[The Spirit of Catholicism] [Previous] [Next]
Sanctify them in truth; thy word is truth (Jn. xvii, 17).
According to the Catholic conception of justification the redemptive function of the Church does not consist only in bringing the Kingdom of God to man, but also in bringing man to the Kingdom of God, i.e. in educating his moral will, by preaching and discipline, for Christ and His grace, and in establishing him ever more and more firmly in this grace. We have to consider therefore, besides that pastoral activity of the Church which is sacramental and brings grace to men, her educative activity also, that is to say her earnest endeavor that "the tree planted by the running waters shall bring forth its fruit in due season and that its leaf shall not fall off (Ps. i, 3).
Of primary importance for this educative task is the Church's claim to authority, to the special divine authority which she asserts in her preaching of the word of God. It is true that non-Catholic bodies also preach of Christ and His Kingdom, and we thank God that they do so. But the Catholic Church alone preaches like her divine Master, like one "having power" (Mt. vii, 29). By the unbroken series of her bishops she stands in a real, historical connection with Christ and His apostles. She alone can truly say, Lo, here is Christ! here are the apostles! And the unimpaired unity of her faith and love guarantees that her objective connection with Christ is a connection of the spirit also, inspired by the Spirit of Pentecost. No mere human authority can have intruded itself here where Christ alone preaches. As the one group of our Lord's disciples extended through space and time, the Church and the Church alone can stand before men and claim for her preaching the authority which Jesus gave to His disciples in the words: "He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me" (Lk. x, 16). Therefore the Catholic hearkens to the Church's teaching with unfeigned respect and unlimited confidence. He does not pick and choose, or exercise private judgment, or withhold his assent, or take up an evasive attitude. For him the words Christ and the Church form one phrase and connote a single thing. So that the Church's preaching has an overwhelming power and an absolute validity. It sets a standard, and it is a law. But it is not a law that comes upon the Catholic as something external and alien to himself, to which he submits resignedly as he would to the ukase of an absolute monarch. Catholicism does not recognize any heteronomous morality of that sort, which submits itself to some alien law because and in so far as it is an alien law. The theologians are unanimous in deprecating that spiritual state wherein a man's moral activity is determined only by fear and compulsion. The Catholic recognizes in the ordinary and extraordinary teaching of the Church the expression of God's will. He knows that the Church does not make the divine law of faith and morals, but only authoritatively attests it, its contents and its validity. The law is the requirement of God, nor is it as such an arbitrary dictate of the divine will—no important theologian, not even Duns Scotus, has ever understood the divine law in that way—but the revelation of the divine Wisdom, Sanctity and Goodness. Its positive ordinances represent the ideal of humanity as the eternal Wisdom and Love desire it to be realized, and the new man as God's design would have him. Of its essence, therefore, the law of God does not impose a burden on human nature, but is an enriching, fulfilling and perfecting of it. It is a life-giving truth and a life-giving law. And therefore the Catholic affirms it in the light of his practical reason and by a free choice of his will makes it his own, so that it becomes his own law, an act of his moral freedom, a determination of his moral conscience. Therefore conscience makes the objective law its own. In that sense is it that conscience is the proximate and immediate norm of human action; but it is a norm which is orientated to the objective law. There is no room here for the arbitrary. Conscience, to use St. Thomas's words, is the "coming of divine precept to man" (perventio praecepti divini ad hominem, De veritate, Q. xvii, A. 4, ad 2). For in a normal man the rational will that operates in the decisions of conscience is ordinated to nothing else than to the realm of the objectively good and holy, that is, to the will of God. Therefore the moral life of a Catholic is not governed by an alien law nor by a subjective law, but by the will of God, inasmuch as his conscience considers itself bound by the objective norms of divine revelation.
Nevertheless it is possible that a man's practical reason may sometimes fail, not recognizing God's will plainly and clearly as such or being involved in invincible error. In such a case he is not bound to the objective law, but to that which appears to his conscience to be God's will, although the judgment of his conscience be objectively false. No less an authority than St. Thomas stresses this obligation of the erroneous conscience. Even in the case of so vital a matter as belief in Christ a man would act wrongly who should profess this faith against the judgment of his (erroneous) conscience (Summa, Prima Secundae, Q. xix, A. 5; cf. Quod lib. iii, 27).
