In this post I’d like to give an answer to the third question, and I’ll start by referring to a passage from Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which ends with what is probably one of the most famous single sentences in the history of Christianity:
‘You are great, O God, and greatly to be praised: great is your power and your wisdom is without measure. And man, so small a part of your creation, wants to praise you: this man, though clothed with mortality and bearing the evidence of sin and the proof that you withstand the proud. Despite everything, man, though a small part of your creation, wants to praise you. You yourself encourage him to delight in your praise, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you’.
In that paragraph Saint Augustine manages to touch on four basic truths of Christian faith, almost what we might call the starting-points of Christian spiritual life.
(i) The first truth is the greatness of God. As I remarked earlier, it’s a common experience of Christians as their faith in God gets deeper to develop a sense, as Augustine obviously did, of the majesty of God’s divine nature, his holiness, his perfect moral goodness, and our human insignificance and weakness and sinfulness.
(ii) The second truth is the fact that every human being has a capacity for God and a desire, an appetite - a hunger or a thirst, to use scriptural language - to live in relationship with God. This desire has been built-in to our human nature by God himself. As the Catechism says, almost in its opening words: ‘The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for’ (CCC 27).
This conviction of an inbuilt orientation to God is the basis of our belief that every human life has a vocational aspect, a ‘given’ aspect to it. We’re not free to do whatever we please. Human existence has limitations and boundaries and we surrender our dignity as creatures made in God’s image when we assert our freedom egotistically and try to pursue happiness in a totally autonomous, self-serving way.
(iii) The third truth is that we are incomplete without God or outside of a relationship with God. Augustine calls it a restlessness that affects us until we rest in God. As he knew more that anyone, human beings are very prone to attempting to satisfy their hunger for God with all kinds of other, lesser things. This is the conviction underpinning the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, seeing addiction to alcohol (or to anything) as a diversion of our inbuilt need for God.
My own opinion is that in a secularised society, which refuses belief in God, a lot of the passion and emotion invested in single-issue political causes, especially around racial or sexual identity, have their roots in our innate incompleteness and hunger for God. Unfortunately, contemporary identity politics tends to channel this incompleteness and hunger in the direction of a radical self-absorption and self-obsession, which is really a form of idolatry.
(iv) Lastly, we could say that there’s a fourth truth in Augustine’s words. Human life has a basic or underlying ‘end’ or purpose, and that purpose is not only to know God but to give glory to God - as creatures and servants, to give praise and honour and adoration to our divine Creator.
The whole of creation gives glory to God in the way that a great work of art gives glory to the genius of the artist; but in the case of human beings we’re called to glorify God in a more conscious and deliberate way - by freely and willingly offering him prayers of worship and praise (as in the Gloria during Mass), by following his commandments, by making sacrifices and by doing things purely out of our love for him and out of a desire to give him glory.
The ‘sense of the supernatural’
Many Christian theologians have described this basic capacity and need for God in terms of an innate ‘sense of the supernatural’.[1]
As we’ve already remarked, the most conspicuous feature of modern secular culture is its determined attempt to reduce human life to the purely natural plane. For the modern mentality the physical world investigated by science is the only world there is, and our intellectual and ethical endeavours rely on the capacities of human reason alone.
This is the distinctively one-dimensional or ‘horizontal’ mentality that denies the ‘vertical’ realities of revelation, faith and the transforming power of divine grace. It denies the existence of a second dimension, the dimension of the super-natural (above, beyond the natural).
We all know people for whom only the natural plane exists. They may well strive conscientiously towards a high moral integrity, but they never pray and they have no conscious openness to God’s grace as an influence from outside themselves that elevates and sanctifies our human nature.
On seeing some objects of Catholic devotion around my home my (then) eight year-old niece told me: ‘but God isn’t real’. In the same vein, on one occasion the mechanic who was repairing my car said to me matter-of-factly, ‘it would be nice to think there’s something out there, but science has disproved it’. Finally, a third person described his attitude to life with these words: ‘I don’t feel any need for religion. I’ve got my girlfriend, my house, my job. I don’t need anything else’.
Modern culture makes it easy for people to interpret our existence on earth as self-contained and self-enclosed; to dismiss notions of another dimension as the product of human imagination. In relation to our innate hunger for God we could say that contemporary Western culture acts as an appetite suppressant.
