Optimizing Human Fulfillment

Dr Martin continues his series on Christian Culture, with the question "how can we become fully human?" The answer is prayer.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

A well-ordered society requires the presence of three essential relationships: man's connection to the world, to one another, and to God.

A young man anxious about his immortal soul approaches his pastor to complain about so many mediocre souls he’s forced to keep company with at Mass. “There must be a parish somewhere,” he asks, “where people are actually saints? Would you please direct me to it?” Suppressing a smile, the kind pastor tells him that, of course, there is such a parish. “Only you must remember,” he advises the young man, “that from the first moment you join such a parish, its perfection will have been diminished by your membership in it.”

Yes, the story is apocryphal, but that’s not the point of it. In fact, as Chesterton would say, “it’s as plain as a potato.” Which is that for certain rarefied souls, the perfect Church would be one so pure that no human being could possibly be a part of it. Only angels need apply. 

Not exactly the sort of Church Jean Daniélou had in mind in writing his little book. An arrangement of that sort, he would argue, would never be acceptable to Christ’s Mystical Body, whose thirst for souls remains as wide as creation itself, and no less generous than God’s offer of salvation, which is extended to all, sinners included. Indeed, to disdain a Church along those lines, a Church so promiscuous as to desire the company of the impure, would amount to an act of abdication, of surrendering the entire sacramental mission of the Church herself, wiping out whole redemptive possibilities envisioned by Christ. Who has precisely come, explains Daniélou,

to save all that has been made. Redemption is concerned with all creation, civilization is part of the order of creation…is sick and needs to be healed like all things that pertain to man in his wounded state…Christianity must take up and consecrate all that has to do with man.

Such a strategy, no more sweeping that which can be imagined, will necessarily include especially the least morally prepossessing of people, which is to say, ourselves. Didn’t Christ come primarily for people like us? For whom, as the poet Eliot expresses it, 

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse [i.e., the Church]
Whose constant care is not to please
But remind of our and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital 
Endowed by the ruined millionaire
Wherein, if we do well, we shall die   
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere…

The problem with the first solution, therefore, to which only those as pure as the driven snow feel themselves drawn, is that it would effectively abandon not only the poor, who are especially in need of grace, but civilization as well, of which grace can make use in order to assist the poor in coming home to God. Meanwhile, by their very rejection of a Church covered with the blood and the dust of so many suspect members—a Church “mud-splashed from history,” as Daniélou would say, describing the Church he loves best—they betray a sheer Catharist fixation upon a Church no more at home in this world than they are themselves. Like their medieval forbears—or, to stretch far back into the first centuries of the Christian era, a philosopher like Plotinus, a man so ashamed to be in the body that he refused to give out his address—they really are too, too fastidious for the flesh. 

And by the poor, incidentally, Daniélou does not mean material poverty, people with little money and fewer prospects. He means, rather, those who are spiritually disadvantaged, people wanting in the stuff of heroism, their souls steeped in mediocrity and sloth. Alas, their numbers are legion. He tells us, 

The Church has been given by God himself the task of leading men to this heavenly city, and has therefore the right to ask of the earthly city that it put no obstacle in the way…a Christian people cannot exist without a milieu to sustain it.

A milieu, Daniélou insists, the maintenance of which will require “creating an order in which personal fulfillment is possible,” especially that highest fulfillment found in prayer. “If it cannot create the conditions in which man can completely fulfill himself,” he says, “it becomes an impediment to that fulfillment.”  

Even the most spiritually destitute among us, people whose energies and lives are consumed by material and sensual pursuits, even they have been called to prayer, however tepid or episodic the exercise. And here Daniélou identifies three levels of human life, each of ascending importance, the last of which culminating in prayer. And pursuant to whatever level of fulfillment may be appropriate at the moment, Daniélou will argue the role and relevance of politics in helping ensure its place in the public life. In other words, it is the business of any humane social order to help optimize human fulfillment.  

There is, to begin with, mastery of the material world, or technology; this is man in relation to things. A city that does not allow for gainful and honest employment is an inhuman city. This is followed by the whole order of interpersonal relations rooted in justice and love; this is man in relation to other men. If the city took no interest in the social life of its citizens, making it impossible for people to interact, it would be an inhuman city. 

And, finally, there is the order of adoration, of man in relation to God. And, once again, were the city not to make any provision at all for its citizens to pray, to talk to God, it would be an inhuman city. At the end of the day, therefore, no decent or sane city can remain hostile or indifferent to those things which aim at the perfection of the human personality, which necessarily includes access to God and the salvation He has promised. 

“It is unreal and dangerous,” concludes Daniélou, “to accept separation…to consider that the Church and the civil society ought to move in two separate worlds…it leaves that society to shape itself in an incomplete and inhuman manner.” To countenance such separation, he warns, is really to indulge “that most detestable form of idealism which separates spiritual existence from its material and sociological substratum.” And separates, as well, the poor from salvation.

Here we touch upon the theme most dear to Daniélou’s heart, the theme of the Religion of the Poor, of faith so permeating the life of a people that even the least of its members will feel its leavening effects. It is an image perfectly congruent with the whole Pauline/Augustinian understanding of the Church as a vast net thrown into the sea, in which “all sorts of fish are caught, the task of separating the good from the bad is for the angels.”

The Church’s task is hardly so exacting. In fact, her ambition is really quite modest, which is simply to enlist as many as possible into a single body, thus enabling the weak and wayward to endure. After all, they, too, have been invited to pray, “an absolutely universal human vocation,” Daniélou reminds us, “and what is offered to all must be within the reach of all.”   

Thus do we see how prayer, for all that it lifts the mind and heart to God, must yet depend on politics to help secure a setting conducive to its success.