divine-mercy

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Human beings certainly have free-choice, for without it, we would have no sense of responsibility. But that sense of responsibility–for we do hold others responsible for their decisions–is a clear indication that we are free. However, contrary to Jean Paul Sartre, I don’t believe we are absolutely free. I’m quite convinced that our freedom is limited by a multitude of factors: ignorance, passion, unhealed memories and emotional wounds that distort our perception and understanding of things and people and that keep us from an accurate assessment of things, etc. These factors in the lives of others are for the most part invisible to us–even to ourselves. Only God, who is omniscient, knows the human heart, and so we are rightly commanded not to judge the hearts or guilt of others (Mt 7, 1-5). 

Years ago, when I held an almost absolutist notion of freedom, I had a tendency to judge, because in my mind at least, I was able to. That absolutist notion of freedom allowed me to leave out any consideration of the myriad of factors that limit human freedom and responsibility–if no such factors exist, then the sinner is completely and entirely responsible for his choices, and I am free to pronounce judgement. But those factors do exist. All we have to do is look back at our own lives to when we were younger and made very bad decisions, even sinful decisions. The point I wish to make is the following: free-choice involves options, and each option contains finite goods, some of which are not contained in the other options, which is the reason we deliberate. The object of the will is the “good”, and so the will is drawn to the finite goods contained in each of these options. If any option contained all the goods that are found in the others, there would be no choice to make–I would not deliberate but would necessarily choose that option. But I continue to deliberate because no option contains all the finite goods that are found in the others. Decision is the “cutting off” (Latin: decidere: to cut off) of the deliberation process.

Now, let’s say I know that option #3 is contrary to God’s will–it may be an act of adultery, or theft, or lying under oath, etc. What draws me to this option is not the evil as such, but the good or goods that the option contains, such as, in the case of adultery, the alleviation of loneliness, the comfort of companionship, the feeling of being loved or the feeling of being important, etc.,–let’s say this woman is saying all the right things at the right time. I know, on the other hand, that this is seriously wrong, but I just don’t believe I have the strength of will to deny my passions–probably because I haven’t had a whole lot of practice, for let’s assume I was not raised by religious parents who stressed the importance of self-denial, who never observed Lent, much less encouraged me to fast and pray, and of course I was raised in a postmodern society that encourages young people to follow our dreams and passions, etc. I would argue that in this imaginary scenario, my choice to be unfaithful was really not a choice to be unfaithful as such, it was fundamentally a choice for the finite goods contained in that option. It was a deficient option to be sure, thus an evil option, and I was aware of that, which is why the experience of guilt results from the decision. I am all too aware that it was a selfish decision, and I am responsible for it, but it was the limited goods in that option that were the motivating principles of that choice. I accepted the evil (as opposed to ‘intend’), that is, the deficiency of that option–which I was obligated not to–, but what I intended primarily in choosing that option (an option I willed) were the goods contained therein. I am indeed responsible for choosing that option, the deficiency of which I understood and in principle could have rejected–otherwise I am completely without responsibility. But how much responsibility do I have? God knows the degree of my freedom, limited as it is by a myriad of factors partially hidden from me, because God is omniscient. Although my choice was a sinful choice, was it essentially a rejection of the Supreme Good Itself (God)? I don’t think so; rather, it was a choice “for” certain goods that are congruent with my nature. That is not all, of course. I knew it was wrong in the larger scheme of things and that there were better options, but accompanied by fear, loneliness, anxiety, weakness of will, etc., I freely chose the sinful option. Did that choice amount to a decision for eternal alienation from God? Did I really look God in the face and spit? I would say not at all, even were I to feel no remorse and to have no use for religion. God knows all the many factors that contributed to my decision to leave religion behind. But it is not as if one option was simply God in all his unlimited goodness and love which I rejected–that’s impossible anyways, for the Supreme Good contains all the good contained in the entire ensemble of all possible alternatives. But it was a deficient option (evil option) that contained finite goods that I was drawn to, and the ultimate motivating principle for my being drawn to these goods is my being drawn to God, who is the Good as such, without limits. 