Awakening the sense of the supernatural
In order to reach the point of believing in the real, living, personal God and responding to him with faith and love, we first have to become aware of our inner capacity and hunger for something beyond our ordinary, everyday experience, our human relationships, our thoughts and emotions and appetites: our ‘sense of the supernatural’.
We all know people for whom only the natural plane exists. They may well strive conscientiously towards a high moral integrity, but they never pray and they have no conscious openness to God’s grace as an influence from outside themselves that elevates and sanctifies our human nature.
On seeing some objects of Catholic devotion around my home my (then) eight year-old niece told me: ‘but God isn’t real’. In the same vein, on one occasion the mechanic who was repairing my car said to me matter-of-factly, ‘it would be nice to think there’s something out there, but science has disproved it’. Finally, a third person described his attitude to life with these words: ‘I don’t feel any need for religion. I’ve got my girlfriend, my house, my job. I don’t need anything else’.
Modern culture makes it easy for people to interpret our existence on earth as self-contained and self-enclosed; to dismiss notions of another dimension as the product of human imagination. In relation to our innate hunger for God we could say that contemporary Western culture acts as an appetite suppressant.
Awakening the sense of the supernatural
In order to reach the point of believing in the real, living, personal God and responding to him with faith and love, we first have to become aware of our inner capacity and hunger for something beyond our ordinary, everyday experience, our human relationships, our thoughts and emotions and appetites: our ‘sense of the supernatural’.
We have to begin to feel a nagging dissatisfaction with the belief that ‘there’s nothing out there’ and to form some kind of consciousness of a reality beyond the world of everyday perception and experience.
Today’s spiritual climate entails that a large part of the Church’s mission to persuade people to embrace the Christian faith involves trying to find ways of awakening this sense of the supernatural in men and women in whom it is still lying dormant.
I agree with theologians and spiritual writers who say that the time has long passed when we can appeal to people principally on the basis of the Gospel’s supposed humanitarian content, as if the message of salvation is a vague philosophy of human love, kindness and compassion. Nor should believers put forward the argument that Christian faith is credible and valuable mainly as a type of therapy, a way of supplying emotional satisfaction and fulfilment.[2]
Rather, we need to invite modern men and women to open up a new space within themselves, the space which God placed within them when he created them, and where he himself is waiting for them to make contact with him.
As a matter of fact, one of the features of the Church’s mission today, when so many Christians seem to regard their membership of the Church as something mainly social, recreational, something purely natural and one-dimensional, is the need to open up this space within those who are already believers, to help them develop a receptivity to God’s grace and - what follows after that inevitably - to embrace a new and determined conviction to answer the call to holiness.
Reverence and reverent love
For us as Christians the initial ‘sense of the supernatural’ has to grow into an attitude of reverence towards God. That’s to say, as we learn more about God’s personality and character as he has revealed himself to us we have to start forming a very particular disposition towards him which, in time, we come to realise is the only appropriate disposition to adopt towards him. This is the disposition of humble submission, adoration and awe - the biblical ‘fear of the Lord’.
Today’s spiritual climate entails that a large part of the Church’s mission to persuade people to embrace the Christian faith involves trying to find ways of awakening this sense of the supernatural in men and women in whom it is still lying dormant.
I agree with theologians and spiritual writers who say that the time has long passed when we can appeal to people principally on the basis of the Gospel’s supposed humanitarian content, as if the message of salvation is a vague philosophy of human love, kindness and compassion. Nor should believers put forward the argument that Christian faith is credible and valuable mainly as a type of therapy, a way of supplying emotional satisfaction and fulfilment.[2]
Rather, we need to invite modern men and women to open up a new space within themselves, the space which God placed within them when he created them, and where he himself is waiting for them to make contact with him.
As a matter of fact, one of the features of the Church’s mission today, when so many Christians seem to regard their membership of the Church as something mainly social, recreational, something purely natural and one-dimensional, is the need to open up this space within those who are already believers, to help them develop a receptivity to God’s grace and - what follows after that inevitably - to embrace a new and determined conviction to answer the call to holiness.
