The Incarnation and Spiritual Doctrine
Jesus Christ, according to Saint Thomas, is a first principle in the order of those who have grace. He is the Chief, and all their supernatural life and activity derive from His influx on His members. So this life and this activity have in Him their first norm, as they have their origin in Him. It is then from Him that we must learn what Christians are and how they ought to act, since it is by causes that we may best know effects.
But, in Jesus Christ, what is first is what He is, His person, His reality. What he has done, wished and ordered, I comes second and has value only because of His personal! dignity. Operari sequitur esse, says the Scholastic adage. This is the logical and supernatural concatenation: the conduct of a Christian should be regulated by the life of grace which is given to him, by the precepts of Christ, and by the life of Christ. And all of this: Christian life, commandments and examples of the Saviour, is derived from what the Saviour is in Himself.
The Christological dogma, that is to say, the doctrine of the Church concerning the person of Jesus, is, consequently, the first foundation of the science which studies Christian actions: Christian morality is essentially theological.
From a principle so primary and so general, we can deduce, as is evident enough, only norms which are themselves altogether general. We have no further purpose in these pages. But such an end does not lack importance. It is the first directives which give spirit and sense to the rules of detail.
The task we are undertaking will occasionally recall the method and the teachings of the "French School" of spirituality. The points of contact are evident enough, as are also the differences, not to require us either to indicate them or to make them the object of discussion. It will suffice to offer our homage of admiration at the very beginning to the masters of the oratory and of Saint Sulpice.
I—Christology
Let us begin then with the principle. The first truth of Christianity is the definition of Christ. This definition has cost the Church long struggles. It was formulated little by little in the Fathers and in the Councils, and was the more difficult to express as it supposes the doctrine of the Trinity already fixed, and as it must itself make a synthesis of all the different and apparently opposed elements in the Saviour's manner of being and of acting.
It was the Council of Chalcedon which pronounced the dogmatic words: "We all confess, following the Holy Fathers, and we all teach with one only voice: one only and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect, the same one in divinity, and perfect, the same one, in humanity." And the Fathers continue, repeating tirelessly both this unity of person and this duality of natures. Christ is "the same one," they insist, one only and the same Son, and in this unity, He is at the same time both all that God is and all that men are.
In this Christ the aspect which touches us, the one by which He communicates to us, in Him, the divine life, is the human nature, and that is what we shall especially consider here. It is this, according to Catholic doctrine, which constitutes Him mediator, second Adam, supernatural founder of humanity, and, to take up again the formula of Saint Thomas, first principle in the order of grace.
In the very first place, the Christian dogma declares, the humanity of Christ is a complete humanity. It implies a body and a soul, flesh and blood, passions and sentiments, an intelligence and a will. From the beginning, the Church has had to defend against heretical dreamings the concrete reality of "the man Christ Jesus." Her affirmations do no other than continue the protestations of the Saviour: He Himself objected when His disciples took Him for a spirit: He made them touch and see "that He had flesh and bones."
In this total resemblance sin alone is lacking. But, in truth, that is no true difference. For sin, far from adding anything to our nature, only takes away from it its integrity. Exempt from this privation, Christ is for that reason only the more a man, such as God conceived and wished a man to be, such a man as we ought all to be.
This total purity makes Him virginally free of all concupiscence. Pride of the flesh, pride of the spirit, all haughty, hard and distant egoism is absent from His soul, and no narrow introversion places between Him and others the barrier of petty calculations and of incomprehensions.
It is true that the holy humanity of the Saviour differs more from ours in this, that it has no personality of its own. It subsists in the very Person of the Word, and the first act of all its substance and of all its components: soul, body, flesh, blood, all in fine, is, as Thomism explains it, the existence which the Only-Begotten receives in the eternal generation.
But, like the absence of sin, this absence of human personality does no slightest injury to the resemblance of Christ to us, to His consubstantiality with us, as the Fathers say. He Himself has announced it, and the Church proclaims it. He has all the concrete rush of reactions, of habits, of sympathies, of will, which constitute an individual truly living; He has His own tone of voice, His favorite gestures, and, even after His resurrection, He can be recognised by the manner in which He walks by the river bank or in which He breaks bread. Personality, as the dogma understands it, is not, in fact, one of the constituting elements of nature; it is, explains the Thomist theology, the last act of all of them. Everything which constitutes Christ subsists in the Word, in the Infinite, and the humanity of the Saviour, not being in the last analysis hypostatized by a limited act, it follows—we begin at least, to be aware of it here—that the very thing which distinguishes it from us and which gives to it in abundance what is most proper, most incommunicable, most "personal" in itself, puts it in the position of being able to contain us all mystically, and of being the life of the human race.
This is the truth which will become more and more clear to us.
It is not only by the moral dispositions of goodness and of kindness that our common Saviour is united to us. It is by function and by reality.
He came, He exists, He suffered for us. All the symbols proclaim it: Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de caelis. . . . Crucifixus etiam pro nobis. Alone amongst men He has not had as the purpose of His life the acquisition of His own personal sanctity. He possessed it from the outset, total, and He has had to live only for others.
His reason for being is to constitute the contact between God and men. His humanity is a means: The Word took it to use it, to sacrifice it, to exalt it too, under the title of first fruits of the human race. In consequence, it has a mysterious union with all the other human natures, a union which is the supernatural exaltation and the divinisation, in some sort, "of the union, already so close, which exists by essence among men, on the ground that they all participate in one same form and in a form which has truly, though imperfectly, its act. It is sociable, if we may so put it, with a transcendent perfection; it is magnificently and immensely human, because it subsists in God; it is then, as intimately united to the others as a human nature can be without ceasing to be a human nature, that is to say, without ceasing to be individual and personal. But is it not precisely a human perfection, an exquisite achievement of human nature, to be intimately bound to others and, as it were, interior to all? In intensifying this natural sociability in all possible measure, the hypostatic union, far from diminishing the individual character of the humanity of Christ, renders it, on the contrary, more total. We do not say the personal character, for, in the case of this humanity, the unique personality is that of the Word, and that is not the kind of personality, we have seen, which could prevent it from being united to all the others, merely by being itself.
