CHAPTER 5
Continuation
21. Human intelligence, therefore, is faced not only with difficult matters, but matters which concern many revealed doctrines, both difficult and obscure. No one should imagine himself capable of removing every veil of obscurity in these subjects. He would be aiming for impossible clarity and facility in writing, and any final clarity he gained would be more apparent than real. Nor can a reader demand the impossible from any writer. If works on such subjects contain no error, their remaining obscurity cannot be laid at the door of the author, nor blamed on the book. It simply indicates human limitation in the present life.
22. The obscurity intrinsic to a subject does not oblige a writer to abandon the subject, provided he undertakes to limit its obscurity in every possible way. In natural sciences, honours have been heaped upon those overcoming the difficulties they have encountered; the greatest geniuses, always glad to exercise their talent on more acute difficulties, have never failed to arouse admiration. Holy men and women, and teachers of sacred doctrine, have done the same, and encouraged others with capacity similar to their own to reflect upon the sublime and mysterious truths of religion, in which the greatest difficulty is mixed with the finally unconquerable obscurity proper to such doctrine.
According to St. Thomas, 'Sacred teaching can receive something from philosophical disciplines, not because it needs them, but for the sake of greater clarity about matters handed on in the knowledge of faith.'*(31) {OLR} This does not depend upon defects or poverty in the teaching nor, as he says, is it a necessary feature of doctrine itself: 'It is demanded by our intellect which is led more easily to things above reason when it sets out with things known to natural reason (reason which gives rise to other branches of knowledge).'*(32) {OLR}
23. When philosophy is rightly applied to it, the content of sacred doctrine is illustrated more clearly according to Aquinas. This is the kind of illumination the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, especially St. Augustine, desired from those whom they encouraged and stimulated in the belief that they were capable of offering it. Such support is useful to piety and to the progress of the kingdom of God on earth, but divine Providence itself placed a new incentive to reflection in the Church when it permitted heretics and God's enemies, or other rash and presumptuous people, to contradict revealed doctrine.
24. Human reasoning has attacked sacred doctrine unceasingly with every kind of subtle, fallacious argument, and provoked the use of contrary weapons based on the finest dialectical expertise. New, opportune distinctions have been needed to define and determine every area of sacred teaching; there should be no room for equivocation concealing deceit and sophistry. And, as St. Augustine often notes,(33) this is one of the great benefits produced by divine wisdom from the evils of heresy and contention. In the 5th Lateran Council also, Pope Leo X encouraged philosophers to solve with reasoning the sophistries brought against the faith by the abuse of reason.
It has always been the Church's desire, therefore, that mankind should attain the greatest possible understanding of the truths believed on the authority of God who reveals, and of the Catholic Church which proposes them. Understood in this way, these truths are subject to greater enlightenment, and rendered immune to attack from the subtle, fallacious arguments of the enemies of the kingdom of God. Unfortunately, our own days have seen the rise of a certain spirit of embarrassment and diffidence in relation to human reason on the part of some devout people. They either want reason totally excluded as incapable of providing mankind with any certainty (leaving the field to faith alone and divine authority); or they take it upon themselves to censure rigorously what they think obscure, whether the subject under consideration is truly obscure because of its mystery, or simply difficult, or new to their way of thinking and to the normal path their form of studies has taken.
Some go so far as to maintain that what is difficult is also dangerous; prudence would require its abandonment. If this opinion is understood in its extreme sense, it is directly contrary to the feeling of the whole of antiquity and to human common sense, as well as being an obstacle to the progress of truth and Christian religion itself here on earth. The only thing we can say is that when giving religious instruction to a particular person or group, it is good to restrict oneself to matters proportionate to their capacity for understanding, and to the level of their moral energies. When the listener, or group, possesses a certain culture, higher and more difficult subjects can be discussed. In speaking to the people at large, easier, more elementary subjects should be treated.(34) Even so, St. Augustine, who wanted the Christian teacher to act in this way, was very keen at the same time to stimulate to the limit the intellectual soaring of his faithful, like an eagle with its young. And he was glad to have been able to achieve this often.(35)
25. The situation is different when there is no predetermined audience, as in the case of a writer publishing his work. Naturally, every author has a certain class of persons in mind when he is developing his argument, but he cannot prevent others from reading the book. Readers themselves, therefore, have the duty to take advice and choose the books best suited to their understanding, and most useful for them. A mistaken choice is their fault, not the author's. A mistake will not harm the reader, however, provided he does not undertake the reading rashly and proudly, persuading himself to his own detriment that he understands a work when this is not the case.
