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The Universal Call to Christian Perfection
A Patristic and Scholastic Essay
Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience as the Means to Perfect Charity
PREFACE: THE FALSE ASSUMPTION
There is an error of comfort that has always threatened the Church from within — more dangerous in many respects than the errors that attack her from without, because it does not announce itself as error but settles quietly into the assumptions of ordinary Christian life and makes itself at home there, undisturbed and unexamined, generation after generation.
It is the assumption that not every baptized soul is called to Christian Perfection.
This error takes many forms. It presents itself as realism — an honest acknowledgment that most people are not monks or nuns and cannot be expected to live as though they were. It presents itself as pastoral charity — a merciful lowering of the bar for souls who are, after all, doing their best in difficult circumstances. It presents itself as theological sophistication — a nuanced recognition that different states of life carry different obligations and that the demands of the Sermon on the Mount were never intended to apply literally to everyone. In every one of these forms it is the same error, and in every one of these forms it produces the same consequence: a Church in which the majority of the baptized have made a quiet and comfortable peace with their own spiritual mediocrity, consoling themselves with the thought that the full demands of the Gospel were addressed only to a special select few.
The Fathers of the Church knew this error well. They encountered it in the comfortable Christians of Alexandria and Antioch, in the prosperous congregations of Milan and Carthage, in the worldly laity of Constantinople and Rome. And they condemned it — not gently, not with pastoral accommodation, but with the full force of the Gospel whose demands they had received from the Apostles and were bound to transmit without diminishment. The great Scholastics of the medieval period received this patristic witness and gave it its precise theological structure, distinguishing with exactness the universal end to which every Christian is called — perfect charity — from the means by which that end is most directly and efficaciously pursued — the Evangelical Counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
This essay presents the argument in the order that its logic demands. It begins with the foundation in Scripture, where Christ Himself addresses the demand to every soul. It proceeds to the patristic witness, in which the Fathers receive and transmit that demand across the breadth of the ancient Church. It then turns to the scholastic synthesis, in which Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure give the argument its exact theological articulation. It applies that argument to the two paths available to the Christian soul — the consecrated life and the married state — and then treats in sequence the three Evangelical Counsels as the means most directly ordered to the universal end. It closes with the doctrine of Purgatory, which stands as the final and most solemn confirmation that the demand of perfect charity is real, inescapable, and will be satisfied — if not by love in this life, then by fire in the next.
PART ONE: THE FOUNDATION IN SCRIPTURE
I. The Universal Command of Perfection
The foundation of the entire argument is not the teaching of the Fathers, nor the systematic precision of the Scholastics. It is the words of Jesus Christ Himself — for it is these words that both the Fathers and the Scholastics received, meditated upon, and were bound to transmit without diminishment.
"Be ye therefore perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). These words conclude the great antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount and function as its summary and its seal. The perfection demanded is not relative perfection, not perfection in comparison with other men, not the perfection of observing the minimum requirements of the Law. It is the perfection of the heavenly Father Himself — which is to say, in the language the Scholastics will later give it, the perfection of infinite charity — set before every soul without exception as both commandment and promise. The command is universal. The words contain no clause restricting their address to any particular state of life, any particular condition of soul, any particular degree of spiritual advancement. They are addressed to every soul that will ever hear them.
II. The Rich Young Man: Image of Every Soul That Refuses the Demand
When the rich young man came to Christ asking what he must do to gain eternal life, Christ first indicated the commandments. The young man claimed to have kept them all. And then Christ spoke the words that reveal the inner logic of the Gospel in its fullness: "If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, give to the poor, and come, follow me." The young man went away sad, for he had great possessions. And Christ, watching him depart, did not soften His words or call him back with a modified offer. He allowed him to go.
