ONE is at first startled to be told that only in the Mystical Body can man be fully and satisfactorily himself. The real difficulty about the doctrine of the Mystical Body, as we have seen, is not to grasp it but to believe that the Church really means it. It is not hard to believe in the Catholic Church as an organization established by Christ to which its members go for Christ's gifts of life and truth; but, about the idea of the Church as an organism into which we are built that we may live in the full stream of Christ's life as members of Christ, there is an extra-ordinariness which dazzles or baffles by seeming so utterly out of scale with us. The ordinary Catholic's first reaction, on being told that that is his condition in the Church, is an incredulous "What, me!" He feels not only that the thing is beyond his powers, but that it is rather beyond his desires. Our meagreness would have been satisfied - even, as we feel in this first reaction, better satisfied - by something less. Some less ardent context, we feel, would suit our ordinariness better.
We have already considered this difficulty in the mind. Here we may look at it again from a rather different angle. Man must grasp that man is extraordinary. He is extraordinary like all creatures? there is nothing prosaic about being held in existence out of one's native nothingness by the continuing will of Omnipotence; but he is more extraordinary than other creatures, both by what God made him and by what he has made of himself.
Let us consider ourselves a little. We are made from nothing, but we are not made for nothing and will never return into nothing. Without God we should be nothing, but we are not without Him and will never be without Him. He made us not only into something, but into something that is like Him; and again not only into something that is like Him, but into something that He could Himself become, something that He thought enough of to die for. Spiritual and immortal, made in the likeness of God, redeemed by Christ, we are clustered with splendours. Consider man's glory as we know it against the dreariness or man as the atheist thinks him. We have nothing as our origin, but eternity as our destiny; the atheist has a cloud about his origin, but nothing as his destiny. We come from nothing, he is going to nothing. Fortunately his thinking so does not make it so. Eternity will have surprises for him, too.
In any event never think that the way of man is prosaic. We are a mixture of matter and spirit, and in this resemble no other creature - at least in the universe known to us: of possible inhabitants of other planets I know as little as the rest of men. We are the only beings who die and do not stay dead: it seems an odd way to our goal that as the last stage on the way to it all of us, saint and sinner, should fall apart. We are the only beings with an everlasting destiny who have not reached their final state. By comparison there is something cosy and settled about angels, good and bad. Men are the only beings whose destiny is uncertain.
There is an effect of this in our consciousness, if we choose to analyse it. There is a two-way drag in all of us, and nothing could be more actual and less academic than this curious fact. How actual it is we can see if we compare our knowledge that the planet we live on is not anchored in space. This ought to be, one would think, the first thing we should be aware of, yet it was only a few centuries ago that scientists arrived at it; and most of us still have to take the word of scientists for it. No one of us has ever felt the whizz of the world through space and the counter-drag of whatever power it is that keeps us upon the earth's surface. But we do feel the almost continuous drag in ourselves downwards towards nothingness and the all too occasional upward thrust. Man is the cockpit of a battle. We are the only creatures who can choose their side and change their side in this battle. We are the only beings left who can either choose or refuse God. All the excitement of our universe is centred in man.
For we human beings started extraordinary, and from extraordinary have grown monstrous? body rebelling against soul, imagination playing the devil with intellect, passion storming will. The medieval travellers' stories of men with their heads under their shoulders were not unjustly felt to be pretty startling. But men with their intellects under their imaginations and their wills under their passions are more startling still. The only reason we are not startled is that we are more sensitive to the shape, and therefore to any misshapenness, of body than of soul. Whatever other reasons we might have or think we have for rejecting the doctrine of the Mystical Body, let us not think of ourselves as too ordinary for so marvellous a context. No context could be too extraordinary for creatures like men.
But the extraordinariness of both is not the only link between man and the Church. At every point in the nature of man the Church fits it. We may summarize the truth about all men in two pairs of facts: first, man is at once spirit and matter; second, he is at once an individual person and a social being. In each pair the Church sees both elements.
As to the first pair, she makes such provision for the needs and powers of the soul as are undreamed of elsewhere; but the body is fully realized, too, by way of asceticism fitting it for full partnership with the soul, by way of sacrament and sacramental fitting it for companionship to the very furthest point the soul can go. With?in the Church there is a consecration of soul and body, an awareness of sacredness in soul and body.
As to the second pair, the Church has turned the social element in man's nature to the uses of religion beyond any other church, seeing man united with his fellows in relation to God, uniting with his fellows in the worship of God, receiving God's gifts of truth and life through the fellowship. Yet the person remains himself, not merged in the human society here or in the divine nature hereafter, under God an end in himself, not a pawn in a game. Nowhere can a man more fully feel at once his kinship with all men and the worth of his own personality.
In relation to both our key facts, notice the two tides that have beaten on the Church in these last centuries, Protestantism and Secularism. Just as in each the Church preserved both components, so in each her assailants chose one component and let the other go. Protestantism stressed the soul and the individual. Secularism stressed the body and society. Consider these a little more closely.