It is not right that something of this nature should lead to neglect and damage in the cause of truth and of the understanding of what is most sublime and precious for mankind, such as the knowledge of religion. This is the constant teaching of St. Augustine, and what he requires of a person instructing others orally, especially the people, is expressed in the following words: 'There are some things which of their nature are either not understood or barely understood despite the effort made by the speaker. These are to be avoided when the people are present, or mentioned only rarely if needs must.' Authors, however, and those presenting a case to learned men, are to follow another path, as he goes on to say immediately: 'It is different with books, which are written so that they may in some way grip the reader when they are understood or, if they are not understood, are no trouble to the reader (who is under no obligation to read them). Sometimes persistence is needed here, so that the truths we have already penetrated, although very difficult to understand, may lead us with only a little effort to understand other things provided the attention of a capable reader or interlocutor is motivated by the desire to learn. The writer needs to make clear how this understanding is possible. And to do this the teacher should pay more attention to evidence than to eloquence.'*(36) {OLR}
26. Despite this, devout but over-prudent people can be found advising modern writers to abandon questions too complicated for ordinary intelligences.(37) According to them, teaching of this kind provides no help to religion, and can easily cause dissension and dangerous division when wrongly understood by those incapable of grasping it. Unenlightened zeal is inclined to panic, they say, and take as contrary to faith what is simply a clearer explanation and illustration of the faith itself. Zealous people then attract others amongst the faithful who either fall into uncertainty about the soundness of a writer's doctrine, or condemn it out of hand on the word of the writer's opponents. The result is unrest and disunity among the faithful, to the detriment of charity. But those focusing attention on these deleterious effects see no necessity for asking whether they result from weaknesses inherent in the written word, or from defects in the uncomprehending reader. They show no hesitation, however, about passing judgment, nor in letting their judgment be known.
Such advice is normally withheld until an author has found lively opponents, and given when special circumstances have put him in a position to be criticised. Before blaming the writer, would it not be better to form some opinion about the incalculable value of the truth he illustrates, about the importance of its development in human minds, and finally about the necessity of safeguarding it more effectively against manifest errors and against the germ of error, which is so often detected by such a writer before its growth is perceived by the ordinary faithful? What does the acute, loving and prudent heart of St. Augustine have to say about the matter (his prudence, be it understood, pertains to the realm of the spirit)? In some of his books he had expounded the teaching on grace; no one had thought it new, nor raised any difficulty about it. What was said later, when Pelagians and semi-Pelagians opposed it as though he had introduced something novel into the Church? That Augustine had imprudently stirred up dissension about a difficult question; that he had disturbed simple people by commenting on a question which could have been passed over in silence without loss to any one: 'Certainly, there was no need of this kind of argument which is a source of disturbance to the less intelligent. The Catholic faith was defended for many years, and just as ably, without this definition of predestination.'*(38) {OLR}
27. St. Augustine was blamed during his own lifetime by the famous Marseillaises, and later by many others, including modern critics who press the charge more strongly. Some have even wondered whether he may not have offered an occasion of eternal damnation to souls.(39) Calumnies of this kind have been repeated to the present day despite their constant condemnation by the Church and the popes who, to say the least, have always rejected such an unbalanced charge.
