WITHOUT
God
man is insufficient for his own life,
because life cannot be lived
intelligently or vitally
without a knowledge of its meaning and purpose,
the
stimulation of hope,
the clear grasp of the laws which will bring life to its
goal.
None of these can man provide of himself if he omits God.
Thus
they cannot discover one as something already there and only awaiting discovery,
because it is hard
for men to persuade themselves or anyone else that a story that has no author
can have a plot;
nor can they arbitrarily invent a meaning and purpose
and impose them upon life,
because too much has happened already to condition
mankind, including the would-be author of the new design,
and because no man
ever knows what is going to happen next.
A
secular hope is equally impossible.
If the individual man has no future,
but must ultimately remerge in that
general mass of reality from which for no known reason he has temporarily
emerged,
it is idle to talk of offering him hope;
one may invent the brightest
conceivable future for the race of man,
but for each individual in it there is
only transience and extinction of personality.
On
the whole men have not been much concerned to provide a secular meaning for
life and a secular hope, not realizing their urgency.
But willy-nilly they have
been forced to provide some sort of ethics, since without general agreement
upon what conduct is right or wrong society would fall to pieces at once.
But even here the effort has not been very energetic.
In our own world, we still tend to live by what remains of the Christian ethic,
though there is no longer any clear grasp of its foundation, and concessions to
human weakness have left it pretty tattered.
Of actual efforts to frame a
strictly secular ethic, there is little to be said.
In the nature of the case
they must fail because the man who would frame a secular ethic cannot prove to
himself that there is no God and no next life.
He may feel sure of both negations,
but if he knows what knowing means, he cannot think that he knows either.
It is
curious that the most convinced atheist not only does not succeed in proving
that there is no God,
but does not even try to prove it.
He does one or all of three things:
one, he tries to find a theory which would account for the universe without
bringing God into it—
in other words he tries to show how the universe might exist without God;
two, he attacks the various arguments that have led men to believe in the existence
of God and tries to show that these arguments are not conclusive;
three, he stresses elements in the universe (suffering, for example) which
ought not to be there if God exists—
which to put it brutally is equivalent to
saying that if he had been God he would have acted differently.
He may state his arguments well or ill under these heads.
But let him state them as well as can be conceived, they still do not disprove
the existence of God.
We might analyse his arguments against a future life in roughly the same way,
and with the same result.
But
God and the next life are vast things to be unsure about.
If either exists, it must wreck any system of human conduct that ignores it.
Take the next life, the effect of ignoring which might be less obvious.
If one is to invent a secular ethic,
a system of laws of conduct for men,
it must be aimed at something.
Almost certainly it will be aimed at the production of the maximum happiness
for men,
however differently happiness might be conceived by different
lawmakers.
But how can man know whether such and such conduct would produce happiness for
mankind if they do not know whether the whole span of human life is available
for inspection?
If there be a next life, then it must be part of the evidence, too;
and there is no way of bringing it into the evidence.
Any secular ethic must fail through its inability to discover the effect of our
actions upon the next life and its inability to prove that there is no
next life.
In any event, the question is academic.
So far no one has been able to persuade any large section of men to adopt any
system of secular ethics.
The secular philosopher's contempt for the moral law is as nothing to the
world's ignoring of his secular ethic.
The ignoring is total.
There is not even the compliment of contempt.
Secular ethics are only in books.
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Meaning
and hope and law remain as needs,
and man cannot supply them for himself.
Religion is the only answer.
Every religion, to the extent of the truth in it and its power to help men to a
living awareness of God, can give some part of the answer.
But for the whole answer we must come to the Church God founded.
We have already considered this from the point of view of God's will,
and this is decisive.
But consider it now from the point of view of man's need.
A non-infallible, non-dogmatic answer would leave man's needs very much where
they were.
Consider for one instant the nonsense of a non-dogmatic hope—
to the best of our knowledge there is the possibility of fullness of
life with God in Heaven:
to the best of our knowledge:
what could be less stimulating?
Let us have the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection,
or let us talk about something else:
anything short of complete certainty is uncertainty.
Consider again for as short a moment the morality of a non-dogmatic ethic—
it seems to us that God does not like remarriage after divorce or sexual
experience outside marriage:
that is too frail a barrier to set against passion:
there is a kind of cruelty in it,
throwing in a probability to worry the mind instead of a certain truth to
sustain it.
We
can see how in the Church man's need for happiness is met at every point.
Where
there is spiritual energy unused, men cannot be happy as we have seen.
There is
so much energy in man that was meant to be used upon God and cannot be
adequately used upon any lesser object, so that if it is not used upon God it
must turn in upon man and torment him.
That is what St. Augustine meant by saying
that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
We have a need for contact
with God at every point of our being, more still in the higher part of our
being, the soul, and above all in the soul's highest faculties of intellect and
will.
In the Church the intellect may know God to the limit of every man's
capacity to know, and the will may love God with a love as high as the love of
the Saints, and the whole being of man may be in contact with God, with the
reality of God and no half-reality, to the limit of every man's capacity for
union.
Yet in that total contact
men do not lose themselves
but find
themselves.
There is no merging and absorption of human personality in the
Absolute,
but a total union between man and God
in which man remains himself as
truly as God remains Himself.
As
against the devitalization of life, there is the life of grace;
as against the diseases of human society,
there is in the Mystical Body
a relation of every man with every other man
which, if even half comprehended,
could remake the natural relationship
upon which all the secondary unities of men depend for their health.
Catholicism meets the complexity of man,
in its simplicity is as complex as man.
In the Church every need of man's nature is met;
and not simply every need of man's nature,
but of this man's nature and that man's nature.
