Chapter 27: Habituation to Man

1. Our Place in the Mystical Body
   • Seemingly Out of Scale
     • The primary difficulty found in the doctrine of the Mystical Body is believing that the Church really means it (371-2).
     • The idea that the Church is an organism and we are inbuilt to that organism through Baptism so as to “live in the full stream of Christ’s life as members of Christ” has an extraordinariness about it that seems to be “utterly out of scale with us” (371-2).
       • From chapter 22: “The Holy Spirit comes to us because we are inbuilt into Christ, in whom [the Holy Spirit] is. The life which is Christ’s – and ours because His – is the operation of the Holy Spirit in His human nature” (316-1)
     • The ordinary Catholic feels that this is both beyond his powers and beyond his desires, and that he would be satisfied with something less that would be more suited to his ordinariness (371-2).
2. Man’s Extraordinariness
   • Extraordinary on Two Counts
     • “Man must grasp that [he] is extraordinary,” and he is extraordinary in two ways (372-1):
       • First, all creatures are extraordinary in that from their “native nothingness” they are held in existence by God’s omnipotence. There is nothing prosaic (i.e., commonplace, ordinary) about that (372-1).
       • Second, man is “more extraordinary than other creatures, both by what God made him (in His own image) and by what he has made of himself (a fallen creature full of contradictions; see 373-3) (372-1).
     • Examples of Man’s Extraordinariness
       • We are made from nothing, for something, and will never return to nothingness, unlike all other material creatures (372-2).
         • “He who eats this bread will live forever” (Jn 6:58).
       • Without God we are nothing, but we will never be without Him (372-2).
       • He not only made us into something, but something like Himself (372-2).
         • “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Gen 1:26).
       • He made us into something that He Himself could become (372-2).
         • “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14).
       • He made us into something that He would die for (372-2).
         • “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn 1:29).
       • “Spiritual and immortal made in the likeness of God, redeemed by Christ, we are clustered with splendors” (372-2).
     • Note the striking contrast between the Catholic’s glorious view of man and the atheist’s dreary view of man (372-2).
       • We have nothing as our origin, but eternity as our destiny, whereas the atheist has a cloud about his origin, but nothing as his destiny (372-2).
       • We come from nothing, the atheist, in his own mind, is going to nothing (372-2).
     • Further Examples of Our Extraordinariness
       • We are a mixture of matter and spirit, and in this we resemble no other creature (372-3).
       • We are the only beings who die and do not stay dead (372-3).
       • We are the only beings with an everlasting destiny who have not reached our final state (372-3).
         • There are only two classes of such beings: angelic and human.
   • The Two-Way Drag We Feel
     • Consider the effect in our consciousness of having not reached our final state:
       • “There is a two-way drag in all of us, and nothing could be more actual and less academic than this curious fact” (373-2).
       • We feel the almost continuous downward drag in ourselves toward nothingness (i.e., sin) (373-2).
       • The downward drag is only occasionally countered with an upward thrust (i.e., synderesis and the consolations of God) (373-2).
       • The two-way drag is the battle for our souls. We are the only creatures who can choose our sides and change our sides in the midst of the battle (373-2).
         • “The life of man upon earth is a warfare” (Job 7:1 DR)
       • For this reason, “all the excitement of our universe is centered in man” (373-2).
   • Our Startling Situation
     • “The medieval travelers’ stories of men with their heads under their shoulders were not unjustly felt to be pretty startling” (373-3)
       • This is a reference to the legendary acephalous monsters of antiquity who had their eyes in their shoulders and their nose and mouth in their chest.
     • In reality, our situation is more startling than that of the acephali (plural of acephalous). We started out extraordinary, as shown above, but we have grown monstrous:
       • Our body is in rebellion against the soul (373-3).
       • Our intellect is ruled by our imagination (373-3)
       • Our will is ruled by our passions (emotions) (373-3)
         • The eleven passions: love, hate, desire, aversion, joy, sorrow, hope, despair, fear, daring, anger
     • We are not startled at this situation, though we should be, because we are more sensitive to the (material) shape of the body than the (moral) “shape” of the soul (373-3).
