The Church And The Catholic
by Romano Guardini

4. THE ROAD TO FREEDOM

WHEN the Catholic Christian handles a vital issue

theoretically or practically, the situation should be

immediately altered. It should be as when something is

brought out from a false light into the full and clear light

of day; or an object previously held in the violent grasp of

some boorish bully has been released from his possession and

passes into the hands of one who can respect and appreciate

Every object brought into the Catholic sphere of influence

and subjected to the Catholic spirit should recover its

freedom and once more fully realize its nature. The Catholic

spirit should impose the true standard, the great should

appear great, and the petty, petty; and light and shadow put

in the right place.... Yes--so it would be if one were

really Catholic! Then indeed we should possess that true

Goodness which sees all things as they are, and brings

freedom. And life, which everywhere is suffering violence,

would again breathe freely in all that we are and do, and

all things be made new!

This is certainly expected of the Catholic Christian by

those who are looking on at him from without. They do not

expect him to talk brilliantly, or to live in an exceptional

fashion remote from life, arbitrary and one-sided. There is

an intelligentsia which in an intellectual fashion does

violence to life more brilliantly and more significantly

than he. These onlookers do not expect this from the

Catholic. They expect him to possess something of Adam's

pure vision, and that creative power with which the first

man named all things according to their nature. They expect

to find in him a glance which proceeds from the center of

the soul and penetrates the heart of objects, and to which

they reveal themselves completely; that great love which

redeems the silent misery of the world.[1]

But we are not really Catholic, if the term is to be

understood in its full and exacting implication, and it is

our great, if painful, good fortune that we realize how

little we are Catholic. But to be truly Catholic is the

real, indeed the only genuine form of human existence, its

way of life dictated at once by man's deepest nature and by

divine revelation. It is a way of looking at things and of

thinking about them which becomes instinctive. This,

however, can be formed only in the operation of a long

tradition, when the personal attitude of individuals has

taken shape in objective forms, customs, organizations,

practical achievements, and these exert a formative

influence upon individuals, to be in turn remolded by them.

The Reformation and the "Aufklarung" have wrought

incalculable destruction; we are all under the influence of

the individualistic, naturalistic, and liberal spirit.

We are, therefore, no doubt taking a risk when we speak

about human life, without being really Catholic. But we to

it tentatively, and well aware that the greatest merit we

can achieve is to be forerunners. Our master is St. John the

Baptist, who said that after him One was to come Whom the

Holy Spirit would baptize with fire. It is only after us

that there will come those who will think, feel, produce and

speak, out of the fullness of Catholic life. Ours must be

the meager joy of being allowed to prepare their way.

We are going to speak about one of the supreme treasures of

life--about freedom.

How shop-soiled this word has become, and yet it is one of

the most noble! How often have we Catholics allowed the most

intimate of our possessions to be taken from us; and filled

with the spirit of error, and then listen suspiciously to

what our soul should utter with the deep accents of her

native speech! Freedom--what a dubious connotation the word

has acquired! Yet it contains the sum of what Christ has

brought us. It is one of those royal words with which the

spiritual masters of the Middle Ages described the majesty

of God. "God the free," they called Him.

What then is freedom? What sort of man, exactly, is the free

man?

To answer that freedom is the absence of external

constraint, the power to choose, according to one's own

will, among several possible courses, gives no notion of the

wealth comprised in the term. For it cannot be contained in

a short phrase.

Let us try to bring to light something of this treasure.

Each one of us possesses a pattern of his being, the divine

idea, in which the Creator contemplated him. It comprises

not only the universal idea of human nature, but everything

besides, which constitutes this particular individual. Every

individual is unique, and a unique variety of human nature.

Indeed, the Rembrandt-German[2] could say truly, could even

maintain, strictly speaking, that a number of people should

not be counted together, because in reality each is unique,

and cannot be compared with the rest.

When this unique quality of a man's individual being is

allowed to emerge, and determines all his existence and

activities; when he lives from the center of his own being,

not, however, putting an artificial restraint upon himself,

but naturally and as a matter of course, he is a free man.

