Until Christ be Formed in You

In a now famous homily given during the Papal Conclave in 2005, then Cardinal Ratzinger said the following:

"Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires."

This criticism of relativism was met with a lot of hostility in the media. Thanks be to God that the Church reads not the Times, but the Eternities and this "uncompromising ultraconservative" was still chosen as Pope. Our current Holy Father has a keen understanding of Western Culture that is much needed and he sees moral relativism as the plague that it is.

Pope Benedict has picked up right where John Paul II left off. In Centesimus Annus, John Paul II said that "a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism." It is not a tyranny like Fascism or Communism, but one of raw power in which a culture that has no transcendent moral norms can only solve conflict by force. Freedom separated from moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.

In quite possibly his most prophetic work, CS Lewis spoke of the consequences of moral relativism in the Abolition of Man. Lewis said that "[F]or the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please… we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.

If then moral relativism leads to "might makes right" and ultimately leads to the destruction of man, what is to be done? The Holy Father after visiting the Czech Republic last fall proposed "integral human formation to counter the new dictatorship of relativism."

In order to put Benedict's solution into practice, we need to first understand what exactly it is that he is proposing. When he says, "integral human formation", what does he mean precisely? Because of the confusing times we live in, we first we need to make sure we have a proper understanding of what it means to be human in the first place. Who exactly is man?

The Catechism has one of the most succinct definitions of the human person and it is a great foundation upon which to build a proper understanding of man. "The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual" (CCC 362). Much of the confusion about who man is today stem from leaving one of those three components—body, soul, or made in the image of God—out of the definition.

The soul is the spiritual principle in man (CCC 363). It is composed of the intellect, the will and the heart. Each of these three "parts" runs on one of the three transcendentals. The intellect is made for truth, the will for goodness and the heart for beauty. Any program of human formation must be based on seeking these things for their own sake. It must also involve fostering both the moral and theological virtues since they act directly in the soul. Prudence and faith are intellectual virtues. Justice and charity are virtues of the will while our heart is acted upon by temperance (moderates our pleasure drive), fortitude (controls our aggressive drive), and the theological virtue of hope.

Although it is the soul that gives life, it is the union of body and soul that makes human nature. The soul expresses itself in and through the body. All knowledge in the intellect was first in the senses of the body. Since Jesus is fully man, He has a body in Heaven right now. We will not be fully human after death until we receive our bodies back in resurrected form. We must therefore reject any spiritualist anthropology that sees man merely as a ghost in a machine. Likewise we must reject any materialist anthropology since human nature contains an immaterial soul. Truth is more than a mere process in the brain. The brain processes sense data so that it can be used by our intelligence.

What does it mean when we say that man is made in the image of God? The simplest thing that we can say about God is that He is Three—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What separates these three is their relationship to each other. So one of the ways we image God is that we are meant for relationship. We are ultimately social creatures. Again any authentic understanding of man must take this into account. We would answer Cain's question as to if we are our brother's keepers in the affirmative.

In the creation account, we hear how man is made in the image and likeness of God. It is ultimately the likeness of God within us that was damaged by the Fall. But properly understood what does this mean? It means that man is ultimately good, yet in many ways broken. This view is unique to the Catholic understanding of man. The majority of non-Catholic Christians would view man as Luther did. He thought man totally depraved. Now entire books have been written on these two views and combinations of the two, but in short to hold that man is totally depraved is a rejection of the fullness of the Incarnation. If the Incarnation actually occurred then God must have so created human nature that it would have the potential for so great a unity. Redemption does not eliminate or replace our sinful humanity but heals and perfects it. With this view, we can speak of grace building upon nature. The Lord takes our natural gifts and supernaturalizes them by infusing grace. It remains incumbent upon us to sharpen all the natural gifts at our disposal so that those instruments can be used by God.

John Paul II loved to quote Gaudium et Spes in saying that Christ came to fully reveal man to himself. We must always keep this in mind when speaking of integral formation. Our ideal is Christ. We have seen our model and that is the mold we are trying to fit.

With all of this in mind then, we can set out to develop a program of integral human formation that the Holy Father is calling for. The Church has always looked at Integral Formation as having four dimensions—Spiritual, Human, Intellectual, and Apostolic—that encompass all of the Christian life. In the coming weeks we will look at each of these individually.