On August 5 (a week from this coming Monday) I will appear on The Journey Home on EWTN as Orestes Brownson, one of the most fascinating Catholic converts in American history.

Me as Orestes Brownson

One of the things Brownson strove to communicate in his writings was the cooperation of grace and nature.  For Brownson, the supernatural was the grounding of the natural, and superior to the natural, but the two realms coincided, working together through God’s providence.   He was quite suspicious of a rejection of either nature or of that which is beyond nature.

And, while most moderns flatly reject even the concept of the supernatural, sometimes devout Christians make the opposite mistake.

Many Catholics, for instance, are fond of a kind of spirituality that seeks to obliterate the self so that only God and God’s will remains.  Men are to become merely empty vessels for God’s grace.  This is not only anti-incarnational, it is almost a form of Eastern despair.

Grace perfects nature, and God gave us egos, wills, desires and reason – in short, personalities – not for their immolation (though there are times when even that is called for in a kind of martyrdom) but in order for Him to work through them and for us to work through them as well, in our personal cooperation with Him.

What we seek is not death to self and life in Christ, but death to sin and life in Christ.  For with new hearts our selves, by His grace, can be without sin.