The Essence of Human Life

Part One

The essential, perhaps the only, elements of the soul are the Intellect and the Will.
The Intellect:
The basic function of the Intellect is to receive, process and utilise knowledge.
The ultimate function of the Intellect is to know God in His fullness.
Knowledge is of two types - natural and supernatural.
Natural knowledge enables man in his Will to carry out successfully the natural functions and responsibilities of his life on earth.
Supernatural knowledge enables man in his Will to love : to love God by obeying His commandments and to love his neighbour by wishing him well and never wishing him harm.
Knowledge has to be true knowledge : false knowledge, in the form of errors, propaganda and lies, is harmful to man.
In man, knowledge is acquired in two ways : indirectly via the senses, especially those of vision and hearing and directly by inspiration from the Holy Spirit (or as temptation from Satan)
In God’s Plan for man, it is man’s responsibility to use his Intellect to acquire the natural and supernatural knowledge about God that has been provided by Revelation.
Revelation has been given to us in the Scriptures and Tradition.
The Scriptures and Tradition are to be found in the Bible and in the Teachings of the Church which together comprise Revelation, the Deposit of Faith.
Some knowledge about God cannot be understood by our limited Intellect : such knowledge is referred to as Mystery : we accept a Mystery by the process of Faith.
St Paul used the word Faith to mean total adherence of a person to God, which requires that : if God speaks a truth, we believe it in our minds : if He makes a promise, we are sure He will keep it : if He gives a command, we will obey : all done in Love which is a product of the Will, not an emotion.
True Faith, being the Truth, cannot conflict with right Reason.
The Cross embodies both Reason and Faith, with Reason the horizontal limb and Faith the vertical limb.

The Will :
The basic function of the Will is to act in accordance with man’s true good, man’s happiness, as revealed to him by an Intellect open to natural and supernatural Truth.
The ultimate function of the Will is eternal happiness - to love God and our neighbour for God’s sake and thus to secure permanent happiness, which come only from total union with God, our final end.

Righteousness :
Is defined as concern for the objective order, for objective morality, for objective justice.
Jesus underwent His Passion as the means of restoring the objective order of Justice unbalanced by original and actual sins.
In civil law, when a person expresses repentence for a crime, that does not lead to his release from penalty. No, he customarily receives appropriate punishment as a means of restoring the balance of the objective order, unbalanced by his crime.
So also does our patient acceptance of suffering during life, and/or the sojourn in Purgatory after death, act towards restoring the balance of the same objective order of Justice unbalanced by our personal sins.

Delights, Joys and Pleasures :
Man can enjoy bodily and spiritual delights, joys and pleasures - delights, joys and pleasures in the body and in the soul.
His soul can experience far greater pleasure than the body but also far greater suffering.
Every delight results from happiness or increments(s) of happiness.
A person is delighted, joyful, when he possesses, recalls from his memory the possession of, or anticipates the possession of, some fitting good, a fitting good being defined as happiness or a share in happiness, real or apparent.
These delights that result from happiness, the perfect good, since they result from happiness, cannot be themselves the essence of happiness but only consequences of it.

Happiness :
Is man’s last end and purpose. It is spiritual, not physical. It is man’s proper and perfect good. It is a state, a perfection of the soul, an inherant good of the soul. It is the reward of virtue.
Happiness satisfies of itself. Man having gained complete happiness cannot be lacking in any needful good.
Man attains his happiness through his soul. However, even the soul is not it’s own final end. If it were it would be like a moving arrow being it’s own target.
It cannot be achieved in it’s fullness in this life though it can be enjoyed incrementally and transiently in the form of spiritual pleasures and delights
Since man is not a supreme good, a supreme and final end and purpose, he must therefore be ordained to something else as his final end and purpose. This final end and purpose cannot be for some good of the body, since man consists of soul as well as body and the existence of the body depends upon the existence of the soul, the body being merely the matter existing for the sake of soul which is the form.
As the body is therefore ordained for and secondary to the soul, the goods of the soul are preferred to those of the body and it is impossible for man’s happiness to consist only in the goods, i.e. delights, of the body.
There is much difference between happiness and contentment. Happiness is objective while contentment is subjective. The lower the animal the more merely content it is : the slug is more content than the cat and the cat more content than the human.
Man is ordained to happiness through principles that are within him. Happiness on earth is incompatible with evil. Happiness and evil cannot co-exist in a person’s soul. Happiness, being a spiritual good, can exist only in a soul in the state of grace.
God, man’s first efficient cause, is also his final cause, his ultimate end and purpose, his final complete and permanent happiness.
It is only when man enjoys the Beatific Vision that he can be fully and permanently happy.
“Thou hast made us for Thyself Oh Lord and our hearts are ever restless until they rest in Thee”.

