loving and caring, but if he places kindness and inclusivity above all other virtues then the family and, by extension, society, will suffer. Certainly, kindness and inclusivity would not have saved Marie Antoinette from the guillotine. And families do not need women who prefer to be nurturing and selfless, but women who are nurturing and selfless. There will be, however, some who will object to this and say that traditional notions of honor and virtue are outdated and bigoted. So, naturally, the question becomes, “Why should we care about honor, aren’t we better off without it?”.

There are a couple of approaches one could take towards answering this question. The first would be to ask what will replace the role that honor had in society? What is beyond honor and virtue? Alasdair MacIntyre explores this question in his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Of a society that has lost its vision of honor and virtue he writes,

In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community’s good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good. Hence notions of desert and of honor become detached from the context in which they were originally at home. Honor becomes nothing more than a badge of aristocratic status, and status itself, tied as it is now so securely to property, has very little to do with desert.

A society that abandons honor does not get egalitarianism. Instead, it gets aristocracy and credentialism.

For the second approach, one might ask if tearing down virtue and honor would also threaten other societal goods. Failing to examine this question would be like removing a wall in a house without first determining if it is load-bearing. Unfortunately, leaving honor in the past has not been without consequence. Honor is the basis for magnanimity. Aquinas identifies this connection: “Now a man is said to be magnanimous in respect of things that are great absolutely and simply, just as a man is said to be brave in respect of things that are difficult simply. It follows therefore that magnanimity is about honors” (ST II-II Q. 129 Art. 1). In 2020, Ross Douthat wrote a book called The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success about how and why our society has, in many ways, stopped advancing. While his hypothesis is beyond the scope of this article, the phenomenon he is discussing is germane to the point. There has been a societal decline in the desire to do great things. This stems directly from a change in societal value. As MacIntyre pointed out, society values the vain status associated with honor rather than the virtue from which honor is derived. Not only is magnanimity a virtue and therefore necessary for human flourishing, but society needs it. Magnanimity landed on the moon, it sailed to new worlds, it wrote poems and epics, it built planes, and made countless discoveries and inventions. So rather than resent success and laugh at honor, we should have the courage to ask ourselves if we are here on this earth for something great. Perhaps there really is something great in store for each and every one of us if we would but have the courage and magnanimity to pursue it. And even more terrifying is the possibility that part of the greatness God wishes to bring to the world can only be brought through you. Sure, God can bring goodness out of anything, but there may be good that never comes if you abandon honor and magnanimity. In closing, I would like to turn to Pope Benedict XVI who so eloquently reminds us of this truth: “The ways of the Lord are not easy, but we were not created for an easy life, but for great things, for goodness”.

Scriptural Bingo

Bible, Church Authority, God's Will, Grace, Scripture, , , , ,

In Book VIII of his Confessions, St. Augustine details his conversion.  After begging the Lord to finally free him from enslavement to sin, he began to weep with bitter sorrow because he felt powerless to overcome it.  He suddenly hears the voice of a child, almost in a sing-song voice, say “Take and read, take and read.”  He reasoned that the voice had a divine source and immediately opened a book of the Epistles of St. Paul.  Happening upon Romans 13:13-14, “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires”, the saint was immediately converted to Christ with “all the darkness of uncertainty vanishing away” (VIII, 29).

Augustine had learned this approach from St. Antony of the Desert whom he had read about.  Antony entered a church and upon hearing the words of Christ to the Rich Young Man to sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mt 19:21) did exactly as he was told.  We might be tempted to think the men superstitious, playing a form of Scriptural Bingo.  Except, that is, for the fact that we are talking about two saints.  Let us then examine exactly what is going on there.

Faith in Sacred Scripture

In his Encyclical on Sacred Scripture, Providentissimus Deus, warned that “a thirst for novelty and unrestrained freedom” in Scriptural interpretation represented a great threat the belief in Sacred Scripture as the true Word of God.  Scripture itself became victim to the cult of the expert and Scripture Scholars, rather than the Church, became authentic interpreters.  The average Catholic comes to think Scripture above his paygrade so that, confused by the experts, he sets it aside.  Faith in Sacred Scripture as the authentic Word of God, addressed not just to experts but to every man, was toppled.

The saints, including Antony and Augustine, believed in the public revelation contained in Sacred Scripture.  But because it is God Who speaks, they also believed that Scripture was a vehicle of private revelation as well.  This does not make them closet Protestants but fully Catholic.  They believed that God also revealed Himself and His will to them personally through Sacred Scripture.  To grasp this fully, we have to do some theology.  “Doing” theology means that we take something we believe and work out the implications of it so that it becomes a real principle in our lives.  We move from just believing it to real-izing it.

Real-izing Our Belief in Sacred Scripture

Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit is the true author of Sacred Scripture.  To real-ize this we must first set aside the question of how inspiration works.  It is not that this is an unimportant question, but that there is a tendency to over-play the hand that man plays in it.  However it worked, we have to know that the Holy Spirit inspired the Sacred Author to say exactly what He wanted to say and how it was to be said.  In other words, the Holy Spirit is the One Who is speaking, even if He is using a human mouthpiece.  From this we can draw a couple of principles

  • Every single word is both inspired—“all Scripture is inspired by God”  (2Tim 3:16) and true—“He cannot deny Himself”(2Tim 2:13)
  • Because it is God Who is doing the speaking Scripture is “living and active” (Heb 4:13)

This second principle likewise bears some explanation.  Because it is God Who was speaking through St. Paul, He had foreknowledge of the fact that St. Augustine would read Romans 13 on the fateful day.  The words contained within their meaning exactly what Augustine needed to hear to move his heart, opening it up to receive the grace of conversion.  It is as if God Himself in that very moment spoke directly to St. Augustine telling him what to do.

The words therefore are more than a dead letter, they are also active.  This means that like all of God’s words they are performative.  They effect what they command.  Augustine was not just reading something directed to him personally, the words themselves contained the power for him to “make no provision for the flesh.”  It is the words themselves that move Augustine to convert.  Whenever God commands, He also equips. 

Augustine as Everyman

What happened to Augustine is really not unique in that regard.  It is the same thing that is supposed to happen to each one of us every time we open our Bibles.  Each time Christ told the Apostles “have no fear”, He wasn’t just telling them to calm down, but He was also taking away their fear.  But not just their fear, but everyone who ever laid the eyes of faith upon Mark 6:45-52 while in a state of anxiety.

The Apostles knew Christ’s words had power because He had commanded a storm to cease with a single rebuke.  We too must come to believe that same power flows from the same Word found in Sacred Scripture.  This is what I mean by faith in Sacred Scripture.  Once you real-ize that it truly is living—directed to you personally from the seat of Eternity—you can expect it to be active by causing something to change in you. 

The problem is that there are forces at work trying to undermine this by turning Scripture into an academic subject and subjecting it to literary criticism without having faith in it living power.  Ultimately this undermines faith by echoing Satan’s “did God really say?”.  God really is speaking through Sacred Scripture, not just to mankind but to me here and now.  Pray for the grace of an increase in faith in Sacred Scripture!    

On Liberty of Conscience

American Founding, Church and State, Church Authority, Faith and Reason, God's Will, Magisterium, Martyrdom, Politics, Saints, , , , , , ,

The character of evil, in imitation of its greatest champion, is such that it is ever on the prowl looking to devour the freedom of each man.  One of the means by which such freedom is protected is liberty of conscience.  This natural right of conscience protects each man from having to act in such a way that he is forced to participate in something that he knows to be evil.  As the prevailing culture moves further and further from its Christian roots, the protection by law of the rights of conscience becomes increasingly important.  Therefore, it is worth examining more thoroughly in order bring into relief why it is so vital.

The Character of Conscience

First, we must clear up some of the popular misconceptions about conscience.  It is not a thing like the proverbial angel on the shoulder, but a mode of judgement.  More specifically it is a judgment of practical reason that is linked to the power of man to do what is right and shun what is evil within the concrete circumstances of human life.  Since it is a power of practical reason, it depends upon a knowledge of the principles that lead to genuine human thriving even if it is only concerned with applying those principles.  It is then the power of man to link truth with goodness. 

Conscience, even if it issues commands to the will, is not an act of the will.  Therefore, we must always keep conscience from becoming synonymous with self-will.  Most people treat conscience as if it were freedom to do whatever they want rather than being beholden to the truth.  It carries about with it a certain obstinacy of “sticking to your guns” no matter what.  Therefore, authority is quick to use its power to command actions in conformity with cultural norms.  This is nothing more than Power attempting to replace conscience. 

Conscience protection is the Catholic’s last line of defense against the growing power of the State.  The next step is to cross over into the field of martyrdom.  So we must fight vehemently to keep it in place.  The necessary principles for this defense were laid out quite articulately over a century ago by St. John Henry Newman.  In a letter to the Duke of Norfolk, the saint gives us a defense of the Supremacy of Conscience that fits with a true and Catholic understanding of conscience and its inviolability.

Conscience and Character

Newman notes that all men are by nature bound to observe the natural law.  Our apprehension of this Divine Law occurs within the realm of conscience.  Even “though it may suffer refraction in passing into the intellectual medium of each, it is not therefore so affected as to lose its character of being the Divine Law, but still has, as such, the prerogative of commanding obedience.”  Steeped within Catholic tradition, Newman views conscience as the voice of God and not merely the creation of man.  It may be more or less heard correctly by each man, but it still remains what he calls the “aboriginal Vicar of Christ.”

Based upon the fact that conscience is properly viewed as the voice of God, the Fourth Lateran Council said: “He who acts against his conscience loses his soul.”  To act against conscience is to act against God.  Despite the fact that God has implanted this voice of conscience commanding us to do good and avoid evil, the ear of the intellect needs to be trained and given its “due formation.”  This formation must come through reason enlightened by Divine Faith because the latter was given to purify the former.  To fail to form the conscience properly constitutes a great evil, perhaps one of the greatest because it chooses to deny conscience its rightful dignity.

