ST JOSEPH & THE VOLUNTARY
Download this document as a
 PDF
The
official terminology of the Church has the feast of May 1st
as that
of St Joseph Opificis. There are two nouns in
Latin signifying work,
opus and labor. The first accentuates
what is produced—we use the term of the productions of our
composers and
artists. The second
signifies only human
effort. The term opificis is related to the first; it signifies ‘the one who
produces the work’. It
is not difficult
to see how preoccupation with Marxist thought and terminology
and the wish to
rebut its influence affected Catholic thought to move the
Vatican to entitle today’s
feast ‘St Joseph the Worker’.
A more
accurate translation would be ‘St Joseph the Artisan’.
*
In
previous papers on this website we have sought to bring out
the way in which
the modern world confuses the natural with the voluntary. To reiterate, the natural is—
that which proceeds from an
intrinsic principle without knowledge of end, but with such
knowledge
presupposed in its Author.
Its
operations may be seen in the ordered behaviour of the planet
as it circles the
Sun, of the Moon as it circles the Earth, and the ordered-ness
of the tides, of
the months and the seasons; in the resistance inherent in the
planet to the
effects of cataclysms, earthquakes and cyclones, and of man’s
own depredations and
its restoration of equanimity; in the behaviour of man’s
operations and his
body’s inherent tendency to healing and to health; in the way
dogs always act
like dogs; and so on. Each
is a creature
of the Divine Author and depends on him both as to what it is (its essence), how it operates and its very existence.
In
contrast, the voluntary is—
that which proceeds from an
intrinsic principle with knowledge of end.
Will,
in which the voluntary reposes, is the appetite that follows
on the power of
intellect. Only
intellectual beings
(men), then, can exercise the voluntary.
In
his pride modern man endeavours to convince himself that there
is no such thing
as the natural, only material beings without inherent
classification; endeavours
to convince himself that man and the whole of reality are
nothing but
accidents, the happy results of evolution over aeons of time
unguided by any extrinsic
intellectual ordering cause. Consistent
with
this he insists that any human will may dictate to material
being as it
wishes imposing upon it his own proclivities such as
indulgence in
contraception (a distortion of the natural sexual order for
the sake of
pleasure without the responsibility that accompanies it);
abortion of the
innocent unborn; sexual perversion in the form of
homosexuality; freedom to
choose one’s gender; and similar exercises in fatuousness.
The
rejection of the distinction between the voluntary and the
natural is, as may
be seen from these effects, an effect of the widespread modern
phenomenon of
atheism, belief in No-God.
The
lesson of the Corona virus and the ravaging it has wrought in
our social and
economic lives is that in those matters which fall within its
provenance the
natural will have its way irrespective of the puny
objections of men
via the
voluntary; and that even the licit exercises of
human will can be
brought to nothing if men will insist in the main on rejecting
the order
imposed on them by nature.
In
harmony with this analysis is a recent paper of Dr Peter
Kwasniewski published on
the website OnePeterFive which addresses the sufferings that
result from the
operation of the virus, noting the fact that they fall
indifferently on the innocent
and the guilty, and explaining why this is so.
It may be viewed at https://onepeterfive.com/catholic-guilty-suffer/ Those
who wish to do so may study the copy reproduced
in Word format in the Appendix.
Dr
Kwasniewski quotes St Thomas Aquinas on the operations of the
voluntary
explaining how our willed actions have moral consequences
precisely because we
are moral beings, beings that choose their ends. In
our works, as in all our actions, we must
pay attention to the ends they serve.
There are rewards and punishments imposed by the Author
of our being and
we ignore them at our peril.
The
artisan exercises the voluntary—his own will—on what is
natural, wood, iron,
silk, cotton, and so on. It
is the
harmony with which he does his work that justifies his work
and provides him
with a vehicle with which to work out his eternal salvation. For, we have not here a
lasting city; we are
made, as St Augustine says, for eternity, “Thou hast made us
for Thyself, O
Lord and our hearts are not at rest until they rest in Thee”. This is the reason why we
celebrate today’s
Feast.
Michael
Baker
May
1, 2020—St Joseph
Opificis
____________________________________________
APPENDIX
THE CATHOLIC VIEW: WE’RE ALL GUILTY, AND WE ALL MUST SUFFER
Peter Kwasniewski: OnePeterFive, April 29, 2020
The pandemic pandemonium of the coronavirus—in
its
volatile mixture of undeniable physical evils and the
superimposed moral evils
of social engineering by political elites only too happy to
take advantage of a
global train wreck—has brought before Christians once again
the ancient
question of why the good and the wicked alike suffer in this
life, seemingly
regardless of personal merits and demerits. In particular, it
has brought up
again the question of whether God can and should be said to be
responsible for
the physical evils we suffer, so they can truly be called
punishments or
chastisements for our sins.
The
Church Fathers
and Doctors and all the premodern popes and catechisms had not
the slightest
difficulty asserting this to be the case, and the Church’s
official public
prayer—prior, that is, to the liturgical revolution of the
1960s—expressed it
over and over again. Yet today we see that most high-ranking
churchmen flatly
deny that God can be said to be in any sense one
who chastises us for our sins by means of natural disasters or
sicknesses.
