The Insufficiency of the Cross, part two: Subjective Happiness

Over the course of three papers, I will demonstrate that the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross was insufficient in itself for the Salvation of man, that His work on the Cross is developed within the hearts of man through the working of the Holy Spirit, and that Christ indeed did have to ascend into Heaven so that man might be fully saved. This is part two.  For continuity, I have repeated the the final paragraph of part one as the first paragraph of part two.  All quotes from Pope Saint John Paul II are taken from his encyclical, Dominum et Vivificantem, unless otherwise stated.

Because the immortality of the soul can never be isolated from the immortality of God, Anamnesis provides the image of man as immortal only insofar as he is created in the image of God, and not by virtue of the knowledge of things within his soul.  This is why we can still speak of individuals who do not attest to the existence of God both as being themselves immortal, created in the Image of God, and have themselves the purpose and therefore obligation of pursuing God: all men have the same foundational inclination towards God because even those peoples in the farthest reaches of the wilderness are seeking that which makes them truly happy in their own unrepeatable and unique lives.  Happiness itself has been observed to be the most subjective thing in the world, nearly impossible to objectively measure; this is because of the unique perceptions and experiences the unrepeatable human subject encounters throughout the physical world around him.  At the same time, the source of happiness is also universal and objective, as “the Church truly knows that only God, whom she serves, meets the deepest longings of the human heart, which is never fully satisfied by what the world has to offer”.  The personal encounter with God, experiencing Him through our daily lives in a unique way according to the knowledge of good written on our hearts and adhering to the moral order “remembered” there is what makes us unique and truly happy.  This is why JPII writes that it is this very ability to “remember” the truth about the moral order and natural law, the “capacity to command what is good and to forbid evil, placed in man by the Creator, is the main characteristic of the personal subject”.  The recognition of Anamnesis truly allows Man to access to Divine Truths which are beheld by the mind of God and which do not need man’s own personal experience, limited as it is by the potential of faulty senses and subject to individual incorrect reasoning.  

Because our happiness lies in our unique inclination towards encounter with God, we have knowledge of the moral order within ourselves, at the core of our very being.  In a very rudimentary way, this is knowledge of the nature of sin - a “‘disobedience’, and this means simply and directly transgression of a prohibition laid down by God”.  Though at its base level we do not recognize that which makes us miserable as sin, we understand the principle of do good, avoid evil.  We simply do not see it for what it is: a “turning away from God, and in a certain sense the closing up of human freedom in his regard”.  In order to recognize sin as what it is, the working of the Holy Spirit in the Anamnesis of the individual is necessary to convince him concerning the nature of sin.  To recognize something as an offense or disobedience to God you must first admit the existence of a God, which of course the world rejects time and again.  This is the only way to correctly see sin in the world as “a stage in ‘a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness’ which characterizes ‘all of human life, whether individual or collective’”.  Because knowledge of God is an encounter with a Person, we who have inherited the effects of Original Sin do not have explicit knowledge of God as the author of our inner inclinations towards the good and do not specifically seek Him, or recognize evil as a transgression against Him.  We turn our backs on Him who is our Chief Good and greatest happiness, leaving us less ourselves with no clear understanding why.  This is the foundation for understanding evil as an absurdity, requiring a response rather than understanding the nature of evil itself.  This response came in the Sacrifice of Christ, who came to re-introduce into the world the Holy Spirit, who convinces the world of sin and truly restores freedom and a new sense of identity into the hearts of men, to “understand himself, his own humanity, in a new way. Thus that image and likeness of God which man is from his very beginning is fully realized.”  This is one way in which we might advantageously reflect on the concept of being “born again” and the title of the Holy Spirit as “giver of Life”, for it is quite literally true that our personhood is changed through the working of the Holy Spirit at the foundational levels of our hearts.

This is not to say that we cannot change, silence, and ignore the whispers of the Holy Spirit within our hearts to such a great extent that we are no longer even aware of our own actions as being contrary to our own happiness.  This is in fact very possible, and is what Christ would call the “unforgivable sin”, that sin which is never repented of because the sense of sin in the subject has been lost due to a constant, repeated, and intentional silencing and therefore expulsion of God’s welcome in the recesses of the heart.  At this stage of being, the subject not only “rejects the ‘convincing concerning sin’ which comes from the Holy Spirit and which has the power to save” but he also  “rejects the ‘coming’ of the Counselor - that ‘coming’ which was accomplished in the Paschal Mystery, in union with the redemptive power of Christ’s blood: the Blood which ‘purifies the conscience from dead works’”.  In this act of rejection of the Holy Spirit the actor literally redefines the good in an invincible way to his own mind.  He refuses to acknowledge his own need for forgiveness because he rejects the unlooked for Mercy of God in its entirety from the Cross to his own life.  This then is the image man who deems himself capable of happiness and goodness left to his own devices: lost without his own sense of identity in a perpetually spiraling nightmare of his own creation, harboring animosity and contempt at the suggestion that he needs any outside intervention in his life, for “God the Creator is placed in a state of suspicion, indeed of accusation, in the mind of the creature”.  This lost soul is the picture of a man in isolation.  Such a man is still a person, because that which makes him happy still exists; his unique experience of the world simply becomes tortuous and he is unintelligible as the person he exists as, since his manifestations and communications of himself are so distanced from the reality of his person that “the truth about man becomes falsified”, without context, and absurd in themselves.