A man has a right to something because he has a corresponding duty.  The right of conscience flows from his obligation to obey it.  But this obligation does not flow from a need to be true to oneself, but to obey God.  As Newman puts it, if conscience is the voice of the Moral Governor then the rights of conscience are really the rights of the Creator and the duties toward Him.  “Conscience,” Newman says, “has rights because it has duties”. This ultimately is what makes freedom of conscience so important and why we must protect it at all costs.  St. Thomas More is the model in this regard.  He was a martyr because he obeyed the dictates of God mediated through His conscience.

As religious liberty goes into decline, conscience protection becomes more and more important.  Pope Leo XIII called it true liberty, the liberty of the sons of God that shows that “the dignity of man and is stronger than all violence or wrong.” (Libertas, 30).  When all the power of the State bears down upon a single man and he still refuses to join in evil, it shows that man is bigger than the State and shows that he is made for God. Leo XIII calls it “the kind of liberty the Apostles claimed for themselves with intrepid constancy, which the apologists of Christianity confirmed by their writings, and which the martyrs in vast numbers consecrated by their blood. And deservedly so; for this Christian liberty bears witness to the absolute and most just dominion of God over man, and to the chief and supreme duty of man toward God” (Libertas, 30).

Catching Zeal

Apologetics, Evangelization, God's Love, God's Will, Grace, The Life of Jesus, Virtue, , , , , ,

In summarizing His mission to the Apostles, Our Lord tells them plain and simply that He “came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled” (Luke 12:49).  He came to set the world ablaze with divine charity and, so ardently does He desire the conflagration that He would offer Himself as tinder.  To set the world aflame with a single kindle would take a highly combustible fuel, a fuel mixed with equal parts of the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  In fact, we could say that everything Jesus said and did was for those two ends.  It drove Him to clean the Temple and it drove Him up the hill of Calvary.  When it was bottled up, it erupted out of the tomb and propelled Our Lord to ascend into Heaven.  It is this fuel that drove Himself in the Eucharist (c.f. Lk 22:15) and it is this fuel that shines forth from all the monstrances on the earth. 

This fire can never be extinguished.  When asked by St. Catherine of Siena what His greatest pain was, Our Lord said it was the pain of desire:

“My child, there can be no comparison between something finite and something infinite. Consider that the pain of My body was limited, while My desire for the salvation of souls was infinite. This burning thirst, this cross of desire, I felt all My life. It was more painful for Me than all the pains that I bore in My body. Nevertheless, My soul was moved with joy seeing the final moment approach, especially at the supper of Holy Thursday when I said, ‘ I have desired ardently to eat this Pasch with you, ‘ that is, sacrifice My body to My Father. I had a great joy, a great consolation, because I saw the time arrive when this cross of desire would cease for Me; and the closer I felt Myself to the flagellation and the other torments of My body, the more I felt the pain in Me diminish. The pain of the body made that of desire disappear, because I saw completed what I had desired. With death on the Cross the pain of the holy desire ended, but not the desire and the hunger I have for your salvation. If this love that I have for you were extinguished, you would no longer exist, since it is only this love that maintains you in life.” 

This habitual desire, this “predominant virtue” of Our Lord as Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange describes it, is zeal.  Our Lord was not only meek and humble, but also zealous.  And it is this zeal that sets the world ablaze.  But we must be absolutely clear on how the fire of Christ’s zeal is spread. 

Christ’s Zeal

We might initially think that it is spread via imitation of Christ.  We would, of course be correct, but only in a secondary way.  Christ’s virtues are not primarily taught to us, but caught by us.  His Messianic mission was not simply to shed His blood on the Cross, but to have that blood touch every aspect of human life.  Messiah was not just a mission, but an identity and His act of redemption is continuous.  He came not just to show us how to live, but to empower us to live that way.  He does not give us an example, but a share in all of His virtues so that if Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange is right, then He wants us to predominantly share in His zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

We have spoken previously on what zeal is and isn’t  so rather than revisiting that, we should examine how by true zeal we already are.  The Church has long taught that one of the distinctive marks of Catholics is the practice of the Works of Mercy.  But there is always a danger in examining ourselves against these because they can easily be animated by a humanitarian spirit.  When this is the case, they become merely signs of activism rather than evangelism.  Therefore we must examine the spirit in which we perform these acts.  To be truly acts of mercy, they must be zealously done for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  When we feed the hungry we must do so for the glory of God and the salvation of the hungry man’s soul.  Any other reason is superfluous and draws us towards humanitarianism.  This remains a serious temptation because activism often masquerades as zeal. 

Fr. Jean-Baptiste Chautard in his book The Soul of the Apostolate calls this the “heresy of good works” and describes “activistic heretics” as those who, “for their part, imagine that they are giving greater glory to God in aiming above all at external results. This state of mind is the explanation why, in our day, in spite of the appreciation still shown for schools, dispensaries, missions, and hospitals, devotion to God in its interior form, by penance and prayer, is less and less understood. No longer able to believe in the value of immolation that nobody sees, your activist will not be content merely to treat as slackers and visionaries those who give themselves, in the cloister, to prayer and penance with an ardor for souls equal to that of the most tireless missionary; but he will also roar with laughter at those active workers who consider it indispensable to snatch a few minutes from even the most useful occupations, in order to go and purify and rekindle their energy.”

Catching Zeal

If it is not in external works that we catch Christ’s zeal, then how do we catch it?  Fr. Chautard tells us that we become infected in prayer.  All of our exterior works are simply overflow from our interior lives.  The more time we spend in prayer, close to the Heart of Jesus, the greater will be our love for Him.  The greater our love, the more we will desire what He desires—the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  An apostle without an interior life is no apostle at all but simply a social worker.  We must first be committed to a deep prayer life before we should set out into the world to save souls.  Only in slaking our thirst for Jesus can we quench His thirst for souls.

As Fr. Chautard puts it, “I must seriously fear that I do not have the degree of interior life that Jesus demands of me:   If I cease to increase my thirst to live in Jesus,  that thirst which gives me both the desire to please God in all things, and the fear of displeasing Him in any way whatever. But I necessarily cease to increase this thirst if I no longer make use of the means for doing so: morning mental-prayer, Mass, Sacraments, and Office, general and particular examinations of conscience, and spiritual reading; or if, while not altogether abandoning them, I draw no profit from them, through my own fault.”   

It is this principle in action that has left the Church with a co-Patroness of missionaries that never left the convent.  St. Therese of Lisieux is, along with the great missionary St. Francis Xavier, the co-Patroness of Missionaries.  Her great zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls was formed and then poured out in prayer.  In fact, it was revealed to St. Therese that through her prayer she had converted as many souls as St. Francis Xavier, the great missionary to the East.  The point is that zeal must always be formed first in prayer and then exercised in the manner in which God chooses.

The Divine Composer

Freedom, God's Will, Prayer,

If we were to encapsulate the teachings of the self-help gurus, then they would boil down to “never leave anything to chance.”  After all, at the heart of the self-help movement is, well, helping yourself, by taking control of your life and seizing the day.  The saints too would exhort us to never leave anything to chance.  But they would express this for a very different reason.  For the saints there is no such thing as chance.  Instead they would urge us to leave everything to Providence.  And it is this attitude that make them saints.  If we too want to join them in the Church Triumphant then it behooves us to study how the most practical of Christian doctrines, Providence, “works”.

Notice how any discussion of Providence will always have the idea of chance in its orbit.  To say that “there is no such thing as chance” might seem provocative at first, but once we unpack it then we will see that it must be profoundly true.  If any discussion of Providence cannot proceed without bumping into the notion of chance, then we must begin there. 

Toppling the Objections to Providence

On the one hand we know that pure chance, the notion that things “just happen” violates the principle of causality.  Everything that happens must have a cause.  Usually what we mean by chance then is when we cannot observe the causality or so many causes seemed to converge that the event was so unlikely that it had to be chance.  Labeling an event as chance really is a way in for us to admit that we cannot fully explain how an event happened.  But this leaves us with only two alternatives—either the causality was governed by some random force that we call chance or it is governed by God through His Providence.  Even if it is a tough pill for us to swallow in our empirical age, we must side with the saints in their choosing of the latter and their insistence that there is no such thing as chance.

This raises a second objection in that, by removing chance, it seems to also remove free will.  If everything is meticulously planned out, then how can there be freedom to choose?  But this is to confuse chance with contingency.  God’s Providence has left some things to necessity (like the Incarnation) and some things to contingency (like Mary’s cooperation).  But it is by His omnipotence that He governs the bringing about of the necessary things through contingent things (c.f ST I, q.22, a.4).  This bears some further explanation because it enables us to marvel more fully at God’s Providence.

Because God is the Creator of all things and, because He knows His own omnipotence, He can know all things that could happen or do happen because He is their ultimate cause.  So, despite leaving some things up to free will decisions, He can alter the events surrounding those decisions to suit His purpose.  This is not to suggest that He is constantly executing “Plan B”, but an admission that He foresaw all that was to happen.  Therefore, His eternal law is simply one plan.  Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange gives a useful example to demonstrate how this might work. 

Over time, the great composer Beethoven grew deaf but, despite not actually be able to hear them, was still able to compose beautiful pieces of music.  This was because he knew music not just in hearing it, but through its laws.  He could compose without audible experimentation because he knew how the notes would fit together and create harmony.  This higher way of knowing his music through the laws governing it made it unnecessary that he try all possible combinations of notes.  In knowing the law he, in a very real sense knew all possible combinations enabling him to say “these fit, these don’t” to every set of notes that entered his mind.   So too with God.  He knows the laws by which the universe is governed, even the “law” of free will by which our actions are presented to Him and thus can Providentially compose the world.

