How a False Unification of Nature and Grace Led to Their Divorce

Certain modern efforts to reconnect the natural and the supernatural contributed to the worldification of the Church

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Infinite natural disproportion

“All the reunited effort of nature cannot produce one supernatural act, one act which has any proportion with our end, which is the beatifying vision of the Adorable Trinity.” Those are the words of Blessed Columba Marmion, who has been informally dubbed “the doctor of divine sonship.”¹ This one sentence, it seems to me, could be taken as the dividing line for all modern Catholic theology.

If you fall to the wrong side—the side of reliance on or reduction to nature—you will end up in some form of naturalism, the ultimate consequence of which is what we see in Pope Francis and the Vatican:

• blessings of soil with female figurines queerly reminiscent of idols;

• obsession with the environment, planting trees, reducing carbon emissions;

• rehabilitation of the pan-evolutionary cosmogony of Teilhard de Chardin;

• the praising of any and all religions as ways willed by God for man to relate to the divine, and their gathering in meetings to pray to their various gods for world peace;

• the release of the primal power of the loins in those who “cannot help” seeking sexual pleasure—be it alone, or with a partner unmarried or already married to someone else, or with someone of the same sex,

and so forth. All these disparate views come down to an exaltation of, or a despairing surrender to, nature—raw, unaided, untutored, unchastened nature.

If you fall to the right side, where you acknowledge that man has been created for and summoned to an end wholly beyond his natural powers and yet not impossible for them when elevated by the grace of divine sonship, you will maintain the primacy, gratuitousness, and transformative power of the gift of grace, you will see it as the most necessary of all necessary things for human flourishing and happiness; the best of all good things to desire, pursue, cherish, and rely upon; the one and only means of escaping the terrible gravity of the fall and its devolving dynamism that leads to the bowels of perdition—and, accordingly, you will conscientiously oppose nearly the entire program of “reform” that has made the Church a sort of honorary chaplain to the United Nations or the European Union or the Democratic Party.

Only those who really believe in the truth spoken by the great Benedictine abbot Dom Marmion will become great missionaries, evangelists, apologists, because they know that without Christ and His grace, men are worse than nothing: we are doomed. And those who believe this truth, if they educate themselves, will end up as traditionalists, because they will see that only the traditional liturgies of the Church, East and West, rightly embody and express the traditional theology of nature and grace.