Protestantism, we say, opted for the soul and largely ignored the body, or at least made no provision for it. It ruled out asceticism, most of the sacraments and all the sacramentals. It produced a religion for the soul only, which would have been well enough had man been a soul only, but was no religion for man. With the onrush of Secularism, the ignored element had its revenge. Secularism concentrated on the body, ignoring the spirit as completely as Protestantism ignored the body. Its aims are primarily the body's good, comfort and security, on the general assumption that, if man does happen to have a soul, it too will be satisfied by improved material conditions. The result is the starvation of the spirit.
Again the emphasis of Protestantism was on the relation of the individual soul to God, any co-operation of man being regarded as an intrusion. There is a truth in this, but it is not the whole truth. There is an element in man beyond the reach of his fellows, something incommunicable which must have its own unshared relation with God, but that element is not the whole of man, and the effort to build the whole of religion upon it as if it were, means ultimately that even it does not reach its fullest achievement. It is within the Catholic Church that mysticism has reached its most marvellous point, as indeed the spiritual non-Catholic shows by reading the works of our mystics in preference to his own. There is the same revenge of the ignored element here as earlier. Secularism came, betting everything upon the social order as against the human person. We see this at its logical extreme in Communism and Nazism, where the collective is everything and the individual has literally no meaning and certainly no destiny apart from it. But though in these two the tendency has gone furthest, the same tendency runs through all modern sociology. The only home left for personality is the Church. Only for the Church is everyone someone.
Thus both Protestantism and Secularism maim man by treating him as half of himself. The Church alone treats man as the whole of himself in the whole of his context.
But if the Church gives us the whole truth in perfect balance, there is a danger that we, receiving it thus whole and balanced, may not use our own minds sufficiently upon it. It is a great thing to preserve truth inviolate, but less so if one keeps it unexamined. And within this danger there is the subtler danger of thinking one's mind active upon the truth when one is in fact merely exercising it upon words. In this matter of what man is, the Catholic is in real danger of stopping at the words of the definition as though knowing them were equivalent to knowing man.
Man, says the philosopher, is a rational animal. He is indeed. As a definition, the phrase is perfect; but as a description it would be totally inadequate. The object of a definition is to define, that is to make a statement about a thing that will apply to that thing exclusively. It is a pointer that points to one single thing, the thing it defines. The phrase "rational animal" manages to point at man and at nothing else within our experience: the word "animal" cuts out every being that is not animal; the word "rational" cuts out every animal that is not man. The phrase distinguishes man from the octopus, say, and from the angel (just as the derisive phrase "unfeathered biped" distinguishes him from bird and beast, since no beast is biped and no bird unfeathered). Once one has put enough into the definition to exclude every other thing, to add anything further would be superfluous. But this means that there is far more in anything than its definition tells. Too many treat the phrase rational animal or the alternative phrase "union of spirit and matter" as a sort of blackboard diagram upon which they proceed to base their thinking on the affairs of man. But in fact either phrase is too meagre a foundation. It leaves out too much?the fact, for instance, that man is fallen.
The truth is that no book and no statement by someone else can tell us what man is. Only life can do that. Every man one meets can add to our knowledge of what man is, provided that we know how to learn. If we want really to understand man, it is not enough to study animality and rationality, on the principle of the man in Pickwick Papers who, having to write an article on Chinese Metaphysics, looked up China in the encyclopaedia, then Metaphysics, and combined the information. If you want to find out what a rational animal is, study man; neither animality nor rationality will be the same when the two are wed: the marriage does strange things to both of them. Rationality functioning in union with a body is not just rationality; animality is so ennobled by its marriage with spirit that no mere animal would know what to do with it. The way to find all this is to meet man and think hard about the experience.
As an example of the mass of actuality that can be wrapped up in a phrase, consider some of the first things that experience shows, and the phrase does not in itself tell us, about man as a union of spirit and matter. The word "union" is a word with a vast variety of meanings. If one is content with the word without getting at the one special meaning that applies to man, then one will never know what man is at all, and this would be a pity since it means a profound ignorance about oneself. Not to know what an angel is, is a misfortune; not to know what a man is threatens sanity.
Let us glance at our phrase, beginning with the word UNION.
The union is of two beings one of them spatial, one of them spaceless. Two unlikelier beings for a union it would be hard to conceive. If we had not the fact of it under our noses, we should be inclined to think that if any union were possible between two such, it could be only a very sketchy and casual union. But the fact is that these two beings are united so closely that they constitute one being, one person, one subsistent operative thing. We have already con?sidered the union in a rather abstract way, but it may be worth repeating something of what has been said and adding some further points.
You may remember the illustration, used in chapter , of a pot of water boiling on a flame. We have here a union of flame and water, the flame enflaming every part of the water, so that the water is immeasurably different from water unflamed both in what it is and in what it can do; so in the human compound, the body acted on by a spiritual soul is immeasurably different from a merely animal body. If ever there were a water and a flame, so related that that flame could heat only that water and that water be heated by no flame but that, we should have a figure closer still. For the soul of man and the body of man can in the one case give and in the other case receive the lifegiving energy only in relation to each other. My soul could not animate your body. In the most literal sense a man's soul and body are made for one another.
