Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

-

"That she, holy and catholic, is possessed of Divine authority, which cannot be resisted without sin, admits of no question." That is positive and universal, and corresponds to what our Lord said, "He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me." (St. Luke x. 16.) "That this authority may be grossly abused to the destruction of individual liberty is also clear." But, with the Reviewer's leave, that cannot be. The authority is Divine, and we do not understand how Divine authority, that is, God's authority, can be abused. If, as the Reviewer asserts, the Church possesses Divine authority, it is God who teaches and commands in and through her. How is it possible, then, for her to abuse her authority? His word is pledged that she shall not abuse it, and can you have a better guaranty than that? Can God's word fail? Can God abuse his authority? To assert that the authority of the Church is Divine, is to assert that it cannot be abused by her, - is to offer the highest guaranty the individual can possibly have, that his rights will be sacredly respected; for he has no rights but those which God has given him, and God never contradicts himself. We are vehemently inclined to believe that our rights have far more security in the justice and love of God, than they have, or can have, in our own private judgment; and we do not find it very humiliating to acknowledge that we are far more likely to have the truth when we rely on the judgment of God than when we rely on our own. No; it will not do, after you have conceded that the Church possesses Divine authority, which cannot be resisted without sin, to contend that she can abuse her authority. You must either deny her Divine authority, or concede that for her to abuse her authority is impossible.

The objection on which the Reviewer seems to place his principal reliance is, that, if we conceive the supernatural as wholly out of the sphere of the natural, no authority can mediate it, and bring the two into real union. The objection is specious, but will not bear examination; for it implies that a supernatural revelation of supernatural truth is impossible, which we have already shown is not true, in showing that the intelligible and superintelligible in God are identical, and that, in knowing God as the intelligible, we know, not, indeed, what he is as superintelligible, but that he is superintelligible, that is, infinitely above, in his essence, both our comprehension and our apprehension. That the supernatural cannot be so evidenced to the natural, that the natural shall apprehend or believe it su

pernaturally, we concede; but that it cannot be so evidenced as to be apprehended, or believed, with what is called human faith, as distinguished from Divine faith, we deny, for reasons just assigned. To apprehend the supernatural as supernatural, or to believe it with supernatural faith, ex parte subjecti, the subject must, no doubt, be supernaturally elevated, by the donum fidei, or gift of faith, which places the creditive subject, as to the form of his act, on the plane of the credible object. But, if this be so, the Reviewer asks, in substance, why faith cannot be elicited without, as well as with, the authority of the Church propounding the object? We answer,- 1. Because the act of faith is not elicited or elicitable without the credible object, and the gift of faith does not propose the credible object; it only prepares, by supernaturally elevating it, the natural creditive subject to believe it supernaturally when it is proposed. 2. Because the authority of the Church proposing, though extrinsic in part to the material object of faith, is yet included, integrally, in the credible object, as the formal object of faith, and must, therefore, itself be believed in believing it. And, 3. Because gratia præsupponit naturam, and though the act of faith demands more than natural reason to be elicited, it yet cannot be elicited without natural reason, and therefore not without such authority as is in se satisfactory to natural reason. The will can do nothing in the work of sanctification without grace, and yet grace does nothing without the concurrence of the will; and hence we address to the will the motives naturally fitted to move it. It is the same with reason as intellect. It can do nothing in the order of supernatural faith without the appropriate grace; but as the grace, in turn, does nothing without the intellect, we address to intellect the motives naturally fitted to convince it. Without such motives, motives proper to convince reason as reason, the grace of faith would supersede reason, the supernatural would dispense with the natural, and faith would be no reasonable act, but mere Illuminism or Enthusiasm, and piety mere fanaticism. If the Reviewer had penetrated a little deeper into the principle of his objection, he would have seen that he was really objecting to our doctrine, not that it does, as he asserts, but that it does not, "supersede the natural order of the world, and contradict it, from age to age, to the end of time."

But the Reviewer contends, further, that if we demand for eliciting faith infallible authority, infallibly accredited to reason, we make faith a conclusion of logic, and fall into Rationalism. This objection seems to us to be urged without due con

sideration. Rationalism is not the assertion of the legitimacy or sufficiency of reason in its proper sphere, but the assertion of the sufficiency of reason in all spheres, and the denial of the necessity and the fact of grace. Rationalism is developed Pelagianism. We do not assert it, for we deny the sufficiency of reason without grace, and acknowledge its sufficiency only when it acts from grace, and in concurrence with it. To call this Rationalism or Pelagianism is to fall into the opposite heresy of Calvinism, which denies all exercise of reason, and loses the natural, as Pelagianism loses the supernatural; or which, in losing the natural, loses also the supernatural, - decidedly the more destructive heresy of the two. The only way of avoiding both extremes, and of reconciling faith and reason, authority and liberty, is to accept the maxim of our theologians, that grace presupposes nature, and therefore, in effecting our faith and sanctity, while reason does, and can do, nothing without grace moving, elevating, and assisting it, grace itself does nothing, save in concurrence with reason, that is, reason as both intellect and will. It is singular enough that the Reviewer should object in us to the very principle he himself needs, is striving after, and actually condemns us for not holding!

