Chapter 26: Habituation to Reality

1. We are part of a story
   • Our History and the Context of Reality
     • Time is a vital aspect of man’s relation to God, for man’s relationship with God has “a history, a shape, an unfolding; in fact, a plot” (361-1).
     • Things that have happened, as well as things that are happening now are part of the story (361-1).
     • If we don’t know the story, we don’t know the religion, and if we don’t know the religion, we don’t know reality (361-1).
     • “The facts of religion are not simply facts of religion, but facts, and the most important facts” (361-1).
       • This takes us back to what Sheed said in the beginning of the book: “If we see things in existence and do not in the same act see that they are held in existence by God, then . . . we are living in a fantastic world, not the real world . . . [For] God is not only a fact of religion: He is a fact. Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything” (25-1, 2).
       • We must see the universe as “God-bathed,” in order to see it as it really is (28-1)
     • All that we have studied up to this point in the text is “that context of reality in which we are, and from which we can in no way escape.” What remains for us is to study our own being and our own life in that reality (361-1).
   • Review: Principle elements of reality
     • Up to this point in the book, Sheed has spoken of two elements of reality, texture and shape:
       • Texture: God is the source of all that exists, for all things were made from nothing. Hence, the texture of created reality is its nothingness.
       • Shape: Sheed describes the shape of reality in these words: “The universe cannot be seen as a whole unless one sees God as the Source of the existence of every part of it and the center by relation to which every part is related to every other” (26-2).
     • In this chapter he speaks of two more elements of reality, history and context.
       • History: time is a vital aspect of man’s relation to God
       • Context: Three principal actors; four principal events.
2. Knowing the Context
   • The Principal Elements of the Context of Reality
     • The context of the reality in which we live can be broadly stated in terms of its three principal actors and four principal events (362-1):
       • The actors: God, Adam, Christ
       • The events: Creation, the Fall, Redemption, Judgment
     • These principal elements of the reality in which we live enable us to “know where we are, what we are, and what we exist for” (362-1).
       • Knowing the totality of the context (by way of knowing our religion) allows us to “know our place in it and establish our relation to everything else in it” (362-1).
       • There is nothing we can do to change the context of our reality, for apart from it we only find nothingness. However, we are able to determine our mental attitude toward the context of our reality (362-1).
       • The choice of this mental attitude is fundamental to all other choices; “No subordinate choice that we can make can ever be as important as this fundamental choice” (362-1).
   • There Are Three Options for This Fundamental Choice
     • At a high level, the choices we have for setting our mental attitude are the following: (362-2)?
       • First, we can understand the context of the reality in which we are and harmonize ourselves with it (362-2).
       • Second, we can understand the context and rebel against it, that is, rebel against reality, which is hardly a sane thing to do (362-2).
       • Third, we can ignore the context and either invent one of our own or act as if there were no context (362-2).
     • Maturity lies with the first choice, that is, in accepting the vast framework of reality which by God’s will is what it is (362-3).
     • Considering what has been said above, we can state the following five inescapable facts about ourselves (363-1).
       • We are part of a universe which God created from nothing and which He continuously holds in existence (363-1).
         • “Each and every creature must be preserved by God if it is to continue in existence. And this preservative action . . . is simply continued creative action” (Garrigou-Lagrange, “Reality,” 130).
       • We enter life born in Adam and the fallen state he brought about (363-1).
       • We are intended to have a supernatural destiny (363-1).
       • We can only attain the supernatural destiny through rebirth in the Redeemer (363-1).
       • We are in a condition to be all we were meant to be and to do all we were meant to do only if we are members of the Mystical Body (363-1).
         • This doesn’t exclude from salvation those who are not members of the Mystical Body. But it does limit the ability of those non-members to do all and be all they were meant to do and be.
     • To be unaware of any one of these five facts is to falsify everything and to be left in ignorance, error and darkness (363-1).
       • “Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’” (Jn 8:12).
       • “Neither living nor lifeless faith remains in a heretic who disbelieves one article of faith . . . [for in his disbelief] he no longer adheres to the teaching of the Church as to an infallible rule, but to his own will. . . . Therefore it is clear that such a heretic with regard to one article has no faith in the other articles, but only a kind of opinion in accordance with his own will” (Summa II-II, q. 5, a. 3).
3. The Theologian and the Novelist
   • The Novelist’s Need for God in His Art
     • We can illustrate the darkness that follows from not knowing the context of the reality in which we live by considering the work of the novelist and the theologian.
     • The modern novelist is not directly concerned with man’s relationship to God, but with the relationship of men to one another, for the most part. The same is true of the sociologist (363-2).
     • “But men are in fact related to God” and if the novelist or the sociologist does not know this “he does not know men; that is, he does not know his business. Even what he does see, he does not see right[ly ordered]” (363-2).
