The very core of Christianity is the belief in a reality so glorious, so sublime that not only it could never have entered man’s head, but moreover clearly bears the seal of the divine.
The infinitely powerful and perfect Creator-removed from his creatures by the abyss separating perfection from imperfection, infinity from finiteness, eternity from time-has chosen, in his infinite goodness and mercy, to make this reality accessible to his creatures. He made man in his image and likeness. We know that our first parents, due to their pride and rebelliousness, lost the treasure of the supernatural. We know that they could not possibly regain this ineffable gift by their own power.
We also know that God in his infinite mercy sent man a savior-Christ, our Lord. Thanks to his death of the cross, the way to the supernatural is once again open to man through grace. Though man can never achieve self-redemption, he can give his assent to God’s grace: he can say yes to God’s gifts. Man is, therefore, not totally passive in the work of redemption; he is receptive.
Both my late husband, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Edith Stein found their way to the Catholic Church by being confronted with the phenomenon of holiness: the first in reading the life of Saint Francis of Assisi; the second, the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. For both this discovery changed every aspect of their lives. That man-imperfect, sinful man, laden with guilt, tempted by evil-could become a new creature, could be reborn and reflect the perfection of our Redeemer, cannot be explained except by a divine intervention, a close collaboration between God and his sinful children.
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44); forgive “seventy times seven” times (Matt. 18:22). These are admonitions that are repulsive to man’s fallen nature and make sense only if one turns to the supernatural. For “I can do all things in him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). This is the work of grace, and this grace is available to us through the sacraments. The Catholic Church has the key to these treasures and offers them to the faithful-this is why the Church is holy despite of the unworthiness of many of its children.
Man therefore can be healed and live up to the command Christ gave us; “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). Without God’s constant help, this order would be not only ludicrous but nonsensical. But there is one condition: man’s collaboration. He must say yes to the gifts that God offers him daily.
But alas, marked by original sin, man-like a sick patient who refuses to take a healing medicine-often refuses divine help because this help is linked to a condition: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). The entrance to the way leading to life is narrow. Most men are willing to follow Christ to Mount Tabor. Few indeed are willing to follow him to Calvary.
When the glorious mystery of Redemption was first revealed, many men-who had been groping in darkness and despair-joyfully accepted the divine message. Luke tells us in the book of Acts that when the first Christians were beaten for their faith, they rejoiced, because they were privileged to join their Savior on the cross. This attitude was prevalent as long as the young Church was persecuted.
Once Christianity gained public acceptance, and its practice was no longer linked to suffering and death, some dangers started creeping into the faith. Many were those who convinced themselves that the holy teaching of the faith was not to be taken a la lettre. They yielded to the temptation of temporizing with the world and weakening the content of their faith. To use the famous words of Soren Kierkegaard, they started “to change wine into water.”
There is something that most men dread: to have a bad conscience. Using what Kierkegaard called “unholy cleverness,” they devised ways to escape from feelings of guilt while avoiding the burden of their daily cross. Many were those in the Middle Ages who, while temporizing cleverly with their duties as Christians, nevertheless acknowledged that one thing alone was necessary. The greatness of the Middle Ages was that those who sinned knew they were sinners and still viewed holiness as a top priority in their hierarchy of values. The cult of the saints was prominent, and there was nothing that the common man admired more than holiness.
Nevertheless, the poison of compromise penetrated into society, and even though medieval saints (and there were plenty) continued to proclaim the holy doctrine of God in all its fullness and beauty, the danger of undermining it and circumventing its decrees gained impetus. Kierkegaard once again deserves to be mentioned. He compares this attitude with the trickiness of schoolboys who, knowing that they will get a thrashing, pad the seats of their pants with thick napkins to soften the sharpness of the blows.
At the time of the Renaissance, this perverse tendency, which had worked underground, surfaced without shame. It was Max Scheler, a famous German philosopher who died in 1928, who said that a reversal of the hierarchy of values became apparent in the fifteenth century. At that point it was no longer the saint who was placed at the pinnacle of men’s hierarchy of values; he was replaced by the genius, whether painter or architect.
