VI. THE SECOND EXISTENTIAL STATE: CHRISTIAN GRACE 'BY ANTICIPATION' UNDER THE LAW OF NATURE AND UNDER THE MOSAIC LAW

1. In the first existential state grace, without reference to any mediation of Christ, established a people of God which was not the Mystical Body of Christ, and so not yet the Church.

After the destruction of the state of innocence, how did God act? Did he withdraw his love from men? On the contrary, he pursued them with his love. He sent his Son so that he might die for them, in order to reconcile heaven and earth, to 'recapitulate'—the word is St Paul's—all things, that is to reassemble, recompose, remould the universe. To the universe of grace centred on the first Adam there succeeded a universe of grace centred on the Word made flesh.

2. Immediately after the fall the mediation of Christ began. It worked in a very hidden manner, by anticipation. This was the age of the expectation of Christ. It was possible for men to be saved by him without knowing of his future coming, except in a very obscure and very imperfect manner. They could be saved if they believed truly, profoundly, by an assent of theological faith, that God is and that he is ready to help. In the faith that God is there was contained, although men were not yet able to realize it, faith in the Trinity; and in the faith in a God ready to help there was precontained faith in the Incarnation and Redemption. This is the great doctrine of the Epistle to the Hebrews (xl. 6): 'Without faith, it is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him.'

The destruction of the first state of innocence was perlnitted so that God might show forth his love for us, his boundless love, by giving his Son for the salvation of the world. From then on everything was to be centred on the cross: 'I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself' (John xii. 32); and the evangelist adds: 'This he said signifying what death he should die'. We have too the great passage from St Paul (Col. i. 20): God willed 'through him to reconcile all things unto himself, making peace through the blood of the cross, both as to the things that are on earth and the things that are in heaven'. To the Ephesians he wrote: 'That he might make known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed in him, in the dispensation of the fulness of time, to re-establish all things in Christ that are in heaven and on earth in him'. Re-establish . . . the true translation from the Greek is 'recapitulate', a compound containing "caput," head: to gather round a new centre, to recentre, if you like, all things in Christ. God allowed the fall only because he held in reserve the remedy of the redemption; the new world remade round Christ would be better than the previous one. So the grace given before the coming of Christ was already, by anticipation, a Christian grace.

No sooner had man fallen, than God from the height of heaven poured down grace and forgiveness. He enters on a dialogue with each individual person, he knocks at the door of each man's heart. The vast multitudes of men in prehistoric time were each, according to their inner attitude to God's invitation, in the state either of grace received or else of grace refused. But all grace before Christ was given only in view of his future coming; it was Christian grace by anticipation. It was given because of the great supplication of Christ on the cross which is mentioned in the Epistle to the Hebrews (v. 7):

'Who in the days of his flesh, with a strong cry and tears, offering up prayers and supplications to him that was able to save him from death, was heard for his reverence. And whereas indeed he was the Son of God, he learned obedience by the things which he suffered. And being consummated, he became to all that obey him the cause of eternal salvation, called by God a high priest according to the order of Melchisedech'. For the souls who opened themselves to the promptings of this grace, Christian by anticipation, there was, even before Christ, a beginning of membership in Christ and his Mystical Body, Christ's Church. In that respect, Christ's Church existed before Christ, in an initial, rudimentary state.

3. It was still hardly visible, hidden in the depths of men's hearts, difficult for the human eye to discern, seen only by God and the angels. To help you understand the hidden way in which grace then worked its way into men's hearts, I suggest this comparison. When you go out on a summer morning into a meadow, you notice that each blade of grass has its own drop of dew which keeps it from dying of thirst. How has this drop come there? We do not know; it is a mystery. So it is with the grace in each soul. According as it is accepted or refused, it traces, in the world before Christ, the frontier between the city of God and the city of evil.

St Thomas calls this age the age of the natural law. Why? Because grace came into men's hearts by adapting itself to the movements of nature. When man obeyed the true impulses of his nature to perform good acts, when he chose the morally good, grace was there in secret, bearing him up to make contact with realities of a higher and more mysterious kind. The impulse urging him to acknowledge God's sovereignty, to adore him, to confess his dependence upon him, to admit and be sorry for his faults, came from a source higher than he could conceive, from the very heart of the Trinity. Grace came down into his soul in the guise of the movements of nature, drawing him towards ends far beyond those he could know by his natural powers.

Think of those words of the Gospel (John iii. : 'The Spirit breatheth where he will and thou hearest his voice; but thou knowest not whence he cometh and whither he goeth. So is everyone that is bom of the Spirit'. The Spirit of God comes from higher and goes much deeper than we think.

