II. ACTUAL GRACE

1. The divine impulse which, if we do not stultify it, causes us to pass from sin to justification (where we are given habitual grace with the indwelling of the Holy Trinity) confronts us with the problems of the divine movement and human freedom.

Grace—we are speaking here of actual grace—is the divine impulse which produces in us acts of free adherence to God, of free acceptance and consent. God comes to me to draw me to him. I can interrupt or destroy this divine movement; or else I can let God act in me and take possession of my free will and make it assent, without violating it.

Actual grace seeks me out in sin to bring me to justification; then, when I am there, it comes back again and again, insistently, to carry me to a higher stage of sanctifying grace. God is constantly knocking at the gate of my heart to invite me to go beyond the state I have reached, because my whole life should be a journey on the way to Love. I cannot give a renewed assent to Love, nor above all can I give a more intensified assent than hitherto, unless a divine movement comes secretly to my heart to help it ascent higher. I can refuse it. But if I let God act he will raise me further, step by step, to a greater love. 'At the end of your life', says St. John of the Cross, 'you will be asked how you have loved'; that is to say, the degree of your love at the moment of death determines the degree of intensity the beatific vision will have for you eternally.

2. The relations of grace and freedom, of God's action and man's, is a great problem that continually preoccupied the thinkers of antiquity. Cicero said that either the gods have foreknowledge, knowing what will happen tomorrow, and we are not free; or else we are free, and the gods do not know what will happen tomorrow. Which are we to choose? According to Cicero, we have to accept human freedom which is certain, and so much the worse for the knowledge of the gods! But, said St Augustine, it would be absurd to choose between the two; they must both be held: divine foreknowledge and human freedom.

There we have the problem. How is it to be solved? Only Catholic teaching provides a solution or, to be exact, the teaching of St Thomas, for I see in him the confluence of all the efforts made by the preceding centuries. The understanding of Scripture possessed by the Fathers has always been preserved in the Church; and their solutions are coordinated, rethought in depth by St Thomas.

The way to solve the problem is, before all else, to distinguish clearly the case of the good act and that of the evil act. All who fail to do this go astray. They say either that man is equally cause of his good and of his bad acts, or else that God is responsible for man's bad acts as well as his good ones. To adopt the same method of explaining good and bad acts is a fundamental mistake that renders the problem insoluble.

3. First let us look at the structure of the good act. In the course of history two contrary positions are in constant conflict. In different terms and in various expositions of this question, we continually find this same conflict of two opposed theses, both of them erroneous.

On the one hand there is the position of Pelagius, a British monk, a contemporary of St Augustine who attacked him. The Pelagian error consists in saying that the good act is decisively the product of man alone. Of course, Pelagius says, God created the universe, placed me in the world, gave me my human nature with its faculties, and imparts abundant graces of illumination. But it is I alone who assent freely to God, and it is this assent which is decisive. Take an example of two men at the bottom of a well: God holds out his hand to each, and so is ready to help; but it is I alone who take his hand; I am, doubtless, saved because God first stretched out his hand, but the decisive factor is that I, by my free will alone, took the hand, whereas my neighbor did not. So the choice is mine alone.

On the other hand, there is the exactly opposite error, held by Luther, among others, in the Western world: the good act comes from God alone. Man is wholly corrupted. The act that saves him comes from God alone. God alone justifies the sinner, in the way in which we have seen Luther to understand justification: God decides to 'regard this sinner as just'.

On the one hand the aim is to exalt the human will, the greatness of man as a free being; on the other, to exalt God's omnipotence.

These flatly opposed views arise from a common initial confusion. They are like brothers at enmity, both sharing the same parentage. The error common to both is to think that divine and human action are mutually exclusive: either it is man who does the good act, and then it is not God; or else it is God, and so not man. We are asked to choose between the two, and this is precisely where the error lies. For who, in fact, does the good act? Both God and man together. Notice that I take these two opposing positions of Pelagius and Luther from the Western world; but in La Valle'e, Poussin's book on Buddhism, I remember coming across the same problem stated in India under a different imagery. Salvation, it was said, comes about either in the way of the kitten or the little monkey. When attacked by a snake, the monkey jumps into its mother's bosom, and the mother jumps up into the trees; the decisive act is the strength with which the monkey clings to its mother; this represents the Pelagian position. The kitten, on the other hand, when in danger, does nothing at all; the mother takes it by the skin of its neck, and does everything. That is the Lutheran position. There is, too, the figure of two railway-engines that face one another on the same line; when one goes forward, the other goes back, each in turn. Divine and human action are held to compete against one another.