Its action on others, in consequence, has, at its base, at its first point of departure, an infinity. Also, by itself, it is capable of having a universal efficacity. Because of what and who He is, His effectiveness will permeate its every action. Each of the events of its life has, in itself, the expansive force which renders it salutary for the entire universe.
On this subject the Scholastics propose a doctrine to which we should call attention, because of the application which we shall have to make of it in what. follows. We mean the doctrine which attributes to the humanity of the Saviour a causality of the instrumental order in the work of salvation. The Word, they say, has taken human nature in order to apply to us more closely and to adapt to us more perfectly the divine action. The best analogy is that of the instrument which a workman takes hold of to do his work.
Evidently, however, it is an instrument in its own proper fashion, which is only analogous to that of ordinary instruments. This instrument is excellent, unique, without peer, because of the altogether singular relations which bind it to God who employs it, to men whom it works upon, and to the effect which it produces.
Instrumentum conjunctum: The humanity of the Saviour forms only one person with the Word of God; it is more inseparable from It than our organs and our members are from our bodies. Death was able to separate the soul and the body of the Saviour, but not His humanity and His divinity.
The humanity of the Saviour likewise forms a unit, only one mystical person, with the men whom it sanctifies, and it is through their interiors that it works upon them. We must not believe that its virtue is quite limited in itself and that, in order to act upon us, it needs the divinity as intermediary. This would be to overturn the economy of the divine plan. The divinity does not take an instrument in order, later, to have to serve as an intermediary itself, and as an instrument of that instrument. The divinity is and remains the first principle, and, if it does everything, it is in its transcendent manner, that is to say, by choosing its instrument, by giving it the necessary forces, by using it, but not by supplying its place. The instrument should have, through grace assuredly, a certain power to sanctify: it will have it then; it needs, in order to act really upon souls, a contact with them: again, it will have it; otherwise, what would it be in the work of God but a useless excrescence?
Also, by its very constitution, the human nature of the Saviour is capable of such an action. The end sought is precisely to communicate to souls what it itself possesses in plenitude: grace, union with God, the supernatural life. It acts then by its own form, if we may so put. it, and produces its own resemblance.
The excellence of such an instrument makes it very close to being a principal cause. It is even, we may say, a principal cause, a first cause, but among the secondary, dependent, and instrumental causes: God being the only veritable First Cause. It is causa prima in genere habentium gratiam, but not causa prima ordinis gratiae.
To continue logically, we should say now, that the principal action for which the Word took its instrument, the supreme procedure also in which Christ is mediator, is the Sacrifice of the Cross.
But for ease of development, we prefer to reserve for a second part the exposition of Soteriology, and to draw at present the ascetic and spiritual consequences which flow from the Christology, which we have just been recalling.
Now, then, let us see in Christ the exemplar of this Christian life of which He is the Source.
Appareat itaque nobis in nostro capite ipse fons gratiae, unde secundum uniuscujusque mensuram se per cuncta ejus membra diffundit. Ea gratia fit ab initio fidei suae homo quicumque christianus, qua gratia homo ille ab initio suo factus est Christus, de ipso Spiritu est hic renatus, de quo est ille natus.[1]
Already Saint Augustine was proving against the Pelagians the gratuity of grace by the gratuity of the Incarnation. We would like here, following the same road, to deduce, from the different points of doctrine which we have recalled on the subject of the Incarnation, the different aspects which the union of nature and grace presents in us.
God, we were saying, willed to unite human nature to Himself in the unity of person.
What are we then, we men, if not those with whom God has sought resemblance and proximity? Domestici Dei: we are of His race and He is of ours, and henceforth He and we are bound together.
And forever. The Incarnate Word has never ceased and will never cease to be a man; his two natures are united without separation, adichiretos, and His Kingdom will have no end.
We too: no force can snatch us from His hands, and alone, our weakness can carry away for us that which, of its very nature, is life eternal.
God, for us, was made man.
He comes then to treat us in a human fashion.
Everything comes to us from Him in a celestial apparition of humanity and of goodness. His manner of acting will not be the coup de force, nor the multiplication of bizarre or unexpected prodigies. He does not act to show His superiority nor His inconceivability, but His union with our nature, His humanity, we may say. He will not then upset the order of the world and overturn all the laws of which our nature is in part made and which He has assumed in the body which He has taken. His miracles are human, marvels of benignity and of love, such as that which is best in our souls secretly desires.
The work of God will walk amongst us as God has walked, so adapted to our manner of being that the lover? of pomp and of noise will not wish to recognize it. It will go the slow rhythm of the hours and of the years, by imperceptible progressions, and the increase of eternal life in us will have the patient allure which is suited to our modest powers of ascent.
God was made man; humanity, in Christ, is united to the Word.
A change has occurred, not merely in our relations with God, but within our race itself.
That is the essential thing, and its aspects are so multiple that it is hard to tell where to begin. A happy constraint directs our choice of plan: the order in which the consequences of the Incarnation have appeared to us in the humanity of Christ.
The human nature of Christ has been elevated to the hypostatic union with the Word, and that is the Incarnation.
Then we, the members of Christ, are no longer simply men. An elevation is given to us which changes us into divine men, and that is grace.
It is grace, appearing in our nature—and that in the first place—as an ennobling of our nature.
We must have respect then, for nature and the natural order. Respect even for matter and material goods: the use of the most prosaic creatures, of silver, of gold, of property, can make the matter of a vow; there is in science and in its interest in empirical phenomena something which goes, if one does not stop it half-way, to the Word, which has dwelt amongst us.
Respect for corporal things and, let us be frank, for the animal element too in our organism and in its activities. The origin of man merits a sovereign respect, the love which propagates him demands in the name of God that it be made the object of a sacrament, among Christians, and perfect chastity, mounting still higher, is the consecration of all human love to the work of God.