There is one final aspect that bears mention as well and that is the role of petitionary prayer.  Prayer is a gift from God meaning that true prayer is always inspired by God in order to conform our desires to the plans of Providence.  That is why the holiest of men and women, that is those who are most like God, willing what He wills, will always be the most effective of pray-ers.  In asking for what God intends to give, they are free instruments in the implementation of His plans.  Prayer then is one of the instrumental causes of Providence, perhaps the most powerful of all them.

The Laws of Divine Providence

The laws of God’s divine composition, which we call Providence, are essentially threefold.  First, nothing that happens is contrary to His purpose of Creation, namely, as a manifestation of His Goodness and the rational creature’s share in the revealed Glory of Christ.  Second, nothing that happens was not foreseen by God and willed either actively or permissively.  Finally, God sees to it that all things work to the spiritual benefit those who are called to be saints and persevere in His love (Romans 8:28).

At this point it is good to be reminded that the doctrine of Providence is practical.  Hidden within the word Providence is provide.  This means that although we make theological distinctions between God’s active and permissive will, in our daily living we should not make any such distinction.  We should see each and everything that happens as coming directly from the hand of God with the intent of providing for the spiritual needs of those who love Him.  And everything, means everything including our own sins.  God only allows us to fall if, in the end, it leads us towards being more fully invaded by grace. 

An example drawn from real life might help us bring all of this into relief.  Forgiveness, something most of us struggle with, is only possible with a firm belief in Providence.  Recall the story of Joseph the Patriarch.  When his brothers sought forgiveness he did not trivialize what they did nor did he forget it.  In fact, he remembered it and told them as such.  But he remembered it as it truly was, an instrument of Providence.  Joseph is the perfect model for the stance towards those that slight us.  When we submit to the plans of Divine Providence, we see those who harm us actually doing us a favor.  They become instruments in God’s Providential plan.  The “logic” is simple if we believe the laws of Providence elucidated above.  This does not mean we won’t suffer, but we are guaranteed to draw the fruit that God intended for us to receive when we submit to His will in it.  Our Lord was silent in the face of His oppressors precisely to win the grace for us to do the same.  Nor does it make what the person has done right.  It simply gives us a means by which we can move towards truly forgiving the other person.  Providence makes forgiveness possible and even easy.

Self-Esteem and the Spirit of Penance

Fasting, God's Will, Grace, Human Dignity, Lent, Prayer, Purgatory, , , ,

In his message for Lent, Pope Francis exhorted the faith not to let “this season of grace pass in vain!”  The Holy Father is echoing a sentiment that we have nearly all experienced.  We have all had the experience of letting Lent pass us by and many of us, despite the best of intentions, will suffer the same fate this Lent unless we do something different.  We need not just encouragement but a paradigm shift to see Lent and its purpose differently than ever before.

This paradigm shift begins with an understanding of the history of Lent.  This does not mean that we need to look at how the Church has classically celebrated Lent, but to understand where it comes from.  Like all the events within the Liturgical Calendar, the season of Lent is given to make the specific mysteries of Christ’s life present to us.  The particular mystery attached to Lent is Christ’s forty days in the desert.  Christ was driven by the Spirit into the desert for 40 days of prayer and fasting with one of the purposes being to obtain all the graces for all the Lents of all Christians for all time.  He did this not in any generic way, but in a very specific way because each member of the Faithful individually was there with Him.  As Pope Pius XII reminds us, “In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (Mystici Corporis Christi,75).  Lent then is the time where we go to Christ in the desert to lay claim to those graces He had merited for us.  We go not just in spirit but in truth because we are already there.

How We Should “Do” Lent

This understanding not only changes how we view Lent, but also how we do Lent.  Our typical approach is to see it as something primarily done by us.  We come up with a plan to “give up X” or “do this thing X” for Lent and then try to white-knuckle our way through it.  But if what we said above is true, then the proper way to look at it is that Christ is doing Penance through us.  The oft misquoted and equally misunderstood Scholastic maxim that grace perfects nature is apropos here.  Grace does not “build on nature” as if we do a little (or as much as we can) and God will do the rest.  It is all done by Christ—“I live no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).  Lent is no different.

This might sound passive or even quietistic, but it is the very opposite.  All grace requires our free response, but it first requires that we remove those impediments that keep us from adopting the true spirit of Penance that Christ won for us.  We often forget this as our primary role.  And this is why many of us struggle through Lent.  We try to do Penance without having the grace of Penance. 

Therefore our first acts should be to obliterate the obstacles.  These obstacles are not only interior but come from those unquestioned beliefs we have adopted from the spirit of the world.  These obstacles, two in particular, are the focus of this article and the next.  We will not fully receive the graces of Lent until we remove the spirits of self-esteem and luxury.

The Problem of Self-Esteem

Who could possibly have a problem with self-esteem?  To ask the question is to reveal that we have been infected with the spirit of the world.  For the spirit of the world always sends us mixed messages, locking us firmly in no-man’s land.  It takes some truth and twists it just enough that it blinds us to the implications of that truth.  It usually starts by baptizing it with a new name.  Then the new term, piggybacking on the old term, is given value by fiat.  “Self-esteem” is a prime example of this.

Self-esteem or “confidence in one’s own worth” is a psychological replacement for a theological term, dignity.  That a human being has worth is unquestionable.  But what has to be questioned is why a person has worth, that is, why a person should have any confidence in their worth.  The world would have us believe that the currency of “self-esteem” is valuable simply by fiat.  But it is not.  It is valuable currency because it rests upon the God-standard.  Human persons only have value because they are made in the image of God and because God has made Himself into the image of a man in Jesus Christ.  Our confidence lies in both of these things—our inherent God-imagedness and our offer of God-likedness in Christ.  The first can never be taken away, while the second must be achieved.   

The problem with self-esteem is that it overemphasizes the first and totally ignores the second.  The odd thing is that many in the Church have tried to “re-theologize” self-esteem through the language of “Temple of the Holy Spirit”.  This term is thrown around as an attempt to convince someone of their own worth.  But that is not how either Scripture or Tradition has understood it.  When St. Paul uses the term it is meant as a corrective to live up to the supreme gift of redemption (which includes the Divine Indwelling).  Tradition has taught that only those in a state of grace, that is those who have kept themselves unstained by serious sin, that are Temples of the Holy Spirit.  The language also betrays itself because a Temple, while it is the earthly home of Divinity, is also, and one might say primarily, the place of sacrifice.  In other words, you cannot say someone is a Temple of the Holy Spirit while not also calling them to make the necessary sacrifices within that same Temple. 

This leads us now to why the spirit of self-esteem is an obstacle to the spirit of Lent.  It always causes us to overvalue ourselves and destroys our spirit of sacrifice and penance.  If you don’t believe me, then let me propose a hypothetical.  Suppose, to use a seemingly trivial example, you are waiting for a parking space in a crowded shopping center and someone steals the space from you.  Now suppose you told me about it and I said “you deserved it.”  What would be your response?

I would bet that you would be angry with me and maybe even accuse me of being unjust.  But in truth, I would infallibly be right no matter what the situation was.  How do I know this?  Because God in His Providence thought you did.  Otherwise He wouldn’t have allowed it to happen.  This seems crazy until we follow out the line of reasoning.

Returning to our hypothetical, did God know the person was going to steal the space and did He allow it to happen?  Without question, but the important question is why.  And the answer ought to be “so that I could willingly accept it as penance for something I did wrong.”  In other words, you may not have deserved it this time, but you never got what you deserved last time.  The only thing that stops us from seeing this is our self-esteem.  “The space was mine and he had no right to take it.”  True, but that is not the point.  The point is that he did you a favor.  He gave you an opportunity to undo the harm you did to yourself when you sinned previously.  You offended God and all you have to endure is finding another space?  Yes, because your measly sacrifice when united to Christ in the desert becomes powerful.  Or you could just get stuck in how poorly treated you were and “pay down to the last penny” later (c.f. Mt 5:26).  Purgatory now is always better than Purgatory later.

So free from the false myth of self-esteem were the saints that they could even practice this for the big things. Not that they became doormats per se, but because they “humbly regarded the other person has more important than yourself” (Phil 2:3) that the only reason they put a stop to it is because of the harm the other person was doing to himself. In other words they would speak up not because of self-esteem but because of charity. In the spiritual life why we do what we do matters just as much as what we do.

The extreme cases obviously are far harder said than done, so we ought to just start developing the wisdom for the less extreme cases; not just because they are easier but because they are far more common.  This Lent let go of your self-esteem and see if there isn’t real growth in the spirit of Penance.  After all, these are the best kinds of Penance because they are not self-chosen, but come from the Provident hand of God.  When you meet with some slight during Lent, even if it seems like a big deal, say “I deserve this” and thank God for forming a spirit of Penance in you.

Next time, we will examine the second worldly obstacle: luxury.

Faith in Christ

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One of the more controversial teachings of the Second Vatican Council deals with the salvation of non-Christians.  Summarizing the teachings of the Council Fathers, the Catechism says “’Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery.’ [GS 22] Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved” (CCC 1260).  The controversy arises not so much in the letter, but in the spirit that followed.  It was interpreted as a softening of the Church’s traditional stance that salvation comes only through faith in Christ.  Once softened, the way became clear for a belief in universal salvation.  While this clearly goes beyond the text, nevertheless the evangelical aftershocks have left the Church’s missionary zeal in the rubble.  In an age where exceptions, rather than proving the rule, become the rule, a certain amount of clarity surrounding this issue will help to reignite the evangelical fires of the Church.

It must be admitted at the outset that like many of the statements of the Council, the teachings surrounding this issue suffer from a certain ambiguity.  That the ignorant can be saved does not mean that they will be saved nor does it even make it probable.  It simply opens a door, something that only the most hard-hearted fundamentalist would refuse to admit.  For nothing is impossible for God.  It is not salvation, at least according to St. Thomas Aquinas, that is improbable but ignorance.

What is Faith?

