The Church And The Catholic
by Romano Guardini

2. THE CHURCH AND PERSONALITY

IF the first lecture has fulfilled its object, it has

displayed the spiritual environment in which the Church

appears before us to-day. We have seen how as the Church

grows in strength a process develops which embraces our

entire spiritual life. And now we have to inquire, what is

the meaning of this Church, which rises before us in such

majesty?

This is the object which we must keep in view. We shall not

attempt to prove that the Church is true; we shall take

belief in her divinity for granted. But when a scientific

investigator has established the existence, in a given part

of the body, of a particular organ, formed in a particular

manner, he proceeds to investigate its significance for the

life of the organism. In the same way we shall seek to

discover what is the Church's significance for the religious

life as a whole. This is the sense of our question. We

shall, it is true, considerably limit the scope of our

question. For we shall leave out of account the primary and

deepest meaning of the Church, which is that she is God's

spiritual universe, His self-revelation and the

manifestation of His glory. We shall consider only its other

aspect. This concerns the Church in her relation to man's

existence and salvation, and her significance for the men

who are her members. But we must make a further restriction.

We must leave mankind out of account and concentrate wholly

upon personality. That is to say, we shall inquire what is

the Church's significance for the personal being and life of

the man who makes his membership a living reality, for whom

the Church is his very life.

What is the Church? She is the Kingdom of God in mankind.

The Kingdom of God--it is the epitome of Christianity. All

that Christ was, all that He taught, did, created, and

suffered, is contained in these words--He has established

the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God means that the

Creator takes possession of His creature, penetrates it with

His light; He fills its will and heart with His own burning

love and the root of its being with His own divine peace,

and He molds the entire spirit by the creative power which

imposes a new form upon it. The Kingdom of God means that

God draws His creature to Himself, and makes it capable of

receiving His own fullness; and that He bestows upon it the

longing and the power to possess Him. It means--alas, the

words are blunted by repetition and our hearts are so dull,

or they would catch fire at the thought!--that the boundless

fecundity of the divine Love seizes the creature and brings

it to that second birth whereby it shares God's own nature

and lives with a new life which springs from Himself. In

that rebirth the Father makes it His child in Christ Jesus

through the Holy Ghost.

This union of man with God is God's Kingdom. In it man

belongs to His Creator, and his Creator belongs to Him. Much

more of profound significance could be said about this

mystery, but we must be content with these few words.

This elevation of the creature is not a natural event but

God's free act. It is bound up with the historical

personality of Jesus of Nazareth, and with the work which He

accomplished at a particular period of history. Nor is it a

natural process, but an operation of Grace, exceeding all

the forces of nature.

Let us examine it more closely. From the standpoint of God,

it is something quite simple. But in the creature it

develops to its maturity according to the forms and laws

which God has established in the Spirit of man.

God's Kingdom resides in mankind. God takes possession of

mankind as such, of the unity, welded by all the biological,

geographical, cultural and social ties which bind one human

being to others; that mysterious unity which, though

composed entirely of individuals, is more than their sum

total. If this whole is to be laid hold upon by God, it is

not necessary that all men should be numerically included in

it. It is sufficient that God's grace should take hold of

the community as such, that something which transcends the

individual. This, however, can be accomplished in a small

representative group. The little flock at Pentecost was

already "mankind," because it was an objective community, of

which the individual was a member; it was in a condition to

expand, until it slowly included everything, as the mustard

seed becomes the tree in which "the birds of the

air...dwell." That is to say we are concerned with a line of

force, the direction along which the divine Action operates.

God takes possession of men, in so far as a man reaches out

above his natural grasp; inasmuch as men belong to a supra-

personal unity, and are, or are capable of becoming, members

of a community.

In so far, therefore, as God's remodeling and uplifting

power is directed towards the community as such, the Church

comes into being. The Church is the Kingdom in its supra-

personal aspect; the human community, reborn into God's

Kingdom. The individual is "the Church," in so far as the

aim of his life is to assist the building up of the

community, and he is a member, a cell of it. This, however,

is the case in so far as he is employing those capacities of

his being which have a more than merely individual reference

and are ordained to the service of the whole, which work for

it, give to it and receive from it. The Church is the supra-

personal, objective aspect of the Kingdom of God--although

of course she consists of individual persons.[1]

The Kingdom of God, however, has a subjective side as well.

