The first weapon in the spiritual combat is mistrust of self and humility. This, on the face of it, is an unpromising start for a rich and vigorous spiritual life. This principle seems to be part and parcel of a dark and defeatist view of the human condition that modern theological developments have been at pains to correct. It seems to be felt in many quarters, and felt very strongly, that we are standing on the threshold of a new age when humanity will have remade itself, if not into Nietzsche’s superman, then at least into members of a rational, progressive and caring society.
Our concern is not to argue against this sort of rosy view of the human condition but to show what it is we should actually do in order to achieve our destiny. In other words, our aim is not to argue for the coherence or plausibility of the Catholic faith at a theoretical level (this is done admirably well in so many apologetics books), but to explain how to use this faith in our own personal struggle to achieve union with God. This first weapon of self-distrust and humility is meant to be a practical, or real, attitude that must affect our conduct.
Faith teaches us that we are creatures wounded by original sin and therefore pulled toward sinful behavior. Furthermore, the escape from this fact about the human condition is only possible through the acceptance of the grace of Christ. Finally, our own experience shows us that without God’s help we are unable to keep clear from mortal sin for an extended period of time.1 Our aim is to explain how to use these principles in a constructive way. God “desires and loves to see in us a frank and true recognition of this most certain truth, that all the virtue and grace which is within us is derived from him alone, who is the fountain of all good, and that nothing good can proceed from us, no, not even a thought which can find acceptance in his sight.”2
Although both God and we play a role in attaining to this self-distrust, we ourselves have to do our part in obtaining it. There are four methods by which, in dependence always on divine grace, we may acquire this gift:
We are to consider or meditate on the truth of our own radical incapacity to merit our salvation.
We should pray to obtain the gift of a real and personal assent to this truth about our own nature.
We should distrust our own judgments about ourselves and realize it is hard to be truthful about ourselves.
When we sin we should look more deeply into ourselves and feel more keenly our absolute and utter weakness.
Meditating on the Human Condition
From faith we learn about the existence of original sin and that we are fallen creatures. By ourselves, left to our own resources, we cannot save ourselves. We are dependent on God for the life of grace and for the hope of heaven. This truth about our condition is the basis of the practice of the virtue of humility and distrust of ourselves. We are wounded creatures given to sin, and humility helps to get rid of a false pride and confidence and makes us submissive and ready to receive divine favor.
The fact that we are wounded creatures is reaffirmed with great vigor in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
The doctrine of original sin, closely connected with that of redemption by Christ, provides lucid discernment of man’s situation and activity in the world. By our first parents’ sin, the devil has acquired a certain domination over man, even though man remains free. Original sin entails “captivity under the power of him who thenceforth had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Council of Trent (1546): DS 1511; cf. Heb 2:14). Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature inclined to evil gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action (cf. John Paul II, Centesimus annus 25), and morals.3
From the doctrine of original sin, secondly, there follows the teaching of our faith that without grace we can do nothing to merit our salvation. In the Letter of St. James we are taught that “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas 1;17). The Church understands this to mean that left to ourselves we cannot please God and inherit eternal life. As the Council of Trent says: “If anyone says that man can be justified before God by his own works, whether done by his own natural powers or through the teaching of the law, without divine grace through Jesus Christ, let him be anathema.”4
Of course, what we do matters, and in the traditional language, we are justified by both faith and works. But good works that help us on the road to salvation issue from God’s gift of faith and accompany God’s gift of faith. They are also, I suppose, in the case of the saints anyway, the evidence of the presence of God’s gift of faith.
There is a third reason for self-distrust, and this is the fact that we are all sinners. Sin, says St. Augustine, is “any transgression in deed, or word, or desire, of the eternal law”.5Sin in this sense, as something each one of us does, may be called personal sin as distinct from original sin.6 The Catechism of the Catholic Church refers us to Gaudium et Spes of the Second Vatican Council where we read:
What Revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn toward what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good creator.7
We are drawn to do the wrong things by our fallen nature, and, as often as not, we follow the promptings of our nature and commit sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to give to “this dark reality other names would be futile”.8 In the light of revelation we see that sin is more than “a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a misstructure”9-or anything like that: “[S]in is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons”,10 a freedom that was supposed to have been used to love God and our fellow men.
Assenting to These Truths
These truths, at least for some people, are easier to accept at a theoretical level than they are in practice. This is not surprising as they are distinctly unpalatable, and deep in our hearts we tend to believe that they do not really apply very adequately to us. I do not say we are consistent about this conceptually, yet there is a real block somewhere in our nature to accepting them. Here I think we should notice that so long as we do not lie to ourselves, this does not matter very much if the block show itself only as a feeling or as a reluctance to accept an unpalatable truth. There are lots of things in life we have to face that we do not want to face, such as having a serious operation, say, or being forced to stay in and work on a beautiful day. Our system rebels against the operation or having to do the work, but, so long as we do not really imagine that not liking the facts is going to drive them away, we are still living in the truth.
A similar observation obtains with the recognition that we are not capable of saving ourselves. So long as we admit the truth of the teaching of our faith and pray that we may learn to understand it more deeply, then we have enough for a solid beginning. The important thing is that there should be no denial of truth or deliberate falseness about ourselves. We must not try to force ourselves into a false feeling either of inferiority and wickedness or, on the other hand, of superiority and holiness. Gradually, as we go on with life, and with our prayer, the truth of our incapacity for good when left to ourselves, as well as the strength of bad habits and of the forces of evil arrayed against us, become ever more apparent to us.