       • It would be more accurate to say that “he cannot see”:
         • “The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor 2:14).
     • When the characters of a novel seem to be unreal, we reject the novel saying it is artificial (363-2).
       • Sheed’s understanding of novels is that they are intended to portray a realistic, though fictitious, human situation, as can be seen by his later reference to “Alice in Wonderland” being a masterpiece though it is of the “nonsense literature” genre.
     • But the situation is worse when the novel’s universe itself is not real. This is the situation the novelist puts himself in when he fails to see the context of reality.
       • Sheed states this differently, saying “The novelist is continually in the absurd position of making laws for his characters in a universe he did not make and he is forced to this absurdity simply because he does not know the laws of the real universe” (363-2).
     • Lacking knowledge of the context of reality, the novelist’s work is doomed to artificiality.
       • An excellent example of a novel that does not fail in this regard is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s, “The Brothers Karamazov.”
     • Now, “a work of art is not composed to illustrate the moral law, any more than a cathedral is built to illustrate mechanical laws. But if the cathedral builder ignores the laws of mechanics, his cathedral will show its unreality [i.e., that its “principles of mechanics” were pseudo principles] by falling down; and if the artist [i.e., the novelist] ignores the moral law, his work will in the long run show its unreality just as certainly” (363-2).
       • It is for this reason that so much of today’s art, which includes architecture, music, painting, literature “et al,” will not remain popular for even one hundred years, whereas we have examples of every type of art that have been produced in the context of reality that have maintained their general appeal for millennia.
       • In order to better see the point Sheed is making, one should consider the difference between beauty on the one hand and style or fashion on the other. Anyone who has lived more than a few decades can readily see that objects he thought were beautiful decades ago are no longer seen by him as possessing beauty, even when they have been kept in pristine condition.
       • Such objects were merely fashionable; they possessed nothing more than a pseudo beauty that was propped up by marketing techniques. Clothing is, perhaps, one of the best examples of this phenomenon; many more examples can be found by watching old movies or looking at your parent’s high school annual.
       • That which is truly beautiful has beauty as an intrinsic property. Such objects have no need of marketing to advertise their beauty, for their beauty is readily seen by those who are not slaves of fashion.
     • “To one who has grasped the shape of reality, the most solemn, somber, closely observed modern novel seems as grotesque and fantastic as “Alice in Wonderland” (364-2).
       • “Alice in Wonderland” is fantastic because it depicts a world in which the principle of cause and effect does not operate (364-2).
       • However, this is a trivial matter compared to the novel in which the First Cause (i.e., God) is unknown, since all effects proceed from Him. The grotesqueness of such a novel is incomprehensibly greater due to the infinite distance between the importance of the First Cause relative to the principle of cause and effect (364-2).
   • The Theologian’s Need for God in His Theology
     • “The theologian dismisses the novelist’s world as lacking shape, [while] the novelist dismisses the theologian’s world as lacking flesh and blood” (364-3).
     • Does the novelist’s counter-charge have merit?
     • For the theologian (i.e., the ultimate student of reality), there is a danger that the handling of realities that are far removed from daily experience (e.g., God, angels, demons, sanctifying grace) might come to be treated as abstractions.
       • Recall from Lesson 11, and 161-2: Abstraction: the ability to identify the universal characteristics of a class of beings having multiple varieties. These characteristics are the essence of what it means to belong to that class, for example:
         • Recognizing “treeness” in the variety of trees
         • Recognizing “triangleness” in the variety of three-sided geometrical shapes
         • Recognizing “dogness” in the variety of dogs.
     • The problem here is that abstractions are ideas; they have no existence apart from their existence as mental concepts.
     • If we fall into the habit of considering the realities that are far removed from daily experience only in terms of abstractions, “our philosophizing would come to be an exercise in getting these abstractions rightly related to one another, in getting the shape of reality right” (364-3).
       • Getting the shape of reality right is not a bad thing in itself. “To know all the ins and outs of the diagram of reality is very valuable” (365-1).
       • However, “reality is not simply something that has a shape. It is something” (364-3), and it is more important to have a firm grasp on what that something is than to have in our minds the diagram of reality.
       • A difficulty in academics is that examinations are necessary, and they tend to be about shape rather than the degree to which reality is real to a particular student, for it is difficult to test for the latter. One can have a real grasp of the reality without knowing all the subtler details of the shape “because of the intensity of his apprehension of it,” whereas one who grasps the details of the shape could be far from grasping the reality (364-3).
         • For example, St. John Vianney was in no way a theologian. He did not have a detailed grasp of the shape, but she had a firm grasp on the reality, as do all the saints.
