CHAPTER XVI.
THE PRIEST'S OBEDIENCE.
We have seen what is the priest's liberty. So long as he does not violate the obligations of his priesthood and the discipline of the Church, he has as much liberty as any other man. But if he use his liberty like other men, he will not be able to say to his flock, "Be ye followers of me as I also am of Christ."[1] A priest who lives up to the limits of his liberty is a lax priest, and a lax priest is an unhappy man. He is fenced all round with restrictions, and they gall him because he does not love them. He has upon him the yoke of the priesthood, which frets him because it is not his joy. The happiest of men is a strict priest, to whom the yoke of the priesthood is sweet, and its restrictions far less than the limitations he has of his own free will imposed upon his liberty. Now what is it that makes a difference even among good men between priest and priest? They have equally the three characters of sons, soldiers, and priests of Jesus Christ, and they have in their measure and proportion the sacramental graces which flow from them. In what do they, then, differ? The difference would seem to be in the use the one makes and the other does not make of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost which are in him. The virtues of faith, hope, and charity are habits; but the gifts are faculties or powers which elicit and perfect these virtues. Three of the gifts—fear, piety, and fortitude—perfect the will; four perfect the reason: intellect and science perfect the speculative reason; counsel and wisdom perfect the practical reason. These seven gifts, when fully unfolded, make men to be saints; unfolded partially and unequally they make the diversities of sanctity seen in the Church; or good, but not perfect, Christians. In the measure in which they are unfolded they give a special character to the mind. Some priests are skilled in counsel, some in intellectual subtilty, some in piety, some in courage, and the like. It is not often that we see all the seven gifts equally unfolded in the same character, for it would form a saintly mind, and saintly minds are few.
But this gives us the key of the great diversities among good priests. Some are wise but not learned, some learned but not pious, some pious but not courageous. Now theologians tell us that it is the loss of these gifts that makes men foolish. When both the reason and the will are imperfectly unfolded, the whole character shows it. Some etymologists derive stultitia from stupor, and they tell us that stultitia is luxuriæ filia, the offspring of a soft and indulgent life. We see even in good priests, whose life is untaxed by effort, leisurely, easy, regular, and blameless, a tendency to inertness and tardiness of mind.
So also in men of the world. The intellectual conceit, indocility, and independence in matters practical and speculative come from the neglect of the gifts of intellect and of counsel. Men of science are especially liable to this dwarfed and distorted intellectual habit. But we have nothing to do with them now; we are speaking of priests—that is, of ourselves. The reason why sometimes priests are pretentious, vain, scornful, critical, and their preaching unconvincing and unpersuasive, may be found in the same cause. As the loss of the seven gifts produces stupor of mind at least in spiritual things, so the obstructing them in their development and neglecting them in their exercise produces insensibility and inaccuracy. Holy fear is the beginning of wisdom. It is a great gift, and keeps us from evil; but without piety we shall be at least cold and hard to others. Filial piety is the loving and tender affection of a son, but without fortitude it may become soft and unstable. If these gifts, which perfect and govern the will, are obstructed or weakened in their action, a priest will be a feeble support to those who need his help. So if his practical reason be warped or darkened, he will be an untrusty teacher of his flock; and if his speculative reason be clouded, he will be an unsafe guide for the innocent, the penitent, and the doubtful.
There are five things which will cherish and unfold the working of the seven gifts in us. The first is a spirit of penance—this clears away the obstructions and hindrances which clog and defeat the working of the Spirit; the second is a constant study of Holy Scripture, for in it the Holy Ghost speaks and perfects His own work in us; the third is a daily prayer for light, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of our studies or of grave actions; the fourth is mental prayer, by which our conscious union with God, and our consciousness of His presence in us, is kept alive; the fifth and last is a spirit of docility, a sense of dependence on God for light, guidance, strength, shelter, and safety; and an ear to hear His voice in our conscience, with a promptness to obey when His voice is heard. A docile mind is always saying: "My heart is ready, my heart is ready;" "Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth." These five habits will continually unfold the seven gifts in our intellect and our will, and form in us the habit of mental obedience, the rationabile obsequium, without which a priest cannot be alter Christus, or the likeness of his Master. We will therefore try to see more carefully in what this mental obedience consists.