The Church no more than God will let man lose his personality.
The Church is the paradise of un-standardized men.
Thus this Church,
more rigid than any in dogma and law,
is, as no other Church
ever has been,
the home of every type of human being,
of every nation and of
every sort of man within every nation.
Because only in the Church is man fully himself.
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Why
do not all men see it?
Because they have lost the very notion of the gifts,
the gifts of Life and Truth given by Christ,
given through the Church.
Having lost the notion of the gifts which are the Church's reason for
existence,
they naturally do not see the Church's reason for existence.
Therefore they test the Church by such notions as they have got.
Generally they test Her and dismiss Her by two lines of inquiry which they
would see as irrelevant if they had any awareness of the things which
constitute Her purpose.
The
commonest criticism is of the character of Catholics—
of popes, bishops, priests and lay-people.
People observe that this or that pope was immoral,
this or that bishop is worldly,
this or that priest is a bully or a snob or lazy,
this or that layman is a corrupt politician or an unjust employer or a
defaulting bookmaker or a scandalmonger.
Catholics can be found in all these categories.
But even if the proportion of unpleasing Catholics at every level were as great
as the Church's severest critic thinks,
the criterion would still be the wrong one.
We have already discussed this at some length,
but it is worth repeating the main point here.
And the main point is that it is through this strange assortment of human
beings that Christ Our Lord gives the gifts of Truth and Life.
No one who knows his own desperate need of those gifts would be kept at a
distance by the character of the human means through which Christ has chosen
that they shall have them, any more than a man hungry for bread will be kept
from it by doubts about the moral excellence of the baker.
But if a man does not know about the gifts, he is bound to have strong views
about the character of the purveyors, for the Catholic Church is a spectacular
body and the vices of Catholics not likely to be overlooked.
The
second criticism is that the Church is failing to take her part in the
improvement of the social order, is not producing or working in support of
plans for the organization of the nations, or social reforms within the nation.
Man, so says the critic, is striving for a better life upon earth, and the
Church stands aside from the strife.
Upon the detail of this, books could be
written and libraries filled with them.
One might say with truth that the
Church has done more for the betterment of life upon this earth than all other
institutions put together.
One might say with equal truth that the popes have
thought and written most profoundly and constructively upon the earthly life of
man.
One might say, not unjustifiably, that the civil order is the affair of
the citizen: that when things go well the citizen clamours that this is his
sphere and the Church must keep out of it:
and that only when he has got
himself into a complete mess does he suddenly whine that the Church is neglectful.
All this is true and massive.
Yet there are areas where the Church seems to
have acquiesced in, if not actually encouraged, great social evils.
Here again
there are all sorts of considerations,
but we cannot rule out the part that
sloth has played in the lives of churchmen—
the sloth of the intellect,
accepting the customary because it is customary without even seeing how evil it
is,
the sloth of the will which finds it easier to take things as they are than
to raise the devil by trying to put them right.
Yet
when the Church in any given place is doing the least for the social betterment
of men's lives, it still remains that by comparison with the Truth and the
Life which God is giving through Her, to treat these other things as
though their absence were a reduction to nothing of the Church's function is a
kind of frivolity.
Certainly there is no sanity in forgoing the vaster thing
which the Church is giving because of such lesser things as She is not giving.
What the world wants of Her and what the Church is actually offering the world
are plainly incommensurable—
provided one realizes what the gifts of God are.
Indeed,
however just a complaint might be made against the Church in this or that
place, the complaints actually made about what the Church is not doing in the
social order are almost invariably made with no appreciation whatever of the
things that She exists to do.
This failure of appreciation varies.
At one end
is the Catholic who accepts the gifts as a matter of habit, is indeed attached
to them and would miss them if they were withdrawn, yet has no profound
awareness of them or response to them.
At the other end is the non-Catholic who
regards the Church's own work as a lot of nonsense, but would be willing to
overlook it as an unaccountable but harmless eccentricity if only the Church
would concentrate on what seems to him the vital business of mankind.
The
soul's needs are the Church's business.
If you are not interested in souls,
then She will seem to have no business at all.
These
two things—
preoccupation with the defects of Catholics,
impatience that the
Church holds secondary what others hold primary—
stand between men and the
realization that the Church is their true home.
Therefore we must try to help
men to see what are those gifts of God through the Church which make human
defects and earthly reforms of secondary importance.
We must show men the
gifts.
But here comes the third, and in the long run the greatest, difficulty.
Even when men do know something of what the gifts are, they are not necessarily
attracted, but may even shrink from them.
More often than not their first
reaction is that they have not the muscles to take hold of them, nor any taste
for them or likelihood of happiness from them.
Merely to grasp the vision of
reality calls for mental muscles they have never used.
The moral law which is
the law of reality threatens the loss of pleasures which,
if they leave our
deeper hungers unfed,
have their own exquisiteness all the same.
The world of
spirit seems so thin and remote, the world we are used to so solid and close,
that in finding reality we feel as if we were losing reality.
Our poor hearts
cling to the things of this world in a desperate fear that if they lose them
they will lose all.
We must have something to cling to, for we cannot stand our
own solitariness:
so we cling to things as empty as ourselves—
shadows
certainly, but "what lovely things these shadows be ".
Men are not
likely to give up shadows so lovely save for the seen loveliness of
reality—
seen, and seen to be greater.
Our Lord's cry
"Ah, if thou couldst understand the ways that can bring thee peace"
utters the deepest trouble
of men upon earth.
To know the things that are for our peace involves knowing
so much:
about ourselves, and about things, and especially about these things,
especially about the life of grace and about the landscape of reality that
Truth opens to our gaze.
Life and landscape each need a chapter.
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