By DEACON JAMES H. TONER
“By making idols for themselves from their silver and gold, they have brought about their own destruction” (Hosea 8:4).
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Although the secular world tells us that we can be gods, Christians, by contrast, understand that our task is to be God’s servants. To behave as we believe, and to cling to God’s will rather than doing things “my way,” we must discern His divine mercy and perfect justice as well as call to mind His saving actions, which help us to order our lives wisely and well (Prov. 3:5-6).
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We have the tripartite duty to know, to love, and to serve God. To fulfill that responsibility we must think, say, and do what is right, growing in holiness (1 Peter 1:15).
As there is much contemporary confusion about the meaning of “freedom,” so is there much bewilderment about the meaning of “right.” To be right, in the judgment of many, requires us to conform to the positive or political law, much as King Creon demanded obedience from Antigone.
But Antigone, and the entire natural law tradition, tell us that “right” means far more than actions in accordance with civil law. There is, we know, a much higher law, and it is primarily that to which we owe loyalty. Obedience to subordinate civic authority is thus always contingent, contextual, and conditional — an apostolic teaching (Acts 5:29), as well as a classical one.
In teaching about this, I routinely suggest that the higher moral law is Right, and the lower conventional law is right. Although there may be debate in philosophical circles about the form or fruits of the natural law, there ought never to be doubt about our primordial obligation to seek the truth and, having found it, resolutely to cling to it.
As Dignitatis Humanae (Vatican II) put it: “All men…are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth.”
To be God’s is to endorse and embrace truth. To think that we are gods is the mortal sin of idolatry (Exodus 32:4, 1 Cor. 10:7, 1 John 5:21), in which we make material — or ourselves — into golden calves for false worship. We know and “do” Truth by recognizing it and, ever after, by remembering it (John 1:14, 17; Romans 6:18, 22). And Truth, we know, is actually not an “it,” for Truth is a Somebody, not a something (John 14:6).
Two words — if esoteric, still perfectly descriptive — have bearing here. The first word is anagnorisis, by which we mean a sudden, and usually life-changing, insight, such as the one Paul had on the road to Damascus. We live at a time and in a place where moral and social emphasis is almost invariably placed upon the great exalted “me.” A radical subjectivism, almost a solipsism, stalks the land.
Professor Peter Kreeft used to say that My Way is “the theme song of Hell” — an understandable comment considering that the song’s lyrics denigrate “the words of someone who kneels.”
The psalmist tells us that God, exhausted by the people who would not listen to Him, “gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels” (81:12). Isaiah, in his turn, instructs us that God revealed that “I have always been ready to welcome my people, who stubbornly do what is wrong and go their own way” (65:2).
Occasionally, though, we are afforded a morally eye-opening glimpse through the solipsistic secular shroud into a glorious Heaven which teaches, first, that God is and, second, that I am not He. Such a glimpse, resulting in what used to be called “contrition and firm purpose of amendment,” is an anagnorisis.
The core of modernist political heresy is that man is, or can become, divine; modernist politics, after all, is idol-worship by other names. Politics, on this progressive view, is not — although essentially it should be — about Augustinian bridge-building between the City of Man and the City of God and about prudential judgment of conventional practice as measured by supernatural truth. Modernist politics is thus an ersatz religion, an impostor ideology.
Christianity, by contrast, teaches that God lowered Himself to become like us in all things except sin. This recognition, this graced insight, leads us to the understanding that Catholic ethics is about, well, an apostrophe. That is, we are either God’s or gods. In a sense, then, the fountain and foundation of ethics is found in 1 Corinthians: “You do not belong to yourselves but to God; he bought you for a price” (6:19-20; cf. 7:20 and 1 Peter 1:14).
We know, following that Pauline truth, that time belongs to God, not to us; that ultimate success is a matter for God, not for us; that making good come from evil is something for God, not for us; that salvation is a gift from God, not the result of our earthly machinations and manipulations.
We think, say, and do what is Right if and, to the extent that, we act as God’s and never as gods. Our behavior reflects our discovery of, our memory about, and our commitment to, our practiced acknowledgment that we act always as God’s agents (Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 2044, 2105; 2 Cor. 5:20), not as self-anointed and self-appointed divinities.
This sacred recollection is anamnesis, the second word (CCC, nn. 1103, 1354), which means that we bring to mind God’s saving actions in history — in particular the sorrowful Passion of our Lord and of His glorious Resurrection. What we do, therefore, must be done in memory of Him (1 Cor. 11:24-25, Luke 22:19). As Sirach told us, our memory that we will die may serve as a prophylactic against sin (8:36). St. Irenaeus similarly counseled us always to “think Eucharistically” (CCC, n. 1327), which helps us morally govern ourselves.
It was Servant of God Bishop Sheen who told us that “if you don’t behave as you believe, you will end up believing as you behave.” This is true, of course, within the walls of the Church as well as outside those walls. Are not the past four or so decades ample and lachrymose proof of the good sense of this admonition?
Both anagnorisis, or discovery, and anamnesis, or remembrance, have to do with mindfulness, or consciousness. When we know that we are God’s, we must reject the siren-songs of the secular world, which grotesquely applaud abortion, artificial insemination, contraception, euthanasia, gender ideology, homosexual practice, and many other bioethical beliefs and behaviors; rather, these must be identified for what they are: Icarian efforts to glorify people as gods (cf. Isaiah 14:14, 2 Thess. 2:4).
Many Catholics begin and end their days with psalms from the Liturgy of the Hours, a key theme of which is our belonging to God (24:1, 67:3, 95:4, 100:3). And so we know that we are to be, primarily, His servants, His stewards, His witnesses. That is what we must discover, and that is what we must remember.
This consciousness leads to perspective, which is the cultivated ability to see through things and thoughts, to see beyond the mundane into the immortal. So we see the consecrated Host, but recognize the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord; so we see the consecrated wine, but recognize His Precious Blood; so we see the ink on paper, but recognize His word in Sacred Scripture.
Without the discovery of God in history (anagnorisis) and without the consciousness which arises from remembering whose we are (anamnesis), we are prisoners of the moral autism of a pervasive and soul-searing selfishness which sickens everything it touches. This selfishness whispers to us that we, too, may be as gods. It is the first lie. It is the perennial lie.
The finest moral advice, in fact, may be found in the petition offered in both Roman Rite forms of the Holy Mass (after the Agnus Dei/Lamb of God) wherein is contained this beautiful, if too rarely noticed, prayer: “fac me tuis semper inhaerere mandatis, at a te numquam separari permittas”: “make me cling always to Thy Commandments, and permit me never to be separated from Thee.”
(Deacon James H. Toner, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of leadership and ethics at the U.S. Air War College, a former U.S. Army officer, and author of Morals Under the Gun and other books. He serves in the Diocese of Charlotte, N.C.)
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