This is perhaps Dr Andrew Kania's finest commentary. The man is firing on about 24 cylinders in what he writes today. He seeks to address what is perhaps the chief disjunction in Catholicism today. It's a very old problem but Andrew addresses it with a fresh slant. It's all about this unbridgeable divide that seems to have opened up in the Church between the legalists/literalists/fundamentalists and the rest. Dr Kania presents a view of what our faith and spirituality ought to be all about that most readers of Catholica will readily assent to. It might even inspire you. Enjoy!

A myriad of moral dilemmas…

Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables (1862), poses to the reader a myriad of moral dilemmas. Set in the post-Napoleonic era of 19th Century France, Les Misérables, depicts the tale of a central hero, Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread, a man who nineteen years later escapes back into the 'free world' only to find himself morally bankrupted by his years of incarceration. Tottering on a moral precipice, Valjean's soul is saved by an act of mercy from a kindly provincial Bishop, who after Valjean robs him of his silverware, lies to the police who have captured the escaped convict, stating that what is in Valjean's possession had previously been personally bequeathed to him.

Now face-to-face with compassion and mercy, Valjean vows to be a force of good, and over the years rises to become a mayor of a town, a man reputed for his wisdom and charity. But Valjean's astonishing resurrection from a moral cesspit, does not please everyone. Javert, a policeman, believes strongly in the upholding of the letter of the law — he is a man who rigidly seeks to live by the code, and who seeks to punish any individual who sways from its legal formula. To Javert, Valjean is still a criminal — for he has failed to fulfil his duties to the State by escaping from prison. Irrespective of any good works he has performed as mayor to a broad section of the public, nor personally as a loving benefactor to an adopted daughter, Valjean is in the eyes of Javert, a law-breaker, an evil person — a man who must be brought to justice, so as to make society 'safe'.

Original illustration of Jean Valjean from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables 1862

Living in a world of black and white, moral ease…

In a world of black and white it is refreshingly easy to pin-point those replete in virginal ivory, from those tainted by sinful pitch — Javert lives in a world of such moral ease. Yet as Valjean's world seems to be spiraling to a return to prison, hunted incessantly by Javert — a twist occurs in the complex world of morality. Valjean saves Javert's life; and in return Javert, trembling in every moral sinew, offers Valjean a means to escape. Thus we come to the conclusion of the novel — Valjean living happily ever after with his daughter and her husband; and Javert staring at the River Seine flowing steadily beneath the embankment on which he stands.

For Javert, his whole life has been held together by sophisticated legal threads; by an application of the law that has sent men to their deaths for a failure to keep their lives on track with each dot on the 'i', and every cross on the 't'. If life and morality are guided along the principles of mercy and love, then he has sent men and women to their peril and long-suffering for stealing a mere morsel of bread; if life is about the arbitrary upholding of the moral code, then he must die for he has himself now broken the law. Like Judas Iscariot clutching his pieces of silver — Javert clutching his vision of justice, chooses death, drowning in the Seine; his epitaph being: the one who breaks the law – does not deserve life.

Ecclesial legalism…

In Yves Congar's tripartite address, Laity, Church and World (1960), the Dominican ecumenist spoke of an evolution of the Catholic Church in the West from the Middle Ages to the modern era, from a less codified rule base to a more legalistic form. According to Congar this development was directly related to the Church's desire to distance Herself from the dogmatic differences that Protestantism raised, as well as Her reaction to questions that the Scientific Revolution had posed. Congar stressed that even though this move toward legalism was inspired by good intentions, a natural self-defence mechanism of the Church, it stood in stark contrast to St. Thomas Aquinas' warning that the Church not become overly prescriptive in setting a morass of laws and rules for the Faithful to follow. As Congar writes: "…the Church is not walls, or barriers either, but people, the faithful. St. Thomas teaches that the Christian law consists principally (and his "principally" has very nearly the meaning of "essentially") in the inward grace of the Holy Spirit; secondarily, and as auxillary to and in the service of the first, in external things, dogma, sacraments, authority, rules and the rest". (Sum. Theol., I-II, cviii, a.1)[1] Moreover as Aquinas once noted about the pedantic provision of rules: "If we resolve the problems posed by faith exclusively by means of authority, we will of course possess the truth – but in empty heads!" [2]

The Dumb Ox seems to have found himself supported many centuries later by the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who commented that the most successful moral laws are those printed not in a book, but those imprinted on, and living in, the hearts of men and women. As Shelley writes: "…aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust".[3] The validity of this comment and that of Aquinas do not detract from the awesome and life-giving Truth that is contained within the pages of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, but it does mean that no lengthening of a Catechism, will ever deepen the love an individual has for God or the Church; perhaps even quite the opposite may occur — the individual may become totally overwhelmed, caught up in a sophisticated moral mine field of regulations and permutations within these regulations.