May a Catholic ever be justified in refusing to obey the church? Let us treat this question more fully, for it illustrates in a unique way the decisive importance which the Church assigns to conscience, and the relation of the subjective dictates of conscience to the objective ordinances of law.
Being conscious that she is the infallible teacher of revealed truth and the sole effective institute for salvation, the Church can never admit that Catholics are in the same condition as those who have not yet come to the faith, so that they can have just cause for regarding the faith which they have already received by the authoritative teaching of the Church as doubtful, and for withholding their assent until they have completed a scientific demonstration of the credibility and truth of their faith.[1]
Therefore, according to the Vatican Council, the spiritual relation of the Catholic to the great kingdom of supernatural reality and its problems is profoundly different from that of the non-Catholic. The Council lays it down that the divine evidences, to which the Church and the Church only can appeal, are too many (multa) and too wonderful (mira), for a Catholic's faith to be disturbed by a serious and objective doubt. The Church's claim to the truth is so deeply set in the hard granite of historical facts and of logical consistency, and is so intimately bound-up with the ultimate and profoundest requirements of conscience, with its reverence before that which is holy and divine, that it can stand fast and prevail over any possible inquiry, whether past, present or future. Moreover the Catholic cannot become the prey of any merely subjective doubt, resting upon false presuppositions or erroneous deductions, so long as he does not proudly and arrogantly exclude that light of grace which is refused to no man of good will.
This light will always be clear and strong enough to reveal the sources of any misunderstanding and to prevent him sinking into invincible error (error invincibilis). The Catholic is therefore generally protected from that radical attitude which deliberately detaches a man inwardly from the professed faith of Catholic Christianity and, reveling in a purely negative criticism, embarks upon research about Christ and the Church as though neither existed. On the other hand the Church does not compel the Catholic to shut his eyes to the religious problems which arise, nor conviction of conscience. Even though the judgment of his conscience be objectively false and even though it be not in its genesis ethically irreproachable, yet he is bound to follow conscience and conscience alone.
In the light of this fact it is an unfair and untenable charge—which does not become more tenable by constant repetition—to say that the Church enslaves conscience by requiring an unqualified obedience in matters of faith and by claiming divine authority. As the authorized preacher of the truth, the Church will never cease to give her authoritative witness to it and to oblige all consciences to accept it. Yet she does not seek to overpower conscience, but to convince it. She seeks internal, not merely external assent. And when a man cannot give this internal assent, she leaves his conscience to the mercy of God and sets him free. That is not fanaticism or severity, but a service to truth and sincerity. For the Church cannot and may not endure that there should be some among her members who are Catholics only in name. She requires that all such men should draw the logical consequence from their new state of conscience and leave her communion. And in this she protects the sincerity of their consciences as much as she guards the sincerity of her own being. The Church does no injury to "liberal" laymen or theologians when she excludes them from communion with her children. On the contrary such people do an injury to the Church if they remain in her communion when they have lost her faith.
In conclusion we say that the Church's careful consideration of the rights of conscience is by no means incompatible with her resolute assertion of her divinely established authority. On the contrary the first is pre-supposed by the second. The law of the Church is intended to operate no other wise than in and through conscience, and from conscience it gets its penetrating force and comprehensive influence. The Church does not supplicate or discuss terms with conscience; she makes a direct demand upon it, and requires that it surrender itself to the word of God as proclaimed by her. Her word is power, and men need this strong word of divine power. They cannot live long by a purely philosophical morality, which is constructed by themselves and owes nothing to authority. Such morality is like "the perfume that remains in an empty bottle." The Church's principle of authority, in its powerful forward sweep, has a stimulating power which arouses conscience and forces it to scale the heights. When the Church speaks to conscience, there can be no subjectivism or antinomianism, no doubt or skepticism. Hence the simplicity, solidity, strength and sureness of aim of the Catholic rule of life. And hence also the comprehensive character of the Church's educative influence. The radiance of her authoritative teaching penetrates to and illuminates those profound depths to which no ray of purely philosophical knowledge can reach. By the categorical imperative of her preaching the Church has won infinitely more souls to a better life than all the moralists together, whether of pre-Christian or post-Christian times, who could not convert so much as the street in which they lived" (Voltaire).