To continue with this phenomenology of sin, I know that I should discipline myself so that I can avoid those choices and choose in accordance with God’s will, but in this case I did not. Before I get to Confession, I am shot as a result of a robbery. Did I freely and totally reject God and choose hell? As was said above, I did freely reject the option I knew would please God, so I made a choice inconsistent with His friendship, and thus wounded my friendship with him, but did I totally and intentionally reject God in all his goodness and beauty? I don’t think so. Do I deserve the pain of purgatory? Yes I do. I need to experience the hurt that I’ve caused others (i.e., my wife, children, relatives, etc.). But do I deserve a never ending torment? I cannot for the life of me see it. Is it possible for me to refuse to repent of that sin? I would have to say yes. But did my choice amount to choosing darkness for all eternity? I don’t think so. I don’t want darkness, for there is nothing to love about darkness; for it is empty. Indeed, I am my own worst enemy when I sin, because I don’t want darkness and emptiness, but I choose a course of action that leads to darkness and emptiness. I was deluded in believing that the pleasure of adultery, or the pleasure of stolen goods, etc., was going to last forever and bring me perpetual joy, which I ultimately seek–because I pre-consciously seek God in every one of my choices. It did not last forever; rather, it left me empty. Again, there’s my ignorance. So what would motivate a person after death to persist in rebellion against God? After all, it is not as if the state after death leaves a person frozen and completely immobile; just consider the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus: “…he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.’” At the very least, the rich man is no longer completely indifferent to Lazarus. When that didn’t work, he said: “‘Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment’” (Lk 16, 24; 27-28). After I am dead, what competing finite good exists that I choose instead of life and light? I have no idea. The illusion of pride perhaps? The fact that I have become my own god? Could anyone choose that perpetually, over the Supreme Good? No one has been able to explain that to me. Some do insist ‘there is no competing good’, one simply has to live eternally within the state of mind one is in, which is a state of darkness and emptiness, for ever and ever and ever and ever, ad infinitum. But what could a person do to deserve a retributive punishment that is unending? A fling with another woman during a difficult period of his/her life? Perhaps it was not a difficult period of a person’s life, perhaps this person is just self-centered and irreligious. Indeed, God does not owe anyone eternal life or mercy. Such a person dies his/her own worst enemy, and there is nothing anyone can do to escape the hell they put themselves in as a result of a life of sin. But what can we on the outside expect from God, according to what He has revealed about himself? We can expect mercy, because his justice was revealed as unfathomable mercy. 

There is real irony in those who, on the one hand, insist that the divine mercy is unfathomable, but on the other hand reveal themselves to be the most brutal of infernalists; for the doctrine of never ending hell makes God’s mercy quite fathomable, limited, and understandable according to our own limits. Some descriptions of hell do much worse than render the divine mercy fathomable; they render the divine justice patently absurd, i.e., Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and others like it found in the writings of some saints. We are the ones who say “I’ll never forgive that person as long as I live”, not God. He instructs us to forgive 70 x 7 (490 is the numerical value of the biblical Hebrew word “tamim” which means to “complete,” “perfect,” or “finished”; God’s forgiveness is perfect). Would God command us to forgive 70 x 7, a symbolic number that corresponds to his divine nature, which is without limit, while He Himself refuses to forgive once the blanket of death covers our eyes? I can only doubt it. A man’s sin is in his unjustified acceptance of the deficiency of his choice, and so that choice deserves kolasis (chastisement), even aionios kolasis (Mt 25, 46), a chastisement that lasts “ages of ages”. But unending? 

A number of people have raised the following objection or something similar: “There is a danger in trying to understand God’s mercy and justice through human experience; we apply limited human logic to mysteries that transcend our comprehension. God is always more.”

This is an interesting objection. Of course, it depends on what we mean by “trying to understand God’s mercy and justice through human experience”. If one means that we impose limits on God, i.e., anthropomorphism, then there is a sense in which this is true. But God became flesh, joined a human nature, precisely in order to reveal Himself, that we might understand him through our natural mode of knowing, that is, through our own human experience. Christ reveals God through his human words, through his own human experience, which he shares in common with us. He speaks a human language and reacts emotionally as well. That is precisely how we understand him, in the same way we understand anything else–you step on a thumb tack and yell out in pain; I understand you are in pain through my own past experience of pain. 

When Jesus says: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”, I understand his words through my own experience of ignorance, which lessens responsibility, which I too have experienced—I’ve done things that I didn’t realize were worse than what I thought, but I just didn’t realize it at the time, for I lacked experience. But that is how we understand Christ, through our own experience. God revealed Himself through a human nature, that of Christ, and when it comes to the mercy and justice of God, he too speaks in a way that we can understand, because it corresponds to our own experience. We know through experience that sacrifice is the language of love. Christ sacrifices his life for us. We understand what that means through our own experience of making sacrifices. When we realize, through faith, that Jesus is God, and that God the Father gave up His only begotten Son for us, we understand this analogically, through our own experience of our love for our children. We also know, through the experience of the limits of our own love, that His love exceeds what we are capable of. Moreover, when we read about the divine justice, again, we understand this through our own experience of justice. However, when we are expected to believe that God’s justice is completely incongruent with our own in the sense that we would not impose an infinite sentence of unending suffering on another, but God would, we experience a cognitive dissonance, one that flies in the face of all we understand about justice. Such a teaching cannot be understood analogically. To insist that “God is a mystery that is beyond us” does not resolve the dissonance, but merely buries it. Justice implies that the punishment fits the crime, and a good judge must, to the best of his ability, take into consideration the intention of the person as well as what he knew and did not know or understand. A 66 year old man from Norwalk, Connecticut received a 675 year prison sentence for sexually abusing an 11 year old relative. Obviously, he cannot serve that. But let’s do a thought experiment. He can now live for 1000 years. After 675 years, he has paid his debt and ought to be released, otherwise it is an inadequate prison sentence. We seem to intuitively understand that justice demands a limit to the punishment, for there is a limit to the crime, for the criminal is limited in every way. Now, if one maintains that God imposes a punishment not of 675 years, but infinity, for a person who was let’s say not a Christian, not baptised, or who lived a very selfish and irreligious life, there is simply nothing in our experience by which we can grasp or make sense out of that, unlike every other aspect of divine revelation; for it is the only thing in divine revelation that is entirely incongruent with our own mode of knowing. Unimaginable suffering that does not end is unintelligible as a mode of justice. From our point of view, it is absurd. But the infernalist claims that from God’s point of view, it is love. Faith is assent to what is beyond reason but consistent with reason, not what is below reason and absurd. Nicholas Berdyaev writes: 

There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone (The Divine and the Human, p. 89). 