     • Despite our startling situation, we should not think of the Mystical Body as being a context that is too extraordinary for us – “no context could be too extraordinary for creatures like men” (373-3)
       • This statement is justified by a realization of the degree of dignity God has bestowed on man. John Paul the Great refers to it as the “almost divine dignity of every human being” (John Paul II, “Evangelium Vitae”, #25).
3. The Church Alone Sees Man’s Double Dichotomy
   • Man and the Mystical Body
     • Both man and the Mystical Body are extraordinary, but this is not the only link between the two, for the Mystical Body (i.e., the Church) fits man at every point in his nature (374-1).
     • The truth about man is that he is a double dichotomy being composed of both body and soul, and being both an individual being and a social being. In each dichotomous pair, the Church sees and provides for both aspects (374-1).
   • The First Dichotomy: Man’s Spirit and Matter Composition
     • The Church provides for the body by way of its ascetical practices, which prepare the body for full companionship with the soul, and with sacraments and sacramentals so as to enable it to be the soul’s companion to the furthest point the soul can go (374-2).
       • Though not intuitive, we should recognize that the grace received from both the sacraments and the use of sacramentals is an aid to the work of bringing the rebellious powers of the body under control “so as to enable it to be the soul’s companion to the furthest point the soul can go.”
     • These aids to full companionship of body and soul show that “within the Church there is a consecration of soul and body, an awareness of sacredness in soul and body” (374-2).
     • This theme is picked up again in 378-1.
   • The Second Dichotomy: Man’s Social and Individualistic Nature
     • “The Church has turned the social element in man’s nature to the uses of religion beyond any other church” (374-3):
       • It sees man united to his fellow man in God (this is the “fellowship of Truth,” the Mystical Body) (374-3).
       • The fellowship provides a means for all of mankind to take part in a truly unified worship of God (374-3).
       • It sees man receiving the gifts of Truth and Life via the fellowship.
     • Yet the man remains an individual within the fellowship (374-3).
       • In this life, he is not merged into the human aspect of the fellowship, despite being a member of the fellowship (374-3).
       • In the afterlife, he is not merged into the divine nature, though he is in an intimate union with God (374-3).
       • He is always an end in himself, under God, and never a pawn in a game (374-3).
     • “Nowhere [other than in the Church] can a person more fully feel at once his kinship with all human beings and the worth of his own personality” (374-3).
4. Two Tides Beating on the Church
   • Secularism and Protestantism
     • Over the last few centuries, the Church has been undergoing beatings from two “assailants,” Secularism and Protestantism. Unlike the Church, which sees and appreciates the dual dichotomy of man, her assailants choose one component from each dichotomy and ignores the other (374-4).
   • Regarding the Body/Soul Dichotomy
     • Protestantism stressed the soul to the neglect of the body (375-1).
       • It rejected asceticism, most of the sacraments, and all of the sacramentals, producing a religion for the soul only (375-1).
     • Secularism filled the void left by Protestantism by stressing the body to the neglect of the soul (375-1).
       • Its aims are primarily the body’s “good,” (i.e., comfort, and security), resulting in the “starvation” of spirit (375-1).
   • Regarding the Individual/Social Dichotomy
     • Protestantism stressed the relationship of the individual soul to God, “with any cooperation of man being regarded as an intrusion” (375-2).
       • Examples are the emphasis on “private interpretation” of Scripture and disdain for the concept of a teaching Church.
         • “No prophecy of Scripture is a matter’s of one’s own interpretation” (2 Pt 1:20).
       • There is something in man that calls for his own unshared relationship with God. But the element is not the whole truth (375-2).
       • Thus, we see that Christian mysticism only reaches its full development within the Catholic Church, and is essentially still-born outside the Church (375-2).
         • This fact is demonstrated by the number of spiritual non-Catholics who prefer the writings of Catholic mystics to the writings available from their fellow Protestants (375-2).
     • Secularism bets everything on the social order as against the individual person (375-2).
       • We see the logical extreme of this philosophy in Communism and Nazism where the “collective” is everything and the individual person has no meaning or destiny apart from the collective (375-2).
       • “The same tendency runs through all modern sociology” (375-2).
     • Since Protestantism stunts the spiritual development of the person, and Secularism treats the individual person as a non-entity, “the only home left for [ontological] personality is the Church. Only for the Church is everyone someone” (375-2).
