INTELLIGENCE AND THE FAITH
“The deepest truth about God and the
salvation of man shines out for our sake on Christ who is both the mediator and
the fullness of all revelation.” ∼ Verbum Dei,
#2, cited in Placuit Deo I, 1.
Though it is quite true that the
intellectual side of Christianity can be over-emphasized by vain and
self-aggrandizing professors, the fact remains that intelligence is essential to the faith.
Nothing could be more harmful to the faith than the undermining of the
intellectual validity and solid grounding of the faith in reason. Individual
academics and intellectuals may be quite foolish, as St. Paul intimates. But
that is no argument for abandoning the effort to understand as much as we can
what we are in the world.
Thus, if a faith has nothing to stand
on but itself (sola fides), it will soon find itself subject to all
sorts of odd and silly opinions about what it all means. Reality is a hard
master. It is already there before we are. We do not read Augustine, Aquinas,
Bonaventure, or Newman for nothing. We read them because faith seeks and needs
understanding. In turn, understanding seeks faith because, if it is honest with
itself, it knows that it does not comprehend everything by itself. If a crisis
of faith exists among many Christians today, the causes are more likely to be
found within the Church itself. Doubt has been fostered by an attitude that
serious intellectual issues need not be faced or explained. Mind is said to be
less important than action. Yet action without truth wanders off into
“left-field” almost immediately on declaring its own independence from reason.
II.
Placuit Deo is an explanation of certain ideas that Pope
Francis has been discussing in his own talks and magisterial documents,
especially concerning Gnosticism and Pelagianism as problems also for our time.
Pope Francis is often difficult for many to follow. He is not the clearest
thinker that has ever sat on the Throne of Peter, as he himself would surely
admit.
Ladaria understands that it is well to give a more
direct discussion to some of the things the Holy Father is attempting to say,
something more in the tradition of John Paul II and Benedict. So when Pope
Francis does speak of things like Gnosticism and Pelagianism, it is helpful for
many to see more clearly what he is driving at.
Roughly, Pelagianism means that we can save
ourselves by ourselves. We do not need any divine assistance or grace. We are
basically self-saving individualists. Gnosticismmeans that, despite the hopelessness
of our present culture, our future will be determined by our own special
knowledge. Yet these “insights” have no real relationship to the kind of beings
we actually are. Salvation is “interior.” It need not have any relationship to
what we know about human nature or divine revelation. Indeed, it exempts us
even from our own body and its relationship to others.
Ladaria seeks to restate what Catholic tradition
meant by “salvation.” The modern world evidently has a tough time figuring out
just what this “salvation” is all about. Ladaria notes that a considerable
difference exists between classical Gnosticism and Pelagianism and what we have
today. But, as Francis notes, we have sufficient similarities to make the
comparison since generation after generation have made the same mistakes
throughout history.
Thus, we can ask two relevant questions about
salvation: 1) “How would Christ be able to mediate the Covenant of the entire
human family if human persons were isolated individuals who fulfill themselves
with their own efforts…?” Christianity obviously maintains that the destiny
that God has in mind for each existing person is not something that man can
concoct and carry out by and for himself.
2) “How could it be possible for the salvation mediated
by the Incarnation of Jesus, His life, death, and resurrection in His true
body, to come to us, if the only thing that mattered were liberating the inner
reality of the human person from the limits of the body and the material
(world)…?” A spirit free of the body is rather an angel, not a human being.
Jacques Maritain used to be rightly concerned with “angelism” in philosophy. In
that view, man is a soul, not a person composed of body and soul.
III.
How does one approach this issue of salvation? We
each know that we exist as a certain particular being that lives more or less
four score years, if he is fortunate. “Man perceives himself, directly or
indirectly, as a mystery: Who am I? I exist and yet do not have the principle
of my existence within myself.” Whether I like it or not, in everything I do or
think, I seek my own true and final happiness. Often this search for happiness
is hidden from us. We only become aware of it in times of crises when the very
limits of our true self become visible to us.
The fact that man is a mystery does not mean that
we can know nothing about him. It only means that we do not know everything
about him. What we do know about ourselves is and should be real knowledge that
is guaranteed by the principle of non-contradiction that prevents us from
holding incompatible beliefs about ourselves. Ladaria adds: “Together with the
struggle to attain the good comes the fight to ward off evil….” Our happiness
consists in knowing and choosing what is in fact good. But in this world,
knowing what is good is the other side of knowing what is evil. In our
understanding, knowing what is evil is both a necessary and good thing in
itself. It is not wrong to know what evil is. Knowing what evil is by faith,
reason or experience allows us to avoid it, reject it. Its depths, no doubt, we
never fully comprehend.
“Faith in Christ teaches, rejecting all claims of
self-realization, that these [tendencies to the good] can be completely
fulfilled only if God Himself makes it possible by drawing us towards Himself.”
The origin of evil is not in the material world. Our mission in this life does
not consist in “escaping” the body as if it were some sort of evil appendage to
our being. Our reality and destiny are given to us. They are not constituent
parts of our being. Our existence consists in the delightful discovery of the
profound gifts we have been given through no merit of our own.
“The salvation that faith announces to us does not
pertain only to our own inner reality but to our entire being.” This is why the
resurrection of the body is so fundamental to our faith and is involved in its
completion. The plan of salvation consists in the formation of a people among
whom the divinity, in the Word, is made flesh. “The good news of salvation has
a name and a face—Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”
IV.
In the life of Jesus, we find both divine and human
activities. He is sent because we cannot save ourselves. But we can, if we
will, be saved. God’s love of each person is gratuitous. Still, it demands a
free response. Love cannot be coerced, even by God. Both our glory and our doom
are found in this truth. The incarnation of Christ brings into the world both a
human and divine presence in one Person. Christ lived a fully human life in
full communion with both his Father and with other human beings whom he knew.
He was not an abstraction or an idea alone.
Christ established a Church in which to carry on
his mission among us. “The grace that Christ gives us is not a merely interior
salvation, as the neo-Gnostic vision claims, [it] introduces us into concrete
relationships that He Himself has lived. The Church is a visible community.”
Salvation is not an isolated event or a product of our own making. “Rather salvation
consists in being incorporated into a community of persons that participates in
the communion of the Trinity.”
Moreover, “self-salvation” bypasses the sacraments
in which we are to participate. These sacraments are outward signs, not just
ideas. We are judged by the actions that constitute the record of our lives. We
live in a dispensation in which forgiveness of our sins is possible. “When they
abandon their love for Christ by sinning, believers can be reintroduced into
the kind of relationship begun by Christ in the sacrament of Penance….”
There is a Last Judgment at which everyone will be
judged on “the authenticity of one’s love.” The Gnostic idea that salvation is
a freedom from the body and from the many normal relations found among men is
untenable. But since our salvation is bound up with existing persons, it can
never be just something affecting only ourselves. This concreteness grounds our
care for actual human persons who are weakest and suffering. With a fuller
knowledge of what salvation is, we are directed outwards to others, to make
known the basis of our belief in salvation.
“Total salvation of the body and of
the soul is the final destiny to which God calls all of humanity.” Placuit
Deo was written lest we forget just what we are, each of us. When God
“calls” humanity, he expects a response from each of its members who enter and
pass through the time of their lives.
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