Heeding St. Paul’s Advice to “Pray without Ceasing”


by Peter A. Kwasniewski

    In the book of Ecclesiastics, we read: “Let nothing hinder thee from praying always” (18:22). Our Lord speaks more strongly still: “Watch ye, therefore, praying at all times, that you may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that are to come, and to stand before the Son of Man” (Lk. 21:36). St. Paul repeats the counsel of his Master several times: “Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer” (Rom. 12:12); “Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication” (Eph. 6:18); “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving” (Col. 4:2); “I desire therefore that men should pray in every place, lifting holy hands” (1 Tim. 2:8). In the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, he forcefully and simply states: “Pray without ceasing” (5:17).

    Speaking of St. Paul’s writings, John Henry Newman comments:

Is it doubtful to anyone, that they speak much and often of the duties of worship, meditation, thanksgiving, prayer, praise, and intercession; and in such a way as to lead the Christian, so far as other duties will allow him, to make them the ordinary employment of his life? not, indeed, to neglect his lawful calling, nor even to be content without some active efforts to do good, whether in the way of educating the young, attendance on the sick and needy, pastoral occupation, study, or other toil, yet to devote himself to a life at Jesus’ feet, and a continual hearing of His word? And is it not plainly a privilege, above other privileges, if we really love Him, to be called to this unearthly life?1

On the face of it, the Bible’s teaching could not be clearer. But surely a Christian who reads these verses is apt to ask himself, “Do I pray all the time, every moment of the day, as Holy Scripture enjoins? Granting it to be desirable, how is such a thing even possible? The Bible also teaches me to fulfill my daily duties, whether at work or at home, with a good will and with devoted attention to the details I am called upon to oversee. There are only a few times in the day when I am actually praying or thanking God; the rest of the time is given over to other activities, other concerns and thoughts, which, though there be nothing objectionable about them, are still something different from prayer. Is the Bible exaggerating to make a point, or am I not living up to its teaching?” And the realization grows that we are not, in fact, living up to the letter of Holy Scripture. But it may also be possible that we do not fully understand what is meant by the words, “pray without ceasing,” “praying at all times,” and that if we had a better idea of what is expected of us, we could learn better how to carry out this important duty. By thinking about St. Paul’s instruction with the help of some of the great teachers of our faith, we will try in this article to come to a deeper understanding of what we can do to make our lives a perpetual prayer.

Love as the Most Perfect Prayer

    As our Lord instructs us, no mere multiplication of prayers makes for a right relationship with God. “And when you are praying, speak not much, as the heathens. For they think that in their much speaking they may be heard” (Mt. 6:5,7). And quoting Isaiah: “This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Mt. 15:8). The Old Testament teaches the same: “Do not prattle in the assembly of the elders, nor repeat yourself in your prayer” (Eccles. 7:14). A vocal prayer involving repetition, like the Rosary or the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, is as valuable as the intentions, attentiveness, and love that goes into saying it; and when these things are present, such prayer is of inestimable value in the spiritual life. “All generations shall call me blessed,” our Lady prays in the Magnificat, foreseeing how the Christian world would praise her special dignity as the Mother of God. Yet St. Paul does not seem to be thinking exclusively of vocal prayers, since he teaches that we are to sanctify our every deed: “Whether therefore you eat, or drink, or whatsoever you do, do all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). As St. Thomas Aquinas explains:

Nothing should be lacking in our friendship with God. Every act should go to Him, actually or habitually. This is a precept laid on all. “Whether therefore you eat, or drink, or whatsoever you do, do all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). A man loves God with his whole heart when he leads his life in God’s service; all his deeds are virtually ordained to God, those excepted which lead him away. With his whole mind he commits himself to revealed truths: “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). All his loves are brought into the love of God: “for whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God; or whether we be sober, it is for you; for the love of Christ constraineth us” (2 Cor. 5:13-14). Every power is engaged when every deed and word is based on love: “let all your things be done with charity” (1 Cor. 16:14).2

