Men speak of nature as supernaturalized in regeneration, and hence assume that grace transforms nature; but in this there must be some misunderstanding or exaggeration. In regeneration we are born into the order of the end, or started, so to speak, on our return to God as our final cause. The principle of this new birth, which is grace, and the end, which is God, are supernatural; but our nature is not changed except as to its motives and the assistance it receives, though it receives in baptism an indelible mark not easy to explain. This follows from the Incarnation. In the Incarnation our nature is raised to be the nature of God, and yet remains human nature, as is evident from the condemnation by the church of the monophysites and the monothelites. Catholic faith requires us to hold that the two natures, the human and the divine, remain for ever distinct in the one divine person of the Word. Some prelates thought to save their orthodoxy by maintaining that, after his resurrection, the two natures of our Lord became fused or transformed into one theandric nature; but they did not succeed, and were condemned and deposed. The monothelites asserted that there was in Christ two natures indeed, but only one will, or that his human will was absorbed in the divine. But they also were condemned as heretics. Our Lord, addressing the Father, says, "Not my will, but thine be done," thus plainly implying a human will distinct from, though not contrary to, the divine will. Can we suppose that the grace of regeneration or even of glorification works a greater change of nature in us than the grace of union worked in our nature as assumed by the Word? If human nature and human will remain in Christ after the hypostatic union, so that to regard him after his resurrection as having but one will or one theandric nature is a heresy, how can we hold without heresy that grace, which flows from that union, either destroys our nature or transforms it into a theandric or supernaturalized nature?
Let us understand, then, that grace neither annihilates nor supersedes or transforms our nature. It is our nature that is redeemed or delivered from the bondage of sin, our nature that is translated from the kingdom of dark into the kingdom of light, our nature that is reborn, that is justified, that by the help of grace perseveres to the end, that is rewarded, that is glorified, and enters into the glory of our Lord. It then persists in regeneration and glorification as one and the same human nature, with its human reason, its human will, its human personality, its human activity, only assisted by grace to act from a supernatural principle to or for a supernatural end. The assistance is supernatural, and so is the end; but that which receives the assistance, profits by it, and attains the end, is human nature, the man that was born of Adam as well as reborn of Christ, the second Adam.
We have dwelt long, perhaps to tediousness, upon this point, because we have wished to efface entirely the fatal impression that nature and grace are mutually antagonistic, and to make it appear that the two orders, commonly called the natural and the supernatural, are both mutually consistent parts of one whole; that grace simply completes nature; and that Christianity is no anomaly, no after-thought, or succedaneum, in the original design of creation.
The heterodox, with their doctrine of total depravity, and the essential corruption or evil of nature, and their doctrine, growing out of this assumed depravity or corruption, of irresistible grace, and the inactivity or passivity of man in faith and justification, obscure this great fact, and make men regard nature as a failure, and that to save some God had to supplant and create a new nature in its place. A more immoral doctrine, or one more fatal to all human activity, is not conceivable, if it could be really and seriously believed and acted on prior to regeneration, which is impossible. The heterodox are better than their system. The system teaches that all our works before regeneration are sins; even our prayers are unacceptable, some say, an abomination to the Lord, and consequently, there is no use in striving to be virtuous. After regeneration there is no need of our activity, for grace is inamissible, and if really born again, sin as much as we will, our salvation is sure, for the sins of the regenerated are not reputed to them or counted as sins. There is no telling how many souls this exclusive and exaggerated supernaturalism (which we owe to the reformers of the sixteenth century) has destroyed, or how many persons it has deterred from returning to the Catholic Church by the common impression, that, since she asserts original sin and the necessity of