Reverence and reverent love
For us as Christians the initial ‘sense of the supernatural’ has to grow into an attitude of reverence towards God. That’s to say, as we learn more about God’s personality and character as he has revealed himself to us we have to start forming a very particular disposition towards him which, in time, we come to realise is the only appropriate disposition to adopt towards him. This is the disposition of humble submission, adoration and awe - the biblical ‘fear of the Lord’.
Moses Receiving the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai
by Gebhard Fugel (1863-1939).
‘With his whole being,’ the Catechism says, ‘man gives his assent to God the revealer’ (CCC 143). When we open ourselves to divine revelation we come to know God as both the origin and the goal of our life. We recognise his majesty and holiness and understand that, like Moses, we also have to ‘take off our shoes, for we are on holy ground’.
Three elements of our reverence for God
The moral theologian Fritz Tillman has described this basic disposition of reverence towards God as having three main elements.
First, there’s an apparently contradictory combination of honour and fear. ‘Just as honour includes the idea of attractiveness,’ Father Tillmann writes, ‘so reverential fear tends to prevent too close an approach. This juxtaposition of attraction and repulsion, of love and fear, is the core of reverence; it emerges on contact with the great and imposing, in the presence of an aura of impenetrability or mystery.’[3]
Three elements of our reverence for God
The moral theologian Fritz Tillman has described this basic disposition of reverence towards God as having three main elements.
First, there’s an apparently contradictory combination of honour and fear. ‘Just as honour includes the idea of attractiveness,’ Father Tillmann writes, ‘so reverential fear tends to prevent too close an approach. This juxtaposition of attraction and repulsion, of love and fear, is the core of reverence; it emerges on contact with the great and imposing, in the presence of an aura of impenetrability or mystery.’[3]
But, he goes on, in spite of these seemingly contradictory facets, the decisive element in reverence is love:
Not only is reverence based on love but in the experience of reverence, love plays a preponderant role. From the mysterious depth and immeasurable value of the object of reverence goes forth an attractive power which awakens the love of man and draws him to itself. Because he recognizes the majesty and the worth of the person revered, a man is also conscious of his own enrichment the closer he approaches the person’.[4]
Reverence for God’s majesty is a fundamental Christian attitude which we’re drawn into by God himself and which we have a duty on our part to cultivate. But, Father Tillmann contends, a reverential disposition towards God is also a light that guides and illumines the Christian disciple, ‘enabling him [or her] to look ever deeper and to love more ardently’.[5]
Second, reverence towards God always includes an awareness of our own sin and guilt, which develops alongside a growing understanding of God’s holiness and goodness.
During his ministry Jesus declared that God is our loving, benevolent and forgiving Father and of course, as in human relationships, there will always be people who regard these qualities as weaknesses to be taken advantage of.
But if, by contrast, we’re people who are sincerely trying to make progress in our Christian life then a growing understanding of God’s love, benevolence and forgiveness will only make us more eager to thoroughly purify our hearts of malice and worldly attachments, so as to be able to unite ourselves more closely to him.
Not only is reverence based on love but in the experience of reverence, love plays a preponderant role. From the mysterious depth and immeasurable value of the object of reverence goes forth an attractive power which awakens the love of man and draws him to itself. Because he recognizes the majesty and the worth of the person revered, a man is also conscious of his own enrichment the closer he approaches the person’.[4]
Reverence for God’s majesty is a fundamental Christian attitude which we’re drawn into by God himself and which we have a duty on our part to cultivate. But, Father Tillmann contends, a reverential disposition towards God is also a light that guides and illumines the Christian disciple, ‘enabling him [or her] to look ever deeper and to love more ardently’.[5]
Second, reverence towards God always includes an awareness of our own sin and guilt, which develops alongside a growing understanding of God’s holiness and goodness.
During his ministry Jesus declared that God is our loving, benevolent and forgiving Father and of course, as in human relationships, there will always be people who regard these qualities as weaknesses to be taken advantage of.
But if, by contrast, we’re people who are sincerely trying to make progress in our Christian life then a growing understanding of God’s love, benevolence and forgiveness will only make us more eager to thoroughly purify our hearts of malice and worldly attachments, so as to be able to unite ourselves more closely to him.