A few preliminary points are in order at the outset.  First when we speak of faith, we must make the distinction between the object of faith and the act of faith.  The object of faith is a statement about reality and the act of faith is an assent to the reality that has been opened by the statement.  Belief requires an object of belief—no one just believes, he must believe something.  When we speak of having “faith in Jesus” we can only mean that we believe that “there is no other name under heaven and earth by which man can be saved” (Acts 4:12).  So when St. Paul declares we are justified by faith (c.f. Romans 3:23-25), he means that we believe the reality that was opened to us by the Incarnation of the Son and by our assent conform our lives to it.

The saving power of faith illuminates a second necessary point.  The author of the Letter to the Hebrews says that “without faith it is impossible to please Him for anyone who approaches God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).  St. Thomas is pointing out what he sees as the content for a “minimum” of faith.  He calls these two fundamental dogmas, that God exists and that He rewards those who seek Him, the credibilia because they contain, at least implicitly, all that God has made explicit through revelation and the Church.

Once he has drawn attention to it, he combines it with the belief that God wishes all men to be saved and concludes that the credibilia have been offered in one way or another to all mankind that has lived apart from Judeo Christian revelation via either the ministry of angels or direct illumination (c.f ST II-II, q.2 art 7).  But he doesn’t stop there because he says that implicit faith is not enough.  It is only an explicit faith in Christ that saves.  The Angelic Doctor says that once the person responds to the credibilia through the workings of Providence He leads the new believer to explicit knowledge of Christ.  With the interior assent to the credibilia and the gift of faith, comes the gifts of the Holy Spirit which perfect that faith.  In other words, ignorance is improbable because, as the Thomist Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, “if anybody were to follow the guidance of natural reason in the pursuit of goodness and flight from evil, God would by an interior inspiration reveal not only the prime credibles but also the redemptive power of the Incarnation.”

Salvation and the Man on the Remote Island

St. Thomas rejects the “man on a remote island” narrative because it is too natural of an explanation.  Faith is a supernatural gift by which God, who desires all men to be saved, saves us.  He uses the example of the conversion of Cornelius to demonstrate the principle:

“Granted that everyone is bound to believe something explicitly, no untenable conclusion follows even if someone is brought up in the forest or among wild beasts. For it pertains to divine providence to furnish everyone with what is necessary for salvation, provided that on his part there is no hindrance. Thus, if someone so brought up followed the direction of natural reason in seeking good and avoiding evil, we must most certainly hold that God would either reveal to him through internal inspiration what had to be believed, or would send some preacher of the faith to him as he sent Peter to Cornelius (Acts 10:20).”


De Veritate q.14 a.11 ad 1

In short, if God wills all men to be saved then He would not allow ignorance to get in the way.  Faith comes from hearing, but sometimes it is God Who does the talking.

There is an important corollary to this that, despite not being ecumenically correct should not be overlooked.  Bear with me on this one.  If God moves each and every man from implicit to explicit faith then there are men who, if they remain within certain religions that openly reject Christ as Redeemer, will not be saved.  Push always comes to shove because you cannot both implicitly accept Christ and simultaneously explicitly reject Him.  God’s invitation, for it to be truly accepted, must come with full knowledge and full consent.  Love would have it no other way.  That is why I say this not from a judgment seat but bedside to put to rest the prevailing mentality that non-Christians are “just fine”.  It is time we stoke the embers of the evangelical fires and enter the fray and fight for souls.  We need to stop apologizing for being Christians and start apologizing again for Christ.

The Glory of God

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Within the Christian vocabulary there are a number of terms that are regularly bandied about, but cry out for definition.  Grace immediately comes to mind as one of the most common.  A close second however is the term glory.  We know it is something that we are supposed to give to God in everything we do (1Cor 10:31).  Short of that however we are hard pressed to describe what this actually entails.  For something so important then it behooves us to reflect on exactly what we mean when we speak of the glory of God and how it is possible that we could actually “give” it to Him.

Because we cannot know God as He is in this life, we spend time contemplating His attributes—His goodness, His power, His wisdom, His omniscience, His Immutability, and so on.  But God Himself “spends His time” contemplating only one—His beauty.  That is, His beauty captures all of His attributes in their wholeness, proportionality, and radiance.  Sacred Scripture has a word for this undiminishing beauty, glory.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Glory

In theological terms God’s beauty, that is, what He is eternally contemplating, is referred to as His intrinsic glory.  From a human perspective this might seem the very height of narcissism, until we call to mind that all goodness and truth are found in God.  The Father, in gazing upon (or knowing) His perfection generates the Son.  From the mutual love of the Father and the Son for the Divine Perfection proceeds the Holy Spirit. Basking in the light of His infinite perfection, God has no need for anything other than Himself and yet, still He created.  Without any need, the only reason for creation must be found in Himself, that is, it must be because of Who He is.  Out of love of His own goodness, He desired to communicate that goodness to creatures.

No finite creature could ever “hold” the infinite goodness and so He makes a multitude of creatures, each with the purpose of reflecting His goodness, even if to a lesser or greater degree.  Or, as St. Thomas says, “the entire universe, with all its parts, is ordained towards God as its end, inasmuch as it imitates, as it were, and shows forth the Divine goodness, to the glory of God” (ST I, q.65, a.2).

From this notion, theologians develop the term extrinsic glory.  This is the reflection of the intrinsic glory that is found in creatures.  The Psalmist proclaims “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1) and St. Paul reminds the Romans that “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20).  Simply in existing, all things reflect God’s glory.  But He also willed to make creatures who not only reflected His glory, but could bask in it with Him.

The proof of this is within the story of creation, as elucidated through the scholastic dictum, “first in the order of intention is last in the order of execution” sheds further light on this.  The last act of creation, that is, the first act of the Seventh Day, is God’s “command” for man to bask in it by joining in God’s rest seeing all things as “good, very good” in reflecting the glory of God.  Man is invited to set aside this time specifically for basking in the “after burn” of God’s glory as a perpetual reminder of his purpose.

Man, then, among all visible creation is the only creature with the capacity to “give” God glory.  Like the rest of visible creation he reflects it, but with his unique powers of knowing and loving he can also give it back by acknowledging it and willing his participation in it.  This is what we mean when we say that man gives glory to God—not that God doesn’t already have it, but that through adoration and praise he may willingly return it to God.

Glory as a Temptation

Man is constantly confronted with two temptations.  The first is to see only the glory and to forget the One Whom it points to.  God has put just enough traces of His glory in creation so that man will seek out the true source.  But even these mirrors are so beautiful that there is always the temptation that they eclipse the One whom they were meant to image.  We can fall in love with the creatures and forget the Creator.

While this temptation is ever-present in our fallen world, it is the second temptation that is the more serious of the two.  With the capacity to give God glory comes the (seeming) ability to keep it for ourselves.   This is the sin of Lucifer and his minions and forms the seeds of pride within us.

Now we see that St. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians to do all for the glory of God is no pious sentiment, but a program of life.  Every thing that we think, do, and say should find its reference point in magnifying God’s glory.  Our Lord too wanted this to be our program of life.  He told His disciples that their light, that is their reflection of God’s glory, should so shine that when other men see what they are doing they know immediately that it is not their own work, but a manifestation of God’s glory (Mt 5:17).  This constant referral of all things to God’s glory increases our share in it both now and in eternal life—“ whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.”

On Hurricanes and Divine Judgment

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Preparations are under way throughout much of the East Coast of the United States for the arrival of Hurricane Florence.  Houses are being boarded up, supplies are being purchased and evacuation plans are being executed.  Meanwhile “fire and brimstone” preachers throughout the country are preparing their sermons about Florence bringing with her the strong winds of Divine Wrath.  These foreboding missives usually greatly miss their mark and bring with them not fear, but mirth, as both the world and Christians alike laugh at them.  Hilarity, that is, until they realize that these prophets of gloom might actually have a point, even if they have failed typesetting their message in its proper context.

We cannot be too quick to dismiss these preachers of peril.  Be it earthquakes (c.f. Ps 17:8, Is 13:13), droughts (c.f. Jer 3:2), floods or calamities in general (c.f. Is 24:5), Scripture is unambiguous in its account of God using natural calamities in order to punish sinners.  Plus, we find a similar echo among the preaching of the saints.  St. Basil said, that “No one troubles himself about inquiring why drought, lightning, hail, are sent down upon us; they are sent us on account of our sins and because we preserve an impenitent heart.”  St. Anselm meanwhile suggested that “By offending God we not only excite His anger but the anger of all creation.”  We could multiply the examples, but the point is that there is an important truth that needs to be heard.

Setting the Proper Context

The problem then is not that what they are saying is untrue, it is that it lacks the proper context.  At the heart of the Christian message is a point that is so foundational that we can easily overlook it.  Death, although considered an evil in itself, is not the worst thing that can happen to you.  The worst thing that can happen to you is that you end up in hell.   But there is, of course, the flip side of that coin.  The best thing that could possibly happen to you is to enter into Eternal Life with God.  What this means for the question at hand is that there really can be no meaningful discussion about “innocent children” who are killed.  They will get their reward.  A reward that, when they look back on their suffering and untimely death, will make those things seem so disproportionately small compared to the bliss they are enjoying.  They will even be grateful it happened because it was the doorway into their present state.  No sane person would ever complain that their liberator was too rough in granting them free from captivity.

Likewise those who die in unrepentance also receive what they deserve.  But even their death is a mercy.  God knows that they will continue to go on sinning only increasing their sufferings in hell.  So, in His abundant mercy, He puts an end to it so that they do no further harm to themselves.  He also puts an end to not only their offense against Him, but their offense against their neighbors whom they invite into sin with them.  Both justice and mercy at all times.  But we must also look to the survivors, both “innocent” and guilty alike.  How can we reconcile this aspect of punishment with the tremendous sufferings that they will have to endure?

