Western Creed, Western Identity: Essays in Legal and Social Philosophy

16. The Interior Life

       THE INTERIOR LIFE  To speak of Catholic education is to acknowledge, for one thing, a specific telos to education and, for another, a distinctive tradition. The recognition of that telos is, of course, shared by other believers. It consists in the awareness that the grave is not the end of man, that man is called to a life in union with the divine, a life, whatever else it might be, consisting primarily in a knowledge and love of God. Acknowledgment of this transcendent end colors the whole of education . At no stage is ultimate fulfillment confused with terrestrial happiness. The distinctive feature of Catholic education is the Catholic tradition itself, a very complex tradition spanning two thousand years of history. One need only enter the Basilica of St. Ambrose in Milan to have the historical asserted. There, under the high altar, lie the remains of Ambrose, who died in , accompanied by the remains of Saints Gervase and Protase, both first-century martyrs. Physical continuity is a visible reminder of intellectual inheritance . Ambrose taught Augustine and Augustine taught the West. The Fathers, no less than the Greeks and Romans upon whom they drew, were concerned with education. From Augustine’s De Magistro to Newman’s Idea of a University, one can find dozens of books, some of them Christian and literary classics, that speak to the aims of education . In common they recognize that the end of life is contemplation and that the road to the Beatific Vision requires a kind of inter-  iority even in the midst of the crassest temporal pursuits. What follows are reflections on what I take to be the features and conditions of this interior life. By the “interior life,” I mean the life of the intellect in general but even more the life of the intellect under certain conditions: the intellect drawing upon its experience of the present, on experience understood and interpreted within the context of an appropriated past, but future-oriented in a movement whose ultimate end is nothing less than self-fulfillment. Christ himself is the model. In teaching he appealed to common sense and built upon the inherited. Christ came to proclaim a new law but in doing so he was respectful of the best of ancient codes. He drew upon his listeners’ grasp of nature’s laws, and on that foundation taught those things that unaided intellect alone could not fathom. His disciples found him credible. When Saint John Chrysostom sought an empirical proof for the existence of God, he found it in the splendor of the Church. The evidence that he found compelling came from the fact that the Church in its teaching appealed to noble and low, rich and poor, learned and illiterate, and had by that teaching in a brief span succeeded in transforming the lives of individuals and nations for the better. An institution that produced such good effects, thought Chrysostom, could only have a divine origin. Three things I wish to underscore: the requirement of critical intelligence , the need for learning, and the need for the Church. Unaided intelligence will not suffice. Isolated from tradition and from community, it will become as sterile as Hume’s believer, sequestered in a private meditation for a moment in the confines of his study. Just as a knowledge of the practical arts is required for success in most of life’s activities, so too in matters of religious activity learning is required . It would be foolish to proceed as if God and the way to God were unknown. Religion is a communal activity. The acknowledgment of God’s existence, the acknowledgment of man’s debt to Him, and an awareness of the propriety of paying that debt are communal affairs. Awareness of the need to worship is found wherever men are found. Piety is thus a natural virtue. “Spirituality” is but a term for The Interior Life  the lifting of intellect and will to things divine. It is a habit of referral, grounded in contemplation, a habit of understanding things in the light of their finality. The love of God requires some knowledge of God. No one can love an unknown God. God has to be present in some manner before His goodness can command the volitional act. Awareness is the result of some act on our part, the result of our attentiveness to a witness, be it oral or written. The normal...