Sect. 132The Spiritual Side of Human NatureThe Spiritual Side of Human Nature

I. The Catholic Church teaches that the human soul possesses, by reason of the act of creation, an active force and tendency to lead a moral and religious life, in accordance with the soul’s essential character of image of God. Catholics consider the moral and religious life of the soul as the exercise of a faculty essential to the soul, or as a natural result of its constituent principles; whereas the Reformers held that the soul was merely a subject capable of receiving from outside the imprint of the Divine image. The Catholic sees the image of God in natural man, independently of supernatural influence; the Protestant sees in natural man only a subject intended to be made an image of God by a further Divine action. The Catholic doctrine is plainly founded upon reason. Every substance, and especially every living substance, is itself the active principle of the activity natural to its species; hence the spiritual soul must be the radical principle of its entire natural activity. The life of the soul, being rooted in its essence and substance, cannot be lost while the substance is not destroyed; and since all human souls have the same essence and are similarly created by God, what is true of the souls of our first parents likewise applies to the souls of all their posterity. The perfect development, however, of the religious and moral faculty, may be impeded through the absence of external aid or of self-exertion, or by positive hindrances, and thus the image of God in the soul may be deprived of its perfection and disfigured by unnatural stains.

We may appeal also to Holy Scripture. “The image and likeness of God” is the result of the creation of man; and even after the Fall, he is still defined as the image and likeness of God. The likeness being the perfection of the image, it is evident that, before and after the Fall, the substance and essence and the nature of man remained the same. In other words, man is the image of God and is able to live the life of an image of God by virtue of the constituent principles of his nature, and not merely by virtue of qualities or faculties which may be added to and taken from his nature.

II. The above general principle includes the following special conclusions.

1. The human soul possesses, as an essential constituent principle of its reasonable nature, power to acquire by itself the knowledge of God, of the relations between Creator and Creature, and consequently of the moral order as based upon Divine Law (Rom. 1:20; 2:14, 15). This living force develops itself, to a certain degree, spontaneously, so that a knowledge of God is gained as soon as the mind develops itself.

2. The human soul likewise possesses, as an essential constituent of its will, a living force and tendency to love and worship spiritual beings, and, above all, God. As the knowledge of God is the natural perfection of reason, so the love and worship of Him is the natural perfection of the will; without the innate power to love God, the soul would be mutilated. Again, the soul, the image of God, has a natural relationship with Him; consequently a tendency to love Him is as natural to the soul as the tendency to love itself and other reasonable beings. The soul would be unnatural indeed if by nature it had the power to love only itself and other creatures. This power is first felt in involuntary emotions of complacency and esteem which follow the knowledge of God and influence the voluntary acts of love; it is most manifest in the sense of the duty to love and serve God. This sense of duty is but a sense of love and reverence for God and His ordinances, which forces itself upon the soul even against its free will. The development, however, of this root can be hindered still more than the development of the knowledge of God. It has to contend with free will and with many other tendencies of human nature; it may be stunted to such a degree that it becomes morally unable to produce an act of love effectively placing God above all other things. Yet in itself it is indestructible, because it is part of the soul’s nature; and even the most hardened sinner feels the unrest caused by the consciousness that he acts against the natural rectitude of his will. See below, the treatises on Original Sin and Grace.

3. The faculty and tendency of the human will to love and respect rational beings, and especially God, implies that the freedom of the will is not only physical but also moral; that is to say, man has not only the power to determine his own and other forces, and to direct them to an end (physical liberty), but also the power of willing them for the sake of their own goodness and of directing them to a moral end, and consequently the power of rejecting and avoiding sin as such (moral liberty). The human will is thus an image of the Divine Will in a twofold manner: first, in as far as the Divine Will disposes its external acts and works with consciousness and with a plan; secondly, in as far as God is Himself the ultimate object of all His actions and volitions. Of course, the exercise of moral liberty is not as essential to man as to God. By abusing his physical liberty man is able to suspend the exercise of his moral liberty, and even to render its further use almost impossible. The moral energy of man is the foundation of every further influence in the form of illumination and assistance coming from God; without such foundation in the soul itself, man could not personally co-operate with the Divine influence.

(a) In its general idea, moral liberty does not at all imply the faculty of choosing between good and evil. It simply consists in the radical power to will the morally good as such, for the sake of its dignity and worth, and to consciously direct the acts of the will to their moral end. In the concise language of the Schoolmen, it is the power of willing what is right because it is right. The greater this power, the greater is moral liberty. It is greatest in God, where it manifests itself as the immutable power to will the morally good immutably; where, consequently, the will is necessarily inclined to what is good only. God possesses this attribute essentially, so that He is as essentially holy as He is essentially free. But creatures also should attain such liberty by the means of grace, which clarifies their will through the caritas gloriæ, and elevates them to the “freedom of the sons of God.”

(b) Moral liberty, in the above general sense, is essential to the human will, and is part of the natural image of God. But the positive power to will what is morally good, if not clarified by grace or fixed by a previous persevering determination, is essentially coupled with the power not to will what is good and to will evil instead; it is “a power to will what is right, together with the power not to will what is right” or “to turn away from what is right.” This power, then, in man, is affected by a deficiency in determination for what is good, and by the possibility of willing evil. The human will, belonging to a being created out of nothing, does not possess by reason of its essence all the perfection of which it is capable. Again, as it is the will of a being distinct from God, it may have special interests, by which it may be led to refuse God the respect due to Him.

(c) If, notwithstanding its inherent imperfection, the positive power to will what is morally good is to be a true and real power, it must be conceived as “a power of the will to elect the good and to reject the evil by its own free determination,” which stamps it as “a moral elective faculty.” In as far as moral liberty in man exerts itself only as an elective faculty, requiring to be determined, it is imperfect and implies a dissimilarity to God, Whose will is essentially inclined to the supreme good. But, in as far as it is still able to exert itself in this manner, and has the power to annul its indetermination by its own decision, it has a peculiar similarity to Divine liberty. This power enables man not only to acquire, possess, and preserve moral goodness, but also to make it his own by his own exertions, just as it is God’s own by His essence, and thus to deserve for it praise and reward, just as God, for His goodness, deserves the highest honour. Moral liberty, in this same sense, is also the condition—not the principle—of moral guilt, placing, as it does, face to face with the faculty of electing evil, the power of resisting and avoiding it, so that evil cannot be chosen except on condition that the will renounces the use of its power of resistance.

(d) The likeness of moral liberty in man to God’s liberty, according to what has been said, consists, not in man’s power of doing evil, but his power of avoiding the evil proposed to his choice.

(e) The power to choose what is morally good is not given to man in such a way that, before the choice takes place, there is in him no inclination or direction towards what is good, and, consequently, no goodness bestowed on him by the Creator independently of man’s free election. On the contrary, such choice would be impossible unless man already possessed a tendency to good. The actual goodness of the will is but the fruit of the habitual goodness received from God; the object of the choice is not the first production of moral goodness, but the development and the exercise of the goodness already bestowed on the soul by the Creator.

Man’s free will, being founded upon a tendency granted by God, can only operate dependently on God; it has an essential tendency to view all moral good as willed and commanded by God, and to seek after it as such, for the sake of the high respect due to God and His law, and especially to direct the will on God as its ultimate object. From this point of view, moral liberty is “a power to will what is right, according to God and for God’s own sake.” Considered specially as an elective faculty, it consists in this, that man, by his own election, gives to God that homage which is due to Him as to the Giver of moral liberty and the Author of the fruits springing from its root.