The educative power of the Church lies secondly in the special emphasis laid in her preaching on the other world and on the supernatural, i.e. on the eschatological element. "We have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come" (Hebr. xiii, 14). No truth of the faith is so deeply impressed upon the Catholic as the declaration at the beginning of the catechism: "God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in the next." That is the Catholic's deepest reality, the reality of the eternal God. In respect of that reality every other natural or intellectual fact is secondary and subordinate. Certainly he regards such natural things as real and as valuable, but he does not rest in them as in his last end. He regards them somewhat as a ship in which he is for the moment traveling, and which he knows that he must presently leave. He acts in the spirit of that saying of our Lord which is inscribed on a gateway in Northern India: "This world is but a bridge; pass over it, build not thy dwelling here." His soul tends continually forwards and upwards. Every day the liturgy of the Mass summons him: Sursum corda! And everyday he answers: Habemus ad Dominum.
Hence the Catholic outlook on life has these two characteristics. In the first place it is easy and light-hearted in its attitude towards the troubles of everyday life, and has a serene detachment. Our Lord's saying concerning the lilies of the field, which labor not neither do they spin, and yet are arrayed in greater beauty than Solomon in all his glory, is deeply imprinted on the Catholic mind. And indeed Catholicism has for that very reason been charged with being culturally retrograde. If it be meant by this that the genuine Catholic does not regard culture as the supreme and ultimate value, or as an end in itself, then the charge is a true one. For the Catholic believes too firmly and really in the heaven of the next world, to be able to believe in a heaven on earth. There have even been Catholics—it is true—and there will always be such, who have lived so completely for the eternal hope, that they have despised and spurned the earthly and natural, and have forgotten the divine injunction to cultivate the earth. That was and is an exaggeration of the Catholic ideal. We have already shown how the Church fought the Gnostic sects of the early centuries and of the Middle Ages, defended natural and bodily values and asserted man's right to the goods and joys of life. The Catholic ideal teaches us not to destroy nature but to transfigure it. It is an ideal which embraces both nature and supernature, both this world and the next, for both nature and supernature belong to the life of the Catholic. If he disown either of these, he is a heretic; whereas the true Catholic is one who sets them in their right relation to each other. Every natural thing, every natural passion, including the sexual impulse, is a gift of God and therefore good. But it is a transitory good, a good that points beyond itself, a secondary and subordinate good. It does not acquire eternal value until it is affirmed in God. So the true Catholic loves the earthly good, but does not love it like a hungry slave who would eat himself to death on it, but rather like the wandering minstrel from whom the gift elicits a glad song of gratitude to the giver. Wherever Catholicism is a living force, the poisonous plant of materialism cannot grow. Moreover the exclusive service of this world, devotion to work for work's sake, to gain for gain's sake, and all arid utilitarianism are alien to the Catholic spirit. According to Max Weber and Troltsch the native soil of capitalism is Calvinism, and it was born in Puritan England and Scotland. Every unprejudiced social psychologist who compares the manifestations of the popular soul in Catholic Bavaria or the Catholic Rhineland with those say of Saxony or Thuringia will recognize a characteristic difference in temper and outlook. The life of this world seems to the Catholic too unimportant for him to take it very seriously. He is really serious only in regard to God and His Kingdom. So he has kept a certain serenity, and a certain childlike indifference. And it is mainly from this child-like quality that he gets his feeling for and understanding of serene and unstudied art, and especially popular art. Along with this child-like character he has humility of spirit and is reverent towards holiness and excellence. The Catholic has no sort of passion for autonomy and self-glorification. From this point of view, as well as from others, Kant's "moral autonomy" is a product of Protestantism. And the Catholic has not lost his interest in life or his faculty of admiration, and therefore he is still able to believe and to pray. Joyful trust in God, child-like simplicity, humility: these are the elements of the Catholic character. There is no need to point out how closely this spirit corresponds with the temper which our Lord requires for His Kingdom.
