The "Good Natural", by Carol Robinson

The "Good Natural" Not the Christian

If it were possible to achieve all these natural reforms by natural action, which it is not, the result would not be a Christian society. We have to say this because many people confuse a Christian order with a naturally good order. They are as different as day from night. Christ's own life centered in the mystery of the Cross, so His society also can be expected to bear an analogous resemblance. Christ's life was a contradiction, so His order can be expected to contradict the world too. Consider the illustration, how different the humanist's "ideal man" is from the saint. He has culture, refinement, learning. His natural gifts are all developed. He is courteous and clean and interested in the common good rather than in his own advancement. Obviously it is an ideal which rests heavily on natural endowment, material and social advantages.

Sanctity, in contrast, can use any human base, wise or simple, rich or poor. It completely fulfills its subjects, even intensifying their natural gifts, but by ordering a man's whole life to charity. a certain transformation and elevation of his nature takes place, within which the nature is perfected but not with the finality one finds in the humanist. St Francis of Assisi was a talented and charming youth before his "conversion." He gave up all promise of human development and achievement. Yet who can say that the saint lacked any fulfillment of his nature? His charm was still there, mysteriously magnified. He was a leader of men above anything he could have hoped for in war or politics. Furthermore what Francis became he could never have become by first perfecting himself in the natural order. The transformation and elevation of his faculties demanded as prerequisite their radical subordination to a higher principle. Francis the saint was so different from what would have been Francis the fully developed man that the quality of the two would have to be submitted to a different measure. One of the most striking contrasts would be in external appearance, that is, in the material aspect.

The same thing holds true with the social order. It is not only in the hearts of men that the difference lies between the naturally good man and the Christian; it is even more sharply evident in the temporal embodiment of the two ideals. We build housing projects and garden suburbs and fancy sometimes that we are making Christian communities, or at least communities waiting for and adapted to Christian groups. But these natural embodiments of natural standards, such as good garbage disposal, attractive houses and private garden plots turn out to be sterile and lifeless and to act as a natural constraint rather than encouragement of the life of mutual charity. It is not the goodness in these projects that condemns them, because Christianity incorporates all the good things like space and air and gardens and family-size units. But it does it in a different way and one which cannot be foreseen by merely technological considerations. Perhaps the best way to express it is to say that the naturally good thing is dead, like a corpes, or frozen, whereas the Christian thing is alive and vital and warm. Or maybe the difference is in the hierarchical structure of a community, a housing project, a political order. Or perhaps it lies in the fact that the naturally good scheme is "perfect" in a narrow, materially realizable way, whereas the Christian social order, being an embodiment in sinful mankind, is imperfect and perfect at the same time. Just as St Francis' clothes were beggar's rags and his body was sickly, so a Christian realization in a social order is unlikely to achieve new paint on all the houses or perfectly paved roads. But as St Francis lent a beauty to his very garments so these Christian things will take on a beauty which will transcend and transform the material element. Needless to say it will not be the beauty of the glass-brick kitchen advertised in the Ladies' Home Journal.
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