Section VII — Confirmation of the Testimony of Christ

§ 1. Internal Criteria: The Wonderful Fulfilment of Human Aspirations

I. The question at issue. If all the legitimate aspirations of human nature — including its higher aspirations — are not merely satisfied but exceeded by a given system of religious doctrine, it is morally certain that this system comes from God, since it is morally impossible that men should reach such a fulfilment by their own natural powers alone. It is not enough, as Modernists frequently argue, simply to point to the general conformity of Christian doctrine with our natural aspirations, for such an argument, taken alone, could prove at most that Christ founded a perfect natural religion, not a supernatural one.

What, then, are the principal aspirations of our nature? (A) The religious and moral aspirations of human nature are as universal as humanity itself; they are nothing other than the seed of the natural virtues, ordered to man’s true end and to the means necessary for attaining it. With regard to that last end, we desire to know with certitude that God exists; we hope for the divine help necessary to attain future happiness; and we desire to love God above all things, not merely in feeling but effectively, so that our whole moral life may be referred to Him as our final end. It is impossible, as St. Thomas teaches, for man to find complete happiness in any created good, since the object of the will is universal good, and universal good is found in no creature but in God alone (Summa, I-II, q. 2, a. 8; q. 3, a. 1). There is, correspondingly, a natural inclination to render God both interior and exterior worship, and, as regards the means to our last end, natural inclinations toward the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, together with the virtues connected with them.

(B) There is, further, a natural desire for a future life, provable in three ways: from consciousness, since the soul experiences a desire to live on even though the body is mortal; from reason, since desire follows upon cognition (nihil volitum nisi cognitum), and while the senses apprehend only particular being, the intellect apprehends being as such, so that every intellectual being desires immortality (Summa, I, q. 75, a. 6); and from the observed fact that in this present life the wicked frequently prosper while the virtuous suffer, so that we are led to hope for a future life in which justice and the moral order will finally be made manifest. Every form of religion, moreover, bears some witness to this desire for immortality, however imperfectly.

(C) There is, finally, a natural desire in man to see God as He is in Himself. Our natural knowledge of God, however rich, leaves certain obscurities unresolved: we cannot clearly grasp the compatibility of such divine attributes as justice and mercy, nor fully explain the existence of moral and physical evil. Man accordingly wishes to see God not merely as reflected in the mirror of creatures, but intuitively and immediately — though, as explained elsewhere, this natural desire remains conditional and inefficacious of itself, a mere velleity, its fulfilment depending entirely on whether God freely wills to raise us to the supernatural vision of His own essence.

II. Imperfect solutions to these aspirations. (a) By natural reason alone, man cannot attain a firm, ready, and accurate knowledge even of those natural truths that properly belong to religion: reason can reach certitude regarding the bare existence of God, but the divine attributes and the true conditions of our future life remain, for unaided reason, largely obscure. (b) Philosophic systems, similarly, offer only imperfect and partial responses. (c) Other religions fare no better: Judaism contains true beliefs — monotheism, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body — but remains, of itself, incomplete; Mohammedanism teaches nothing comparable, and its promised paradise is one of carnal and sensual delight; polytheism and idolatry corrupt and destroy the higher aspirations of the soul, not without manifest error concerning the very nature of God; and Buddhism teaches that man reaches his “perfection” only in Nirvana, effectively the annihilation of personal desire and existence alike. Conservative Protestants hold Scripture to be the sole rule of faith, but since this rule, without a living authority to interpret it, is neither obviously complete nor suited to settle disputed questions, innumerable sects have arisen from it; Liberal Protestants, for their part, acknowledge no binding authority at all, and some among them are little more than Rationalists, denying even the divinity of Christ.

III. The Catholic solution. Catholic teaching not only satisfies the natural aspirations of the soul but exceeds them at every point:

Natural aspiration	Satisfied and exceeded by
To know God	Christian Faith; the gift of Wisdom; the Beatific Vision
To hope in God	The Incarnation, the Redemption, Eternal Glory
To love God, and to render Him internal and external worship	The intimacy of Charity; the Eucharistic Sacrifice of the Mass; the Sacraments; Holy Communion; the prayer of the Church
To virtue	The Christian virtues, cardinal and connected
To happiness	The Christian Beatitudes; the gifts and fruits of the Holy Ghost; peace and joy

1° To the natural aspiration to know God with certainty corresponds the doctrine of Faith, divinely revealed, confirmed by divine signs, and safeguarded by an infallible magisterium. This revelation gives us, even in the present life, knowledge of the secrets of our heavenly Father, and a wisdom inspired directly by the Holy Ghost; as regards the future life, it promises the direct Beatific Vision of the Divine Essence — a good exceeding every natural desire: “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

2° To the natural hope of future happiness, which suggests only the expectation of God’s help toward a naturally good life and a merely natural happiness hereafter, corresponds the Incarnation of the Word of God, the Redemption, and Eternal Glory — gifts that lie far beyond the reach of natural hope altogether.