That is the individual soul, as God's grace takes possession

of it in that private and unique individuality by which it

exists for itself. The Church embraces a man as he reaches

out beyond himself to his fellows, capable and desirous of

forming in conjunction with them a community of which he and

they are members. The individual personality, however, is

also based upon itself, like a globe which revolves around

its own axis. And as such, also God's grace takes possession

of it. By this I do not mean that there exists in human

beings a sphere which lies outside the Church. That would be

too superficial a notion. It is truer to say that the whole

man is in the Church, with all that he is. Even in his most

individual aspect he is her member, although only in so far

as this individuality and its powers are directed to the

community. His whole being belongs to it; it is in its

social reference--his individuality as related to his

fellows and incorporated in the community. But the same

individuality has an opposite pole. His powers are also

directed inwards to build up a world in which he is alone

with himself. In this aspect also he is the subject of God's

grace.[2]

For God is the God of mankind as a whole. As such He is

concerned with the supra-personal, the community, and its

members jointly find in Him the social Deity of which human

society has need. But He is also the God of each individual.

This is indeed the supreme and fullest revelation of His

life--that for each individual He is "his God." He is the

unique response to the unique need of every individual;

possessed by each in the unique manner which his unique

personality requires; belonging to him, as to no other

besides, in his unique nature. This is God's Kingdom in the

soul, Christian personality.[3]

Clearly this Christian personality is not a sphere lying

outside the Church, or something opposed to her, but her

organic opposite pole, demanded by her very nature, and yet

at the same time determined by her.[4]

We have contrasted the Kingdom of God as the Church with the

Kingdom of God as personality. We were obliged to do so, in

order to grasp clearly the distinctions between them. But

the question at once arises, what is the relation between

them?

We must reply at once and as emphatically as possible: they

are not two things separable from each other; not two

"Kingdoms." They are aspects of the same basic reality of

the Christian life, the same fundamental mystery of grace.

There is only one Kingdom of God; only one divine possession

of man by the Father, in Christ, through the Holy Ghost. But

it develops along the two fundamental lines of all organic

development. And it manifests itself in accordance with the

two fundamental modes of human nature--in man as he is self-

contained and asserts himself as an individual, and in man

as he merges in the community which transcends his

individuality.

The Kingdom of God is at once the Church and individual

personality, and it is both a priori and of its very

essence. It is definitively the Church; for the Church is

the transfiguration of man's nature by grace, so far as he

is within the community. It is a kingdom of individual

personality in every believer. It is thus both the Church

and the individual Christian. They are not independent

spheres. Neither can be separated from the other, even if

each can be considered separately. On the contrary, of their

nature and a priori they are interrelated and

interdependent.

For the nature of the community as Catholicism understands

and realizes it, is not such that individual personality has

to struggle for self-preservation against it. It is not a

power which violates personal individuality, as Communism

does, or any other variety of the totalitarian state. On the

contrary, Catholic community presupposes from the outset and

requires the free individual personalities as its

components. In particular the Church is a community of

beings, which are not simply members and instruments of the

whole, but at the same time are microcosms revolving on

their own axes, that is, individual personalities. Mere

individuals can constitute only herds or human antheaps;

community is a mutual relationship of personalities. This is

an ethical requirement, for morality demands a free

intercourse. It also results from the very structure of

being, for it is only when units with their individual

centers, their own "modus operandi" and a life of their own,

come together, that there can arise that unity, unique in

its tension and flexibility, stable, yet rich in intrinsic

possibilities of development, which is termed a community.

(See below, pp. 44, 45.)

And Christian personality is not so constituted that it is

only as an afterthought associated with others to form a

community. Its membership of the community does not

originate in a concession made by one individual to another.

It is not the case that individuals by nature independent of

one another conclude a contract, by which each sacrifices a

part of his independence, that by this concession he may

save as much of it as possible. That is the view of society

held by individualism. Personality as Catholicism

understands it, looks in every direction, and thus a priori

and of its very nature is social, and man's entire being

enters into society. A mere sum total of individuals can

produce only a crowd. If a large number join together merely

by a contract for some definite object, the sole bond which

constitutes their society will be this common purpose. A

genuine community on the contrary cannot be formed in this

way by individuals. It exists from the outset, and is a

supra-individual reality, however hard it may be to

comprehend from an intellectual conception of its nature.