But human action (created) and divine action (uncreated) are not on the same plane. Divine action (in relation to human action) is one of envelopment: it gives rise to it, gives it being and continuance. According to Catholic doctrine, we must say that the good act comes from both God and man, from grace and freedom.

If you draw a circle and set inside it God and man, grace and freedom, you have the Catholic doctrine as defined; you escape both the Pelagian and the Lutheran error (not to mention the Calvinist and, in our own time, the Barthian). But the problem now lies within the circle; how are the divine and human actions to be coordinated or subordinated?

4. There are two schools of thought on this. One is that of St Thomas Aquinas which, through St Augustine, derives from St Paul—the great traditionalist school.

The other arose in the age of the baroque and of humanism. It is that of Molina, a Portuguese Jesuit who, on account of certain unresolved difficulties, wanted to explain in a way hitherto untried the relation of grace and freedom. God and man, he said, act like two horses on the tow-path of a canal drawing a boat. The actions of God and of man are supplementary like those of the horses. Molina thought of them as simply added one to the other. His doctrine has not been condemned, since he said, as regards the good act, God and man, grace and freedom. But, as we see, he transposed to within the circle the preceding error and if he did not set them against each other, at any rate he juxtaposed the divine and the human action. He did not sufficiently grasp the difference in plane between divine and human action and stressed unduly, to an extreme degree, the power of the human will. Here, expressed in accepted Christian terminology, we find again the example just given: God holds out his hand, I take it.

5. The traditional doctrine, the only one rooted in Revelation, has not yet been defined because there still remain certain questions to elucidate. But the definition will come, already the general line is clear: human action is subordinated to the divine action. It is not only God and man, grace and freedom, but God through man, grace through freedom, that does the good act. Is the rose produced by the rose-tree? Or by God? Or else partly by God, partly by the rose-tree? We must say: the rose is produced wholly by the rose-tree as secondary cause, and wholly by God as first cause, the enveloping cause. God gives the rose-tree the ability to produce the rose. God, acting on the rose-tree to make it produce the rose, does not diminish, but rather enriches, it. The more he intervenes, the more excellent will be the rose-tree the more powerful its action, the more God gives the radium atom both being and the power to act by emitting rays. Thus he communicates to it something of his dignity as cause though, admittedly, to a very low degree. Now, in affecting the atom to endow it with activity, God does not violate it, but makes it fecund. The atom then is, as it were, a transformer of the divine energy and changes it into physical energy on the mineral plane.

Now take a rose-tree. In the winter, it is at rest; but when touched by God in the spring, life begins to awake within it and soon it brings forth roses. The rose-tree, then, is as it were a transformer of the divine energy into vegetative energy. The divine action does not impair its nature, but helps it act in the vegetative order.

A bird sings. When God touches its nature, he enables it, without violating it, to exercise its activities in the sensitive order. He enables it to sing in the way proper to a bird.

We come to man, a free being with intelligence and will, with his immortal soul greater than all the world; when God touches his soul he enables it to act according to its nature, which is to rule over things of a lower order. Freedom is not independence in relation to God: if God does not touch me, am I then free? O no! If God does not touch me, I act no more, I exist no more, I fall into nothingness. Freedom is to be found within God himself, as in its infinite source; the nearer I draw to God and the more I share in his rule over lower beings, the more I am free. My freedom is a dependence in relation to God, a dependence that gives me a power over and freedom of choice in regard to the lower things. Because my heart is made for the fullness of the good, the beautiful and the true, because my soul is greater than the world and the world offers me only partial goods (real or apparent) I can, confronted with these goods, assent because they are good, or refuse them because they are partially good.

Take the case of truth. I can look for it in the world of physics and chemistry, or of mathematics or philosophy, or anywhere you like. These will never be other than particularized truths, none of them can fill my mind to capacity. I am always free to turn my life to the pursuit of this or that aspect of the truth. It is the same with the good. You offer me such and such a good, life in the world, for example, or the religious life. I always have to give up some things good and choose others, which are good but particularized. Even if I choose the contemplative life, God shows himself to me in the aspect of a particular good: if I am a Carthusian, I cannot go out and preach to pagans or raise a family. You offer me only particular goods and I was made for total good. My soul keeps its power and freedom of choice. Then God, when he touches me according to my nature, does not infringe my freedom but, on the contrary, exalts it: 'God who made this delicate machine of our free-will is the only one who can move it without breaking it.' He does not impair natures, but makes them flourish. Who was more dependent on God than St Francis of Assisi, and who was freer? You could place him in any condition you like, throw him into a concentration-camp, he would still be in command of all that was lower in the scale of being, he would still be St Francis.

