Sense and Nonsense: Inward and Outward Spirituality

Father Cornelius Monacell is a Jesuit classmate of mine. He hails from Albion, New York, where he grew up with wonderful Abruzzi-style pasta every Sunday noon. I even had one of his dear cousins in one of my classes at Georgetown, though she was still an un-Americanized Monacell. “Monte” is one of my greatest benefactors. Among other things, he deals in books. He used to work for the St. Vincent de Paul Society here in San Francisco, and he still collects and distributes good books, mostly to the elderly. He called me up recently with C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, which I had never read, but long coveted. Likewise, he had a 1954 Edition of God and the Supernatural: A Catholic Statement on the Christian Faith, which was originally published in London by Sheed & Ward (how we miss them!) in 1920.

In this book, Christopher Dawson wrote an essay, “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” on which I want to comment here. Our age in religion, I think, is that of the heresy of “grandiose schemes for the eradication of evil.” Earlier generations that meditated on the Fall, on Augustine, Paul, and even Aristotle, were immune from this sort of thing. To-day we can send pious men to, say, Cuba or Nicaragua or Moscow even, and they come back not having noticed anything. Their spirituality is totally conformed to ideological power. They go off crippled and return self-righteous and even more crippled.

A friend recently wrote of a Catholic academic Peace Corps type: “He’s a fine person, but I just couldn’t believe that his two weeks in Cuba didn’t reveal to him anything to indicate a suppression of religious freedom or any other adverse effect of Castro’s regime.” Today, we must clearly recognize that the very ability to recognize an utter tyranny is no longer a “given,” obvious thing, something we might expect from almost anyone. We live among pious folks who praise tyrannies and never seem ever to wonder about it, among those who cannot imagine how some tyrannies are worse than others. No wonder these are first to be eliminated when they become tyranny’s actual subjects. “Darkness at Noon” is today an academic and clerical phenomenon — I guess it always was.

But I want to talk about Dawson, specifically about the relation between our inner and outer worlds. The current trend is to suggest that our inner holiness or authenticity is necessarily a function of the structure of the external, politico-economic world. Thus, there is little sense in praying much, or if we do pray, it is for some immediate ideological purpose, even in our music and our speech. The Holy Father has been waging a lonely, one-man war to make us realize that Christian revelation does not work this way.

So I was glad to read these lines in Dawson, from just after World War I, when subjective forms first began on a large scale to be projected onto the external world.

From the beginning, the church has taught that it is impossible to judge the inward growth of the Kingdom by outward signs . . . Critics of Christianity are apt to judge of it as though it were an external system of law. This system is applied to a nation or a civilization, and if these prosper, well and good; if not, Christianity is a failure. They do not realize the infinitely tenuous and delicate nature of the supernatural life, which works as continuously and infallibly as a natural force, through the sacraments, and transforms human nature by the consent and co-operation of the individual will. Where it is accepted in a merely natural way as a law, as part of a human system, it is powerless to act.

Why these lines are important is not only because they repeat the central tradition, but because they suggest also the only really effective way to achieve what counts, even in the external world.

Christianity does not at all believe that our spiritual life ought not to burst forth into the external world to result in an infinite variety of beautiful things, good actions, and true speech. It does believe, however, that these arise from grace and the experience of what is, first stemming from the source of all action in the human mind and will in specific human persons. We Christians, if we be orthodox, are currently the most radical folks about, the ones most at odds with what Leo Strauss called “the modern project,” which governs the social world: the effort to create a completely man-made environment from resources subject to nothing but the unlimited will. Much of this endeavor has now ironically taken on religious form and is spoken of in religious terminology, so that it is often difficult to find religion even in religious places.

Many young men and women today sense this. When they finally decide to return to religion, after finding the ideologies die in them, they hear there only talk of social action, which was what confused them in the first place in their colleges or experience. Numerous young men and women, alienated for some years from the faith, for various reasons, personal, academic, religious, or political, now seek to come home, only to discover the faith they seek is no longer “there.” All they hear and see inside is what they rejected from the experience of an earlier alienation, in which they once placed hope. They discover that hardly anything any more is rejected, except the idea that some things should be rejected, this combined with a sort of rigid determinism about activism.

So Dawson’s observation strikes me now as especially pertinent if we are to have a religious life over against the sort of preachments that insist that we model the world on the form of some ideologically spoken religious terminology, but one still based on the human will, not on its own relation to gift and grace. “It is impossible to judge the inward growth of the Kingdom by outward signs.” We are surrounded by those who have gone to Cuba and seen nothing. This, I suspect, is not because there is nothing there to be seen, but because the inner life was already so alienated by external ideology before landing in Havana, or wherever, that the only thing that appeared was the Kingdom of God. I would suspect this applies to the Christian soul of Mr. Castro himself.

The first thing we must do as human persons, then, is to return to prayer and sacrament, if we can find them. Otherwise, we will be preaching politics, earnestly, to be sure, and wondering why our hearts remain so empty. In the end, there is nothing wrong with saying that God’s grace is at work in the hearts of the Cubans. What is dangerous is the notion that the form of rule in Cuba, or wherever, is the sign of this grace, of that Kingdom which, as Dawson said, is impossible to judge by outward signs.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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