This is the text of Dr Cullinan's afternoon talk:
2. Looking Backwards
This morning we looked forwards to Lent and
Easter. And tried to understand why we have to go through it. By looking back
at human sinfulness. At Adam’s fall, Abraham’s faith, and Moses’s law. The Age
of Nature and the Age of Law. And our own ages of nature and law as we grow up.
How we can want to do whatever we like, even
when we know it isn’t right, even for ourselves. How we can see all rules and
laws as somebody else interfering with our freedom. Or go to the opposite
extreme and see goodness as just keeping a lot of rules, to please somebody
else or pile up credit for our eternal profit.
We’ve seen the limits of fallen nature and of
laws. Even good laws. Even God’s laws.
Perhaps we’ve seen why we need Lent and Easter,
but we haven’t seen how to keep them. How to find a cure for our fallen nature
better than anything law can come up with. How to find a better principle for
our moral lives than keeping rules.
And to do this we’re going to look back. Not
forward to Lent but back to Christmas.
But first we have to go a bit further back. Not
as far as Adam this time. Just a few centuries before Christ. To ancient
Greece. To Aristotle and virtue.
Because, as St Thomas Aquinas points out, there
are four principles behind moral action: nature and law, yes. But also virtue
and grace.
Grace is what we shall find at the manger, when
we go back to Bethlehem. But grace acts on nature partly by giving us virtues,
so we need to have a look at virtue first.
It wasn’t as easy for the Greeks as for the
Jews. The Greeks didn’t have a Law to guide them as the Jews did. They had to
think everything out for themselves.
They asked themselves what makes a person good.
They asked what are the excellences of human character. They saw that a good
person must be prudent, just, courageous, and temperate.
And that you can’t learn how to be prudent,
just, courageous, and temperate from books. You can only learn from prudent,
just, courageous, and temperate people. And only by practice.
It’s a bit like driving, or learning a language
or a musical instrument. You learn from someone who can do it. And you learn it
by doing it. And as you do it, it gets easier and more pleasurable. Practice
makes perfect. Until it becomes second nature.
You can even understand what it is to be
prudent, just, courageous, and temperate from driving. Courage is the
accelerator. You won’t get anywhere without it. Temperance is the brake. You’ll
get altogether too far without it. Justice is mirrors and indicators and good
maintenance. You’ll be a menace to others without it. And prudence is the
steering wheel and, maybe, the SatNav. You’ll be in a very bad place without
it.
From the Jews we learn the goodness of the Law
but also its limits. From the Greeks we learn virtue.
From the Greeks we can learn the goodness of
nature. Or at least how to make our fallen nature better. How practising the
virtues can make goodness second nature. At least up to a point.
Of course goodness is a lot harder than driving
or learning a language or an instrument. Because human beings are such
complicated creatures. We have intellects and wills. Angels have those too. But
we also have passions. Emotions, if you like, but principally anger and sexual
passion.
And we can’t easily control our passions. Not
the way we can control most of our senses and the movements of our limbs.
So it’s easy to think that our passions are bad.
Because they are dangerous and can overcome us. That’s what the ancient Stoics
thought. Many of the Romans followed them. And so do too many British. Leading
to an ideal of goodness that is cold, unfeeling, and insensitive.
Aristotle was wiser. He said our passions have
to be managed. They can’t be controlled as we control our fingers and our
faces. They have to be managed, like an appallingly surly and rebellious
workforce. By negotiation not dictat. Democratically rather than dictatorially
is the way Aristotle put it.
Because when they are managed they make our good
actions better.
I’m not going to say much more about virtue. It
would be a talk in itself. Like law it has its limits. The proud,
self-sufficient pagan is not an adequate model of goodness for a Christian.
But virtue forces us to look beyond our actions
to what kind of people we are. And what kind of people we are becoming. Because
there’s an opposite to virtue. There are bad habits too. Vices and sins. Our
behaviour can make us worse instead of better.
But it would be a pity if we thought the only
thing to look at this Lent was our actions. What sins we have committed since
our last Confession. It would be a bad mistake if we thought that all that
mattered in the moral life was isolated actions, rather than what kind of
people we are. What kind of people we are becoming, through those isolated
actions, perhaps.
