But we have not exhausted the creative act. God creates all things for an end, and this end is himself; not that he may gain something for himself, or increase his own beatitude, which is eternally complete, and can be neither augmented nor diminished, but that he may communicate of his beatitude to creatures which he has called into existence. Hence God is first cause and final cause. We proceed from him as first cause, and return to him as final cause, as we have shown again and again in the magazine with all the necessary proofs.
Between God as final cause, and his creatures, the mediator is the Incarnate Word, or the man Christ Jesus, the only mediator between God and men. In Christ Jesus is hypostatically united in one divine person the divine nature and the human, which, however, remain for ever distinct, without intermixture or confusion. This union is effected by the creative act, which in it is carried to its summit. The hypostatic union completes the first cycle or procession of existences from God as first cause, and initiates their return to him as final cause, as we have said in our remarks on Primeval Man. It completes generation and initiates the regeneration, or palingenesiac order, which has its completion or fulfilment in glorification, the intuitive vision of God by the light of glory, or, as say the schoolmen, ens supernaturale.
Theologians understand usually, by the supernatural order, the order founded by the Incarnation or hypostatic union, the regeneration propagated by the election of grace, instead of natural generation. But between the natural and the supernatural, in this sense, the nexus or middle term is the creative act effecting the hypostatic union, or God himself mediating in his human nature. The Incarnation unites God and man, without intermixture or confusion, in one and the same divine Person, and also the order of generation with the order of regeneration, of which glorification is the crown. But as the two natures remain for ever distinct but inseparable in one person, so, in the order of regeneration, the natural and the supernatural are each preserved in its distinctive though inseparable activity.
These three terms, generation, regeneration, glorification, one in the creative act of God, cover the entire life of man, and in each the natural and supernatural, distinct but inseparable, remain and co-operate and act. There is no dualism in the world of reality, and none is apparent—except the distinction between God and creature—when the Creator's works are seen as a whole, in their real relation and synthesis. The dualism results in the mind from studying the Creator's works in their analytic divisions, instead of their synthetic relations; especially from taking the first cycle or order of generation as an independent order, complete in itself, demanding nothing beyond itself, and constituting the whole life of man, instead of taking it, as it really is, only as the beginning, the initial, or the inchoate stage of life, subordinated to the second cycle, the teleological order, or regeneration and glorification, in which alone is its complement, perfection, ultimate end, for which it has been created, and exists. Our age falls into its heresies, unbeliefs, and intellectual anarchy and confusion, because it undertakes to separate what God has joined together—philosophy from theology, reason from faith, science from revelation, nature from grace—and refuses to study the works and providence of God in their synthetic relations, in which alone is their true meaning.
The Positivists understand very well the anarchy that reigns in the modern intellectual world, and the need of a doctrine which can unite in one all the scattered and broken rays of intelligence and command the adhesion of all minds. The church, they say, once had such a doctrine, and for a thousand years led the progress of science and society. Protestants, they assert, have never had, and never, as Protestants, can have any doctrine of the sort, and the church has it no longer. It is nowhere set forth except in the writings of Auguste Comte, who obtains it not from revelation, theology, or metaphysics, but from the sciences, or the positive facts of nature studied in their synthetic relations. But unhappily, though right in asserting the necessity of a grand synthetic doctrine which shall embrace all the knowable and all the real, they forget that facts cannot be studied in their synthetic relations unless the mind is previously in possession of the grand synthetic doctrine which embraces and explains them, while the doctrine itself cannot be had till they are so studied. They must take the end as the means of gaining the end! This is a hard case, for till they get the synthetic formula they can only have unrelated facts, hypotheses, and conjectures, with no means of verifying them. They are not likely to succeed. Starting from anarchy, they can only arrive at anarchy. Only God can move by his Spirit over chaos, and bring order out of confusion and light out of darkness.