A related development is that we also acquire a deep conviction of God’s grace and mercy, the conviction that we’re rescued and lifted out of our weakness and sinfulness, and supported in our daily struggles, not by our own resources but by the power of God’s grace.
Third, it follows that our love for God, when we come to truly know him, can only be a grateful and reverent love. It can only be a love that admires and honours the perfection of God’s divine attributes, recognises the inequality in our relationship and gladly thanks him for his graciousness and condescension in effecting our salvation. It’s this quality of reverence that distinguishes our love for God from our love of neighbour.
Jesus taught the disciples to approach God with just such a reverent love. When they asked him how to pray, the first thing he told them to say to God was: ‘hallowed be thy name’.[6] In other words: pray that God’s name will be held holy, that men and women will come to an awareness of God’s holiness and approach him with an attitude of worship and adoration.
We today should have this same desire and frequent prayer intention, that many atheistic and secular-minded people will have an encounter with God and acquire a reverent love for God.
For Jesus this attitude extended to all the things associated with God. He expressed indignation at the way the temple, built for the worship of God, was degraded into a marketplace and a ‘den of thieves’ – an offence against the building’s true purpose and a negation of reverent love for God.
Perhaps modern Catholics can reflect on how they conduct themselves in the presence of sacred objects or symbols of the divine: church, Bible, altar, cross and - most of all - Jesus’ Body and Blood received during Mass and contained in the tabernacle. Would Jesus be pleased with our behaviour, or would he drive us out with a whip?
The fruits of a reverent love[7]
Father Tillman goes on to explain that, as it takes root and comes increasingly to characterise our fundamental disposition towards God, this reverent love gradually bears four ‘fruits’ within us:
(i) a growing consciousness that we are constantly standing before God, we are always in God’s presence;
(ii) a growing trust in God, a ‘holy freedom from care’ i.e. a detachment from anxieties and from the appetites and self-serving goals that we allow to determine our activities, which prevent us from advancing spiritually. The greater our trust in God to look after us in every area of our life and bring us to our eternal destiny, the better we’re able to face difficulties and remain calm and even happy amid disappointments and losses;
Third, it follows that our love for God, when we come to truly know him, can only be a grateful and reverent love. It can only be a love that admires and honours the perfection of God’s divine attributes, recognises the inequality in our relationship and gladly thanks him for his graciousness and condescension in effecting our salvation. It’s this quality of reverence that distinguishes our love for God from our love of neighbour.
Jesus taught the disciples to approach God with just such a reverent love. When they asked him how to pray, the first thing he told them to say to God was: ‘hallowed be thy name’.[6] In other words: pray that God’s name will be held holy, that men and women will come to an awareness of God’s holiness and approach him with an attitude of worship and adoration.
We today should have this same desire and frequent prayer intention, that many atheistic and secular-minded people will have an encounter with God and acquire a reverent love for God.
For Jesus this attitude extended to all the things associated with God. He expressed indignation at the way the temple, built for the worship of God, was degraded into a marketplace and a ‘den of thieves’ – an offence against the building’s true purpose and a negation of reverent love for God.
Perhaps modern Catholics can reflect on how they conduct themselves in the presence of sacred objects or symbols of the divine: church, Bible, altar, cross and - most of all - Jesus’ Body and Blood received during Mass and contained in the tabernacle. Would Jesus be pleased with our behaviour, or would he drive us out with a whip?
The fruits of a reverent love[7]
Father Tillman goes on to explain that, as it takes root and comes increasingly to characterise our fundamental disposition towards God, this reverent love gradually bears four ‘fruits’ within us:
(i) a growing consciousness that we are constantly standing before God, we are always in God’s presence;
(ii) a growing trust in God, a ‘holy freedom from care’ i.e. a detachment from anxieties and from the appetites and self-serving goals that we allow to determine our activities, which prevent us from advancing spiritually. The greater our trust in God to look after us in every area of our life and bring us to our eternal destiny, the better we’re able to face difficulties and remain calm and even happy amid disappointments and losses;
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
by Jusepe Leonardo (1601-1652)
(iii) a growing obedience to God’s commands, a sense that we are on the earth to serve God, not ourselves; that we exist to carry out God’s will, not vice versa;
(iv) a growing sense of gratitude, the conviction that God is infinitely generous in giving us everything that we truly need and helps us shake off the resentful, ungrateful, self-absorbed impulses that we nurture within ourselves.
