My dear friends,
There has been a thread running through these Tuesday conferences which, when we began some weeks ago, I am not sure I had entirely intended. Each week has seemed to take up something left unfinished by the week before. We began with Res sunt quod sunt — things are what they are — because the spiritual life cannot begin anywhere except in reality. Then came Accipere, non fingere: what God gives is to be received, not remade according to our own preferences. We went on to the words of Our Lord, Quaerite primum regnum Dei, and asked what it means for the Kingdom of God to be established not merely in society, or in the Church as we wish to see her, but within ourselves. Last week, with Nomen manet, res deest, we considered the uncomfortable possibility that a familiar name may remain long after the reality which gave it meaning has been weakened or lost.
There is a natural next question. If things really are what they are, if we are bound to receive rather than invent them, and if the names we use are to correspond to realities rather than conceal them, how do we keep our judgement sound? How do we avoid confusing things which resemble one another but are not the same? The old schools had a maxim for precisely this: Qui bene distinguit, bene docet — he who distinguishes well, teaches well.
At first hearing it sounds like advice for a professor of theology. In fact it reaches very deeply into the spiritual life. Catholic theology has always been full of distinctions, not because theologians enjoy making simple things complicated, but because things are complicated enough already without our confusing them. The Church distinguishes temptation from consent, venial from mortal sin, nature from grace, the sacramental sign from the reality signified, veneration from adoration. A good confessor spends a surprising amount of his time making distinctions of this kind because souls suffer when they do not know how to make them for themselves. The scrupulous person may take an involuntary thought for a deliberate sin. Another may mistake remorse for repentance. Someone else may suppose that because he has fallen again there can have been no real progress at all. A few careful distinctions can sometimes restore peace more effectively than a great many consoling words.
That is worth remembering. Precision is not the enemy of mercy. Very often it is one of mercy’s instruments.
The Mass of the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost gives us a rather beautiful way of thinking about this. In the Epistle, St Paul prays that the faithful may be “strengthened by his Spirit with might unto the inward man”, and that Christ may dwell by faith in their hearts. The phrase is easily passed over, but it deserves lingering over: the inward man. There is an interior order which grace is meant to establish, an order of intellect, will, memory, imagination, appetite and affection, so that the whole person becomes increasingly capable of seeing things as God sees them and loving them according to their proper worth.
Then the Gospel gives us the man with dropsy. Our Lord heals him, and afterwards watches the behaviour of the guests who are choosing the better places at table. The old commentators saw more than an accidental sequence. Dropsy swells the body. Pride swells the soul. The bodily illness is especially suggestive because the sufferer may retain fluid and still remain thirsty. He has more and yet remains unsatisfied.
That is not a bad description of a good deal of our spiritual trouble.
We imagine that one more possession will settle us, one more recognition, one more success, one more reassurance that we are valued. It comes, perhaps, and for a little while we are pleased. Then very quickly it becomes normal and something else is required. Praise behaves in much the same way. A man who becomes accustomed to being noticed does not cease to want attention; he becomes more sensitive to its absence. The person who was once grateful to be included becomes wounded when he is not consulted. We may even resent another person’s success without admitting to ourselves that resentment is what we feel.
The Gospel is mercifully realistic about human beings. Our Lord does not need to be told why the guests are watching the seating arrangements so carefully. He knows. We know too, if we are honest. There is something in us which wishes not merely to be loved but to know where we stand in relation to everybody else. Who was asked first? Who was thanked? Who has the title? Whose opinion mattered? Why was he consulted and I was not? Whole interior dramas can unfold without anybody else in the room knowing that the performance has begun.
Our age has taken this ancient weakness and given it machinery.
Never before have ordinary people possessed so many numerical ways of measuring attention. We know how many people watched, followed, liked, shared or responded. The numbers themselves are not sinful. They may be useful. The difficulty comes when they begin to tell us something about our worth, or about the worth of what is being said. An audience of fifty thousand can create an impression of authority even where no corresponding competence exists.
Religion has not escaped this. Someone speaks confidently about the Church, knows how to hold an audience, speaks quickly and with certainty, and before long people begin to defer to him upon matters which would once have sent them to a priest, a canonist, a historian or a serious theologian. A difficult Roman document appears and scarcely has the ink dried before its final significance is being announced. It proves the restoration; it proves the apostasy; it proves that one party was right all along. The man who says that he has not yet read enough to know looks rather unimpressive beside the man who has already produced a twenty-minute judgement.
