We Believe

A Simple Commentary on the Catechism of Christian Doctrine

Msgr. A. N. Gibley

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781618905864
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Taken from his own catechism courses, We Believe: A Simple Commentary on the Catechism of Christian Doctrine by Monsignor A. N. Gilbey was first published anonymously and became a surprise smash hit. Following the structure of A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, better known as the Penny Catechism, We Believe teaches the Faith in classic question-and-answer form. But where the Penny Catechism excels in its simplicity, We Believe excels in its thoroughness and depth, and in its personal even conversational explanations. Msgr. Gilbey draws from the Scriptures, the rich treasury of Catholic Theology, the writings of the saints, and his own perceptive insights into human nature to lead readers step-by-step to a comprehensive grasp of the Catholic Faith. Msgr. Gilbey divides his lectures into three categories: Faith, Hope, and Love. Faith covers Divine Revelation, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the Communion of Saints, forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Hope addresses Church teachings on grace and prayer, Our Lady, and the Sacraments. Lastly, Charity gives us a rich explanation of the Ten Commandments. With a tender love for both the Church and for his students, and a distinctively English charm, Msgr. Gilbey's We Believe: A Simple Commentary on the Catechism of Christian Doctrine is at once engaging, personal, and inspiring.

CHAPTER 1

THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH IN REASON

WHAT I propose to do is to take as the basis of our talks The Catechism of Christian Doctrine approved by the Archbishops and Bishops of England and Wales and published by the Catholic Truth Society. The Catechism is an extraordinarily valuable attempt to bring the whole scope of Catholic theology down to a small compass and almost to the vocabulary of a child. The point in taking the Catechism as the framework is that it does cover the whole ground. One of the things I want to emphasize is that Catholicism is one whole philosophy of life and not a series of disconnected statements of belief. It is to this whole philosophy of life that these Instructions, please God, will lead you.

The Catechism tries to cover the whole ground of what Catholics believe. If you turn back to the contents list of this book you will see the scheme on which the Catechism is composed. As you see, the whole scheme is concerned with Faith, Hope and Charity, the three theological virtues, which have Almighty God as their end and object. In accepting and practicing Faith, Hope and Charity we have fulfilled the whole duty of man. The fourth section of the Catechism, on the Sacraments, is only apparently an exception to the scheme. Logically and theologically the Sacraments come under the section of Hope, where I shall discuss them. I can only think that the Catechism puts them in a separate section in order to deal with them at greater length.

Coming now to the body of the Catechism, I shall make one of my few criticisms of a work of which I am a great admirer. That concerns the placing of the word “Faith” before Chapter 1. You will see that the place where it really belongs is between questions 8 and 9. Question 9, “What is Faith?” is the start of a new chapter and that is the point where the Catechism begins to consider Faith. Placing the word “Faith” at the very beginning of the whole work is really misleading because those first eight questions are an attempt to suggest to the mind of a child the preamble of faith, that is the foundation in natural reason that we need to lay before we can talk about Faith, Hope and Charity at all. These three theological virtues, as we shall consider later, are all gifts of Almighty God. What we need to do first is to exercise our minds to try to reach a rational concept of Almighty God, of our own nature, and of our own relationship to Him, before we start talking about His gifts to us.

We believe that it is possible for the unprejudiced human mind, even before consideration of divine revelation, to come to a certain but obviously very limited knowledge of five points: the existence of Almighty God; His nature; the immortality of the human soul; the freedom of the human will; and our consequent responsibility.

These five points—the existence of God, the nature of God, the immortality of the human soul, the freedom of the human will and our consequent responsibility—are a brief summary of what is properly called natural theology. We believe that men can come to such knowledge and, in fact, that the overwhelming majority of men have come to it throughout the course of human history, conducting their lives in the belief that there is a Supreme Being, that He is a personal God, that we survive death, that we are free in our actions and that we are responsible for them.

The best classical presentation of these truths, which are not, as you see, especially Christian, let alone exclusively Catholic, is in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. His approach to the existence of Almighty God is often spoken of popularly as his “five proofs.” It is significant, however, that he does not use the word “proof” himself. I always try to avoid that word “proof,” as it is liable to suggest a sort of knock-down argument. The word Aquinas uses is viae—that is, “ways”—which lead us to the knowledge of Almighty God. For our immediate purposes we need dwell only on two of the five “ways,” but I do want to spend a little time on those two because they are immensely important. They have so many practical applications to the conduct of our lives and are a very necessary foundation of much that we shall consider later in this course.