But respect above all for man himself.
Because of the hypostatic union, the humanity of Christ is worthy of adoration.
Respect for man ought then to be elevated to the dignity of a cult. The members of Christ, once they are perfectly united to Him, are worthy of the cult of dulia. And all men, members, in right at least, of the Man-God, claim a supernatural love and veneration; they are the object of theological charity, that is to say, of a love which, in them, is really related to God, so much are they united to God in Jesus Christ. This love will lead a man to sacrifice himself humbly in their service, as, with due proportion, one sacrifices himself to God.
But the Word has assumed our nature in its entirety.
He has taken all our substance and our human manner of acting. Totum cum toto: "Nothing of God, in Him, is separated from man, and nothing of man is separated from God."[2]
Important truth, as the greatest of the Fathers have vied with one another to point out. If any part of us had been despised by the Saviour, this part would have remained outside salvation, and the divine life would have been given, not truly to the descendants of Adam, but. to some other species like it.
But He has taken all: body, soul, will, intelligence—all.
Nothing human then remains exclusively ours. The total consecration of our being implies total exigencies. Everything human, in our spirit and in our body, is matter for holocaust and God does not wish rapine in the sacrifice.
Certainly, as we must state at once, there is an exception. The Word, in its humanity, wished no sin; so grace cannot admit it in us. We sinners then must pluck out sin from ourselves, if grace is to dwell in our souls. Abnegation, suffering, sacrifice, have a capital role in Christian spirituality: did they not fill the life of the Saviour? There is consequently in the supernatural life and in spiritual doctrine, a negative aspect, which is extremely important. But we prefer not to develop it for the moment. It will be more advantageous to reserve the study of it for the second part of this work, which considers Soteriology, that is to say, the attitude taken by the Saviour Himself before sin and the consequences of sin. That then will be the place to state what our dispositions should be, in union with our Chief, before the evil which is in us. Up to that time there will be a lacuna in our pages, which you will please note. The delay will not be inconvenient, however. Evil has no necessary connection with our nature, and we shall be able to continue speaking of it without mentioning evil.
The Word then has despised nothing in our nature.
Then, no more have we, in order to unite ourselves to Him by grace, anything to despise in ourselves or anything to destroy. Sinners as we are, we ought to go to God with all our poor heart, with all our weak forces, and with all our complicated and obtuse spirit.
Alas! To truly take men, ought we not always to take them as they are, quit of rendering them, as much as we can, better than they are? So God has done. Such as we were, such as we still are, He has taken us and continues to take us every day.
So must we dispose ourselves in order to imitate God and His wisdom. Sanctity, like Christ, is totally human. A Christian spiritual doctrine ought to outline asceticism on the divine method, which does not commence by destroying man in order to redeem him. Non in commotione Dominus: God does not fashion us by a series of explosions.
Austerity, yes; mortification, yes, and total; we shall see that later. But in order better to cure and better to conserve. All the delicacies of our sentiments, all the shades of our Psychology ought to be respected. More still: all our resources, each according to its importance evidently, ought to be cultivated and developed. The law of our nature is to grow, and the God Who wished as an infant to increase in age and in wisdom before God and men, demands that we become men in fulness in order to become like to God.
We do not cease to march towards heaven by stopping before the lilies of the field. On the contrary, by allowing our souls to vibrate in unison with things, we make our hearts more human, and reproduce the action of the Incarnate Word, who stopped Himself before these created splendors to contemplate there the traces of an eternal love. It is not necessary to renounce the love of country because of perfection, since Jesus wept over Jerusalem. It is not necessary to extirpate friendship from the soul, since Jesus loved Saint John. It is necessary rather to respect strongly these human affections, and to require that they be limpid as the looks of infants and strong as death, since Jesus loved His own even to the giving of His life for them.
The Christian life is then simple, like the mystery of the Incarnation. Let one only be a man, let one be a man joyously, great-heartedly, and piously, but let one be a man because of God, who was made man for us, and in His manner.
A human ideal, consequently, but human in a supernatural manner.
The entire human nature of Christ subsists by assumption in the Word. The perfection of His humanity is due to the splendor of the divinity.
What interest have we then in the Apollo Belvedere and the moderate maxim of ancient wisdom: a healthy mind in a sound body! It is all over with these low aims since our nature forms only one person with God in Christ. Certainly one must be a man; but not to dream of being more is, henceforth, to refuse to be totally human. Our dust can by grace resemble the Only-Begotten, and the divine goodness can transfigure our smile. It is finished then: the naturalist idea is a profanation.
The material universe itself has received from the Incarnation increase of dignity. What shall we say then of our souls and of our acts? What is done in man surpasses human conceptions; for the divine work a divine master is required; we, we are only children in school.
The science of human actions is not then exclusively human; it is subordinated to the science of God, and our intelligence enters into it in a subordinate capacity. Still more: we are ignorant in large part of the aims of God on the world and on our souls. Only the general directives have been revealed; we know that God wishes to save all men and to give to all of them resemblance to His Son. But how, by what means, under what modalities, God does not tell us; and if he deigns to take us as workmen, he does not appoint us architects.
Christian spiritual doctrine is not then a special part of natural morality: an Ethic with some additions. Like Christ, it constitutes one whole. Its first principle belongs to it entirely, and it is the Man-God, force and light for His own.
Without doubt, natural speculation and philosophical reflection have their place in it, and we shall have to say in a moment what it is. But in any case, although it is not separated from anything human, it constitutes a science independent of the others.
Or rather, more than a science, it is a docility to an ever living master. Everything, for the member, consists in receiving from the chief thought and movement. But it remains to be seen in what this dependence and this docility consists.
Christ is the Son and no one else but the Son.
