Theology and Sanity (Illustrated) by Frank Sheed

Author:Frank Sheed
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Aeterna Press
Published: 2015-03-17T06:00:00+00:00

II. HIS NEED FOR THE SUPERNATURAL

Our Lord then as man had a real body with a real soul, with a real intellect and a real will. His emotions were real, too: He loved St. John; He wept over Jerusalem and over dead Lazarus; He stormed at the Pharisees.

But if Our Lord had a real human nature with a real natural life, then He needed the supernatural life, too, to accomplish those things which are beyond the power of nature. By merely human natural power. He could not see God direct any more than we could; but His human nature was capable of receiving sanctifying grace, just as ours is. The work of grace in the soul is, as we have seen, appropriated to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. The Second Person as God possessed all things; but as man He needed the indwelling of the Holy Spirit both for that elevation and sanctification which every human nature needs, and for the special guidance and illumination His human nature needed for the unique work which as Son of God He was to do in it and through it. Our Lord then had sanctifying grace in His soul. He did not have faith or hope because, possessing the Beatific Vision He did not need them; but He had charity in the fullest measure possible to a creature—for, at the risk of wearying, we must constantly remind ourselves that His human nature was a creature: like ours.

His charity, like all charity, was love of God and love of neighbour. There is a modern fashion for concentrating on Christ’s love for men and either totally ignoring His love for God or regarding it as an amiable weakness. It is easy enough to maintain this attitude if one has either not read the Gospels, or had read them sketchily as a boy and forgotten them. For Christ Our Lord Himself His Father’s will was paramount and His one joy was in doing it: indeed it is the one joy that He can see for anyone—

“yea, rather blessed are they who have the word of My Father and keep it.”

Readers of this book who may be making a serious study of the Gospels for the first time will almost certainly be startled by the place that prayer to the Father takes in Christ’s life. His first recorded words are that strange answer to His mother when after three days’ loss she found Him in the temple:

“Could you not tell that I must needs be in the place which belongs to my Father?” (Lk.ii.49.)

His last words as he was dying on the Cross were:

“Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit” (Lk.xi.46).

Here again, as with the co-existence of human and divine knowledge in the one Person, the mind sees a real problem. If Christ was God, in what sense was He praying to God? It is idle to try to avoid the difficulty by answering that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was speaking to the other two Persons.

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