The first of the five “ways” of Aquinas, which is almost an obsession with me and which I find extraordinarily fruitful, is what he calls “the argument from contingent being.” Very simply it is this: nothing that we know exists of itself. There was a time when everything of which we have knowledge or experience did not exist; and there will come a time when it will cease to exist. Existence, or being, is not, therefore, part of its very nature. Being is something lent to everything we know, given to it, communicated to it. Now, unless there existed that Being Who not only has but is being of His very nature, and is able to communicate being, everything that we know would not be or exist at all. The things we know and see were once possibilities: they are now realized facts. If there were not that one Being Who is being of His very nature, Who is able to translate them from the region of unrealized possibility to the region of realized fact, they would be unrealized possibilities still.

This approach, or “way” of Aquinas seems to me to be the most fruitful for many reasons. First, it helps us to understand that all things must not only be called into existence by Almighty God but must be kept in being by Him from moment to moment. Things do not become necessary in the philosophical sense by being called into existence—they remain as “unnecessary” or “contingent,” as before their creation. If Almighty God did not keep things in being from moment to moment, they would drop back to the nothingness from which He drew them.

We see from this that the creative power and the conservative power of Almighty God—the power to cause things to be and the power to keep them in being—are two aspects of the same thing. We may consider the creative power as the first of a whole series of conservative acts or the conservative power as a whole series of creative acts.

This concept leads us to an appreciation of the “immanence” of Almighty God, which is His constant presence in and through the whole universe. The consequence of God’s immanence is His omniscience. Because He is in and through all that exists—for otherwise it would not exist at all—He must know all that exists: “Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” (Luke 12:7).

We see what a wonderful foundation there is here for a life of prayer, or for what is called “practicing the presence of God.” We are never out of the presence of Almighty God. He is in and through not only our bodies and all material objects but also our thoughts, hopes, fears and desires. Without Him they would not exist. We are therefore always in touch with Him.

Of all the approaches to the existence of Almighty God, the argument from contingent being is the one that ties up most immediately with what we know about Him from Holy Scripture. We are not at this stage using Holy Scripture as a foundation for our belief, but as a confirmation of what our reason leads us to. You may remember that incident, recorded in the Book of Exodus, where Almighty God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and charges him to speak to the children of Israel in His name. Moses asks in whose name shall he say he is speaking. In reply, Almighty God gives, as it were, a definition of Himself: “I am Who am” (Exodus 3:14), in other words, “I am very being itself: everything else is contingent.”

Now, leaping forward to the New Testament and remembering that we are using it only in confirmation of where our reason leads us, one of our Blessed Lord’s clearest claims to divinity is when He tells the Jews, “Abraham rejoiced that he might see my day.” (John 8:56). They say to Him, “Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?” And the sublime reply, “Before Abraham was made, I am.” Not “was” but “am”—“I am Being itself.”

That concept of God as Being itself illuminates the whole concept of eternity. We so often make the mistake of thinking of eternity as an infinite prolongation of time, going back, back, back and forward, forward, forward again. That, of course, is not eternity at all. In eternity there is no succession of events. St. Thomas Aquinas has the perfect expression for it when he describes eternity as perpetuum nunc—perpetual now. Almighty God is a perpetual presence in all eternity.

There is an analogy which may help to clarify the relationship of time to eternity. Now remember, analogies are analogies only. If they are useful, use them. If they are not useful to you and fail to illuminate the truth to you, have no hesitation at all in discarding them, and remember that you are not discarding with them the truth they are meant to illuminate.

The analogy or comparison which I personally find useful is to think of eternity as the point at the center of a circle. You know from your geometry that a point has no extension in space: it simply exists. In the same way, eternity has no extension in time: it simply exists. When we say of Almighty God in our limited language that He was, is and always will be, it would be for more correct to say—since in eternity there is no succession of events—that He always is. Now, if you think of time as the circumference of that circle, with every single point on the circumference equally and simultaneously present to the center, you may see what we mean when we say that the whole of time is likewise equally and simultaneously present to Almighty God. But to us the succession of events is real indeed: we are successively encountering what is simultaneous to Almighty God. This is a thought to which we shall come back, but I do want you to get our meaning very clear in your mind when we say that God is Being and that everything else is contingent or dependent upon Him and accordingly unnecessary in itself.

The other argument of St. Thomas I want to spend a moment on is what is called “the argument from design.” It is a much more popular one, in a sense, and it has a strong appeal to people living closer to nature, such as sailors or shepherds. Anyone who is closely in touch with the material creation will inescapably see evidence of a design or plan. Creation does not work haphazardly. Days and nights, seasons and years, are not a random succession. Things do not just happen out of order or without design. Design necessarily and inevitably implies a Designer, Someone Who has conceived in His mind, and Who has effected by His will, that which we are observing.