So we need to look beyond law to virtue.
But we still haven’t seen the most important
thing. The thing I’m going to spend the rest of the talk on.
Grace.
It was the Jesuits who ruined grace, if you ask
me. It used to be part of my subject, moral theology. It still is at sensible
Dominican Universities. Because it is one of the principles of human moral
action.
But then the Jesuits came along and moved it
into dogmatic theology. Where it dried out into a desiccated discussion of
various kinds of grace, like different fuel additives for spiritual locomotion.
It took until the twentieth century to get
things back in perspective.
But it’s easy to understand what grace is. You
simply have to look back. To Christmas. When God became man for us. For us all
and for each one of us. God became present among us. Assuming our vesture of
flesh. With its passions. And assuming a human soul with its intellect.
He came to us. To bring us to him. By his life
among us, his death for us, and his resurrection and ascension. And by the
sending of the Holy Spirit.
You’re lucky you don’t have to study all this
academically. If you were in my fifth year at Maryvale you’d have to do an
essay whose title begins, ‘What was visible in Christ has passed over into the
sacraments’. It’s from a sermon of St Leo the Great on the Ascension.
I promised a trip back to Christmas. To see
again the crib. The Holy Family. The shepherds and the kings. To ‘hail the dawn
of redeeming grace.’ ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see. Hail the incarnate
deity.’
Christmas. A time of love and gifts. Of giving
and receiving. Of looking back to our own childhood, when all we had to do was
receive. Receive the gifts.
And the greatest gift? God himself, Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. Seen in the manger.
But not by us. Which is why there’s another
carol. ‘Oh that we were there, oh that we were there.’
We weren’t there. But it doesn’t matter. Because
of what St Leo said. ‘What was visible in Christ has passed over into the
sacraments.’
The presence in the manger. The presence in the
Jordan. The presence on the mount. The presence on the cross. And the presence
at Pentecost. The gift of the Holy Spirit.
All have passed over into the sacraments.
Baptism with its gifts of faith, hope, and charity. And other infused virtues.
Given without effort or practice. Confirmation with the gifts and fruits of the
Holy Spirit. The Mass with the gift of Our Lord’s body, blood, soul, and
divinity. Marriage and Holy Orders to direct and sanctify our lives and those
of others. And confession and anointing to renew within our fallen natures the
healing of baptism.
Grace is really just God’s presence within us. His
gift of Himself. When Father, Son, and Holy Spirit come to make their home with
us. That’s called uncreated grace, in the technical jargon.
Then there’s created grace.
Guests always cause trouble, you know. Even the
nicest and most loved ones. They have an effect on us. On our homes and also on
ourselves.
Created grace is just the effects God has on us.
On our untidy and disorganized souls. Healing us and raising us up. Giving us
good resolutions and inspirations.
It’s the work of a lifetime, of course. And
maybe beyond. God comes to us to make us like Him. If we’ll let Him. But at His
pace not ours.
Perhaps now we can look forward to Lent and
Easter. To the repairing of our fallen natures. By virtue and law. But mainly
by grace.
When St Thomas was asked whether the New Law of
the gospel was a written law, he said that it was primarily the grace of the
Holy Spirit and only secondarily a written law.
So we need to look forward to Lent and Easter
not as proud and virtuous pagans, not as rule-bound Pharisees or rebels, but as
mature in Christ, living by faith and grace.
Grace found in the sacraments. Grace found in
prayer. And grace found in the ministry of others.
One of the bad things about sacraments is that
since we realized that there are seven of them, only about a thousand years
ago, we have tended to neglect all the other mysteries of grace. We call them
sacramentals and relegate them to an appendix. Things like Holy Water and
Scapulars. Rites like ministries and vows. All the different mysteries of
grace.
Like the one we celebrated this morning.
The Council of War is really over now. All my
complicated stuff about nature, law, and grace. For planning the Lenten
campaign.
I want to end by saying a few words to you, Brother Robert. I don’t know you so I
can’t be personal. And I don’t know enough about the Order to which you have
pledged yourself to be very specific.