4. The external forms of worship were taken from the surrounding world. Souls interiorly illuminated considered God's witness to himself in cosmic phenomena as symbolic of divine realities. The various events were manifestations of the divinity: 'hierophanies' (hieros—holy; phanie = manifestation), as they are called by historians of religion. For example, in the religions of the Siberian nomads, or again, in China, the word for 'heavens' sigIufies the transcendence of God. As we still say 'Heaven grant that . . .'. Stomls manifested God's anger and the dependence of man liable to be overwhelmed by them. The stability of the rocks evoked that of eternity as compared with the things of time. And these symbols are found in the Bible; for example, 'God is my rock', he is my support. In the gemlination of spring-time, in the cycle of the seasons, men read the manifestations of a God who was good and beneficent, towards whom their hearts could be tumed by interior grace.

We read in the Acts of the Apostles (xiv. 7 ff.) that Paul and Bamabas, after arriving at Lystra in Asia Minor and working a miracle among the pagans there, had to prevent them from adoring them as gods in human fomm: 'We also are mortals, men like unto you, preaching to you to be converted from these things to the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all things that are in them; who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless he left not himself without testimony, doing good from heaven, giving rains and fruitful seasons [rain, in hot countries, was a sign of the fruitfulness given by the divine goodness], filling our hearts with food and gladness. . .'. The phenomena of nature, said Paul and Barnabas, bore testimony to God and enabled you to acknowledge him by worship. 'Filling your hearts with joy' signifies that, over and above these outward gifts, God gave the Gentiles an interior light enabling them to grasp their inner meaning.

In the same connection St Paul's words to the Athenians (Acts xvii. 26) may be cited: 'He hath made of one all mankind, to dwell upon the whole face of the earth, determining appointed times and the limits of their habitation. That they should seek God, if haply they may feel after him or find him, although he be not far from every one of us. For in him we live and move and are; as some also of your own poets said: For we are also his offspring'.

5. Such then was the state of the natural law, in which grace, already Christian, was offered in a hidden manner to each soul. Indeed we find in Scripture the names of persons who, though not belonging to the line of the patriarchs, yet lived in holiness; for example, Melchisedech, superior to Abraham because the latter offered tithes to him—which, incidentally, is why Christ is said to be priest, not according to the order of Abraham or Aaron, but according to the order of Melchisedech. Who, in fact, was Melchisedech? Historically nothing is known of him, but he appears in the Bible as someone mysterious, invested with high dignity. Yet he did not belong to the chosen people. The Bible speaks also of Job, who was not a Jew but an Idumaean; and of the queen of Sheba, 'who will rise on the day of judgment to condemn this generation' for its hostility to the Messias, the queen 'who came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon' (Mt. xii. 42).

6. Christ was to come as Mediator, to teach, to give his grace through the sacraments. Previous to his coming, he may be said to have begun already to mediate. A form of teaching was possible: various individuals scattered and hidden in the gentile world, were endowed with prophetic gifts, and empowered to proclaim the truth and set things in order when disorder had gone too far. There were sacraments, too. These were sensible signs chosen by men through the interior inspiration of grace. For example, when parents presented their new-born child to God, theologians hold that he cleansed it from original sin. Yet these sacraments were not like those of the New Law; grace did not pass through them, they were only signs, not causes, of grace; their function was limited to designating the subject on whom grace was conferred.

The mediation of prophetic teaching and of sensible signs served to prepare men under the law of nature for the twofold visible mediation of teaching and sacraments that would be inaugurated later by the Redeemer. The time of religion without intermediary had passed away.

What was offered to men in these times was a very simple revelation: the inscrutable mystery of a God who is, in the first place; and who, in the second place, is a rewarder, that is to say, beneficent to those who seek him.

7. We must add that the forces of evil were not inactive. They tended to distort the rites, the sacrifices, the recognition to God in the hierophanies.

What form of distortion was prevalent in the world of the natural law? For most people it was idolatry; for the intellectuals, pantheism. God was not denied, but associated with the things of this world; his transcendence was lost sight of. Monotheism was the primitive belief, anterior to polytheism. But, in submerging God in the world, men came to divide him just as they divided the world, so that there came to be as many gods as separate lands.

There existed, besides, other forms of distortion. The rites of initiation, for example, were often cruel, immoral, perverse.

Human dignity could be raised above itself by the presence of grace, just as it could be degraded and infected by diabolic perversion. Such was the world of the natural law, its nobility and its depravity.