Adam’s Endowment :
Adam was born with the essentials of human nature - and more.
The essence, the essentials, of human nature included the Intellect and the Will, the two essential elements of the Soul.
His Intellect possessed the ability to acquire information to use in the pursuit of knowledge and with this information, the ability to reason.
His Will possessed the ability to make decisions relating to various actions, appetites and desires.
God’s plan for Adam and his descendants required man to use his Intellect to seek Truth, natural and supernatural, and to use his Will to love : to love God by subjecting his will to God’s will and to love his neighbour by seeking his well-being and never wishing him harm.
The essence of human nature does not include grace or the virtues - love, goodness, truth, humility, generosity, chastity, or temperance. These all have their first origin in the Creator and without union of man’s soul with God, man could not acquire them.
Inasmuch as God created man so that He would have someone upon whom He could bestow His love and affection and who would be the recipient of His gifts and ultimately sharers in His divinity, He had added to man’s natural essences the gifts or graces man needed to control, coordinate and direct his naturally-wayward actions, appetites and desires.
Without these gifts, man’s essential actions, appetites and desires would lack the full control and direction of his Will and would be incoordinated, each going it’s own way without regard to the others.
These gifts were available to Adam as long as he remained faithful and obeyed God. Because of them, Adam’s intellect and will, his emotions, actions, appetites and desires, were coordinated, integrated and under his control and he was at peace, united with God and able to enjoy doing God’s will. Adam was in a ‘state of innocence’ - a ‘state of Grace’, a state of full union with God.
As stated, one of man’s natural essences was his Will.
Man had to be given the ability to make a free choice between obeying God or obeying his own natural appetites, inclinations and desires so his Will was given the freedom to either love God by obedience or to disobey Him.
He had to prove by his behaviour whether he was worthy of the awesome eternal future God has put before him as his destiny.
Herein lay the explanation of the Original Sin - the first sin.
We know from Genesis that Adam disobeyed some command of God, the nature of which we don’t need to consider at this time.
We know that the essence of his Fall from Grace was the sin of disobedience - an expression of the loss, perhaps transient, of his love for God.
As a result of this first sin, Adam (and Eve) forfeited those added privileges, those gifts, given to them by God and so could no longer control, coordinate and direct their natural appetites, inclinations and desires and place them at the service of God.
Because Adam lost these added privileges, he was also unable to transmit them as an inheritance to his posterity - there was a ‘block’ at Adam’s level.
Thus, the Church is able to say that the Fall of Adam from Grace had it’s effects on his Intellect and his Will : it ‘darkened our understanding, weakened our wills and left in us a strong inclination to evil’. Adam’s fall left him and his descendants stripped of God’s gifts with only the essences of human nature remaining.