Just as our imaginary interlocutor makes the distinction between the dead and the survivors, so too must we mark the difference between the living and the dead.  For those that die, their punishment or lack thereof is eternal.  But temporal punishments are wholly different.  God issues those for the express purpose of leading to the individual to conversion.  As the Doctor of the Church St. Alphonsus Liguori put it,  “my brethren, let us convince ourselves of what I have undertaken to show you today, namely, that God does not afflict us in this life for our injury but for our good, in order that we may cease from sin, and by recovering His grace escape eternal punishment.”   As the tolerant and loving Messiah once told us: the path to destruction is wide so that He must at times give a foretaste of this destruction in order that people will rebuild on the narrow path (c.f Mt 7:13).  Comfort in this fallen world rarely leads to comfort in the next.

The Good News and the Bad News

Denial of what has been said so far amounts to a denial of another foundational element of the Christian message—the Good News is really that includes the bad news.  Sufferings are inevitable in this world, but Christ liberated us from, not suffering, but useless suffering.  But it is only useful when it is accepted in a spirit of penance.  Otherwise it does have an air of cruelty about it, but only in our steady refusal of reality.  United with Christ however it carries with it the fragrance of freedom.

This is why the objection that these natural disasters seem rather indiscriminant won’t do.  They are part and parcel to God’s Providence.  Contained within the chaos of the calamity, are personal invitations to penance.  Penance that comes from the hands of God not only pays a debt to Divine justice, but heals the effects of the sin within each individual person.  The sufferings are only to the degree that they are needed for this purpose and no more.  There is both justice and mercy, neither of which can exist without the other.

For those outside the path of the hurricane, I close with a quote from gentle Jesus.  When His disciples asked him about the fate of a group of calamitous Galileans, He warned them “unless you do penance, you will likewise perish” (Lk 13:3).  The circumstances are different, but the invitation remains the same—do penance so that you can enter into eternal life.  The Hound of Heaven will not cease to hunt you until you are safely within the room of His Father’s house.

God’s Choice?

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As criticism continues to mount against Pope Francis amidst this time of ecclesiastical turmoil, a growing number of peacemakers have emerged, who, in an attempt to diffuse the situation, are quick to offer the reminder that “he was chosen by the Holy Spirit.”  One can certainly appreciate the attempt to maintain unity.  Especially because the Pope is the most visible sign of Catholic unity.  But this path to peace is a theological dead end.  The Pope is not “chosen by the Holy Spirit”, at least in the sense that the peacemaker means it.  Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI was once asked whether the Holy Spirit is responsible for the election of a pope to which he replied:

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the Pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined…There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!

In his usual pedagogical succinctness, the Pope Emeritus gives us several important reminders, not only on the election of the Pope, but also on the nature of the Church, especially in times of crises such as we are currently facing.

The Holy Spirit and the Conclave

As Benedict is quick to point out, one need only study history to see that this hypothesis is highly questionable.  History is rife with scoundrels who came to occupy the Chair of Peter.  It is always a good idea to study Church history and remind ourselves of this, especially because most of us have lived under the reign of popes who became saints.  It is only with great intellectual dexterity that we could admit that the Holy Spirit “picked” both these saints and someone like, say, Pope Alexander VI.

One might object that, even if it is a highly informed one, Cardinal Ratzinger was just offering an opinion (“I would say so…”).  The tradition of the Church would suggest otherwise.  Lex orandi, lex credenda—as we worship, so we believe.  The Church, among her various liturgies, has a Mass for the Election of the Pope.   The Church Universal prays that the Conclave will be docile to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  This implies that they can also operate under the promptings of mixture of other spirits as well.

Free will of the Cardinal electorate then is operative and “anyone” can be chosen.   Yet we are also treading on the horizon of free will and Divine Providence.   The man chosen to be Pope will be God’s choice, but only in the sense that the papal election, like all things, falls under God’s Providence.  We may be certain that the Holy Spirit directly wills the election of a given man as Supreme Pontiff, but through the mystery of Providence will allow another to take his place.

Our Lord told St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church.  What He meant by this was that no matter what, the Church would not fail.  The Barque of Peter may take on water, but it will never sink.  The Holy Spirit will allow the Church to take on water, but will always keep her afloat.  That is the extent of His protection.

This however is not the end of the story because of God’s Providence.  Regardless of whether it is a good Pope or bad, the Church will always get the Pope it needs.  Providence dictates that God will always provide the People of God with what they need.

Reading the Times

There may be a mutiny on the Barque of Peter and the Holy Spirit will pick a strong captain to lead a counter-mutiny, stopping the flow of the water.  Or, He may allow another man who joins the mutiny and ignores the water that continues to flow onto the boat.  Eventually all the compartments are flooded, washing the mutineers overboard.  The end result is the same, the corruption has been washed away and the Church was given exactly what she needed.

In a very real sense then the Pope is always God’s choice but only as an instrument.  As a type of the Church, Israel shows us this.  History continually moved in the direction towards the coming of the Messiah, the only question was whether the king and the people would cooperate.  Israel would flourish, grow fat, play the harlot, be chastised, and continue through the remnant.  This pattern is revealed so that we will come to recognize and expect it in the Church.  Either way history will continue to move towards the Second Coming.

In turbulent times this ought to serve as a great comfort.  The infestation of corruption in the Church is finally coming to a head and God is going to root it out.  He will use Pope Francis as his instrument.  The only question seems to be which type of captain Pope Francis will be.  Either way these scandals should not push us towards despair, but should instill hope into us.  God will not be mocked for sure, but neither will He ever abandon His people. He is always on the lookout for co-redeemers—those people who will pick up the Cross with Jesus and lay down their lives for the Church.  Only acts of reparation will repair the Church and each of us has an obligation to do this.  Every man must come on deck, stem the mutiny and start bailing water or risk being carried overboard.  “Penance, penance, penance!” the Angel of Portugal told us through the children of Fatima.  The time is at hand.  Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

The Natural-Supernatural Distinction

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In his latest Apostolic Exhortation, Pope Francis cautions the faithful to avoid what he sees as two re-emerging Christian heresies, Gnosticism and Pelagianism.  I will speak on the former another time, but today I would like to address the latter—Pelagianism.  Thanks to the hammer of over-correction, this whack-a-mole heresy is perpetually popping up within the history of the Church.  Now that Pope Francis fixed the crosshairs upon this heresy, we need to also guard against its over-correcting counterpart, Quietism.  In order to do this we must find the spiritual middle ground.

To begin, a few definitions are in order.  Pelagianism has a number of principal tenets but its essence consists in a denial of the supernatural order and the necessity of grace for salvation.  Despite condemnations from numerous Popes and Councils, it still persists to this day.  Likewise with the heresy of Quietism which puts forth the position that to become perfect one must be totally passive in the spiritual life waiting for God to act.  Quietism rejects not only prayers with any specific content (like acts of love, petition or adoration) but also sees mortification and the sacraments as useless.  Despite coming from a different starting point, notice how this heresy comes to the same practical conclusions of Pelagianism.  Left unchecked, these heresies leave us dangling on a pendulum mostly due to a failure to make a crucial distinction.  It is a failure to make what we might call the “Natural-Supernatural Distinction” that lay at the heart of the re-emergence of Pelagianism along with the seemingly endless “Faith vs Works” debate that has plagued Catholic and Protestant discussion for centuries.

The Important Distinction

This distinction comes into focus once we examine the following proposition—“Free will, without the help of God’s grace, acts only in order to sin.”  How should we respond to this?  In order to condemn Pelagianism, we want to accept the proposition.  The problem however is that the Church condemns this one as well.  Pope St. Pius V in his 1567 Papal Bull Ex Omnibus Afflictionibus anathematized this proposition as contrary to the Faith.  How can both Pelagianism and this proposition be false?  It hinges on what we mean by good when we ask the question, “can we be good without God’s grace?”.

A morally good act is one that is in accord with right reason and fulfills our nature.  Thus a man, without being under the influence of grace can act prudently by doing what is just, temperate, and courageous in specific situations. He may even do so habitually so that he grows in virtue and becomes a “good” man.  History is replete with examples of good pagans and other non-Christians so it seems undeniable to think one cannot be good without grace.  But no matter how many good things he does, a man cannot do a single thing that will merit him everlasting life.  In the face of that end, he is like a cow reading Shakespeare, utterly incapable.  But unlike the cow, man can have a super-nature grafted onto him that enables him to perform God-like actions.  Once he receives this nature, that is, once he becomes a “partaker of the divine nature” (c.f. 2 Peter 1:4) and is given sanctifying grace can he now do things that will fulfill his gifted supernatural end.

The Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us and brings with Him a new set of human powers.  First He brings infused virtues that enable the man to direct his actions to God.  No longer does he act for some particular good, His actions can be habitually directed towards the ultimate Good, God Himself.  And he is rewarded accordingly.  He is given the power to be moved directly by that same Spirit with His seven-fold gifts.  And he is rewarded accordingly.  He is, day by day, made not just good but holy.  No longer are his actions merely good in the natural sense but now they are supernaturally good.  St. Thomas sums it up well when he says “without grace man cannot merit everlasting life; yet he can perform works conducing to a good which is natural to man” (ST I-II q.109 a.5).

Becoming More Human

As the Supernature becomes more and more operative in the man, he becomes more human and not less.  “Christ came to fully reveal man to himself and make his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).  Grace most certainly perfects nature, but only to the extent that we cooperate with it.  How do we nurture this super-nature?  By becoming naturally good.  Cooperation really means that remove the obstacles that we place in the way.  Growth in the infused virtue of prudence, for example, is directly related to growth in the acquired virtue of prudence.  This is not because the infused virtues are somehow grafted on top of the natural virtues, but because the natural virtues facilitates the removal of any obstacles to the infused virtue being completely operative.  This is why we must never forget the truth that we are capable on our own of growing in natural virtue.

