Catholic Anthropology - Part 4
As we all know from our first hand experience, the wounds in our nature—ignorance, malice, weakness, and concupiscence—plague our best efforts at building a coherent and integrated life aimed at lasting happiness. Once the defect of sin takes root, it tends to produce more sins, and habits of certain sins called vices are built up and they become difficult to resist and dispel from our actions. And the truth is that all of our efforts to achieve a state of happiness are powerless, despite the longing of our hearts for a return to the peace and rest of friendship with God. The happiness of which human beings are capable in a state of separation from God is minimal, fleeting, and deeply unsatisfying. If we resigned ourselves to this form of happiness as all that is possible for us, the appropriate response would be complete despair and the human story would take the form of a tragedy.
As Christians, however, we lay claim to Good News, to the gospel of God’s saving grace! Our message is that the human story is not a tragedy but rather takes a sudden joyous turn in which we can place our hope for happiness. The good news is that the separation from God that is a result of sin, which cannot hope to be repaired by merely human initiative, has been repaired by God. To do this, God has become human, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity, the Son, has taken to himself a complete human nature. As the man who is God, Jesus Christ is able to exercise a response of obedience and love for God that super-abundantly satisfies the requirements of healing the ruptured relationship between man and God. Through his suffering and death on the Cross, and his Resurrection from the dead, human beings can be restored to a state of graced friendship with God, mediated through his Son.
This is a fourth truth about human nature that is critical for understanding the moral life: human nature has been redeemed through the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ. The passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, his Paschal Mystery, is salvific—or healing—of human nature and its wounds. At the source of the dysfunction in human nature, estrangement from God, Jesus Christ has joined human nature into an unbreakable union with God the Father. Through faith in the Son and the reception of his sacraments, we have access to the healing grace he has made available for us. The effect of this grace is to heal the wounds in human nature and elevate our souls through supernatural gifts that propel us in faith, hope, and love into the union with God for which we were created.
With the help of grace, in place of vice and inclination to sin, human beings can build authentic virtues that protect our integrity, and especially help us to hold on to the sanctifying grace that now dwells anew in our souls. In place of ignorance, malice, weakness, and concupiscence we can have the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and to assist these on our way to God, we can have the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. And even in addition to these, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, God gives us abundant inspirations and spiritual instincts to do the divine will.
The last basic truth of human nature is that we have not been abandoned. But rather that, through our Lord Jesus Christ and his love for us, which is now made generously available to us through the ministry of the Church and her sacraments, we can be restored to a state of friendship with God and carried by God’s grace to our heavenly home.
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Yet, “ … we have not been abandoned …!” Thank you, Gideon, for this timely instruction - and the HOPE it inspires!