The difference between "Living" the Catechism and "Obeying" the Catechism…

Paul J. Philibert O.P. in his Translator's Introduction to Chenu's, Aquinas and His Role in Theology, writes that the beauty of Aquinas' theology lay in its affirmation that: "The point of the Church is not maintenance of creeds and formulas of faith, but mission that will engage the whole of society".[4] The difference between the spiritual individual who lives the Catechism from the individual who obeys the Catechism out of fea ris the same chasm that exists between a wife passionately in love with her husband, who seeks to increase the happiness of her spouse, in comparison to that woman who lives in fear of her lover becoming angry with her, and thus feigns love. In the first case, the loving wife, fulfils the desires of her husband and does so happily, even if it requires from her a great sacrifice. In the second case, we find a woman too frightened to feel any emotion but fear — even though she may smother her lover with well-disguised but empty kisses.

As Fr. Chenu so beautifully summed up in his short text, The Theology of Work: "The more complete is the mystery of love the more freedom it confers".[5]

Etienne Gilson in The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, would explain the relationship of the Law and the Spiritual Life, as follows:

"The just man, on the contrary, taking upon him the yoke of divine love, is no longer under a law, but neither is he without law: non sub lege, nec sine lege. But the law that he makes his own is now God's law; it is in a very deep sense that he daily prays that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven; that is to say that as God lives eternally by love of His own perfection, so man may desire nothing here below save that very perfection of God."[6]

In addition, a great Father of the Eastern Lung of the Universal Church, St. Basil of Caesarea (329-379), also wrote on this subject, stating:

"We obey God and avoid vices, from the fear of punishment, and in that case we take on the resemblance of Slaves. Or we keep the precepts, because of the utility that we derive from the recompense, thus resembling Mercenaries. Or finally, from love of Him who has given us the law, we obey with joy at having been judged worthy of serving so great and good a God, and thus we imitate the affection of Children towards their parents." (Von Hügel, 1999, Vol. II, p. 166)

Perhaps an emphasis on an obedience to the Law has since the Reformation, blurred the vision among many of the clergy and faithful of the far greater imperative of an obedience to God out of Love. To this end as part of the Preface to the First Edition of his monumental study, The Mystical Element of Religion, Baron Friedrich von Hügel, makes the following observation of the status of the 'catholicity' of the Catholic Church:

"Born as I was in Italy, certain early impressions have never left me; a vivid consciousness has been with me, almost from the first, of the massively virile personalities, the spacious, trustful times of the early, as yet truly Christian, Renaissance there, from Dante on to the Florentine Platonists. And when, on growing up, I acquired strong and definite religious convictions, it was that ampler pre-Protestant, as yet neither Protestant nor anti-Protestant, but deeply positive and Catholic world, with its already characteristically modern outlook and its hopeful and spontaneous application of religion to the pressing problems of life and thought, which helped to strengthen and sustain e, when depressed and hemmed in by the types of devotion prevalent since then in Western Christendom. For those early modern times presented me with men of the same general instincts and outlook as my own, but environed by the priceless boon and starting-point of a still undivided Western Christendom; Protestantism, as such, continued to be felt as ever more or less unjust and sectarian; and the specifically post-Tridentine type of Catholicism, with its regimental Seminarism, its predominately controversial spirit, its suspiciousness and timidity, persisted, however inevitable some of it may be, in its failure to win my love". (Hügel, 1999, xxxix)

A different way of looking at the Catechism of the Catholic Church…

If the faithful stop praying to God with love, but do so out of servile fear — then the Law of course loses none of its Truth, for It is still the Law — but the Law loses Its potency, Its immediacy, Its relevance — Its Spring of life-giving among men and women. The Catechism should thus be 'gifted' and presented to the faithful of the Church NOT as a rule book, by which to hang the sinner — BUT AS A GUIDE TOWARD SELF-REALIZATION — a source-book indicating the surest pathway to attaining the greatest happiness in life; for the Holy Spirit lives in the Law as He does in Love, but an over-emphasis of the letter of the Law over the 'spirit' of the Law, not only has the potential to reduce the Faithful to a race of men and women caught up in scrupulosity, but moreover has the real potential to subtract love from out of the relationship between God and Man; the Faithful becoming moral accountants in place of a living and loving People of God.

Another critical issue, is that the knowledge of God should not be separated from the love of God. St. Ambrose alluded to this problem many centuries ago when he wrote of the danger that exists when we seek to know God, without desiring to love Him; a case of empty hearts seeking to clinically fill their minds.