The narrative contains a structural teaching of the greatest importance. Our Lord distinguishes between keeping the commandments — which the young man claimed to have done, and which Christ does not deny — and the perfection that goes beyond mere commandment-keeping to the total surrender of the whole self. The commandments are the minimum. Perfection is the universal destination. The young man walks away from the universal destination, and Our Lord allows him to walk away, because He will not reduce the destination to accommodate the walking away. He is the image of every soul that hears the full demand of Christ and turns away to preserve what it already has — its possessions, its pleasures, its self-will, its comfortable arrangements with the world.
III. The Consistent Demand of the Gospel
The words of the Sermon on the Mount and the encounter with the rich young man are not isolated texts. They confirm and are confirmed by the whole consistent witness of the Gospel. "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." "No man can serve two masters." "Unless you deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me, you cannot be my disciple." "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."
These words were not addressed to a monastic audience that did not yet exist. They were addressed to fishermen, tax collectors, soldiers, and the anonymous crowds of Galilee and Judea — to every human soul that would ever hear them. The last of these words — that in the resurrection men are as the angels — establishes the direction in which every Christian life must move: away from the structures of this passing age and toward the angelic life of perfect charity and perfect continence that constitutes the life of the Kingdom. That is where every soul is going. The only question is how directly it travels there.
PART TWO: THE PATRISTIC WITNESS
I. The Fathers Receive and Transmit the Demand
The Fathers of the Church received the words of Christ through the Apostolic tradition and transmitted them with the full force with which they received them. They did not soften the universal demand. They did not restrict it to a spiritual elite. They encountered in their own pastoral experience the same error of comfort that this essay names in its preface — the assumption that the radical demands of the Gospel apply to some Christians and not to others — and they condemned it with the authority of the Apostolic deposit they were charged to guard.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, meditating on the universal command of Matthew 5:48 in his Life of Moses, understands it as a call to what he names epektasis — the soul's perpetual, ever-deepening advance into the inexhaustible perfection of God. The perfection demanded is not a fixed state to be achieved and rested in but an infinite movement into an infinite God — a movement that admits of no stopping point this side of eternity and that is therefore the permanent obligation of every soul at every moment of its existence. The soul always has further to go. The distance remaining is always infinite. The obligation to advance is therefore always absolute.
Saint John Chrysostom, preaching on the rich young man to the congregations of Antioch and Constantinople, draws the pastoral lesson with terrible clarity: the young man's sin was not that he possessed wealth, but that his wealth possessed him — that he could not conceive of himself without it, that his identity was constituted by what he owned rather than by who owned him. He is the image of every soul that hears the full demand of Christ and turns away. And Chrysostom's homiletical practice confirms that the demand is addressed to the married layperson with the same force as it is addressed to the monk. The congregation of Antioch is not excused from the demand because it has not taken vows. It is obliged to pursue perfect charity — the universal end — by whatever means its state of life affords.
II. The Patristic Teaching on the Two States of Life
Saint Paul establishes with apostolic authority the relative standing of the two states of life in relation to the universal end. He does not present the consecrated life and the married state as two equally valid paths to which different souls are assigned by divine decree. He presents continence as the good he desires for all without exception: "I would that all men were even as I myself." He follows this with his permission of the married state — not as an equal alternative but as a concession to those who cannot bear the better good: "but if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." And he states the reason for the superiority of continence with equal explicitness: "He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things of the world, how he may please his wife." The undivided heart — the heart that belongs entirely to God — is the superior condition for the soul's advance toward perfect charity.
Saint Ambrose of Milan, in his treatise On Virgins, draws the theological consequence with precision. The virgin is already living the life of the angels — already participating, in this mortal body, in the mode of existence that characterizes the resurrection: the life in which the soul belongs entirely to God, undivided by the claims of carnal generation or material care. Saint Augustine, in his treatise On Holy Virginity, confirms the patristic consensus: the remedial good of the married state is genuine and should not be despised — but the good of consecrated virginity surpasses it not merely in degree but in the quality of what it offers to God and to the soul. Saint Jerome states the hierarchy with characteristic directness: he praises the married state because what is lost in root it produces with virgin offspring. The married state is ordered beyond itself toward the higher goods of marital continence and the desire for virginal consecrated offspring that represent the spouse's response to the universal call to perfect charity.