Religious profession is seen as the renewal and
deepening of baptism. And what you have done today is also a renewal and
deepening of your baptism, all those years ago. That’s why the Holy Water is so
appropriate. The habit you have received is a symbol of Christ’s coming to you,
Christ who in becoming man for our salvation deigned to assume our vesture of
flesh.
You put it on to obtain, through the prayers of
the Blessed Virgin Mary and of Saint John the Baptist, grace to protect you
from every evil of mind or body.
I don’t know how often you have to put it on.
It’s a bit like my collar. There was a time when clergy always dressed the
part. There are now some who never dress the part. Our Spiritual Director in
the seminary (he was a Jesuit!) said that he didn’t like those who couldn’t
take the collar off and those who couldn’t put it on. So I’ve always been a bit
of a half-and-halfer, myself.
I’m saying this because I know you won’t visibly
wear a habit to the office. You’ll be a bit of a half and halfer, like me. And
the thing we have to remember, then,
is that wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, that habit or that collar is
still part of what and who we are. And that’s not always easy.
Two last things. The first is the specific
aspect of what you’ve done. While the East begins with the person, we in the
West begin with nature. We like the general more than the specific. We like to
generalize, for example about what a religious is, and we like to construct
vast programmes of formation for baptism, ordination, profession or whatever. Big
sausage machines for putting everyone into, whatever their specific gifts and
needs. We talk of goodness in general terms, as if everyone were alike.
So it’s important sometimes to turn to the
specific. You’ve taken a specific habit, made a specific promise, to a specific
institution. Just as I belong to a specific diocese, and just as most people
work out their salvation with a specific spouse.
It’s important to remember this amid all the
generalities. You’ve directed your soul and your baptismal grace in a
particular direction: that of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. And it’s
through these specific life choices that we find our vocation and work out our
salvation, perhaps with fear and trembling as St Paul puts it.
And this specific choice isn’t something
abstract and idealistic either. Of course the Order, like any institution,
isn’t simply the people in it at one time. But a choice of it necessarily
includes a choice of those people, with all their particularities and
weaknesses.
It was said of Charles de Gaulle that he loved
France and hated Frenchman, because they never came up to his lofty ideals.
Churchill was, I think, much better in this regard.
Too many of us have a touch of the De Gaulle. Of
this idealizing tendency. We look at the Church idealistically, quite apart
from the actual people, priests, bishops, dare I say even popes, that inhabit
it. We join an institution hoping for an ideal, only to discover that it is
full of people even stranger and weaker than we think we are ourselves.
We hope to be another De Gaulle, but it is much more
likely that we shall simply become sad and frustrated, as indeed he did towards
the end. But we aren’t intended to spend our lives sulking at Colombey Les Deux
Eglises! So watch out for a touch of the De Gaulle. The truth is, of course,
that God has called us to goodness and salvation not as individuals but along
with others, specific, real others, with all their failings.
One last thing. You have made a promise of
obedience. That’s a brave thing to do today. Ever since the defeat of the
Nazis, and particularly since the 1960s, obedience has been a rather dirty
word. We are so very conscious of how it was abused. And obedience is certainly
directed to specific, real people with all their failings. So we’re right to be
a little scared of it.
I would suggest one point that may help. The
root of the word ‘obedience’ is to listen. To listen, in this case, for the
voice of God. And this voice must always be one of truth and love. This voice
of God can come to us from superiors, even when we hate what it seems to say,
but it is only likely to come from a superior who is himself listening for that
voice. And it always has to be a voice of truth and love.
St Paul talks about the obedience of faith. He
is happy enough to speak of God’s
love for us. And he exhorts us to love God and neighbour and so
fulfil the whole of the law. But he knows how poor we are at loving. So he
prefers to talk about our obedience of faith, as a sort of simplified
introduction to love.
The obedience of faith. And living by grace.
Really that’s all I’ve been trying to say today. To encourage us in our journey
forward by looking back at the dawn of redeeming grace. To prepare us for the
next Lenten campaign by looking back to Christmas.
And to prepare us for the rest of our natural moral
lives by incitement to virtue and stirring up within us the New Law that is the
grace of the Holy Spirit.
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