grace, she holds and teaches the same frightful system. Men who are able to think, and accustomed to sober reflection, find themselves unable to embrace Calvinism, and, confounding Calvinism with Christianity, reject Christianity itself, and fall into a meagre rationalism, a naked naturalism, or, worst of all, an unreasoning indifferentism; yet there is no greater mistake than to suppose that the church holds it or has the slightest sympathy with it. We have wished to mark clearly the difference between it and her teaching. Christian asceticism, when rightly understood, is not based on the assumption that nature is evil, and needs to be destroyed, repressed, or changed. It is based on two great ideas, liberty and sacrifice. It is directed not to the destruction of the flesh or the body, for in the creed we profess to believe in the "resurrection of the flesh." Our Lord assumed flesh in the womb of the Virgin; he had a real body, ascended into heaven with it, and in it sitteth at the right hand of the Father Almighty. He feeds and nourishes us with it in Holy Communion; and it is by eating his flesh and drinking his blood that our spiritual life is sustained and strengthened. Our own bodies shall rise again, and, spiritualized after the manner of Christ's glorious body, shall, reunited to the soul, live for ever. We show that this is our belief by the honor we pay to the relics of the saints. This sacred flesh, these sacred bones, which we cherish with so much tender piety, shall live again, and reenter the glorified body of the saint. Matter is not evil, as the Platonists teach, and as the false asceticism of the heathen assumes, and with which Christian asceticism has no affinity, though many who ought to know better pretend to the contrary. The Christian ascetic aims, indeed, at a moral victory over the flesh, labors by the help of grace to liberate the soul from its bondage, to gain the command of himself, to be at all times free to maintain the truth, and to keep the commandments of God; to bring his body into subjection to the soul, to reduce the appetites and passions under the control of his reason and will, but never to destroy them or in any manner to injure his material body. Far less does he seek to abnegate, destroy, or repress either will or reason, in order to give grace freer and fuller scope; he only labors to purify and strengthen both by grace. Nature is less abnormal, purer, stronger, more active, more energetic in the true ascetic than in those who take no pains to train and purify it under the influence of divine grace.
The principle of all sacrifice is love. It was because God so loved men that he gave his only-begotten Son to die for them that they might not perish, but have everlasting life. It was love that died on the cross for our redemption. Nothing is hard or difficult to love, and there is nothing love will not do or sacrifice for the object loved. The saint can never make for his Lord a sacrifice great enough to satisfy his love, and gives up for him the most precious things he has, not because they are evil or it would be sin in him to retain them; not because his Lord needs them, but because they are the most costly sacrifice he can make, and he in making the sacrifice can give some proof of his love. The chief basis of monastic life is sacrifice. The modern notion that monastic institutions were designed to be a sort of hospital for infirm souls is essentially false. As a rule, a virtue that cannot sustain itself in the world will hardly acquire firmness and strength in a monastery. The first monks did not retire from the world because [it was] unfit to live in it, but because the world restrained their liberty, and because it afforded them no adequate field for the heroic sacrifices to which they aspired. Their austerities, which we so little robust as Christians, accustomed to pamper our bodies, and to deny ourselves nothing, regard as sublime folly, if not with a shudder of horror, were heroic sacrifices to the Spouse of the soul, for whom they wished to give up everything but their love. They rejoiced in affliction for his sake, and they wished to share, as we have already said, with him in the passion and cross which he endured for our sake, so as to be as like him as possible. There are saints to-day in monasteries, and out of monasteries in the world, living in our midst, whom we know not or little heed, who understand the meaning of this word sacrifice, and make as great and as pure sacrifices, though perhaps in other forms, and as thoroughly forego their own pleasure, and as cheerfully give up what costs them the most to give up, as did the old Fathers of the Desert. But, if we know them not, God knows them and loves them.
