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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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.
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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