3° The natural inclination to love God above all things could never, of itself, aspire to a genuine friendship of intimacy with God — yet this is realized above all in Eucharistic Communion, itself already the pledge of eternal life. What could be more conformable to our deepest aspirations, and at the same time more utterly gratuitous? Here appears a harmony that God alone could effect, for harmony is unity amid diversity, and is greater the more intimate the union and the more marked the diversity involved; in the Eucharist, the very gratuitousness of the gift stands in the most complete diversity with its own profound conformity to what we most deeply desire. Supernatural gifts of God are distinguished from merely natural gifts precisely by their gratuitousness, and are distinguished from the ravings of false mysticism precisely by their conformity with right reason. Christ Himself said to the Samaritan woman: “if thou didst know the gift of God, and who he is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou perhaps wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water … the water that I will give him, shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting” (John 4:10, 13–14); and St. Augustine’s words remain unsurpassed: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee” (Confessions, I, 1). This same harmony extends to interior and exterior worship together: the perfect expression of exterior worship is the Sacrifice of the Mass, which is the commemoration of the Sacrifice of the Cross, in which Our Lord offers Himself as Priest and Victim of infinite value, so that the whole sweetness of Christ’s own person and mysteries becomes accessible even to the simplest believer, as the old hymn on the Blessed Sacrament puts it — a poor and humble servant feeding on his Lord. It is the same charity that requires us to love our neighbour, since our brethren are, with us, members of Christ’s mystical body in this life, and are to be, with us, partakers of eternal glory hereafter — a communion of prayer and hymn well expressed in the Church’s own devotional tradition (as, for instance, in the medieval hymn Jesu, dulcis memoria).

5° The natural inclination to virtue is not merely satisfied but exalted in Christianity. Christian prudence, directing all things to God and avoiding excessive solicitude for merely temporal things, infinitely exceeds both the worldly prudence founded on utilitarian calculation and the natural prudence that aims only at natural virtue. Christian justice is inseparably associated with charity, and is thereby immeasurably raised above mere natural justice. Christian fortitude draws not only on the strength of nature but also on the strength of divine grace. Christian temperance exceeds the merely natural temperance that aims only at bodily health, by bringing the whole body into subjection to the spirit. The gifts of the Holy Ghost, moreover, render the Christian virtues perfect and lead to a lasting happiness that natural virtue alone cannot secure.

6° We desire happiness even in the present life, and the fruits of the Holy Ghost stand as so many guarantees of genuine mental peace. St. Paul’s exhortation remains a classic expression of this: “rejoice in the Lord always … and the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:4, 7).

§ 2. An External Criterion Intrinsic to Religion: The Sublimity of Christ’s Teaching

Article 1 — The Wonderful Harmony of Christian Teaching

The essence of sublimity — one of the highest manifestations of beauty — lies in the union of elements that are notably diverse; it is accordingly a sign of something beyond the reach of ordinary human achievement, and, when the doctrine in question is proposed in God’s own name, a sign of genuinely divine origin. Christian doctrine unites, in fact, the highest and the lowest, the supernatural and the natural, infinite mercy and human misery, things old and new, the deep obscurity of mystery together with a wisdom accommodated even to the intelligence of a child. This characteristic appears in four distinct areas: (1) the natural truths concerning God and man; (2) the supernatural mysteries; (3) the precepts and counsels of the moral law; and (4) the harmonious development of the whole body of religious truth taken together.

