Robert Wyer

Christ presents no threat to human happiness. Unlike the scribes and Pharisees, His Church does not add to man's burdens. Despite the claims of many scientists, professors, and just plain folk, the Catholic Faith embraces life in all its richness. Human nature, wounded by sin and deprived of God's friendship, isn't depraved or evil. Left alone, though, in a state of sin, man cannot play the innocent and noble savage. He is, as the text of the Mass states, marvelously created and more marvelously re-created.

The history of heresy, according to the theological masters, turns on the three principal mysteries of the Catholic religion: the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Redemption. The tendency to deny one of the two natures, divine and human, in the one person of Jesus Christ, distorts the true doctrine necessary for human salvation. At times, the errors may seem quibbling, but they are profound and result in a false and impotent human fabrication incapable of allowing fallen man to participate, through grace, in God's life. Arianism, for example, taught that the Son was of like substance with the Father, but not the same substance. Unless Jesus Christ is God, He cannot satisfy the infinite debt owed by man's sin against the infinite God. Likewise, unless He is man, He cannot pay the debt man owes. Boethius, while awaiting his execution, demonstrated that happiness can only be found in God, either in Himself by nature or by sharing in His nature through adoption. All other religions are empty. St. John of the Cross says God spoke only one word–the Word, and that Word contains everything God chose to reveal. The beginning of St. John's Gospel, read at the end of Mass, summarizes and reminds us of these realities.

Without wishing to diminish the awesome quality of these supernatural truths, we can see a similarity in other aspects of reality. Natural, acquired virtues require a balance between defects and extremes. Temperance lies between teetotaling and drunkenness; fortitude, between cowardice and recklessness; liberality, between being a miser and a spendthrift. Humans are rational animals, which means they have bodies and souls. We are neither beasts nor angels. It is easy to recognize humans acting as animals, like Circe turning Odysseus's men into pigs. On the other hand, what the novelist Walker Percy's old-fashioned doctor of the soul, Tom More, calls "angelism" may be little more than false piety, a puritanical refusal to recognize and legitimately enjoy the material goods God has created. Denying either aspect of human nature ultimately results in a caricature.

The Incarnation continues, fusing the human and the divine, using matter to lead human souls to God. The sacraments use water, bread, wine, and oil. The penitent speaks, and the confessor listens. The priest speaks the words of absolution, and the penitent hears that God has forgiven his sins. What we are cries out for this audible expression of mercy. The liturgy follows the rhythms of the seasons, makes use of colors, singing, bells, and incense. God sanctifies the parts of human life, making the marriage act produce offspring, candidates for the kingdom of heaven, at the same time that physical union draws husband and wife closer together. Only the Catholic Church has such a high regard for every aspect of the lives we lead here and now. Our sanity and our sanctity, our happiness here and now–and in the next life, all find their right place in this ordered existence.

As individuals, we exist as part of something greater than ourselves. We find our personal reason for being only in recognizing and adding to the larger body. Radical individualism, operating politically and philosophically in libertarianism, cuts off the person from his community. No one asked any of us if we wished to live; someone else–our parents–made the most fundamental decision of our existence for us. No one can be without at least two others, mother and father. The family is a fundamental reality. It touches each of us, and goes a long way towards making each of us what we are–for good or ill. There could be no state or nation or city or neighborhood or school or parish without individuals, but the fact that we form parts of a larger community does not make us simply cogs in the great wheel, atoms subsumed, forgers of a common good at the expense of our private goods. We are neither Marxists nor libertarians because each fails to appreciate the fusion of individual and community, body and soul, human and divine.

Irritation, exasperation even, with a bloated government, intrusive and positively evil in some of its policies, does not mean we are revolutionaries. All authority comes from God, and we can no more refuse this order than we can ignore Him.

Modern man thinks that he cannot be himself unless he exercises autonomy. "I need to be happy, I need my own space, I see things differently." He seeks to create his own universe, and no one–Almighty God included–is going to tell him what to do. In throwing off Christ's sweet yoke, he desperately fumbles for what he thinks will make him happy: a younger wife, a faster car, an older whiskey. If he is rich, he can distract himself longer, extend his search to foreign and exotic markets. No amount of finite goods can ever satisfy an infinite desire; by design, we desire God, and only He can satisfy our unbounded limits because only He is without limit.

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton likens the Church to a vehicle, careening between two possible departures from its path. Getting to the end of our journey means remaining upright, an animal that stands on its two hind legs while turning upward to consider the stars above, the stars that God has called by name–each shining in its place within the heavens.

Robert Wyer teaches high-school English in Wisconsin and attends St. Pius V chapel in Mukwonago.