PART THREE: THE SCHOLASTIC SYNTHESIS — PERFECT CHARITY AS THE UNIVERSAL END
I. The End: Perfect Charity Obligatory for All
Saint Thomas Aquinas receives the patristic witness and gives it its precise theological articulation. In the Summa Theologiae he establishes the thesis with a clarity that leaves no room for qualification: the perfection of Christian life consists essentially and principally in charity. Not in the observance of the Evangelical Counsels. Not in the adoption of the religious state. Not in any particular ascetic practice or external condition of life. In charity — the love of God with the whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the love of neighbor as oneself. This is the end. Everything else is ordered to this end as means.
Thomas is equally precise on the universality of the obligation. The perfection of charity to which every Christian is called admits of degrees. There is a minimum of charity required of all — the exclusion of whatever is contrary to charity, the avoidance of mortal sin, the maintenance of the fundamental orientation of the soul toward God. This minimum is required of every baptized soul without exception and without dispensation. But the Christian obligation does not stop at the minimum. Every soul is called to tend toward the fullness of charity — to pursue, with whatever means are available in its particular state of life, the ever-deepening love of God that constitutes the perfection of the Christian life. There is no soul for whom this pursuit is optional. There is no state of life that excuses from it.
II. The Means: The Evangelical Counsels as Instruments of Perfect Charity
If perfect charity is the universal end, the Evangelical Counsels are the most direct and efficacious means to that end — the instruments most completely ordered to removing the obstacles that stand between the soul and the perfect charity to which it is called.
Thomas identifies with characteristic precision why each counsel removes a distinct obstacle. Poverty removes the attachment to external material goods that divides the heart from God. Chastity removes the division of carnal desire — the evil drive that draws the soul downward toward the creature when grace is drawing it upward toward the Creator. And obedience — which Thomas identifies as the greatest of the three — removes the final and deepest obstacle: the self-will that is the root of all sin. Together the three counsels form a complete and hierarchically ordered set of instruments for removing every obstacle to the perfect charity to which every soul is universally called.
The religious state, understood in this framework, does not pursue a higher end than the layman. It adopts the most direct means to the common end. The consecrated soul is not aiming at a different destination — it is traveling by the most direct road to the destination that every soul must reach. This is the precise theological ground for the patristic insistence, just surveyed, on the superiority of the consecrated life: not that it alone is called to God, but that it has adopted the means most completely ordered to the God to whom all are called. The perfection it seeks is not its private possession — it is the common obligation of all the baptized.
III. Bonaventure: The Counsels as the Path of the Whole Church
Saint Bonaventure, approaching the same question from within the Franciscan tradition, reaches the same conclusion by a parallel path. In his De Perfectione Evangelica, he argues that the perfection of charity is the obligation of every Christian soul — that the command to love God with the whole heart admits of no relaxation and no reserve — and that the Evangelical Counsels are the means most perfectly ordered to fulfilling that universal obligation. The soul that adopts the counsels has placed itself in the most favorable conditions for the growth of charity. The soul that has not adopted them remains obliged to pursue the same perfect charity by whatever means its state of life affords — and obliged to pursue it with no less intensity of will and desire.
Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum — the great mystical itinerary of the soul's journey into God — is addressed not to Franciscan novices but to every Christian soul. The journey it describes — from the vestiges of God in the exterior world, through the image of God in the interior soul, to the union of love that transcends all created knowing — is the journey of every baptized person. The destination is perfect charity. The means are whatever the soul's state of life provides, used with the full intensity that love of God demands.
