Görres died as he had lived, well, pious, and happy. It is a remarkable fact, that great men have at last often to undergo great trials. Moses died before entering the promised land; Peter and Paul, in the midst of a fierce persecution excited against the young church they had founded; St. Augustine, while African Christianity was being destroyed by the Vandals; Gregory VII., dying, exclaimed, "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore do I die in exile." In our time, O'Connell saw his beloved island a prey to famine, while he breathed his last far away from her. Görres, too, saw all that he had contended for well-nigh ruined, and the labor of years appeared to be in vain. Eight days before his death, he took to his bed, and received the blessed Eucharist. On January 25th, 1848, his children and friends celebrated his seventy-second birthday. He received holy communion again two days before his departure, which took place on January 29th, at half-past six in the morning, whilst his children and friends knelt at his bedside repeating the Litany for the dying; and while his friend and pupil, Professor Haneberg, was saying Mass for him. A letter, written just after his death by an eye-witness, contains this passage: "The corpse was beautiful. It became like alabaster. The head, face, and broad brow were calm, clear, and peaceful, as if freed from the cares of this life, and awaiting the resurrection of the just." Thus died, uttering holy sentiments, one of the greatest intellects of this or any other age.
An extraordinary remark of Görres, just before his death, is preserved. His mind wandered among the scenes of his former studies, and, recalling the dead nations of history, he said, "Let us pray for the peoples that are no more!"
Görres has been frequently called the O'Connell of Catholic Germany. There is some truth in the parallel. It is true he could not address a hundred thousand of his countrymen from the rostrum; yet his Mercury of the Rhine and his Athanasius could effect as much as his living voice. He was not, like O'Connell, the recognized leader of his people; yet all good men regarded him as their master; and all who had witnessed his patriotism in 1814, and his faith in 1837, trusted him as Ireland did her O'Connell. O'Connell's work was indeed more rapid and exciting in the present; but more efficacious in the future was what Görres had done, and more fruitful the seed which he planted. Görres had not to free the Catholics of Germany from a yoke, such as England had put over the neck of her sister isle; still he was a real liberator, a liberator of Germans from foreign manners; for every nation is ordained of God, and it is a shame and a disgrace, by aping foreign manners, to deny the fatherland to which we belong by speech and nativity; a liberator of the church from state tutelage, which injured the civil as well as the ecclesiastical power; a liberator of the sciences from the shackles of rationalism and infidelity; a liberator of the catholic spirit and of catholic self-consciousness from the slumber of indifferentism and the chains of the spirit of the age; an agitator and excitator was he in the cause of truth and virtue; he dragged Catholic Germany out of the miry dungeon of pusillanimity, taught her self-respect, and made the blood, which had been stagnant, flow again in her veins. As O'Connell loved his country, his church, and liberty, so did Görres; especially that true liberty which is as distinct from the false as God is from idols. May Germany and the church never want geniuses like Görres in their need; and may God send a shower of such men to our own United States!
Nature And Grace.
In the article on Rome and the World in the Magazine for November last, it was shown that there is an irrepressible conflict between the spirit which dominates in the world and that which reigns in the church, or the antagonism which there is and must be between Christ and Satan, the law of life and the law of death; and every one who has attempted to live in strict obedience to the law of God has found that he has to sustain an unceasing warfare between the spirit and the flesh, between the law of the mind and the law in the members. We see the right, we approve it, we resolve to do it, and do it not. We are drawn away from it by the seductions of the flesh, our appetites, passions, and carnal affections, so that the good we would do, we do not, and the evil we would not, that we do. This, which is really a struggle in our own bosom between the higher nature and the lower, is sometimes regarded as a struggle between nature and grace, and taken as a proof that our nature is evil, and that between it and grace there is an inherent antagonism which can be removed only by the destruction either of nature by grace, or of grace by nature. Antagonism there certainly is between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of the world, and in the bosom of the individual between the spirit and the flesh. This antagonism must last as long as this life lasts, for the carnal mind is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be; but this implies no antagonism between the law of grace and the law of nature; for there is, as St. Paul assures us, "no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the flesh." (Rom. viii. 1.) Nor does this struggle imply that our nature is evil or has been corrupted by the fall; for the Council of Trent has defined that the flesh indeed inclines to sin, but is not itself sin. It remains even after baptism, and renders the combat necessary through life; but they who resist it and walk after the spirit are not sinners, because they retain it, feel its motions, and are exposed to its seductions. All evil originates in the abuse of good, for God has never made anything evil. We have suffered and suffer from original sin; we have lost innocence, the original righteousness in which we were constituted, the gifts originally added thereto, or the integrity of our nature—as immunity from disease and death, the subjection of the body to the soul, the inferior soul to the higher—and fallen into a disordered or abnormal state; but our nature has undergone no entitative or physical change or corruption, and it is essentially now what it was before the fall. It retains all its original faculties, and these all retain their original nature. The understanding lacks the supernatural light that illumined it in the state of innocence; but it is still understanding, and still operates and can operate only ad veritatem; free-will, as the Council of Trent defines, has been enfeebled, attenuated, either positively in itself by being despoiled of its integrity and of its supernatural endowment, or negatively by the greater obstacles in the appetites and passions it has to overcome; but it is free-will still, and operates and can operate only propter bonitatem. We can will only good, or things only in the respect that they are good, and only for the reason they are good. We do not and cannot will evil as evil, or for the sake of evil. The object and only object of the intellect is truth, the object and only object of the will is good, as it was before the prevarication of Adam or original sin.