8. But God set up a second regime, centred on a revelation of such power that it set aside a whole people, the little people of theJews, from the great mass of the world under the natural law. God sent Abraham into exile from the polytheistic environment in which he lived. By a stroke of extraordinary power he manifested himself to him a second time, revealing the mysteries of his infinite transcendence and his wonderful condescension. He is the one God and he is beneficent. As Abraham lay prostrate before him, he promised him a progeny more numerous than the sands of the desert and the stars of heaven. With Abraham and the patriarchs a new world comes into being.

It takes definite form at the moment when the Law is given to Moses. God wishes to prepare a people that will be as it were a cradle to receive his Son at the Incarnation. The people are the Jews. With them, the regime of the Mosaic Law succeeds to that of the natural law. Grace goes on knocking at the door of each man's heart even more urgently than in the past.

9. What is new is, primarily, the continuity of the prophetic light of revelation. God undertakes to supplement continuously that first revelation made to Abraham, till the moment when, after manifesting himself to his people for nearly two thousand years as the one God, so that this idea of his unity should remain ineffaceable in man's memory, he could, in the end, make known to them that the infinite abundance of his unity of being overflows, from eternity, into a Trinity of persons. Thus, on the one hand, the notion of Unity opened out into that of Trinity, which was seen to be precontained therein, as is the rose in the bud. And, on the other hand, the notion of God's providence for mankind opened out into that of the Incarnation and Redemption: God is so beneficent to men as to send his Son Jesus to die for them on the cross—that will be the era of the New Testament.

Besides the continuity of prophecy, what is also new is the institution of the sacraments of the Old Law, such as circumcision and the Paschal Lamb. What, for example, was circumcision originally? All these matters are explained by Pere Lagrange in his book on the semitic religions. (M. J. Lagrange, O.P. "Etudes sur les religions semitiques," Paris, 1905.) All primitive peoples had a profound sense of the value of life, of its generation and preservation. They marked the passing from childhood to adolescence by an initiation ceremony, different among different peoples, a ceremony whose real meaning was religious. With the Semites it was circumcision. What does God do? He consecrates this rite, and makes it the sign of the gathering of his people, the seal of his alliance with them. The Paschal Lamb, too, had the value of a sacrament. At the moment when the Israelites were about to leave Egypt, they ate the Paschal Lamb whose blood, marking their doors, signified God's protection over their houses; this protection was renewed with each commemorative celebration of the Pasch.

These were true sacraments, indicated and commanded by God himself. But we must be careful! They still were not like those of the New Law, causes of grace; like those of the natural law, they were simple signs designating those to whom they were applied as potential beneficiaries of the divine goodness. The Gentiles had to devise sacramental rites for themselves or to choose rites already used in the tribe; in any case, they had a free choice. But in the people of Israel it was God who designated the rites by revelation: 'Behold the sign you will take'; this was a greater manifestation of the divine will. In the New Testament, it was to assert itself still more precisely; for now Christ chooses the sacraments, not we; and he makes them instrumental causes, channels, of his grace.

10. Grace, then, is Christian by anticipation, whether in the world of natural law, the Gentile world, or in that of the Mosaic Law, the Jewish world. It is more clearly seen in the people to whom God gave more, and from whom he demanded more. I have compared the regime of natural law to the dew that comes from an unknown source; that of the Mosaic Law is like a stream whose origin and course are clearly seen. If the Israelites were faithful, they would be more fully rewarded; if they sinned, their punishment would be the more severe. We find this in the Epistle to the Romans (ii. 9-12): 'Tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that worketh evil, of the Jew first (because more enlightened) and also of the Greek (the Gentiles). But glory and honour and peace to everyone that worketh good, to the Jew first [if he is faithful to the Law, for, since it demands more from him, his life will be nobler], and also to the Greek. For there is no respect of persons with God. For whosoever have sinned without the law shall perish without the law: and whosoever have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law'.

This doctrine of divine grace present in both these worlds figures in the Sistine Chapel (in those days theology provided artists with their subjects; so we have the myustical Lamb painted by van Eyck). The theme there is the two worlds of the Jews and of the Gentiles approaching the judgment-seat of Christ, according to St Paul's words: 'God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ' (Rom. ii. 16). The Sybils symbolize the presence of grace in the Gentile world; in reality, they were little more than are the fortune-tellers of today. Still, to the mind of St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church the Sybils, in the world of the Gentiles, corresponded in some sort to the prophets of the Jews. Thus the presence of grace was affirmed among both Jews and Gentiles, whom Christ, according to St Paul, was to make a single people in his Church, a people sealed by his blood.