It is this which fundamentally distinguishes the

relationship between the community and the individual as

Catholicism understands it from all one-sided conceptions of

it, such as Communism and the totalitarian state on the one

hand, and individualism or even anarchy on the other. It is

not based upon a one-sided psychology or a mental

construction, but on reality in its fullness. The Catholic's

conception of personality differs from every type of

individualism essentially and not merely in degree. For the

same individual who is a self-centered unit is at the same

time conscious in his whole being, he is a member of the

community, in this case of the Church. And in the same way

the community is not a mere feeble social restriction or

state bondage, but something fundamentally different. It

differs as does living being with its innumerable aspects

from an artificial construction without flesh and blood For

the community realizes that it is made up of individuals;

each one of which constitutes a self-contained world and

possesses a unique character. This is a fundamental truth

which it is most important to understand thoroughly. Unless

it is grasped the Catholic view of the Church, indeed of

society as such, must be unintelligible. We must not get our

sociological principles either from Communism, State

Socialism, or individualism. For all these tear the living

whole to pieces to exaggerate one portion of it. All are

false and diseased. The Catholic conception of society and

of individual personality starts on the contrary--like all

Catholic teaching--not from isolated axioms or one-sided

psychological presuppositions, but from the integrity of

real life apprehended without prejudice. In virtue of his

nature man is both an individual person and a member of a

society. Nor do these two aspects of his being simply co-

exist. On the contrary, society exists already as a living

seed in man's individuality, and the latter in turn is

necessarily presupposed by society as its foundation, though

without prejudice to the relative independence of both these

two primary forms of human life.

From this point of view also the Catholic type of humanity

is reappearing at the present day, and shaking off at last

the spell of State worship on the one hand, of a

disintegrating self-sufficiency on the other. Here, too, we

are again handling realities instead of words, and we

recognize organic relationships instead of being dominated

by abstract conceptions. It is for us to decide whether we

shall allow ourselves to be re-enslaved or remain conscious

of our mission to be true to the fundamental nature of

humanity and express it freely and faithfully in word and

deed.

The Church then is a society essentially bound up with

individual personality; and the individual life of the

Christian is of its very nature related to the community.

Both together are required for the perfect realization of

the Kingdom of God. An electric current is impossible,

without its two poles. And the one pole cannot exist, or

even be conceived, without the other. In the same way the

great fundamental Christian reality, the Kingdom of God, is

impossible, except as comprising both Church and individual

personality, each with its well-defined and distinctive

nature, but essentially related to the other. There would be

no church if its members were not at the same time mental

microcosms, each self-subsistent and alone with God. There

would be no Christian personality, if it did not at the same

time form part of the community, as its living member. The

soul elevated by grace is not something anterior to the

Church, as individuals originally isolated formed an

alliance. Those who hold this view have failed completely to

grasp the essence of Catholic personality. Nor does the

Church absorb the individual, so that his personality can be

realized only when he wrenches himself free from her. Those

who think this do not know what the Church is. When I affirm

the "Church," I am at the same time affirming individual

"personality," and when I speak of the interior life of the

Christian, I imply the life of the Christian community.

Even now, however, the mutual relationship has not been

fully stated. Both the Church and individual personality are

necessary. Both, moreover, exist from the first; for neither

can be traced back to the other. And if anyone should

attempt to ask which of the two is the more valuable in the

sight of God, he would see at once that it is a question

which cannot be asked. For Christ died for the Church, that

He might make her, by His Blood, "a glorious Church, not

having spot or wrinkle." But He also died for every

individual soul. The state in its human weakness sacrifices

the individual to the society; God does not. The Church and

the individual personality--both, then, are equally

primordial, equally essential, equally valuable. Yet there

is a profound difference between these two expressions of

the Kingdom of God. Priority of rank belongs to the Church.

She has authority over the individual. He is subordinated to

her: his will to hers, his judgment to hers, and his

interests to hers. The Church is invested with the majesty

of God, and is the visible representative in face of the

individual and the sum total of individuals. She possesses--

within the limits imposed by her own nature and the nature

of individual personality--the power which God possesses

over the creature; she is authority. And, however aware the

individual may be of his direct relation to God, and as

God's child know that he is emancipated from "tutors and

governors," and that he enjoys personal communion with God,

he is notwithstanding subject to the Church as to God. "He

that heareth you, heareth me." "Whatsoever thou shalt bind

upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven."

It is a profound paradox which nevertheless is alone in

harmony with the nature of life, and, as soon as the mind's

eye is focused steadily upon it, self-evident.