    Hence it is helpful to think of the Scriptural command to “pray always” not as though it meant always saying or reciting prayers – for that at any rate would be nearly impossible in the course of an ordinary layman’s day. Nor should we necessarily think of contemplative life in a monastery, where consecrated men and women have given up the world in exchange for the holy leisure to worship God with heart and voice from morning to night; the teachings of Scripture are meant to apply to all believers, those in the midst of the world as well as those removed from it. St. Thomas states that we must strive always to love God in everything we do; and this offers us a clue to the meaning of “praying at all times.” For love is itself a prayer, indeed the greatest of all prayers, since every act of unselfish love redounds to the glory of God and extends His kingdom in the hearts of mankind. Love is the greatest praise and worship we can offer, and that is why participating in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where the love of God is really and truly present in the Blessed Sacrament as the very substance of Christ, is the most perfect form of prayer, the most pleasing to God, and the most salutary for believers. Moreover, to love one another as Christ loves us – to lay aside attachment to self and serve others with an undivided heart – joins us intimately to His eternal act of loving where He gives Himself entirely to His heavenly Father. Finally, to love God and one’s neighbor with a pure heart, to serve with a will freely placed under the yoke of Christ, already involves listening to and obeying the voice of God in one’s soul. The pure heart is the prayerful heart, and to the extent that one’s heart is pure, it is in a state of prayer, a state of aspiration towards divine perfection. Prayer, says St. Thomas, is “the interpreter of our desire before God.”3 Every Christian who desires to do the will of God is, in virtue of that desire, making his life into a prayer for grace and perseverance, and every Christian who does the will of God makes his very self into a burnt offering, a pleasing sacrifice, to the Most High. Of the person who thus makes his life into a prayer, Newman says:

He sees God in all things; every course of action he directs towards those spiritual objects which God has revealed to him; every occurrence of the day, every event, every person met with, all news which he hears, he measures by the standard of God’s will. And a person who does this may be said almost literally to pray without ceasing; for, knowing himself to be in God’s presence, he is continually led to address Him reverently, whom he sets always before him, in the inward language of prayer and praise, of humble confession and joyful trust. . . .To be religious is, in other words, to have the habit of prayer, or to pray always. This is what Scripture means by doing all things to God’s glory; that is, so placing God’s presence and will before us, and so consistently acting with a reference to Him, that all we do becomes one body and course of obedience, witnessing without ceasing to Him who made us, and whose servants we are . . .4

Self-knowledge and Intimacy with God

    St. Paul is commending a way of living for God at every moment in imitation of the way that God is always present to us, sustaining us in being and conferring graces upon us. Although it is a mystery veiled to the sight of reason, God’s presence to us may be partially understood by comparing it to the way in which the human self is present to itself. From the first dawning of consciousness, I am aware that there are things around me with which I interact; here the accent is on things. Later, when consciousness matures to that mysterious phase where it comes to be self-consciousness, the accent shifts: I am aware of things. What is important about self-consciousness is that man’s awareness of things distinct from him turns back upon itself, reflects upon itself to apprehend the unity of mind by which a multiplicity of things is grasped. This reflexive turn towards the self is seldom conscious in the sense of being explicitly willed and dwelt upon, yet it is a steady part of our experience. The more a man knows himself, the more habitually reflexive will he be – so much so, that the thoughtful or “reflective” person is, almost by definition, “the person who knows himself best.” This reflexiveness does not, however, take the form of solipsism or an unhealthy self-absorption. Since the God who made and preserves me is more intimate to me than I am to myself, when I know myself best I will know that God is my all in all, the total purpose of my life and the innermost reality of my being. To know myself rightly is to catch a glimpse, as through a mirror, of the God who created, redeemed, and sanctifies me.

    A thoughtful or reflective person will therefore understand the following notion: “You are present at all times to yourself, but you do not need to make an effort to be present to yourself, nor do you need to be thinking of yourself to be present to yourself. In fact, by a paradox for which words are inadequate, you are most vividly yourself when you are most caught up in something which is greater than yourself: for example, when you are swept away by Beethoven’s music or lost in admiration of a painting by Rembrandt. Filled with the beautiful, you are intensely alive — you are, in a manner of speaking, doubly yourself, because all of you is intensified by all of the thing to which you have abandoned yourself. In this ecstatic movement, the self is enlarged, its boundaries broken, and the thing (or person) to whom the self goes out returns to dwell within. The more one learns to view beauty as the effect of artistry, the more one is drawn to meditate on the artist – and as one does this, the beauty itself will become more apparent, more accessible, more united to oneself because of the familiarity that readily springs up in the soul. On the contrary, when you sit in a chair and dwell on yourself alone, do you not find the subject an impoverished one? You may start to think about a novel you read, or a friend whose company you miss, or a sermon you heard; but notice how quickly you are drawn into something other than yourself. That is because the self, despite its centrality, is like an empty jar that needs to be filled before it can be of any use. The vase in the middle of the table does no good if there are no flowers in it. This explains why egocentricity, at its limit, is synonymous with death, whereas the philosopher, the artist, and the lover are all necessarily ‘eccentric,’ that is, they go out from the self-center to the very perimeters of being, always stretching the limits of their consciousness. To stay at the center would be death, voluntary starvation in protest of being; to keep going out from the center is to hunger for eternity and infinity, in the hope of being more like the God who is infinite and eternal. Hence, although it is very difficult to express this truth, you are most present to yourself, that is, you are most truly and fully in harmony with yourself, when you are most present to the Other, the Thou.