Yet “I do not know” is sometimes the most intelligent sentence available.
The danger is not merely that we may receive bad information. Something subtler takes place when we listen to the same voices day after day. We acquire their habits of interpretation. We begin to recognise the people they distrust, the things which excite them, the evidence they dismiss, the expressions they use. Without quite realising it, we may come to inhabit somebody else’s map of the world.
Adults need formation no less than children do. We simply have fewer people admitting that they are forming us.
It may be useful, therefore, to notice who is actually occupying our minds. If I spend more time each day listening to one commentator than I spend in prayer, spiritual reading and serious reflection combined, I should at least recognise that a kind of formation is taking place. I may still decide that much of what he says is worthwhile. The point is not to cultivate suspicion of everybody. It is to recover freedom of judgement.
There is also the difficulty that attention is now commercially valuable. Again, one need not accuse anybody of bad faith to recognise the temptation. If indignation attracts viewers, indignation acquires a usefulness of its own. If scandal keeps an audience returning, a quiet week can feel strangely empty. The person whose public identity has been built around the conviction that everything is getting worse may find good news almost inconvenient.
And there is dropsy again. One has had the attention, but more attention is required. One has had the scandal, but another scandal is needed. One has consumed a whole day’s supply of controversy and somehow remains hungry before bedtime.
Our Lord does not humiliate the sick man. He heals him. That should be the pattern here too. There is little profit in despising ourselves because we have become distracted or because the telephone has acquired too much power over our attention. What matters is to see what is happening and restore some order.
The loss of recollection is not merely a problem of concentration. It affects judgement because everything begins to arrive with the same apparent urgency. A war, a family message, a Vatican rumour, an advertisement, a joke, a scandal, a prayer request and two strangers quarrelling somewhere on the internet can all appear upon the same little screen within five minutes. Visually they are presented almost on one level. In reality they belong to entirely different orders of importance.
The inward man has to recover the hierarchy which the screen abolishes. God matters more than today’s controversy. The state of my soul matters more than whether somebody on social media has made a fool of himself. The person actually sitting beside me possesses a claim upon my charity which a distant argument often does not. If we spoke before about seeking first the Kingdom of God, this is one of the places where that principle becomes very ordinary and very practical. Christ must reign sufficiently within us that not everything which demands attention succeeds in receiving it.
We can become full of information while starving for wisdom.
Another confusion characteristic of our time concerns the way we see people. There are now powerful intellectual habits which invite us to interpret persons primarily through categories of power and identity: privileged or marginalised, oppressor or oppressed, insider or outsider. Sometimes such categories illuminate real injustice. Christians have no reason to deny that power can be abused or that institutions can treat people shamefully.
The trouble begins when the category saves us from encountering the person.
Once somebody has been placed in the morally disfavoured group, it becomes possible to stop listening. A disagreement can be treated as evidence of hostility rather than as an argument which has to be answered. A Christian conviction about marriage or sexual morality can be examined principally for the social power it allegedly maintains rather than for whether it is true. A parent’s concern about what a child is being taught can be reinterpreted as harm before anyone has considered whether the concern has substance.
Something similar happens on all sides of our controversies. We Catholics can do it too. “Modernist”, “liberal”, “woke”, “traditionalist”, “progressive”, “extremist”: sometimes the descriptions have real meaning, but they become spiritually dangerous when the label allows us to believe we already know everything necessary about the person.
Our Lord never seems to encounter human beings in that flattened way. Zacchaeus is a publican, and that fact matters, but Christ sees Zacchaeus. The Samaritan woman comes with a history and belongs to a people with whom the Jews have deep religious disagreement, yet He speaks to the woman before Him. The woman taken in adultery has committed adultery — Our Lord does not make the sin unreal — but neither does He permit the sin to become the whole account of the person.
To distinguish well means learning to hold these things together. A man can be wrong and still be treated justly. Someone may be confused without being malicious. Another may suffer greatly while also misunderstanding the cause of his suffering. Charity does not require us to choose between truth and kindness as though God had made them enemies.
