The medium of all sacramental grace is the Man Christ Jesus, the Word made flesh, and the sacraments are the media through which the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ flows out from him, the Fountain,—the grace that begets the new life, justifies, sanctifies, and makes pleasing to God, we mean,—is infused by the Holy Ghost into the soul, and constitutes alike the vital principle of the individual, and of the whole body, quickening and sustaining each. In rejecting sacramental grace, the heterodox separate the individual soul, and also the church herself, from all real communion or intercourse with Christ, or God in his human nature, and accept the seminal principle of rationalism, into which we see them everywhere falling. They dissolve Christ, and render the Word efficient only in his divine nature. The sacraments are the media of our union with God in his human nature, through which the hypostatic union is, in some sort, repeated in us, or made by the Holy Ghost practically effectual to the justice and sanctity of believers, and the perfecting of the church, which is the body of Christ; and as this grace, in its principle and medium, is Christ himself, all who are born of it are born of him, and the life which they live in and by it is the one life of God in his humanity. Looking at the church, in what theologians call her soul, she is literally and truly the man Christ Jesus, and looking at her as the whole congregation of the faithful, she is the body of Christ, and related to him as the body to the soul. It is this intimate relation of the church to God in his human nature, that led Moehler to represent the church as in some sort the continuation on earth, in a visible form, of the Incarnation; and she is certainly so closely united to his divine personality, that we may say truly, that he is her personality, as really as he is the personality of the flesh he assumed and hypostatically united to himself. Perrone says that, if we exclude from this view all pantheistic conceptions, it is scriptural, and, moreover, sustained by the fathers, especially St. Athanasius, who says, in writing of the Incarnation, "Et cum Petrus dicat: certissime sciat ergo omnis domus Israel, quia et Dominum eum, et Christum fecit Deus, hunc Jesum quern vos crucifixistis: non de divinitate ejus dicit, quod Dominum ipsum et Christum fuerit, sed de humanitate ejus, quae est UNIVERSA ECCLESIA, quae in ipso dominatur et regnat, postquam crucifixus ipse est: et quae erigitur ad regnum coelorum, ut cum illa regnet, qui seipsum pro illa exinanivit et qui induta servili forma, ipsam assumpsit." [Footnote 72] Christ, in his humanity, is the universal church, which rules and reigns in him. We cannot study the great fathers of the church too assiduously, and we wish we had earlier known it. The doctrine we are trying to set forth is there.
[Footnote 72: Edit. Maur. opp. tom. i. p. 2, p. 887; apud Perrone, Praelect. Locis Theolog. p. I. c. 2; De Anima Ecclesiae, Art. I.]
There is nothing here that favors pantheism:
1. Because the hypostatic union is by the creative act of God, as much so as the creation of Adam.
2. Because, although God is really the church, regarded in her soul, it is God in his human, which is for ever distinct from his divine nature, and therefore in his created nature.
3. Because the Word was incarnated in an individual, not in the species, as some rationalists dream, save as the species was individualized in the individual nature he assumed; and,
4. Because, though Christ is identically the soul, the informing principle, the life of the church, the individuals affiliated to the body of the church retain their individuality, their human personality, and therefore their own free-will, personal identity, activity, or their character as free moral agents.
Not all individuals apparently affiliated to the body of the church are really assimilated to her, and vitally united to the body of Christ. They pertain to the society externally, but not by an inward union with Christ, the head and soul. They are, as St. Augustine says, "in not of the church," as the dead particles of matter in the human body which receive not, or have ceased to receive, life from it, and are constantly flying or cast off. Gratia supponit naturam. All the operations of grace presuppose nature, and nature has always the power to resist grace. Without grace nature cannot concur with grace; yet even they who have been born again, and have entered into the order of regeneration, are always able to fall away, or back, practically, into the natural order. Not every individual in the church is assimilated to her, nor every one who is assimilated to her will continue to the end. But she herself survives their loss and remains always one and the same body of Christ.