1. First, it consists in a loving obedience to the Church. Obedience without love is a mask, not a living reality. To obey because we must, to obey for fear of penalties or censures, is not enough. The obedience of our Lord in His baptism is our example. Why was He, the sinless Son of God, baptised with a sinner's baptism? Why was He, the greater, baptised by the less, the Lord by the servant? Why was He baptised in the sight of His enemies, as if He were as they thought Him to be—a sinner, and a friend of sinners? It was that He might fulfil all justice; that humility and obedience to His Father might have their perfect work. What plea, then, can a priest ever find for disobedience? The rule, or the injunction, he may say, is needless, irksome, open to misunderstanding, emanating from an authority partial or ill-informed. Be all this true, yet the duty and grace of obedience remain unchanged, and a docile mind will obey. They who criticise authority are not docile. Even if they obey, they lose the grace of obedience; if they disobey, they must give account to God. The mind that was in Christ Jesus is the mind of obedience; and the mind of the Divine Head pervades the Body of Christ. The axiom, Sentire cum Ecclesia, means also to believe with the Church, to hope with the Church, to love with the Church, and therefore to obey with the Church. A priest is, above all, vir obedientiarum, a man of many obediences. He obeys the Father as a son, the Son as a priest, the Holy Ghost as a disciple, the Church as his mother, the Bishop as the visible witness and representative of all these, who, in God's name, receives his obedience in the person of Jesus Christ. Such an obedience dignifies a priest. It is the highest act of his will. It matters not whether the obedience be in a great thing or in a small. The same authority runs through all the commandments and laws of discipline, and speaks to us by the living voice of Him to whom we have promised obedience. Prudence is his duty, obedience is ours. Mental obedience does not argue, or object, or criticise. It obeys; and in his obedience a Divine Presence meets the priest, and blesses him. The absence of such mental obedience betrays the absence of the gift of wisdom.
2. Another sign of mental obedience or docility is devotion to the Saints. They are our examples. Their counsels, their sayings, their instincts, are our rule and admonition. S. Philip bids us read authors who have S. before their name. They were once what we are now, weak, buffeted, tempted, penitent, and even sinful. We shall be hereafter, if we persevere to the end, what they are now. Their examples come home to us in every state of life, and in every part of our spiritual warfare. They are planted all along our path, in every age and condition, as guides and admonitions. In their lives we see the commandments, the precepts, and the counsels embodied. Every devout priest has his patrons. A priest without an intimate relation to Patron Saints can have little realisation of the supernatural order in which we live, and of our communion with "the spirits of the just made perfect."[2] It is not enough for a priest to have devotion to our Blessed Mother. She is not the patron of any one, being the Mother of all. Our relation to her is necessary, not voluntary. We cannot have God for our Father without haying the Church for our Mother; and we cannot have God for our Father without having the ever-blessed Mother as our Mother. We do not choose her as a patron. We are her children from our baptism, before we knew her, in the supernatural consanguinity of the Incarnation. So, also, we hardly choose S. Joseph; for he is the patron of the universal Church. We, therefore, are his foster-children through the maternity of the spotless Virgin Mary. Our patrons are of our own choosing. And a priest must be of a strangely unreflecting mind who does not find himself in manifold relations to "the Church of the first-born written in heaven."[3] The day or place of our birth, our falls, our faults, our needs, our works, all suggest to us many who, in their warfare on earth, were tried as we are. The habit of mind that turns to the Saints is a docile reverence; the habit of mind that turns away from them is an indocile self-sufficiency. Devotion and conscious relation to the Saints is a part of the gift of piety. It is the affection of mind by which we adore the ever-blessed Trinity with our whole soul and strength; for love and worship are the same affections, whether the object be infinite and uncreated, or finite and a creature. But this charity differs infinitely in motive and in measure. The worship of God has no measure in us except our finite nature, because of His immensity. The worship of the Saints is finite, because they are creatures. The love of our neighbour begins with our kindred, and ascends continually from earth to heaven, from our homes to the heavenly court. It was well said by one who saw the truth in part that "the greatest school of mutual respect is the Catholic Church." He saw that the reverence of children to their parents, of subjects to their rulers, of people to their priests, of priests to their Bishops, of Bishops to the Head of the Church, is all one habit of mind, differing only in measure and accidental diversities. In itself it is all one habit of filial piety. A priest who is devout to the Saints will hardly be irreverent and contumacious, or critical and murmuring against his superiors. France has been infected and afflicted by a spirit of mockery against all authority, sacred or secular. England has hitherto been free. But everywhere there will be whisperers, murmurers, critics, censors, and carpers, who spare nobody, and least of all those whom they should most respect, if not for what they are, at least for the office they bear. Such minds invoke their own Nemesis. No priests are so carped at as they who carp at their brethren; none are so turned into ridicule as those who ridicule superiors. Carping in a priest betrays the absence of the gift of piety.