    From this, it may be seen that “to pray always” is to seek and ask of God a relationship with Him akin to the relationship one has to oneself in these moments of intense self-realization. We need to come into the presence of God, we need to stay there, abide there – that is what St. Paul is asking us to do, not repeat Hail Marys from morning to night, nor to go to three Masses a day, but, in addition to a sound measure of vocal and mental prayer (which build up good habits in us), to try always to remain in God’s presence. Now of course we are always in His presence, no one can escape the vigilant love of God; but we do not always make ourselves present to Him, which is the harder part. If my friend is sitting three rows behind me at the lecture hall, and I do not know that he is there, can I truly say that he is present to me or I to him? Of course he seems to be: he’s right there. But I have not acknowledged his presence. Just as a gift is not a gift without the recipient’s recognition of it as a gift, so presence is merely coexistence without the mutual recognition of one person by the other. That is why a dozen people can be sitting beside one another in a café, or millions of people can be rubbing shoulders in a city, without anyone being present to anyone else. They are there, occupying space; they are not with each other, for “to be with” – or with proper emphasis, to be with another – is a reality not constituted by spatial proximity but engendered by love alone. It may be true to say that the person who does not make himself present to another is really nowhere, because to the extent that he is cut off from the other who fills his self-identity with purpose and meaning, he cannot have a place, which implies a certain stable and definite being-there; he can only have something analogous to a state, like liquid, solid, or gas.

Abiding in the Presence of God

    Abiding in the presence of God is not to be attained by inquiries or speculations, nor by the mere fact of existing (which a stone, on a lower level, does just as well), but by reminding ourselves frequently of Him and turning our hearts to Him in unobtrusive ways: saying morning and evening prayers, placing prayer cards in the books we are reading, putting ikons on the wall above our desk or in the kitchen, repeating a few simple prayers throughout the day — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner”; “Thy will, not mine, be done”; “Lord, increase my faith” — associating beautiful things with sacred mysteries (when you see the setting sun, think of Christ being laid in the tomb; when you see the morning sun, think of the risen Christ in glory), making the sign of the cross or bowing one’s head when passing a Catholic church, recalling a Scripture verse heard at Mass, kissing a nephew on the forehead and in our heart asking God to bless him, saying grace reverently before and after meals. If we do such things perseveringly, we will acquire a habit of prayer, a disposition to turn readily to God throughout the day, and will find to our delight that God is intimately present to all things that are good or true or beautiful. Indeed, all things noble or lowly are suffused with His presence, so that, after a time, we will be able to discern what we should and should not do by whether or not God can be found in it. As St. Thomas puts it:

    Not merely learning about divine things but also experiencing them – that does not come from mere intellectual acquaintance with the terms of scientific theology, but from loving the things of God and cleaving to them by affection. Fellow-feeling comes from fondness rather than from cognizance, for things understood are in the mind in the mind’s own fashion, whereas desire goes out to things as they are in themselves; love would transform us into the very condition of their being. Thus by settled bent of his affections, a virtuous man is able to judge straightway the affairs of virtue; so also the lover of divine matters divinely catches their gist.5

