Prudence
THE NINTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
Permit me to ask a philosophical question: do the means justify the ends, or do the ends justify the means? Does a good outcome excuse any wrong you have done to achieve it? Or does what you do excuse whatever outcome you attain, whether good or ill? There are means, and there are ends. Means are the ways by which we achieve something, the doing necessary for attaining what is desired. For instance, a car is the means by which one arrives to work. Work is how one receives a paycheck. A paycheck is how one provides the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Now, an end is a final result, the ultimate goal, the ultimate conclusion, the terminus for which one sets out on a journey. Mount Doom was the end of Frodo's ring-bearing pilgrimage. But setting off for Grey Havens and the Undying Lands beyond Middle-earth, which welcomes immortals and Ring-bearers, was the eternal terminus of his worldly life.
So, we could say that by bearing that terrible and awesome Ring, the twentieth Ring forged by Sauron himself- with its allure of power, temptations, dangers, and burdens- Frodo attained eternal life in the Gray Havens. The Ring was the means to the eternity of the Gray Havens. Now, what if these had been reversed? What if Frodo's ultimate goal, his chief end, was to attain and possess the One Ring? And what if the Gray Havens became his means instead of an end? The illusory nature of eternity, peace, rest, and blessing in the Gray Havens would have served no purpose nor directed him away from pursuing that precious Ring. And when he had finally possessed it, it would have ultimately possessed and disfigured him as was the sorry case with Gollum.
Tragedy often follows when means and ends get confused because one is inherently less valuable than the other. We desire means less than ends because the end, or whatever it is we desire and want to attain, is superior to the means by which we get there. If means we're better than ends, they would cease to be means. The logic follows, ends are greater than means: the Gray Havens are vastly superior to Mt. Doom. And yet, how easily we get these two confused in the spiritual life.
As he coaches his nephew Wormwood in devilry, Screwtape (the senior demon) instructs his junior to employ the following tactic on "the patient" (a man whose soul they are trying to wrestle from Christ). Screwtape writes,
"Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meets, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours--and the more 'religious' (on those terms), the more securely ours."
You see, the strategy is to cause the patient to worship the wrong things; to get him to mistake the means for the end. This isn't a new tactic but the oldest and most original. The garden was the means for men to enjoy God. But the garden and its fruit became an end in itself and, ironically, the means by which man lost friendship with God. Consequently, men have struggled to keep ends and means straight. St. Paul testifies to this in his epistle to the Roman’s writing,
"For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things."
And there it is, the unholy exchange! Exiled humanity desires a lie over truth, worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator. Here St. Augustine is of great use for us: he calls this base malady of the human condition disordered love.
This is how Augustine puts it,
"Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves less or more which ought to be loved equally. No sinner is to be loved as a sinner, and every man is to be loved as a man for God's sake, but God is to be loved for His own sake. And if God is to be loved more than any man, each man ought to love God more than himself" (On Christian Doctrine I. 27. 28).
In his book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher writes,
“The source of all disorder is loving finite things more than the infinite God. Even loving good things, like family and country, can be a source of damnation if one loves them more than one loves God and seeks fulfillment in those things rather than in the Creator of those things."
Disorder desires good things improperly and employs harmful means to obtain them. But prudence knows what to desire, how to act, what one should do to attain its desires, and what should be avoided. The wise man is the prudent man because he clearly understands the true and final end he is trying to attain. And he knows which things are merely the means to get there. So he knows how to love each, both the means and the end, in true proportion.
Classical and biblical Christianity has a high view of creation: all things have been created and given for our good. Material goods like prime rib, a fine whiskey, endless seashores, and butterflies are not the problem; disordered desire is. Jesus says, "it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person" (Mt 15:11). The moral virtue of prudence is needed concerning how we relate to material things and spiritual things as well- their means and ends, especially regarding the sacraments.
In today's epistle, St. Paul tells us that the people of the old Israel were in a spiritual circumstance like our own: their lives were lived in Coram Deo, in the presence of God. Their miraculous passage through the Red Sea, when the waters parted, was a type of baptism. St. Paul, interpreting the history of Israel says, they [Israel] "were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud in the sea." Thus, having passed through the water, they were received as God's people. Moreover, the rock, struck by the rod of Moses to yield water for drinking in the desert, and the manna, which fell by night so that they might eat in the wilderness, were both signs. Both were signs that they were God's people, "the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand," whom God would feed and for whom he would always care.
But the people of Israel did not discern God’s gracious gifts nor treat this spiritual food as the means of their life with God. Rather they treated them as things to be enjoyed for their own sakes and forgot God: the means became an end. Paul writes that "The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play." The people saw nothing but the outer reality and behaved as if it were the final reality. They confused the means with the end.
They tried to gather and save the manna as if they could have security in this World's goods. God had commanded them to save only enough for each day, promising that he would provide daily bread," but they demanded more. After bread, they wanted meat, and so on. Because they mistook the means as the end and sought the means instead of God, their lusts made them idolaters.
“Now, these things were our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted. Neither be ye idolaters, as some of them were.”
St. Paul goes on to tell us how to treat this blessed sacrament which we are celebrating this morning. It is of no use to us unless here, at the altar, we discern the presence of the body and blood of Christ. The offering on our altar of bread and wine makes present Christ's heavenly intercession for us and his sacrifice on the cross. Eating bread and drinking wine, we feed upon the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And we somehow participate in the body and the blood. Hear St. Paul once more,
The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?
Beloved, this bread that we break and this cup which we bless are the Divinely appointed means by which we participate in the life and love of God. These creatures of bread and wine are divinely appointed means of grace, the end of which is communion: we in Him and He in us. And yet, the key is knowing what are the means and what is the end we seek. And yet, we Christians can easily get confused. And, like Israel, unholy desires can overtake us. Attracted by its false enticements and empty promises, we lust after the things of this World. For we are all prodigals. Surely at some point, we have exchanged the things of heaven for the things of this world, wandering off to that far country and away from homes blessings. And being far away from where we should have been, we squandered every good gift: being frivolous with money; wasting precious time; disregarding unique talents and spiritual gifts; using others for gain, and discarding them once they’ve been used up.
All the while, never once perceiving God in these gifts- the means- given not only for our use and pleasure but as means to find, know, and love God: for "every good and perfect gift comes from above." The truth is, means aren’t meant to be ends; therefore, means never truly satisfy. It is God alone who finally satisfies, and we mustn't stop anywhere else, not at the far country nor the pig trough. He must govern us in the great things as well as the small. Only by fixing our heart and mind, our soul and strength, altogether upon him, only by loving him above all and letting him as our end govern all that is between, shall we finally arrive at our true enjoyment and perfect bliss.
Our disordered love is made right only when we learn to love God first and foremost, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, as the good to be loved and enjoyed entirely for his own sake. We then come to love all else as the means to the true love and complete enjoyment of God. Correcting our love is a matter of prudence, learning how much to love each good thing. The key is to love God as the perfect goal and end, and then to love all else as means.
As with the prodigal, we too need the grace of the Holy Spirit to fill us with wisdom and prudence to set us back on the road of rightly using the means God gives to attain the great end of this earthly life. That great end being to one day attain God himself in all His fullness, not mediated through creaturely means like bread and wine, but face to face forever and ever. By grace, we need to desire the right things and the wisdom to attain them in the right way: we need prudence. And so, we pray,
Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do such things as be rightful; that we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee, may be enabled to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