Members of Him who is the Son, Christians are then sons by adoption, "the adoptive filiation being a certain participation in and resemblance to the eternal filiation."[3]
So, though they are nothing, and though they are completely exterior to God in themselves and in all their qualities, even their supernatural qualities, Christians, in Christ, possess union with the holy Trinity: they are united with it, exclusively in the measure in which they are united to Christ, and exclusively by the union which Christ has. They live of Him as He lives of the Father, and their life in consequence, in Him and in Him alone, has its first principle in the Trinitarian life, whence it comes to them by participation and resemblance, as Saint Thomas says.[4] Does not the Apostle affirm that Christians, in Christ, are seated at the right hand of the Father?[5]
We may surmise then the primordial importance of the Trinitarian dogma for the Christian life: it may be said that it is the great principle for the morality of Christians, inasmuch as they are united to Christ.
We see also how, for Christians, the Pater Noster, the prayer of the children of adoption, is a true moral code: a very simple, but very exacting moral code and one very sweetly adapted to us.[6]
We see too all that the Gospel means, when it demands that the faithful become like children. We see all the meaning of the "little way of spiritual childhood, which, according to the doctrine of the Gospel, Saint Theresa of the Infant Jesus taught,"[7] and which the Pope recommends so earnestly to all Christians.[8]
In Christ, the humanity has no personality of its own. It subsists in the proper being of the Son, Who, Himself, proceeds altogether entirely from the eternal generation.
So also with us. Our nature is no more independent. In the natural order, it makes a complete whole, so finished that all its obligations are determined by its possibilities; in the supernatural order it is no longer worth anything unless supported by grace. Omnia autem ex Deo. God must, by His action in us, arouse our acts; He must aid them, elevate them, make them persevere to the end; otherwise, for our salvation, they are useless: the aspect under which they would be exclusively ours, would be that under which they would be without veritable solidity, without subsistence, without, value.
In us, the first principle of our acts is no longer ourselves. Assumed by grace, as the humanity of Christ was assumed by the Word, we cease, not to be human persons certainly, but to be human persons in the isolated way and with the narrow completeness which would have been ours without this assumption. Exclusa est omnis gloriatio. We have done with all pretended sufficiency. Considered alone, we are incomplete beings.
Or rather, the very supposition which we have just made is what is incomplete. To consider nature in itself alone and without grace is a trick of the mind.
In Christ the humanity is so united to the divinity that, in wishing to study it separate from the Word, we think of it as it is not. In it, the absence of distinct personality is not an intrinsic lacuna, but, exclusively, the hypostatic attachment to the Word.
The same in us. There is not, in the first place, a powerlessness in our nature and in the natural order which grace might afterwards succeed in strengthening. Our insufficiency is only the consequence of the transcendent dignity which has been given to us and of the obligations which flow from it for us. Dedit eis potestatem filios Dei fieri. It is by relation to the immense power which is offered to us that, by ourselves alone, we are inept for everything: sine me nihil potestis facere. Dogma of nothingness then, of humility and of absolute weakness: what is a man, Lord, when there is question of becoming perfect, as the heavenly Father is perfect?
But also dogma of omnipotence, of achievement and of plenitude. What can a man not do, Lord, in you, who are his strength?
Let us look at Christ. His two natures, united, act each in its own manner, but also, each in communion with the other. "Agit utraque forma, cum alterius communione, quod proprium est." Subsisting, not in itself, but in the Word, flesh of God, body of the Life, soul of the eternal Light, the humanity of Christ, by all its fibres and by all its acts, becomes a principle of life, of light, and of divinisation.
This elevation, like everything else, flows down from the head into the members, and should rule their conduct. Non ego tamen, sed gratia Dei mecum. We alone, we no longer exist, and when we work, we place in action something other than human energies. Agit utraque forma cum alterius communione. Our reality and our actions remain of themselves what they were, banal and tiny things; but because of their union with grace, they acquire in themselves, though not by themselves, a value for eternity.
Here one of the essential principles of the spiritual doctrine begins to appear in outline: the one which attributes to our actions and sufferings a causality of the instrumental order in our sanctification. It will help also to put an increase of precision into our formulas.
Instruments, in the ordinary acceptance of the term, are inert things which apply an action to an end, but which do not act by themselves. In the sense in which we understand them here, they are not inert: they are free beings. They will be then, in a real sense, the principle of their act, causa sui actus. But, and this is what we wish to say, they will be principles in a dependent, an essentially dependent, manner, and what they shall have to effect, and shall have to wish to effect in every act they initiate, will be the very thing which another, the principal cause, shall wish to make them wish, but shall wish to make them wish in a manner suited to free beings. Precisely because they are free, they cannot be reached, in their depths, by an action which is not theirs. God makes use of them then in order to act on them in the manner which they require. So, at the same time, they apply the divine action to the term which it is working on, and they are essentially dependent on the principal worker in the work undertaken. These are the two reasons which justify the application we have made to them of the term, instrument.
For what concerns the relation between Christ's manner of acting and ours, it must be noted that, between the union of the two natures in Christ and the union of nature and grace in us, there is this great difference, that in Jesus Christ the two natures are complete, while grace in us is not a complete substance. Grace, as we know, while it is an entity sui generis, cannot, claim to be more than an accident. It is, not God Himself, not a being complete in itself, but a modification and an elevation of our being, a deiform and permanent quality which has no reality except in affecting our substance.
As regards its intrinsic nature, the question is obscure, and it does not seem that theology has said its last word on this subject. Let us say only, for what concerns our study and without wishing to make a methodical exposition, that the grace of Christians, while it is something for them and in them, is connected with the union of their souls with God, that is to say, with the increated grace, and it is inseparable from their incorporation in Christ. It is because they are united with God, inasmuch as they are members of the Saviour, that they are divinised.
Divinisation by grace, being thus a diminished prolongation of the excellences which union with the divinity gives to the humanity of the Saviour, does not differ from this union, except as a participation differs from the archetype. From the moment that one takes account of this essential subordination, all that remains is to grow in knowledge by contemplating their continuity. Let us take up again then the formula which expresses the communication of idiomata in Christ. We shall there see the communion of nature and grace in men.