The Redemption:
After the Fall, God, in His mercy, which, like all His attributes, is infinite, and which, because of His love, is always available, conceived the plan to enable Man to return from the grace-less wilderness into which Adam’s disobedience had plunged him.
It is believed that God left man in this wilderness for so long that man over several centuries would see the terrible consequences of sin and separation from the Creator.
Even then He gave man in those times a chance to redeem himself by choosing the Jewish people to be His chosen people and sending the Prophets and Moses to them to show more clearly in the Ten Commandments what God wanted man to do.
Man already with his natural reason could use that reason to see the evidence all around him that there was a higher Being who created the world and all within it.
However, this knowledge was imperfect and inadequate even in persons of high intelligence who had the time and inclination to meditate on spiritual matters, people like the Prophets of old, Aristotle, Socrates and Plato.
This knowledge, known as the Natural Law is knowledge naturally available to man’s reason should he choose to seek and meditate upon it.
Within God’s Grand Design, God had willed that a woman - a second Eve, the Jewish Mary, would be born in the State of Innocence similar to that of Adam’s pristine state.
To this totally pure and sinless woman - this woman ‘full of grace’ who had made a vow of perpetual chastity and who was to be protected by a chaste union with Joseph who had made a similar vow - would be born the Second Person of the Holy Trinity as the second Adam.
God as Jesus would take on man’s human nature, with a human soul intimately united with His divine soul in a hypostatic union within a single Person, a Divine Person, God the Son Himself.
Jesus’s correct name is God the Son Jesus Christ because it is as God the Son that He is a Person, not as Jesus Christ.
We should get used to thinking of Jesus Christ as God the Son to avoid the common tendency to compare Him to the prophets or founders of man-made religions such as Mohamet, Buddha etc.
Jesus was not a human Person - He had to be a Divine Person if He was to take on Himself (figuratively the Lamb of God) and atone for, all of mankind’s sins - not only Adam’s sin but also all those that had been and would be committed during man’s life on the earth.
Inasmuch as God is the Infinity in Justice as in all His other attributes, all sin against Him, even the most venial type, is of infinite gravity, somewhat analogous to how an offence against a high personage such as a king or queen or president is considered to be much more serious than the same offense committed against a common person, an ordinary citizen.
Jesus, as the God-Man suffering death on man’s behalf, because He died as a Divine Person in human form, is the only person who could fully satisfy God’s Infinite Justice for sins of infinite gravity and restore the balance of the objective order of Justice, disturbed by defiant offences against the Creator.

Part Two

Because Jesus is God - the Infinite in all things - the merits flowing from the sacrifice of His life are also infinite.
Jesus devised a plan to make these infinite and inexhaustible merits available on a continuing basis to Adam’s descendants, merits that would be given to us as Graces - Sanctifying and Actual.
Jesus, before His Ascension, established a Church as the institution that would subsist throughout all ages preaching and teaching His Truths, His Revelation, reenacting daily in the Mass in an unbloody manner the bloody Sacrifice of Calvary and administering the other Sacraments as channels of the infinite merits flowing from His Passion.
The Church, inasmuch as it’s Christ’s Mystical Body, is the Treasury
(under Mary) of Jesus’s merits - ‘the Treasury of the Church’.

The Civil State has to have a Constitution as a statement of it’s authority and it’s mission.
Constitutions require that State laws be clearly and reliably understood by it’s citizens.
Because the citizens cannot always reliably determine for themselves the meaning of the Constitution and it’s laws, the U.S. Constitution gives a Supreme Court the authority to interpret and it’s ruling is final.
In the same way, since the Christian Constitution or Divine Revelation cannot always be reliably interpreted by the individual Christian, a Supreme Court is required to give a final judgment on biblical matters in dispute.
This Supreme Court is the Magisterium of the Catholic Church - the Church that Christ founded to perpetuate His message, Revelation, in it’s purity and truth.
“All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth : as the Father has sent Me, I also send you : go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation : he who believes and is baptized will be saved but he who does not believe shall be condemned”. “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build My Church ...and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven and whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven”. “ He that heareth you, heareth Me.”
“ - if he refuses to listen even to the Church, let him be to you as a heathen and a publican ” - these statements of Christ gave divine authority to the Church to pass on Christ’s message to future generations and to be the arbiter of it’s meanings.
The civil State or it’s individual citizens do not have this authority and this is why civil law in any country must not contravene divine law as expounded by the Catholic Church. The fact that nations do not recognise this authority of the Catholic Church does not release them from this requirement.
Baptism restores to the soul the graces lost by Adam and the soul is then said to be in the state of Sanctifying grace, wherein the Holy Spirit resides in intimate contact with the soul - ‘our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost’
As with Adam, so we his descendants possess Free Will.
As did Adam, we also have to prove by our obedience/love whether we are worthy of the eternal future with God that He has presented to us as our ultimate goal in life.
Just as Adam’s sin was essentially one of disobedience, so also our sins, regardless of their variety and nature, are ultimately sins of disobedience - disobedience to God’s laws, Natural and Revealed.
The death of God the Son was the ransom paid for Fallen Man. Man was once again capable of achieving the goal for which he was created, to share in the Divine Nature, to share in his inheritance as a child of God the Father, the inheritance lost by Adam’s sin and recovered by the death of God the Son. Just as a son or daughter do not earn a gift of inheritance because of their goodness but receive it because of their parent’s goodness and generosity, so Man does not earn the heavenly gift of inheritance by his good works but receives it because of God’s goodness and generosity.
In the same way, just as children may forfeit their gift of inheritance by deliberate rejection of their parent’s will, so man can forfeit the gift of heavenly inheritance by deliberate rejection of God’s Will.
In neither case, therefore, does the inheritor have an essential right to the inheritance because inheritance is a gratuitous gift by the donor.