He is free who lives in complete harmony with the divine

idea of his personality, and who is what his Creator willed

him to be. He has achieved a complete equilibrium, the

effect of a tension but a resolved tension, a powerful yet

gentle rhythm of life, a life at once rich and concentrated,

full yet restrained.

All this, however, is but a part of true freedom. The free

man must also see things as they are, with a vision not

clouded by mistrust, nor narrowed by prejudice, nor

distorted by passion, whether hatred, pride, or selfishness;

must see them in the fullness of their objective reality,

and in their genuine measure. He must see them in their

entirety, rounded off, displayed on all sides, in their true

relations with other objects, and in their right order. He

will thus see them from the standpoint of their divine idea,

just as they are. His glance will pierce from the center of

his soul to the center of its objects. His love, issuing

from an entire heart, will embrace their entire fullness.

And his action, supported by a personality not divided

against itself, grasps the world steadily and draws from it

that which had awaited the hand of God's child, to be

brought pure and complete into the light.

That man should respond to the true nature of things with

the integrity of his own nature and in the unique fashion of

his divinely ordained individuality, that the divine idea

within and that without encounter each other in his personal

life--this is freedom.

But freedom is even more than this. A man is free when he

can see the great as great, and the small as small; the

worthless as worthless and the valuable as valuable; when he

views correctly the distinctions between different objects

and different conditions; the relations between objects and

their measure. He is free when he recognizes honestly the

hierarchy of objects, and their values, placing its base and

its apex, and each intermediate point in its right position.

He is free when he apprehends the idea in its purity, but

contemplates in its light the complete reality; when he sees

everyday life with all its rough and tumble and all its

shortcomings, but also what is eternal in it. He is free

when his vision of the idea does not blind him to reality,

and everyday existence does not make him oblivious of the

idea, when he "can gaze upon the stars, but find his way

through the streets."

To see all this, to hold fast to the vision with stout heart

and unswerving will, and act in accordance with it amid the

confusion of appearances and passions--this is freedom.

But he must do this not because a compulsion is upon him,

but because he himself is resolved upon it; not merely as

the laborious and painful application of principles, but

because the impulse and volition of his own nature impel

him, and because the very heart of his personality is

thereby fulfilled--thus and not otherwise is he free.

Freedom is a great thing--the supreme fulfillment and the

purest standard of worth, truth and peace.

And with all that we have said we still have not plumbed the

ultimate depth of freedom. It is that the man who is truly

free is open to God and plunged in Him. This is freedom for

God and in God.

You will ask, if that is freedom, are we free? Outwardly, of

course, we are often free. We can resist a palpable

restraint. Psychologically also, for we can choose between

right and left. But freedom in the comprehensive sense which

we have given? No, we must certainly acknowledge that we are

slaves.

Here once more we encounter the mission of the Church--she,

and she alone, conducts us to this freedom.

What are the bonds which a man must break to win this

complete freedom?

There are in the first place those external circumstances

which impede a man's development. These can be very strong;

but if his energy is sufficient, he will in the end overcome

them, either outwardly, by altering them, or inwardly, by a

free renunciation which raises him above them.

The intellectual environment binds more potently, through

current opinions, customs and tradition; through all those

imponderable but constantly operative forces of example and

of influence, mental and emotional. These things penetrate

to the profoundest depths of the spirit. Even genius cannot

wholly break their spells. And we average people are all

subject to these influences, whether we consent to them or

oppose them.

Just consider for a moment the extent of their sway. What

cannot be effected by a slogan if the environment is

favorable? No one can altogether escape its power. How

powerful are the intellectual tendencies of an epoch! So

potent can they be that ideas which are simply

incomprehensible when the intellectual situation has changed

may receive the unquestioning credence due to dogmas of

faith. Do we not ask ourselves with amazement to-day how

certain ideas of Kant's could have been accepted as so many

dogmas, disagreement with them regarded as a proof of

intellectual weakness? Remember, too, how powerful a

compulsion is exercised by highly developed forms of art if

the cultural environment is congenial. Think of the manifold

ways, often so subtle as to defy discovery, in which certain

political, social, or economic forms, for example, democracy

or capitalism, mold a man's entire psychology; how a type of

humanity recognized as ideal, for example, the knight, the

monk, or the traveler, shapes men by its influence to the

very core of their being. Against such forces the individual

is powerless.

