Religion a Weariness to the Natural Man

My parish pastor has noticed an unfortunate pattern: the most requested song at funerals, in his experience, is Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” which exults in a life lived in accord with one’s own wishes. How can the demands of religion square with this kind of outlook? Of what possible use is Christianity, with its commands and its rules, its sacrifices and prohibitions, its insistence on “God’s way” first? The world celebrates following one’s own instincts, making narcissism the guide to fulfillment and happiness. Didn’t God make us with desires and personalities that are good? Is the path to beatitude really one of submission, deprivation, obedience, asceticism, and sacrifice?

The ultimate aim of Newman’s “Religion A Weariness to the Natural Man” is to show us that life lived only in accord with “My Way” is one that is not really happy or fulfilled, because it leaves us with nothing shared, nothing held in common, no bond of love with others. However, Newman does not wish his readers to begin by self-righteously pointing a finger at other “natural men” for whom religion is a weariness. He asks us to point a finger at ourselves. Rather than assume we are already “supernatural men” for whom religion is a blissful delight, he gives us five reasons to find that “natural man” still in ourselves. 

First, as children we approach faith with “reluctance.” We prefer games and diversions, and fear the “ridicule of companions” more than God. 

Second, as young adults, we dislike the “gloom,” the “melancholy” of devotion, mortification, piety, conscientiousness, and moral caution. Full of “ideas and feelings” in our social worlds, religion has no “sensible influence,” but is a chore, an obligation, a wearying exercise. 

Third, we prefer our “active occupations… worldly business, speculations in trade, ambitious hopes, pursuit of knowledge,” current events. And even when we are less busy, why should we not “relax” from all these strenuous activities rather than scourge ourselves with religious observances? It is not that we should not fulfill our duties and take care of ourselves. It is that we allow these things to “find a way directly to the heart,” and prefer them to God.

Fourth, wise men, even philosophers, have found religion, upon reflection, to be unnatural. Does not loving the world for its own sake appear rewarding? Comforting? Luxurious? Pleasant? Why should thesebe bad, and why should our Maker have us disregard them? Loving religion more than the world seems “unnatural and inconsistent with the original condition of our minds.” 

Fifth, and finally, even those who are already religious find it wearying. The same ideas, the same stories, the same repetitive practices become dull, uninteresting, a matter of rote habit. Even the better among us seek ways to make it more “pleasurable,” seeking “excitements” and “novelties” to break up the monotony. What weariness it is to “serve God humbly and in obscurity… detecting our secret failings, denying ourselves, creating within us, under God’s grace, those parts of the Christian character in which we are deficient.” How dreary to learn “modesty, love insignificance,” love to be “thought little of” and “slandered” and to regularly confess our wrongs. 

This goes to show that the “natural man” is not just out there in the world, but is in the hearts of each one of us. We feel a “strange reluctance” toward the things of faith, and cannot doubt that our will “runs contrary to God’s will.” This is not helped by a culture that thinks Christianity is “unsuitable” to the “enlightened age” of science, economy, and social progress. Many think that the Church may have had its “use” in a former age, but it has “done its service” and humanity has outgrown it. It now appears as an “obstacle” to “the improvement of the human race, and must ultimately “fall” in favor of the human achievement of “knowledge and virtue.”

And yet this is nothing new. Newman finds it implied in the ancient prophecy of Christ in Isaiah 53:2, that the Messiah would have “no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.” Yet many Christians hope and feel that their faith is beautiful, that it is ennobling and gratifying and fulfilling, and cannot imagine happiness without it. So why is Newman so insistent on gloom? It is because he is highlighting the “Old Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45) in us, the “natural man” who on his own can find nothing interesting or attractive in the ways of Christ. How many of us, on the first Good Friday, would have fled with the other Apostles at the sight of Christ’s arrest, his scourging, his blood, his heavy cross, his agonized cries to the Father, his punctured hands and feet and his torn-open side? How many of us would honestly have thought, “yes, this is the path of happiness and beauty and goodness”? 

Newman’s point is this: the goodness and beauty and nobility we feel about our faith is itself a gift from God. It is God’s transformative grace in us. It does not originate from our “natural” selves. To honestly confront our natural selves is to acknowledge the hope of the Gospel: “we must be changed.” If “we would be happy in the world to come,” God himself “must make us new hearts.” The things of God are fixed and unchanging—His Will and Attributes, the Angels and Apostles and Saints and Prophets and Martyrs, the Church Triumphant about His Throne. But still below we must “go over to them,” must change, must be “born again.” To be blessed by the All-blessed, we must go out from ourselves, approach Him to be “like Him” and to “love Him.” Newman cautions us to not make up an “ideal blessedness” for ourselves, of our own preferences, but to submit to God’s will manifested in Christ’s “wounds,” his poverty, lowliness, rejection, torments, and death that dispels our “self-delusions.” Let us continually open ourselves to the necessity of Christian transformation through suffering, allowing our lowly souls and bodies so disinclined from faith to be made like His soul and body, a work that only He can do in us by the power of the cross.