The second characteristic quality of Catholicism, arising out of the Church's proclamation of the next world and forcible emphasis on man's supernatural end, is its ascetical trend. The Catholic attitude towards the supernatural, with its conviction that earthly things have only a limited value, leads to that "tantum quantum" principle which has received its exact and classical expression in the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. According to this principle, earthly things are to be used only so far as they are serviceable for the attainment of the supreme and ultimate end; and they are to be renounced in so far as they withdraw one from God and become ends in themselves. When any earthly good threatens to become an end in itself, then our Lord's words hold: "If thy eye scandalize thee, pluck it out!" "He that doth not take up his cross and follow me, is not worthy of me." In this way renunciation and patient endurance become part of the life of the Catholic. Yet they are not to be regarded as other than ministering forces, subservient to the love of God and our neighbor; for love must be our supreme directive force. The new life of Christianity is founded on the precept "Love God with thy whole heart and thy neighbor as thyself." The purpose of renunciation and asceticism— which is the methodical practice of renunciation—is to set the soul free for the exercise of this love. They are not meant to destroy man's sensitive impulses and passions, but to control them, so that they may be directed convergently towards the one great goal, the formation of the new man of a whole-hearted and unselfish love, and may not, like untamed natural forces, break their banks and produce ruin and destruction. The purpose of asceticism is love and love alone. When it is treated as an end in itself, when men renounce for renunciation's sake, when they fast, take the discipline, and practice celibacy for the sake of these things, when the spirit of rivalry and competition enters in, then their asceticism is no longer Catholic, but Gnostic and pagan in character. The practice of asceticism, the deliberate methodical exercise of self-control, makes our souls free and strong, so that, as St. Paul requires of them, they exercise and practice "charity from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and an unfeigned faith" (1 Tim. i, 5). For us men, bound as we are to the body and burdened from our birth with the effects of original sin and of the passions of our ancestors, asceticism is an indispensable necessity, so that we may not only hear the Word of God but do it. It is a fundamental element in our Lord's teaching and must therefore occupy a principal place in the Church's educative effort. All the ordinances of the Church, and in particular the law of fasting, have for their end the training of the faithful in self-control. The Church's priests endeavor systematically in sermons and instructions, but especially in confession, to remove all weeds and evil growths from the souls of her children, so that they may grow more and more like to Christ. And to these normal pastoral methods the Church adds such extraordinary ones as retreats and public missions. Who can estimate the blessings and the beneficial effect of the countless public missions held by Franciscans and Capuchins, Jesuits and Redemptorists, in town and village and for every stratum of society. Such missions are a rich source of well-being, not only for the religious and moral life of our people, but for their national life also. And a retreat, for which a man goes to some retreat-house and there in retirement and under the guidance of an experienced director orders his interior life and makes God supreme in it: such a retreat is a school of the soul. It is a means whereby a man may refresh and recreate his soul, become spiritually sound and strong, and re- discover himself in God. Karl Ludwig Schleich, late Professor of Surgery in Berlin, has some remarkable words about the "Spiritual Exercises" of St. Ignatius of Loyola. "I am profoundly convinced," he writes, "and can therefore say it quite confidently, that with these exercises and these rules in his hand a man might reform all our asylums, and prevent at least two-thirds of their inmates from ever entering them."[2]
Celibacy and monachism are to be understood in the light of the fundamental purpose of asceticism, namely the methodical training of the will. When a Catholic priest vows perpetual chastity, and when a monk binds himself solemnly to the observance of the "evangelical counsels," i.e. poverty, chastity and obedience, neither in the case of the priest nor of the monk is it a mere matter of voluntary renunciation, as though renunciation of itself had a moral value. They esteem the moral goodness of marriage too frankly and too completely for that. They regard marriage as a great and holy thing, as a sacrament, as being indissoluble and founded upon the faithful love of Jesus for His Church. The Catholic priest should be secure beyond all others from the suspicion of despising marriage, for he confesses and preaches the sacramental dignity of marriage as a tenet of the Church's faith. Why then does he renounce it for himself? And why does the monk go further and renounce gold and riches, and that great good of being his own lord and master? St. Thomas[3] gives us the decisive reason. It is that they