Each nature in Christ, operates that which is proper to it, in communion with the other, because Christ, in spite of His double operation forms only one operator.
In the same way, in us grace and nature do not have two separate operations which develop their series of acts in two parallel lines and in different planes. So much the more because grace, not being a complete substance, is not an isolated principle of activity. It is "that by which" we are intrinsically divinised in Christ. It is then, for what concerns our manner of acting, "that by which" the activities of our nature have a divine worth. And the worth is as intrinsic to our activities as is the dignity conferred by grace on the very substance of our soul. When the supernatural work is effected, our nature has truly produced it through union with grace.
Union then, yes certainly. But also dependence.
Human nature has been taken by the Word as an instrument for the salvation of the world.
In the same way our own humanity: in the hands of grace it is the instrument of our salvation.
It is even the only instrument which depends on us. For the miracles of sanctification which God can perform when it pleases Him, remain His secret and His privilege. In the sacraments it is Christ who acts, and our role is limited to administering them, to accepting them, and to placing no obstacles. We must note, however, to be complete, that the effect of the sacraments depends in its intensity on the dispositions with which they are received.
But, apart from miracles and the sacraments, it is human nature which is the carrier of grace and the agent of divinisation here below. Not of itself, certainly: but inasmuch as, through continuity with Christ, who is the excellent and perfect instrument, it is the instrument of the unique First Cause.
Instrumental causality: the notion, for the subject of our study, appears to us capital, and we shall do no more than draw applications from it.
It will allow us to clear up the indefiniteness that still remains in the spiritual doctrine. The spiritual doctrine is not so much a science as a docility to an overliving master. That is true. But this docility is not a passive attention. The instrument of the Word is humanity, even our humanity. We must then make our divinisation our own affair. It is, to that extent, the object of human sagacity and tactics, the object of human science. We shall, therefore, have to determine exactly what our nature and its Psychology is, what our manner of acting is, and what are its moral laws. The common maxims of human prudence ought here to neighbor with our philosophic theses and the results of even clinical observation. "Sweetness does more than violence; to the small merchant a small basket; it is by hammering that one becomes a blacksmith; a bird must sing according to the shape of its beak," these humble proverbs will have their word to say, and an important one, in the human science of the divinisation of men. Nothing will be too small from the moment it is useful: we shall have to develop skill at keeping ourselves attentive along with systems of accountability and the play of sanction to maintain perseverance. Briefly, the spiritual doctrine will be a science as complex as human conduct. But it will have to be more complex still. After having given all its rules, it will have to keep repeating that they are all essentially insufficient; because, in the work of salvation, human conduct has the value only of an instrument. Its laws do not bind without appeal, and if we must apply them to the best of our power, we must, nevertheless, and before all else, not use them except in a sentiment of entire dependence upon the principal worker.
But we must use them and this ought to be said very plainly: the ideal thing, in the good instrument of grace, is not a totally inert human nature.
In Christ all the human nature was the instrument of salvation. In order to assume it, the Word did not previously empty it of all initiative; on the contrary: He is life, He made it more intensely living. All its resources of soul and of body, of action and of sentiment, of love and of suffering, have been strained and increased tenfold in order to transmit to our race in all its vigor, the supernatural life. It would be Monothelism to wish to suppress the human energy of the Saviour in order to exalt His divine activity.
The same with us: to cry up pure passivity as a means of union with grace, is to get into Quietism. Human workers, it is true, would be disconcerted if their tool moved of itself in their hands, but that is because man is not master of things and can use them only by some exterior accidents: by their hardness, by their structure, not by their essence. Before God, it is the very being of things that is in dependence. Creator of all, and of liberty as well as of the rest, He can take as an instrument our entire substance, even in what is most personal to it. If He had wished only inert tools, He would have seized hold of stones and of pieces of wood. But in choosing us, it is a living, thinking instrument, all trembling with interior spontaneity, that He wishes.
We would lack docility to His grace if we offered Him only a deboned human nature. It is by acting that one becomes the instrument of the Pure Act; let us be ourselves, and ardently, in order that He may be able to use us in our entirety.
Humanism then, once more; but once more also, supernatural humanism, made up of humility, obedience, abnegation, and charity. The glory of our nature is that it has been inserted into a work which surpasses it.
The Word has assumed a human nature as an instrument of salvation for the entire human race.
This universality of action ought to pass from the Head into the members. It is for the redemption of the entire universe that each one is an instrument. To say that God saves man by man means that God saves all humanity by all humanity.
It is impossible then to regulate the supernatural attitude by considering only isolated individuals: grace, like Christ, is human in a larger fashion. Made to flow into all by the same Man-God, it continues to be, in each one, a thing of the entire Mystical Body. The Catholic spirit, the missionary mentality, the ecumenical pre-occupations, are essential to this life and to the spiritual doctrine which is its science. One narrows souls, if one speaks to them only of themselves, or of their order, or of their country.
As our action is composed of influences coming from the entire Church and destined to have reactions on the entire world, it cannot be understood except in this ensemble. It is then, at base, a thing of universal charity.
Furthermore, the only one who can direct it is He who understands the working of grace throughout the entire universe, that is to say, Christ alone. Whence the necessity of obedience.
Our manner of praying ought also to be Catholic. No one makes a total prayer by himself alone, any more than anyone has total sanctity. Members of an organism, voices which unite with others to form an immense harmony, we are integrating parts of a whole, and our meaning is not in ourselves alone.
It would be possible to develop at length the Catholic aspect of the spiritual doctrine. It would even be very important; for it would show the union of all spirituality with the Church, with the magisterium, and through them, in a new way, with Christ.
But it is time to stop. What precedes suffices to show how Christ, first principle of grace in our humanity, is also first principle in the science which explains how our humanity ought to act in the embrace of grace. He is the transcendent type of the Christian attitude, and we need only make the Christological dogma explicit in order to find in it the rule of our actions.