    Then, the most wondrous transformation will begin to happen: instead of finding God, we will be found by Him, He will come to us of His own accord because we will have made ourselves always ready to receive Him. And just as a reflective man is always present to himself, although he seldom thinks explicitly of himself, so too will God be present in the depths of this generous heart, no matter what he may be doing, whether chopping wood or teaching English, listening to Mozart or doing the dishes, kissing his wife or playing with his children. “Faith opens upon us Christians the Temple of God wherever we are; for that Temple is a spiritual one, and so is everywhere present.”6 The thought of God, the constant returning to Him in one’s heart, never stands in the way of living one’s ordinary life, as if His claims upon us were a distraction from or an impediment to our duties and recreations. Much to the contrary, one who sees God in everything loves everything all the more passionately for being filled with Him; he is like a child ardent about things that adults are tired of, he is energetic and focused where others are bemused and worn out, because he knows how to love, having learned it from God whose love is the principle of all things. St. Paul says: “To the pure, all things are pure.” How few are they who, amidst the trials and cares of this life, can enjoy everything in its purest form with a pure heart! Yet this is what we are called to do: reflect the beauty of God as a mirroring pond holds a perfect image of the sky. “To some extent we can share in Christ’s sinlessness,” St. Thomas asserts, “if we walk the way trodden by Him our leader, if we seek to bend out mind to our destiny, and if we let God rule our soul.”7

    This reflection, or better, this union, is what the masters of the spiritual life promise as God’s reward to the faithful soul. But it is only gained by small steps, so small and slow, in fact, that one will hardly seem to be moving forward, and may sometimes get the impression that one is moving backwards. If we press on day after day and call upon the Lord to help us, these feelings of discouragement will not lead to infidelity or harden the heart against grace. A sense of loneliness, futility, abandonment, indifference will sometimes come upon us, and we must be prepared to face it with trustful prayer, with a trust that God will bring good out of whatever evils we must pass through. Gabriel Marcel writes:

It must therefore be well understood that the faithful soul is destined to experience darkness and that it must even be familiar with the temptation to let itself be inwardly blinded by the night through which it has to pass. Moreover, this is saying too little and the language I have used here is not courageous enough. Fidelity is not a preliminary datum, it is revealed and established as fidelity by this very crossing of the darkness, by this trial combined with everyday life, the experience of ‘day after day’.8

Prayer and Fidelity to One’s Vocation

    Because humble submission to our calling in life is required at every moment, fidelity to vocation is the first and highest standard by which God judges each of us. Just as the artist must consult with the patron not only at the beginning but all throughout the progress of the work, so too must the soul frequently go to God and make sure that she is following the right path, asking forgiveness when she has left it.9 One sometimes hears vocation spoken of as though it were a once-in-a-lifetime event: “I have a vocation to become a priest, and once I am a priest, I shall have fulfilled my vocation.” But there is more to living unto God, more to living out one’s vocation, than beginning well; one must persevere and reach the end, the glory that awaits the sons and daughters of God. A vocation is a pattern given to us, that we may conform our life to it with God’s help. If one learns to listen to Him in prayer, one will discover more and more how to make the love of God incarnate in one’s life. We shall always be in a state of discernment, which, like salvation, is not once and for all, but steady and laborious, full of “fear and trembling,” full of promise and hope. God is constantly revealing to us deeper aspects of our vocation, dissolving dangers and removing temptations for our benefit, and to do this He uses every means available to Him: our times of formal prayer and the words of Sacred Scripture, the advice of spiritual directors and wise friends, the good books we read, our experience of the natural world, our interaction with other people, our travels and circumstances, our desires and aversions, the voice of conscience – and for those to whom the gift is given, the cross and resurrection of spousal love. It is true that, for reasons hidden to us, He will occasionally also use extraordinary means, such as inner locutions, visions, or angelic messengers. But surely we cannot expect extraordinary divine interventions when the language of God is writ large everywhere in the world, when His gifts are so abundant and plentiful in the course of our lives! The only response we should make to this tremendous outpouring of love is the response we should give to a gift we do not deserve: humility, loyalty, self-abandonment, absolute trust. In a word, love, more love, always love. “He that takes delight in a thing holds it fast, by clinging to it with all his might: but he also opens his heart to it, that he may enjoy it perfectly.”10

    Will we ever be able to seek out God’s will and truth for our life as we ought to do? Most of the time we feel fortunate if we can just perform our daily duties, let alone study the word of God and deepen our practice of prayer. Yet we should never allow anything to interfere with our duty to please God, we should not allow ourselves to be thrown off course by the responsibilities and diversions of life. No matter what matters occupy our attention from morning to night, we must try to keep the presence of God in our consciousness and return love to Him as much as we can. “He who does not use a gift, loses it; the man who does not use his voice or limbs, loses power over them, and becomes disqualified for the state of life to which he is called. In like manner, he who neglects to pray, not only suspends the enjoyment, but is in a way to lose the possession, of his divine citizenship.”11 The most immediate thing everyone can do to please God is to follow His commandments as they are taught to us in the revealed Word of God, among which may be found the crowning commandment to “love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.” Prayer and private sacrifices are the ways in which we confess His authority over us and our willingness to do His will. Prayer is particularly important for revealing to us a tiny fraction of the infinite love God has for us in hearing our prayers, teaching us what we need to know, granting us what we truly need. The more we realize with Whom we are dealing, the more we shall see into His mercy, generosity, and compassion, and the more, too, we shall know what we are meant to do with our lives and our fortunes.