Reflect how, under the spell of such a general tendency, a

particular age, the Renaissance, for example, with the

decision born of the sense of an immeasurable superiority,

rejects what another age--in this case the Middle Ages-had

ardently embraced, how we are only now beginning to regard

the Renaissance and what followed it as a disaster, and the

Middle Ages as--rightly understood-our future. And bear in

mind that this was no mere change of externals, but of man's

attitude to essentials, values and ideas. In view of all

this we have only one choice. Either we must canonize

relativism in one shape or another, whether in its cruder

form, the doctrine of the milieu, or in the form given to it

by Keyserling, psychologically more profound and resting on

a metaphysical basis, or embrace with our whole soul a power

which can emancipate us.

It is the Church

In the Church eternity enters time. Even in the Church, it

is true, there is much which is temporal. No one acquainted

with her history will deny it. But the substance of her

doctrine, the fundamental facts which determine the

structure of her religious system and the general outlines

of her moral code and her ideal of perfection, transcend

time.

In the first place, of her very nature she thinks with the

mind, not of any one race, but of the entire and Catholic

world. She judges and lives, not by the insight of the

passing moment, but by tradition. The latter, however, is

the sum total of the collective experience of her past. She

thus transcends local, national and temporal limitations,

and those who live and think with her have a "point d'appui"

above all such restricted fields of vision, and can

therefore attain a freer outlook.

The Church of her nature is rooted, not in particular local

conditions or particular historical periods, but in the

sphere above space and time, in the eternally abiding. She

enters, of course, into relation with every age. But she

also opposes each. The Church is never modern. This was the

case even in the Middle Ages. We have only to read between

the lines of the "Imitation" to detect it. The present

always reproaches the Church with belonging to the past. But

this is a misconception; the truth is that the Church does

not belong to time. She is inwardly detached from everything

temporal, and is even somewhat skeptical in her attitude to

it.

And she has also had to endure the constant charge that she

is not national, that she represents foreign nations, not

the particular nation in question. It is a misconception of

the truth. In the last resort she is not concerned with

nations, but with humanity as a whole, and individual men

and women. These, however, are the two expressions of

humanity which touch eternity, while everything lying

between them, and in particular political and national

organizations, are bound to time.

The Church, therefore, stands amid the currents of

intellectual fashion like a vast breakwater. She is the

power which resists the spell of every historical movement,

no matter what. She opposes the strength of her misgivings

to every force which threatens to enslave the soul--economic

theories, political slogans, human ideals of perfection,

psychological fashions--and repudiates their claim to

absolute validity. The Church is always the opponent of the

contemporary. When an idea is new, it exercises a special

attraction. It is fresh and novel; opens up to the mind

unexplored avenues of thought, and thus arouses far more

enthusiasm than its intrinsic value merits And when a people

becomes acquainted with a culture previously unknown and the

conditions are favorable, it takes an irresistible hold upon

that people, as Asiatic culture, for example, is affecting

us to-day. In the same way new tendencies in art, new

political principles, indeed novelties in every sphere down

to such externals as fashions of dress and the conventions

of social intercourse. If the environment is receptive,

everything new is doubly potent, like oxygen "in statu

nascendi." Very often its power bears hardly any proportion

to its true value, with the result that our picture of it is

falsified to the point of distortion. The present,

therefore, is always to a certain extent an hallucination

and a prison. It has always attacked the Church, because it

is over-excited, and her timeless calm resists its petulant

importunacy; because it is one-sided, and her

comprehensiveness transcends its limited vision. And the

Church has always been the foe of the present, because its

unspiritual violence enslaves the soul and its obtrusive

clamor drowns the voice of eternity. In every age the Church

opposes what is Here and Now for the sake of For Ever; the

contemporary tendencies and "politics," for the sake of

those aspects of humanity which are open to eternity--

individual personality and mankind. When this has been

understood, a great deal becomes clear.