I. Natural truths concerning God and man.

(A) Truths concerning God. Right reason teaches that there exists one God — the beginning and end of all things, self-existent, pure spirit, eternal, infinitely perfect, really and essentially distinct from the universe, most wise, provident, good, merciful, a just legislator and rewarder — and Christianity teaches every one of these truths explicitly, and more perfectly than any other religion or philosophical system. This much is confirmed by the common consent of mankind (communis sensus hominum) regarding the principal truths of natural religion. Christianity in particular teaches: that one infinitely perfect God exists (John 4:24); that He is immutable (James 1:17); self-existent (Ex. 3:14); most wise (Rom. 11:33); omnipotent (Matt. 19:26; Eph. 3:20); omnipresent (Eph. 4:6; Rom. 9:5); most holy (Matt. 19:17; John 17:11); most happy (Acts 17:25; 1 Tim. 6:15); the source of life (Acts 17:28); Creator (Acts 4:24; 14:15; Eph. 3:9; Apoc. 4:8); most provident, merciful, and just. Christian doctrine on creation, moreover, avoids the errors alike of pantheism, dualism, and determinism; God’s providence, according to Christian teaching, extends to every individual being (Matt. 6:26; 1 Pet. 5:7), against both Mohammedan fatalism and Calvinist pessimism; and God is most just (Rom. 2:6), most kind (Matt. 6:26–30), most merciful (Luke 15:20; Eph. 2:4) — the whole array of divine attributes taught without any compromise or diminution.

(B) Truths concerning man. Right reason likewise teaches that man is mortal in body but possesses a spiritual and therefore immortal soul, a soul that is free, and subject to a moral law founded on God as its supreme Legislator and Rewarder — and again Christianity teaches these truths more perfectly than any other religion or philosophical system, a further conclusion confirmed by the common consent of mankind. Christianity teaches specifically that man is created in the image of God (Eph. 4:24; Gen. 1:26; Wis. 2:23); that he is not mere body, which men can kill, but possesses also a spiritual soul, which God alone can consign to eternal punishment (Matt. 10:28), and which is called to a glorious life to come (Rom. 8:18; 2 Tim. 4:7–8); and that man was created to know God, to love Him, to keep His commandments, and to attain eternal life (John 17:3; 1 Tim. 2:4; Matt. 6:33; 7:21; 25:46). That Christianity teaches all these truths with such certitude is itself a fact that gives moral certitude of its divine origin, since men cannot, morally speaking, without special help from God, know the whole sum of natural religious truth firmly, quickly, and correctly by their own unaided powers.

II. The supernatural mysteries. The sublimity of Christian doctrine appears further in the fact that the supernatural mysteries, notwithstanding their obscurity, present themselves to us as a genuine “light of life,” precisely because of their conformity with the attributes of God known by natural reason and with the deepest aspirations of the human heart. The very element of sublimity here consists in the intimate union of the life of God with the minds and hearts of men of good will, brought about through the Redemption wrought by Christ.

1° The Trinity. The mystery of the Trinity is the highest and most obscure of all the mysteries, yet its obscurity involves no absurdity or incoherence — it is a mystery of overwhelming light, only too powerful for our created intellect’s scrutiny: God is one in nature and threefold in Person. Theologians show the congruity of this mystery by a twofold principle: (a) the Supreme Good is, of its nature, essentially self-communicative; and (b) the higher a nature stands in the scale of being, the more intimate is its own inner self-communication. The word which the human intellect conceives is intimate indeed, but remains contingent, mutable, and only imperfectly expressive of the faculty from which it proceeds; but in God, whose life is absolutely perfect and immanent, the Word that proceeds from Him is united to Him by strict numerical identity of nature — accomplished through the eternal procession of the Divine intellect, whereby the Father and the Son, in mutual love, communicate their whole undivided being to the Holy Ghost.

2° The mystery of our elevation to the supernatural order. The congruity of this elevation is shown from the standpoint of God’s own goodness, since it is fitting that the Infinite Good should communicate Himself to a rational creature in the most intimate way possible — through a real participation in His own Divine life; and from the standpoint of man, since our natural knowledge of God, gained through the mirror of creatures, remains obscure, and our natural desire — imperfect and inefficacious of itself — for the direct vision of God’s essence is a further sign that such elevation, while never owed to nature, is nonetheless in profound harmony with it.