Besides, the spiritual doctrine is so dependent on the Saviour, that it is not so much an abstract science as a living docility before the unique and ever living Master, who is Christ.
The formula is so true that we can conclude by reversing it: Christ is so perfect a Master that He is, in His own person, the resume of all the spiritual doctrine. In ipso erat vita, et vita erat lux. . . . He Himself has borne witness to Himself: Ego sum . . . Veritas.
II—Soteriology
Up to the present our exposition has been incomplete: it has not considered sin in us, nor the quality of Redeemer in Christ. We must now fill up this lacuna and see what Christ did in the presence of sin, in order to conclude what we should do.
It is always the chief who should be considered first, if we are to properly assign to the members their formulas of action.
But Christ is the surety for our sins. The Incarnation had, as its reason for being, the original sin and the crimes of men. Perhaps even, without the fall, it would not have taken place. At least God has not revealed to us anything certain on that subject. The surest thing about the Incarnate Word is that He came as a Redeemer, and that Jesus, in fact, is inseparable from our sins.
His Incarnation itself was the first and the principal of the means which He used to purify us. As the Fathers and the Doctors teach, vying with one another, it included such an exaltation of our race in Christ, our Chief, that by its own virtue it was capable of rendering us all immaculate before God.
But to this justice which, in principle, has been acquired for us, an obstacle presented itself in us: original sin and our actual sins, together with their results. What was then sufficient, if we consider only Christ, our Chief, was incomplete if we consider ourselves, the members. A miracle, without doubt, or, more exactly, a direct operation of God, could have arranged everything and grace with a victorious movement would have penetrated every soul.
Only, such was not the divine counsel in the Incarnation. Wishing to sanctify humanity by humanity, God wishes also to destroy the sin of men by the co-operation of men, and, so to speak, in a human fashion.
The humanity of Jesus also, in its human fashion, will have to deal both with sin and with the effects of sin.
Sin has no part in it, nor the effects of sin, which include a moral exhaustion or even an intrinsic imperfection. Its sanctity and its perfection are categorically opposed to it. So does the Head begin to rid us, the members, of it.
Still more: Not only does Christ not admit sin nor evil tendencies in Himself, but He takes exactly the contrary attitudes. He obeys even unto death, because our sin had been a disobedience; He loves God and souls even to the sacrifice of Himself, because sin had been a sensual egoism.
As for the effects of sin which imply no intrinsic imperfection, Christ takes them without stint. They are chastisements, certainly, but, in themselves, they do not constitute any weakness, and He will undergo them for the sins of others. They will come to Him then from the exterior: from His executioners or from His free will, which will give access, in Himself, to sorrow and to torturing foreknowledge.
Nothing will be lacking there. From the crib to Calvary His life will have something opposed to what we would have dreamed for Him. Messiah, but Messiah humble and hidden, He will do the work of God and of men in poverty, in self-effacement and in contradiction. A day will come when He will be tortured in all His body and in every manner, when He will open His soul to impressions even more dolorous for Him, the Holy One: to confusion, to shame, to overwhelming, before the divine Justice, under the sins of humanity.
All will not be consummated until it is all over with Him. It will be required that He disappear from the surface of the earth and, in spite of His Resurrection, it will remain forever true that, from Friday to Sunday, the Incarnate Word was dead.
The proof of it is incontestable; the sepulchre is still there, and on His glorified body, the blows which killed Him are still visible. Only, they are today streaming with splendor.
For Christ underwent these sufferings and death to save the world: they have been the matter of His acts of love and of sacrifice, and they have a glorious and eternal aspect in the effects which they have produced.
It remains to draw the conclusion from what the Saviour has been to what the Christians whom He saves should be.
The Incarnation, we have just finished saying, has a connection with sin: the reason for it is a struggle and an expiation.
The serene perspectives which we have considered up to the present allow then the uncovering of only a part of the truth about our conduct. The supernatural life which the Incarnate Word causes "to inflow" in us, is a life of struggle and of war.
Sin is, in fact, in us, and grace wishes no more of it in us than the Word wished of it in Christ. We must then, quit ourselves.
Abneget semetipsum. And to know how to quit ourselves, it still suffices to look at the Master and to follow Him: Et sequatur Me.
To follow Him, yes. All the faults in the world do not prevent us from being His.
On the contrary. Christ, we have seen, is essentially Redeemer; He is, in fact, and as He came, inseparable from sin.
Our very crimes then can attach us to Him. They can furnish the elements for our holiness, magnificent shades of humility and of confidence for our love. Peter would not be Peter, and his physiognomy would not have all its supernatural beauty without the trace of tears on his cheeks. Augustine, without his Confessions, would not be Augustine.
In the same way as He uses Satan to form His elect, God makes use even of our past sins to shape our souls. It all consists in taking our sins as He takes them, in order to detest them. "Shall I then," as Paul says, "multiply faults to make grace superabound? God forbid!" The divine plan integrates sins, but in an inverse sense, by making us flee and deplore them. We must consider them as the worst of miseries, and they will become for us stimulants for union with the God of mercies.
God wishes to disengage us from our miseries, but through ourselves.
In Christ, it is the human nature which serves as an instrument for the divinity to work the redemption of men. In us also. Humanity is the instrument which God deigns to take up in order to purify humanity: He saves man, as He divinises him, by man.
The first condition is to be between His hands. The first reason why the humanity of Jesus consumed our sins in itself is because it was united to the Word and in virtue of that union.
The same thing is true in our case. The great means of delivering ourselves from our sins is to unite ourselves more to God by the sacraments, by prayer, by love. The disinfection of our interior is not the preliminary condition to all entrance of grace. It is the result of that entrance: it is life which, by the force of its invasion into us, makes death fall back.