The argument from design, applied to Almighty God, takes us one stage further than the argument from contingent being because it leads us to the concept of a personal God. It is, however, very necessary to understand correctly what we mean by “a personal God.” This concept is frequently misunderstood in two quite different ways. People are inclined to think either that when we talk of a personal God we are looking upon Him as though He were an outsize man; or that, though we do indeed believe Him to be God, we refer directly to Jesus Christ.

By a person we mean a being who has a mind and a will. By a personal God we mean that He Who is, He Who has called all things into being and keeps them in being, has a mind to conceive and a will to execute the whole of the visible and invisible creation.

These two approaches, the argument from contingent being and the argument from design, lead us to the thought of Almighty God as Being itself—not as a blind force but as a personal God. In ordinary speech we generally confine the word “person” to human beings, but its real meaning is far wider than that. We can use it theologically to express our belief that Almighty God is a person, the angels are persons, the devils are persons. For they are all beings who have minds and wills.

Let us now consider in what sense we are made in the likeness of God. Our likeness to Him lies in this: that we have minds that can conceive and wills that can execute. We have minds that are, however distantly, reflections of the Wisdom that is Himself and wills that are reflections, however distantly, of the Power that is Himself. It is that which makes us the Godlike creatures that we are—we are made in the image of Almighty God. We are unique in the whole of the visible creation in having these two Godlike characteristics: a mind that can conceive and a will that can carry into effect. Invisible spirits such as the angels and devils have minds and wills, but in the material creation nothing but man has the Godlike power to know and to do.

Man alone of the whole material creation survives death. His body plainly dies and corrupts. His soul, we believe, survives death. The terms “body” and “soul” are entirely acceptable but may be misleading if they cause us to think of body and soul as two separate entities brought together for the space of a human life. It may be more helpful to think of man as a single entity acting on two planes at once—the material and the spiritual.¹

The material goes the way of all material things, being resolved at death into its material parts. The spiritual, we believe, survives death precisely because it is not material and has no material parts into which it can be resolved.

In this life, of course, the material and the spiritual are constantly interacting. The spiritual is being fed all the time by impressions received and communicated to it by the material senses and is in its turn using those senses to express its thoughts, judgments and reflections. But this activity is not a material one.

The senses, for example, are constantly registering “this man” and “that man” and “the other man.” We can see, hear and touch our fellow men. The mind, reflecting on these impressions, reaches the abstract concept of Man and the yet more abstract concept of Humanity. The mind goes further and passes abstract judgments on abstract concepts, as when it says, “Man is mortal.” All this is at the very lowest level of thought of which the human mind is capable. But it is enough to show the completely different nature of the physical and the spiritual activity of man. The senses can only register an enormous but ultimately finite number of phenomena. The mind or soul can reach abstract concepts and pass abstract judgments about them. No material thing can do that; the mind or soul is therefore not a material thing.

The other reason that impels us to believe that the mind or soul is immaterial is that it has the power of reflection, which no material sense can have. The eye cannot see itself, the ear cannot hear itself, but the mind, the function of which is to think, can think about itself thinking about itself ad infinitum. No material thing can do that.

We believe that that immaterial faculty which enables us to think and to will is immortal, for although Almighty God could of course extinguish what He has called into being—and at this stage before we come to the assurance given to us by divine revelation, we cannot exclude this possibility—it would seem improbable that He should give to our souls an essential characteristic of which He later intended to deprive them.

What I have said so far gives a general outline of three of the five points I have already mentioned—the existence of Almighty God, His nature and our own immortality. We have now to consider the freedom of the human will and our consequent responsibility. The responsibility plainly is this: the fulfilling of the end, purpose or object of Him Who called us into being. He Who has made all things alone knows why He made them. The whole of the inanimate creation fulfills the purpose of Almighty God willy-nilly, simply because it has no mind or will. As I have emphasized, Man alone in the whole of the visible creation has a mind and a will; and therefore has it in his power to seek to fulfill the purpose Almighty God had in mind in bringing him into being. Man also has it in his power to try to oppose that purpose.

Now, with those five considerations in mind—the existence of Almighty God, His nature, our immortality, our free will and our consequent responsibility—I should like to run through the first eight questions of the Catechism, which are an attempt to put something of what we have been saying within the reach of a child. Then I shall relate these eight questions to what we have already said.

Q1 Who made you?—God made me.

The three monosyllables of the answer have in them everything of design, purpose, status and responsibility. Think how many people there are who lack those concepts and are consequently miserable and frustrated. They are tempted to think of life as a haphazard series of events with no purpose behind them: whereas the concept we have been considering presumes a purpose in the work of a Creator Who is Wisdom, and Power.²

For all that we are intell...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on the Text
• Author’s Preface
• Chapter 1: The Foundation of Faith in Reason
• Part I: Faith
• Part II: Hope
• Part III: Charity
• Appendices
• Critical Reaction to the Original Edition
• Tan Books
• Back Cover