In the early ages of the church, the fathers had no occasion to take care that reason and nature should be preserved, for no one dreamed of denying them. All their efforts were needed to bring out and vindicate the other series of terms, God, the supernatural, revelation, grace, faith, which was denied or perverted by the world they had to war against. The ascetic writers, again, having for their object the right disciplining of human nature through grace, which includes revelation and faith, as well as the elevation and assistance of nature and reason, had just as little occasion to assert reason and nature, for they assumed them, and their very labors implied them. Grace, or the supernatural, was rarely exaggerated or set forth as exclusive. The danger came chiefly from the opposite quarter, from Pelagianism, or the assertion of the sufficiency of nature without grace.
When, however, the reformers appeared, the danger shifted sides. The doctrines of the reformation, the doctrines of grace, as they are called by evangelicals, were an exaggerated and exclusive supernaturalism. The reformers did not merely assert the insufficiency of reason and nature, but went further, and asserted their total depravity, and utter worthlessness in the Christian life. They made man not merely passive under grace, but actively and necessarily opposed to it, resisting it always with all his might, and to be overcome only by sovereign grace, the gratia victrix of the Jansenists. The church met this and its kindred errors in the holy Council of Trent, and while affirming the supernatural element, and defining the sphere and office of grace, rescued nature and reaffirmed its part in the work of life. But error has no principle and is bound to no consistency, and the Catholic has ever since had to defend nature against the exclusive supernaturalists, and grace against the exclusive naturalists; reason, for instance, against the traditionalists, and revelation and authority against the rationalists. To do this, it has been and still is necessary to distinguish between the two orders, nature and grace, natural and supernatural, reason and faith.
But we find a very considerable number of men who are not exclusively supernaturalists, nor exclusively rationalists, but who are syncretists, or both at once. They accept both orders in their mutual exclusiveness, and alternately, rather, simultaneously, assert exclusive supernaturalism, and exclusive rationalism. This is the case with the great mass of Protestants, who retain any reminiscences of grace, and even with some Catholics in countries where Jansenism once had its stronghold, and where traces of its influence may still be detected with people who deny its formally heretical propositions, and accept the papal constitutions condemning them. The two extremes are seen, and both are accepted; but the mediator between them, or the truth which conciliates or harmonizes them, seems to be overlooked or not understood. Of course, Catholic theology asserts it, and is in reality based on it; but, some how or other, the age does not seize it, and the prevailing philosophy does not recognize it.
The problem for our age, it seems to us, is to revive it, and show the conciliation of the two extremes. The labor of theologians and philosophers is not, indeed, to find a new and unknown truth or medium of reconciliation, as so many pretend, but to bring out to the dull and enfeebled understanding of our times the great truth, always asserted by Catholic theology, which conciliates all extremes by presenting the real and living synthesis of things. This Father Hewit has attempted and in great part achieved in his Problems of the Age.
There can be no question that the dominant philosophy, especially with the heterodox, does not present the conditions of solving this problem, and the scholastic philosophy, as taught in Catholic schools, needs to be somewhat differently developed and expressed before the age can see in it the solution demanded. According to the philosophy generally received since Des Cartes, the natural and supernatural are not only distinct, but separate orders, and reason without any aid from revelation is competent to construct from her own materials a complete science of the rational order. It supposes the two orders to be independent each of the other, and each complete in itself. Reason has nothing to do with faith, and faith has nothing to do with reason. The church has no jurisdiction in philosophy, the sciences, politics, or natural society; philosophers, physicists, statesmen, seculars, so long as they keep in the rational order, are independent of the spiritual authority, are under no obligation to consult revelation, or to conform to the teachings of faith. Hence the dual life men live, and the absurdity of maintaining in one order what they contradict in another.
This, we need not say, is all wrong. The two orders are distinct, not separate and mutually independent orders, nor parallel orders with no real or logical relation between them. They are, in reality, only two parts of one and the same whole. We do not undertake to say what God could or could not have done had he chosen. If he could have created man and left him in a state of pure nature, as he has the animals, we know he has not done so. He has created man for a supernatural destiny, and placed him under a supernatural or gracious providence, so that, as a fact, man is never in a state of pure nature. He aspires to a supernatural reward, and is liable to a supernatural punishment. His life is always above pure nature, or below it. The highest natural virtue is imperfect, and no sin is simply a sin against the natural law. The natural is not the supernatural, but was never intended to subsist without it. The supernatural is not an interpolation in the divine plan of creation, nor something superinduced upon it, but is a necessary complement of the natural, which never is or can be completed in the natural alone. In the divine plan, the two orders are coeval, always coexist, and operate simultaneously to one and the same end, as integral parts of one whole. The natural, endowed with reason and free-will, may resist the supernatural, or refuse to co-operate with it; but if it does so, it must remain inchoate, incomplete, an existence commenced yet remaining for ever unfulfilled, which is the condition of the reprobate. A true and adequate philosophy explains man's origin, medium, and end; and no such philosophy can be constructed by reason alone; for these are supernatural, and are fully known only through a supernatural revelation.