    “Lord, teach us how to pray,” the disciples said to Jesus (Lk. 11:1). And Jesus taught them the Lord’s Prayer, the most perfect prayer of all. But there are many things on which we can fruitfully meditate, many prayers we can spontaneously raise within us, to extend the kingdom of God over our hearts. Ponder who Jesus Christ is, what He has done and will do for us, the ways in which we can better reflect His merciful love here and now. Spend time daily with a Psalm or a chapter of the Gospel. Plead for strength of soul, light for the mind, loyalty for the heart. Thank God for friends, family, co-workers, neighbors; ask Him for patience and strength to bear without grumbling the burdens each day brings. Prayer is of utmost importance because it is directly linked to action, to active conversion of heart, the pressing practical duty of faith. “Prayer is to spiritual life what the beating of the pulse and the drawing of the breath are to the life of the body,” writes Newman. “It would be as absurd to suppose that life could last when the body was cold and motionless and senseless, as to call a soul alive which does not pray.”12 Every sincere prayer is an act of faith, a confession of the sovereignty of God over our lives. “For what is faith,” Newman asks, “but the looking for God and thinking of Him continually, holding habitual fellowship with Him, that is, speaking to Him in our hearts all through the day, praying without ceasing?”13 Christians travel by this hard road of faith, of believing without having seen; they have no access to an easy road of quick results, much less to seeing the God in whom they confide and to whom they entrust everything. And let there be no mistake about it: to live by faith is a cross, sweet in its consolations when they come, but bitter in its trials when consolations are absent. To believe in the word of Christ requires of us that we die to the world and its seductions, its false prophets and promises of security, its mad rush to exploit, with industrial efficiency, the brief pleasures of this unpredictable life. Living by faith requires nothing less than a total commitment to renounce “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” How difficult this renunciation can be in day-to-day life is a fact known to all Christians who examine their consciences.

Dying to the World, Living unto God

    What does it mean to “die to the world,” which, in the ears of unbelievers, sounds gloomy at best, if not positively absurd? “Die to the world!” they say, “you have got to be kidding. This is the only world we know, and this is the only life we have.” But the unbeliever has missed a primary truth that offers the key to making sense of reality, a key which unlocks the secret that makes life worth living. Think first about what it means to live for someone or something. As Christ teaches, to live for another is actually borne out to the utmost when a man lays down his life for his friend. Acceptance of death for the sake of love is a sign of a higher kind of life, a higher purpose on which to expend one’s life. The soldier who dies in defense of land and people, the martyr who dies confessing the truths of his creed, the father who dies protecting his family, has borne witness that there is a higher purpose to life than merely living, a good worth saving more than his own limited self. This is a paradox utterly beyond the reach of the materialist, for whom life is equated in all respects with biological life, and the hedonist, for whom ‘goodness’ is identical to ‘pleasure.’ Even the artist who has no religious faith is capable of seeing that living would be to no purpose without artistic creation, regardless of the poverty and obscurity that must be endured to accomplish it. For the artist, to live is to make beautiful things, not to grow fat off of the accomplishments of others.

