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The three Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Communion, by making all Christians the free, equal brethren of one another, and all the sons of God, incorporated in His only Son Jesus Christ, bestow upon them Messianic dignity and sovereign rights. Man has the right to be the son of God, for it was for this that God created him. But because he is only by right, and not immediately in fact, the son of God, Man has also the privilege of making himself in reality what ideally he is already and of realizing the principle of his being by his own act. Thus, the duties of Man flow from his sovereign rights as the conditions which he must fulfil in order to exercise his sovereignty.
Since Man is, to begin with, a son of God only in principle, his first duty is to recognize that he is not so in fact, to recognize the vast distance between what he is and what he ought to be. This is the negative condition of all positive progress, the supreme duty of Man, the duty of humility, marked by the Church in the Sacrament of Penance and Confession. Protestantism, as though to ensure in advance the impenitence of its adherents, has rejected this sacrament. But more to blame than the Protestant heretics are those false Orthodox who would confine the duty of humility to individuals and would leave the units of society, states and nations, without hope of repentance, to their vanity, pride, egoism, and fratricidal hatred. Such was not the attitude of the prophets of the Old Testament, who called upon cities, nations and rulers of states to repent. Nor was it the attitude of that unique prophet of the New Testament who in his letters to the angels of the Churches upbraided them for the public vices and sins of their communities.
At the root of all human evil, all sins and crimes both individual and social, lies a weakness, a radical infirmity which does not allow us to be in reality sons of God. It is the chaotic principle, the primordial basis of all created being. Reduced to impotence (or to pure potency) in Man, but roused anew by the fall of Adam, it has become the basic element of our limited and self-centered existence which, clinging to its infinitesimal fragment of true being, desires to make this fragment the one and only center of the universe. This self-centered assertion, which isolates and separates us from the true divine totality, can only be destroyed by love. Love is the power which makes us inwardly surpass the confines of our given existence, reunites us to the Whole by an indissoluble bond and, by making us in reality sons of God, causes us to share in the fullness of His essential Wisdom and in the enjoyment of His Spirit. The task of love is the integration of Man and, through Man, of all created existence. A threefold union is to be achieved by (1) the reintegration of the individual Man by uniting him in a true and eternal union with his natural complement, Woman; (2) the re-integration of social Man by the reuniting of the individual to the human collectivity in a fixed and stable union; (3) the re-integration of universal Man by the restoration of his intimate and living union with the whole of nature, which is the organic body of humanity.
Man is inwardly separated from Woman by the desire of possessing her externally in the name of a blind and irrational passion. The two are re-united by the power of true love which identifies their two lives in their absolute substance eternally fixed in God, and only admits the material relationship as an ultimate consequence and external realization of this mystical and moral relationship. It is love at its most concentrated and most concrete, and therefore at its deepest and most intense, the true basis and general type of every other love and every other union. The word of God has ordained and blessed it, and the Church perpetuates this blessing in the Sacrament of Marriage which makes true sexual love the first positive basis of the divine-human integration. For it is this sanctified love which creates the true individual elements of the perfect society, the incarnate Sophia.
But in order to constitute social Man, the individual element, re-integrated by true Marriage, must be re-united to the fixed collective form. The individual is inwardly separated from society by the desire for pre-eminence and external domination in the name of his own personality. He re-enters the unity of society by the moral act of renunciation, the subordination of his will, his own interests, his whole ego to the will and the interests of a superior being recognized as such. If married love is essentially a co-ordination of two equal though different existences, social love is bound to express itself by a definite subordination of social units of different orders. Here it is not the brutal egoism of Man which must be shattered by an intense emotion impelling it to identification with another being; that has already been done by sexual love. It is the individual existence which must be linked to a general hierarchy whose gradations are defined by the formal relation existing between the whole and its parts of greater or less significance. The perfection of social love cannot then consist in an intensity of subjective feeling, but in its conformity with objective reason which tells us that the whole is greater than any of its parts. The obligation of this love is therefore infringed and the realization of social Man is hindered, not only by mere egoism, but also chiefly by that particularism which draws distinctions between the interests of lower groups, to which we are more immediately attached, and those of higher and more extensive groups. When a man separates his love for the family, the trade union, the social class or the political party to which he belongs from his love for his country, or when he is ready to serve the latter without regard to mankind as a whole or the Universal Church, he is putting asunder what God has joined in one, and is becoming an obstacle to the integration of social Man.
The type and basic reality of this integration are given in the ecclesiastical hierarchy formed by the Sacrament of Order. It is the triumph of social love, for no member of this order functions or acts for himself or in his own name; each one is ordained and invested by a superior representing a wider social unit. Here, from the humblest priest up to the Pope, the servant of the servants of God, all are absolutely free, as far as their sacred ministry is concerned, from self-asserting egoism or isolated particularism; each one is simply a distinct organ of a united social whole, the Universal Church.
But the reintegration of mankind cannot stop short at social Man. The law of death divides the Universal Church itself into two parts, the one visible upon the Earth, the other invisible in the heavens. The dominion of death is established. The heavens and the Earth are separated by Man’s desire for immediate and material enjoyment of earthly reality and finite existence. Man desired to experience or taste everything by external sensation. He desired to unite his heavenly spirit to the dust of the Earth by a superficial union of mere contact. But such a union could not last; it was bound to end in death. In order to re-unite the spirit of humanity to material humanity and to conquer death, Man must be linked to the Whole, not by the sensible surface of his being, but by its absolute center, which is God. Universal Man is re-integrated by divine Love which not only raises Man to God, but by identifying him inwardly with the Godhead causes him to embrace in It all that is, and thus unites him to every single creature by an indissoluble and eternal union. This love brings down divine grace into earthly nature and triumphs not only over moral evil, but also over its physical consequences, sickness and death. Its work is the final resurrection. And the Church, which teaches this resurrection in her revealed doctrine, formulated in the last article of her creed, foreshadows and inaugurates it in the last of her sacraments. In face of sickness and the danger of death, Extreme Unction is the symbol and pledge of our immortality and of our future integrity. The cycle of the sacraments, like the cycle of universal life, is completed by the resurrection of the flesh, the integration of the whole of humanity, the final incarnation of the divine Wisdom.
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