From all this one fact emerges. The personal life of the

Christian is engaged to its profoundest depth in the Church

and affected by her condition. And conversely the Church is

to an incalculable degree affected by the spiritual

condition of her members. What concerns the Church concerns

me. You see at once what this implies. It does not simply

mean that a child for instance will be badly taught if the

servant of the Church who has charge of his education is

inadequate to the task. On the contrary, between the

individual and the Church there is an organic solidarity of

the most intimate kind. The same Kingdom of God lives in the

Church and in the individual Catholic, The state of each is

correlative, as the surface of the water is determined by

the pipes which supply it. The individual can as little

dissociate himself from the state of the Church;--it would

be the illusion of individualism--as the individual cell can

dissociate itself from the state of health of the whole

body. And conversely it is of a matter of incalculable

concern for the Church whether the faithful are men and

women of strong and valuable personality, character. The

Church could never aim at a power, strength, and depth to be

achieved at the expense of the individual personality of her

members. For she would imperil the power, strength and depth

of her own life. This must not be misunderstood. The Church

does not depend for her existence and essential nature upon

the spiritual and moral condition of individuals. For, were

this the case, she would not be an objective reality. And

everything said hitherto has insisted upon her essential

objectivity. But in the concrete the abundance and

development of her life do depend in every age upon the

extent to which her individual members have become what God

intended them to be, developed personalities, each unique,

with a unique vocation and unique capacities to be

fulfilled. The relation between the Church and the

individual should never be understood as though either could

develop at the expense of the other. This misconception is

at the root of the un-Catholic attitude to this question,

whether in its Protestant or Byzantine form.

We are Catholic in so far as we grasp--or rather, for this

is insufficient--in so far as we live the fact, indeed feel

it as obvious in our very bones as something to be taken for

granted, that the purity, greatness, and strength of

individual personality and of the Church rise and fall

together.

You now realize, I am sure, how very far short of this

Catholic frame of mind our ideas are, and even more our

deepest and most immediate feelings; how far the

contemporary tension between the community and the

individual has affected our view of the relation between the

Church and the individual, thereby imperiling its very

essence.

We are conscious of a tension between the Church and the

individual personality, and the most enthusiastic speeches

cannot abolish it. And it is not the tension of which we

have already spoken, the tension inherent in the nature of

their relationship, which is a source of health and life,

but an unnatural and destructive tension. In the Middle Ages

the objective reality of the Church, like that of society in

general, was directly experienced. The individual had been

integrated in the social organism in which he freely

developed his distinctive personality. At the Renaissance

the individual attained a critical self-consciousness, and

asserted his own independence at the expense of the

objective community. By so doing, however, he gradually lost

sight of his profound dependence upon the entire social

organism. Consequently the modern man's consciousness of his

own personality is no longer healthy, no longer organically

bound up with the conscious life of the community. It has

overshot the mark, and detached itself from its organic

context. The individual cannot help feeling the Church to

be, with her claim to authority, a power hostile to himself.

But no hatred pierces deeper than that between complementary

forms of life, from which we may form some idea of what this

tension involves.

It will be the mission of the coming age once more to

envisage truly the relation between the Church and the

individual. If this is to be achieved, our conceptions of

society and individual personality must once more be

adequate. And self-consciousness and the sense of organic

life must again be brought into harmony, and the inherent

interdependence of the Church and the individual must again

be accepted as a self-evident truth. Every age has its

special task. And this is equally true of the development of

the religious life. To see how the Church and the individual

personality are mutually bound together; how they live the

one by the other; and how in this mutual relationship we

must seek the justification of ecclesiastical authority, and

to make this insight once more an integral part of our life

and consciousness is the fundamental achievement to which

our age is called.

If, however, we wish to succeed in this task, we must free

ourselves from the partial philosophies of the age such as

individualism, State Socialism, or Communism. Once more we

must be wholeheartedly Catholic. Our thought and feeling

must be determined by the essential nature of the Catholic

position, must proceed from that direct insight into the

center of reality which is the privilege of the genuine

Catholic.

