Focus on Things That Matter the Most
Lesson 2
Focus on Things That Matter the Most
Focus on Things That Matter the Most
Three things we must know to be saved.
Question 2
What must we know to be saved?
Thomas answers that . . .
“Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.”
—Treatise on the Two Commandments of Charity
The Three Things We Gotta Know: to Believe, to Desire, to Do
If we’ve retained our first life lesson and have our sights on eternal bliss with God, we need to focus on the things that matter the most to help us attain that ultimate goal, and that is the stuff of this second chapter. In our opening quotation Thomas tersely lays out for us the three things we’ve got to know to be saved: what we must believe, what we must desire, and what we must do.12
What we must believe is expressed most clearly, yet briefly, in the Nicene Creed, which we say at Mass most Sundays, beginning with the words “I believe” in English or “Credo” (meaning “I believe,” and hence our English word “Creed”), the word that St. Thomas used, and the word that you use as well, if you attend the Latin Mass. In Thomas’s treatise on The Two Commandments of Charity, he does not elaborate any further on what we are to believe, and I won’t do so either — not right now in this section anyway, since the remainder of this book will flesh that out aplenty as we examine and strive to live our lives according to all manner of articles of the Faith!
What we must desire is expressed just as succinctly in the Lord’s Prayer. This, of course, is the Our Father (Pater Noster in Thomas’s Latin), the prayer that Christ gave us (Matt. 6:9–13; Luke 11:2–4). In the same treatise on charity we are referencing here, Thomas elaborated no further, since his focus was on what charity bids us to do. (Please be aware, though, that Thomas wrote entire homilies explicating the meanings of the words of both the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and we’ll pull insights from them in the chapters ahead.)
What we must do was expressed succinctly as “the Law,” but Thomas spelled out what is meant by the Law in great detail, so now we will get down to business.
In brief, God created the first humans, Adam and Eve, with a natural light to know right from wrong in terms of what they should or should not do. This awareness of natural law lingers in us today. Thomas notes that “no one, for instance, is ignorant that he ought not to do to others what he is unwilling to have done to himself.”13 In our original state before we embraced sin, our actions readily followed the dictates of this natural light of understanding. Through Satan’s envy and Adam and Eve’s prideful disobedience, however, sin and the law of concupiscence came into the world, so that, as Adam and Eve rebelled against God, our passions and lower natures gained the capacity to rebel against the natural light of our reason. Thomas cites St. Paul, who stated so well: “I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind” (Rom. 7:23).
Thankfully, however, God came to our aid to remedy this corruption by giving us the law of Scripture through Moses. Through this revelation, humanity came to hate sin, so as to avoid eternal punishment. Thomas notes that “the first reason anyone begins to avoid sin is the thought of the last judgment and hell.”14 This then is a law of fear. Indeed, not only is the fear of the Lord the beginning of wisdom, but, “the fear of the Lord driveth out sin” (Ecclus. 1:27, Douay-Rheims).
Jesus Christ brought us the fourth and the highest law of all when He gave us the law of love. Loving, filial fear casts out imperfect servile fear of punishment, since, as St. John told us, “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). Christ’s law of love is the highest of all laws that should reign within our hearts. It is the law that matters the most and should guide and perfect the acts of our lives.
Thomas elaborates that Christ’s law of love differs from and perfects Moses’ law of fear in three essential ways:
1. Whereas the law of fear makes us slaves, the law of love makes us free, as St. Paul says: “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17).
2. The keepers of the first law were rewarded with temporal goods: “If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land (Isa.1:19). But the keepers of the new law are promised heavenly rewards; for example, in the words of Christ: “If you would enter life, keep the commandments” (Matt. 19:17) and of St. John the Baptist: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 3:2).
3. The yoke of the old law was heavy and burdensome, as St. Peter said to the Pharisees: “Why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?” (Acts 15:10), but Christ said of His law, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30).
We’ll move on right now, but note that the lightness of Christ’s yoke will be weighed and examined with much more care when we arrive at chapter 5.
