by admin » Tue Mar 27, 2018 7:37 am
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Notes:
[1] Following the general tradition, we attribute this work to Albert the Great, but not all critics are agreed as to its authenticity.
[2] Albert the Great is speaking here in a special manner of religious perfection, although what he says is also true of Christian perfection in general.
[3] He speaks here of the obligation laid upon all Christians.
[4] Religious bind themselves to observe as a duty that which was only of counsel. To them, therefore, the practice of the counsels becomes an obligation.
[5] The vows of religion have as their immediate object the removal of obstacles to perfection, but they do not in themselves constitute perfection. Perfection consists in charity. Albert the Great speaks of only one vow, because in his day the formulas of religious profession mentioned only the vow of obedience, which includes the other two vows.
[6] John iv. 24.
[7] Matt. vi. 6.
[8] When Albert the Great and the other mystics warn us against solicitude with regard to creatures, they refer to that solicitude which is felt for creatures in themselves; they do not mean that we ought not to occupy ourselves with them in any way for God's sake. The great doctor explains his meaning in clear terms later on in this work.
[9] 1 Pet. v. 7.
[10] Phil. iv. 6.
[11] Ps. liv. 23.
[12] Ps. lxxii. 28.
[13] Ps. xv. 8.
[14] Cant. iii. 4.
[15] Wis. vii. 11.
[16] Matt. xvi. 26.
[17] Luke xvii. 21.
[18] Albert the Great supposes here that we give ourselves equally to God and to creatures, which would be wrong, and not that creatures are subordinated to God, which would be a virtue.
[19] This must be understood to mean that God is the principal and supreme end of all created activities.
[20] The perfect image of God in man does not consist merely in the possession of those faculties by which we resemble Him, but rather in performing by faith and love, as far as is in our power, acts like those which He performs, in knowing Him as He knows Himself, in loving Him as He loves Himself.
[21] In scholastic theology the term "form" is used of that which gives to anything its accidental or substantial being. God is the "accidental form" of the soul, because in giving it its activity He bestows upon it something of His own activity, by means of sanctifying grace. Yet more truly may it be said that God is also the "form" of the soul in the sense that it is destined by the ordinary workings of Providence to participate by sanctifying grace in the Being of God, enjoying thus a participation real, though created, in the Divine nature.
[22] We must avoid these things in so far as they separate us from God, but they may also serve to draw us nearer to Him if we regard them in God and for God.
[23] It is by the intelligence and will that man actually attains to this, but the use of the sensitive faculties is presupposed.
[24] The sensitive faculties, if used as a means, often help us to draw near to God, but when used as an end, their activity becomes an obstacle.
[25] This teaching is the Christian rendering of the axiom formulated by the Philosopher: "Homo sedendo fit sapiens"—"It is in quiet that man gains wisdom."
[26] This is especially true for religious.
[27] By this is meant that the Holy Scriptures, though always presupposed as the foundation of our belief, of themselves give only an objective knowledge of God, while that which the Holy Ghost gives is experimental.
[28] God knows and loves Himself in Himself by His own nature, while we know and love Him in Himself by grace.
[29] A very striking feature in the doctrine of this book is that it requires first the perfection of the soul and the faculties, whence proceeds that of our actions. Some modern authors, confining themselves to casuistry, speak almost exclusively of the perfection of actions, a method less logical and less thorough.
[30] Prov. viii. 31.
[31] The exterior powers of a man are the imagination and passions; the interior his intelligence and will, which sometimes find themselves deprived of all the aids of sensible devotion.
[32] In truth, all the designs of God in our regard are full of mercy, and tend especially to our sanctification; the obstacles to these designs come only from our evil passions.
[33] The book "De Spiritu et Anima" is of uncertain authorship. It is printed after the works of St. Augustine in Migne's "Patrologia Latina," vol. xl., 779.