What was St. Augustine's reaction to this criticism? Did it stop him from writing, or bring him to confess humbly (and he was a truly humble man) that he had acted imprudently in dealing with difficult questions, or in writing obscurely? He did neither, but told the faithful for whom he had written that he thought he had expressed himself clearly, and that those who had not understood should ask God for light to comprehend: 'Those who still do not understand what I think I have expressed clearly, granted the nature of the questions, should not calumniate me as though I had been negligent or blame me for my lack of skill. Rather, they should ask God for understanding.'*(40) {OLR}
Indeed, St. Augustine never tired of explaining the question. He wrote more than thirty works in defence of divine grace, and through them brought many people in good faith with a desire to learn to a greater understanding and love of the truth he was teaching, although the lucidity of his writings was lost on others badly disposed. Amongst the Marseillaises, those who took St. Augustine as an authority, but without understanding his teaching, were enlightened and fully satisfied with his De correptione et gratia, written to resolve difficulties brought against his work in Africa. Others found no help in the book, but rather an occasion for greater animosity against its author. St. Prosperus describes the situation in a letter he wrote at the time to St. Augustine: 'Those who have read your Beatitude's book (De correptione et gratia) and were already adhering to the holy, apostolic authority of your teaching have understood better and become better informed; the others, who were having difficulty, are more opposed to it than ever.'*(41) {OLR} St. Augustine added clarification after clarification for the sake of those who 'were having difficulty', but in vain.
28. The difficulties raised by his opponents, but attributed to the saint, persisted for over a century in Gaul after his death, and were revived still later. But truly wise people, and the entire Church, were adamant in praising St. Augustine's courage in facing up to blame, calumnies and excessive fear of being misunderstood or causing trouble amongst malicious or badly disposed persons, in his defence and explanation of the truth. In the second half of the 9th century, the church of Lyons and its bishop, St. Remigius, acclaimed Augustine for such courage in its Book of Three Letters: 'Nor could his resolution, intent upon the truest and most faithful teaching, be broken or revoked by such perturbation and disturbance amongst the faithful. Rather, he warned and instructed them in his writings, while praying fervently to God for them, so that they might understand and know how necessary and salvific it was that the truth of predestination should be believed and preached to the praise of divine grace.'*(42) {OLR}
29. Truth is and always has been precious in the eyes of the holy Doctors of the Church. They have always considered work to explain and support it as a great benefit for the faithful and the kingdom of God on earth, and have made light of the opposition aroused by the untutored piety of those incapable of grasping certain difficulties, and by the rashness and malice of others who twist their sense or undermine with sophistries what they had expressed clearly with the best of motives.
Notes
(31) [S. T., I, q. 1, a. 5, ad 2].
(32) [Ibid., 713].
(33) Confessions, bk. 7, c. 19; On True Religion, c. 6-10; Genesis against the Manichaeans., 1. c. 1; Letter 185, c. 1; Exposition on Psalm 7, n. 15; Ps. 8, n. 6; Ps. 9(other), n. 20; Ps. 54, n. 22-24; Ps. 67, n. 39; Ps. 106, n. 14; On Faith in Things that are not seen, c. 7; On Catechising Beginners, n. 42-44; Sermon on the Usefulness of Fasting, c. 8; City of God, bk. 16, c. 2; bk. 18, c. 51; Against Faustus the Manichee, 12, c. 24; On the Gift of Perseverance, c. 20.
(34) Cf. St. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 4, and On Catechising Beginners.
(35) For example, in one of his sermons he speaks to the people as follows: 'In the previous apostolic readings, which I have explained to your charity as far as the Lord in his mercy has enabled me to do, I worked hard and anxiously. I felt with you and was anxious about you. But as I see it, the Lord helped you and me, so that the really difficult passages he vouchsafed to explain through me in such a way that every question dealt with might disturb a pious mind. The impious mind, however, hates understanding'* {OLR} (On the Words of the Apostle, Sermon 13).
(36) On Christian Teaching, bk 4, c. 9.
(37) [Cf. Foreword, p. vi].
(38) On the Gift of Perseverance.
(39) Cf. Luis de Molina in his Concordia: 'Augustine's teaching on predestination greatly disturbed many of the faithful, unlearned and learned, especially those in France, and might even have put their salvation in danger'.* {OLR} Noris, in his Vindiciae, offers examples of authors who in the last century attacked Augustine. Many other modern authors fall into the same category.
(40) [On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, bk. 3, cc. 2, 4].
(41) [Prosper, Ep. 1, 2].
(42) c. 35.
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