This becomes especially important when we consider how we understand ourselves. Modern culture places enormous weight upon self-description, but the spiritual life has always known that human beings are capable of misunderstanding their own motives. We have all done it. We thought we were acting from principle and discovered later that pride was involved. We believed ourselves angry for justice and slowly realised that a personal wound was doing much of the work. We thought we had forgiven because we no longer spoke about the grievance, while inwardly we were still arguing the case every night.
If we can misinterpret motives of that kind, then clearly the mere intensity of a feeling does not make our interpretation of the feeling infallible.
“I feel rejected” describes something real in the person who feels it; it does not automatically establish that another person has rejected him. “I feel guilty” does not prove guilt. “I feel at peace” does not prove that a proposed action is good. Feelings belong to human life and should not be despised, but they need to be brought within the order of truth.
Here our earlier thought about receiving rather than inventing returns with particular force. I receive my creaturehood. I receive a nature which I did not construct. I receive a body which is not meaningless material surrounding a sovereign will. I receive my life from God before I begin to make choices about what I shall do with it. Grace does not release me from this created reality; grace heals it, elevates it and draws it towards the end for which God made it.
That has consequences for compassion. We can take suffering entirely seriously without assuming that every interpretation placed upon that suffering must therefore be true. Indeed, there are occasions when genuine love waits, listens and helps a person to distinguish before encouraging a conclusion which may prove very difficult to undo.
Our Lord has never loved us by agreeing with everything we think about ourselves. Fortunately for us, His love is far more serious than that.
The same confusion can enter ecclesiastical life, although there it often arrives dressed in excellent vocabulary. Words such as pastoral, accompaniment, discernment, development, reception, inclusion and synodality all have legitimate places within Catholic thought. Some are very rich words indeed. The problem arises when the attractiveness of the word begins to relieve us of asking what is actually being done.
“Pastoral”, for example, concerns the care of souls. It does not automatically follow that everything described as pastoral actually serves the souls involved. We still have to look at the act, its purpose and its consequences. “Accompaniment” is a beautiful Christian notion. Our Lord accompanies men patiently; so does a good priest. Yet accompaniment has a destination. If we become so concerned not to disturb the journey that we cease to speak of conversion, we have altered something essential while retaining the attractive word.
“Discernment” is another example. The spiritual tradition takes discernment very seriously because interior movements are complicated and circumstances sometimes require patience. But discernment is meant eventually to discern. It cannot become a dignified name for permanent unwillingness to reach a conclusion where revelation and moral truth already give us the principles necessary to do so.
Last week’s theme returns here without needing to be forced. Nomen manet, res deest. We have to ask from time to time whether the thing still corresponds to the name.
Nor should we rush to the opposite extreme. Precision does not mean crudity. There are circumstances where delicate language is appropriate. A confessor should not address every wounded soul as though he were writing a theological manual. Diplomacy requires discretion. A bishop may sometimes need time, gradualness and restraint in governing a difficult situation. Not every ambiguity is dishonest.
But when those affected by a policy cannot tell what the policy means, or when two contrary courses can be justified by appealing to the same formulation, we are dealing with something other than pastoral delicacy. There comes a point when lack of clarity itself becomes a problem of government.
The Catholic mind should be able to bear complexity without becoming vague. Authority is real, and not every exercise of authority is prudent. Obedience is a virtue, and obedience does not require the abandonment of reason. A canonical situation can be irregular without every other description of rupture or unbelief becoming applicable to it. Resistance may sometimes be justified without every act of the person resisting thereby becoming justified.
We ought to be able to hold these things together.
Factions make that difficult because factions prefer a world in which all the distinctions fall on one side. Once we have decided who the good people are, their mistakes acquire charitable explanations. Once we have decided who the bad people are, even their virtues become suspicious.
Traditional Catholics have no supernatural exemption from this temptation. The fact that Tradition is true does not mean that every traditionalist conclusion is true, every rumour circulated among traditionalists reliable, or every judgement made in defence of Tradition proportionate. One can diagnose a real crisis and then exaggerate it. One can be justified in mistrusting a particular source and unjustified in believing every bad report about him thereafter.
The opposite error exists too. A man becomes so committed to defending ecclesiastical authority that acknowledging a mistake by somebody in authority begins to feel like an attack upon authority itself. A bad decision must somehow be redescribed as a good one because the alternative seems too threatening.
Neither reaction is particularly secure in faith. Both contain an element of fear.
