Quotes Worth Contemplating
for the Feast of Sts. Adam and Eve (Christmas Eve)
According to Dom Mary Eugene Boylan, self-sufficiency is the death of love:
[T]he waywardness of weakness and the faults of frailty can be forgiven by love precisely because it is love. But there is one thing that love, precisely because it is love, finds most difficult to forgive; there is one thing that causes love, because it is so deep a love, intense anguish; there is one thing which repels love and casts it down completely like waves shattered into fragments and thrown back from the unyielding and relentless cliffs; and that is, self-sufficiency. Love of its nature is dependent, and calls for dependence. Love wants to give, and nothing can be given to the self-sufficient. (This Tremendous Lover, 364–365)
This being the case, if God’s purpose in creating men and angels at all was to bestow His Love on rational creatures who would find their beatitude in receiving and returning that Love, it stands to reason that God would very deliberately not make these creatures self-sufficient in the supernatural order. Nor did He. “If any man marvel,” says St. Thomas More, “that God made all His creatures such as they should always need aid of His grace, let him know that God did it out of His double goodness. First, to keep them from pride by causing them [to] perceive their feebleness, and to call upon Him; and secondly, to do His creatures honor and comfort” (The Book of Catholic Quotations, 410).
It is indeed an honor to be cared for by an Omnipotent Being. It is a comfort and delight beyond words to think that all our needs — natural and supernatural — He wishes to provide for Himself. To acknowledge as much, to appreciate the sublime ramifications of our status as creatures, to take complacency in our adoption as beloved sons of an all-provident Father — this is the glory that our God is eager to receive from us.
And it is precisely the glory that our first parents refused to give Him.
They had everything. But, not knowing what it was to be without the everything that they had, alas, they did not appreciate it. The one thing they should have desired and sought to increase — the love of their Father — they merely took for granted. Was this not their fatal mistake? For, St. Francis de Sales warns us, “That mortal who does not desire to love the divine goodness more, loves Him not enough; sufficiency in this divine exercise is not sufficient when a man would stay in it as though it sufficed him” (Treatise on the Love of God, 271).
Is it too much of a stretch to suppose this as being the unfortunate state of Adam standing with the forbidden fruit as yet untasted in his hand?
St. Lawrence of Brindisi lends credence to the idea when he speaks thus:
If man had not sinned, Christ would still have been his Savior, not indeed by freeing him from evils contracted through sin, but by preserving him from these evils. Yet, man would not have highly valued this great gift of salvation, for health is most appreciated after a lingering illness and freedom is most valued after a wretched bondage. For this reason nowhere do we read that man rendered thanks to God for his happiness in paradise. Nowhere does man lift his soul in gratitude to God for, before his fall, man only faintly realized how boundless is God’s goodness and love. (The Mariale, Vol. I, 85)
In saying this, the Apostolic Doctor merely echoes the sentiments expressed by St. Irenaeus of Lyons some fourteen hundred years earlier:
Things which fall into our lap and things acquired after much effort are not cherished in the same way. Now we were called to love God more, and that, according to what the Lord taught and the Apostles handed on, involves struggle. Were this not so, we would not appreciate the good; where there is no exertion, there is no appreciation. Sight would not be so desireable if we did not know what a great evil blindness is. Health, too, is made more precious by experience of sickness….
How could man have ever known that he was weak and mortal by nature, whereas God was immortal and mighty, if he had not had experience of both? To discover his weakness through suffering is not in any sense evil; on the contrary, it is good not to have an erroneous view of one’s own nature. (The Scandal of the Incarnation, 69–70)
Oh, mystery of mercy! Who cannot see how easily God might have prevented the Fall had He wished to, respecting all the while the free will of His creatures? What would have been easier than for Him to have kept the snake out of the Garden; or to have fortified Eve interiorly to resist the temptation when it was presented to her; or to have aroused in Adam a righteous indignation as his wife’s disobedience? Had God but intervened, Adam and his posterity would have remained in His grace, and God would have been glorified thereby.
But He did not intervene. He did not wish to intervene. He permitted the Fall because He wished to permit it. Why? Because man must learn never to rely on himself. God would be loved, and self-sufficiency is the death of love. Thus, in the Garden, says Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, God allowed that man should prefer nature to grace in order that nature’s threadbareness be apparent (cf. Our Savior and His Love for Us, 293). “This, then,” explains St. Irenaeus,
was the forebearance of God. He permitted man to pass through every situation, to undergo death, and then to come to the resurrection of the dead, discovering from experience the evil from which he had been delivered. Thus man will forever give thanks to the Lord for the gift of incorruptibility, and will love Him more, for the one to whom more is forgiven loves more…. And where there is an increase of love a greater glory is procured by God’s power for those who love Him. (SI, 71)
Saints Adam and Eve, pray for us that, renouncing the evil of self-sufficiency, we may delight in always relying upon so good a God!