may be free for the things of God. And long before St. Thomas, St. Paul had said as much: "He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please God. But he that is with a wife is solicitous for the things of the world, how he may please his wife" (1 Cor. vii, 32-33). The Catholic priest and the religious are by their vocation devoted to the things of God. It is their business to establish and propagate God's Kingdom, not only in themselves, but also in others, in the world. This task is so sublime, so sacred and delicate, so difficult, responsible and sacrificial, that it demands and engages the best of a man's being and precludes family life. A man cannot be a good apostle and the father of a family at one and the same time. Our Lord Himself was unmarried, and He spoke the noteworthy words about those who have voluntarily become eunuchs. The apostles left everything and followed Jesus. Although they were when called, with the exception of St. John and St. Paul, married men, yet after they had undertaken the apostolate they no longer lived as married men, but as servants of Christ, as men, in St. Paul's words, who "had made themselves free as to all, to become the slaves of all" (1 Cor. ix, 19). Consequently celibacy derives its meaning, its power and its serious purpose from the apostolate, from resolute self-surrender to Christ and His Kingdom. The love and care which a married man gives to the restricted circle of his family, are given by the priest and monk to their Lord and Master, and to the thousands of souls entrusted to them by the Lord, to the sick, to children and to sinners. So the priest's personality becomes richer and deeper, the more he sacrifices himself and gives himself to others. What he loses in spiritual values by his renunciation of family life, he gets back in richer abundance by his life of prayer and by his loving pastoral activity. The Church encompasses the priest's life with many safeguards, and sanctifies it by the obligation of the daily of Fice and by the frequent celebration of Holy Mass, so that the ideal priest—there must always be occasional hirelings—cannot help but be a pattern to his flock. The Gospel of the Kingdom of God, of the supernatural and other-worldly, of the precious pearl for which one should give up everything, is personified in him, in a form that is manifest and inspiring. The Catholic does not receive from his priest nothing but pious and benevolent words, nor does he love him merely for his noble character. He also expects from and finds in him the uncompromising spirit of the Gospel and a literal belief that the "kingdom of heaven suffereth violence." Hence the reverence which Catholics show towards their priests. F. Nietzsche observes that "Luther allowed priests to marry. But three quarters of the reverence of which mankind . . . is capable, rests upon the belief that a man who is exceptional in this respect will be exceptional in others also."[4] And Schopenhauer goes so far as to say that "Protestantism, by eliminating asceticism and its central belief in the meritoriousness of celibacy, practically rejected the very core of Christianity, and in that respect Protestantism must be regarded as a falling away from Christianity."[5]
That which holds of the Catholic priesthood in general, holds in a special way of Catholic monachism. It is the literal following of our Lord's teaching concerning the pearl of great price and the treasure hidden in the field, and in particular of His counsel, "If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast and give to the poor.... And come, follow me!" (Mt. xix, 21). Our Lord's gospel in all its spiritual power, stimulating force and immense austerity, is objectivised in the religious life. That life implies no new morality, nor is it regulated by any new ideal of perfection, other than that which is common to all Christians. The religious is not able to do anything higher than imitate in his own life the example of Jesus, than exercise a perfect love of God and of his neighbor. And that ideal is the common ideal of all men. But this single ideal can be striven for in infinitely various ways, according to a man's education and vocation in life, according to his personal gifts and aptitudes, and according to the special opportunities and guidance which come to him. Now of all possible ways of following Jesus, that way is the most magnanimous and courageous, if we regard the matter objectively, which entails a resolute renunciation of all those values and goods which are able to allure man's senses and to hamper his freedom in seeking God. Therefore the religious life is objectively the best way and the surest way to realize the Christian ideal. But in saying this we by no means imply that it is also the best way subjectively, that is to say the best way for all men. For men are too differently made, and external circumstances are too various, to allow of any one way of life being equally good and profitable for all. According to the wise designs of God's Providence the great majority of men are so made that the subjectively best way to perfection for them is to live and work in the world. Yet it remains true that, regarded in its objective nature and in abstraction from all particular circumstances, the religious life is the strongest and purest expression of the high aspirations which pulsate through the Body of Christ.