We have dwelt at great length on this view of the church, not because we have any special partiality or aptitude for mystic theology, but because we have wished to show that the church is not something purely external and arbitrary. We hold that all the works of God are real, and have a real and solid reason of being in the order of things which he has seen proper to create. He does nothing in the supernatural order, any more than in the natural order, without a reason, and a good and valid reason. We have wished to get at the reality, and to show that Catholicity is not a sham, a make-believe, a reputing of things to be that are not; but a reality, as real in its own order as the order of nature itself, and, in fact, even more so, as nature is mimetic, and Catholicity, to borrow a term from Plato, is methexic, and participates of the divine reality itself. All heterodox systems are shams, unphilosophical, sophistical, and incapable of sustaining a rigid examination. Their abettors do not, and dare not, reason on them. The age supposes Catholicity is no better, is equally unsubstantial, unreal, dissolving and vanishing in thin air at the first glance of reason. We have wished to show the age its mistake, and to let it see that Catholicity can bear the most thorough investigation, and that it has nothing to fear from the most rigid dialectics. We do not pretend to divest it of mysteries, or to explain the mysteries so as to bring them within the comprehension of our feeble understandings, but to show that the church, with all her attributes and functions, has a reason in the divine mind and in the order of things of which we make a part, and is a real, inward life, as well as an outward form.
From the view of the church which we have presented, it is easy to deduce her attributes. She is in some sort, according to St. Athanasius, the human nature of Christ, or Christ in his humanity, and he is her divine personality, for his humanity is inseparable from his divine person. That she is one, follows, necessarily, from the unity of Christ's person, from the fact that, in her soul, she is Christ and, in her body, is his body. Her unity is the unity of Christ himself, and the unity of the life she lives in him. There are individual distinctions and even varieties of race or family among men in the natural order, but all men are men only in that they are one in the unity of the species. Jesus Christ is not only the individual man Christ Jesus, but also in the order of regeneration the species, as Adam was both an individual man and the entire species in the order of genesis or generation. The church as growing out of the incarnation, and, in some sense, continuing it, and in her body composed of individuals born of him and affiliated to him, must necessarily be one, one in her faith, one in her sacraments, one in her worship, one in her love, one in the life that flows through her, animates and invigorates her, from the one Christ, who is her forma, or informing principle, as the soul is the informing principle of the body—anima est forma corporis, as the holy Council of Clermont defines. Diversity in any of these respects breaks the unity of the body and interrupts communion with the head, and the communion of the body with the soul, whence is derived its life. It is therefore all Christians have always held heresy and schism to be deadly sins, and the most deadly of all. They not only sever those guilty of them from the body or external communion of the church, but from her internal communion, from Christ himself, the only source of supernatural and divine life. There is not only the grossest ingratitude and baseness in heresy and schism, but there is spiritual death in them. By them we die to Christ as, in the natural order, we should die to Adam, or lose our natural life, if we were deprived of our humanity or cut off from communion with its natural head. It is not from bigotry or intolerance that the church regards heresy and schism with horror; it is because they necessarily separate the soul from Christ, and destroy its spiritual life; because they reject Christ, and crucify him afresh. It is so in the very nature of the case, and she can no more make it not so, than the mathematician can make the three angles of a triangle not equal to two right angles. It is not, therefore, without reason that the church has always insisted that to keep the unity of the faith is the first of Christian duties, or that St. Paul bids St. Timothy to keep the deposit, and to hold fast the form of sound words; for without the faith it is impossible to please God. We know men may err without being heretics; we know that invincible ignorance, an ignorance not culpable in its cause, excuses from sin in that whereof one is invincibly ignorant; but there is no invincible ignorance where one may know the truth, but will not; and invincible ignorance itself cannot regenerate the soul, and elevate it to the supernatural order, which can be done only by faith given in baptism.
The church is holy, holy in her doctrines, her worship, her life, and in her living members. This follows necessarily from the fact, that in her soul she is Christ, and her body the body of Christ. She is holy as he is holy, and because he is holy, as she is one because he is one. Doubtless all individuals in her communion are not holy; for men may, as we have seen, be in the church and not of the church. Regeneration, or the infused habits of faith, justice, and sanctity, do not destroy one's individuality, or take away one's free-will; men may, if they will, profane the sacraments, eat or drink unworthily, even fall from grace, and become gross sinners against God and criminals before the state. These are not holy, but the reverse; yet all who are born again, and are united by a living bond to the church, may derive, if they will, life from Christ through her, and all who do so are holy in her holiness, as she is holy in the holiness of Christ. His life, the life of God in his humanity, is their life.
The attempt to disprove the sanctity of the church from the bad conduct of some, if you will many, of her members, overlooks the real character of the church, supposes her to be simply an aggregation of individuals, living only the life she derives from them; and it also starts from the false assumption that grace is irresistible and inamissible. Poor Luther, in the morbid state into which he fell in his convent, could find relief only in assuming that, as he had once been in grace, he must be still in grace, and sure of salvation; for grace, once had, can never be lost, however one may sin after having received it. Yet this doctrine was false, and but for his morbid, half insane state of mind, he would never have entertained it for a moment. Protestantism sprang from the diseased state of Luther's soul. A sad origin.