3. A third sign of mental obedience is deference to theologians. It is true that we incur the note of heresy only when we impugn the faith; but we may incur the notes of error, rashness, offensiveness to pious ears, in rejecting opinions which are outside of divine or Catholic faith. Private judgment, three hundred years old and erected into a law, and even into a religion, has infected the atmosphere in which the Catholic Church is forced to live and to breathe. It is true that the teaching of theologians, even though unanimous, will not make matter of divine faith; but their consent creates an intellectual tradition against which no man can set his judgment without rashness. We should be rash if we measured ourselves against any one of them; we should be more than rash if we set ourselves against their unanimous judgment. The unanimous interpretation of the Fathers makes a rule for fixing the sense of the Scriptures against all private spirits. The unanimous teaching of theologians is the maximum, or a high degree of human certainty in matters of revealed and of unrevealed truth. If we trust our individual reason, is not their collective reason to be rather trusted? If we think that the light of the Spirit of Truth has been leading us, does He not also lead them? And is not their unanimity the result of a collective guidance and a confluent illumination? Their combined and united light puts out our isolated spirit, as the noonday sun makes all lesser lights to be invisible. The habit of teaching others generates also a habit of forming and adhering to our own opinion. We are sent to affirm and to assert, and this leads easily to self-assertion. The teachers of dogma easily become dogmatic. Priests meet with less of contradiction than other men, and often bear it less patiently. Men in the world, as at the Bar, or in Parliament, are trained by constant contradiction to courtesy and forbearance. They are often an example and a rebuke to us. It is the absence of the gift of counsel that makes us opinionated and impatient.
4. Another sign of mental obedience or docility is a fear and suspicion of novelties in doctrine or practice or devotion. Theology or the science of God is a divine tradition, running down from the beginning, ever expanding, and rising in its unity and symmetry to perfection. It is built up indeed of things old and new, but the new are, as Vincent of Lerins said, non nova sed nove. The coins of the Roman, the Byzantine, the British Empire have new and various images and superscriptions, but the gold is all one. So the definitions of the truth may be new, but the truth is old. It is the restless sea of human intellect casting up mire and darkness that forces the Church to make new dykes, and to guard the faith with new definitions. But some minds are weary of old truths, old terms, old phrases, old modes of teaching, old prayers, old devotions. They need the stimulus of novelty: new colours, new forms, new ways of stating old doctrines. It is with doctrines as with fashions: they must be always changing. Critics and authors, professors and preachers, often have a craving for originality. To be like their forefathers is to be commonplace; to strike out new lines, new ways of putting old truths, makes a reputation. It is only the Church that can revise the sacred terminology of faith. It alone "can bring forth things old and new." All other innovations are departures from the beaten path, which is safe because beaten, and beaten because it is the way of our forefathers in the faith. What is true in theology is more evidently true in the interpretation of the sacred Scripture. The love of novelty is always at work to find new meanings; and criticism is impatient of restraint. We live in an age of unlimited intellectual liberty. Priests read without scruple or hesitation books and writings which fall under the rules of the Index. The habit of intellectual independence is easily formed. We are surrounded by both Gnostics and Agnostics: by those who out of their own consciousness are wiser than the Church, and by others who measure what can be known by what they know. Catholics would not consciously listen to either of these schools of error; and yet they are continually and unconsciously taking in their erroneous premises, and principles, and assumptions in their daily contact with the world. As to false theology and false interpretation of Scripture, they would be upon their guard; but they are off their guard in philosophy, and readily open their ears and their intellect to the aberrations of modern metaphysics. They think that as in philosophy there is no heresy, so there need be no fear. But a false philosophy undermines faith, and one philosophical error, like a rotten beam, will loosen the whole superstructure of theology. Priests have of all men need to be upon their guard, for they are the guides and teachers of the faithful. It is dangerous to receive and to propagate the least intellectual error. We have need to live in great watchfulness against what is glorified as "modern thought." The thought of the modern world is setting steadily away from God. The love of novelty is one of its signs, and the only adequate corrective is the donum scientia, the gift of science or knowledge, which sees God in all things, and all things in God. With this light we may traverse the whole world of abstract or applied sciences without hesitation or fear.
5. There remains still one more sign to be added, that is, a mistrust of self in all its forms, especially in our intellectual and moral judgments. To acquire this self-mistrust we have only need to remember three things—first, how often we have erred in our opinions; secondly, how little we have read; thirdly, how little we have studied. To read is one thing, to study is another. No conscientious priest will shut his books; no wise priest will answer in grave matters without consulting them; no priest who mistrusts himself will print and publish without putting his book under the revision of other eyes and other minds; the more the better. We must know how to learn before we teach. And we must learn to obey before we can guide. This mistrust of self comes from the gift of filial fear—that is, the fear of offending God either in His law or in His truth by any reckless action or by any idle word.
It is to priests emphatically that S. John's words apply: "Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and you know all things," And among those things are, first and above all, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self, out of which springs mistrust of self. It was of our Divine Lord, whose priesthood we share, that Isaias prophesied: "The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him: the spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the spirit of counsel and of fortitude, the spirit of knowledge and of godliness. And He shall be filled with the spirit of the fear of the Lord."[4] Of this unction every priest receives, and in the measure in which these seven gifts are cherished by conscious obedience he is conformed to his Divine Master.