Yet we pretend not to deny that many went into monasteries from other motives, from weakness, disappointed affection, disgust of the world, and some to hide their shame, and to expiate by a life of penance their sins; but, if the monastery often sheltered such as these, it was not for such that it was originally designed. In process of time, monastic institutions, when they became rich, were abused, as often the priesthood itself, and treated by the nobles as a provision for younger sons or portionless daughters. We may at times detect in ascetics an exaggeration of the supernatural element and an underrating if not a neglect of the natural, we may find, chiefly in modern times, a tendency amongst the pious and devout to overlook the fact that manliness, robustness, and energy of mind and character enter as an important element in the Christian life; but the tendency in this direction is not catholic, though observed to some extent among Catholics. It originates in the same causes that originated the Calvinistic or Jansenistic heresy, and has been strengthened by the exaggerated assertion of the human and natural elements caused by the reaction of the human mind against an exclusive and exaggerated supernaturalism. The rationalism and humanitarianism of the last century and the present are only the reaction of human nature against the exaggerated supernaturalism of the Reformers and their descendants, the Jansenists, who labored to demolish nature to make way for grace, and to annihilate man in order to assert God. Each has an element of truth, but, neither having the whole truth, each makes war on the other, and alternately gains a victory and undergoes a defeat. Unhappily, neither will listen to the church who accepts the truth and rejects the exclusiveness of each, and harmonizes and completes the truth of both in the unity and catholicity of the faith once delivered to the saints. The Catholic faith is the reconciler of all opposites. These alternate victories and defeats go on in the world outside of the church; but it would be strange if they did not have some echo among Catholics, living, as they do, in the midst of the combatants, and in constant literary and intellectual intercourse with them. They create some practical difficulties for Catholics which are not always properly appreciated. We cannot assert the natural, rational, and the human element of the church without helping, more or less, the exclusive rationalists or naturalists who deny the supernatural; and we can hardly oppose them with the necessary vigor and determination without seeming at least to favor their opponents, the exclusive supernaturalists, who reject reason and deny the natural. It is this fact very likely that has kept Catholics for the most part during the last century and the present on the defensive; and as, during this period, the anti-supernaturalists have been the most formidable enemy of the church, it is no wonder if the mass of devout Catholics have shown some tendency to exaggerate the supernatural, and been shy of asserting as fully as faith warrants the importance of the rational and the natural, or if they have paid less attention to the cultivation of the human side of religion than is desirable.
Some allowance must be made for the new position in which Catholics for a century or more have been placed, and it would be very wrong to censure them with severity, even if we found them failing to show themselves all at once equal to the new duties imposed upon them. The breaking up of old governments and institutions, founded by Catholic ancestors, the political, social, and industrial revolutions that have been and still are going on, must have, to some extent, displaced the Catholic mind, and required it, so to speak, to ease itself, or to take a new and difficult observation, and determine its future course. Catholics to-day stand between the old, which was theirs, and which is passing away, and the new, which is rising, and which is not yet theirs. They must needs be partially paralyzed, and at a momentary loss to know what course to take. Naturally conservative, as all men are who have something to lose or on which to rely, their sympathies are with the past, they have not been able as yet to accept the new state of things, and convert regrets into hopes. A certain hesitation marks their conduct, as if in doubt whether to stand out against the new at all hazards, and, if need be, fall martyrs to a lost cause, or to accept it and do the best they can with it. In this country, where Catholicity is not associated with any sort of political institutions, and Catholics have no old civilization to retain or any new order to resist, we, unless educated abroad, are hardly able to appreciate the doubts, hesitations, and discouragements of Catholics in the old world, and to make the proper allowances if at times they seem to attach as Catholics undue importance to the political and social changes going on around them, to be too despondent, and more disposed to cry out against the wickedness of the age, to fold their hands, and wait for Providence to rearrange all things for them without their coöperation, than to look the changes events have produced full in the face, and to exert themselves, with the help of grace, to bring order out of the new chaos, as their brave old ancestors did out of the chaos that followed the irruption of the northern barbarians, and the breaking up of the Graeco-Roman civilization. It is no light thing to see the social and political world in which we have lived, and with which we have been accustomed to associate the interests of religion and society falling in ruins under our very eyes, and we must be pardoned if for a moment we feel that all is gone or going.
But Catholic energy can never be long paralyzed, and already the Catholics of Europe are arousing themselves from their apathy, recovering their courage, and beginning to feel aware that the church depends on nothing temporary, is identified with no political or social organization, and can survive all the mutations of the world around her. Leading Catholics in Europe, instead of wasting their strength in vain regrets for a past that is gone, or in vainer efforts to restore what can no longer be restored, are beginning to adjust themselves to the present, and to labor to command the future. They are leaving the dead to bury their dead, and preparing to follow their Lord in the new work to be done for the new and turbulent times in which their lot is cast. "All these things are against me," said the patriarch Jacob, and yet they proved to be all for him and his family. Who knows but the untoward events of the last century and the present will turn out for the interests of religion, and that another Joseph may be able to say to their authors, "Ye meant it for evil, but God meant it for good?"