There is a real sense in which I am what I am today because of the imperfections and mistakes of my past. What I know today was the result of a decision, to be sure, a decision to continually reflect upon my life as it was unfolding and unfolded, and so it was a result of a continued reflection upon my experiences, which are now past. I and everyone else are expected to grow from experience, but how can a person change for the better unless he was in some ways worse than he is today? That is why judging the past using the standards of today is irrational, because the standards of today were the result of reflection upon what is now past; for we are here today, precisely where we are morally, as a result of that past and our decision, as a society, to reflect upon our past decisions and their repercussions. That’s how a culture changes and truly progresses. That does not necessarily cancel our responsibility for certain past decisions–one may still have to make reparation for a decision made long ago, perhaps a criminal decision or simply an immoral decision that left another or others profoundly hurt.

Finally, consider the following objection: “If we can freely choose love and goodness, then it’s also possible to freely reject them. And if someone were to persistently reject God, even in the face of His mercy, then the separation they choose may well be eternal”.

Perhaps this is correct. If someone were to persistently reject God, then God must allow that person to do so, if God is Love, for love does not compel. But this becomes very mysterious when we consider the fact that God did not allow you and me to reject Him, for while we were sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5, 8). Consider the gospel of John: “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (15, 16). My freedom was restored by grace. Moreover, it is my experience that most Catholics hold a semi-Pelagian position in that they naturally believe that grace came to us precisely because prior to the infusion of grace, we made a free choice to open ourselves to God, and so God responded. But no, this is a heretical position. “While we were sinners” means while we were slaves, and slaves are not entirely free. We were unable to merit any grace; for we were unable to do anything pleasing to God that would merit a sharing in the divine nature. Otherwise, we are not saved by grace, but by our own initial choice to say ‘yes’ to God. Grace is utterly gratuitous. You and I were saved by grace, and so our cooperation with grace was itself a grace. 

Freedom is a task to be achieved. It is not a homogeneous state that endures unchanging throughout the many changes in our lives. I was not as “free” in the past as I am today–and here I do not refer to political freedom, but moral freedom, which implies love, knowledge, and responsibility. Moreover, we often look upon the relationship between free-will and one’s ability to reject a course of action (such as the decision to form a friendship, or to marry and remain faithful to another, etc) as enjoying a positive correlation. But this may not be the case. Consider a faithfully married couple, married for 40 years. At the start of their relationship, they were more free to choose another option, for example, to pursue other relationships. And yet, they did not love one another then as they love one another now, after 40 years–their love now has been tested; it is stronger and purer. Are they more able to say to one another: “Well, there are other options for us, so let’s pursue those and open our marriage or just call it quits”? No, they are not; rather, that is far less likely to happen. And yet, their freedom is much greater than it was at the beginning. The greater the love, the greater the freedom, which in this case also means the less likely they are to freely choose to dissolve it; the less love there is, the greater the likelihood that they will dissolve it. Similarly, it is far less likely for a saintly person to reject God than it is for a not so saintly person, but the saintly person has a much greater freedom, a much deeper knowledge and certainly a greater responsibility than the not so saintly person. The paradox is that grace increases our freedom, but it also makes us less likely to reject it. Hence, St. Edith Stein writes:

All merciful love can descend upon anyone. We believe that it does. And now, should there
be souls who exclude themselves from it permanently? In principle, the possibility is not
excluded. In fact, it can become infinitely unlikely, precisely through what prevenient Grace is able
to accomplish in the soul. This Grace can only knock, and there are souls that open themselves
at even this quiet call. Others let it go unheeded. But then this Grace can worm its way into these
souls, and more and more expand itself in them. The greater the space that it occupies in such an
illegitimate way, the more unlikely it will be that the soul closes itself off. It already sees the
world now in the light of Grace…The more ground that Grace wins from that which occupied it
before, the more ground it deprives from the free acts directed against it. And, in principle, there
are no limits to this displacement. When all the impulses against the spirit of light are displaced
from the soul, then a free decision against it [the spirit of light] becomes infinitely unlikely. For
this reason, the belief in the boundlessness of God’s love and Grace, as well as the hope for universal salvation, are justified… 

This is an interesting and mysterious paradox: that grace slowly and gradually deprives a soul of the ground for the free acts directed against it, and yet such displacement in fact marks an increase in freedom, for “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Co 3, 17). Those in darkness are slaves to sin, and they really do not understand the full implications of the choices they make. Indeed, Christ himself said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23, 34), and for the most part, we don’t know what we are doing–at least not entirely–, especially when our choices plunge us more and more deeply into darkness.