Chapter XIV: Out Of Harm's Way (3)

We have seen that the immateriality, unity, and simplicity of the soul prove that it does not necessarily die with the body, but that it _may_ survive it. The fact that God has written his promise of a future life in the very nature and destiny of the soul, is for us a sufficient proof that the soul does not die with the body. That God is, and is the first and final cause of all existences, is a truth of science as well as of revelation. He has created all things by himself, and for himself. He then must be their last end, and therefore their supreme good, according to their several natures. He has created man with a nature that nothing short of the possession of himself as his supreme good can satisfy. In so creating man, he promises him in his nature the realization of this good, that is, the possession of himself as final cause, unless forfeited and rendered impossible by man's own fault. To return to God as his supreme good without being absorbed in him, is man's destiny promised in his very constitution. But this destiny is not realized nor realizable in this life, and therefore there must be another life to fulfil what he promises, for no promise of God, however made, can fail. This argument we regard as conclusive.

The resurrection of the flesh, the reunion of the soul and body, future happiness as a reward of virtue, and the misery of those who through their own fault fail of their destiny, as a punishment for sin, etc., are matters of revelation or theology as distinguished from philosophy, and do not require to be treated here, any further than to say, if reason has little to say for them, it has nothing to say against them. They belong to the mysteries of faith which, though never contrary to reason, are above it, in an order transcending its domain.

We have thus far treated spiritualism and materialism from the point of view of philosophy, not from that of psychology, or of our faculties. The two doctrines, as they prevail to-day, are simply psychological doctrines. The partisans of the one say that the soul has no faculty of knowing any but material objects, and therefore assert materialism; the partisans of the other say that the soul has a faculty by which she apprehends immediately immaterial or spiritual objects or truths, and hence they assert what goes by the name of spiritualism, which may or may not deny the existence of matter. Descartes and Cousin assert the cognition of both spirit and matter, but as independent each of the other; Collier and Berkeley deny that we have any cognition of matter, and therefore deny its existence, save in the mind. The truth, we hold, lies with neither. The soul has no direct intuition of the immaterial or intelligible. We use _intuition_ here in the ordinary sense, as an act of the soul--knowing by looking on, or immediately beholding; that is, in the sense of intelligible as distinguished from sensible perceptions--intellection, as some say, as distinguished from sensation. This empirical intuition, as we call it, is very distinct from that intuition _a priori_ by which the ideal formula is affirmed, for that is the act of the divine Being himself, creating the mind, and becoming himself the light thereof. {632} But that constitutes the mind, and is its object, not its act. No doubt, the intellectual principles of all reality and of all science are affirmed in that intuition _a priori_, and hence these principles are ever present to the soul as the basis of all intelligible as well as of all sensible experience. Yet they are asserted by the mind's own act only as sensibly represented, according to the peripatetic maxim, "Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu." The mind has three faculties, sensibility, intellect, and will, but it is itself one, a single _vis_ or force, and never acts with one faculty alone, whether it feels, thinks, or wills; and, united as it is in this life with the body, it never acts as body alone or as spirit alone. There are then no intellections without sensation, nor sensations without intellection; purely noetic truth, therefore, can never be grasped save through a sensible medium.

We have already explained this with regard to material objects, in which the substance, though supersensible, has its sensible sign, through which the mind reaches it. But immaterial or ideal objects are, as we have seen, precisely those which have no sensible sign of their own--properties or qualities perceptible by the senses. For this order of truth the only sensible representation is language, which is the sensible sign or symbol of immaterial or ideal truth. We arrive at this order of reality or truth only through the medium of language which embodies it; that is to say, only through the medium of tradition, or of a teacher. So far we accord with the traditionalists. We do not believe that, if God had left men in the beginning without any instruction or language in which the ideas are embodied, they would ever have been able to assert the existence of God, the immateriality of the soul, and the liberty or free will of man--the three great ideal truths which the Holy See requires us to maintain can be _proved_ with certainty by reason; and we do not hold that, like the revealed mysteries, they are suprarational truth, and to be taken only on the authority of a supernatural revelation. If God had not infused the knowledge of them into the first of the race along with language, which he also infused into Adam, we should never by our reason and instincts alone have found them out, or distinctly apprehended them; but being taught them, or finding them expressed in language, we are able to verify or prove them with certainty by our natural reason, in which respect we accord with those whom the traditionalists call rationalists.