He who lives with the Church will experience at first an

impatient resentment, because she is constantly bidding him

to oppose the aims of his contemporaries. So long as he

regards what is being said everywhere, the public opinion

prevalent at the moment, as the last word on any question,

and makes parties or nations his criteria of value, he will

inevitably feel himself condemned to obscurantism. But once

the bandage has been removed from his eyes, he will

acknowledge that the Church always releases those who live

in her from the tyranny of the temporal, and to measure its

values gives him the standard of abiding truth. It is a

remarkable fact that no one is more skeptical, more inwardly

independent of "what everyone says" than the man who really

lives in the Church. And as a man abandons his union with

her, to the same degree does he succumb to the powerful

illusions of his environment, even to the extent of sheer

superstition. And surely the decision between those two

attitudes involves the very roots of human culture. The

Church is indeed the road to freedom.

But we have not spoken so far of the strongest bonds of all,

those imposed by a man's own character.

There are, in the first place, psychological characteristics

common to all men as such, passions, for example, and

tendencies of the will. Only if we could conceive knowledge

as the purely logical operations of a purely logical

subject, as a kind of intellectual mechanism, which always

functions smoothly, and which can immediately be set in

motion under any conditions, would it be possible to regard

it as unaffected by the other psychological functions. But

the subject of thought is not an abstract, logical subject,

but a living man; thought is a vitally real relation between

man and the object of his thought. In the function of

thinking all his other activities and states participate,

fatigue, for example, and energy strung to the tensest

pitch, joy and depression, success and failure. The

experience of every day proves that our intellectual

productivity, the direction of our thoughts and the nature

of our conclusions, are influenced by the vicissitudes of

daily life. Our psychological states may assist, hamper or

completely prevent acts of knowledge, strengthen or weaken

the persuasiveness of arguments. Desire, love, anger, a

longing for revenge, gratitude--anyone who is honest with

himself must admit how enormously the force of an argument,

apparently purely logical, fluctuates in accordance with his

prevalent mood, or the person who puts it forward. Even the

climax of the cognitive process--the evidence, the

subjective certainty of a judgment, a conclusion, a

structure of reasoning--is to an enormous extent subject, as

you can see for yourselves, to the influence of

psychological states and the external environment. It is a

strange chapter in practical epistemology.

So far we have been speaking only of speculative thought.

There remains the whole order of values, judgments,

pronouncements about good and evil, the lawful and the

unlawful, the honorable and the dishonorable, the valuable,

the less valuable, and the worthless. How enormously these

judgments depend on the fact that the man who forms them

acknowledges, esteems, and loves the value in question, or

rejects, hates and despises, and on his general attitude

towards men and things; whether he is receptive or self-

contained trustful or suspicious, has keener eyes for good

or evil.

When you reflect upon all this, you must admit that our

thought and valuations are permeated to the depths by the

influences of a man's personal characteristics, his stage of

development, and his experiences.

By this I do not mean that our thought and judgments are

merely a product of our internal and external conditions; no

reduction of thought and valuation to psychological and

sociological processes is implied. Their nucleus is

intellectual, but it is embedded in those processes. Thought

has an objective reference, and is always striving to

realize it more purely, that is to say, to grasp more

perfectly objective truth. It has an objective content, this

very truth--and becomes more perfect as this content becomes

richer and more distinct. In spite of this, however, thought

is life, and valuation is life--a vitally real relation

between man and the object. And everything which affects

that man or the object plays its part in the process.

What will bring us release from this imprisonment? Most

certainly no philosophy; no self-training, no culture. Man

can be set free only by a power that opens his eyes to his

own inner dependence and raises him above it, a power that

speaks from the eternal, independent at its center of all

these trammels. It must hold up unswervingly to men the

ultimate truths, the final picture of perfection, and the

deepest standards of value, and must not allow itself to be

led astray by any passion, by any fluctuations of sentiment,

or by any deceits of self-seeking.