    Thus the element of striving for immortality, as even the pagan Aristotle saw, is contained within every vital act, every act that tends to perpetuate something beautiful or worthy of existence. In this sense, plants and animals too give glory to God by perpetuating themselves, for these creatures are as instruments playing the symphony of divine creation. All things working in their places, working for their purposes, are the rhythms and melodies woven together by divine wisdom into the most perfect music. Man makes his contribution to this glorious music of creation when he lives in the highest way possible to him, that is, on the spiritual plane. When a man lives for the sake of artistic beauty, he is therefore nobler than the one who lives like a beast; when he lives for the sake of loving another human person with his whole being, he is nobler still; and when he lives for the sake of the God who made him and sustains him, he is the noblest of all, having soared up from this darksome vale to the throne of the heavenly Father who is the first of beginnings, the last of ends. At this highest point, man is not cut off from loving and making as a human being, but is able to do both with a fecundity and self-sacrifice unknown to the mere artist or earthly lover. Such a person has died to art for its own sake and the tragedy of human love worshipped for itself; his art from henceforth will be the song of heavenly beauty, his love the incarnation of God’s love for man. He has died to the world and is living unto God, even though he still journeys as a pilgrim in the world. His human passion and human experience is consecrated to God, who does not then dehumanize it, but, as the Incarnation of the Word reveals, divinizes it, elevating it to the conditions of eternity, of deathless life, burning with the fire of love that is the Heart of God. What this believer has really died to is a lie that has great currency among mortals. He has died to the lie that the world is anything apart from God, for it is nothing – and only by building up their stubborn fabrications, their Towers of Babel, do wretched mortals deprive themselves of the blessed waters that flow from the fountain of life in our midst.14 For the Kingdom of God is at hand, it is among us, within us when we partake of God’s gifts. “We are members of another world; we have been severed from the companionship of devils, and brought into that invisible kingdom of Christ which faith alone discerns, – that mysterious Presence of God which encompasses us, which is in us, and around us, which is in our heart . . .”15

    To keep ourselves aware, in many different ways, of the presence of God “in us and around us”; to make a conscious return to Him again and again, whether we are suffering or prospering, in sorrow or in joy, at work or at rest; to share our innermost thoughts and desires with Him, conversing as with a friend – to do these things is to begin building up a habit of prayer, of remaining in habitual communion with God, and in this way we come to please Him with our love, fidelity to vocation, and humble obedience to His holy will. St. Thomas speaks of the intimacy with God produced by frequent prayer:

Pleas to men require some previous acquaintanceship that may afford the petitioner an opportunity to present his request, but when we pray to God, the very prayer we send forth makes us intimate with Him, inasmuch as our soul is raised up to God, converses with Him in spiritual affection, and adores Him in spirit and truth. The familiar affection thus experienced in prayer begets an inducement in the petitioner to pray again with yet greater confidence. And so we read in Psalm 16:6: “I have cried to Thee” (that is, in trusting prayer) “for Thou, O God, hast heard me”; as though, after being admitted to intimacy in the first prayer, the Psalmist cries out with all the greater confidence in the second. That is why perseverance or repetition of our supplications is welcomed by God, and are not over-importunate as they may be when addressed to human power. Our Lord, too, invites us to pray, for He said: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you” (Mt. 7:7).16

Although no sinner, indeed, could ever pray as perfectly as our divine model, Jesus Christ, yet His grace availing we can turn our lives measure by measure into an unceasing prayer. Relying on the promises of Christ and full of faith in the divine largesse, let us implore God for this great gift and work at it every day, not losing hope in spite of our weaknesses. “With God, nothing is impossible.” Our small setbacks cannot stand in the way of divine love, once it has taken possession of our souls!

Peter A. Kwasniewski is studying for a Doctorate in Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, concentrating on medieval philosophy.

End Notes

1    “The Good Part of Mary,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 684. Hereafter cited as PPS.
2    De Perfectione Vitae Spiritualis, cap. 5. Thomas also writes: “All deeds which are not from sin can be done for God, not that every activity has always to be explicitly referred to Him, for to be set on Him by our settled disposition suffices. . .Theologians hold that in fact no deliberate act is morally neutral: if directed to God by grace then it is meritorious; if it cannot be so directed it is a sin; if it is not directed at all then it is vanity, which amounts to sin” (Commentary on the Sentences, Book I, dist. 1, qu. 3, art. un., corp. and ad 3). See also Newman’s sermon “Doing Glory to God in Pursuits of the World,” PPS, pp. 1643-52.
3    Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, qu. 83, art. 9.
4    “Mental Prayer,” in PPS, p. 1525.
5    Commentary on De Divinis Nominibus, cap. II, lect. 4.
6    Newman, “Moral Effects of Communion with God,” PPS, p.869.
7    Commentary on the Sentences, Book III, dist. 12, qu. 2, art. 1.
8    “Value and Immortality,” in Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951), p. 151.
9    Thus it may be seen that the modern view that man creates his own values and decides with absolute freedom what he shall or shall not be is far removed f

The Catholic Faith - January/February '98 - Table of Contents