The Catholic ought to be free enough to say that an action was wise yesterday and foolish today if the evidence warrants it. He ought to be able to say that a person he usually criticises acted honourably in this particular matter, or that someone he generally admires was wrong. We do not owe anybody the surrender of judgement.
Nor does making a correct judgement make us superior.
That is where Sunday’s Gospel becomes uncomfortable again. The men at the banquet are watching the places of honour because they have an interest in the answer. Their view of the room is affected by where they think they themselves ought to sit.
So is ours.
Was I really treated unjustly, or was I simply not given the importance I expected? Was I insulted, or contradicted? Was my advice ignored, or was somebody else perfectly entitled to reach a different conclusion? Is the problem that something bad has happened, or that the thing happened without my being consulted?
There are times when we really are treated badly. Humility does not require falsehood. If someone lies about us, there is no virtue in pretending he did not. If an injustice should be corrected, it may be our duty to correct it. The lower place is not cowardice.
But humility permits us to ask the question without already needing one particular answer.
That is rare freedom.
The person whose reputation depends upon always being right finds correction very expensive. A public commentator who has interpreted an event one way before a large audience may find new evidence psychologically inconvenient. To say, “I spoke too quickly; the facts do not support what I said,” seems to diminish him.
But why should it?
Surely it is better to lose a judgement than lose one’s freedom to recognise the truth.
A Christian should be able to revise his opinion without experiencing the revision as humiliation. If a man whom I generally oppose is right on Tuesday, I should be capable of saying that he is right on Tuesday without imagining that I have thereby endorsed everything he said on Monday. This is elementary justice, yet increasingly our public discourse seems to find it almost impossible.
The same failure of distinction appears when offence and harm are treated as though they were identical. Words can certainly be used cruelly. Deliberately humiliating another person is sinful. But it cannot follow that whatever causes offence ought therefore to be suppressed. Truth sometimes offends us precisely because something in us does not wish to hear it.
There is a spiritual lesson here before there is a political one. How easily correction feels like injury when pride is involved. Someone points out a fault and our first interior movement is not gratitude for the possibility that we might improve but irritation at the person who noticed it. A friend disagrees with us and for several minutes we are not considering whether he may be right; we are considering his tone.
Again, perhaps his tone really was poor. That possibility does not settle the other question.
The saints acquired a remarkable freedom from the need to make every slight the centre of their interior life. This did not happen because people treated them well. Frequently they did not. Sanctity did not make injustice disappear; it changed the amount of territory injustice was permitted to occupy within them.
That, I think, is something of what Our Lord means when He tells us to take the lower place.
It is not theatrical self-deprecation. Nothing is gained by pretending we have no gifts when God has given them. If we hold an office, we should exercise it. If we possess knowledge which may help somebody, we should use it. False humility is simply another way of refusing reality.
The lower place means that we do not have to grasp.
Another person can receive praise without our becoming smaller. Somebody else can be consulted. We need not answer every criticism. We can occasionally allow a foolish remark to pass unanswered. We may even permit another person to have the last word and discover, to our surprise, that the Catholic Faith has survived.
That is the inward man becoming a little freer.
There is a peace which comes when one’s whole sense of self is no longer dependent upon the verdict outside. Recognition remains pleasant, of course. Misunderstanding remains painful. We are human beings, not stones. But neither praise nor misunderstanding has to become sovereign.
The confessional teaches this extraordinarily well. There is no audience there. No public image to maintain. No need to appear clever or consistent. One enters to tell the truth about oneself before God.
And even there we discover how inventive language can become.
We rightly mock bureaucratic expressions such as “mistakes were made” because one searches the sentence in vain for the person who made them. Yet we can sound rather similar when speaking about ourselves. “The conversation became uncharitable.” “I found myself getting angry.” “I ended up doing something I shouldn’t.”
Sometimes the grammar is trying to save us from the moral subject of the sentence.
A serious examination of conscience quietly puts the “I” back where it belongs. I chose. I said it. I consented. I neglected what I should have done.
That sounds harder, but in fact it is immensely hopeful. What I truly own I can truly confess, and what is honestly confessed can be absolved. There is no need to protect the false version of myself because God already knows the true one and has nevertheless invited me to repentance.
Here, perhaps, the sequence of these past conferences becomes clearest.