Moreover, the Positivists do not reconcile the conflicting elements; for they suppress one of the two series of terms, and relegate God, the supernatural, principles, causes, and supersensible relations into the region of the unknowable, and include in their grand synthesis only positive sensible facts or phenomena and their physical laws. They thus restrict man's existence to the first cycle, and exclude the second or palingenesiac order, in which alone reigns the moral law. The first or initial cycle does not contain the word of the ænigma. It does not exist for itself, and therefore is not and cannot be intelligible in or by itself. If they could succeed in removing the anarchy complained of, they would do so by ignorance, not science, and harmonize all intelligences only by annihilating them.
Nor is it true that the church has lost or abandoned her grand synthetic doctrine, or that her synthesis has ceased to be complete, or sufficiently comprehensive. Her doctrine is Christianity; and Christianity leaves out no ancient or modern science; has not been and cannot be outgrown by any actual or possible progress of intelligence; for it embraces at once all the real and all the knowable, reale omne et scibile. If the church fails to command the adhesion of all minds, it is not because any minds have advanced in science beyond her, or have attained to any truth or virtue she has not; but because they have fallen below her, have become too contracted and grovelling in their views to grasp the elevation and universality of her doctrine. She still leads the civilized world, and commands the faith and love of the really enlightened portion of mankind. The reason why so many in our age refuse her their adhesion is not because her doctrine or mode or manner of presenting it are defective, but because they are engrossed with the development and application of the physical or natural laws, or with the first or initial cycle, and exhaust themselves in the production, exchange, and accumulation of physical goods, which, however attractive to the inchoate or physical man, are of no moral or religious value. The cause is not in the church but in them; in the fact that their minds and hearts are set on those things only after which the heathen seek; and they have no relish for any truth that pertains to the teleological or moral order.
The church does not object to the study of the natural or physical sciences, nor to the accumulation of material wealth; but she does object to making the initial order the teleological, and to the cultivation of the sciences or study of the physical laws for their own sake; for, with her, not knowledge but wisdom is the principal thing. She requires the physical and psychological sciences to be cultivated for the sake of the ultimate end of man, and in subordination to the Christian law which that end prescribes. So of material wealth; she does not censure its production, its exchange, or its accumulation, if honestly done, and in subordination to the end for which man is created. What she demands of us is that we conform to the Creator's plan, and esteem things according to their true order and place in that plan. She tolerates no falsehood in thought, word, or deed.
The natural is not suppressed or injured by being subordinated to the supernatural, for it can be fulfilled only in the supernatural. We find the indications of this in nature herself. There are, indeed, theologians who talk of a natural beatitude; but whether possible or not, God has not so made us that we can find our beatitude in nature; that is, in the creature or a created good. He has made us for himself, and the soul can be satisfied with nothing less. This is the great fact elaborated by Father Hecker in his Questions of the Soul, and his Aspirations of Nature. In the first work, he shows that the soul asks questions which nature cannot answer, but which are answered in the supernatural; in the second, he shows that nature desires, craves, aspires to, and has a capacity for, the supernatural; that the soul is conscious of wants which only the supernatural can fill. Man has, as St. Thomas teaches, a natural desire to see God in the beatific vision; that is, to see him as he is in himself; to be like him, to partake of his divine nature, to possess him, and be filled with him. This alone can satisfy the soul, and hence holy Job says, "I shall be satisfied when I awake in thy likeness."
There can be no real antagonism between the natural and the supernatural; for there can be none between nature and its Creator, and equally none between it and its fulfilment, or supreme good. There is none, we have shown, between reason and faith, any more than there is between the eye and the telescope, which extends its range of vision, and enables it to see what it could not see without it. There can be none between science and revelation; when the science is real science and is cultivated not for itself alone, but as a means to the true end of man; and there can be none between earth and heaven, when the earth is regarded solely as a medium and not confounded with the end. There can be none between liberty and authority; for man can be man, possess himself, be himself, and free only by living in conformity to the law of his existence, or according to the plan of the Creator; and finally there can be none between church and state, if the state remembers that it is in the teleological order, and under the moral law, therefore subordinated to the spiritual order.