     • “Therefore it is necessary to balance our study of the relations of things by a growing intimacy with the very being of things” (365-2).
       • For example, we must study the created world itself, rather than limiting our considerations to the fact that all of creation came into being through an act of God’s omnipotence operating on nothingness (365-2).
       • By studying that which came into being, the universe, we will not only come to a deeper knowledge of material creation; we will also come to a deeper knowledge of God that we would not otherwise have. This comes about in two ways:
         • First, as discussed in an earlier lesson, we learn about the maker of a thing from a study of the thing made (Lesson 9, 141-3).
         • Second, “From the study of created being itself we come to an awareness of ‘being,’ which we can bring to our study of the Uncreated Being” (365-2).
     • The primary truth about God is that He is, meaning that God not only exists but is also the source of all existence. Consequently, “the more ‘is’ means to us, the richer our knowledge of God. For a beginning of our study of ‘is,’ finite being lies ready [at] hand, accessible, apt to our habits. It is only a shadow of infinite Being, but even a shadow is still something immense if infinite Being has cast it” (365-2).
4. Knowing God via the Universe
   • Created Being and the Universe
     • Sheed uses the word “being” frequently in this section, so we should recall that it can mean either something that exists or the act of existing. Sheed seems to be using the word in both senses in this section.
     • The universe, being close at hand and ready for our study, provides us with the opportunity to come to a greater knowledge of God, and for this reason Sheed says: “We must study being . . . as a reality expressed in everything that exists” (366-1).
     • The way to come to an understanding of being is to begin, not with abstract concepts, but with those things of which we have abundant experience, that is, the things of the created universe (366-1).
       • “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19:1).
       • “From the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (Wis 13:5 NAB).
     • Our motivation for studying God through the universe is that the created universe presents us with two means, in particular, by which we can learn about Him: imprint and likeness (366-1).
       • Even the lowliest created thing carries with it the imprint of God (366-1).
       • In the highest of creatures, angels and man, we find a likeness of God (366-1).
         • “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Gen 1:26).
       • “The mind really aware of the splendor of creation cannot but feel how superb must be the infinite Being, if He can make this admirable stuff out of nothing” (366-1).
         • Ironically, we get so caught up in the mundane things of this world that we seem to rarely consider the marvels of the world that are all around us.
           • A few examples: the night sky, an airplane in flight, human language, the rapid development of an unborn child, human thought, life (vegetable, animal, human), consciousness.
       • The correction to this disordered approach to God is to come to know the world He created. In doing so “our relation to God [will be] better and richer because of our use, with mind and will and body, of what He has made” (366-1).
     • We note again that the universe “is,” and by studying it, we can get a notion of what “is” means. As our knowledge of the universe grows, we tend to experience two things (367-2):
       • First: a growing sense of wonder about everything that is in it
         • For comparison with the numbers below, a stack of 1 billion $1 bills would stand about 80 miles high (roughly the distance between Wichita and Salina).
         • Consider the Milky Way Galaxy. It contains 400 billion stars and it is 120 thousand light-years across (approximately 720 quadrillion miles – that’s 720 with 15 zeroes behind it).
         • Consider the number of galaxies in the universe: 100 billion, each containing an average of 100 billion stars, giving us 10 sextillion (10 followed by 21 zeroes) stars.
         • Fr. Dubay’s “Evidential Power of Beauty” can be helpful in growing this sense of wonder.
       • Second: “a growing awareness of the element of nothingness in it”
         • Compared to non-being, the universe is immeasurably great. Compared to infinity, it is hardly anything at all (366-1).
     • Recognizing that we need to study the universe, the question is how should we go about the study.
       • “There is no one set way. Once one has the shape of reality, there is almost no way of not studying it, if one’s mind is not abnormally lethargic” (367-3).
       • Much of the enriching process will come about in a spontaneous and unmeditated manner. There must be direct study of the universe, but that is not the whole or even the better part of the mind’s action in this endeavor (367-3).
       • “Any living activity will serve. There is . . . an immense amount to be learned about being, and therefore about God if one knows how to apply it, merely by having a cold plunge on a winter morning” (367-3).
   • Excursus: Being
     • To get a proper understanding of the word “being,” we need to understand three Latin terms: “ens,” “esse” and “essentia.” By “ens” is meant a particular existing thing. By “esse” is meant the act of existing by which a thing is something rather than nothing. By “essentia,” is meant a thing’s nature.
     • Putting all three of these ideas into play, we can say a being (“ens”) is known, and it is known to be through its act of existing (“esse”), and it is known to be what it is through its essence (“essentia”).
     • A being is known; that is, a being is a knowable reality.