If the Reviewer clearly apprehended the principle expressed in the maxim, Grace presupposes nature, of which he catches now and then a faint glininer through the darkness of his Calvinistic mysticism, and which, not understanding much of Catholic theology, he supposes we deny, he would see that the problem, which he contends needs a higher than the Catholic principle for its solution, is solved by this very Catholic principle itself, and can be effectually solved only in the Catholic Church, for she alone, at the same time that she is the medium of the grace, presents the motives of credibility satisfactory to reason. Out of the Church you can have only reason without faith, or faith without reason. Thus the whole Protestant world alternates eternally, as every one knows, between Pelagianism and Calvinism, Rationalism and Illuminism, Fanaticism and Impiety, Despotism and Licentiousness. The Reviewer, in principle, does the same. When he objects that we, in placing the supernatural above the sphere of natural reason, deny natural reason itself and wrong the individual mind, and when, in opposition, he asserts faith as a natural capacity, and that we are naturally able to apprehend immediately the supernatural, he assumes and maintains the radical principle of Rationalism, or Pelagianism. When, on the other hand, he objects that faith in the super

natural, elicited on a supernatural authority, accredited by motives satisfactory or convincing to natural reason, Divine grace moving and assisting the reason to elicit it, is Rationalism, he asserts the radical principle of Calvinistic Illuminism, or, as it is now called, Evangelicalism, and on the Continent of Europe, ordinarily, Methodism; and, to be consistent, he must assert irresistible grace, and, if he does not choose to be a Universalist, particular unconditional election and reprobation, mere vulgar Calvinism, which, as the Reviewer must be aware, is the denial of the natural, of reason and will, and the assertion of man's absolute passivity in conversion and sanctification; thus making justification purely forensic, and giving the one justified a carte blanche to live as he lists after justification, with absolute impunity. Here are the two extremes, Calvinism and Rationalism, not Rationalism and Catholicity, as the Reviewer erroneously alleges, for Catholicity saves both terms, the natural and the supernatural, by the principle, gratia præsupponit naturam.

The Reviewer, notwithstanding the many grievous errors which flow logically from his principles, has done well in protesting against sham, and in demanding reality. He also has really some dim and indistinct view of the principle he needs in order to solve his problem; but he misapprehends that principle, as we ourselves did before knowing Catholic theology. He seeks this principle in the mystery of the Incarnation. Unquestionably, the Incarnation has given to the world the principle of a higher life than the life of the natural order, whether sensible or intelligible; but it has not, properly speaking, inserted a new principle into the constitution of human nature as such. The Reviewer misapprehends this sacred mystery. It was not the introduction into human nature of any principle that it had not from the first. The "Word was made flesh," not in the sense that God was converted into man, or that man assumed God, but in the sense that the Divine nature assumed the human. Strictly speaking, God did not enter into human nature in a new sense, or in any sense in which he was not always in it; he simply took human nature up to himself; but they remained each secundum rationem suam as distinct after the assumption as they were before. There was in the Incarnation no conversion or transformation of nature, whether human or Divine; there was no intermingling or confusion of the two natures; for there remained and remain for ever in Christ two distinct natures, two natural operations, and two natural wills in one person. To deny this, is to fall into the Eutychian and Monothelite heresies,

which the Reviewer's school, both at home and abroad, we are sorry to add, seem to us strongly inclined to revive. Indeed, these heresies underlie not a few of the errors of our age.

It is also a great mistake to suppose, as the Reviewer does, that our Lord came to complete the natural, or as the complement of human nature in its own order; for the human nature our Lord assumed was not incomplete; it was perfect human nature, since he is perfect God and perfect man, and the human nature he assumed was man's nature as it was before, as well as since, the Incarnation. He came not as the complement of the natural as natural, otherwise the Christian order would not be an order of grace, or a new creation; but he came as the complement of the supernatural, to complete the order of grace, instituted as early as man's fall, — to consummate the realities promised to our first parents and to the patriarchs, and which were prefigured in the institutions of the old law, so that life might be had, and had more abundantly; that is, he came to make real the life hitherto held only by promise, and to render grace more easy and abundant. That grace is more abundant, and its means facilitated and multiplied, under the new law is most true; but this does not imply the creation of a new principle in our nature, for the ens supernaturale is given us only in patria, and grace remains always a habitus, or an auxilium, enabling us to do what without it we could not do, but continuing always distinguishable from our nature, changing the form of its activity, indeed, but never transforming the nature itself; for it may be resisted by the will and wholly lost, and our nature remain physically what it was before. The inamissibility of grace is a heresy; but if grace transformed our nature it would be inamissible, without the destruction of our nature itself. As in the Incarnation there is no conversion, mixture, or confusion of the two natures, so is there no intermingling or interfusion of nature and grace, in such sense as to form a new nature; and hence what we do in grace, it is not we that do it, but the grace that is in us; and therefore it is that our acts performed from grace, by its aid, and in concurrence with it, are estimated, not by the nature which is assisted, but by the grace that assists, and rewarded accordingly, for, in rewarding us, as St. Austin says, God simply crowns his own gifts. Overlooking this fact, the Reviewer loses his new principle by converting it into a natural principle, and regarding it, not as a supernatural habit or aid, but as a mere completion of the original sketch or design of man's natural constitution.

« AnteriorContinuar »