Grace:
The Church defines Grace as ‘a supernatural gift bestowed upon us by God for our salvation’ : the word grace means gift.
As a supernatural gift it must be capable of acting upon our souls.
As our souls are comprised of Intellect and Will, Grace must act upon one or both of these elements.
How can Grace act upon our Intellect ? : how else but by imparting supernatural knowledge to it inasmuch as the intellect is concerned only with the receipt, processing and utilization of knowledge.
How can Grace act upon our Will : how else but by modifying our attitude to God so that we will be influenced to act in obedience to God’s Will.
How can our attitudes be thus modified but through the medium of knowledge, which, received in our Intellect, influences our Will to act in accord with our true best interests.

Knowledge:
In everyday life man deals in information of one kind or another and in one form or another.
In casual conversation we exchange information about ourselves or about other people, we relate or refer to happenings, past, present or expected : we give opinions, make predictions, we advise, we recommend, we tell stories, we tell jokes.
We produce and read newspapers. We produce and watch TV programs. We produce and listen to radio.
We educate in schools, colleges and universities.
In the professions, information in the form of medical knowledge, legal knowledge, engineering knowledge - indispensible to the preservation and maintenance of health, to resolution of disputes, to protection from criminals, to building construction etc - is generated, dispensed and utilized.
In business we use information of different kinds - technical, professional, promotional - to manufacture, produce and sell.
All these activities deliver as their product, information/knowledge.
All human life, in other words, depends upon and cannot function without information, without knowledge.
Information/knowledge is as essential to human life as are water and food : we cannot survive without it, physically, materially or spiritually.
Knowledge includes natural knowledge whose source in man is principally through the five senses.
The angels who possess no bodies with sense organs, possess intuitive knowledge as a direct infusion from the Creator.
There is also supernatural knowledge - knowledge about the hidden world of the spiritual, knowledge about God and His ways. Man receives this knowledge not only through the senses in religious teaching but also as a direct infusion from the Holy Spirit usually in response to prayer and the Sacraments when received worthily : that is, when free from unconfessed mortal sin, since the Holy Spirit cannot dwell within a soul that is not open to the Holy Spirit, a soul ‘with a hardened heart’, a soul that is at enmity with God.
Before His ascent to Heaven, Jesus promised that He would send the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of Truth who would teach you all things and bring all things to your minds whatsoever I had commanded you’
Just as man’s capacity for natural knowledge is limited so also is his capacity for supernatural knowledge.
This capacity for supernatural knowledge however, can be increased by Grace, by growth in the spiritual life, by a greater depth of knowledge of God.
Good examples are provided by the lives of the canonized saints whose object was always to advance in the knowledge of God and who endeavoured to make their wills as fully coordinated as possible with the Divine Will.
Man’s ultimate responsibility is to freely allow God to control, direct and coordinate his earthly life in all things : to continue to be open to receiving those lost graces needed for the exercise of this control, direction and coordination.
When man succeeds in handing over his life, in all it’s decisions and actions to God, he can be assured that he will be successful, not only in religious terms, but often in terms of progress and well-being in the temporal sphere. “ Your heavenly Father knows that you have need of these things, Seek first the Kingdom of God and His Justice and all these things will be yours as well ” (Matt.6:32)
Yes, man will no doubt have problems and privations but if he unites these with the sufferings of God the Son in His Passion, he will know that everything that he does or that happens to him is in accord with God’s will and plan for him and is increasing his capacity to enjoy the heavenly hereafter.
He who just, so to speak, ‘sneaks into heaven’ by a last-minute repentence will indeed be completely happy but only in a relative sense in that his capacity to be completely happy will be correspondingly less than that of the person who always, or for much of his life, lived always in accord with God’s Will.
His cup of happiness though full, is a smaller cup than that of the more consistently faithful one whose cup, when filled, is continually being replaced by a larger one that, in turn, becomes full and replaced by a yet larger one.
Mindful of this we can understand that the level of complete happiness of Our Lady, St Joseph and the canonized saints will be far greater than that of the vast majority of those finally admitted to the Vision of God.
The soul, made up of Intellect and Will, in it’s Intellect equips man to seek and find the information he needs to function in his natural life.
His Intellect uses the nervous system - central and peripheral - and the organs of sense - which are essentially components of the nervous system - to acquire this natural knowledge from an environment made up of the natural world and other people.
By the operation of his nervous system man acquires not only natural knowledge but also much of his supernatural knowledge indirectly, from study of the Scriptures and from the traditions and teachings of the Church through the medium of the spoken and the written word.
Besides naturally-acquired indirect knowledge there is also direct knowledge from divine inspiration.
In divine inspiration, God imparts knowledge in the form of Grace directly, without the medium of the senses, to the intellect of the subject.
This knowledge-by-grace enables man to ‘enlighten his understanding and strengthen his will’ and thus serve to lessen the effects of Original Sin.

