The Fear of the Divine Majesty
The Other Side Of Christ . . .
The Fear Of The Divine Majesty
By Fr. Robert D. Smith
St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuits, gave his men some advice about preaching which is good for all preachers of Christianity throughout the world. "We ought not to speak of grace at such length and with such emphasis that the poison of doing away with liberty is engendered. Hence, as far as possible with the help of God, one may speak of faith and grace that the Divine Majesty may be praised. But let it not be done in such a way, above all not in times which are as dangerous as ours, that works and free will suffer harm, or that they are considered of no value.
"Though the zealous service of God our Lord out of pure love should be esteemed above all, we ought also to praise highly the fear of the Divine Majesty. For not only filial fear but also servile fear is pious and very holy. When nothing higher or more useful is attained, it is very helpful for rising from mortal sin, and once this is accomplished, one may easily advance to filial fear, which is wholly pleasing and agreeable to God our Lord since it is inseparably associated with the love of Him" (Spiritual Exercises, nn. 369-370).
These are the very last words in the Spiritual Exercises. St. Ignatius put them in this place of particular emphasis. And what do we notice about them? That what he was warning about is disregarded today totally and everywhere.
What St. Ignatius particularly warns against is exactly what great numbers, the vast majority, of priests are doing today. They speak Sunday after Sunday, from one end of the year to the other, from one end of each decade to the other, on this very point, to the exclusion of the rest. They speak interminably on the grace of God, on His great mercy, on His great forgiveness for sinners, on His great love for all men, on His power in bringing men to Himself, on His universal call to salvation.
All these things are perfectly true. But when taught without mention of the necessity of repentance for salvation, without any mention of the fear of God, they give hearers the impression that God's grace overrides even unrepentance.
This is the great problem today. The greatest problem today is not the priests who openly teach error; that there was no Resurrection of Christ, no Virgin Birth, no miracles worked by Christ. These people are relatively few in number, as serious as their errors are.
The real problem comes from the vast number who, not openly teaching error at all, speak in the way described by St. Ignatius exclusively about the grace of God. Incredibly, in their preaching, they never mention the Commandments, Judgment, Hell, Purgatory; they scarcely ever use the word repentance and never speak of it as required. They see the words salvation, the chosen, the elect as too negative in their implications ever to be used at all. By omitting mention of these things, they sabotage Christ's central teaching that repentance is necessary for salvation.
Notice that St. Ignatius does something very rare. He not only praises filial fear and stresses it by saying that it is "inseparably associated with the love of God," but he also praises servile fear. Why so? Because the person committed long-term to sin, who is in mortal sin, will almost invariably see the Commandment which he is breaking not as a help but as an oppression delivered by God. The adulterer sees the prohibition of adultery as an oppression. In such a case, filial fear is impossible, and only servile fear can deliver him from sin, to begin to work toward a higher level.
St. Ignatius is telling us what Christ Himself, St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John all tell us again and again. Beware of thinking that Christianity teaches us merely to love God without any thought of repentance as absolutely required for salvation, without any thought of the need to fear God and to fear God's coming Judgment.
This item 193 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