IV. The Scholastic Principle Applied: No Soul Excused
The Thomistic framework makes precise what the Fathers teach by exhortation: it is not sinful to use lesser means toward the common end. The Christian who does not adopt the vows of religion and chooses to marry has not sinned by that choice. What is spiritually catastrophic — and what the whole of both the patristic and the scholastic tradition condemns — is to mistake the means for the end, or to abandon the pursuit of the end because one has adopted the less direct means. The married Christian who pursues perfect charity with all the intensity that his state permits — using the sacramental grace of the married state, mortifying the carnal desire and pleasure that the concession of marriage tolerates, dying to self-will in the ordered structure of conjugal obedience, practicing interior poverty in the midst of material sufficiency — is genuinely pursuing the universal end. What he cannot do is excuse himself from the pursuit.
PART FOUR: THE TWO PATHS — THE CONSECRATED LIFE AND THE MARRIED STATE
I. The Consecrated Life as the Universal Call
The consecrated life is not one path among two equally valid alternatives assigned by God to different souls according to their respective spiritual temperaments. It is the universal call of the Gospel — the life toward which every baptized soul is drawn by grace, toward which Christ's own words consistently point, and which the scholastic synthesis has now confirmed as the state that adopts the most direct means to the universal end of perfect charity.
Our Lord's words — "He that is able to receive it, let him receive it" — have been misread in recent times as identifying a pre-selected group constitutionally equipped for celibacy. Saint John Chrysostom reads these words as precisely the opposite: a universal call addressed to the freedom of every hearer. The ability Christ speaks of is not a charism granted to some and withheld from others. It is the ability of a will that freely chooses to want what God is universally offering — a will sufficiently freed from the tyranny of the flesh to embrace the better part. Chrysostom exhorts his congregation not to ask whether God has granted them the special gift of celibacy, but to examine honestly whether their preference for the married state reflects a will not yet sufficiently mortified to embrace the higher good universally offered.
Saint Jerome does not present virginity as the province of a spiritual elite. He presents it as the better choice available to every Christian who has the love and the mortified will to make it. Saint Paul's wish that all men were as he is — continent and undivided in their service of God — is the wish of the Apostle that every soul would choose the better part that is offered to all. The grace of continence, like all grace, is given freely by God to every soul that opens itself to receive it. The soul that has not received it has not been passed over by divine design. It has simply not yet opened itself sufficiently — has not prayed with sufficient earnestness, mortified the flesh with sufficient seriousness, or turned the will with sufficient determination toward the Kingdom.
II. The Married State: A Concession Redeemed by the Sacrament
The married state, understood in the authentic patristic register and confirmed by the scholastic analysis, is a concession of God's mercy to fallen human nature — an act of divine compassion meeting the choice of those souls who do not yet have the strength or the sufficiently mortified will to embrace what is universally and better offered. The choice of the married state and the permission of the marriage bed are inseparable — for no one ordinarily chooses the married state intending perfect continence. The soul too weak in will or strength to contain chooses the married state precisely because of this weakness, and the married state is the divinely ordered remedy that God's mercy provides for that incontinence. Marriage and the marriage bed are one concession — one choice, one divine permission, one act of mercy meeting human weakness at its root.
What is genuinely and unreservedly good in Christian marriage is what Saint Augustine identifies as proles, fides, sacramentum — offspring, fidelity, and the sacramental bond. These genuine goods provide the ordered context within which the concession of marriage is rendered lawful. They excuse the intrinsic evil necessarily bound up in the carnal desire and pleasure of fallen nature, but do not render the carnal desire and pleasure holy. The sacrament provides the grace by which carnal desire and pleasure is to be fought, mortified progressively, and ultimately overcome as the soul advances toward the perfect charity to which it is universally called. What the sacrament redeems is the state and the spiritual bond, never carnal desire or pleasure. It equips the soul to mortify and overcome the carnal desire and pleasure that the state tolerates.
The married state, rightly understood, is not a destination but a school — a school of sacrifice, mortification, ordered charity, and progressive detachment from the flesh, whose sacramental grace is given precisely to produce souls capable of the gift of continence. The tradition honors those married couples who by mutual consent embraced complete continence within the married state as their love for God deepened — not as strange exceptions but as the most luminous expressions of what the concession of marriage, fully redeemed by sacramental grace and directed with full intensity toward the universal end of perfect charity, is ordered to produce.
