The Epistemology of Holiness

The following is an excerpt from
How to Be Holy: First Steps in Becoming a Saint 
published by Ignatius Press

But the seeing that makes us holy is not seeing with the first eye, the eyes of the body.  Nor is it seeing with the second eye, the eye of the reason.  It is seeing with the third eye, the eye of the heart.  And that seeing is called faith (and also hope, and also love, which are all parts of one attitude, which de Caussade calls "abandonment" ). 

De Caussade says: "Our faith is never more alive than when what we experience through our senses [apparently] contradicts it and tries to destroy it" (p. 37).  The same is true of our feelings, which are our internal senses.  Seeing and feeling are good and give us much truth and joy; but God deliberately hides from our senses and usually also from our feelings in order to strengthen our faith.  He hides from our outer eye in order to exercise our inner eye.  De Caussade says: "By our senses we can see only the actions of the creature, but faith sees the creator acting in all things" (p. 34). 

Faith does not blind itself to things; it looks along them instead of looking at them; it reads them as signs, as words spoken by God.  Once we look along things instead of just looking at them, we "see" God everywhere, with the eyes of faith.  For He is really there, but veiled.  De Caussade says: "The actions of created beings are veils which hide the profound mysteries of the workings of God" (p. 34).  He is there, but He is holding up a thick rug behind which He is hiding.  The rug is the material appearance of everything in the universe.  Thus "we know the truth without seeing it" with either senses, reason, or feeling. 

Faith is not a feeling, faith is a knowing that is deeper than rational knowing.  Faith is like a rock; feelings are like waves.  They are lots of fun to play in (and sometimes scary and painful when they whomp you), but you cannot live in them, and you cannot build on them anything solid and lasting. 

The very lack of emotional excitement in faith can be deeply exciting: faith knows that there's Somebody there, and He's hiding! At death, He will pop out like a jack in the box and inhabit our seeing and our feeling like a conquering king returning to his rightful throne.  Until then, "we walk by faith and not by sight."

There is a moral dimension to this.  "The duties of each moment are shadows which hide the action of the divine will" (p. 21).  Duties — the driest and dullest and dustiest and least "sexy" of all moral categories — are our divine guru's training in preparation for the mystical ecstasy for which we are all designed.  Duties are disguises of spiritual foreplay.

Faith does not blind itself to things; it looks along them instead of looking at them; it reads them as signs, as words spoken by God.

This vision radically changes our relations to our neighbors, for most of our duties are to our neighbors.  These duties, and our neighbors themselves, are disguises worn by God.  De Caussade says: "If we know that someone in disguise is really our king, we shall behave very differently toward him . . . the clothing is shabby and mean to the ordinary eye, but we shall respect the royal majesty hidden under it" (p. 36).  As C. S. Lewis says, "Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.  If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him Christ vere latitat [truly hides]" (The Weight of Glory).  As Christ himself said, "As you did to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." Especially the least, for He especially disguises Himself "in the distressing disguise of the poor", as Mother Teresa used to say.  If we only saw Who was there . . .

How important for holiness is the intelligence, then? 

That depends on what kind of intelligence you mean.  Factual knowledge is irrelevant; holiness is not a quiz show.  General IQ and cleverness are irrelevant; holiness is not dependent on Harvard or Mensa.  There have been some brilliant saints (Augustine, Aquinas), some very bright saints (More, Newman), some very ordinary saints (Philip Neri, Francis of Assisi, Francis de Sales), and some saints who seldom used words of more than one syllable (Joseph of Cupertino, Mother Teresa of Calcutta).  All of them see with the eye of faith in the heart, with the intelligence of the heart, which, Pascal famously said, "has its reasons, which the reason does not know".  It is this seeing with the heart that is a most powerful aid to sanctity. 

But what does "heart" mean?

We have to distinguish four different meanings.

1. Sometimes "heart" means intellectual intuition, as in Pascal. 
   
   
2. Sometimes "heart" means the emotions, the feelings.  Many human emotions we share with animals, for instance: anger, fear, spontaneous liking or disliking, comfort, discomfort, pain, pleasure, and the instinct to aid others of our species.  Other emotions are specifically human, for instance: righteous anger, not just at inconvenience, but at injustice; respectful fear, not just servile fear; deliberate approval or disapproval; the peace that the world cannot give; spiritual agony and ecstasy; and personal compassion.  These are as much a part of the image of God in us, a part of our immortal souls, as the intellect and the will are.  (See Dietrich von Hildebrand's little classic The Heart.)
   