Individual personality starves in a frigid isolation if it

is cut off from the living community, and the Church must

necessarily be intolerable to those who fail to see in her

the pre-condition of their most individual and personal

life; who view her only as a power which confronts them and

which, far from having any share in their most intimate,

vital purpose, actually threatens or represses it Man's

living will cannot accept a Church so conceived. He must

either rise in revolt against her, or else submit to her as

the costly price of salvation. But the man whose eyes have

been opened to the meaning of the Church experiences a great

and liberating joy. For he sees that she is the living

presupposition of his own personal existence, the essential

path to his own perfection. And he is aware of profound

solidarity between his personal being and the Church; how

the one lives by the other and how the life of the one is

the strength of the other.

That we can love the Church is at once the supreme grace

which may be ours to-day, and the grace which we need most.

Men and women of the present generation cannot love the

Church merely because they were born of Catholic parents. We

are too conscious of our individual personality. Just as

little can that love be produced by the intoxication of

oratory and mass meetings. It is not only in the sphere of

civil life that such drugs have lost their efficacy. Nor can

vague sentiments give us that love; our generation is too

honest for that. One thing only can avail--a clear insight

into the nature and significance of the Church. We must

realize that, as Christians, our personality is achieved in

proportion as we are more closely incorporated into the

Church, and as the Church lives in us. When we address her,

we say with deep understanding not "thou" but "I."

If I have really grasped these truths, I shall no longer

regard the Church as a spiritual police force, but blood of

my own blood, the life of whose abundance I live. I shall

see her as the all-embracing Kingdom of my God, and His

Kingdom in my soul as her living counterpart. Then will she

be my Mother and my Queen, the Bride of Christ. Then I can

love her! And only then can I find peace!

We shall not be at peace with the Church till we have

reached the point at which we can love her. Not till then.

May these lectures help a little towards this consummation.

But I must make one request--do not weigh words! A

particular word or proposition may well be distorted, and

even erroneous. It is not my purpose to offer you nicely-

calculated formulas, but something deeper--trust. You are, I

trust, listening to the underlying meaning I wish to convey,

and that in the light of the whole you will correct for

yourselves any verbal deficiencies or misstatements. In

short you will, I am sure, make of these lectures what all

speech and hearing, all writing and reading should be--a

joint intellectual creation.

ENDNOTES

1. We must, however, bear in mind the following

qualification. What we have said refers solely to that

aspect of the Church with which sociology can deal. What the

Church is--her actual essence--can never be conducted a

priori. There is no such thing as a philosophy of the Church

if it is understood to mean more than the consideration of

those social phenomena to be found in her, which are also to

be found in natural communities, and which reappear in the

Church simply because she is a community of human beings.

But in the Church these very phenomena differ from their

counterparts in all other societies. Even in her natural

aspect the Church is unique. And her essence, her

distinctively supernatural character is exclusively the

effect of a positive work of God, of the historical

personality of Christ and her historical institution through

Him. Only from revelation can we learn what the Church is in

her essence. We can never do more than describe her as that

community of faith and grace which Christ founded, and which

continues to live on in history as the Catholic Church, with

her distinctive and unique character. Only on this

presupposition are such books as Pilgram's "Physiologie der

Kirche," or Andre's "Kirche als Keimzelle der

Weltvergottlichung" valuable, indeed, of very considerable

value.

2. This is not a contradiction, but a contrast. One term of

a contradiction precludes the other--good and bad, yes and

no, for example, exclude each other. Every living thing,

however, is a unity of contrasts which are differentiated

from each other, yet postulate each other. The firm, yet

flexible, simple, yet creative, unity of the living organism

can only be grasped intellectually as a web of contrasts. I

hope to explain this point thoroughly in another book.

3. This word is not a good one. It is colored by the

associations of individualism, the doctrine of individual

autonomy and above all of pure ritualism. St. Paul certainly

would not have talked about "personality." The notion of

Christian personality is as different from its philosophic

counterpart as the notion of the "Church," Christ's Church,

differs from that of the "Religious Society." However, I

know of no better word; I use it, therefore, in the sense in

which Our Lord speaks of a "child of God," and St. Paul, in

his Epistles, of the individual Christian as distinct from

the community.

4. This personal sphere has been detached from the religious

life as a whole by Protestantism and every other

individualistic system and developed in a one-sided manner.

Thus the direct communication between God and the redeemed,

who is, however, at the same time a member of the Church,

was perverted into the autonomy of a completely independent

and self-sufficient personality. And the healthy tension of

the relationship established by the very nature of its terms

was replaced by an unnatural constraint.

Copyright ©1999-2023 Wildfire Fellowship, Inc all rights reserved