This is important because we often remain rather passive in our attempts to grow in holiness.  Avoiding any traces of Pelagianism, we have a tendency to be rather passive in our attempts to grow in holiness and move towards an equally spiritually impotent habit of Quietism.  We wait for God to provide the growth but forget that we have the power to till and fertilize the soil in the meantime.  We should be at all times working diligently to grow in the natural virtues so that when the grace of growth comes, there is nothing stopping it.  And this is why the “Natural-Supernatural Distinction” is so important for us to grasp.  Naturally we cannot achieve any merit, but we can (naturally) remove the impediments by actively cultivating the acquired virtues.    We must constantly be at work fertilizing our soil.  No saint ever reached the heights of holiness without going through a stage of active purgation.  We are still fallen creatures so that our efforts at natural perfection will always fall short.  This is why each of the saints also went through a stage of passive purgation in which God, through the workings of Providence and actual graces, completes the growth in perfection.

The problem with most heresies is not so much that they are false, but that they tend to overemphasize one aspect of the truth at the expense of other aspects.  In this regard, Pelagianism is no different with its over-emphasis on human effort.  But the response is not then to become a Quietist, passively waiting on God to act.  Instead, we must live the “both/and” doctrine of the Faith in which we follow the rule of St. Ignatius, “pray as if everything depended upon God and work as if everything depended on you.”

Owning Our Hypocrisy

Divine Mercy, God's Love, God's Will, Grace, Incarnation, Mercy, Sin, , ,

If a man was to read the gospels with a fresh mind, that is, without any pre-conceived notion of Who Jesus is and what He was trying to accomplish, he would quickly conclude that one of the worst sins was hypocrisy.  And in a certain sense, he would be right.  There is no group of sinners that Our Lord singles out more often than the hypocrites.  Knowing His profound distaste for this particular sin, it is not surprising that we, His followers, should vigilantly avoid it and keep any traces of it from creeping into our lives.  In many ways this should be one of the easiest sins to avoid because it is also one of the easiest sins to identify in ourselves.  We should know when we are posing to be something we are not.  But this may be oversimplifying the case because it has a subtle way of insinuating itself into our spiritual lives and spreading like a weed.  Therefore, it is fruitful for us to examine this vice more closely.

If lying is to signify by words something different from what is in one’s mind, then dissimulation is a form of lying in which the outward deed does not correspond to the inner intention.  To the topic at hand, hypocrisy is a type of dissimulation when a “sinner simulates the person of a just man” (ST II-II q.111, a 2).  Like all offenses against the truth, when practiced enough, one forgets the truth and begins to believe the untruth.  One starts seeing himself as just.  This was why Our Lord was so harsh with the Pharisees—they had become blinded to their hypocrisy and only by shining His light that the Truth could they be set them free.

Hypocrisy’s Deadly Roots

Rightly recognizing its capacity to kill our spiritual lives, we do all we can to avoid it.  The problem however is that we do too much, mostly because we have failed to make an important distinction.  St. Thomas doesn’t say that you must do everything with perfect intention in order to avoid hypocrisy.  That, unfortunately is the way most of us think of hypocrisy.  No, instead he says that hypocrisy consists in the intention of presenting ourselves as just.  An example might help see the distinction more clearly.  Two men enter an adoration chapel and prostrates themselves before the monstrance.   The first man does so in order to be seen by others and be thought a holy man.  His is an act, not of piety, but of hypocrisy.  The second man does so, not because he wants to adore Our Lord, but because he has always been taught that is what you are supposed to do with only a vague awareness of why.  This is far from being a perfect intention, but it is not hypocrisy.

This description helps to clarify why Our Lord spent so much time pointing hypocrisy out.  It can, and usually does, become a sin of those who have advanced a certain amount in their spiritual life.  At first, we have little interest in appearing to be religious and we may even have reason to hide it.  But as our friends change, our vanity can be directed towards our “spiritual” friends and hypocrisy creeps in.  A hypocrite has to see some value in faking it and thus it is a more “advanced” sin.  This makes Our Lord’s command to “go into your room and shut the door” (Mt 6:6) invaluable for avoiding hypocrisy.  We should perform acts of piety as if we have only an audience of One.

Counterfeit Hypocrisy

There is a further dimension of this that merits some explanation as well.  It is a fear of hypocrisy that keeps us from performing certain acts of piety.  This fear causes us to confuse the false piety of hypocrisy with weak acts of genuine piety.  We hold out until we can get fully behind what we are doing.  For example, a person sends you a novena to St. Joseph, asking you to pray it.  Deep down you believe novenas work, but you feel like you mostly would be going through the motions doing it.  If only your faith was a little stronger than you would do it.  Therefore, to avoid “feeling” like a hypocrite you don’t do it.

It should be clear that to do the novena would not be hypocritical, but what is not clear is that you will never get to the point where your faith is “a little stronger” without doing acts that are weaker.  Faith and the accompanying virtue of piety are habits in our soul and only grow when they are exercised.  By starting with the weak, imperfect acts, they eventually grow to full bloom.  This is not merely going through the motions, but instead adding a little more fervor, a little stronger intention, each time we do them.  With each repeated act, God does His part by strengthening these virtues further because He will not be outdone in generosity.  Before long you not only develop a devotion to St. Joseph, but the Communion of Saints becomes not just a sterile dogma, but a living reality in your life.  This cannot happen however without those first weak baby steps.  “I believe Lord, help my unbelief!”

 

Christian Dignity

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There is a certain logic and progression to the Catechism that reveals it to be more than a book of beliefs, but a map for the spiritual journey.  After delivering the content of what we believe (the creeds) and how we are empowered to believe it (the Sacraments), the Catechism examines what being a Christian looks like through an account of the moral life.   It begins with a quote that, at least at first glance, flies in the face of what most of us think of when we consider the moral life of a Christian.  It references a Christmas homily of St. Leo the Great in which the great pope exhorts Christians to “recognize your dignity and, now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return to your former base condition by sinning. Remember who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Never forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of the Kingdom of God” (CCC 1691).  Of course it mentions “not sinning” but his reasoning for shunning sin strikes many of us as a little off.  He mentions nothing about breaking commandments or risking salvation but instead says sin is beneath our dignity as Christians.  In reading the signs of the times, the authors of the Catechism chose this particular quote because of both its timelessness and timeliness.  We live in an age of defensive Christianity and it is only by embracing our dignity as Christians that we can go on the offense once again.

This last sentence regarding widespread defensiveness bears an explanation.  There are certainly many Christians that live in a defensive stance against the world, trying to protect Christianity from outside influences.  Insofar as that is concerned, this is a good and necessary stance provided it is done with proper moderation.  What I mean by “defensive Christianity” has to do with the stance we take in our individual spiritual lives.  Most of us see a life of grace as one in which we are protected from evil.  Evidence the habit, even within Catholic circles, to focus on “being saved” and “getting to heaven.”  Both are important, but they represent a stunted view of the Christian life.  By placing the emphasis on our Christian dignity and off of merely being saved, we can fly towards Christian perfection and sanctification.

Dignity

Although this may be slightly tangential, it is worth discussing the concept of dignity.  Many people insist that men and women have an inherent dignity because they are made in the “image and likeness of God.”  That is not entirely true.  Adam and Eve were made in the image and likeness of God, but we are not.  Our dignity rests in the fact that we are made in the image of God.  That is, as creatures who have the spiritual powers of intellect and will, we surpass all of material creation in greatness.  This means that we are afforded a certain treatment that we call dignity.

Christian dignity is something more because it restores God’s likeness.   To “be like” God means we have a nature like His, or, more accurately since He is God, a share in His nature.  It is the “likeness of God” that was forfeit by our first parents and, thanks to Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, is restored to us in Baptism.  Christian dignity then stems from our restored likeness to God or as St. Leo puts it “recognize your dignity and, now that you share in God’s own nature.”

Of course Pope St. Leo is just reminding of something that Pope St. Peter said in his second letter—“that you may become partakers of the Divine nature” (2Pt 1:3).  Catholics have always called this share in the Divine nature sanctifying grace.  But Catholics rarely reflect on the full impact that this has and what our being “born anew of the Spirit” (c.f. Jn 3:6-7) really means.  Because most assuredly if we did then, at least according to the Saintly Pontiff, it would be enough to keep us from forfeiting it through sin.

Reading the Scriptures with the Head and not just the Heart

One of the obstacles has to do with our approach to Scripture.  We can read it with sentimentality rather than taking it literally.  One might be excused with reading St. John’s letters this way when he says something like “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are…Beloved, we are God’s children now” (1 Jn 3:1-2).  But one cannot ever read St. Paul in a sentimental manner.  When he says “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, “Abba! Father!”  it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God,  and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:15-17) we should take our sonship quite literally.  This is a repeated theme throughout the New Testament and one of the keys to understanding what it means to be a Christian.  We are quite literally God’s children only because He has given of His own nature to us.  To be adopted by Him means not just that we were created by Him, but that as Father He recreated us by impressing His own nature on us.

There is more to this than simply realizing it.  He gave this gift to us not just as protection from sin (i.e. that we might be saved) but for us to make use of it.  Those in a state of grace are given a super-nature, one that enables them not just to “be like God” but to act like Him.  As the name implies, this supernatural power builds upon our natural power, or more accurately, it transforms and elevates it.  The more we use this super-nature, the more we become like God which only makes us the super-nature more (in theological terms we increase in sanctifying grace).  We become, as Jesus commanded us “perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt. 5:48).  Notice too how this clears up all the intellectual debates about faith and works and merits.  It is us using God’s nature that He was given us.

This also takes the emphasis off of “getting to heaven.”  Why?  Because we are already there.  Heaven is the place where God dwells and those who dwell with Him enjoy union with Him.  With the gift of sanctifying grace comes the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Romans 5:2-5).  God comes and takes up residence in our souls so that we may be united with Him.  Again, sentimentality blocks us from understanding what St. Paul means when he says we are “Temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19).  The Holy Spirit truly comes into our souls and dwells there.  With Him come the other two Divine Persons as they cannot be separated, even if their mode of presence is different (like the Incarnation).  That is why St. Paul says we have been given the “first fruits” of heaven through the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:22-23).  It is still first-fruits so that the degree in which we will know God (faith versus the Beatific Vision) is different, but not in kind.  Divine grace truly contains the seeds of heaven, growing day by day.  Our focus should not be simply getting there, but acting like you are already there.  As St Theresa of Avila said, “it is heaven all the way to heaven.”