PART FIVE: HOLY POVERTY — THE FIRST MEANS TO PERFECT CHARITY
I. The Obstacle Identified: Attachment to Material Goods
Thomas Aquinas teaches that poverty removes the attachment to external material goods that divides the heart from God and prevents charity from reaching its perfection. The soul that clings to what it possesses cannot give itself entirely to the God who demands the whole. This is the obstacle. Holy poverty — interior detachment from material goods, ordered toward their complete renunciation by those who can bear it — is the means specifically ordered to removing it.
The Fathers teach the same truth with the force of pastoral experience. Saint Basil the Great, in his homily To the Rich, addresses the comfortable Christian with a directness that has never been surpassed: the goods you call your own are not your own. They belong to God. They belong to the poor. The man who keeps more than he needs while his brother starves is not merely ungenerous — he is a thief. But Basil's most penetrating observation goes beneath external possession to the interior disposition: the heart that has placed its trust and its identity in material things, that measures its security by what it owns, that cannot contemplate loss without anxiety and despair. This interior disposition is the obstacle that must be removed — the division of the heart that prevents charity from reaching its perfection. No external arrangement of goods can remove it. Only the interior transformation of the soul's fundamental orientation, away from the creature and toward God as its only genuine security, can do so.
II. Chrysostom and Clement: The Depth of the Interior Demand
Saint John Chrysostom identifies the love of money — philargyria — as a comprehensive spiritual disease that corrupts the whole of the interior life and makes the growth of charity impossible at its root. It makes prayer impossible, because the mind occupied with the management and increase of material wealth cannot be recollected in God. It makes charity toward the neighbor impossible, because the heart that clings to its possessions cannot give freely. It makes obedience impossible, because the soul that serves its wealth will not serve God when the two demands conflict — and they always conflict. Chrysostom applies this teaching to those in the married state without exemption. The married Christian faces the same fundamental requirement as the monk: a heart that holds material things loosely and uses them only as instruments in the service of the perfect charity to which every soul is called.
Clement of Alexandria's treatise Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? intensifies rather than relaxes the demands of poverty. The real demand of the Gospel penetrates beneath external practice to the very roots of desire and attachment in the soul. The rich man is saved not by keeping his wealth but by achieving a genuine interior poverty — a detachment from possessions so complete that wealth and poverty become genuinely indifferent to him, his peace rooted in God alone. This is harder than merely giving things away. It requires precisely the interior poverty that Thomas identifies as the removal of the first great obstacle to perfect charity — not merely the management of external goods but the transformation of the soul's deepest orientation.
III. The Desert Fathers: Poverty as Interior Dispossession
The Desert Fathers speak of poverty with a radicalism that cuts through every qualification. Abba Poemen taught that a man must breathe humility and the fear of God just as he breathes in and breathes out — and the humility he speaks of is inseparable from poverty of spirit, the complete dispossession of the soul not only of material things but of self-esteem, reputation, and the subtle spiritual possessiveness that can survive the most rigorous external poverty. A man could live in a cell with nothing and still be utterly possessed by his own thoughts, his own preferences, his own spiritual pride. True poverty of spirit penetrates beneath external circumstances to the interior depths where the real attachments live and where alone the first obstacle to perfect charity can be fully removed. This interior poverty is equally demanded of every soul in the married state. The forms of expression differ. The substance does not.
PART SIX: HOLY CHASTITY — THE SECOND MEANS TO PERFECT CHARITY
I. The Obstacle Identified: Carnal Desire & Pleasure as the Evil of the Fall
Thomas Aquinas teaches that chastity removes the division of carnal desire that prevents the soul from giving itself entirely to God. The Fathers give this scholastic identification its full weight by naming precisely what carnal desire is: not a neutral force requiring ordering, nor a natural beautiful drive requiring elevation, but the evil consequence of the Fall — the punishment of original sin manifesting itself in the body, the body's rebellion against the soul mirroring and reflecting the soul's original rebellion against God. This is the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, stated without qualification across centuries and across the full geographical breadth of the ancient Church.
