MY concern in this book is not with the will but with the intellect, not with sanctity but with sanity. The difference is too often overlooked in the practice of religion. The soul has two faculties and they should be clearly distinguished. There is the will: its work is to love—and so to choose, to decide, to act. There is the intellect: its work is TO KNOW, TO UNDERSTAND, TO SEE: to see what?—TO SEE WHAT’S THERE.
I have said that my concern is with the intellect rather than with the will: this not because the intellect matters more in religion than the will, but because it does matter and tends to be neglected, and the neglect is bad. I realize that salvation depends directly upon the will. We are saved or damned according to what we love. If we love God, we shall ultimately get God: we shall be saved. If we love self in preference to God then we shall get self apart from God: we shall be damned. But though in our relation to God the intellect does not matter as much as the will, (and indeed depends for its health upon the will) it does matter, and as I have said, it is too much neglected—to the great misfortune of the will, for we can never attain a maximum love of God with only a minimum knowledge of God.
For the soul’s full functioning, we need a Catholic intellect as well as a Catholic will. We have a Catholic will when we love God and obey God, love the Church and obey the Church. We have a Catholic intellect when we live consciously in the presence of the realities that God through His Church has revealed. A good working test of a Catholic will is that we should do what the Church says. But for a Catholic intellect, we must also see what the Church sees. This means that when we look out upon the universe we see the same universe that the Church sees; and the enormous advantage of this is that the universe the Church sees is the real universe, because She is the Church of God. Seeing what She sees means seeing what is there. And just as loving what is good is SANCTITY, or the health of the will, so seeing what is there is SANITY, or the health of the intellect.
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Now in that sense most of us have Catholic wills, but not many of us have Catholic intellects. When we look at the universe, we see pretty well what other people see, plus certain extra features taught us by our religion. For the most part, the same influences that form other people’s minds, form ours—the same habits of thought, inclinations, bodily senses, indolences, worked upon by the same newspapers, periodicals, best-sellers, films, radio programmes. So that we have not so much Catholic minds as worldly minds with Catholic patches. Intellectually, we wear our Catholicism like a badge on the lapel of the same kind of suit that everyone else is wearing.
If that seems to you too sweeping, consider what the Church does see when She looks at the universe. For one thing, She sees all things whatsoever held in existence from moment to moment by nothing but the continuing will of God that they should not cease to be. When She sees anything at all, in the same act She sees God holding it in existence. Do we? It is not merely a matter of knowing that this is so. Do we actually see it so? If we do not, then we are not living mentally in the same world as the Church. What is more, we are not seeing things as they are, for that is how they are.
Let us look a little longer at this first fact about anything. I can recall with great clarity the moment when for the first time I heard myself saying that God had made me and all things—of nothing. I had known it, like any other Catholic, from childhood; but I had never properly taken it in. I had said it a thousand times, but I had never heard what I was saying. In the sudden realization of this particular truth there is something quite peculiarly shattering. There are truths of religion immeasurably mightier in themselves, and the realization of any one of them might well make the heart miss a beat. But this one goes to the very essence of what we are, and goes there almost with the effect of annihilation. Indeed it is a kind of annihilation. God used no material in our making; we are made of nothing. At least self-sufficiency is annihilated, and all those customary ways that the illusion of self-sufficiency has made for us. The first effect of realizing that one is made of nothing is a kind of panic-stricken insecurity. One looks round for some more stable thing to clutch, and in this matter none of the beings of our experience are any more stable than we, for at the origin of them all is the same truth: all are made of nothing. But the panic and the insecurity are merely instinctive and transient. A mental habit has been annihilated, but at least the way towards a sounder mental habit is clear. For although we are made of nothing, we are made into something; and since WHAT WE ARE MADE OF does not account for us, we are forced to a more intense concentration upon THE GOD WE ARE MADE BY.
What follows is very simple but revolutionary. If a carpenter makes a chair, he can leave it and the chair will not cease to be. For the material he used in its making has a quality called rigidity, by virtue of which it will retain its nature as a chair. The maker of the chair has left it, but the chair can still rely for continuance in existence upon the material he used, the wood. Similarly if the Maker of the universe left it, the universe, too, would have to rely for continuance in existence upon the material He used? NOTHING. In short, the truth that God used no material in our making carries with it the not-sufficiently-realized truth that GOD CONTINUES TO HOLD US IN BEING, and that UNLESS HE DID SO WE SHOULD SIMPLY CEASE TO BE.