Part Three:

Spiritual and somatic resonance:
There are two parts in a human, the spiritual soul and the human body.
Because these two are so closely united as to form but one person, it follows that for normal and harmonious operation there should be a parallel condition on one side to match the condition on the other side : this parallel condition is called a resonance. Resonance can be spiritual or somatic.
When, as is more usual, the resonance is on the side of the material body, it is called somatic from the Greek word ‘soma’ or body.
When on the side of the immaterial spirit, it is called spiritual resonance.
Somatic resonance represents the emotional counterpart to the ‘things of the spirit’.
Emotion is defined as feelings reacting to a value perceived by the intellect and desired by the will or to a dysvalue perceived by the intellect and shunned by the will.
Somatic resonance, since it is emotional in nature, is affected, among other things, by changes in body biochemistry produced by medications, hormones or fatigue e.g. sex hormones or serotonin deficiency may lead to sexual excitation and excess lactate may lead to anxiety.
Somatic resonance, expressed as emotional feelings, may also be affected by different kinds of music, by oratory, by public or peer pressure or by propaganda. Martial music tends to stir up feelings of patriotism and national pride, Gregorian chant and hymns tend to evoke feelings of spiritual ardour and reverence, classical music tranquillises, civilizes and excites, while hard rock music may promote feelings of depression, despair, anti-feminism, irresponsibility and varying degrees of general depravity, and pornography inevitably promotes feelings of sinful sex .
Thus, we may experience healthy or unhealthy feelings, healthy or unhealthy emotions, healthy or unhealthy somatic resonance, depending on the causative influences.
In the framework of resonance, if a condition is present on either one of the two sides, spiritual or somatic, there is a tendency for the parallel condition to develop on the other side.
Faith lies in the spiritual Intellect while Love lies in the spiritual Will.
Love towards God is expressed by obedience to His Will, aligning our will to His will, to His laws.
“ He who has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me” (John 14 : 21)
“If you love Me you will keep My commandments.” (John 14:15.)
Love towards persons consists of wishing them well. We do not have to have feelings of affection towards them to love them. Love of persons other than our spouses or children is essentially a spiritual desire residing in the spiritual will and not in the emotions or feelings, which are somatic not spiritual, in nature.
In sexuality, if emotion or somatic resonance of the right kind is present, then there will be a tendency for love to develop in the spiritual will : if young people follow God’s plan, confining sexual acts to legitimate marital union, sexuality will tend powerfully, by a double channel of spiritual and somatic resonance, to produce real spiritual love : otherwise, it generates fakes or counterfeits.
Sexual feelings on the somatic, emotional side are designed to enhance and facilitate the growth, on the spiritual side, of true love in the attracted parties, and are not designed to simply promote sexual pleasure, especially sexual pleasure divorced from marital, spiritual love.
In marital love it is essential that each person be aware of the importance of each one unselfishly and unconditionally seeking the happiness of the other, rather than the selfish seeking of one’s own interests exclusively - that one not use the other selfishly - e.g. as a sex object only.
It is common that couples mistake biochemical effects, sexual feelings, the somatic, emotional resonance to love, for the spiritual virtue of love : they will say or think ‘we are madly in love’ when what they may be experiencing is merely the somatic resonance of love, the emotional or biochemical resonance, the chemical counterfeit of love.
Sooner or later these feelings will dissipate exposing in such unions the lack of true love when now one partner finds him/herself yoked to one that he/she does not love truly, does not love unconditionally, does not love spiritually.
If, at this juncture, one or both suffers from the false modern spirituality that sees no virtue in bearing one’s cross for Christ’s sake, no virtue in maintaining the marriage intact despite the disillusionment, then almost certainly the marriage covenant will be violated by divorce and the danger of sinful remarriage and other evils follow.
Love, faith and humility, are examples of virtues while pride and hatred are examples of vices which resonate on the spiritual side.
To spiritual love of God, our somatic resonance would be feelings of reverence and awe, leading to obedience - our authentic mode of loving God.
To spiritual love of persons of the opposite sex, our somatic resonance would be sexual, emotional feelings leading to a desire for the loved one’s well-being.
To spiritual love of our children, our somatic resonance would be parental feelings of tenderness and solicitude for their well-being.
To the spiritual virtue of humility, the somatic resonance would be feelings of inferiority which allow us to realize that all good comes from God and not from ourselves.
To one’s spiritual vice of pride, the somatic resonance would be puffed-up feelings of superiority and arrogance leading to our ascribing all good to ourselves rather than to God.
To one’s spiritual vice of hatred, somatic resonance would consist of feelings ranging from feelings of aversion to actually wishing harm to the one hated.
Thus we can see that somatic resonance is a matter of one’s feelings, of one’s emotions : it is not directly related to reason and the intellect and in fact, not infrequently may operate contrary to reason and good sense.