11. In this way Christianity existed in embryonic rorm before Christ. Consider the sunlight! Suppose you go out very early, when it is still night. At a certain moment, things begin to grow light. Whence comes this light, which steadily grows stronger? All at once the sun appears; you realize that, even before it rose, it was giving its light to the world. So Christianity existed before Christ, and not merely virtually; it had begun and it was on the move. We could take another image: the flower, which, before it blooms, already exists in the stem and the bud. It is easy to meet Rousseau's objection in the "Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard": either Christianity is necessary for salvation, and you have to consider all the millions of men who lived before Christ to be damned; or else you say they could be saved, in which case Christianity is not necessary for salvation and pagan religions are equally valid. He, no doubt, thought this problem insoluble, but the answer is simple enough: Christianity is necessary for salvation; those who were saved before Christ were saved through him; they constituted, by anticipation, his Mystical Body, his Church. For, even then, grace was Christian.

Such is the second existential state of grace, but the first state of Christian grace. When Christ came, he fused in himself Jews and Gentiles. That is why he is called the 'cornerstone', which unites in itself the two facades. St Paul wrote to the Ephesians, a Gentile people (ii. 13-18): 'Now, in ChristJesus, you, who some time were far off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and, breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities . . . that he might make the two in himself into one new man, making peace, and might reconcile both to God in one body by the cross.... And coming he preached peace to you [Gentiles] that were afar off, and peace to them [Jews] that were nigh. For by him we have access both in one Spirit to the Falher. Now, therefore, you are no more strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow-citizens of the saints and the domestics of God. . . '. Such was to be the Church in the fullness of its reality.

12. We must notice that the law of nature and the Mosaic Law, the one for the Gentiles and the other for the Jews, existed concurrently. This double regime of grace was normal for those days. At the same time, among both Jews and Gentiles, God was working secretly to prepare them for the cross of the Redeemer. According to the Fathers of the Church, both under the law of nature and under the Jewish law, sacrifices offered to God uncontaminated either by human perversity or by diabolic activity were acceptable to him only because he saw in them an adumbration of the future sacrifice of his Son. If the blood of Abel cried out to God, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews (xii. 24) this was because, one day and still more eloquently, the blood of Christ would cry out to God. All that was genuine before Christ came, all the things that were acceptable to God, were so because he saw them already overshadowed by the cross; they were the first rough outline of what he would receive later from the supreme sacrifice of his Son. The Christian graces formed a single people, not yet visibly assembled, but already centred on Jesus. The Church was in course of formation, advancing through the centuries towards the Redeemer. Human dignity was solicited both by divine grace and the forces of perversity; assent and refusal were, then as now, the outcome of a free interior decision; grace constantly returned to move men's hearts, and those who did not refuse it at the end already belonged to Christ, though perhaps still knowing nothing of him.

St Thomas puts the case of the justification of a child born and living in pagan surroundings where no missionary has ever been. What happens when he begins to distinguish right and wrong? There comes a moment when he is about to perform his first free act. Not just a preliminary essay in that direction, for there are always tentative gropings first, but a truly free act, conscious and moral, in which he chooses between good and evil, in which, if he chooses the good, it is not out of obedience to his parents, or through habit or fear, but precisely because it is good. He has to choose, says St Thomas, the "bonum honestum," which we might translate as the 'human' good or what is 'noble'. It may be in connexion with some particular happening. According to St Thomas, if he chooses the good, he is at that moment secretly given grace; for, since human nature is impaired, no one can choose the morally excellent in matters of ultimate importance without the aid of the grace of Christ. At that moment, says St Thomas, the child is justified and cleansed from original sin. Imagine a child, angry with another, who sees him suddenly attacked by a wild animal. Instead of thinking: 'so much the worse for him', he says: 'no, I will go to his help'. He chooses the noble part, without more ado. In fact, his impulse comes from the Trinity and bears him on towards the Trinity although he quite certainly has no knowledge of God in three Persons. He may not, perhaps, even have formulated mentally the distinction between the created and the Uncreated. His heart has made its decision before ever the mind could have completed its reasoning. Unlike the Christian child, already acquainted with the teachings of revelation, he has to find out the truth bit by bit for himself. I am speaking here of a child born 'in the wilds', before the time of Christ. We may say that he has received in advance 'the baptism of desire', since he is justified from original sin. By choosing what is good in the merely human order, the only kind he is capable of perceiving, he chooses a greater good than he suspects: his ultimate destiny and the deep mysteries of God.

We may add that this could happen in connection with an act the child thinks good but which is, in reality, not so. If he thinks that it is courateous to steal a sheep from a neighbouring tribe and does so thinking it good, his act will be deemed good.

So Christ's redemptive grace was at work even before his coming, illuminating from within all man's sufferings, his emotional conflicts, his warfare with natural forces. Already under the natural law and under the Law of Moses, the cross threw its shadow over the world and brought it salvation.







     

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