Divo Barsotti
From here you understand how long the path is to reach pure love. The Church has even condemned the theologians who taught that in the present life one can live in a state of pure love. No, you cannot live thus, because, as I told you before, as long as we are not in heaven, we must long for heaven.
That is, hope can never be eliminated in the present life. As long as we live down here, we cannot but hope. When in fact we will possess God, and therefore hope will have been totally transformed into pure love, then we will no longer have any memory of ourselves but, transformed into God, we will be God through the participation of love.
What is hope? It is the median virtue between faith and charity. Faith is the condition for man to live a supernatural life. It is a very simple thing: man is a man in so far as he is a rational being. It is intelligence first of all that determines the difference that exists between us and the pure animal. Of course, the spiritual powers of man are not only intelligence; there is also the will and the memory. But the first spiritual power that determines the qualitative distinction between us and the animal is intelligence, is reason. Man lives a human life precisely because he knows himself and entities and objects around him and can live a supernatural life only because human intelligence is now enabled, through divine revelation and grace, to know God.
Faith, therefore, for this very reason, begins the supernatural life. Without faith, the Letter to the Hebrews says, it is impossible to please God. No one will ever be able to enter into a relationship with God, nor will God ever be able to enter into a personal relationship with man, if not through this virtue. Without faith neither God knows you, nor do you know him. He knows you as a creature, but not as a son and on the other hand you do not know him. It is true that human reason can come to the knowledge that there is a first principle, a first cause; but never – St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us – never will human intelligence be able to know who God is. What God is, yes; who God is, no. Knowledge of God presupposes divine revelation, through which man, through faith, enters a new dimension of life.
As for the sentient aspect of life, we live like other animals, but we are not only animals, we are men. And as men, we have a life that implies rationality: we know things, values. And it is because we know that another power can intervene – the will – which would be blind without knowledge. We can only want what we know. Our will is moved only by the knowledge of things.
Thus in the supernatural life, God reveals himself to us, and from this revelation, comes that faith that introduces us to the world of God. We no longer know things, we no longer know this world, but we know this ultimate, supreme reality, which is God himself. A reality that attracts us to itself, because to the extent that we know it, he who is our ultimate goal, arouses in us an irrepressible desire to possess it. And here is where the will moves. Hope is no longer just a virtue that affects intelligence, it is a virtue that affects will. We need saints, living souls: souls who seek God, souls who can no longer do without him, souls who are thirsty for him, hungry for God and who tend to him with indescribable ardor. This is what we want. If the good leave a mark on the world, how much more of an impact must the saints make. A saint living among us necessarily gives us the desire to free ourselves from our spiritual poverty and to be truly alive in the search for God.
The life of the Church is this hope. Neither man nor the Church can say that they have yet achieved their definitive reality. The ultimate reality always eludes us. But woe to us if it does not escape us! Because if it did not escape us, we, having reached the goal in the present life, would no longer know what the content of our life should be. It would be like retiring: whoever does not feel committed to anything, fatally dies, lives only a vegetative life. But man cannot live a purely vegetative life as long as he is alive; he needs to feel that his life is worth something, that his life tends towards a purpose. If this is true in natural life, how much more is it true in supernatural life! But in the supernatural life, as opposed to retiring, as we live, we become younger and younger. When we are born to the Christian life, we are old, we take our first steps as if weighed down by bricks because, tied as we are by our selfishness, by our habits, it is already a lot if we are able to be faithful to morning and evening prayers and to attend Mass every Sunday. We may appear to be good Christians doing just this. But if we really begin to walk in the spiritual life, nothing is enough for us.
God becomes more and more demanding of us. He becomes more demanding because he gives us more and more strength, vitality, so that we become younger and younger. So that from old men we become middle-aged men, from middle-aged men we become young men, full of boldness and interior vivacity. And then we become children: we live a life that is pure joy and like children we play with God. Our life must become a game of love. At the end, as human life begins in the womb of the mother, so our life ends in the womb of God. But on this journey only hope can make us complete, because hope is the virtue that moves us, that sustains us, that it feeds us and pushes us.
(From “Che Dio vi parli,” Chorabooks 2016, translated by Aurelio Porfiri. Image: jeffjacobs1990 at Pixabay.com)
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