This power is the Church. As contrasted with the individual

soul she may easily give an impression of coldness and

rigidity. But to the man who has grasped her essence, she

becomes pure life. Certainly it is a life so abundant that

the weakly, irritable man of to-day cannot easily experience

it. The Church clears the path to freedom through the

trammels of environment and individual psychology. In spite

of all her shortcomings, she shows man truth seen in its

essence, and a pure image of perfection adapted to his

nature.

He is thus enabled to escape his personal bondage.

Once more we must delve deeper, and at last we shall reach

our conclusion.

We have spoken of the inner pattern contained in every

individual personality which determines its unique quality.

The individual is not a human being in general, but bears a

stamp peculiar to himself. He embodies a distinctive form in

virtue of which he realizes human nature in a special way.

It is the organic ideal and fundamental law of his entire

being and activity. It is expressed in everything he is or

does; it determines his disposition and external attitude.

It is, however, the task of the individual--we shall return

to this point later--to acknowledge this individual form,

bring it out, see its limitations, and place it in its due

relation to the world as a whole. The strength of the

individual lies in this unique quality. It represents what

God desires him to be, his mission and his task. But at the

same time it is the source of his weakness.

Consider first those more general mental types which

classify men into distinct groups, that is to say,

fundamental types of character. Thought is determined by

them, the way in which things are seen, will and emotion,

and the attitude towards self, man, the world, and God.

We shall sketch one example of these types of character,

though only in general outline. We shall call it the

synthetic type. A man of this type is interested in

similarity and combination. This is already evident in his

own nature. There thought, will, activity and emotion

strongly tend towards unity and effect a thoroughgoing

harmony. Such a man gets quickly into touch with things, and

can easily pass from one to another. In objects he sees

first of all their similarities, the connecting links and

numerous transitions between them. He is powerfully aware of

their unity, and if he gives a free rein to his native

temper he will reach some type of monism, that is to say, a

conception of the universe based wholly on the tendency to

likeness and unity which pervades reality. He is, of course,

aware of the distinctions between things, but regards them

as of secondary importance and is disposed to relegate them

increasingly to the background and to explain them away as

mere stages of development, transitional forms, and modes of

the one great unity. He will even by degrees transform the

relation between God and the universe into a unity, and

regard Him as simply the Energy at work in all things,

maintaining and animating them. And his practice will

correspond with his thought. His fundamental attitude will

be one of conciliation unless, indeed, as a result of the

law of psychological ambivalence, he develops a passionate

antagonism towards external objects, which, however, is at

bottom determined by his sense of affinity with them. In

every sphere he seeks a compromise. He explains evil as due

to accidental imperfections, or as a necessary step in the

development of good. Thus in practice and theory he is a

monist, though his monism may wear a rationalist, aesthetic

or religious color.

A man of this type proves and disproves, unaware of the

extent to which he is in the power of his own disposition.

He persistently selects from reality those features which

suit his nature, and passes over or distorts those which are

opposed to it. In the last resort his entire view of the

world is an attempt to establish his personal preference by

rational proofs.

The opposite temper may express itself similarly. It gives

birth to that fundamentally critical attitude which in any

sphere notices past and present unlikenesses, what

differentiates one object from another, their limitations

and dividing lines. For men of this type the world is

dissolved into isolated units. The distinctive qualities of

objects stand out sharply side by side; the classifications

made by thought are not linked up with sensation and desire.

The distinctions between what is and what ought to be,

between duty and right, and moral choices stand out rigid

and inexorable. Conflicts, the decision between

alternatives, are universal.

If this type of man follows his bent to the full, he also is

enslaved. He, also, chooses, values, and measures in

accordance with "his own mind," and is convinced that the

result is objective truth. When the intellectual processes

of a mind dominated by its period are listed in the light of

their psychological presuppositions, the effect is

peculiarly devastating. A host of affirmations, chains of

reasoning and systems of valuations, apparently purely

rational, prove but the slightly veiled expression of a

particular psychological temperament. One of the most

striking instances of this is Kant. His writings develop a

system of thought at first sight as purely objective as

could be conceived. But simultaneously they reveal their

author's most intimate personality. To us, whose mentality

is so utterly different, this latter aspect stands out

clearly, like the original writing of a restored palimpsest,

and we cannot understand how a philosophy so largely the

self-expression of a genius could be mistaken for a

discovery of the fundamental nature of objective reality.