     • A being is known to be through its act of existing. A being can only come to be known as a result of its act of existing. If the being possessed no act of existing, it would not be a knowable reality for it would not be anything. It simply would not be.
     • A being is known to be what it is through its essence. A being’s essence is its nature. Its act of existing as a particular type of being is expressed through its nature.
5. The Theologian Learns from Poet and Scientist
   • Learning about Reality from the Poet
     • There is much to be learned from the experiences of those who are “especially gifted to react to reality.” The poet and the scientist can be especially helpful in this regard (367-4).
     • It is particularly in his deep awareness of reality that the poet can teach the theologian who is caught up in his abstractions (368-1).
     • Consider some examples from G. K. Chesterton:
       • There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
       • “Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
       • “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
       • “There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
       • “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
       • “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
       • “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
       • “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”
       • “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
       • “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children [that] the dragons can be killed.”
       • “[Feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
       • “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies [just] because they become fashions.”
         • Source: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7014283.G_K_Chesterton
     • The true poet (there are many pretenders these days) has an awareness of reality that is vital for hearing what God has to say to us through creation (368-1).
     • Hence, “the poets cannot be happy with the idea that nature is dead”. They feel the life of nature, though they may not know what the life is they feel (368-2).
     • The Christian is just the reverse. He knows the mystery of God’s presence in everything, but for the most part he does not feel it [i.e., he does not have a genuine realization and appreciation of the reality he knows intellectually] (368-2).
     • What the Christian knows as a matter of doctrine, that the universe is nothingness worked upon by the omnipotence of God, the poet responds to as a living fact (368-2).
     • The poet’s response to reality is the first half of his gift. The second half is his ability to communicate what he sees so that we see it also, thus making creation come alive for us (368-2).
   • Learning about Reality from the Scientist
     • The natural sciences can be said to serve both a greater and a lesser purpose. The lesser purpose is to make the world more habitable; the greater purpose is to increase our knowledge of the universe (368-2).
       • This order of things may be difficult to see for a society that worships pleasure. We are inclined to see the lesser purpose as the greater.
     • “Science” comes from the Latin “scire,” to know. Hence, true science is an exploration of nature’s mysteries so as to understand the causes of the effects we see (369-1).
     • Consequently, the scientist has information about the material world that “the theologian can turn to gold” much in the way that the engineer turned the scientist’s knowledge about electricity into a light bulb (369-1, 2).
     • Nevertheless, the scientist is concerned only with the material world. Because he completely ignores the spiritual world, he does not and cannot, know the bigger picture.
       • “From his science he cannot learn the totality of being, and therefore he cannot know the full meaning . . . even of what he does know,” however much that might be, because he sees it out of context (369-2).
       • If the scientist happens to be a devout believer in God, as many of the greatest scientists have been, he does see the bigger picture.
     • The scientist studies the relationships among material things and this is valuable work, but it is a loss for him if his explorations take him no further, for he is “a man with a man’s need to know and a man’s capacity to know the meaning of his own life” (369-2).
     • The things that the scientist studies are the lowest in value, and apart from their relationship to God and the rest of creation, they are of no value at all (370-1).
       • The scientist tends to study things at this level only and, in doing so, neglects the greater realities of the universe and neglects “the better part of his own humanity” as well (370-1).
       • An example from the next chapter (386-1): One man is a great authority on butterflies and will speak of them endlessly and admirably, but if you interrupt his discourse on butterflies to ask what he is, where he is going, and how he will get there, he will tell you those are religious questions and he has not the time for them, because he is so deeply engaged with butterflies. “The little creatures should be flattered. But the man is hardly sane. And he is the perfect type of our world” (386-1).
     • The scientist loses more by not learning from the theologian than the theologian loses by not learning from the scientist, for “the theologian has never ignored the stuff of the universe as the scientist has ignored the mind [God] behind the universe” (370-2).
     • The theologian can’t help having knowledge of many things on the material order just as the result of his ordinary experience in the world. The scientist, however, can go through life without adverting to God and the universe’s greater realities; hence, his loss is truly great (370-2).
     • Nevertheless, the point is that both lose when they ignore the work of the other (370-2).
     • The theologian can learn from the things that bear God’s imprint (i.e., the things the scientist studies), but he can learn more about God by studying the higher beings that not only bear God’s imprint, but also bear a likeness to their Creator, that is angels and men (370-2).
   • Our Concern: Man
     • Our concern here is the theologian’s loss because “we are taking our first steps along his road” (370-2).
     • In order to make the greatest progress along his road we must study the highest creature available to us, for there is more to learn from a creature the higher it is on the scale of being because the greater a creature’s degree of being, the more it is like God (370-2).
     • Consequently, angels would be the best creature for study, but lacking direct access to angels, the best we can do is to study the next highest creature: man (370-2).