If all that I have said to this point is true, then why would we ever forfeit it for a momentary delight?  There are no “cheap thrills”; each is more expensive than we could possibly imagine.  We would be more foolish than Esau who failed to see his dignity as the first-born son and sold his birth right for a bowl of porridge (Gen 25:29-34).  This is Pope St. Leo’s crucial point—stop and recognize who you are now, Whose you are now; do you really want to throw that all away?  Recognize your dignity Christian.

The Truth on Lying

Conscience, Defending the Faith, Dialogue, God's Will, Moralilty, Natural Law, Sin, ,

 

One of my favorite all-time commercials is a Geico ad in which President Lincoln is asked by his wife whether or not the dress she is wearing makes her backside look fat.  As cleverly designed as the commercial is, and as refreshing as “Honest Abe” might be in our current political climate, this short ad is particularly compelling because it forces the viewers to think about the nature of lying.  Drenched in a culture that has shown a particular allergy to truth-telling, we “spin the facts” and color-code our lies, bleaching them of any wrong doing.  As lies increase, trust decreases, turning us all into masters of suspicion. Lies will break down any society, the family included, but there is an ever-greater danger hidden in the weeds of lying—losing a grip on what is real.  Telling a lie over and over, we can easily forget the truth.  As philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth…but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world…is being destroyed.”   It is time to tell the truth about lying.

Most of us know a lie when we tell it, but there is a shadow over truth telling that creates a grey area.  That is because we lack a really good definition.  Even the Church has struggled to come up with a good definition.  In the 1994 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the definition of lying was “to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth”(CCC 2483).  When the official Latin text was released 3 years later, the italicized part was left out, rendering lying as “speaking or acting against the truth in order to lead someone into error.”  This is true as far as it goes, but it does not shine enough light to remove the shadow.  This is why St. Augustine’s definition is especially helpful.  He says that lying is deliberately speaking (verbally or non-verbally) contrary to what is on one’s mind.  In other words, there is an opposition between what one speaks and one what thinks in lying.

Loving the Truth

Because most people look at lying as mostly a legal issue, it is first important for us to discuss what makes lying wrong.  Our communicative faculties have as their end the ability to convey our thoughts.  When we lie, that is when we say something that is contrary to what we are thinking, we are abusing that power.  Notice that in this teleological (looking at the purpose of the power) approach circumstances do not matter.  Lying is always wrong.

Seen another way, we can make further sense of the intrinsically evil nature of lies.  Our Lord is pretty harsh in His condemnation of lying; calling those who lie the devil’s offspring “because he is the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).  There are no such thing as white lies.  A lie is an offense against the truth, the same reality that God, in His Providence, has orchestrated.  That is, all lies, are primarily offenses against God because we are rebelling against the way things are and revolting against His ordering of things.  It is our love for God and with gratitude for His Providential care that we should love the truth so much that we would never lie.

In this case, removing the white does not necessarily remove the grey area until we can answer what constitutes lying.  Recall Augustine’s definition of a lie as the willful communication of an idea that is contrary to what one is thinking.  This definition is preferred because it removes the situation where the speaker is wrong in their thinking from the realm of lying.  If your son did not know he had homework and then told you he didn’t then that would not be lying.  He communicated the truth as he understood it.  Similarly with joking or story telling where the purpose is to convey irony or illustrate a deeper truth.  Many people say “I was just kidding” when they are caught in a lie, so again this is something we all naturally seem to grasp.  Regardless, at a certain point—like when the person asks “are you joking?” –it ceases to be a means of laughter or truth telling and becomes lying

Intuitively we grasp that to forget or joke around is not the same thing as lying.  But it is the so-called hard cases that make it more difficult.  For example, there is the oft-cited situation of the Nazi asking where the Jews are hidden. It was an attempt, although not precise enough, to deal with these hard cases that motivated the authors of the Catechism to include the clause “who has a right to know the truth” in the original definition.  It would seem that the only way out of this Catch-22 would be to lie because it is “the lesser of two evils.”

Living the Truth

It is necessary as this point to make the distinction between deception and lying.  All lies are deception, but not all deception is lying.  There are times when deception might be necessary, especially when the interlocutor plans to use the information in order to commit some evil.  Although our communicative faculties have as their purpose the communication of the truth as we know it, this does not mean that we have an obligation to communicate the truth.  In fact, the obligation may be to remain silent such as when you are keeping a secret.  Likewise the obligation to communicate the truth does not mean it has to be communicated in the clearest fashion.   But because lying is intrinsically evil, that is, it can never be ordered to the good, it can never be a means of deception.

Protecting the truth from those who have no right to the truth is done then not through lying but through what is called Mental Reservation.  A mental reservation is a way of speaking such that the particular meaning of what one is saying is only one possible meaning.  There are two classes of mental reservation—a strict mental reservation involves restricting it in a way that the listener could never guess what you mean.  This would be a form of lying.  A broad mental reservation means that the average listener could figure out one’s meaning, even if it is not very clear.  Blessed John Henry Newman uses the classic example from St. Athanasius’ life when he was fleeing persecution and was asked “Have you seen Athanasius?”  The great enemy of the Arians replied, “Yes, he is close to here.”  Obviously there are a number of ways this could have been interpreted, but it was not a falsehood strictly speaking.  A similar approach could be taken with the example of the Nazis and the Jews but never in a way that would constitute lying.

What if however the soldiers had continued to probe Athanasius, forcing him to answer directly?  Broad mental reservation may be employed for as long as possible but when it fails, one may, out of a love for the truth, simply remain silent and suffer whatever consequences may come from that.  Likewise, many people tell other’s secrets simply because the other person asked and “I wasn’t going to lie.”  One can keep a secret without lying, but it may mean suffering at the hands of the interrogator.  However, before my teen readers see this as a Jedi mind trick and add it to their war-chest to use against their parents, this only applies when the person in question does not have a right to the truth.  When the person has a right to the truth, you have an obligation to give it to them in as clear a manner as possible.  There are some, especially in the Church, that rely on mental reservation to mask heresy.

In the commercial, Honest Abe, wanting to avoid lying, answers that the dress does make Mary Todd look a little fat.  Is this the only possible answer he could have given, or could he have exercised a mental reservation?  I’ll leave that for the readers to answer and debate in the comments section below…

Lead Us Not into Temptation?

God's Love, God's Will, Mercy, Suffering, Virtue, , , , ,

In his personal memoirs, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung described how he finally broke from Christianity because of Jesus’ apparently inconsistent portrait of God as simultaneously “love and goodness” and “tempter and destroyer.”  It is reasonable to think that Jung might not be alone in his conclusion, especially considering that each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we ask that God “lead us not into temptation.”  The implication is that He has the power to either tempt us or lead us away from it.  Whether we recognize it or not, there is a certain mistrust of God that cannot be totally put away until we deal with what seems like a messy contradiction.  Putting temptation within the proper framework will not only help us to address the intellectual difficulty surrounding the issue of temptation, but, more importantly, help us to see why they are a constituent element in our quest for holiness.

What God Desires

In constructing the frame, we must first start with a proper understanding of what God wants for each one of us.  God is not content with merely bestowing the divine life upon us.  He does not merely want to give us grace so we can go to heaven and be with Him.  No, if you can imagine it, He wants so much more.  He is not looking for test subjects for some cosmic social experiment, but sons and daughters who can stand on their own two feet and run towards Him.  He wants His glory to shine from every pore of our being but He also wants to bestow upon us the dignity of having worked for it.  Eternal life is a free gift, but He won’t cheapen it by asking for nothing in return.

Rather than getting bogged down in an explication of the mystery of man’s free will and God’s grace, we will accept as a given that they are cooperative powers.  When God plants the seed of eternal life (i.e. sanctifying grace) in our souls, He also implants the supernatural virtue of charity.  Now each of our natural virtues as well as the two theological virtues of faith and hope has charity as its center of gravity.  As the virtues increase, our capacity to harness the Supreme Goodness that is God’s life increase with it.  It is, to borrow a principle from St. Thomas, grace perfecting nature.

Grace and Nature

It seems that a digression is in order regarding this important Thomistic principle because it is relevant to a proper understanding of all that I just said.  Often it is paraphrased as “grace builds upon nature.”  This is more than just “saying the same thing.”  If you tell me “grace builds upon nature” I think, “I just need to try harder to be good” and God will give me grace.  It is as if I can achieve a certain amount of natural goodness and then God will give me grace.  In other words it is my hard work that comes first then grace.  Grace becomes essentially a superfluous add-on.  This is just a subtle form of the old heresy called (semi-)Pelagianism which denied original sin and taught that holiness was ours for the taking.

What I have proposed is not “becoming the best version of yourself”, that is a good natural life, but instead a path to an abundant supernatural life.  It is grace that comes first.  No amount of work on our part can change that.  Without the initial installment (ordinarily through Baptism) or a re-installment (through Sacramental Confession), we can never get there no matter how good we are.  Heaven is not the natural result of a good life, it is the supernatural consequence of a holy life.  All holy people are good people, but not all good people are holy.  It is grace at the beginning and then grace all the way through.  Grace perfects nature, not builds upon it.

What we are talking about then is our cooperation with grace through a growth in the virtues and how this is achieved.  The classic definition of a virtue as the firm and habitual dispositions toward the good needs to be examined.  We instinctively get the habitual part, understanding that it requires more than solitary acts that look like virtue to actually be virtuous.  We mistakenly think then to grow in virtue we just need to keep repeating the act.  For an increase in virtue however the first part, that is the firmness, is what needs to be emphasized.  It is only an act done with greater vehemence that wins the increase in virtue.