But unless some higher source of truth safeguards us against

the danger, we shall inevitably yield credence to some other

teacher who proclaims as objective truth what is but the

expression of his own mentality, or formulate as serious

fact, and with a great display of reasoning, matters which

we have devised to express our personal attitude to life.

To return to the two types we described above-neither is

free. First and foremost both are slaves as men, as human

types. For there exists in every human being, side by side

with his predominant mentality, its opposite. Therefore, the

synthetic type of mind is also capable of criticism, and the

critical type is not devoid of the power of synthesis. But

in each case the complementary disposition is weaker; the

mentality takes its character from the predominant tendency.

But every living organism is subject to a law we may term

the economy of force. It tends to use those organs which are

particularly developed, so that the rest become increasingly

atrophied. Each type, therefore, should develop its

complementary aspect to the utmost of its power. Only by

this mutual balance it will achieve complete and harmonious

development. But the man who is left to himself develops

one-sidedly. The predominant trait of his inner

psychological composition increasingly asserts itself and

thrusts the rest into the background. Over-developed in one

direction he is stunted in another. Such a nature, however,

is an enslaved nature, for only a being which has developed

freely and harmoniously all its native capacities is free.

Moreover, a man whose development is thus one-sided is not

free in relation to his environment. For of the rich

abundance of its concrete reality he can see only one

aspect--that aspect which is adapted to his particular

temperament, and for which the powers he has specially

fostered have given him a peculiarly acute vision and

comprehension. He is thus held captive by it, and incapable

of taking an all-round view of reality.

Such men do not live with their full nature, nor in

accordance with the idea of their personality, which,

whatever its particular emphasis, is always a whole, but

merely with a fragment of their true selves. And their life

is not in contact with objects as concrete wholes, but

merely with artificial selections from them. Each, however,

by a singular delusion, maintains that he is complete and

his attitude the right one, his impoverished and mutilated

world God's free world of full reality.

There are other types and corresponding ways of regarding

the world. Each is a power, each the way to a distinctive

outlook. But each is also a net liable to entangle the man

who casts it. The different types mingle, and the degree of

their combination varies. Their energy, warmth and wealth

vary. To these must be added national, local and vocational

characteristics, and those derived from heredity or

environment. And finally, there are those enigmatic

qualities which may be said to constitute the coloring,

idiosyncrasy or mannerism of the individual, that wholly

unique something which belongs to the one individual alone.

All these blend with his fundamental type and foster its

independent development.

Remember, also, that the instincts of self-preservation,

self-love, and the sense of honor, feed a man's predominant

disposition, that all his personal experiences are viewed in

its light and adjusted to it. You will now be able to gauge

its strength.

How then can a man thus in bondage to his disposition be set

free?

He must acknowledge, and to the very core of his being, that

reality includes all its possible aspects, is all-round. He

must recognize that this reality can be grasped only by a

subject equally comprehensive in his knowledge, his

valuations and his activities; and that he himself does not

possess this comprehensiveness, but is fragmentary, the

realization of one possibility of human nature among a host

of others. He must recognize the errors which this one-

sidedness produces, and how they narrow the outlook and

distort the judgment.

He must indeed fully accept his own special disposition, for

his nature and his work are based upon it. But he must also

fit it into the entire scheme of things. He must correct his

own vision of the world by the knowledge of others, complete

his own insights by those of other men, and thus stretch out

beyond himself to the whole of reality; and this not only in

his knowledge, but in his judgments of value and practical

conduct.

That is to say, he must not efface his distinctive character

and attempt to make his life a patchwork externally sewn

together. His distinctive character must always remain the

foundation. But character must become vocation, a mission to

accomplish a particular work, but within an organic whole

and in vital relation to it. Then one-sidedness will become

fruitful distinction, bondage be replaced by a free and

conscious mission, obstinate self-assertion by a

steadfastness in that position within the whole which a man

recognizes to be his appointed place.