3° The mystery of Original Sin. “By the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners” (Rom. 5:19). Original sin is not voluntary through any personal act of ours, but through the will of our first parent; it is, properly, not a personal sin but a sin of human nature, contracted by us inasmuch as we receive our human nature from our first parents already deprived of the original justice which, according to God’s design, that nature was meant to possess — so that, as St. Paul writes, we are “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). Original sin thus consists essentially in the privation of a justice that would have been ours, a privation occasioned, voluntarily, through the will of our first parents. Catholic doctrine here stands midway between two opposite extremes: Pelagianism, which denied original sin altogether, and an exaggerated Lutheranism, which so magnified its effects as to destroy human free will entirely.

The mystery, understood in the sense the Church actually proposes it, is in no way repugnant to reason. (a) It is not repugnant to Divine justice, since original sin is simply the privation of grace and of preternatural gifts — that is, of benefits never owed to nature as such. A helpful comparison: a king may give his ambassador certain powers necessary for his office (natural powers); he may further increase these with added dignity and influence, without altering the ambassadorial office itself (preternatural powers); but should he go further still and share his own royal prerogative, adopting the man as his son and heir to the kingdom, such privileges would be, strictly, supernatural. God, similarly, could have given His grace to the whole human race on the express condition that Adam, its head, should not sin — extending the natural solidarity and heredity that already exists between a father and his descendants to supernatural and wholly gratuitous gifts as well. (b) Nor is the mystery repugnant to Divine wisdom and goodness: St. Thomas argues that God permits evil only that He may draw from it a still greater good — “where sin abounded, grace did more abound” (Rom. 5:20); the blessing of the Paschal candle itself sings of the “happy fault” (felix culpa) that merited so great a Redeemer. (c) The present condition of the human race, moreover, is far better explained by accepting the doctrine of original sin than by rejecting it: mankind visibly suffers both corporal penalties — among them sickness and death — and spiritual ones, above all the manifest weakness of reason in governing the passions; and one may reasonably argue that God intended the higher, nobler part of man to rule securely over his lower nature, so that the loss of this ordered governance itself points to some antecedent fault. (d) The traditions of many different races lend independent support to this belief — Hesiod’s myth of Prometheus among them. Pascal observed that man, without this mystery, would present a still greater degree of incomprehensibility than the mystery itself claims to explain; and Bossuet, in the same spirit, wrote that the very impress of God rests upon man — an impress so strong that he cannot wholly lose it, and so weak that he cannot, of himself, fully live up to it.

4° The mysteries of the Incarnation and the Redemption, remedies alike for original and for personal sin. (A) The Incarnation is the intimate union, without confusion, of the divine and human natures in the one Person of Christ, so that He is truly God and truly man — the union of human soul and body in a single person offering a partial, if imperfect, analogy. The possibility and fittingness of the Incarnation appear from two standpoints. From the standpoint of God: goodness is by nature diffusive, and the Infinite Good communicates Himself in the highest conceivable way by uniting, in one Person, His own Divine nature to a created nature; it is congruous that Divine Mercy should thus come to the rescue of sinful man — “God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son” (John 3:16) — and equally congruous that Divine Justice should exact a satisfaction proportioned to the true gravity of sin, which, because of the infinite dignity of the One offended, is itself a quasi-infinite offence requiring a satisfaction of infinite efficacy. From the standpoint of man: the personal union of human nature with God is not, in itself, inconceivable, since personality itself is more perfect the more intimately it depends on God and rules over what is inferior to it — moral personality being stronger, for instance, in a just man less subject to the sway of passion; St. Paul could accordingly write, “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:19–20). The most perfect union conceivable — the union of the divine and human natures, without confusion, in a single Person — is precisely what is realized in the Incarnation of the Word, an Incarnation supremely effective, in turn, for the Redemption of the human race: “greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In Christ we possess at once the exemplar of every virtue and an efficacious remedy against human pride and presumption alike.

