Theology and Sanity

MY concern in this book is not with the will but with the intellect, not with sanctity but with sanity. The difference is too often overlooked in the practice of religion. The soul has two faculties and they should be clearly distinguished. There is the will: its work is to love—and so to choose, to decide, to act. There is the intellect: its work is TO KNOW, TO UNDERSTAND, TO SEE: to see what—TO SEE WHAT’S THERE. I have said that my concern is with the intellect rather than with the will: this not because the intellect matters more in religion than the will, but because it does matter and tends to be neglected, and the neglect is bad. I realize that salvation depends directly upon the will. We are saved or damned according to what we love. If we love God, we shall ultimately get God: we shall be saved. If we love self in preference to God then we shall get self apart from God: we shall be damned. But though in our relation to God the intellect does not matter as much as the will, (and indeed depends for its health upon the will) it does matter, and as I have said, it is too much neglected—to the great misfortune of the will, for we can never attain a maximum love of God with only a minimum knowledge of God. For the soul’s full functioning, we need a Catholic intellect as well as a Catholic will. We have a Catholic will when we love God and obey God, love the Church and obey the Church. We have a Catholic intellect when we live consciously in the presence of the realities that God through His Church has revealed. A good working test of a Catholic will is that we should do what the Church says. But for a Catholic intellect, we must also see what the Church sees. This means that when we look out upon the universe we see the same universe that the Church sees; and the enormous advantage of this is that the universe the Church sees is the real universe, because She is the Church of God. Seeing what She sees means seeing what is there. And just as loving what is good is SANCTITY, or the health of the will, so seeing what is there is SANITY, or the health of the intellect. This classic is organized as follows— 1. Religion & the Mind 2. Examination of Intellect 3. He Who Is 4. The Mind Works on Infinity 5. God Tells Man 6. Three Persons in One Nature 7. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost 8. Some Further Precisions 9. Concluding This Part 10. God as Creator 11. The Created Universe 12. Angels, Matter, Men 13. The Testing of Angels and Men 14. The Fall of Man 15. Between the Fall and the Redemption 16. The Mission of Christ 17. The Redeemer 18. The Redeeming Sacrifice 19. Redemption 20. The Kingdom 21. Dispensing the Gifts 22. The Mystical Body of Christ 23. Life in the Body 24. Life After Death 25. The End of the World 26. Habituation to Reality 27. Habituation to Man 28. The Insufficiency of Man 29. Sufficiency in the Church 30. The Life of Grace 31. The Landscape of Reality 32. Idyll and Fact