Anyone who honestly attempts this task quickly realizes that

he cannot accomplish it by himself. Then is the moment of

decision. Will he abandon the attempt? Will he acquiesce in

the impossibility? Will he become a skeptic? Or will he

arrogantly endeavor to make his inner impotence tolerable by

declaring it the only right attitude? In either case, he

remains the slave of his own inner bonds, in the deepest

sense a Philistine, however eloquent the language with which

he proclaims his servitude. Or else his determination to

possess truth, reality, the whole, is ready for the

sacrifice which alone will lay the way open, ready "to lose

his soul, in order to save it." If this is his disposition,

he will experience the Church as the road to freedom.

Of her nature the Church is beyond and above these bonds,

and he who "surrenders his soul to her, in her shall win it

back," but free, emancipated from its original narrowness,

made free of reality as a whole.

The Church is the whole of reality, seen, valued, and

experienced by the entire man. She is co-extensive with

being as a whole, and includes the great and the small, the

depths and the surfaces, the sublime and the paltry, might

and impotence, the extraordinary and the commonplace,

harmony and discord. All its values are known, acknowledged,

valued and experienced in their degree and this not from the

standpoint of any particular type or group, but of humanity

as a whole.

The whole of reality, experienced and mastered by the whole

of humanity--such, from our present standpoint, is the

Church.

The problems with which we are faced here involve experience

as a whole. No part of it may be detached from the whole.

Every partial question can be correctly envisaged only from

the standpoint of the whole, and the whole only in the light

of a full personal experience. For this, however, a subject

is required which itself is a whole, and this is the Church.

She is the one living organism which is not one-sided in its

essential nature. Her long history has made her the

repository of the entire experience of mankind. Because she

is too great to be national her life embraces the whole of

humanity. In her men of diverse races, ages, and characters

think and live. Every social class, every profession and

every personal endowment contribute to her vision of the

whole truth, her correct understanding of the structure of

human life. All the stages of moral and religious perfection

are represented in the Church up to the summits of holiness.

And all this fullness of life has been molded into a

tradition, has become an organic unity. Superficialities are

subordinated to deeper realities; intermediate values take

precedence of the trifling and the accidental. The

fundamental questions of man's attitude to life have been

the meditation of centuries; so that the entire domain of

human experience has been covered and the solution of its

problems matured. Institutions have had to be maintained

through vicissitudes of period and civilization, and have

reached a classical perfection. Consequently, even from the

purely natural point of view, the Church represents an

organic structure of knowledge, valuation and life, of the

most powerful description. To this we must add her

supernatural aspect. The Holy Ghost is at work in the

Church, raising her consistently above the limits of the

merely human. Of Him it is said that He "searcheth all

things." He is alone the Spirit of discipline and abundant

life. To Him "all things are given." He is enlightenment and

Love. He awakens love, and love alone sees things as they

are. He "sets in order charity" and causes it to become

truth with a clear vision of Christ and His Kingdom. He

makes us "speak the truth in love." Thus the Church is

sovereign above man and above the world, and can do full

justice to both.

Dogma that is revealed and supernatural truth binding our

assent, is the living expression of this living organism.

The entire body of religious truth which it records is seen

by a complete man. And it determines the attitude towards

truth of the individual Catholic.

And that form of religion in which the entire man enters

into a supernatural communion with God--namely, the liturgy-

-is another living expression of this living organism. It

determines the Catholic attitude towards religion in the

stricter sense.

Finally, the Church's discipline and constitution--her moral

law and ideal of perfection--are yet another living

expression of this organism. They determine the Catholic

attitude towards ethics.

The Church holds up before man this truth, this scale of

values, and this ideal of perfection; and not as merely

possible or advisable, but as obligatory. She calls upon man

to rise above his narrowness and grow up to this complete

truth, this comprehensive ideal and universal rule of life.

She commands it, and disobedience is sin. Only thus does the

demand receive sufficient weight to counterbalance human

selfishness, with its exaggerated and tenacious self-

assertion.

