MAN’S DESIRE FOR GOD

The disposition spoken of here is the consent to be justified. This is a positive openness to receive which man has in his nature by his will, just as he has in his nature the positive need for God to fulfill the intellect by vision.ⁱ The whole of human life consists in preparation for grace, which God will give because he has infallibly promised he will.

Grace, then, perfects nature because of the presence of the intellect in man. God could not create a human nature which would be neutral regarding the perfective necessity of grace, because such a being would lack an intellect and would thus not be human. But arriving at that end is something for which there is no natural power in man. Man has only a natural, receptive and passive potential by which he can prepare himself to receive God’s grace - the only possible means by which he could realize this destiny. The fact that the vision of God is man’s destiny is due to the intellect. The actual attainment of that destiny is due to the will filled with the supernatural gift of divine grace. Unless he attains the fulfillment of this natural desire through a supernatural appetite, man will never be perfectly happy.

"Unhappy is the one who does not know you, even if he knows all the other things (created things). Happy is the one who knows you even if he knows nothing else. The one who knows you and all the other things is not any happier for knowing all the other things than for knowing you alone."ⁱⁱ

The life of the Christian must be a daily death to sin. Many mystical authors attest to this, taking their basis from St. Paul.

What a going out from self that implies! What a death! Let us say with St. Paul, 'Quotidie morior (I die daily).' The great saint wrote to the Colossians, 'You have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.'

That is the condition: we must be dead! Without that we may be hidden in God at certain moments; but we do not LIVE habitually in this divine Being because all our emotions, self-seeking and the rest, come to draw us out of Him.ⁱⁱⁱ

If the day of death were the only completely personal act which a person made, that day would mark the only merit of his final perseverance. In fact, each day opportunities are offered to the Christian by which he is invited to die to self. Those acts are often much more personal than acts performed in the "moment of death" and each one is sufficient to merit heaven.

Some have said that no one absolutely merits life everlasting except by the act of final grace, but only conditionally, i.e. if he preservers. But it is unreasonable to say this, for sometimes the act of the last grace is not more, but less meritorious than preceding acts, on account of the prostration of illness. Hence it must be said that every act of charity merits eternal life absolutely [...]^iv

The day of death is very important for the Christian, but for most it is not the day of the greatest act of perseverance nor of free choice. There can be no state after death, or in some no-man's-land between death and eternity, in which a person makes his only really personal act, because by then he is free from his body. Man can merit nothing without the body; every act of charity he performs in the body roots him in unity with the Trinity, his final home. The day of death is that day of final birth into eternal life, a life which has been continually nurtured by every human choice here on earth.

For the Christian the day of death inaugurates, at the end of his sacramental life, the fulfillment of his new birth begun at Baptism, the definitive "conformity" to "the image of the Son" conferred by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and participation in the feast of the Kingdom which was anticipated in the Eucharist.^v

ii. "Infelix homo qui scit omnia illa (scilicet creaturas), te autem nescit; beatus autem qui te scit, etiam si illa nesciat. Qui vero te et illa novit, non propter illa beatior est, sed propter te solum beatus." Augustine, Confessiones, V, 4, (PL 32, 708), quoted in Thomas Aquinas, ST, I, 12, 8, ad 4.

iii. Elizabeth of the Trinity, The Complete Works, v. 1, translated by Sister Aletheia Kane (Washington, D.C., ICS Publications, 1984) 148.

iv. "Quidam dixerunt quod nullus meretur absolute vitam aeternam, nisi per actum finalis gratiae; sed solum sub conditione, si perseverat. – Sed hoc irrationabiliter dicitur: quia quandoque actus ultimae gratiae non est magis meritorius, sed minus quam actus praecedentis, propter aegritudinis oppressionem. Unde dicendum quod actus caritatis meretur absolute vitam aeternam." Thomas Aquinas, ST, I-II, 114, 7, ad 3.

v. Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1682.