Wednesday, Thursday and Friday will be the last days on the perfection series, except for the odd reminder now and then.
Today, I want to emphasize the crucial idea that the intellect must grow with spiritual life. When I hear a Catholic say that he or she does not have to study the CCC or read the encyclicals because his or her faith is from the heart, cringe. This idea creates a false dichotomy in a person. The heart and head grow together.
Again, one of the huge problems with so many Catholics, especially in England, is belief that one cannot be intellectual about the spiritual life. This concept is in contradiction to thousands of years of teaching in the Catholic Church and in the Jewish Old Testament preparation for Christ.
Learning brings one closer to God. Learning and the love of God must grow together. To get stuck in an anti-intellectual mode is to stop growing. Infused knowledge is given at the last stage of unity, after sin and the tendencies of sin have been purged from one.
We are given the gift of wisdom, but it must be cultivated. If a person has been a Catholic for twenty or thirty years and is still reading books on spiritual phenomenon, witnessing or protestant spirituality, a problem exists in the intellect. One must move on to the understanding of the Catholic Faith.
Faith and Reason, as I told my students for years, form the pillars of our religion. Revelation, that is, the Old and New Testament, form the Faith and Reason helps one grow in holiness and discernment.
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to grow intellectually. Here is Garrigou-Lagrange on the subject.
In true mystics and ecstatics, on the contrary, it has been established that their intellect grows through their knowledge of God, the divine perfections, the dogmas of faith, and also through their profound knowledge of themselves. They declare that in a few moments of contemplation they learn more than by reading all books on the interior life. In these moments they receive a higher light which makes them glimpse, as it were, a superior synthesis of all they already knew, a living, luminous synthesis which, arousing the impulse of the will, makes them undertake and carry out great things with admirable, persevering courage in spite of almost unbelievable difficulties. The lives of St. Catherine of Siena and of St. Teresa illustrate this fact.
Heroic courage is a sign of real holiness. No complaining, but acceptance of suffering provides a clue to those who are holy. Obedience to Church teaching and love are two other signs. Remember, if a Catholic is unorthodox in any way and seems holy, sin and deceit are to be found.
Love of the Truth is another sign of holiness.
Indeed, any one who is contradicting Church teaching in any way is not on the road to perfection and the gifts which that person seems to exhibit are false.
In addition, true mystics are humble, charitable, submissive to the divine will amid even the greatest trials. In them is patent the connection and the harmony of the most dissimilar virtues, and, dominating all, a love of God and of neighbor and a wisdom that give them peace and wonderful serenity. Properly speaking, they represent the inverse of the passionate agitation and inconstancy of hysterical subjects. This fact is evident in their labors for the successful prosecution of a difficult undertaking; likewise their perseverance in good, their constant love of the truth, united to reserve and humility, give proof of it.
Reason not hysteria marks the saint.
To be continued...