Distrusting Ourselves
The earliest tradition concerning the ascetical life insisted on the importance of living with other people for the development of the virtues. Solitude not only preserves but intensifies the faults of those who are not subject to the correction that is brought to bear on the individual by living with others. Like a mirror, a community holds up the faults of its members, and without the reflector it is easy to obtain a distorted view of ourselves.
Living with others is not, however, enough to guarantee accurate self-knowledge. Nor is avoiding self-deception enough to guarantee living in the truth. Although, certainly, however we are to explain this strange capacity we have for misleading ourselves, this is one element in the situation. The root cause of a justified self-distrust is that we do not know ourselves very well, nor have we any certainty as to how we will act in the future. In the Confessions Augustine makes this very clear, and what he wrote at the end of the fourth century is still as accurate and as succinct an expression of the human situation as can be found. He refers to the text in the First Letter to the Corinthians that asks “what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him?” (1 Cor ). He then goes on to say that there still remains an area in ourselves that we do not know: “Yet there is something of the human person which is unknown even to the ‘spirit of man which is in him’”.11 Proper integration into a community and an honest effort to understand ourselves do not bring full self-knowledge. That is the fact of the matter, and then the saint goes on to draw the conclusion that he cannot be sure how he will behave in the face of future temptations:
I know that you cannot be subjected to violence, whereas I do not know which temptations I can resist and which I cannot. There is hope because “you are faithful and do not allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear, but with the temptation make also a way of escape so that we can bear it” (1 Cor. ). Accordingly, let me confess what I know of myself. Let me confess too what I do not know of myself. For what I know of myself I know because you grant me light, and what I do not know of myself, I do not know until such time as my darkness becomes “like noonday” before your face (Isa. 58:10).12
Through his faith Augustine knows something about himself: “You Lord know everything about the human person; for you made humanity”,13 and in that knowledge given by God to Augustine, he knows that the good in him is from God and that the evil is from himself. There is a tendency we all have to claim our good actions as our own and the bad things we do as not pertaining to ourselves in the same way. The truth is the reverse: The good things we do are the result of God’s grace and mercy, and the evil things we do are the sign of what we really are. This theological truth is behind our insistence that we must learn to distrust ourselves when it comes to the foundations of the spiritual life. Our corrupt nature too easily inclines us to a false estimate of ourselves: “so that, being really nothing, we account ourselves to be something, and presume without the slightest foundation, upon our own strength.”14
The good in us is God’s, and the evil in us is our own. However much this may go against contemporary modes of thought, this unpleasant truth is the lesson of Scripture and the teaching of the Church. But it is not just contemporary modes of thought that find the truth repellent-it is we ourselves. Somewhere, buried not all that deep in ourselves, is a conviction that we are not really all that bad. Here we have to learn to pray for the humility to see and accept this fundamental lesson of the Gospel about the human condition.
With experience comes a deepening in the practice of humility. Humility is a large subject and has been much written about and analyzed. St. Benedict, for example, dealt with twelve degrees of humility, which indicated the importance that traditional spirituality attached to this virtue.15 Humility in its primary sense has to do with moderating an exaggerated feeling of hopefulness about something that is difficult to obtain. Leading our lives in such a way that we will not only end with Blessed Vision of God, but also begin to live in the presence of God now is just such a difficult goal. All too often we approach our spiritual lives as though sanctification and salvation were really easy to obtain; or even worse, that we do not really have to try at all in order to lead a perfectly satisfactory Christian life. We may not quite say all this, but our actions show we think there is little urgency about the law of God and its application to our own existence here; and we say, at least to ourselves; Let us not get into a sweat; let us take it easy, and it will all come out in the wash. If we had a better developed sense of reality, and that is at least part of what is being talked about here, if we began to practice the virtue of humility, then we might begin to get rid of this terrible complacency. St. Thomas puts it this way:
The chief reason for repressing presumptuous feelings of hopefulness…lies in the reverence you bear towards God, which prevents you from claiming more than is due to you according to your divinely apportioned lot. Humility implies most of all man’s subjection to God.16
It is very hard for us to accept this. We give lip seice to the fact we need God, but we think, in a confused way, that some aspect, some quality of ourselves is good in and of itself without God’s grace. That is, we seem to believe that this aspect or quality is good through our own nature and our own doing and that this aspect or quality merits, that is, is entitled to, the commendation of God. Well, it is hard to take, and it is a blow to our pride, and it does go against much modern thought, but our faith teaches us that all the good in us that works toward our salvation is based on God’s gift and that left to ourselves and our own endowments we are on the road to spiritual self-destruction.
Self-distrust and humility are the first weapons of the spiritual combat. Until we have some sense of our own nothingness, and some realization that we are unable to save ourselves without God’s grace, there will be no serious understanding of faith. And, such a serious understanding of our faith is required if we are to be capable of both deepening our relationship with God as well as changing the way we behave.
Adapted from Spiritual Combat Revisited, by Jonathan Robinson (Ignatius Press, 2003), ch. 2
Photo by Glen Michaelsen on Unsplash
