Through-out my life, I have had a love affair with truth. I love teaching logic and reading essays, encyclicals, and documents which follow exquisite rational discourse.
Our faith embraces reason and rationality. We are made in the image and likeness of God and our intellect and rationality are part of that image and likeness. Along with the will and the immortal soul, reason marks each one of us as human, made for eternity.
When I try and speak with youth, especially, or the Gen-Xers on faith being reasonable, I find that there is a resistance to the idea that we can reason out many truths in our religion. The sign of an adult faith formation is the use of reason with regard to doctrine and spirituality.
But, the world, the flesh and the devil conspire to deny the use of reason with regard to the Faith. The over-emphasis on the appetites, the sensual, the idea that religion is always primarily "experiential", stop people of all ages of appropriating an adult faith.
I have written on this many times under the label "thinking like Catholics", which many of you have read.
Why logical reasoning has been denigrated has partly been for political reasons, partly because of the "Protestantization" of some Catholic circles, and partly because of laxity in the training of young minds.
Without reasonable discourse being trained in schools, at home, and even in the workplace, the ability to reason atrophies and one becomes either the cog in the machine or a emotionally reactive person, only.
This is what satan and his minions want; non-thinking Catholics, Catholics who only react, never reflect, do not read, do not study the Faith and do not want to apply the principles of religion to themselves. The unthinking Catholic cannot form a correct, right conscience and cannot critique the deceit of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
But, none of the intellectual capacities truly "work" with grace. Grace purifies and hones the intellect. The Benedictines have known this since the beginning of the Rule. The love of learning in the abbey schools was always connected to the desire for God, as one of my favorite books explained to me so long ago when I first read this masterpiece.
Since I started my blog in 2007, I have been referring to this book, but even though one may not read the book, the ideal is presentable is a simple phrase.
If one desires God, one will seek Him in learning.
Simple, really.
When St Anselm, in order to renew the seminaries, introduced the classical Trivium and Quadrivium into the training for the priesthood, he got his ideas from his own Benedictine order. Included in those studies were geometry, astronomy, music, art, mathematics, grammar. The study of the Scriptures, the Doctors of the Church, and other Catholic literature, as well as philosophy, theology, and logic, brought alive the intellect to be cleaned from the cobwebs of the world in order to shine forth for the building of the Kingdom of God.
Some of the oldest libraries in the world are monastic.
What are you reading?
What are you studying?
Are you learning to think like a Catholic?
Ask yourself today, why this is more important now than ever before in the history of the world.
Oh, my soul, how much longer do you wish to be so stingy with Jesus? Why so negligent towards Jesus who made You? Why so lazy towards Jesus who redeemed you? Who do you want to love, if you do not want to love Jesus? St. Gemma Galgani.
To know is to love and to love is to want to know. The pursuit of knowledge, using logic and reason, brings us closer to the One is Knows Himself and knows us intimately. There is a great mystery in learning and remembering, in that one creates, as Henri Gilson notes, a sort of metaphysical background to the soul"
Slowly, through the Dark Night, when one's intellect and soul are cleansed, one comes to the real knowledge of self and God, as much as He reveals Himself this side of death.
This knowledge become a huge oasis, or universe surrounding one with the omnipresence of God, as Gilson notes, with the growing knowledge of the Indwelling of the Trinity.
Except for the chosen few mystics, like St. Gemma Galgani, or the young saints like St. Therese, the Little Flower who have infused knowledge, for most of us, the way through the years and years of learning and seeking, through the Dark Night into the Illuminative State is one of intense suffering and pain.
Those Catholics who refuse to start on the journey of learning, cannot get to the mystic places they believe come through experience, and this is the tragedy of so many good people who do not grow in holiness
They do not desire God enough to get out of their comforts zones in order to really learn, use the reason God has given them, and not only for themselves, but for the world, which is starving for reason.
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| Brno Capuchin Library |
Those who deny themselves the time, or waste time instead of pursuing the knowledge of God may one day stand in heaven and see the great saints they could have been, if they had responded to the grace of learning.
Only in the Dark Night of the Soul is one then allowed to die to memory and understanding, as God takes that which has been learned and changes all into the infused knowledge of sheer grace.
This can only happen after the purification of the imagination and memory. Do not waste any time. Read, study, think, reflect, pray, act.
Be a Catholic. Think like St. Bernard below....from On Loving God.
There is no glory in having a gift without
knowing it. But to know only that you have it, without knowing that it
is not of yourself that you have it, means self-glorying, but no true
thou that thou didst not receive? Now, if thou didst receive it, why
glory in God. And so the apostle says to men in such cases, What hast
dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it? (I Cor. 4.7). .. .....
The apostle shows how to discern the true glory from the false, when he
says, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord, that is, in the
Truth, since our Lord is Truth (I Cor. 1.31; John 14.6).
We must know, then, what we are, and that it is not of ourselves that
we are what we are. Unless we know this thoroughly, either we shall not
glory at all, or our glorying will be vain. ...
And this is right. For man, being in honor, if he know not his
thou know not, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock' ..
own honor, may fitly be compared, because of such ignorance, to the
beasts that perish. Not knowing himself as the creature that is
is own true glory which is within, he is led captive by his curiosity
distinguished from the irrational brutes by the possession of reason,
he commences to be confounded with them because, ignorant ...
and... concerns himself with external, sensual things. So he is made to
resemble the lower orders by not knowing that he has been more highly
endowed than they.