This upsetting of values was bound to be followed by worse aberrations: the genius was to be replaced by the inventor who, in his turn, has been replaced by the sports star, the billionaire, or the Hollywood celebrity. Many believers became infected by this new philosophy, and their religious life started on a down slope without their full realization how dangerous it was going to be for their faith.
Many diseases can be cured if they are diagnosed early. But if they are ignored for whatever reason, they are bound to become more and more lethal. Faith was not yet frontally attacked, but was deprived of its sap and holy vitality. It became fashionable to laud the supernatural for purely secular reasons: to praise St. Paul for his eloquence or to commend the jolliness of Saint Francis of Assisi or the resiliency of Saint Teresa of Avila.
To acclaim Vincent of Paul for his social work may sound like a compliment to the ear untrained to supernatural music. In fact, it is offensive to the supernatural for the plain reason that a secularistic praise is a fake praise. By a sleight of hand, it tricks people into believing that the person praising is a friend of religion.
In fact, the opposite is true. A very wicked man can be eloquent, jolly, or resilient. Francis is to be praised not for his jolliness but for his holy joy-the joy he experienced when he was ill-treated-because it brought him close to his Savior who was a man of sorrow. And Vincent de Paul’s work of mercy was at the antipodes of the one of secularistic social workers who care little about the eternal fate of their clients.
Such encomiums contain a subtle poison: They cheat the faithful into believing that they are favorable to holy people and are in no way opposed to religion. In fact, they deflect the attention of the faithful from the supernatural to the secular. I know no better example of this insidious perversion that a remark I heard on television not long ago. Some commentator sang the praise of Mother Teresa of Calcutta-and Ted Turner. Both, the commentator said, were so remarkably efficient!
The downhill trend we have mentioned leads inevitably to another devaluation of the supernatural: Not only is the latter praised for secular reasons, but nature is now placed above the supernatural. This victory of secularism amounts to a total reversal of the hierarchy of values-a metaphysical disease which has now penetrated deeply into our society.
A couple of examples will shed light on this perversion.
When my husband started teaching at the University of Munich, one of his well-intended colleagues warned him that it would be wise to refrain from using the word religion-so dear to this ardent young convert-while on university grounds. “Replace it by the word metaphysics,” he advised, implying that it was more respectable within the sacred precincts of a university.
Another colleague expressed his surprise that, following European customs of giving precedence to someone of higher rank, my husband let his students who were priests step ahead of him when crossing a threshold.
“Why do you let your students step in front in you?” the professor asked him.
“Because they have been ordained,” Dietrich replied.
“That may be,” the professor snapped, “but they have no Ph.D.” In other words, a doctorate is more respectable that the sacrament of holy orders, which gives a human being the unfathomable power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of our Savior.
Should we then be surprised if this distorted view has now penetrated so deeply into our society that the stars in the modern world are athletes, actors, and billionaires-in short, those who have succeeded in a worldly sense. Whether or not this success was achieved by dubious means is no concern for the hoi polloi. The main thing is to be successful.
The picture I am etching is depressing indeed. But what is heartbreaking is to witness that this secularism has penetrated deeply into our Church. It is not my purpose to inquire what are the causes of this religious disaster (be it infiltration, cowardice, or progressive secularization of the clergy whose religious life has become anemic). The fact cannot be denied. The world in which we live has waged war on the supernatural. The holy dogmas of our beloved Church are being challenged from within by insidious arguments borrowed from apostates or even atheists. The Bible has been demythologized; the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist-the jewel of Catholic worship-is put into doubt. The moral teaching of the Church is being trampled upon because it is in conflict with the needs of modern man and has not kept pace with the discoveries made by contemporary sociology, psychology, psychiatry et cetera. The authority of Peter is not only challenged but disregarded. Disobedience is praised as a legitimate assertion of modern man who has come of age. But what will happen to him in the age to come?