Res sunt quod sunt. What I did is what I did. Changing the description will not alter reality.
Accipere, non fingere. I have to receive the truth about myself as readily as I insist that others receive the truth about the world.
Quaerite primum regnum Dei. Christ must reign in this actual soul, not merely in the Church and civilisation I hope to see restored.
Nomen manet, res deest. I must beware of keeping the respectable name after the reality has changed. What I call zeal may have become anger. What I call prudence may be fear. What I call vigilance may now be an appetite for scandal. What I describe as justice may be a grievance which I rather enjoy preserving.
And then comes Qui bene distinguit, bene docet. We ask for enough light to know the difference.
That work is quieter than public controversy and considerably less rewarding to the ego. Nobody applauds because a man decided not to answer an insult. Nobody knows that he caught himself taking pleasure in another person’s failure and repented of it. There is no audience for the moment when somebody realises that the reason he is angry is not quite the reason he has been giving himself.
Much of holiness is made in places where nobody is watching.
We must not therefore become indifferent to the outward world. That would be another confusion. Doctrine matters. Liturgy matters. Authority matters. Justice matters. Children matter. Religious liberty matters. The truth spoken in public matters. There are times for resistance, times for argument, times when silence would itself be culpable.
But we cannot defend an ordered world indefinitely with an interior life left in disorder.
Being correct about a crisis is not the same thing as becoming holy through it.
A man may diagnose an ecclesiastical error with absolute accuracy and allow bitterness to eat into him for years. Another may defend orthodoxy vigorously while becoming vain about his own orthodoxy. Someone may spend his days exposing corruption until corruption becomes necessary to his sense of usefulness. A Catholic may know the latest scandal in every dicastery and scarcely be able to remain recollected for ten minutes before the Blessed Sacrament.
There is the man with dropsy once more. Full and thirsty.
Christ desires to heal that swelling too.
He does not ask us to cease judging what is true and false. He asks us to allow grace to purify the person who judges. He does not ask us to pretend the crisis is unreal. He asks us not to make the crisis an excuse for neglecting the work of sanctification. And He does not ask us to love truth less, but to love it enough that we permit it to judge us as unsparingly as we wish it to judge everybody else.
So perhaps this week we might carry the old scholastic maxim into prayer.
Where am I failing to distinguish?
Have I confused necessity with appetite? Have I confused zeal with irritation, prudence with fear, perseverance with stubbornness, vigilance with curiosity? Have I begun to call resentment justice because justice sounds nobler? Have I mistaken being well informed for being wise? Have I confused winning an argument with serving the truth?
And there are gentler distinctions to make as well. Perhaps I have mistaken temptation for consent and burdened myself unnecessarily. Perhaps I have treated slow progress as no progress. Perhaps I have called myself insincere because a fault returned after a sincere confession. Perhaps I have judged another person’s weakness as malice when I had very little knowledge of his struggle.
God’s truth is exact enough to correct presumption, but also exact enough to correct scrupulosity. Catholic distinctions cut both ways, and mercy is found on both sides.
That is why St Paul’s prayer seems more beautiful the longer one thinks about it: that we may be strengthened by the Spirit “unto the inward man”. There is an inward man whom Christ wishes to make steady, sane and free. Not indifferent. Not passive. Not unable to feel strongly. Rather, a soul in which things increasingly occupy their proper places because Christ Himself occupies the first place.
Then the lower place at the banquet ceases to seem humiliating.
One discovers that it is quiet there.
We do not have to supervise everybody’s opinion of us. We can be corrected without collapsing, praised without becoming intoxicated, overlooked without nursing the omission for three days. We can speak when duty requires it and remain silent when speech would merely satisfy ourselves.
There is more room for God when less room is taken up by the management of our own importance.
And perhaps that is where all these weeks have been leading. Reality is not our enemy. We need not remake it. We receive what God has given, allow Christ to establish His Kingdom within us, call things by names which correspond to what they are, and learn patiently to distinguish where sin and self-deception have blurred the boundaries.
Qui bene distinguit, bene docet. He who distinguishes well, teaches well.
But before we presume to teach anybody else, may God give us the grace to distinguish honestly within ourselves.
May He heal what has become swollen, quiet what has become restless, correct what has become distorted, and strengthen us in the inward man, so that Christ may dwell by faith in our hearts and reign there without rival.
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