Saint Augustine teaches this in The City of God and in On Marriage and Concupiscence with the precision that characterizes all his theological work. Before the Fall the generative faculty would have been governed entirely by the rational will in complete tranquility — without burning, without the overwhelming of reason by passion, without the loss of rational governance that characterizes carnal pleasure in its fallen form. The specific character of carnal desire and pleasure as it exists in every fallen human being and necessarily employed in every natural conception — its intensity, its tendency to overwhelm the rational faculty, its resistance to the will's governance — is precisely the evil consequence and punishment of Adam's pride expressing itself in the flesh of every one of his descendants.
Saint Jerome writes: the pleasure accompanying the conjugal act is itself a defilement, leaving the soul in a carnal heaviness from which it must recover before approaching the heights of prayer and the immediate encounter with the Holy. This is the precise theological foundation of the ancient discipline requiring abstinence from the marriage bed before reception of the Holy Eucharist, during Lent, on the vigils of great feasts, and in all times dedicated to prayer.
This teaching carries a decisive consequence for the theology of the Incarnation. Because original sin is transmitted through generation — the carnal desire and pleasure accompanying the conjugal act being the vehicle of its transmission from parent to child through every generation — the Incarnation required a virgin birth. Christ could not have assumed a human nature untainted by original sin if He had been conceived through the ordinary mechanism of its transmission. The virgin birth is not merely a sign. It is a theological necessity — the Son of God bypassing the diabolic vehicle of carnal desire and pleasure to enter human nature without inheriting its deadly wound.
II. The Universal War Against Carnal Desire & Pleasure
Because carnal desire and pleasure is an evil of the Fall present in every human soul, the war against it is universal — not the specialized combat of the monk in his cell but the unavoidable battle of every baptized Christian in every state of life. Saint John Chrysostom calls the married laity of Antioch and Constantinople to precisely the same interior disciplines he would prescribe for a monastic congregation: regular fasting including fasting from the marriage bed for prayer — explicitly commanded by Saint Paul: "Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer" — vigilance over the eyes and imagination, mortification of appetite in all its forms, and the cultivation of interior silence in the midst of ordinary life. The married layperson and the monk are fighting the same war against the same enemy — the carnal desire and pleasure that stands between the soul and the perfect charity to which it is called. The battlefield differs. The weapons are the same.
Evagrius Ponticus identifies carnal desire as the most powerful and most persistent of the logismoi — the unchaste thoughts that attack the soul and prevent its advance toward God. He teaches that the combat requires not merely the avoidance of obvious expressions of carnal desire and pleasure but the systematic mortification of everything that feeds it: immoderate eating and drinking, idle conversation, curiosity of the eyes, undisciplined sleep, and the failure of interior vigilance — the watchfulness of the heart the tradition calls nepsis. Every one of these disciplines is available to and required of the Christian in the married state with precisely the same urgency as it is required of the monk.
III. The Stages of Purity and the Goal of Perfect Continence
Cassian describes in his Conferences the stages of purity through which the soul advances in chastity — from the earliest victories over gross carnal sins, through the progressive quieting of the imagination and memory, to the final stage of perfect purity in which the soul is no longer disturbed even in sleep by the movements of carnal desire. This final stage — the perfect gift of chastity — is the goal of every Christian soul in every state of life, because it is the condition in which the second great obstacle to perfect charity has been fully removed.
The use of the marriage bed must therefore be governed always and strictly by the procreative end — never by desire, never by pleasure or comfort sought for its own sake, but by the sober and willed decision to cooperate with God in the transmission of human life destined for redemption in the baptismal font. Carnal desire and pleasure accompanies the conjugal act as a diabolic wound to be borne, not a pleasure to be sought. The married person who approaches the marriage bed in this manner — permitting its use only when procreation is the genuine intention, practicing voluntary continence at all other times, fasting from the marriage bed during seasons of prayer, tending always toward the greater continence to which sacramental grace draws the soul — is cooperating fully with the grace received in the sacrament and advancing toward the perfect charity to which every soul is called.