6. This then is the structure of the good act. God produces through me my free act and, since he knows all that he does, he knows this act. If I perform an act of love tomorrow, it will be because God has given me the enveloping and sustaining impulse. Does he know this act beforehand? Knowing beforehand is the act of someone immersed in time, and what I know in advance are only those things that are not free, they are predetermined facts whose cause is already posited today and whose development is inevitable. I know beforehand the stakes that have been laid. A doctor can say in advance that a disease will develop in a certain way and that death will result. I can say that the sun will rise tomorrow at such and such a time. But I cannot know a free act beforehand and with certainty, I can only make a conjecture: perhaps this person will do this particular act, which is good, or that, which is bad. If God were within time, he would be reduced to knowing the future only 'in advance'. But he would know in this way only predetermined events, the stakes already laid, the drama whose scenario was already written. But God is not in time; he is on the mountain of eternity. If I am on level ground and see a procession comes along, I see first the beginning, then the middle, then the end; but if I go up a hill, I see at a single glance the whole sequence. In God there is no past, present and future parallel to our past, present and future. He is on the mountain of eternity, whence he sees simultaneously the whole sequence of our past, present and future. In God there is no remembrance of things past nor, strictly speaking, foresight of things to come. There is in him but one vision, a single present and simultaneous look at what, successively, has been, is, will be. From his place of eternity God knows all the free acts his creatures have done, are doing, will do; he knows with a knowledge which does not precede these free acts, but is above them; he knows them not beforehand, but from all eternity. You see then, that when we say 'God knows beforehand', we are attributing to him a human manner of knowing.

So God's knowledge is safeguarded in the case of the good act. It is certain that, from all eternity, God sees himself instigating in me this or that good action, making it come to fruition, and that without violating my free will, but rather creating it. God's prescience from all eternity—the prefix must be understood not as meaning 'beforehand', but as signifying knowledge 'of a higher mode ('He to whom everything is always present knows the future not by prescience but by a knowledge of the present, praesentium scientia.' St Anselm, "Dialogue on the fall of the Devil," P.L., v. 158, col. 353.)—and human freedom are thus reconciled. We come, not to a contradiction, but to a great mystery. God is mystery; if you stop thinking a mystery of him, if you imagine him and his knowledge of the world after the fashion of man, everything falls to pieces.

7. Let us pass on to the structure of the evil act. This is a mystery too, but one of darkness.

Suppose I have to testify in court of law. I have to think what I want to say, I proceed from not doing to doing; there is an element of being there. If my testimony is true, all this being is ordered to truth; if it is false, there is the same amount of physical being, but the whole action is morally warped, anarchical; it is far removed from the purpose for which it was made. The power and the very act of witnessing were given me for the sake of justice; I use them for injustice, to destroy and not to build. So we must say: all that there is of physical being in the sinful act derives from God, the source of all being; all that there is of moral deviation comes from me.

The example given by St Thomas is that of a man whose brain's locomotive centres function well, but whose tibia is bent. As a result, whenever he walks he limps. If you try to prevent him from limping, you prevent him from walking; the two are inseparable. But the deviation comes from the bent tibia, not the moving centre. The whole action comes from the locomotive centre and the nerves controlling walking, which are themselves sound; the whole deviation comes from the bent tibia, from an intermediate cause, not from the source of the movement.

So it is with the act which is bad. All the being (physical) of the bad act comes from God, but all the deviation (moral) of the bad act, everything that causes the deviation of the movement given by God for our good, all the sinfulness, comes from man alone.

In the good act, God has the first initiative, he is the first, enveloping cause of the act, and man the secondary cause. In the sinful act, man is first cause of the deviation, that is of the non-being, the disorder, the destruction. Homo prima causa mali: man is first cause of evil! But can he be first cause of anything? Yes, he can be first cause of whatever is not a thing; he can do what is no thing, he can destroy, annihilate the divine action that comes to visit him. Here man can take the first initiative; he is first cause of the annulling of the divine action. So, you see, it is a mystery of darkness.