This is the truth about the universe as a whole and about every part of it. Material beings—the human body, for instance—are made up of atoms, and these again of electrons and protons, and these again of who knows what; but whatever may be the ultimate constituents of matter, God made them of nothing, so that they and the beings so imposingly built up of them exist only because He keeps them in existence. Spiritual beings—the human soul, for instance—have no constituent parts. Yet they do not escape this universal law. They are created by God of nothing and could not survive an instant without His conserving power. We are held above the surface of our native nothingness solely by God’s continuing Will to hold us so. In Him, we live and move and have our being. (Acts xvii. 28.)
Therefore if we see anything at all—ourself or some other man, or the universe as a whole or any part of it—without at the same time seeing God holding it there, then we are seeing it all wrong. If we saw a coat hanging on a wall and did not realize that it was held there by a hook, we should not be living in the real world at all, but in some fantastic world of our own in which coats defied the law of gravity and hung on walls by their own power. Similarly if we see things in existence and do not in the same act see that they are held in existence by God, then equally we are living in a fantastic world, not the real world. Seeing God everywhere and all things upheld by Him is not a matter of sanctity, but of plain sanity, because God IS everywhere and all things are upheld by Him. What we do about it may be sanctity; but merely seeing it is sanity. To overlook God’s presence is not simply to be irreligious; it is a kind of insanity, like overlooking anything else that is actually there.
It is part of the atmosphere in which we live—and which therefore we too must breathe—to take for granted that these considerations are edifying, and possibly even relevant if one happens to be of a religious temperament: but not otherwise. It may be a first step towards a fumigation of the atmosphere if we see the fallacy of this too easy view. If you were driving in a car, saw it heading straight for a tree, and called out to the driver to swerve or he would hit it; and if he answered: “It is no good talking to me about trees: I’m a motorist, not a botanist,” you would feel that he was carrying respect for the rights of the specialist too far. A tree is not only a fact of botany: it is a fact. God is not only a fact of religion: He is a fact. Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything, which includes being wrong about one’s self. It does not require any extreme of religious fanaticism for a man to want to know what he is: and this he cannot know without some study of the Being who alone brought him into existence and holds him there.
I have discussed at some length this first thing that the Church sees when She looks at the universe: what we may call the texture of the universe: what it is made of. That of course is only a beginning of what She sees. Above all She sees THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE, all the things that exist and their relation one to another. Again it is worth our while to linger upon this and see what value it may have for the health of the mind. It is a plain fact that we do not know anything at all until we see it in its context, that is, in its place in the totality to which it belongs. Take the human eye as a convenient example. The human eye is very beautiful, as all lovers have seen. But the most ardent lover might find it hard to recapture his emotion if the lady, taking his praise of her eye too literally, decided to present it to him on a plate. The eye needs to be seen in the face; its beauty, its meaning, its usefulness all come from its position in the face; and one who had seen eyes only on plates would never really have known them at all, however minutely he might have examined the eye thus unhappily removed from its living context.
This is true of all things whatsoever. Nothing is rightly seen save in the totality to which it belongs; no part of the universe is rightly seen save in relation to the whole. BUT THE UNIVERSE CANNOT BE SEEN AS A WHOLE UNLESS ONE SEES GOD AS THE SOURCE OF THE EXISTENCE OF EVERY PART OF IT AND THE CENTRE BY RELATION TO WHICH EVERY PART IS RELATED TO EACH OTHER. The man who does not see God may have vast knowledge of this or that section of being, but he is like a man who should know all about the eye never having seen a face. His knowledge is of items in a list, not of features in a face. The shape of things, the proportion of things, the totality of things, are unseen by him, indeed unsuspected by him. Because he does not know them he must omit them from his vision of things and his judgment of action. He sees nothing quite right, because he sees nothing in its context. We live, indeed, in a vast context of things that are, events that have happened, a goal to which all is moving. That we should mentally see this context is part of mental health. Just as knowing that God upholds all things, is a first step in knowing what we are, so a clear view of the shape of reality is a first step toward knowing where we are. To know where we are and what we are? that would seem to be the very minimum required by our dignity as men.
Now the Church does thus see the universe. Just as we never think of an eye without at the same time being aware of the face, She never sees anything at all without in the same act seeing the face of reality: God, infinite and eternal, Trinity, Unity; humanity, finite, created in time, fallen and redeemed by Christ; the individual man born into the life of nature, reborn into the life of grace, united with Christ in the Church which is His Mystical Body, aided by angels, hindered by devils, destined for heaven, in peril of hell.