   
3. Sometimes "heart" means "will", which is the captain of the soul and which commands the intellect to look or not to look, and (with much less success) tries to command the emotions to turn on (usually with little or no success) or off (with only a little more success).  This is where essential love resides: essential love is an act of will, the will to the good of another.  That is the only reason God can command us to love.  Emotions cannot be commanded.  It matters absolutely, it matters enormously, whether we love God and neighbor with our will — in fact, it matters eternally.  It matters only relatively whether we love with the emotions.  Emotions can be a powerful aid to willing.  They can also be a powerful obstacle to willing.  They are also natural effects of willing: the more you will good to your neighbor, the more compassion you feel toward him; the less you will his good, the easier it is to feel indifference or cruelty.  So emotions are very important, but not so much for themselves as for their aid to willing.
   
   
4. Finally, "heart" often means the mysterious source and center of everything in the soul, as the physical organ that pumps the blood is the source of life (through the blood) throughout the body.  This is what Scripture usually means by "heart".  It is impossible to define because it is not a wedge of the circle but the dimensionless point at its center; not an object to be mapped, but the subject doing the mapping; not one of the distinguishable powers of the soul, but the "I" whose powers they are.  For we speak of "my" mind, "my" will, "my" emotions.  My "heart" is the "I" who possesses them.  On two occasions the New Testament calls it "spirit" and distinguishes it from "soul" (1 Thess 5:23; Heb 4:12).  Solomon in his Proverbs says "Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flow the springs of life" (Prov 4:23).  It is the source of our thinking, willing, and feeling; the pre-functional root of all the functions.  This is the deepest meaning of "heart". 

When Scripture uses "heart", it sometimes means specifically human emotions like compassion; sometimes it means "will"; sometimes it means intellectual intuition; and most often it means that mysterious center of the self that is our "I", the center in us of the image of the "I am" that is God.  Only you and God have that name.  We are forbidden to make graven images of God not only because God is not material but also because God has already made the only true images of Himself: us. 

The first eyes, the eyes of the body, relate us to the physical world, the world of matter.  The second eyes, the eyes of the mind, relate us to the mental world, the world of forms, of essences, of logoi, of ideas, of meanings.  (Animals cannot enter that world, though they tremble on its brink.) The third eye, the eye of the heart, relates us to God. 

The practical point about holiness that this map of the soul helps to explain is that the eye of the heart can to some extent compensate for our weakness of will, our divided will. 

The practical point about holiness that this map of the soul helps to explain is that the eye of the heart can to some extent compensate for our weakness of will, our divided will.  We all love creatures too much and God too little, ourselves too much and God and our neighbors too little.  The eye of the heart can compensate for this somewhat for a very simple reason: because if we see God better, it will be easier to love Him.  And if we see Him in our neighbor, whom He created in His image and in whose soul He wants to live and whom He loves and commands us to love — if we see Him there, we will much more easily love Him there. 

For He is beautiful, and seeing beauty naturally leads to loving beauty, wherever we see it.  And loving something beautiful with our emotions naturally (but not inevitably) leads to loving it with our will and our deepest heart.  The obvious example is romantic love.  Since beauty of soul is expressed in the beauty of the acts of the body, especially the face, we can be led, if we will, from the physical signs to the spiritual beauty of the person that these signs signify.

We should apply what we know about the power of romantic love to the goal of holiness.  We should see holiness as "sexy".  For human sexuality, too, is part of the image of God (Gen 2:7 says that!) and is spiritual as well as physical, unlike merely animal sex.  It is inexcusable that when we want to be holy and when we look around for the most effective and powerful analogies and examples from which to learn, we ignore the most powerful passion in the world.  But the saints and mystics have not ignored it; it has been their favorite analogy, metaphor, and image ever since the "Song of Songs" was written, about twenty-five hundred years ago. 

This analogy is the heart of Saint John Paul II's "Theology of the Body", the Church's answer to the Sexual Revolution.  God's Church always redeems and uplifts and beautifies what God has created and designed, especially when sinful mankind perverts, degrades, and uglifies it.