37. Why practicing the presence of God is the key to sanctity
37. WHY PRACTICING THE PRESENCE OF GOD IS THE KEY TO SANCTITY
What can we do about our moral insanity: choosing misery (sin), not happiness (virtue)?
Augustine says that all desire happiness with one will . . . as the intellect of necessity adheres to the first principles (e.g., the Law of Noncontradiction, X is not non-X), the will must of necessity adhere to the last end, which is happiness, since the end is in practical matters what the principle is in speculative matters . . . But (this) natural necessity does not take away the freedom of the will . . . (For) we are masters of our own actions by reason of our being able to choose this or that. But choice regards not the end but the means to the end, as the Philosopher says. . . (I,82,1) (These “means” are) individual goods which have not a necessary connection with happiness, because without them a man can be happy; and to such the will does not adhere of necessity.
But there are some things (faith, hope, charity) which have a necessary connection with happiness, by means of which things man adheres to God, in Whom alone true happiness consists. Nevertheless, until through the certitude of the Divine Vision the necessity of such connection be shown, the will does not adhere to God of necessity, nor to those things which are of God (faith, hope, charity). But the will of the man who sees God in His essence of necessity adheres to God, just as now we desire of necessity to be happy (I,82,2).
Plato taught us an important half-truth when he said that all evil comes from ignorance. (It is only a half-truth because he forgot that ignorance also comes from evil, and that the will moves the reason as well as the reason moving the will.) The truth of his “half-truth” is that if we truly knew and totally understood, without a doubt, that choosing good (which ultimately means choosing obedience to God’s will) always made us happy, deep down and in the long run, and that choosing the opposite (evil) always infallibly made us miserable, we would never choose evil. We will see this clearly in the Beatific Vision, face to face with God in Heaven. But we do not see this clearly now.
As St. Thomas says, all desire happiness, necessarily. But not all desire virtue as the means to happiness. We are free to choose different means, different roads to the end we all seek. So if we could glue “happiness” to “virtue” with a mental glue that did not become unstuck, we would always desire virtue as we desire happiness. What glues happiness to virtue in this way? Wisdom.
Therefore the key to being good and choosing good is wisdom, the wisdom that sees the good as it is, i.e., as desirable, and sees the evil as it is, i.e., as undesirable; the wisdom that sees through the Devil’s deceptive worm wiggling invitingly on his concealed hook.
How do we acquire the X-ray vision that sees through this deception? It’s crucially important, because if sin didn’t seem like fun, we’d all be saints! The answer is that we must first choose to practice the truth, i.e., the presence of God and the goodness of God and the trustability of God and the beauty of God. Make it a habit to say many times a day, “Father, I trust you.” Especially when He (through your conscience) tells you to make some sacrifice that seems painful instead of pleasant.
In other words, get as close to the Beatific Vision as you can. In this life we do not clearly see the necessity of the connection between virtue and happiness. But we can believe it. Faith = wisdom.
Wisdom comes in four ways: experience, reasoning, seeing, and believing (faith). We know from experience that every time we have chosen virtue, it has made us deeply happy, and every time we have chosen sin, it has made us deeply miserable. But this experience is not enough, for we still choose sin. (We are quite insane. We choose misery over joy. That is part of Original Sin.) Reasoning can prove it to us, as in Plato. But this moves us even less than experience does. What about vision, just seeing it, just knowing it? Some have more of this gift than others, but no one has much of it this side of Heaven. Pray for this vision, though; it is a great grace. There remains faith: “If God said it, it must be true.”
God did more than say it: He showed it, He did it, on the Cross.