8. The divine movement takes the initiative in my regard; it is always attentive to my welfare. Its presence surrounds me like the air I breathe; if I place no obstacle in its way, it will bear fruit in me in good acts. But God does not create good acts in me without my doing anything. He does them through me. He does not deck me out in them as one decorates a Christmas tree with candles and sweets, which would be absurd; rather, he makes me produce good acts as the fir tree brings forth cones, that is to say by a vital process.

God is always knocking at the door of my heart. If I let him act, he makes me assent in a more and more excellent way. I cannot pride myself on this or pray like the Pharisee: 'Lord, I give the tithe of all I possess . . . while this publican is a sinner'. If I do something good, what I should say is, 'My God, I have so often refused you. Thank you for having helped me to consent this time. To you the glory, and not to me, worm of the earth.'

I can say 'No!' It is not that God has not helped me sufficiently. He was there, as I told you, knocking at the door of my heart. I have impeded his movement and in such wise that, if I continue to do so and death comes, it will be hell, separation from God. I shall not blame him, I shall never be able to blame him for not having helped me enough. It is I who willed to hinder the divine movement, I am to blame. None of the damned will arise at the last day to say, 'Lord, you did not help me enough.' They will all say, 'That is what 1 willed.' And they will go on maintaining that their choice was an excellent one. If a single one of the damned could say he was damned by God's fault, God would not be God.

So then, if I die in an act of love, it is God who will have enabled me to do this act, and I shall say, 'Lord, it is due to your infinite goodness that I am entering finally into your Light. You have sent me into Paradise, as an archer shoots his arrow at the mark. To you be the glory.' That is precisely what predestination is: the act by which God takes hold of me and causes me to give the ultimate assent to his love.

If I refuse, God comes again, seeking to raise me from the ruinous state into which I have fallen. He may rouse me to remorse; right to the end he pursues me with his mercy. If I decide to refuse to the end, that is my fault: I will that my will prevail over God's summons. So the text always cited by St Thomas: 'Thy destruction comes from thee, O Israel; from me alone comes thy help' (Osee xiii. 9), is applicable to each of us when we understand Israel as a figure of the soul. The man who has shut himself against grace would have been led by the divine action, had he not frustrated it, to do a good act, which would have been followed by other good acts till final justification. God offered him what would have produced the bud, which would have put forth the flower, and finally the fruit.

9. On the other hand, if I allow God to act, he will as a rule cause me to make first an act of faith, then of saving fear, then one of hope, and then will come a beginning of love: all is not lost, you can yet, with this grace, rise to your feet again.

I go to a church, to a confessional, confess my sins humbly, receive absolution and God's boundless pardon, and at that moment I am justified. That is how it happens in the majority of cases.

None the less, there may be exceptional cases. Instead of preparing a sinner gradually for justification, by a succession of movements each of which may be impeded, God may overwhelm him suddenly by an irresistible movement, as he did St Paul on the road to Damascus. He may cause him to enter Paradise with the suddenness of a man falling into ecstasy; he does so frequently, I think, but theologians say that this is in the nature of a miracle. The normal process is a series of graces which can be resisted but which, if accepted, will lead to one which is irresistible, victorious—a grace that will make me produce the good act and I will thank God for giving me the strength to do so.

Let us call the resistible graces that I may frustrate sufficient graces, and the irresistible ones offered in these when they are not impeded—as fruit is offered in the flower—efficacious graces. That will explain the distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace.

10. This distinction brings to mind Pascal's "Lettres Provinciales," but we will not find there anything to throw light on it. Pascal rejects the doctrine, which he attributes to the Jesuits, according to which 'there is a grace given indiscriminately to all men and dependent on free will to the point that it makes this grace efficacious or inefficacious, without any additional help from God', a grace 'they call sufficient because it suffices by itself for acting'. That is the theory of the man at the bottom of a well, who has no need of help to take hold of God's hand stretched out to help him. We, too, along with Pascal, reject this doctrine. He attributes to the Dominicans of Saint Jacques a doctrine which may indeed have been held by several of them, according to which sufficient grace is the simple power God gives to all men of acting aright; we also reject this 'sufficient grace which does not suffice'. We hold that sufficient grace is the movement God gives to all men to make them act rightly, which they may impede (through their fault) or not impede (and then it infallibly attracts efficacious grace and leads to good actions). But Pascal maintained that there were no sufficient graces, only efficacious graces, and that these are not given to all men. Here we have the Jansenist error.