There in outline is the real universe. Now it would be plainly frivolous for most of us to pretend that we see things like that. We know about the individual truths concerned, but they do not combine in our minds to form the framework in which as a matter of course we see everything. We know about the Blessed Trinity, and the Incarnation, and Infinity and Eternity, and our own creation from nothing. But we know about them much as we might know that the sum of the angles of a triangle is two right angles, or that Washington’s name was George. They are things we know, but we have not got them into the mind’s landscape. They are extras, immeasurably more important to us and more valued by us than those mathematical or historical bits and pieces, but like them in this, that we do not see them as a matter of course when we see anything at all; we see them only when we advert to them.
The test of anyone’s mind is WHAT IS IN HIS MENTAL LANDSCAPE. And it is not even enough that we should see the same thing as other people plus the things the Church teaches. Even the things that we and they both see will not look the same or be the same; because what the Church teaches affects even the things already in the landscape, the things of ordinary experience. It is like a physical landscape at sunrise: it is not that you see the same things that you saw before and now find yourself seeing the sun as well. You see everything sun-bathed. Similarly it is not a case of seeing the same universe as other people and then seeing God over and above. For God is at the centre of the being of everything whatsoever. If we would see the universe aright, we must see it GOD-bathed.
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To many, the idea of bringing the intellect fully into action in religion seems almost repellent. The intellect seems so cold and measured and measuring, and the will so warm and glowing. Indeed the joy of the will is always figured in terms of warmth—such words as ardour, fervour and the like come from Latin words for a fire burning: there is a fear that intellect can only damp down the fire. Many again who do not find the use of the intellect in religion actually repellent, regard it as at least unnecessary—at any rate for the layman—and possibly dangerous. One can, they say, love God without any very great study of doctrine. Indeed, they say, warming to their theme, some of the holiest people they know are quite ignorant. Plenty of theologians are not as holy as an old Irishman they have seen saying his Rosary. All this is so crammed with fallacy as to be hardly worth refuting. A man may be learned in dogma, and at the same time proud or greedy or cruel: knowledge does not supply for love if love is absent. Similarly a virtuous man may be ignorant, but ignorance is not a virtue. It would be a strange God who could be loved better by being known less. Love of God is not the same thing as knowledge of God; love of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him: for every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him. It is true that some get vast love from lesser knowledge: it is true even that some get vast light from lesser knowledge: for love helps sight. But sight helps love too.
After all, the man who uses his intellect in religion is using it to see what is there. But the alternative to seeing what is there is either, not seeing what is there, and this is darkness; or seeing what is not there, and this is error, derangement, a kind of double darkness. And it is unthinkable that darkness, whether single or double should be preferred to light.
Indeed light is the joy of the mind as warmth is the joy of the will. But warmth and light are both effects of fire, warmth fire as felt, light fire as seen (and seen by). It seems strange to value the one effect and not the other of that fire by which the Holy Ghost is figured to us. It is an odd delusion that one is warmer in the dark, that one can love God better in the dark—or should we say in the half-dark, since a Christian can never be wholly in darkness.
We can be saved and even holy without a great deal of knowledge; for holiness is in the will and we are saved by what we love, not by how much we know. But knowledge of the truth matters enormously all the same. It matters for the reason we have already stated, namely that every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him. It matters also for a reason that may not at first sight appear: that, in the appallingly difficult struggle to be good, the will is helped immeasurably by the intellect’s clear vision of the real universe. Unless our mind has made that kind of study, then the position is that the Church is living in one world (which happens to be the real world) and we are living in another. One practical consequence is that the laws of right living promulgated by the Church, moral laws generally, are the natural laws of that real world and would seem so to us if we were mentally living in it; whereas in the twilight world we are living in, they often seem odd and unreasonable, which does not make obedience any easier. Thus the whole burden of right living is cast upon the will—do it because the Church says it—with no aid from the intellect, or rather with active hindrance from the intellect that naturally tends to judge by the half-reality it sees. And this is sheer cruelty.
The problem we shall consider in this book is how our minds are to “master” the Church’s landscape, habituate themselves to it, move about easily in it, be at home in it. Somehow or other we must become fully conscious citizens of the real world, seeing reality as a whole and living wholly in it.
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