[34] This darkness is the silence of the imagination, which no longer gains a hearing, and that of the intellect, which is sufficiently enlightened to understand that we can in reality understand nothing of the Divinity in itself, and that the best thing we can do is to remove from our conception of God all those limitations which we observe in creatures. The reason of this is that we can only know God naturally by means of what we see in creatures, and these are always utterly insufficient to give us an adequate idea of the Creator.
[35] Ps. lxxxiii. 8.
[36] We only lose God, the uncreated Good, by an unlawful attachment to created good; if we are free from this attachment, we tend to Him without effort.
[37] The subsequent condemnation, in 1687, of this doctrine, as taught by Molino, could not, of course, be foreseen by Blessed Albertus writing in the thirteenth century.
[38] John xiv. 6.
[39] And this she does because creatures no longer occupy her, except for God's sake.
[40] This is so because, according to true philosophy, the essence of a thing is distinct from its existence.
[41] Every actual cause is more intimately present to its accomplished work than the work itself, which it necessarily precedes.
[42] John i. 3, 4.
[43] We cannot always experience Divine things, and at first we can only compare them to the things which we experience here below.
[44] We deny that there is in God anything which is a mere potentiality, or an imperfection. We deny in Him also the process of reasoning which is the special work of the faculty of reason, because this implies the absence of the vision of truth. We deny "being as it is found in creatures," because in creatures it is necessarily limited, and subject to accident.
[45] "Nom. Div.," i.
[46] Exod. xxxiii. 11; Num. xii. 8; Heb. iii. 2.
[47] It would be well to quote St. Thomas, the disciple of Albert the Great, upon this important doctrine: "A thing may be said to belong to the contemplative life in two senses, either as an essential part of it, or as a preliminary disposition. The moral virtues do not belong to the essence of contemplation, whose sole end is the contemplation of truth.... But they belong to it as a necessary predisposition ... because they calm the passions and the tumult of exterior preoccupations, and so facilitate contemplation" ("Sum.," 2, 2ae, q. 180, a. 2).
This distinction should never be lost sight of in reading the mystic books of the scholastics.
[48] John xvii. 3.
[49] Ps. xvi. 15.
[50] This admirable doctrine condemns a whole mass of insipid, shallow, affected and sensual books and ideas, which have in modern times flooded the world of piety, have banished from souls more wholesome thoughts, and filled them with a questionable and injurious sentimentality.
[51] Matt. xi. 6; xiii. 57, etc.
[52] This shows an excellent grasp of the meaning of the celebrated maxim "Perinde ac cadaver."
[53] Luke x. 42.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Luke ii. 14.
[56] Nothing could be more conformable to the teaching of the Gospel than this doctrine.
At His birth Jesus bids the Angels sing that peace belongs to men of good will (Luke ii. 14); later He will declare that His meat is to do the will of His Father (John iv. 34); that He seeks not His own will, but the will of Him Who sent Him (John v. 30); that He came down from heaven to accomplish it (John vi. 38); and when face to face with death He will still pray that the Father's will be done, not His (Matt. xxvi. 39; Luke xxii. 42). Over and over again, in the Gospel, do we find Him using the same language.
He would have His disciples act in the same manner. It is not the man, He tells us, who repeats the words: "My Father, my Father," who shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of God (Matt. vii. 21; Rom. ii. 13; Jas. i. 22); and in the prayer which He dictates to us He bids us ask for the accomplishment of this will as the means of glorifying God, and of sanctifying our souls (Matt. vi. 10).
Finally, He tells us that if we conform ourselves to this sovereign will, we shall be His brethren (Matt. xii. 50; Mark iii. 35).
When certain persons, pious or otherwise, confusing sentiment with true love, ask themselves if they love God, or if they will be able to love Him always, we have only to ask them the same question in other words: Are they doing the will of God? can they do it?—i.e., can they perform their duty for God's sake? Put thus, the question resolves itself.