After the condemnation of the five propositions, the Jansenists themselves made no further difficulty about confessing that Jesus is the Redeemer of all men, as the Church sings at Christmas. Yet all are not saved. Is that their own fault? Or is it the fault of God in being too sparing of his grace? This is the crucial question. The true doctrine is that Jesus is the Redeemer of all men, even of those who will not be saved, for he obtains for them and grants them interior graces of such power that not one of them will dream of accusing God, and they will never cease, throughout eternity, to claim and to choose to be alone responsible for their own damnation.

11. Man alone is the entire cause of sin; in sin he alone has the first initiative. In sinning, then, do I take God by surprise, elude his knowledge, change his eternal plan?

To say so would be absurd. I should baffle the divine knowledge if, by myself alone, I were able to bring into the world the slightest fraction of being. But when I sin, it is not being but non-being, nothingness, that I bring into the world.

When does God come to know this nothingness? After he has established his plan? No. My sin of yesterday, my sin of tomorrow, it is not that God saw or will see me committing them; he sees me now: he sees me frustrating the prevenient movements of his grace. He sees this in the eternal present in which he establishes his plan. It is true that the divine plan is immutable, once it is fixed from all eternity. But it is fixed from all eternity only with the free defection of man taken into account. Thus man's sin does not modify the divine plan, but enters into its eternal and determined pattern.

All our difficulties come from representing God's knowledge after the fashion of man's. As soon as we take account of the transcendence of the divine knowledge, will and freedom, all contradictions disappear; but we are plunged in mystery. 'O the depths of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!' (Rom. xi. 33).

12. Now we are at the point where we can form some idea of the drama of the world:

The first initiative always comes from God in the case of the good; so the initiative of created freedom itself derives from the divine initiative. But on account of the power of refusal which is a natural part of all created freedom, the first initiative always comes from the creature in the case of evil, God being able but unwilling to prevent the creature opposing him by refusal whenever it so decides.... The glory of the divine freedom is to make a work all the more beautiful, in proportion to the extent to which it allows the other [creaturely] freedom to undo it, because from the abundance of destruction it alone can draw a superabundance of being. As for us, part of the pattern as we are, we only see the strange intertwining of the threads that are woven on our heart. (Maritain)

13. This is the essence of what it is possible to say about actual grace. We have seen that God is bound by his justice and his love to give each one such graces that, if he is not saved, it is his own fault as a sinner, not God's. But God is not obliged to give the same graces to all. There are inequalities in the order of grace, just as there are in the order of nature.

We do not mean the inequalities that come from sin, from injustice, against which we ought to fight. What of the natural inequalities of men? Why do they exist? St Catherine of Siena says: so that each one may be, in regard to all the rest, both a giver and a beggar. St Thomas, viewing the whole of creation, explains that God was, doubtless, free to create or not. But if he willed to create with a certain magnificence, he had to multiply and diversify creatures, so that each should represent some aspect of his infinite richness.

So it is with grace. God imparts his gifts variously the better o show forth the beauty and perfection of his Church. It is like a garden where there are the white roses of virginity and the red ones of martyrdom, the holiness of innocence and that of repentance.

Think of little children at the moment of their baptism. They each receive the same baptism. Their state is the same, it is purely a state of waiting. But with the awakening of moral consciousness, when God knocks at the door of their soul, inequalities begin to appear. St Teresa of Lisieux, for example, began with a grace much superior to that of other small children. There must be every sort of thing in God's garden, not only all the different flowers but grass, too, and pebbles in the paths. And, after all, it is a fine thing to be only a pebble in the paths of Paradise!

14. We shall end with a word on what are called 'charismatic graces'. The word grace is here taken in a different sense, not unrelated to the former, but not so radical. It is no longer a question of grace "gratum faciens" (which makes the soul 'graceful' and gives it an attractive quality, itself a gift of God, who himself becomes enamoured of it); nor of actual grace (which precedes and follows sanctifying grace); but of graces not directly sanctifying the person receiving them, graces that simply enable him to perform acts which assist others along the road to sanctifying grace. They are useful socially.