Temptation from its Proper Perspective

Only when we grasp God’s desire for our personal perfection and what that perfection consists in, we can look at temptation in a proper light.  Temptation is not so much a push to do something bad, but an opportunity to love and do what is good all the more.  It is an indispensable means for a growth in virtue.  Lacking any resistance, we are content with feeble acts of virtue because they “get the job done.”  Virtue is often compared to a muscle with a “use it or lose it” mentality.  But God is calling us to be spiritual bodybuilders, becoming huge in our holiness.  Muscle grows with an increase in resistance and so it is with virtue.  It might not be the only way to increase the intensity of our virtuous acts, but it is the most effective.  “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” is not just a mission statement from Jesus, Life Coach, but a command from the one Who always equips us to fulfill it.

Addressing Jung’s objection that I opened with will also help us to see how best to make use of temptations.  It is not God who tempts but instead He is the one Who allows temptations to occur for our own good.  If there is no opportunity for growth then He will not allow it.  This truth is so important to hold onto, especially in the midst of strong temptations.  What you shouldn’t hold onto is the hackneyed Christian maxim that “God does not give you more than you can handle.”  This is not only not true, but also counterproductive.  God absolutely gives us more than we can handle, but He never abandons us, spotting us in our spiritual workouts.  But like a good spotter, He only gives us enough help for us to keep the bar moving and does not pull it off of us.  Even in being overcome, we still have the opportunity to grow.  No saint was devoid of humility, a virtue that only grows with more intense acceptance of humiliations.

Before closing I should mention one thing that may not be clear from what I have said.  It seems that if God has allowed a temptation to occur for my good, then I must simply face it head on.  Fleeing from them means that I will have missed the opportunity for growth.  Fleeing in the face of temptation, especially those of the flesh, is one of the ways in which we grow in virtue.  The rapidity and vehemence in which we avoid what would be evil is exactly what causes our growth.

We can see why it is that God then never frees us from temptation wholly.  As Sirach says, “when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trial” (Sir 2:1).  “To be human,” Aquinas says, “is to be tempted, but to consent is to be devlish.”  We do not pray to be freed from temptation in the Lord’s Prayer, but instead that we may not be led into temptation, that is, to consent to it.    Unfortunately, Jung was wrong.  Temptations come from a loving Father, Who wants nothing more than our perfection.

On Free Will

Freedom, God's Will, Moralilty

What do we mean when we say that man has free will?  To address this question, we must first look at man in his totality, both body and spirit.  Man exercises powers of both animals and angels.  Each of these powers is naturally inclined towards a given object.  For example, hearing is naturally inclined towards sound and eyesight towards light.  If you clap beside someone’s ear or pass something before his eyes (assuming they are not diseased in any way), then he cannot help but hear the clap and see the thing.  Our spiritual powers of knowing and willing likewise are naturally inclined towards truth and goodness.  Focusing only on the will at the moment, we can say that the will is fixed towards always choosing the Good.

This is an important point to understand because it often leads to moral confusion.  It is not possible for us to act contrary to the Good.  Everything we choose is because we have perceived it to be good, even if we are objectively wrong.  As a thought experiment, think about the person who commits suicide.  Why do they do it ultimately?  Because they deem it better to be dead than alive.  So too with the teenage girl who cuts herself—the pain of the cut is better than feeling the interior angst.  We could come up with any number of other examples, but the point is that no one can choose something they know to be bad for its own sake.

Given that we are bound by necessity to choose the Good, in what ways can we say that we have free will?  We have free will with respect to individual goods.  This is because each individual good merely participates in the Supreme Good itself, namely God.  Thus it is lacking in some way and we are free to choose it or to choose another (albeit also limited good) in its place.  But this is not the only manner in which we can exercise our free will.  We can also choose the means towards those good and acts associated with them.

For example, because it is a limited good, I am free to choose to become a pianist or not.  Once I decide to pursue that goal, I am free to choose what kind of piano I will buy.  I am also free to choose how I will practice or even if I will practice at all.

Pin_puppet

This also helps us to understand the question as to how, if we cannot sin in heaven, we could still have free will.  The idea that the will is naturally inclined to the Good means when we sin, we are actually choosing only what are apparent goods and not real goods.  In Heaven because we are caught up in Goodness itself, there are no apparent goods, only real ones.  Therefore, we can no longer sin.

This naturally leads us to wonder about the relationship between our free will and God.  When I said that no one can force our will, this includes God Himself.  This immediately presents a problem in that it seems that God is then limited.  But properly understood this is not a limitation at all because He has the power to change our wills.  While this seems like a mere intellectual sleight of hand, it is an important distinction for us to understand.  God is always the divine pursuer and lover.  He will never force Himself upon us like a rapist but will woo us like a lover.

God can change our wills in two ways.  The first is to create a desire in us for some good that was not there before.  The second is by introducing what St. Thomas calls a “form.”  This could be something like an actual grace in which our minds our enlightened as to what is really a good for us here and now or by strengthening our wills to achieve the concrete good.  In either case however it is still the person who chooses, even if he has had assistance from God in knowing and desiring.

St. Thomas offers a helpful analogy (De Veritate q.22, a.8) that makes the distinction clearer.  He notes that a stone has a natural inclination (i.e. gravity) to fall to the earth.  To throw it up in the air, is to violently alter its inclination.  But God could also change the inclination by removing gravity so that the stone had a new inclination to go up.  In that way, the stone would still be acting “freely” according to its own inclination.

With a proper understanding of free will, not as the power to do whatever I want, but the power to want what is good, comes the ability to act with authentic freedom.  It helps us to see freedom not as an end itself (mere license) but as given to us for a specific purpose, moral excellence.  That is why the Second Vatican Council called freedom “an exceptional sign of the divine image within man” (Gaudium et Spes, 17).  God is totally free not just because He is God, but because He is Good.  His laws for mankind are only blueprints for sharing in His Goodness.  In this Lenten season when we atone for all of our failures of living freedom excellently, may we embrace the true freedom to live as children of God.

 

Knowing God’s Will

God's Will

Aside from its self-refuting character, one of the reasons that I find the position of Sola Scriptura untenable is because there are so many places in the Bible where we find seeming contradictions.  Without an authoritative interpreter of Scripture we are left, at best, scratching our heads.  The best interpretive method in this case then is to simply ignore either passage or both.  Most heresies are a direct result of not finding a way to hold two apparently contradictory things in tension.  But it was not the will of God that we should not understand His Revelation even if we might have to wrestle with it.  With the idea of knowing the will of God in mind, I would like to address one of these apparent contradictions today; namely, how it can be that God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1Tim2:5) and yet “there are many who enter the gate to destruction” (Mt 7:13).

To begin it is necessary to frame the question properly because people often try to solve it by merely referring to man’s free will. That is certainly as aspect of it, but we need to make sure we keep man’s free will properly situated within the mystery of God’s Providence. The mistake comes about in equating our own free will with God’s free will. But they are different—our free will is contingent upon the good that is present, God’s is not. In other words, if God is omnipotent then He depends on nothing outside of Himself. What He wills, happens. He might will that they be brought about by free will decisions (that He already knew) or He might use other causes, but God is not in any way be dependent on our free will decisions. A God who is dependent is not really God.

While this keeps us from taking a short cut around the problem, it does not address it. To address the problem we need to make a further distinction with respect to God’s will. We can really on St. Thomas to help us with this because as he routinely shows in the Summa Theologiae, he was a master of making distinctions that explained away what many viewed as contradictions. When he addressed the question at hand he made the distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will.

Antecedent will is an expression of one’s will prior to considering all the circumstances and facts surrounding a particular situation. Once those facts are taken into account, a judgment is expressed through the consequent will. Aquinas offers an analogy to help us better understand by presenting a just judge who wills that men should live freely. However once an individual man is found to be a murderer, the judge wills the good that the person should be justly punished. It is the judge’s consequent will that all men live freely while it is his antecedent will that a particular man should suffer punishment. This analogy helps us examine St. Paul’s words in that we understand that he is expressing God’s antecedent will rather than His consequent will, which allows some men to be eternally punished.

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This distinction allows us to go a little deeper and examine the problem of evil. God’s antecedent will is what He wills for a thing in isolation. He considers only individual parts of His plan (individual men) and not the entire plan. While it is true that God creates out of love is true, it is more accurate to say God creates to share His goodness. It is His goodness that He finds in us that makes us lovable. Therefore His consequent will for creation is to produce the most goodness as a whole and not as sum of individual parts.

What does this have to do with evil?  God will permit evil only in order to manifest His goodness to the greatest extent.  Without the presence of evil, much goodness would be lacking in the universe.  This is so foundational to our faith that we can often overlook it.  Without the evil of Adam’s fall, the greatest good of the Incarnation would never have happened.  “O happy fault, that gained us such a Redeemer!”(*see note below)

This has practical implications for us all. In the presence of suffering and evil we will find good. We all know this, but I think we don’t realize that it is not just generic “good” but very concrete and specific goods. These very specific goods for us would not come about any other way. That is the only reason why any evil is allowed to be there—because there is a particular (more accurately many) good attached to it. If we truly believe this then we do not need to shy away from it but instead look straight at the Cross so that we might pluck the fruit from it. This is not optimism but the very truth of reality. Optimism says “it could always be worse. I could have XYZ instead.” The realist says “this could be worse. I could miss this fruit.” In truth the only truly evil thing is to miss the good that a particular evil has attached itself to. Embrace the Cross and taste the sweetness of the fruit that Our Savior has left attached to the true Tree of Life for you.

 

**NOTE: I realize there has been debate between Franciscans and Dominicans as to whether the Incarnation would have still happened without the Fall, I would lean towards the Dominican view that the Incarnation would not have happened because everywhere in Sacred Scripture (e.g. Lk 19:10, 1Tim 2:15) suggest that the Incarnation happened solely because man sinned. It may be a speculative question but by speculating on it we see the great love of God Who seeks out the lost sheep while explaining the very reason He allowed us to be lost to begin with.