We have studiously avoided, as far as possible, the metaphysics of the subject we have been considering, and perhaps have, in consequence, kept too near its surface; but we think we have established our main point, that neither spiritualism nor materialism, taken exclusively, is philosophically defensible. We are able to distinguish between spirit and matter, but we can deny the existence or the activity, according to its own nature, of neither. We know matter by its sensible properties or qualities, We know spirit only as sensibly represented by language. Let language be corrupted, and our knowledge of ideal or non-sensible truth, or philosophy, will also be corrupted, mutilated, or perverted. This will be still more the case with the superintelligible truth supernaturally revealed, which is apprehensible only through the medium of language. Hence, St. Paul is careful to admonish St. Timothy to hold fast "the form of sound words," and hence, too, the necessity, if God makes us a revelation of spiritual things, that he should provide an infallible living teacher to preserve the infallibility of the language in which it is made. {633} We may see here, too, the reason why the infallible church is hardly less necessary to the philosopher than to the theologian. Where faith and theology are preserved in their purity and integrity, philosophy will not be able to stray far from the truth, and where philosophy is sound, the sciences will not long be unsound. The aberrations of philosophy are due almost solely to the neglect of philosophers to study it in its relation with the dogmatic teaching of the church.

Some of our dear and revered friends in France and elsewhere are seeking, as the cure for the materialism which is now so prevalent, to revive the spiritualism of the seventeenth century. But the materialism they combat is only the reaction of the mind against that exaggerated spiritualism which they would revive. Where there are two real forces, each equally evident and equally indestructible, you can only alternate between them, till you find the term of their synthesis, and are able to reconcile and harmonize them. The spiritualism defended by Cousin in France has resulted only in the recrudescence of materialism. The trouble now is, that matter and spirit are presented in our modern systems as antagonistic and naturally irreconcilable forces. The duty of philosophers is not to labor to pit one against the other, or to give the one the victory over the other; but to save both, and to find out the middle term which unites them. We know there must be somewhere that middle term; for both extremes are creations of God, who makes all things by number, weight, and measure, and creates always after the logic of his own essential nature. All his works, then, must be logical and dialectically harmonious.

Whether we have indicated this middle term or not, we have clearly shown, we think, that it is a mistake to suppose the two terms are not in reality mutually irreconcilable. Nothing proves that, as creatures of God, each in its own order and place is not as sacred and necessary as the other. We do not know the nature or essence of either, nor can we say in what, as to this nature and essence, the precise difference between them consists; but we know that in our present life both are united, and that neither acts without the other. All true philosophy must then present them not as opposing, but as harmonious and concurring forces.

We do not for ourselves ever apply the term spiritualism to a purely intellectual philosophy. We do not regard the words spirit and soul as precisely synonymous. St. Paul, Heb. iv. 12, says, "The word of God is living and effectual, ... reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit," or, as the Protestant version has it, "quick and powerful, ... piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit." There is evidently, then, however closely related they may be, a distinction between the soul and the spirit. Hence there may be soul that is not spirit, which was generally held by the ancients. The Greeks had their [Greek text] and [Greek text], and the Latins their _anima_ and _spiritus_. The term spirit, when applied to man, seems to us to designate the moral powers rather than the intellectual, and the moral powers or faculties are those which specially distinguish man from animals. St. Paul applies the term spiritual uniformly in a moral sense, and usually, if not always, to men born again of the Holy Ghost, or the regenerated, and to the influences and gifts of the Holy Spirit; that is, to designate the supernatural character, gifts, graces, and virtues of those who have been translated into the kingdom of God and are fellow-citizens of the commonwealth of Christ, or the Christian republic. {634} Hence, we shrink from calling any intellectual philosophy spiritualism. If it touches philosophy, as it undoubtedly does--since grace supposes nature, and a man must be born into the natural order before he can be born again into the supernatural order, or regenerated by the Spirit--it rises into the region of supernatural sanctity, into which no man by his natural powers can enter; for it is a sanctity that places one on the plane of a supernatural destiny.

But even taken in this higher sense, there is no antagonism between spirit and matter. There is certainly a struggle, a warfare that remains through life; but the struggle is not between the soul and the body; it is, as is said, between the higher and inferior powers of the soul, between the spirit and concupiscence, between the law of the mind, which bids us labor for spiritual good which will last for ever, and the law in the members, which looks only to the good of the body, in its earthly relations. The saints, who chastise, mortify, macerate the body by their fastings, vigils, and scourgings, do not do it on the principle that the body is evil, or that matter is the source of evil. There is a total difference in principle between Christian asceticism and that of the Platonists, who hold that evil originates in the intractableness of matter, that holds the soul imprisoned as in a dungeon, and from which it sighs and struggles for deliverance. The Christian knows that our Lord himself assumed flesh and retains for ever his glorified body. He believes in the resurrection of the body and its future everlasting reunion with the soul. Christ, dying in a material body, has redeemed both matter and spirit. Hence we venerate the relics of our Lord and his saints, and believe matter may be hallowed. In our Lord all opposites are reconciled, and universal peace is established.

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Translated From The German Of
Conrad Von Bolanden.

Angela.