St Thomas distinguishes two kinds of common good: the extrinsic common good of a collectivity, and the common good intrinsic to, immanent in the collectivity. The latter serves the former. In the temporal order, the 'extrinsic' common good of the army is victory, which is what is aimed at; the common good 'immanent' in, interior to, the army is its right order; it must be organized in such a way as to achieve victory. In the spiritual order God is the common good extrinsic to or distinct from the Church; the order of the Church is the common good immanent in the Church. So, then, sanctifying grace is directly ordered to be pleasing to God, the extrinsic common good of the spiritual universe. Charismatic graces, on the other hand, are directly ordered to the perfection of the Church, the immanent common good of the spiritual universe, and to promote in the Church the flowering of sanctifying grace.

How, asks St Thomas, can a man act so as to prepare others to receive sanctifying grace? Not by entering their heart (interius movendo) to turn it towards God; God alone can do that. But he can, from outside, perform a certain number of acts which may be like ladders enabling others to gain access to sanctifying grace (exterius agendo).

How are these charismatic graces to be recognized? By applying the passage in St Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians (xii. 27): 'You are the body of Christ and members of member. And God indeed hath set some in the Church: first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly doctors: after that miracles: then the graces of healings, helps, governments, kinds of tongue, interpretation of speeches. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all doctors? Are all workers of miracles? . . . No!'

These graces, which do not necessarily sanctify those who have them, are privileges. But the privilege reserved to a few is not what is most valuable; it is at the service of love, which is offered to all. One of these privileges is a prophetic light enabling one to transmit the message with a certain penetration. This light, this knowledge, is indeed called faith, but it is not the theological virtue offered to all, which alone is necessary for salvation. It is the 'faith to work miracles' offered to a few. For example, at certain moments a saint will feel that, if he asks God for a particular miracle, perhaps the raising to life of a dead person, God will grant it him; at other times, he will not pray for it. Such gifts enable their possessors to confirm their message. There is also the gift of expression, of interpretation of tongues. The gift of tongues spoken of in the first Epistle to the Corinthians requires discernment. A certain exaltation may cause a man to speakin tongues, to utter words he is unable to explain. What accounts for this? Sometimes a morbid element. In the beginnings of Christianity these manifestations took place in various circles, and they may have been the vehicle of valuable lights or gifts; but a considerable discernment is necessary in such cases, and St Paul says that those who interpret are more important than those who speak in tongues, since the latter do not edify the community, but the former do.

The gift of tongues the apostles had at Pentecost was a grace of quite different quality from the gift of tongues to whose presence among the Corinthians St Paul witnesses, and which may still be found at meetings of Salvationists and other sects, where the divine and the human, the true and the false, the healthy and the morbid are intermingled. The gift of Pentecost, on the contrary, must have been wholly excellent. The best explanation I know is that given by Mickiewicz, a kind of prophet in the natural order. He used to speak in French at the College de France entirely without any sort of preparation. When he had an audience in front of him, all sorts of things came into his mind, and he succeeded in communicating his most profound thoughts in a language which was not his native tongue. This led him to explain how he conceived the gift of Pentecost. The apostles, so he thought, may simply have spoken in their own language, but their thought itself was instilled, in its pure state, into their hearers, so that 'each man heard in his own tongue', that is to say, in the sounds of his native language. To illuminate or stir, almost directly, the hearts of those present, by overcoming the language obstacle, was quite a different thing from the gift of tongues of the first Christian communities.

To these charismatic graces I would add other privileges: those of the hierarchy, that is the power of jurisdiction or the power of teaching with authority in matters speculative and practical which resides in the bishops and the Sovereign Pontiff, and the power of orders or the power of consecrating the Eucharist and administering the sacraments, all of them powers enabling some people to help others to attain eternal life. They are powers at the service of love, which is primary and given to all. In this connection, I like to recall that there is one precept of the Gospel Jesus asks us to observe, though he did not observe it himself: 'Cast not your pearls before swine'. He himself offered, gave his love to all! So much so that Bloy says—in a phrase characteristic of him—that the Holy Ghost 'prostitutes himself' to go in search of people in the gutter. Those who are given privileges will have to account to God for the way they have used them. If they do so in a holy manner, they may be brought closer to God, but in themselves these charismata are a burden, a service. We must recall in this connection the last words of Claudel's "Jeanne d'Arc au bucher": 'It is love that is strongest'.








     

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