Dr. Colossus:
The Church teaches that every human being has free will. But the will is not simply a matter of the mind. In order to will something, we must desire it with our entire mind, body, heart and soul. Simply changing our “mind” to will against sin will not change the rest of us. We have to discipline our hearts and bodies, and while this is occuring, we can and will still sin, through our own fault.
Fascinating discussion.
Your discussion of will here parallels what Jesus said was the greatest commandment, ie. to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds, and even went on to say in St. Matthew’s Gospel that that first commandment combined with “love your neighbor as yourself” are basis for all the law and prophets. That’s a pretty broad and heavy statement when you think about it.
Furthermore, you are right, it is simple to say but very difficult to accomplish. As Fr. John Corapi says when someone tells him they have nothing to confess, how about the first commandment? He says nobody ever gets past that one.
Part of what you touch on here, Racer X, is the doctrine that is so misunderstood (in my opinion) that seemingly came out of nowhere in Gaudium Et Spes and other documents of Vatican II, ie. that there are those that God gives Grace to, who have not heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In actuality, the early church fathers were wrestling back and forth on this issue right from the start, and concluded simultaneously that God would not condemn someone without voluntary fault, and there is no salvation outside the Church. The discussion all turns on this issue of free will and concupiscence.
I think you have the Catholic doctrine exact, as least as much as I understand it.
You will note the contrast to the Calvinist point of view, which I heard from a friend not long ago, from a Brethren congregation, to the effect that we are so hopelessly bound in sin that the Blood of Jesus covers us so that our sin cannot be seen by God and thus we are saved. We are chosen (predestined) to be saved because we would never seek it on our own.
I tend to see it this way. God opened up a window of temporality in the midst of eternity (some say Big Bang) in order for there to be a physical creature like us that would love Him freely for His own sake. Einstein noted that mass and energy do not cease to exist, just change form and re-configure in this physical universe. In a sense, the Garden of Eden was the portal, the cross-over, the communication point of the temporal with the eternal and not co-incidently was the place of Divine sustenance for Adam and Eve.
Time is only the measure of change, and change is only the moving from existence of form to the exstence of another form, with continuity of the matter/energy. That is to say death, or the discontinuance of a self-contained form or entity, is part of the cycle of temporality. Cycles within cycles. All of this is only perceived by that which has an eternal or linear character, ie. the human soul the source of our mind. Ultimately, the only thing that is linear in this cyclical temporal world, is the imprint of God, through revelation and incarnation, Jesus Christ, centre of history…