Thomas drills down into Christ’s law of love even further when he spells out a full ten effects of the law of charity or love, “four things that are to be sought for most earnestly,”15 as well as “six other effects of charity in the soul.”16
The first and foremost effect of embracing Christ’s law of love is a profound spiritual transformation. As the thing loved is found in the heart of the lover, the person who loves God has God in himself, for “he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16). Indeed, Thomas notes that “it is the nature of love also to transform the lover into the thing loved.”17 There could not be a more complete transformation!
The second of the fourfold major effects of Christ’s law of love is the lover’s faithfulness in keeping the commandments, both the affirmative commandments that bid us what to do and the prohibitive commandments that bid us what not to do, for Christ said “if a man love me, he will keep my word” (John 14:23).
The third major effect is confidence in God, for “we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom. 8:28). Moreover, Thomas reminds us, according to our own experience in doing things for those we love dearly, that “things hard and difficult seem easy and pleasant to one who loves.”18
The fourth of the fundamental effects that flow from Christ’s law of love is that “charity leads us to everlasting life,” the ultimate goal of our first lesson, since “he who does not love remains in death” (1 John 3:14). And not only does charity open the gates of heaven to us, but the greater our love of God is, the greater will be our beatitude in heaven, like that of the Apostles, “who have the first fruits of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:23) because of the greatness of their love.
Let’s look very briefly at six other effects of charity St. Thomas describes, since he notes we “must not, however, pass by six other effects of charity in the soul,”19 and we will flesh them out more fully in the chapters ahead.
1. Forgiveness from God flows from the love of charity since, as our first pope wrote, “love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Pet. 4:8), King Solomon declared that “love covers all offenses” (Prov. 10:12), and Christ said of Mary Magdalene, “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much” (Luke 7:47).
2. Light. Charity enlightens our hearts, for while without the love of charity “we are wrapped up in darkness” (Job 37:19, Douay-Rheims) and do not know what to do to attain salvation, but “his [God’s] “anointing teaches you about everything” (1 John 2:27).
3. Joy. We saw in our first chapter how joy is an effect of love, since we rest in joy when we attain what we love. Indeed, Thomas notes that the charity that comes from the love of God “makes man perfect in joy.”20
4. Peace comes from the love of God, because no earthly goods can bring us complete rest and contentment, so as soon as we obtain some coveted thing, we begin to seek out something else. Only God brings complete satisfaction, as we will strive to make clear in our very next chapter.
5. Dignity flows from charity, for, although all creation serves God, the love of charity makes us, alone of all creatures on earth, free beings and friends of God: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).
6. Sonship of God. Not only does charity free us and make us God’s friends; it also makes us His own children: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1).
The Angelic Doctor has truly given us a great deal to penetrate in this chapter’s first section, but be not afraid, for we have the rest of this book to peer deeply into its many implications. To put it in a nutshell for now, we will focus on what matters most when we focus on what we must believe, desire, and do to be saved, in accord with Christ’s law of love. Next, let’s take our first look at the kinds of sins and errors we must pulverize so that the many glorious effects of Christ’s law of love may pour into and transform our souls.
Three Things We Must Pulverize to Be Saved
If we are to open our hearts fully to Christ’s law of love, we must pulverize the sins and errors that have grown in our hearts’ chambers through Satan’s still lingering and festering law of concupiscence. There are a host of sins and errors that can lead us away from God’s love. As Satan’s minions said of themselves, we could name them “Legion,” “for they are many” (Mark 5:9; Luke 8:30). Here, though, we will focus our attention on but three of their names: the ages-old sins of curiosity and covetousness and the modern-day false god of consumerism.
Vices are the tendencies we build up in ourselves that incline us toward the commission of sins. As virtues are to virtuous deeds, vices are to sins, which are, literally, vicious (immoral or sinful) thoughts, desires, words, or deeds. We will start with the vice Thomas called curiositas because it diametrically opposes our second lesson of focusing on things that matter the most. Curiositas derives from the Latin cura (care) and is translated into English pretty straightforwardly as “curiosity.” Although, in our day, some describe curiosity as a great virtue, implying “an inquiring mind,” the vice of curiosity means the tendency to care too much for things that don’t really matter or for things that are harmful and evil. We saw that Aristotle wrote that it is better to know a little about sublime things than much about trivial things, and St. Thomas agreed. Curiosity focuses too much on learning about trivial things that provide simple excitements and pleasures, at the expense of higher, more important things, such as the articles of the Faith. We need to ask ourselves if our curiosity has us spending far too many hours flitting from one website or social media account to the next, when we should be spending much more time and energy focusing on the things that truly matter the most, such as learning the Faith or discerning the needs of our friends and families.