(B) The Redemption was consummated on the Cross, and is perpetually commemorated in the Sacrifice of the Mass. “God commendeth his charity towards us; because when as yet we were sinners … Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8); “Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example, that you should follow his steps” (1 Pet. 2:21); “you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:20); “Christ … delivered himself for us, an oblation and a sacrifice to God, for an odour of sweetness” (Eph. 5:2); “we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:10). On the Cross, infinite justice and infinite mercy meet — and it is precisely this meeting that gives the mystery its sublimity and splendour. The suitability of the seven sacraments for perfecting man at every principal stage of his individual and social life is likewise evident: by Baptism spiritual life is received; by Confirmation it is strengthened; by the Eucharist it is nourished; by Penance it is restored; by Extreme Unction it is cleansed of the remains of sin; by Matrimony it is extended to future generations; and by Holy Orders the human instruments of spiritual life are themselves perpetuated. The sublimity of Holy Communion in particular was famously expressed by St. Thomas: the Bread of Angels becomes, astonishingly, the bread of men — a poor and humble servant feeding upon his Lord. There is here a wonderful association of the infinite grandeur of God with the lowliest human misery and need — just as, in the Church’s teaching on the Communion of Saints, the living are helped by the prayers of the living, and by the intercession of the saints already in heaven, uniting the Church militant, suffering, and triumphant into a single communion.

5° The mysteries of the future life. Eternal happiness is described by Christ as the “kingdom of heaven” which the just will possess, and in which “the clean of heart” shall see God; St. Paul and St. John both write that we shall then see God “face to face, as he is” (1 Cor. 13:12; 1 John 3:2). All the aspirations of our nature will there be satisfied, and more than satisfied: “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard … what things God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). Eternal punishment, by contrast, is reserved for those who die impenitent — that is, in a state of grave, wilful, and fully-conscious enmity with God — on whom the sentence is pronounced: “depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire … and these shall go into everlasting punishment” (Matt. 25:41, 46). St. Thomas notes, writing on this mystery, that once an impenitent sinner dies he remains irreparably fixed in grave sin; that the punishment is proportioned to the gravity of the fault, since sin, as already noted, is a quasi-infinite offence; and that Divine mercy, itself regulated by the order of wisdom, cannot be extended to one who has definitively refused it, since the penalty in this case is no longer intended to correct the sinner but simply to repair the order that his sin has violated. Both the justice and the mercy of God are, in the end, infinite, and both alike are founded on love — a truth captured in the inscription Dante reads over the gates of Hell: divine power, supreme wisdom, and primal love together made it. The doctrine of Purgatory, and the universal practice of praying for the dead, manifest both this same justice and this same mercy: souls not yet perfectly cleansed are aided by the intercession of the living, just as the living are in turn aided by the saints already in glory.

III. The excellence of the Christian moral law. The New Law contains “counsels” as well as precepts; observance of the precepts is necessary for salvation, while adoption of the counsels enables one to attain salvation with still greater certainty and expedition — hence the great multitude, across the centuries, who have freely embraced the counsels of voluntary poverty, chastity, and obedience. No more perfect law can be conceived than this New Law, since its principle or source is Divine grace itself, its end or motive is love, and its precepts, once observed, secure salvation, while its counsels, once adopted, open the way to the exercise of heroic virtue. (a) The New Law is a law of grace — the grace of the Holy Ghost, given through faith in Christ; St. Augustine notes that the Old Law was given extrinsically, to deter the wicked from sin by fear, whereas the New Law is given intrinsically, for their positive justification. (b) The New Law is a law of love, since the supreme motive of every act, interior and exterior alike, must be the love of God. (c) The New Law is concerned above all with interior acts — “thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” — and the only external acts Christ Himself enjoins are those necessary for receiving the sacraments; its ceremonial observance is, correspondingly, far lighter than that of the Old Law. (d) The precepts of the natural law are already contained in the Decalogue, and St. Thomas shows at length the superiority of the New Law over the Old (Summa, I-II, qq. 106–108).

IV. The harmony of the whole body of Christian doctrine. (a) The supernatural mysteries together manifest the supreme goodness of God: the internal communication of God’s own intimate life is revealed in the Trinity, while its external communication is revealed in our elevation to the supernatural order, and in the Incarnation, the Redemption, and our final glorification. (b) A single bond of union connects every one of these supernatural mysteries to every other: were the Trinity itself to be doubted, the Incarnation, the mission of the Holy Ghost, grace, the Church, the Eucharist, the Communion of Saints, and eternal life would all be affected together, since all proceed from the Trinity as their common source and, in the end, return to it — from Faith, through Hope, to Charity. (c) The precepts and counsels of the moral life, similarly, are logically bound up with the doctrines of Faith. St. Thomas observes that a system endowed with such wonderful and self-consistent characteristics could never have been conceived even by the best efforts of unaided human reason — the very sublimity and originality of Christian charity, which surpasses all that fallen human reason could devise on its own, points beyond itself to a genuinely divine origin.