It is, however, only a way to perfection, and not perfection itself. The evangelical counsels, as St. Thomas explains, are "certain instruments for the attainment of perfection."[6] They are nothing but specially suitable means for maintaining and deepening that unselfish, holy love, which St. Paul celebrates in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (Chap. xiii), and which constitutes the essence of holiness and of the Christian character. If this love be not present and alive, then the religious life is being violated in its profoundest meaning. St. Paul's words would then apply: "If I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor . . . and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (1 Cor. xiii, 3). Monasteries are meant to be homes of love, shrines of the Holy Spirit, schools of the following of Christ. All their asceticism, all their vows and rules, aim only at the one thing necessary and seek to form the man of the new love, the man whose life is wholly love of God and his neighbor.
In saying that, we have described the ideal for which Holy Church works in her educative activity. That ideal is the man of perfect love, the man who has put away from him all self-seeking and who enlarges his little, narrow heart until it becomes a sacred temple of God in which the fire of sacrifice burns, the man who every day fulfills the words of St. Paul: "I most gladly will spend and be spent myself for your souls" (2 Cor. xii, 15). It would be a pleasant task to describe the noble fruit produced by the Church's action in all the saintly figures of her history. How exceedingly various are the ways by which they followed Christ, and how manifold their forms of saintliness. By the side of the saintly hermit and the ascetic of the desert stands the social saint, the saint of the great city and of the industrial classes. By the side of the foreign missionary stands the saint who gave his life to cripples, or idiots, or to the criminals condemned to the galleys. By the side of the saint who is arrayed in robe of penance and rough girdle, stands the saint of the salon, the refined and saintly man of the world. By the side of the saint of strict enclosure and constant silence stands the joyous friar, who calls the swallow his sister and the moon his brother. By the side of the saint of divine learning stands the saint who despised all knowledge save of Christ. By the side of the contemplative mystic, the world-conquering apostle. By the side of the saint who does penance in filth and rags, and values ignominy beyond all things else, stands the saint robed in imperial purple and crowned with the glory of the tiara. By the side of the saint who fights and is slain for his faith, stands the saint who suffers and dies for it. By the side of the innocent saint stands the penitent. By the side of the saint of child-like meekness, the saint who must wrestle with God until He bless Him.
How infinitely various are all these saintly figures! Each one is marked with the stamp of his own time, some very plainly so. There are many, indeed, with whom we can no longer establish any genuinely- sympathetic contact. For there is but One who is ever modem, never out of date, One only who belongs to all time. Yet however much the saints may be marked with the stamp of their time, and however imperfectly they may represent the perfection of Christ, there is but one spirit that animates them all and makes them all dear to us, and it is the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of His great and holy love. Their lives were lived according to the word, "The charity of Christ presseth us."
And around all these outstanding saintly forms, in whom God's power and grace have won their most beautiful triumphs, shine the thousands of lesser lights, the countless little flames that have caught fire at the Heart of Jesus—from the little child that dies in the fatherly arms of God to the old man who has barely escaped the dangers of life and sorrowfully prays, "Lord, be merciful to me a sinner!"
O world! a sea of love and light engulfs thee. O world, so poor and cold! how art thou so rich, how art thou so fair? . . . O Holy Church!
Endnotes
1. Vatican Council, Sess. III, cap. 3, canon 6.
2. K Schleich, "Vom Schaltwerk der Gedanken," 1917, p. 143 ff.
3. "Summa Theol., Secunda Secundae," Q. CLII, Art. 5.
4. "Frohliche Wissenschaft," 1887, p. 295.
5. "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," ed. Grisebach, Vol. II, p. 736. Eng. tr., "The world as will and idea" (London 1883-6), Vol. III, p. 447-8.
6. Op. cit., Q. CLXXXIV, Art. 3.
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