The reason for such a doctrine is very simple: to love anyone is to wish him well; that, in the case of God, is to desire His beneficent will towards us. Our Lord and Master recalled this principle when He said to His disciples, "You are My friends, if you do the things that I command you" (John xv. 14).
[57] We must, in virtue of the same principle, keep a firm hold of the truth, as indisputable as it is frequently forgotten, that we have the merit of the good which we will to carry out and are unable to accomplish, as we have also the demerit of the evil we should have done and could not.
[58] "Upon the will depends our future of Heaven or hell," because, given the knowledge of God, the will attaches itself to Him by love, or hates Him with obstinacy.
[59] We may notice, in particular, a three-fold benefit: first, temptation calls for conflict, and so strengthens virtue; then it obliges a man to adhere deliberately to that virtue which is assailed by the temptation, and so gain a further perfection; finally, there are necessarily included in both the conflict and the adherence to good numerous virtuous, and therefore meritorious, acts. Thus we may reap advantage from temptation both in our dispositions and our acts.
[60] Job vii. 1.
[61] 1 John iv. 8.
[62] Cant. viii. 6.
[63] The author is speaking here of the soul in so far as it is human, and it is as such that it is more where it loves than where it gives life.
[64] Without charity there is no perfect virtue, since without it no virtue can lead man to his final end, which is God, although it may lead him to some lower end. It is in this sense that, according to the older theologians, charity is the "form" of the other virtues, since by it the acts of all the other virtues are supernaturalized and directed to their true end—i.e., to God. Cf. St. Th. "Sum.," 2, 2ae, q. 23, aa. 7, 8.
[65] Matt. xxii. 40.
[66] Rom. xiii. 10.
[67] 1 Tim. i. 5.
[68] God can only love Himself or creatures for His own sake; if we have this love within our souls we shall be in a certain sense one being with Him.
[69] This teaching is based on the definition that prayer is essentially "an elevation of the soul to God."
[70] 1 Thess. v. 17.
[71] 1 Tim. ii. 8.
[72] Remission may be obtained in this way of the fault in the case of venial sins, of the punishment due in all sins.
[73] Ps. ix. 24.
[74] Isa. iii. 12.
[75] Luke vi. 26.
[76] St. Thomas explains as follows both the possibility and the correctness of this opinion of ourselves: "A man can, without falsehood, believe and declare himself viler than all others, both on account of the secret faults which he knows to exist within him, and on account of the gifts of God hidden in the souls of others."
St. Augustine, in his work "De Virginit.," ch. lii., says: "Believe that others are better than you in the depths of their souls, although outwardly you may appear better than they."
In the same way one may truthfully both say and believe that one is altogether useless and unworthy in his own strength. The Apostle says (2 Cor. iii. 5): "Not that we are sufficient to think anything of ourselves, as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God" ("Sum.," 2, 2ae, q. 161, a. 6, 1m).
[77] 1 Pet. v. 7.
[78] Ps. liv. 23.
[79] Ecclus. ii. 11, 12.
[80] Matt. vi. 31.
[81] Deut. xi. 24.
[82] Cf. Serm. I. in Pent.
[83] Mark xi. 24.
[84] 2 Cor. iii. 5.
[85] 2 Tim. ii. 19.
[86] The teaching of Albert the Great on Divine Providence is truly admirable. It is based upon the axiom that the actions of the creature do not depend partly upon itself and partly upon God, but wholly upon itself and wholly upon God (cf. St. Thomas "Cont. Gent.," iii. 70).
Human causality is not parallel with the Divine, but subordinate to it, as the scholastics teach. This doctrine alone safeguards the action of God and of that of the creature. The doctrine of parallelism derogates from both, and leads to fatalism by attributing to God things which He has not done, and suppressing for man the necessary principle of all good, especially that of liberty.
It is the doctrine of subordinated causes also which explains how things decreed by God are determined by the supreme authority, and infallibly come to pass, without prejudice to the freedom of action of secondary causes. All this belongs to the highest theology. Unhappily, certain modern authors have forgotten it.