       • Both Protestantism and Secularism “maim man by treating him as half of himself,” that is, considering only the body or the soul (376-1).
       • The Church alone “treats man as the whole of himself in the whole of his context” (376-1).
5. Man as Union of Spirit and Matter
   • Recognizing the Reality by Studying Man
     • The Church gives us the whole truth in proper balance of man as union of spirit and matter. But there is a danger that we may not use our minds sufficiently upon that truth (376-2).
     • We need to go beyond merely knowing the words of this truth so that we understand their meaning, for knowing the words of a doctrine is not the same thing as knowing the doctrine. To know that man is a union of spirit and matter is not the same thing as knowing man (376-2).
     • Man is a rational animal, says the Catholic philosopher. This statement is perfect as a definition, because it excludes everything that is not man. However, it is an inadequate description of man (376-3).
   • A Fallen Rational Animal
     • The definition cannot be used as the foundation on which to base one’s thinking on the affairs of man, for it leaves out too much – for example, that man is fallen (377-1).
     • “The truth is that no book and no statement by someone else can tell us what man is. Only life [i.e., lived experience] can do that” (377-2).
     • We cannot study rationality and animality as separate subjects and then join the concepts we have obtained from each subject and expect the result to be the description of man (377-2).
       • An example from the “Pickwick Papers”: “Chinese Metaphysics” cannot be described by looking up “Chinese” and then “metaphysics” and then combining that information (377-2).
     • The problem man has is that the marriage of rationality and animality does strange things to both of them; neither remains the same when wed to the other (377-2).
       • One of the effects of this marriage is that man is “predictably irrational” as Dan Ariely’s book by that name demonstrates.
     • Hence, the only way to know man is “to meet man and think hard about the experience” (377-2).
   • Understanding Effects of the Union
     • Specifically, the human being is “the union is of two [types of] beings, one of them spatial, one of them spaceless,” that form “a single being, one person, one subsistent operative thing” (378-1).
       • “Spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature” (CCC 365).
       • We do not know the specific timing of this union. It is possible that either body or soul or both exist as separate entities prior to their union as a human being. See http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/science/ethical-issues/do-embryos-have-souls.html for a discussion of the Church’s position on the timing of ensoulment.
     • To get a better understanding of the relationship between body and soul, recall the analogy in chapter 12 of a pot of water boiling over a flame.
       • We have here a union of flame (heat) and water, the heat affecting every part of the water such that the water is immeasurably different from unheated water in terms of both what it is and what it can do (378-2).
       • Similarly, in the case of the human compound of body and soul, the body is immeasurably more capable of doing things than a mere animal body (378-2).
       • The analogy would be more precise if there were a flame and water such that the water could only be heated by that flame, and the flame could only heat that water (378-2).
       • This is exactly the case of the united body and soul. The two are literally made for each other. The body cannot be vivified by any other soul, and the soul cannot vivify any other body (378-2).
     • With a union so close as that of the body and the soul, we might expect that the body affects the soul in the activities proper to the soul (378-3).
       • This clearly happens in the border region of emotions, where it is difficult to tell which is more in operation, the body or the soul (378-3).
       • But it also happens in the area of intellectual knowledge, an area in which the body has no competence whatsoever. Nevertheless, the bodily senses play an essential role inlearning, for all that the intellect knows by natural means comes to it through the body’s five senses (378-3)
         • What the senses provide can be further developed by the intellect, but only after the knowledge has been acquired by way of the senses.
     • Similarly, the body is affected in its proper activities by the soul.
       • For example, the proper development of the brain is dependent on the activity of the intellect and not merely on the stimulation provided by the senses.
       • In recent decades there has been much written about the way one’s mental attitude, an operation of the soul, affects the body’s ability to heal and to fight disease.
     • This interrelation of body and soul is a common fact of our lived experience. States of the soul produce effects on the body, and what happens to the body produces states of the soul (379-2).
     • All of this Protestantism chooses to ignore (379-2).
     • “This immeasurably close union constitutes the fullness of man. And man’s ultimate destiny is to live the life of heaven not as part of himself, even the noblest part, but as his whole self” (379-2).