If man obeys and accepts the fundamental sacrifice of self-

surrender and trusts himself to the Church; if he extends

his ideas to the universal scope of Catholic dogma, enriches

his religious sentiment and life by the wealth of the

Church's prayer, strives to bring his conduct into

conformity with the lofty, complete pattern of perfection, a

pattern, moreover, which molds the private life of the

spirit presented by her communal life and her constitution,

then he grows in freedom. He grows into the whole, without

abandoning what is distinctively his own. On the contrary,

for the first time he sees his individuality clearly when it

is confronted with all the other human possibilities to be

found in the Church. He sees its true significance to be a

member of the whole. He perceives it as a vocation, a God-

given task, the contribution made possible by his unique

character as an individual, which he has to make towards the

great common task of life and production.

Thus man develops into a personality. It is rooted in his

individuality, but essentially related to the whole. It

involves an individual outlook, the consequence of its

uniqueness, but this individual outlook is harmonized at

every point with the outlook of others because it never

loses sight of the whole. It involves also a joyful

determination to realize its own nature, but within the

framework of the entire organism. Thus the outlook of the

genuine personality is comprehensive and recognizes other

men's points of view. He divines their meaning, and views

his own vocation in relation to the whole. Such a man will

not display instant enmity towards a personality of

different type to his own, as one species of animals is

hostile to another. On the contrary, he will co-ordinate

both within the superior unity to which both belong, in the

performance of a common task in which each supplements the

other. He evinces that great power of acceptance which finds

room for other types, and is therefore able to share their

life. Thus his wealth increases, for what belongs to others

is also his.

My attention has been drawn to a saying of St. Paul's in

which the Christian's consciousness of this supreme freedom

of his entire being finds striking expression: "The

spiritual man judgeth all things: and he himself is judged

of no man." (I Cor. ii. 15.) The true Christian is

sovereign. He possesses a majesty and a freedom which remove

him from the jurisdiction of the unbeliever. He cannot on

principle be subject to his judgment, since the unbeliever

cannot focus the Christian within his field of vision. The

vision of the former, on the contrary, embraces "all

things," and his standard is absolute. How remote is the

impoverished consciousness of our Catholicity from this

attitude of St. Paul, in which perfect humility--all his

Epistles reveal it--is united with the knowledge that he

possesses, not one point of view among others, but the

unique and absolute point of view; genuine humility combined

with the sublime consciousness of absolute and perfect

supremacy.

This is the meaning of "sentire cum Ecclesia"--the way from

one-sidedness to completeness, from bondage to freedom, from

mere individuality to personality.

Man is truly free in proportion as he is Catholic. But he is

Catholic to the extent that he lives, not within the narrow

confinement of his purely individual and separate existence,

but in the fullness and integrity of the Church, to the

extent, that is to say, that he has himself become

identified with "the Church."

ENDNOTES

1. I do not think that I am exaggerating the case. What else

are those numerous men and women seeking in the Church, who

are looking towards her to-day? No doubt some may be

influenced by a romantic preciosity, others, by the desire

to find something solid in whatever quarter, without any

genuine conviction that here, and here alone, truth is to be

found; and fashion also plays its part, as in the interest

in Buddhism or primitive cultures. This cannot be denied.

But there is more than this. We can detect the expectation

that in Catholicism the Essential--the Eternal, the

Absolute--finds its due recognition. The man of today

expects to find a substantial piety in the Church,

independent of time, place or fashion, reality--of being and

conduct--in every department of life. And it will be a

bitter disappointment for which we shall all be jointly

responsible, if this expectation is disappointed, not by the

Church, but by her members.

2. Julius Langbehn, 1851-1907. He became famous as a result

of his book "Rembrandt als Erzieher," published in 1890.

This work is a criticism of German pre-war culture, which

Langbehn viewed as heading for disaster. At the same time it

sets forth his belief in the passing of the "age of paper"

into a new "age of art," which was to be brought about

through the primary forces inherent in the German people.

Langbehn was received into the Church in 1900. (Translator's

Note.)

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