Even our lower nature, concupiscentia, in which is the fomes peccati, is still entitatively good, and the due satisfaction of all its tendencies is useful and necessary in the economy of human life. Food and drink are necessary to supply the waste of the body and to maintain its health and strength. Every natural affection, passion, appetite, or tendency points to a good of some sort, which cannot be neglected without greater or less injury; nor is the sensible pleasure that accompanies the gratification of our nature in itself evil, or without a good and necessary end. Where, then, is the evil, and in what consists the damage done to our nature by original sin? The damage, aside from the culpa, or sin and consequent loss of communion with God, is in the disorder introduced, the abnormal development of the flesh or the appetites and passions consequent on their escape from the control of reason, their fall under Satanic influence, and the ignoble slavery, when they became dominant, to which they reduce reason and free-will as ministers of their pleasure. All the tendencies of our nature have each its special end, which each seeks without respect for the special ends of the others; and hence, if not restrained by reason within the bounds of moderation and sobriety, they run athwart one another, and introduce into the bosom of the individual disorder and anarchy, whence proceed the disorder and anarchy, the tyranny and oppression, the wars and fightings in society. The appetites and passions are all despotic and destitute of reason, each seeking blindly and with all its force its special gratification; and the evil is in the struggle of each for the mastery of the others, and in their tendency to make reason and free-will their servants, or to bring the superior soul into bondage to the inferior, as is said, when we say of a man, "He is the slave of his appetites," or "the slave of his passions," so that we are led to prefer a present and temporary good, though smaller, to a distant future and eternal beatitude, though infinitely greater. Hence, under their control we not only are afflicted with internal disorder and anarchy, but we come to regard the pleasure that accompanies the gratification of our sensitive appetites and passions as the real and true end of life. We eat and drink, not in order to live, but we live in order to eat and drink. We make sensual pleasure our end, the motive of our activity and the measure of our progress. Hence we are carnal men, sold under sin, follow the carnal mind, which is antagonistic to the spiritual mind, or to reason and will, which, though they do in the carnal man the bidding of the flesh, never approve it, nor mistake what the flesh craves for the true end of man.
The antagonism here is antagonism between the spirit and the flesh, not an antagonism between nature and grace—certainly not between the law of nature and the law of grace. The law of nature is something very different from the natural laws of the physicists, which are simply physical laws. Transcendentalists, humanitarians, and naturalists confound these physical laws with what theologians call the natural law as distinguished from the revealed law, and take as their rule of morals the maxim, "Follow nature," that is, follow one's own inclinations and tendencies. They recognize no real difference between the law of obedience and the law of gravitation, and allow no distinction between physical laws and moral law. Hence for them there is a physical, but no moral order. The law of nature, as recognized by theologians and moralists, is a moral law, not a physical law, a law which is addressed to reason and free-will, and demands motives, not simply a mover. It is called natural because it is promulgated by the Supreme Lawgiver through natural reason, instead of supernatural revelation, and is, at least in a measure, known to all men; for all men have reason, and a natural sense of right and wrong, and, therefore, a conscience.
Natural reason is able to attain to the full knowledge of the natural law, but, as St. Thomas maintains, only in the élite of the race. For the bulk of mankind a revelation is necessary to give them an adequate knowledge even of the precepts of the natural law; but as in some men it can be known by reason alone, it is within the reach of our natural faculties, and therefore properly called natural. Not that nature is the source from which it derives its legal character, but the medium of its promulgation.
The law of grace or the revealed law presupposes the natural law—gratia supponit naturam—and however much or little it contains that surpasses it, it contains nothing that contradicts, abrogates, or overrides it. The natural law itself requires that all our natural appetites, passions, and tendencies be restrained within the bounds of moderation, and subordinated to a moral end or the true end of man, the great purpose of his existence; and even Epicurus, who makes pleasure the end of our existence, our supreme good, requires, at least theoretically, the lower nature to be indulged only with sobriety and moderation. His error is not so much in the indulgence he allowed to the sensual or carnal nature, which he was as well aware as others, needs the restraints of reason and will, as in placing the supreme good in the pleasure that accompanies the gratification of nature, and in giving as the reason or motive of the restraint, not the will of God, but the greater amount and security of natural pleasure. The natural law not only commands the restraint, but forbids us to make the pleasure the supreme good, or the motive of the restraint. It places the supreme good in the fulfilment of the real purpose of our existence, makes the proper motive justice or right, not pleasure, and commands us to subordinate inclination to duty as determined by reason or the law itself. It requires the lower nature to move in subordination to the higher, and the higher to act always in reference to the ultimate end of man, which, we know even from reason itself, is God, the final as well as the first cause of all things. The revealed law and the natural law here perfectly coincide, and there is no discrepancy between them. If, then, we understand by nature the law of nature, natural justice and equity, or what we know or may know naturally is reasonable and just, there is no contrariety between nature and grace, for grace demands only what nature herself demands. The supposed war of grace against nature is only the war of reason and free-will against appetite, passion, and inclination, which can be safely followed only when restrained within proper bounds. The crucifixion or annihilation of nature, which Christian asceticism enjoins, is a moral, not a physical crucifixion or annihilation; the destruction of pleasure as our motive or end. No physical destruction of anything natural, nor physical change in anything natural, is demanded by grace or Christian perfection. The law of grace neither forbids nor diminishes the pleasure that accompanies the satisfaction of nature; it only forbids our making it our good, an end to be lived for. When the saints mortify the flesh, chastise the body, or sprinkle with ashes their mess of bitter herbs, it is to maintain inward freedom, to prevent pleasure from gaining a mastery over them, and becoming a motive of action, or perhaps oftener from a love of sacrifice, and the desire to share with Christ in his sufferings to redeem the world. We all of us, if we have any sympathies, feel an invincible repugnance to feasting and making merry when our friends, those we tenderly love, are suffering near us, and the saints see always the suffering Redeemer, Christ in his agony in the garden and on the cross, before their eyes, him whom they love deeply, tenderly, with the whole heart and soul.