It is not for that reason any the less true that, in every spiritual system, the purgative way must come before the unitive way. Not that man can in reality rid himself of his stains otherwise than by union with God. But because, in psychological experience, that which attracts and ought to attract the most attention in the beginning is the fight against faults and especially against self-love. At this time the conscience is greatly encumbered with material preoccupations, impressions, sentiments. Besides, what it perceives best when grace is penetrating it are the complaints of sensibility and of the lower part. Life is being lived at that level, so it is there especially that the conscience ought to act. Later it will become more capable of a more enlightened co-operation, one more suited to it. But from beginning to end the task will remain the same: the conquest by the true life of everything that is mortal in us.
This will then be a struggle. Our nature, which God uses as an instrument, is penetrated with evil of which we must be cured. Our nature, itself, is not evil, certainly; but evil, original, habitual, actual, has placed it in a certain opposition to the very work which it ought to accomplish.
The operation will have then something paradoxical about it, and God, often, will make us do the contrary of what we would have planned.
More still: the Redemption has been an overturn. As Scripture and the first Fathers have already pointed out, Jesus has opposed contraries to contraries: to our rebellion, a total obedience; to our pride, a crushing; to our sensual covetousness, an immolation. This procedure we must continue.
To be Christian is to turn oneself against oneself; it is to detest, to overturn something in oneself; past sin and its persistent effects.
To weep is not enough. Christ has set Himself against the current; for us too then the Christian tactic must be the offensive: Agere contra. We shall not flee then—save for the exception which will occur to every one—we shall react positively. Against egoism, principle of all evil, we shall practice detachment, humility, mortification; or rather, to keep the lead more surely, we shall insist on what is positive in these virtues, on generous, humble, mortified love for God and the neighbor.
In Christ the struggle has been even to the Passion, even to sacrifice, even to death. He has taken on Himself all the effects of sin, to make of them, as we have said, the remedies for sin.
Such should be our attitude also. And we would like to pause here a moment, for we have come to the Christian doctrine of suffering, one of the pearls of Christianity, one of the great chapters of the spiritual doctrine.
Let us go back to the beginning, to the Incarnation. When God decided to become man, humanity was no longer the marvel which had gone forth from His hands. Soiled and wounded it lay, an immense sick body, over all the surface of the earth. It is on it that God took pity. Despising neither His work nor ours, He became man, not only in the philosophical sense of the word, but son of man, heir of the heavy human past, man in the historical and concrete sense of the term. He has then taken our miseries and our sorrows. They occupy too large and too legitimate a place in our life for the Word not to assume them too, in assuming truly the descent from Abraham.
He has taken them then, and He has allowed the wave to inundate His soul even to the depths.
He has not taken refuge, to escape them, in a stoic hardness; He wished to feel all the confusion which overwhelms our flesh and our soul before them: it is as a man that He has endured the sorrow of men.
But human sorrow, in being thus taken up by the Incarnate Word, has been transformed. In being made one with God, it has acquired a divine value and it, the ancient vestige of sin, has become an antidote to sin in becoming the principle of a higher life.
It retains its virtue in us through attachment to Christ. To suffer then is no longer merely our lot as men and as sinners, it is a supernatural vocation. Man is born for pain, they say, as the bird to fly—and the Christian, like Christ, is born to suffer and to die. The life which he receives in Baptism, is, by essence, a destructive life, destructive of everything sinful in him, and of all the old man in him.
So it nourishes itself on mortification. Its instinct of self-preservation, its will to grow, express themselves, by a sort of reversal, "in a diligent care to seek more and more continual abnegation in all things, as much as shall be possible." It is not however necessary, in order to fulfil the function of suffering in a Christian way, to tense one's soul to superhuman efforts. On the contrary, patience should be human, as Jesus Christ was. It is useless to pretend that tortures cause no pain. It is useless even to wish to endure them beyond one's strength. Let each man suffer with his own resistance: it is concrete humanity, composed of men of courage and of others, which is united to God in Christ. The lot of many will be "to carry their cross with littleness, joining to the sorrow of carrying it the shame of carrying it badly." The essential thing is that, when each one has carried his part and his own way, the Mystical Body of Christ gives their plenitude, their pleroma, to the redemptive sorrows of the Chief.
We ask ourselves even, if we should not say more, and if the essential thing, when God wishes that we suffer, is not simply to suffer. This, evidently, is only an opinion, which we mention in passing, but it is too much in keeping with the ideas expressed in these pages for us to pass it over in silence.
We wish to say that acts of positive acceptance, of patience, of sorrowful love, are without doubt very salutary and meritorious, when suffering touches us. But these are acts, meritorious as acts, and different in themselves from the suffering endured. Are they necessary in order that our suffering may have some salutary result? Would it not suffice that we should suffer without positive rebellion in order that, truly, if we have grace, aliquo modo, if we do not have it, our sufferings may expel sins by union with the sufferings of Christ?
The wording of the Christian dogma about the death and the Passion of Jesus seems to indicate that, in themselves, abstracting even from the intense love and adoration of which they furnished the matter, they have had a considerable efficacy in the work of salvation. Might we not say as much, with due proportion, and in the measure in which they are united to Christ, of the members of the Saviour; especially since, in virtue of the dispositions in which Christ suffered, all our sufferings, in Him, have been offered to God for the salvation of the world? The dignity of Christ is, by participation, ours: when the body of a man suffers, when a human soul is tortured, that is not a trifle in the sight of God. He who sees us, chooses us and loves us in His Incarnate Son, does not divide those whom He has united. The sorrows which our flesh endures are the continuation and the complement of those of the Saviour. In the persecuted Church, according to the testimony of Jesus Himself, it is Christ Who is again tormented.
The vocation and the grace, which attach us to the universal Redeemer, attach our expiations to His sacrifices: so truly is it in virtue of this sacrifice that they have been given to us, in order that, in Christ, humanity may make satisfaction for itself.
That is the explanation of the singular esteem which the Fathers of the Church and spiritual authors have for suffering. They often have the air of considering it useful in itself, and their exhortations to renunciation and to suffering do not seem to indicate that the Cross is worthwhile only because of the virtues of which it is the occasion and the stimulant.