Covetousness for the things of the world (avarice or greed, if you prefer), is another vice that draws us away from the things of God by focusing our thoughts, desires, and deeds on the acquisition of material goods, “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:21). If we are to focus more on what matters most, we must work to pulverize any tendency we might find in our hearts to spend inordinate time and energy devising ways to amass money or the limited goods that money can buy. Do you really need to work overtime again tonight, even if you can probably still see the last half of your son’s or your daughter’s ball game? Do you really need that new eight-hundred-dollar cell phone that your next-door neighbor just showed you — as he chuckled a bit at your outdated model from last year? Are there other signs of covetousness in your own heart? If so, what are they? And what can you do to start pulverizing them?
While good Catholics have for centuries tried to rein in vicious curiosity and covetousness, through “chastity of the eyes” and examination of one’s conscience, in our time, in ways never dreamed of before, we are encouraged by advertising, marketing, and our enormous information and entertainment industries to become ever more curious and ever more covetous, focusing more and more on things that matter less and less. One of the most widespread and powerful false life lessons that encourages this the most is that of consumerism, the idea that worldly things and worldly experiences are what will bring us joy. Consumerism strives to keep us so focused on animal, sensory pleasures, that we have little time to reflect that, being made in God’s image with intellects and wills, we were made for far higher things. Note well, too, that this erroneous worldview of consumerism is not merely the product or goal of any one political or economic system, for the overzealous capitalist who lives only for his financial profit may share much in common with the socialist who so dearly desires to possess the material goods that the capitalist produces, or at least to deprive the capitalist of them. Both kinds of immoderate hearts beat fastest for the treasures of the earth. When we strive to crush curiosity, covetousness, and consumerism, and focus on the goods of the soul that matter the most, our hearts will beat loudest for the treasures from above.
Three Virtues That Matter Much
The vice of curiositas has a much abler and nobler foe in the virtue of studiositas, which is precisely the virtue that enables us to maintain our focus on the things that matter the most! Aristotle wrote, and St. Thomas concurred, that all people have by nature a desire to know, and we can see this by the delight we take in the information provided to us by our senses. Such is the natural breeding ground for the vice of curiosity. Yet, when we practice the virtue of studiousness through repeated daily training, we pulverize both our unrestrained natural intellectual desire to know things that are not worth knowing and that are potentially sinful, and our natural bodily resistance (laziness) to the focus and diligence we can acquire through prolonged study. We can cultivate this virtue of studiousness by the way we arrange our physical study spaces, by removing or turning off potential distractions, such as unnecessary electronic devices, and by carrying materials worthy of study with us when we can anticipate we will have time to sit and wait somewhere, such as a doctor’s office or an airport terminal. We can also set goals for ourselves when we sit down to serious study of the Faith. Who could not spare, for instance, even fifteen minutes every day to study the Bible or other religious materials that will foster the growth of Christ’s law of love in our hearts and our minds?
Temperance is another grand virtue that can help us focus on what matters the most. Temperance, also known as self-control or moderation, is one of the four cardinal moral virtues that reins in and regulates our desires for the things that bring us pleasure. Indeed, Thomas lists the virtue of studiousness as one of many virtues, including honesty, sobriety, chastity, modesty, and humility, that work in the service of temperance. And how do we become temperate? Here we call in yet another virtue in temperance’s stable of allies, namely, continence.