Presumably they would also deny that death is a punishment for
sin, contrary to
the explicit words of Scripture.
Here I shall explain why we should say physical
evils are punishments from God for moral evils; why all of us
are implicated in
moral evil and deserving of punishments; why universal
suffering is a test sent
from Him and an incentive to love, and in Christ becomes the
supreme witness of
love; and finally, how the faithful are being asked today to
enter in a special
way into the Passion of Our Lord in His Church on Earth.
Physical
and
moral evils
St.
Thomas Aquinas
in many of his writings gives the classic account of the
distinction
between moral evil, which has the nature of voluntary
wrongdoing, and physical evil, which has the
nature of an involuntary deprivation.
In
the Compendium Theologiae, he writes:
We should observe that sometimes action is in the
power of the agent. Such
are all
voluntary actions. By
“voluntary action”
I mean an action that has its principle in an agent who is
conscious of the
various factors constituting his action… The voluntary agent,
being master of
his own action, deservedly draws blame and punishment on
himself. If actions
are mixed, that is, are partly
voluntary and partly involuntary, the sin is diminished in
proportion to the
admixture of the involuntary element. (ch. 120)
Aquinas
goes on to
explain how exactly physical evils are punishments:
Just as defect in voluntary action constitutes
fault and sin, so the
withdrawing of some good, in consequence of sin, against the
will of him on
whom such privation is inflicted, has the character of
punishment. Punishment
is inflicted as a medicine that is
corrective of the sin, and also to restore right order
violated by the
sin. Punishment
functions as a medicine
inasmuch as fear of punishment deters a man from sinning; that
is, a person
refrains from performing an inordinate action, which would be
pleasing to his
will, lest he have to suffer what is opposed to his will. Punishment also restores
right order; by
sinning, a man exceeds the limits of the natural order,
indulging his will more
than is right. Hence a
return to the
order of justice is effected by punishment, whereby some good
is withdrawn from
the sinner’s will. As
is quite clear,
unless the punishment is more galling to the will than the sin
was attractive
to it, a suitable punishment will not have been assigned for
the sin. (ch. 121)
Aquinas
reminds us
that rewards and punishments pertain only to rational
creatures:
Since good actions merit a reward and sin calls
for
punishment, rational creatures are punished for the evil they
do and are rewarded
for the good they do, according to the measure of justice
fixed by Divine
Providence. But there
is no place for
reward or punishment in dealing with irrational creatures,
just as there is
none for praise or blame. (ch. 143)
Recovering
our
humility as sinners
We need
metaphysical humility. In
the account of
creation in all three of his summaries of theology (the Summa theologiae, the Summa contra gentiles,
and the Compendium theologiae), St. Thomas presents the nine
hierarchies of angels first, before he treats of man as the
lowest, least, and
last of the intellectual creatures made by God.
Metaphysically speaking, man is already vulnerable and
fragile,
delicately poised on the horizon of the spiritual and bodily
realms. Adam was robed
by God with “preternatural
gifts” of bodily immortality, impassibility, and perfect
self-control—safeguards and elevations God wished to give
mankind to compensate
for the weakness of human nature.
In
spite of that
perfect set-up, Adam royally failed.
I
mean that literally: he failed as only a king can fail when he
drives his
entire nation into debt, ruin, war, and dissolution.
The rock-bottom truth—and this will be found
spelled out in every penny catechism that has ever been
written—is that all of mankind is implicated in Adam’s sin.
We are all a guilty lot—“in iniquity was I
conceived, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps.
50:7)—and that is why we
must be baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ.
Moreover,
after our
baptism, we still suffer the effects of the
fall, such as passibility, mortality, and disordered
concupiscence, and we will
not be rid of them until the glorious resurrection of the dead
on the last
day. Apart from the
Blessed Virgin Mary
and Our Lord Jesus Christ, there is no man who can say he has
not sinned (1 Jn.
1:8); indeed, Scripture says the just man sinneth seven times
a day (Prov.
24:16). If we have a
realistic view of
ourselves, we will not be surprised about human frailty and
suffering, because
we will not be surprised to be, and to be called, sinners.
Although no sin we commit goes unpunished,
whether
here or hereafter, Scripture and experience alike show us that
God does not
punish every moral evil the moment it has occurred.
God sometimes quickly corrects the sinner; at
other times, He leaves him in his sins.
Therefore,
it is
absurd when people say: “Well, if the coronavirus [or insert
any other natural
disaster] were a punishment for sins, why are the evil and the
innocent alike
suffering?”—as if there were any person on
this Earth right now who could be described as simply good
or
innocent. Not even a
newly baptized
infant, full of sanctifying grace and infused virtue and ready
to go
immediately to Heaven should he suddenly die, can be said to
have ceased to be
among the fallen children of Adam, heir to the same woes,
plagued with the same
evils.
