Transcript

We live in an age when being good is often reduced just to following rules.

A good citizen is the one who obeys traffic laws, for example, and the good son is the one that gets home before curfew.

But reducing being good merely to just obedience creates a problem.

If being good is equated with doing what an authority commands us, then what's our freedom for?

Do we have to renounce our freedom in order to be good?

Or are we most free when we break the law?

Many people today are convinced that this is the case and would answer yes to these questions.

Christian teaching holds a different view of the moral life.

For the church fathers, for example, morality or being good was not fundamentally about obedience.

For them, morality was a question of happiness.

To be fair, the church fathers were also concerned with laws and rules, and they wrote extensively on questions of law and they studied the 10 Commandments with great care.

Nevertheless, they understood that in discussions of the moral life, obedience remains secondary to happiness.

The fathers asserted this because of their appreciation of God's goodness and their confidence that God created man to share in this happiness.

When St. Thomas Aquinas launches his discussion of the Christian moral life in his great work, the Summa Theologiae, he begins with the question of happiness, and this is a very deliberate move.

St. Thomas begins with the goal or purpose of the moral life, because he describes how through moral action, we arrive at the proper end, and this makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

If we want to travel to another city, for example, we need to find it on the map before we figure out how to get there.

We need to find the destination before we can figure out the best route.

For St. Thomas, seeing God face-to-face is the activity that will grant us complete and final happiness.

St. Thomas explains that God made us to know and love Him, and this would be the case even naturally speaking, just to know and love God in some vague and general sense.

But in Jesus Christ, God has offered us the supernatural gift of sharing His life forever in a vision of His very essence, a vision that we could never have were it not offered to us.

And God's offering of this gift changes everything.

The goal of life is not to find our greatest happiness in the goods of this life, but to cooperate with the graces that God gives us, to elevate us to Himself, to befriend Jesus Christ, and to follow Him through the mystery of His passion and death, to a participation in His resurrection.

St. Thomas understood clearly what the scriptures reveal about the moral life.

We won't simply fall into Heaven, nor will we get there simply by following a list of rules.

Rather, we arrive at our supernatural home by moving toward it in this life by grace, following step-by-step the path that Jesus set out for us.

The catechism of the Catholic Church continues St. Thomas' line of thinking when it explains that the Christian moral life, which has the beatific vision as its end, is a life composed of virtue, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Beatitudes.

The intellectual virtues, wisdom, understanding, and knowledge allow us to comprehend the things of this world well.

And the moral virtues, prudence, justice, courage, and temperance allow us to love the things of this world properly and moderately.

But the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, elevate our intellects and wills to enable them to know and love things beyond this world, God and the things of God.

The theological virtues form the very basis of our Christian moral life, and without them, we couldn't move toward God.

But with them, God invites and draws us into His divine life.

Infused with these virtues at baptism, the Christian moves toward God as his end through real acts of knowing, acts of faith, and real acts of loving, acts of hope and charity.

In the act of faith, the Christian believes that what God has said is true, and so to participate in God's infallible knowledge of Himself.

In faith, the Christian knows what God knows because he clings intellectually to God as first truth, the one who graciously speaks the truth to us.In the act of hope, the Christian loves God as a good that's difficult but possible to attain.

God is a difficult good to attain, because on our own we can't cross the infinite chasm separating the created and uncreated realms.

Nevertheless, God remains attainable because He has made Himself available to us by giving us every divine help necessary to reach Him; revelation, the Church and the sacraments, Mary and the saints, and daily graces and inspirations, and everything else.

Hope helps us love God as our difficult but attainable final good, and also helps us to love God as the helper who draws us to Himself.

In the act of charity, the Christian loves God as a friend.

And this is possible because, as St. John tells us in his first letter, God has loved us first.

In communicating His truth to us, God shows us His mercy and love, and so establishes the possibility of our being friends with Him.

Our response to revelation thus includes not just obedience to God's commands, but also the sharing of God's life in true friendship.

And once we love God as a friend, then we can love our neighbor in that same friendship of charity.

Faith then allows us in this life to know God as the source of all truth.

Hope allows us to love God as our promised reward.

And charity allows us in this life to love God as our first and best friend.

As we pass from this life to the next, faith will pass away.

What we believe now about God will finally be seen.

Hope will pass away too.

What we expect to enjoy in Heaven, we'll actually be enjoying.

And charity will remain, as the friendship we begin with God on Earth will continue everlastingly in the life of Heaven.

Theological virtues form the foundation of the Christian moral life, but the gifts of the Holy Spirit are its crown.

The seven gifts; wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord, compliment the theological and moral virtues, and they allow us to exercise these virtues under the direct influence of the Spirit.

The gifts render our minds and wills supple to the stirrings of the Spirit, so that our movement toward God by faith, hope, and charity is directed explicitly by God Himself.

And so by remaining docile to the Spirit, we imitate the Lord Jesus Himself, who in His earthly life was constantly led by the Spirit.

Finally, the Beatitudes indicate the precise kinds of actions that the gifts of the Holy Spirit enable us to perform.

The Beatitudes are not a checklist of things we have to accomplish, but are markers of what life looks like when it's lived in the Spirit.

The Beatitudes are the markers of Jesus' life.

And the Spirit enables us, through the gifts, to act, to move towards the Father as Jesus did.

In summary, the Christian moral life is not about completing lists of commands, but about moving by the power of grace toward our final happiness, union with God in the face-to-face vision of Himself, a vision He promises us in glory.

Thank you for joining me in this session.

In our next session, we'll discuss law and the Ten Commandments.