In the language of this chapter’s life lesson, let’s say you have decided to devote those fifteen minutes every morning to the study of the Bible or of some kind of spiritual writing, so that you may have a greater grasp of what we must believe, desire, and do to be saved. You arise early in the morning, and armed with a cup of hot coffee, conform your contours to a comfortable chair and reach out for something to read. Behold! There upon the table at your elbow rests volume 1 of Thomas’s glorious Summa Theologica! Ah, but next to it lies the morning newspaper or some magazine on your special interest. An internal struggle briefly ensues, and, thanks be to God, you ignore the paper or magazine and immerse yourself, for a while, in the Summa! That internal struggle, the period of hesitancy during which you weighed your options and selected your newly chosen goal of spiritual reading over your long-held habit of beginning your day immersed in the things of the world, was conquered by your practice of the virtue of continence. When you have so firmly established the habit of starting your day with spiritual reading that you no longer feel any internal struggle, congratulations, for you have arrived at the virtue of temperance full-blown. Please allow St. Thomas to explain it:
Temperance is far greater than continence, because the good of a virtue derives its praise from that which is in accord with reason. Now the good of reason flourishes more in the temperate man than in the continent man, because in the former even the sensitive appetite is obedient to reason, being tamed by reason so to speak, whereas in the continent man the sensitive appetite strongly resists reason by its evil desire. Hence continence is compared to temperance, as the imperfect to the perfect (II-II, 155, 4).
If we stop to think about it a bit, when we embrace cultural messages of consumerism, we do not tame our sensual appetites according to reason, but we rein in our reason in service of our sensual appetites, which, as we saw in our first lesson, can never satisfy us.
Expressing Our Desires in Prayer
We can also reach up to God for His supernatural assistance in helping us focus on what matters the most, so that we may be saved. Thomas, you will recall, said that what we should desire in order to be saved was summarized for us by Christ Himself when He gave us the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9–13; Luke 11:2–4). In his prefatory remarks on this prayer, Thomas states: “Among all prayers the Lord’s Prayer stands preeminent, for it excels in the five conditions required in prayer: confidence, rectitude, order, devotion, and humility.”21 Surely, we all know Thomas well enough by now to know that he has precise meanings in mind for each of those conditions.
Sometimes modern spiritual writings denigrate the rote prayers we learned in childhood as superficial formulas most fit for beginners, the kind of spiritual “milk, not solid food” that St. Paul wrote about (1 Cor. 3:2); these prayers include, of course, the Our Father or Lord’s Prayer, and the Hail Mary. I agree that such prayers can lack spiritual depth if we learn merely to parrot them with little grasp of the deep meanings expressed in every word. When properly understood though, these prayers, which are derived from Scripture, from the words of an archangel, the Blessed Mother, St. Elizabeth, and even the Word Incarnate, are of unparalleled depth of meaning and beauty of expression. Indeed, we will examine many of Thomas’s insights on the phrases, praises, and petitions of the Lord’s Prayer as we move through our life lessons in the chapters ahead.
Let’s conclude this section on prayer with excerpts of prayers from the Treatise on the Two Commandments of Charity added by its English translator, Fr. Rawes, so that we might pulverize sins and might always know what to believe, what to desire, and what to do to be saved:
O Jesus, let Thy sin-destroying love dwell always in my soul. Thou, in Thy graciousness dost forgive me again and again. Give me, dear Lord, true sorrow for my sins. The more that I love thee, the more I must grieve when I offend Thee. (34)
O Lord, lighten my heart with Thine own brightness and the brightness of Thy Spirit, that I may always know what to do, what to believe, and what to desire. Lead me, my Savior, in the right way. Thou art my Judge and my King. Jesus, give me joy in God; and let my soul, loving and longing, rest in Him. (35)
On Believing, Loving, and Participating in the Sacraments
St. Thomas said that what we need to believe to be saved is summarized in the Creed. Among the beliefs you and I express in the Nicene Creed is that of our belief in the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” Christ said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18), and from Christ and His Church have flowed the seven sacraments. Of particular interest for this life lesson is the sacrament Christ refers to in the very next verse of Matthew’s Gospel: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven.” That power of binding and loosing given to Peter and passed on to his successors and the priests they ordain is expressed quite clearly in the sacrament of Confession or Reconciliation — poenitentia (Penance), in St. Thomas’s words. Indeed, Thomas reminds us that this sacrament is necessary for salvation for any who are in a state of sin, recalling Christ’s words: “Unless you repent you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3).