The Beatific Vision:
What is the Beatific Vision.?
It is the ultimate vision of God when one reaches Heaven.
Yes, we will be able to see God the Son Jesus Christ in His human body which like our own, will last forever.
But God the Father and God the Holy Ghost are pure Spirit without a body.
So how do we see pure Spirit.
Using one’s reason it seems that it can only mean that we will see God by knowing Him more fully, by receiving a maximum knowledge of Him : by our intellect receiving infusions of supernatural knowledge to the extent that our still limited human intellect after death can absorb this knowledge : by receiving, not indirectly through our senses anymore, not through the intermediation of images received through our organs of sense which pass by material pathways first into the realm of perceptual thought in our material brain prior to it’s passing into the soul, but instead, bypassing this material pathway, and proceeding directly by infusions from the Holy Spirit into the realm of conceptual thought in the immaterial soul.
According to Our Father’s Plan p 68, the Beatific Vision is so direct that there is no image involved.
In seeing persons or things in our daily lives we do not take the person or thing within us, we take instead an image.
There is no image involved in the vision of God as no image - since an image is finite - could show us Him who is infinite.
St Thomas Aquinas drew the inescapable inference that the divinity must join itself directly to the human mind or soul with no image in between.
Within the Blessed Trinity there flows among the three divine Persons an infinite stream of infinite, indescribable knowledge personified by God the Son, the Word, and infinite, perfect love personified by the Holy Spirit.
After death, the soul who reaches heaven, made partly divine by grace, participates in this infinite stream of knowledge and love where God joins Himself directly to our Intellect and Will - knowledge in our Intellect and love in our Wills.
Our Intellects will have full access to vast amounts of knowledge, natural and supernatural, and our Wills will be devoted solely to loving God by a total alignment of our Wills to that of the Creator : this is why we must prepare for that life by ensuring now that we use our Intellects to know God and our Wills to love and obey Him.
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the mind of man, to conceive the wonderful joys God has in store for those who love Him “.
St. Paul (1st Corinthians 2 : 9).


Ref. “ Our Father’s Plan” by Fr W.G. Most.
“A Shorter Summa” by Peter Kreeft.