The Christian mysteries which we are hoping to study are called supernatural mysteries. The doctrinal theologian who studies these mysteries can be called a theologian of the supernatural. Perhaps we should have entitled this particular blog, “The Problem of the Supernatural,” a problem seemingly founded on the very word itself. Theology, of course, cannot control the developments that take place as words and expressions are caught up in the evolving of the culture. Take the word “propaganda” for an example. It’s a wonderful word derived from the Latin that speaks of the spread and the growth of faith as God’s Word moved from mountaintop to mountaintop to bring the good news of the Gospel to men and women of everywhere. Now propaganda has become a nasty word. It represents in our culture what most of us dislike immensely. The word supernatural has had a similar fate in some quarters. Hollywood, television, the communications conglomerate, apocalyptic types of movies and the cultural celebration of Halloween think of the supernatural as whatever is beyond the senses or cannot be accounted for, so people begin to think of ghosts, miraculous events, strange and violent and always frightening happenings. This of course has nothing to do with the theological use of the word.
To live in the realm of the real is the mark of the balanced, intelligent person. Failure to distinguish between what is real and what is unreal is characteristic of psychological problems. But what constitutes the real? The believer and unbeliever would say: the world is real, nature is real, to learn by reason is real. The believer would say: God is real, the Holy Spirit is real, grace is real, to learn from divine revelation is real. In other words, the natural and the supernatural are constitutive of the real. The thought that nature alone is real is a truncated and inadequate view of what is real. Let’s use a few examples. The unbeliever sees the church as a sociological institution. The believer accepts that but sees the church as the house of God, body of Christ, temple of the Spirit. The unbeliever sees Jesus as a first century preacher, Son of Mary. The believer agrees with that but identifies Jesus as much more than that – he is Son of God who became Son of Mary for our salvation. The unbeliever would say we learn by using our reason. The believer would say – we learn also through Divine Revelation, that is, through the teachings God gives us in and through the Church.
It might be interesting to reflect on the fact that three basic questions figure prominently in the lives of thinking persons. First, there is the knowledge question. In this vast and complex world of ours, with competing philosophies and world views, what can I come to know as truth? Then there is the ethics question. In this vast and complex world of ours, which offers me all sorts of exciting goals and seemingly attractive ways to follow, what is the good that I have been made for? What is the good I ought to seek? Finally, there is what we might call the hope question. In this vast and complex world of ours, where hard things happen in the mischances of life, wherein many wonder if human existence has any ultimate meaning, what can I hope for – in whom can I place my trust? In a certain sense the hope question takes priority. If there is no hope, if life merely runs aimlessly from womb to tomb, why should I seek the truth in knowledge, why should I choose what is truly good and thus live an ethical existence? For a moment let us concentrate on the knowledge question.
How do we ascertain the truth of things? How do we get to know what is real, what exists, what has extra mental existence? Popularly we say there are two basic ways of knowing what is real. There’s what we call scientific-knowledge and there is what we call faith-knowledge. It might be helpful to begin this little discussion with the words Pope John Paul II uses at the beginning of his wonderful Encyclical Letter – Faith and Reason: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” First, then, there is scientific knowledge which is self-appropriated knowledge based on scientific methodology, treating as it does all that can be seen or weighed or touched or is detectable by the canons of scientific methods. On the other hand, there is faith-knowledge which comes from sharing in the knowledge of others. Faith is born when one who does not know begins to share in the knowledge of one who knows. If there is no one who knows, there can be no one who believes. If the one who knows is human, then we have human faith. If the one who knows is divine, then we have divine faith. Most of what we know in the course of a lifetime comes from faith-knowledge, not scientific knowledge. We grow in knowledge in our very early years in the environment of the home and the school. As adults we read newspapers, books on geography and history and all the real, and the knowledge that results is really faith-knowledge. To use a personal example, I could say that my education was highly classical, as I did not have as much training in the physical sciences. What I know about the physical sciences is what good physical scientists have said to me in lectures or in books, so my knowledge of science is more faith-knowledge than personally-appropriated scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is quite limited. It cannot deal with truth and beauty and friendship and virtue and obviously cannot say anything about God. How did the human race first begin to know all these things that transcend the realm of science? The pagan philosopher six centuries before Christ can be a wonderful example. He first studied logic and rhetoric so that we learned how to reason and how to speak. He then wrote his treatise, the physics, his version of the philosophy of nature. Following the physics, Aristotle wrote his philosophical treatise which came to be called metaphysics, the philosophical discipline which deals with the reality that transcends the methodology of the physical sciences. There is no problem; at least theoretically, between scientific knowledge and divine faith-knowledge. The problem of the supernatural, especially in our one-dimensional world today, has not developed, as Aristotle did in his day, a study of metaphysics but that has to be left for another day.
It’s time that we looked at our title “The Supernatural” – the real beyond the natural, the real above the natural. The word itself can give us problems because of the way television and popular literature think about various phenomena which they carelessly call supernatural. What then is meant by the supernatural? The best way to answer this question is to think of words like Incarnation or sacrament. The Incarnation means the reality of the Son of God taking on our humanity. The word sacrament means the outward, visible, tangible sign of the real but invisible presence of the Holy Spirit and divine grace. Or take the word nature. Nature is a principal of operation and natures differ because they have different modes of operation. For example, a carrot plant has vegetative life so it can grow. A puppy dog has both vegetative and sensitive life so that it grows and it barks and it can feel pain. A human being has vegetative life, sensitive life and intelligent life, and has what we call the freedom of the will. Human nature enables us to do human things. Thus, one writer says, “The natural describes the inborn resources and the capacity of a thing; whatever is within the scope of its nature is natural.” Thus, it is natural for a tree to grow but not to sing like a canary. It is natural for a canary to fly or to chirp, but not to joke and laugh. What is natural to the canary is in a sense supernatural to the tree. And so it is with the great gift of our Catholic faith – our sharing in God’s nature, in God’s life through grace. What is natural to God is supernatural to us. It means our sharing in the divine nature; it means our incorporation into the mystery of Christ; it means our call to eternal life with God; it means the life of faith, hope and charity which is our way of living the new life God gives us in Baptism; it means the forgiveness of our sins and the indwelling presence of our three-Personed God.
One writer speaks of the supernatural in this way: “The supernatural is the self-communication of our three-Personed God, out of personal love, to sinful man in Christ and the Church, in view of heaven.” In other words, as the writer affirms, the supernatural is God giving God to us – which plainly, only God can do. That God is our Creator is part and parcel of the natural. That God is Savior and Redeemer is what we call the supernatural.
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