As Garrigou-Lagrange writes with regard the warning that John Tauler echoed from the pulpit:

"The Scribes, he [Tauler] says, were wise men who made much of their learning, whereas the Pharisees, who were strongly attached to their practices and observances, highly esteemed their own piety. We recognize in these two classes the two most harmful evil inclinations that can be found among pious people. … Nothing good comes from either of these dispositions. Nevertheless, rare are they who are not somewhat retained in one or the other of these evil inclinations or even in both of them at the same time; but some are much more held than others. By the Scribes we must understand intellectual men who value everything according to the standard of their reason or sensibility. They pass on to their reason what their senses have furnished them, and thus they come to understand great things. They glory in this knowledge and speak eloquently, but the depths of their souls, whence the truth should come, remain empty and desolate. The Pharisees, on the other hand, are pious people who have a good opinion of themselves, think they amount to something, hold firmly to their observances and their practices, believe there is nothing beyond these, and aspire to esteem and consideration because of these practices. They condemn those who do not see things as they do (even if their lives are in no way seriously reprehensible). … Let everyone, he adds, guard against these Pharisaical ways in the depths of his soul, and be watchful that no false sanctity hide there." (Garrigou-Lagrange, 1927, p. 34, Vol. II)

The primary call of the human soul…

Jacques Maritain

Many of the Saints and Blesseds tell us that the primary call of the human soul is not to 'know' God but to love God. The Thomist, Jacques Maritain said as much in the opening chapter of his famous work, The Degrees of Knowledge (1932), when he wrote: "The saints do not contemplate to know, but to love. They do not love for the sake of loving but for love of Him whom they love. It is for the love of the first beloved, God, that they aspire to that union with God that love demands whilst they love themselves only for Him".[7]

Anselm was indeed right when he said that faith seeks understanding — but no one ever is concerned with something that they do not first feel passionate about. Certainly when we love, we wish to know more about the object of our desire — but it is a misnomer and a blurring of the Truth, to force-feed information in the hope that this will bring about elegant sufficiency rather than spiritual indigestion, or in fact an 'immunization' to God. The Truth will indeed set a person free – but only when and if, that Truth is perceived by the individual as something imperative to the existential questions that form the bases of that individual's life. If this Truth remains external — then no number of codes, nor increased number of sub-paragraphs will ever make the ear hear, nor make the eye see.

It is only when our spiritual imagination has been awakened that we can begin to live our Faith, we become alive as members of the Church — as in the case of Bishop Myriel, or Jean Valjean; we know God because we have felt his touch through the hands, eyes and hearts of others. We thus begin to know the Truth, we thirst for the Truth and our capacity to love increases. Conversely it is when we know our Faith, but are not moved by it — that we breed a generation of mercenaries and slaves, who believe that life is solely about clearing a complex moral obstacle course — rather than, in the words of Saint John of the Cross — increasing over the duration of our lives, our capacity to love. We become then, as the tragic Javert, a repository of knowledge, devoid of a warm spirit with enough love to breathe life into this knowledge. We may go to the Liturgy – but do we actually listen to the words we hear and those we utter; we may light candles to an army of Saints, but do we seek to emulate their lives; we may know the entire Catechism, but are we able to save our souls for want of desire for walking the Way, or are we able to hear the cries of others for all our erudition? In the end we become embittered because deep within our hearts we know that all this moral accountancy enacted for the Glory of God, has not made us any the more Divine, in the same way that it has not made us any more human. For this reason, and for those that Garrigou-Lagrange espoused upon, we find in the Letter of St. James, the following extract:

"You believe in the one God – that is creditable enough, but even the demons have the same belief, and they tremble with fear. Fool! Would you not like to know that faith without deeds is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by his deed, because he offered his son Issac, on the altar? So you can see that his faith was working together with his deeds; his faith became perfect by what he did. In this way the scripture was fulfilled: Abraham put his faith in God, and this was considered as making him upright; and he received the name ' friend of God'. You see now that it is by deeds, and not only by believing, that someone is justified. There is another example of the same kind: Rahab the prostitute was she not justified by her deeds because she welcomed the messengers and showed them a different way to leave? As a body without a spirit is dead, so is faith without deeds". (cf. James 2: 19 – 26, The New Jerusalem Bible)

Such a call as has been alluded to in this paper, is not an anthem for antinomianism, far from it, for antinomianism is the twin evil of the other extreme, legalism. Laws are important and Divine in their nature — and who doubts that one paints better when one has an idea of the size of the canvas that one is offered. Rather it is call for Christians to live the Faith in order that others see that Christ indeed resurrected from the dead, and is not one more wise and dead hero of the past confined only to the dusty books on a library shelf, or incarcerated forever in a piece of art, locked away in marble or frozen in stained glass. It is in fact a call, for the choice between life and death – between the life of a Christian and that death of the Pharisee.

Footnotes:
[1] Congar, Y., (1960): 31
[2] Chenu, 2002, p. 26
[3] Shelley 1994, p. 228
[4] Chenu, M.D., (2002), viii
[5] Chenu, M.D., (1960), p. 66.
[6] Gilson, E., (1936), pp. 298-299.
[7] Maritain, J., (1932), p. 10.

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©2008 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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