The natural demands the supernatural; so also does the supernatural demand the natural. If there were no nature, there could be nothing above nature; there would be nothing for grace to operate on, to assist, or complete. If man had no reason, he could receive no revelation; if he had no free-will, he could have no virtue, no sanctity; if not generated, he could not be regenerated; and if not regenerated, he could not be glorified, or attain to the end for which he is intended. To deny nature is to deny the creative act of God, and to fall into pantheism—a sophism, for pantheism is denied in its very assertion. Its assertion implies the assertor, and therefore something capable of acting, and therefore a substantive existence, distinguishable from God. The denial of God, as creator, is the denial alike of man, the natural, and the supernatural. To solve the problem, and remove the dualism which bisects the modern mind, it is necessary to study the Creator's works in the light of the Creator's plan, and as a whole, in the whole course or itinerary of their existence, or in their procession from him as first cause, to their return to him as final cause, and not piecemeal, as isolated or unrelated facts. If we know not this plan, which no study of the works themselves can reveal to us, we can never get at the meaning of a single the smallest part, far less attain to any thing like the science of the universe; for the meaning of each part is in its relation to the whole. What is the meaning of this grain of sand on the sea-shore, or this mosquito, this gnat, these animalculæ invisible to the naked eye? Have they no meaning, no purpose in the Creator's plan? What can you, by reason, know of that purpose or meaning, if you know not that plan? Your physical sciences, without a knowledge of that plan, are no sciences at all, and give you no more conception of the universe than a specimen brick from its walls can give you of the city of Babylon.
Though that plan is and can be known only as revealed by God himself, yet when once known we may see analogies and proofs of it in all the Creator's works, and study with profit the several parts of the universe, and attain to real science of them; for then we can study them in their synthesis, or their relation to the whole. We may then have rational science, not built on revelation, but constructed by reason in the light of revelation. We do not make revelation the basis of the natural sciences. They are all constructed by reason, acting with its own power, but under the supervision, so to speak, of faith, which reveals to it the plan or purpose of creation, to which it must conform in its deductions and inductions, if they are to have any scientific value. If it operates in disregard of revelation, without the light radiating from the Creator's plan, reason can know objects only in their isolation, as separate and unrelated facts or phenomena, and therefore never know them, as they really are, or in their real significance; because nothing in the universe exists in a state of isolation, or by and for itself alone; but every thing that exists, exists and is significant only in its relation to the whole. It is a mistake, then, to assume that the church, the witness, guardian, and interpreter of the faith or revelation, has nothing to say to philosophy, or to the physical sciences, cosmogony, geology, physiology, history, or even political science. None of them are or can be true sciences, any further than they present the several classes of facts and phenomena of which they treat in their respective relations and subordination to the divine plan of creation, known only by the revelation committed to the church.
The principle of the solution of the problem, or the middle term that unites the two extremes, or the natural and the supernatural, in a real and living synthesis, or reconciles all opposites, is the creative act of God. The supernatural is God himself, and what he does immediately without using any natural agencies; the natural is what God creates with the power to act as second cause, and what he does only through second causes, or so-called natural laws. Nothing is natural that is not explicable by natural laws, and nothing so explicable is properly supernatural, though it may be superhuman. A miracle is an effect of which God is the immediate cause, and which can be referred to no natural or second cause; a natural event is one of which God is not the direct and immediate cause, but only first cause—Causa eminens, or cause of its direct and immediate cause. The copula or nexus that unites the natural and supernatural in one dialectic whole, is the creative act of the supernatural, or God, which produces the natural and holds it joined to its cause. Creatures are not separable from their Creator; for in him they live and move and are, or have their being; and were he to separate himself from them, or suspend his creative act, they would instantly drop into the nothing they were before he produced them. The relation between them and him is their relation of entire dependence on him for all they are, all they have, and all they can do. There is, then, no ground of antagonism between him and them. If man aspires to act independently of God, he simply aspires to be himself God, and becomes—nothing.