6. Man as Rational Animal
   • Animality and Rationality
     • Exploring the nature of man more deeply, we note that these two aspects of his nature, animality and rationality, “are so oddly assorted in themselves that they seemed to need ideal circumstances to give them any chance” (379-3).
       • They did have ideal circumstances in the Garden of Eden, but only there, for once Adam sinned, man lost integrity and its four attendant freedoms (i.e., from death, ignorance, concupiscence and suffering).
     • “An archangel or a cat would be driven mad in twenty-four hours by the problem of living in two such various worlds at once” (380-1).
       • “Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and [they] were drowned” (Lk 8:33).
     • The problem we have with the combination of animality and rationality is that animality is so much easier than rationality (380-2).
     • The soul can enjoy the body’s pleasures, but the body cannot enjoy the pleasures of the soul (e.g., the body cannot enjoy mathematics and philosophy) (380-2).
     • The dice seem to be loaded in favor of animality (380-2).
       • In our society animality is winning out, for the dominant philosophy considers pleasure the be all and end all of life, as can be seen in many different ways.
   • The Conflict in Man
     • Nevertheless, just as the body is on the quest, so is the soul, and it is never wholly silent and its hungers can be as torturing as the body’s (380-2).
     • For even though the soul can enjoy the pleasures of the body, it cannot be satisfied with them (380-2).
       • The reason for this is that the intellect has knowledge of infinite goodness (i.e., God), and the will is informed of this knowledge by the intellect.
       • The will always seeks what it sees as the greatest good.
       • When the will comes into possession of a finite good, it recognizes the limit of that finite good and remains unsatisfied because the created good necessarily falls short of uncreated (unlimited) good (Garrigou-Lagrange, “Life Everlasting,” p. 7-9).
       • “O God, you are my God, for you I long. For you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you, like a dry, weary land without water” (Ps 63:1-2 Grail Psalter).
     • “There is a conflict in man between these two so different sets of needs, and the result is a kind of near-chaos” (380-3).
     • Animality and rationality either complete each other, if the relationship between them is exactly right, or, if it is not, they perturb one another, neither one knowing what the matter is, and make of us two incomplete beings, one animal and the other rational (380-3).
       • “The needs of the body inflame the soul; and the needs of the soul torment the whole man, in such a way as to mar the perfection of the body’s pleasure in its pleasure; and the animality is spurred further to provide what it cannot provide, namely, satisfaction for the whole person” (380-3).
       • The result of all of this gives rise to every kind of perversion that we call animality but is really not animal at all, not because it’s not found in animals, but because it is mixed with strange streaks of magnificence such as could never be found in a mere animal (381-1).
       • The only word for this is chaos, “and if we are not aware of the chaos, then we do not know man” (381-1).
         • “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:15; read all of Rom 7:13-25).
   • Do Not Judge and You Will Not Be Judged
     • “The fact of this conflict within man [between animality and rationality] is one reason why we should not judge other men” (381-2), and the Gospel rightly forbids such [moral] judgment.
       • “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Mt 7:1).
   • If we judge others, we expose ourselves to God’s judgment for three reasons:
     • First, we do not understand the chaos in our own soul; hence, we cannot understand the chaos in the soul of another (381-2). Thus, our judgment is likely to be rash judgment.
       • “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:15).
     • Second, our judgment is necessarily based on incomplete information. In judging another person, we implicitly claim to have knowledge that we cannot possibly have; such a claim is a lie (381-2).
       • “Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart” (1 Cor 4:5).
     • Third, we tend to judge in others the vices that we also possess. Thus, our judgment is inclined to hypocrisy.
       • “In passing judgment upon [another man] you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things” (Rom 2:1).
     • The best approach to judging others: “Be kind [in your judgment], for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” (Philo of Alexandria, et al)
   • What we have seen here is the just the beginning of what we can know about man; we must continue the study so as to better understand mankind, and to better understand ourselves (381-3).
   • In doing so, two things, in particular, will become clearer:
     • First, man is incalculable. He is a rational animal, but that only means he is an animal with reason. It does not mean that he acts reasonably.
       • “We must never take our eye off him: he is always liable to surprise us, and himself too” (382-1).
     • Second, man is insufficient for himself, and this insufficiency is “essential to an understanding of the religion God made for him” (382-2). This is the subject of the next chapter.