A union so close, and here the figure of the flame and the water becomes totally inadequate, might be expected to affect the soul in its own proper activities. And so we find it. There is not only that border region of emotion and passion where it is hard to tell which is more in operation, but, in the activity of intellectual knowledge, which is the soul's own special affair and for which the body as such has no competence at all, the body does in fact play a part. The soul receives all that information upon the outside world? upon which it does its own thinking and from which it draws knowledge amounting ultimately to the knowledge of God Himself ? through the doorways of the body's senses. While soul and body maintain their union here upon earth, the body must play this organic part in the soul's knowing, or the soul not know.
The inter-relation of soul and body in the concrete living of life is the commonest fact of experience. States of the soul produce effects upon the body. What happens to the body produces states of the soul. And all this Protestantism chooses to ignore. At any rate it will not be ignorable in Heaven. We have observed that the flame can go on flaming even after the water is taken away. And the soul can continue in its own spiritual activities even after the body has reached a point where it can no longer respond to the animating energies of the soul and we have the separation that is called death. But the separation is not to be permanent. For this immeasurably close union constitutes the fullness of man. And man's ultimate destiny is to live the life of Heaven not as part of himself, even the noblest part, but as his whole self.
We have glanced a little at the union of spirit and matter; we may now look at its other face, the union of rationality and animality. At first sight these two look if anything less apt for life together than "spaceless" and "spatial". In terms of marriage it looks like the most impossible misalliance. Friendly angels may well have shaken their heads and malicious devils rubbed their hands to see a marriage that looked so certain to go on the rocks, and which very soon looked as if it had in fact gone on the rocks. Rationality and animality are so oddly assorted in themselves that they seemed to need ideal circumstances to give them any chance, and ideal circumstances are just what they did not get, at least for long. In our own experience we know how bothersome a union it is. An archangel or a cat would be driven mad in twenty-four hours by the problem of living in two such various worlds at once. Indeed madness sometimes looks like a pretty good summarization of what man has made of the problem himself, a madness we have got used to.
The trouble is that animality is so much easier than rationality. For one thing it is quite effortless, whereas rationality demands effort. We are good at animality and very much attached to it: we find rationality difficult and not so immediately rewarding. What makes it worse is that the soul can enjoy the body's pleasures as the body cannot enjoy the soul's. The dice seem heavily loaded in favour of animality, especially in a generation as fatigued as ours. Yet we have spiritual and not only animal needs. The body is on the quest, but the spirit is on the quest, too. The body quests more clamorously, but the spirit is never wholly silent, and its hungers can be as real and even as torturing as the body's. We shall see more of these hungers of the soul, but pause here long enough to grant their reality. The soul can enjoy the body's satisfactions, but it cannot be satisfied with them. There is a trouble in it, and an unawareness of what is troubling it. H. G. Wells half hit it in his description of one of his heroes - "a street arab in love with unimaginable goddesses ".
There is a conflict in man between these two so different sets of needs and the result is a kind of near chaos. Rationality and animality either complete each other (and that if the relation is exactly right), or perturb each other, neither knowing what is the matter. They tend to fissure, making two beings of us instead of one: but two incomplete beings. The needs of the body inflame the soul; and the needs of the soul torment the whole man in such a way as to mar the perfection of the body's pleasure in its pleasure; and the animality is spurred further to provide what it cannot provide, namely satisfaction for the whole man; and so we get every sort of perversion and that sort of depravity which in our exasperation we call animal, but which is not animal at all and would shock an animal to the root of his being if he could comprehend it; and mixed with the perversion and the depravity strange streaks of magnificence. Chaos is the only word, and if we are not aware of the chaos, then we do not know man. The chaos roars or mutters or only whimpers, according to the energy of the man and what he has made of the conflict. It may be only a kind of uneasy shifting or sense of insecurity. But it must always be taken into account.
The fact of this conflict within man is one reason why we should not judge other men. Our Lord tells us not to judge, "lest we be judged". That is one reason, but it is not the only reason. We should refrain from judgment not only because we expose ourselves to judgment, but because we have not the knowledge that judgment needs. The quick slick confident judgments we are forever making are merely silly. Who can read the chaos in another's soul from which his actions proceed? Who can read the chaos in his own soul?
What we have just seen is simply a sample of what beginners in the study of man can find out for themselves on their way to deeper knowledge. Such a study once entered upon must not be allowed to cease. We must keep on studying man. We may not be able to say, that is to cast into words, the new knowledge we gain; but there is an intimacy, a new feel and instinct for man such as a good sculptor gets for stone, which will make the most enormous difference to our handling of all men, and especially of the man who is ourself. Each must make the study for himself. But we may summarize here two of the things that will become always clearer. The first is that man is incalculable. Man is a rational animal. But that does not mean that he is a reasonable animal. It means only that he has reason, and therefore can misuse it. If he had not reason, he could not be unreasonable. But he has, and is. That is what I mean by his incalculability. But once you have said that man is incalculable, you have said that the definition is not enough, that no definition could be enough, and indeed no description. We must never take our eye off him: he is always liable to surprise us, and himself, too.
The second truth that will emerge is that man is insufficient for himself. His insufficiency is so essential to an understanding of the religion God made for him that it must have its own chapter.