In Purgatory the pains expiate of themselves, per satis-passionem. Could they not produce something analogous in us during this life, the more so because, it should be noted, for a thing as difficult as suffering, the simple absence of rebellion is already the act of a well-disposed will? Suffering, in sum, is by essence a passive thing. Since Christ takes it as it is, in us and in Himself, can we not say that it is received with the indispensable dispositions, from the moment when it is received at least passively and without refusal in the superior part of the soul? We could then say that, just as Christ takes our activity in all its active elements, and that He sanctifies us by our acts, so He unites our passivity to Himself in all its passive components, and that He purifies us by our sorrows, non ex opere operate, sed quasi ex passions passa.
Whatever may be the fact about this opinion, and we leave it to the reader to evaluate, it is certain, in any case, that in the conquest of sanctity, sorrow ought to play a considerable role. The most frequent image of Himself which God shows us, in the Church, is the crucifix, and the food of our supernatural life is the victim, the host, of a perpetual sacrifice: we live always on death, as on bread.
If such is the worth of suffering, what will the value of death be!
The Man-God died for our sins. We also then, His members, ought to die. The Man-God has vivified and resuscitated us by His death.
It is then by our death also that we shall live. In the Man-God death was not a necessity of nature, but a redemptive act and an instrument of salvation.
In us also. To die, for us, is something other than a physiological phenomenon. It ought to be an act, and a solemn act, of cult and of resurrection. In advance or at the moment itself, we should make of it a sacrifice.
A special grace is ready for the task: the grace of perseverance; a special sacrament is prescribed for it, at least in general: Extreme Unction. For our part, let us try to co-operate in this matter as instruments, by allowing God to come and take us, without rebellion. Vive moriturus.
As the scars have remained in the glorified body of Jesus, the sufferings and the death remain in the Mystical Body.
They remain there in their own proper nature: bitter by their banal realism and their imperious brutality.
But their very hardness, which makes them chastisements of sin, makes of them also, in Christ, remedies for sin and sources of beatitude.
They continue then here below after the Incarnation, but under a different banner. They too are glorified.
All that is human has been transfigured at the contact of Jesus without being altered.
Integral realism in an integral optimism, Christianity takes the entire man, and exactly as he is, but for the purpose of rendering him in his entirety, and through the full sum of his resources, like to God in Jesus Christ.
Sin itself does not efface this general note of the divine economy. God overturns sin and turns against it all its effects.
Also, even in this liquidation of human passivity and in what are, at first sight, its negative and pessimist elements, the Christian doctrine remains essentially positive and optimist. Its optimism is even singularly absolute and does not believe it should deny either evil or sorrow, because it feels itself of the stature required to change them into good.
The role assigned to penance, to the struggle against self, to sorrow, is immense. It can even appear primordial. But it is transitory and essentially accidental. Evil, all evil, remains always that which should not have been: it is present then only to take its departure, and all that remains of it serves only to expel it.
So suffering can never be total. Since its reason for being is to beget for beatitude, the innermost heart of everything is the eternal life, and it comes to us through everything. One should then fast, but with a joyous face, and the saints in their rudest penances will weep with gladness as they reflect that they are only pardoned sinners.
Even while suffering, even while struggling, all one does is love God and men. Hatred for self, yes; obstinacy in destroying nature in ourselves, yes; all the force of these traditional formulas is required to express the ardent battle which life, in us and with us, wages with death. But these formulas should be rightly understood. One who would see in them the expression of a radical misanthropy or of an absolute antagonism towards our nature which God has created and which Christ has divinised in Himself, would completely misinterpret them. It is through respect for our human nature, through charity towards man, that Christianity sets up such limitless requirements.
To sum up this entire article in a few words, we would say that a spiritual doctrine, like the Christian doctrine in general, is not in the first place a declaration of war, but a formula of union.
The fundamental truth is that God has created everything, that Christ has redeemed all of us, and that, in Him, human nature forms only one person with the divine nature.
Union with God, union with Christ, union with all men in Christ and in God, that is the essential, and in a certain sense, the whole thing.
The first, the unique precept even, is to love God and the neighbor. And also, since God is not accessible except through the humanity of Christ, and since the humanity of Christ is no longer visible here below except in men, the centre of all spiritual doctrine and the great means of sanctification is love of the neighbor, zeal for souls.
To contribute, in ourselves and in others, to this mystical prolongation of the Incarnation, which is the divinisation of the human race, is our entire duty, and it should constantly preoccupy us.
For this divinisation, if we except miracles and the efficacy of the sacraments, should be produced by our efforts. Let us act then, let us work with all our human energies and with all our human prudence. And let us suffer also, with all our body and with all our soul.
But in this integral deploying of all our resources for the divine service, let us always remember that we are only instruments. Humility then, obedience, detachment, prayer; but no depression and no mutilation. This integral dependence aims at realising us in our entirety, in the hands of God in union with Christ. This is the Christian program.
The author of these lines begs leave to add a word. It seems to him that this program corresponds exactly to the one which Saint Ignatius Loyola proposes to his children. So it will not be surprising if, often, it is the ideas and the very formulas of the saint which quite naturally flow from his pen.
Literary dependence, filial rather, which it would have been hard not to declare.
ENDNOTES
1 St. Augustine, Liber de Praedestinatione Sanctorum, 31; P.L. XLIV, 982.
2 Council of Florence, Decretum pro Jacobites, Denz. 708.
3 St. Thomas, S.T. IIIa, Qu. XXIV, Art. 3.c.
4 Ibid.
5 Eph. II, 6; Rom. VIII, 34.
6 St. Thomas, S.T. IIa, IIae, Qu. LXXXIII, Art. 9.c
7 Brev. Rom. Oct. 3, Lesson 6.
8 Acta Apostolicae Sedis, t. XVII, 1925, p. 213.
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