He is grateful who recognizes the value of the gift and the intention of the giver, and who feels obliged to express his gratitude in thought, word or deed. He is ungrateful who regards the gift as something obvious or even owed to him and does not think of paying the giver the honour due to him (Rom. 1:21; Lk. 17:18). The more the pious man perceives in God his greatest benefactor, the Father from whom comes every good and perfect gift (Jas. 1:17), the more readily his piety will show forth gratitude to his God.[8]
Most of all we become grateful for God’s initiative in bringing about our salvation, for Christ’s sacrifice, for the constant renewal of that sacrifice in the Mass:
‘How great the tale, that there should be
in God’s Son’s heart, a place for me’.
The greater our sense of gratitude towards God, the less liable we are to fall into grumbling, ingratitude and self-pity.
Of course in their purest form all these attitudes are the result of steady, painstaking growth in holiness. They stand at the end of a process of advancing in Christian perfection, they don’t come to us overnight at the outset of our journey. But they constitute the ‘end’ or the goal we begin to strive towards from the moment of our first conversion.
NOTES
[1] Jean Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural, T & T Clark, 1998.
[2] ‘It is time to stop proposing faith solely to our moral and humanitarian sense, to our natural affective powers, and finally awaken this sense of God that, by creating us, God has lodged in our hearts’. Jean Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural, p.xiii.
[3] Fritz Tillmann, The Master Calls, Burns and Oates, 1962, pp.91.
[4] Tillman, p.91
[5] Tillmann, p.91. On the same page the author supports his understanding of reverence with an apt quotation from Saint Augustine:
‘What is it that enlightens me and at the same time strikes my heart without wounding it, so that I am affrighted yet all on fire? I am affrighted insofar as I do not resemble Him and I am on fire insofar as I am like Him’.
[6] Tillmann, p.92
[7] Tillmann, p.94-96.
[8] Tillmann, p.96.
(iv) a growing sense of gratitude, the conviction that God is infinitely generous in giving us everything that we truly need and helps us shake off the resentful, ungrateful, self-absorbed impulses that we nurture within ourselves.
He is grateful who recognizes the value of the gift and the intention of the giver, and who feels obliged to express his gratitude in thought, word or deed. He is ungrateful who regards the gift as something obvious or even owed to him and does not think of paying the giver the honour due to him (Rom. 1:21; Lk. 17:18). The more the pious man perceives in God his greatest benefactor, the Father from whom comes every good and perfect gift (Jas. 1:17), the more readily his piety will show forth gratitude to his God.[8]
Most of all we become grateful for God’s initiative in bringing about our salvation, for Christ’s sacrifice, for the constant renewal of that sacrifice in the Mass:
‘How great the tale, that there should be
in God’s Son’s heart, a place for me’.
The greater our sense of gratitude towards God, the less liable we are to fall into grumbling, ingratitude and self-pity.
Of course in their purest form all these attitudes are the result of steady, painstaking growth in holiness. They stand at the end of a process of advancing in Christian perfection, they don’t come to us overnight at the outset of our journey. But they constitute the ‘end’ or the goal we begin to strive towards from the moment of our first conversion.
NOTES
[1] Jean Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural, T & T Clark, 1998.
[2] ‘It is time to stop proposing faith solely to our moral and humanitarian sense, to our natural affective powers, and finally awaken this sense of God that, by creating us, God has lodged in our hearts’. Jean Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural, p.xiii.
[3] Fritz Tillmann, The Master Calls, Burns and Oates, 1962, pp.91.
[4] Tillman, p.91
[5] Tillmann, p.91. On the same page the author supports his understanding of reverence with an apt quotation from Saint Augustine:
‘What is it that enlightens me and at the same time strikes my heart without wounding it, so that I am affrighted yet all on fire? I am affrighted insofar as I do not resemble Him and I am on fire insofar as I am like Him’.
[6] Tillmann, p.92
[7] Tillmann, p.94-96.
[8] Tillmann, p.96.
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