Benefits
gained
from suffering
The
real question
will then shift to this: What purpose can
suffering serve in our spiritual journey?
The greatest pagan thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, saw
that they, too,
had to answer this question—and even they were capable of
seeing that the good
is worth suffering for. Socrates
was
condemned for leading people away from the conventional wisdom
of Athens, and
he accepted it as a witness to the truth, which is greater
than any finite
good.
St.
Catherine of
Siena—whose feast day is celebrated today on the traditional
calendar, tomorrow
on the modern calendar (sic)—writes in The Dialogue that
God chose to make us men dependent upon one another in order
to teach us
charity, which we could not have learned so well in any other
way. Our social nature
is the ground, our social
environs the schoolroom, for learning how to love and be
loved.
Something similar is true of suffering.
One discovers the true mettle of soldiers not
in a time of peace, not even in time of rigorous training, but
in the time of
battle, of hardship and deprivation.
There is a saying: Show me your friends, and I will
tell you what kind
of person you are. One
could also say:
Show me how you bear your sufferings, and I will tell you what
kind of person
you are.
Suffering brings out our deepest capacities; it
tests and expands our limits, breaks down our resistance to
grace and higher
aspirations, assaults our egoism, humbles our pride, burns
away our sins, leads
us to rely on others and to accept their service, calls us to
remember our
ultimate end. In many
ways, a life
without suffering would be a life of vanity and illusion.
In her
marvelous
biography of St. Catherine, completed after World War II and
published
posthumously in 1951, Sigrid Undset makes a further point with
provocative
language:
The
intense
remorse which Catherine always felt for her sins came of her
knowledge of what
complete Purity, complete Love, really is… When she spoke as
though she
believed that her sins were the cause of the misery of the
Holy Church and the
whole world, she meant it with deadly seriousness…
This
is the
communism of the society of the blessed: just as the rewards
of the blessed are
collected in the treasure-house of the Church, so that every
poor and infirm
soul may have its share of this treasure, so in a mysterious
way the sins of
the faithful impoverish the whole of Christendom.
Our generation, which has seen how the
horrors of war and the concentration camps have fallen alike
on the guilty and
on those who by human reckoning were the most guiltless,
should find it easier
than our forefathers, with their naïve belief in personal
success as a reward
for personal service, to understand the dogma of the Church
that we all have
our share in the rewards of all the saints and the guilt of
all sinners. (Sheed
& Ward, 1956 ed., 135–36)
Conformity
to
Christ Crucified
Jesus Christ is the only “satisfying” answer to
the
problem of suffering (play on words intended).
He is the answer not by explaining it away, but by
taking it into His
flesh, absorbing it utterly and totally, and giving it a new
meaning, a new
purpose, a new power—that of atonement and redemption and,
more fundamentally,
that of love. Suffering
becomes the
ultimate expression of a love that stops at nothing in order
to redeem, and be
united with, the beloved. It
is the
decisive demonstration of the words of the Song of Songs:
“Love is stronger
than death” (Cant. 8:6).
Why did St. Paul say, in the midst of a letter in
which he was sorting out moral and liturgical problems among
the Corinthians:
“I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus
Christ, and him
crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2)?
While
the Eucharist
is, in a special way, as St. Thomas teaches, ipse Christus passus—Christ
Himself
as having suffered for our salvation, all of the
sacraments apply to our souls the fruits of the Passion of
Christ. The very
structure of the Church is Christ
crucified; the principal action of the Church is Christ
crucified; the entire
Christian life is Christ crucified; Heaven itself is nothing
other than our
perfect participation in the God-Man who reigns in glory with
His life-giving
wounds, “a Lamb standing as though slain” (Rev. 5:6).
If I could but know “Christ Jesus, and Him
crucified,” everything else worth knowing would grow out of
that root, as a
mighty tree from a tiny seed.
A
blogger who
called himself the Sensible Bond—sadly, long since gone from
the internet, but
not before I grabbed a few of his best articles—wrote the
following:
We should take consolation from our
irrelevance. God knows
what we do, and
its importance is not measured in human terms but in those of
divine love. We can
sing, dance, do penance and what you will,
in the full knowledge that the value of our actions is beyond
calculation, as
long as they belong to Christ.
Most of
what we say will be a dead footnote in history.
It is our child-raising and prayer muttering that
threaten to make a
difference, if not on this earth, then at least in Purgatory
or Heaven…
Find your consolations other than in the “human health” of
the
Church. We are not
wrong to be so
scandalised by the current management.
We just have to take the pain.
It’s our cross. We
have to bear
it. Our love is love
unknown.
If Our
Lord is
summoning us, in this era of ecclesiastical dereliction, to an
ever deeper
participation in the mystery of the Agony in the Garden,
should we not bow our
heads, thank Him tenderly—“not my will, but Thy will be
done”—and enter through
the narrow gate, leaving aside the wide gate and broad way
that leadeth to
destruction (Mt. 7:13)? “For
I reckon
that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared
with the glory
to come, that shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18).
__________________________________________
|