In the words of our “lesson plans,” the sacrament of penance is the ultimate weapon for pulverizing sin, since it draws its limitless powers from the One who completely conquered sin. The word “mortal,” used for grave sin, comes from the Latin mors (death), and the word “venial,” used for less serious sins, comes from venia (pardon). Mortal sins produce spiritual death and cut us off from God’s graces, leading to damnation, and not salvation, if we remain unrepentant. In mortal sin, we deliberately turn away from God in favor of worldly goods. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) explains that for a sin to be considered mortal, three things are required: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent” (1857).
Venial sins are smaller moral transgressions regarding less serious matters. Thomas explains that such sins do not involve a deliberate turning away from God, but they do entail an inordinate or inappropriate focus on worldly goods. They do not cut us off from God’s grace, but “by venial sins man’s affections are clogged so that they are slow in tending towards God” (III, 87, 1). Venial sins cause disorder in our souls but do not destroy them, though they may plant the seeds and help establish vicious habits under which mortal sin can take root.
The good news is that through the sacrament of Penance, both mortal and venial sins are forgiven. Recalling that sacraments entail some kind of matter (such as the water used in Baptism) and some kind of form (the words of the rite), Thomas explains that the matter of the sacrament of penance “consists in the acts of the penitent, the matter of which acts are the sins over which he grieves, which he confesses, and for which he satisfies. Hence it follows that sins are the remote matter of Penance, as a matter, not for approval, but for detestation, and destruction” (III, 83, 2). As for the form of the sacrament of penance, this is the priest’s words in the rite, in which, speaking in persona Christi, he declares, “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Thomas also makes clear the three necessary parts or elements of the sacrament of Penance: contrition, confession, and satisfaction.
The first requisite on the part of the penitent is the will to atone, and this is done by contrition; the second is that he submit to the judgment of the priest standing in God’s place, and this is done in confession; and the third is that he atone according to the decision of God’s minister, and this is done in satisfaction. (III, 90, 2)
With those elements in mind, let’s take a look at the traditional Act of Contrition that one prays in the confessional after confessing one’s sins:
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.
Do you detect in this prayer not only contrition, but confession and commitment to satisfaction too? Further, do you see expressions of the heavenly goal of our first life lesson, and of servile and filial fear?
It so happens that this question of four articles on “The Parts of Penance in General” is the last question Thomas ever wrote in his unfinished Summa Theologica. He ceased to write after a mystical experience of Christ on December 6, 1273. Before his death on March 7, 1274, Christ told Thomas he had written well and asked what He might give him, to which Thomas responded: “Only You, Lord.” Thomas reported to his friend Friar Reginald that all he had written seemed “as straw,” after his mystical experience, perhaps a glimpse of the Beatific Vision, to which no words could do justice. We’ll examine those experiences in this book’s conclusion. For now, please note that the priest who heard Thomas’s last confession would report that the Angelic Doctor’s own simple sins were like those of a young child.
Moving back to our time and our souls, when we search our consciences for sins we have committed, such as sloth or any of its “daughters,” curiosity, or covetousness that we’ve addressed so far, we must always bear in mind that the sacrament of Penance was given to us through Christ and His Church to free us from the bondage of our sins, and that’s what matters most.
Life Lesson 2 Summa
We focus on what matters most when we attend to what we must know, believe, and do to be saved, particularly in regard to the law of love that Christ gave us. We best hone our ability to sustain our holy focus by striving to crush sins of curiosity, covetousness, and consumerism, by building countervailing virtues of studiousness, continence, and temperance, by praying traditional prayers with a depth of understanding attached to each word, and by embracing the contrition, confession, and satisfaction of the sacrament of Reconciliation, which cleanses us of distracting sins and opens God’s floodgates of virtues and graces to carry us back to Him.
12 You may refer to the appendix to see the table “Three Things We Must Know to Be Saved” and additional summary tables for material in this and subsequent chapters.
13 Treatise on the Two Commandments of Charity and the Ten Commandments of the Law, trans. Father Rawes, D.D. (London: Burns and Oats, 1880), 2.
14 Ibid., 4.
15 Ibid., 23.
16 Ibid., 27.
17 Ibid., 24.
18 Ibid., 26.
19 Ibid., 27.
20 Ibid., 29.
21 St. Thomas Aquinas, The Aquinas Catechism: A Simple Explanation of the Catholic Faith by the Church’s Greatest Theologian (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2000), 103.