The tradition honors those married couples who by mutual consent embraced complete continence within the married state as their love for God deepened — not as strange exceptions but as the most luminous expressions of what the sacramental grace of the married state, fully cooperated with and directed toward the universal end of perfect charity, is ordered to produce.
IV. No Entrance to Heaven While Carnal Desire and Pleasure Governs
The theological ground beneath the entire patristic teaching on chastity is the absolute assertion that no soul enters the presence of God — enters, that is, into the infinite charity that is God Himself — while the evil of carnal desire and pleasure still holds dominion over the spirit. God is love, and the soul that has not been freed from the carnal division opposed to love cannot yet enter the infinite love that is God Himself. Scripture declares: "Our God is a consuming fire"; and Saint Paul confirms that "every man's work shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is."
Saint Gregory of Nyssa understands this purgation as the necessary completion of the soul's journey toward perfect charity — toward the image of God from which sin has distorted it. The soul that has not achieved freedom from carnal desire and pleasure in this life — that received the sacramental grace of the married state and used the tolerated permission of the marriage bed not to advance toward perfect charity but to indulge the deadly wound of the Fall — will be brought to that freedom after death in a purification that strips away every earthly carnal desire refused freely in this life. The sacramental grace of the married state was given precisely to prevent this necessity.
PART SEVEN: HOLY OBEDIENCE — THE THIRD AND GREATEST MEANS TO PERFECT CHARITY
I. The Obstacle Identified: Self-Will as the Root of All Sin
Thomas Aquinas teaches that obedience is the greatest of the three Evangelical Counsels because it surrenders what is greatest: not what the soul has, as poverty surrenders, nor what the soul desires, as chastity surrenders, but what the soul is — the will itself, the final citadel of the self, the seat of that pride which is the root of all sin and which in the Garden opened the door through which carnal desire and death entered the human race. It is therefore the most direct and comprehensive means to the perfect charity that demands the soul's complete and unreserved surrender to God — for charity is precisely the will's surrender to God and to the neighbor, and self-will is precisely what charity must overcome.
Saint Paul places before us the entire movement of the Incarnation and the Passion as a single act of obedience: "For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous"; and again: Christ "became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, meditating on this parallel in his Against Heresies, teaches that the recapitulation of all things in Christ is accomplished precisely through this obedience. What Adam lost by asserting his own will, Christ restored by abandoning His. And what Christ accomplished for the human race must be appropriated by each individual soul through its own participation in His obedience — through the death of self-will that recapitulates, in the small theater of each personal life, the great drama of redemption and opens the soul to the perfect charity that is God Himself.
II. Obedience as the Foundation of the Spiritual Life
The Desert Fathers regard obedience as the foundational virtue — without which no other virtue can be genuine and no advance toward perfect charity real. Abba John the Dwarf, asked what is the foundation of the spiritual life, answered with a single word: humility. And by humility he meant above all obedience — the complete submission of the self to God expressed through submission to the spiritual father and the demands of love in every concrete situation. The monk who obeys his abbot in all things including things that seem foolish or unjust is practicing the death of self-will in its most concentrated form. The monk who obeys only when he agrees is practicing not obedience but the sophisticated management of his own will dressed in the clothing of compliance — and so long as self-will persists in any form, the third and greatest obstacle to perfect charity remains intact.
John Cassian insists that the spirit of obedience — the interior death of self-will — is required of every Christian in proportion to their capacity and state of life. The form of expression differs between the monk who obeys his abbot and the married person who obeys within the structure of conjugal, ecclesial and civic life. The interior reality — the death of self-will, the complete surrender of one's own preferences to the will of God expressed through legitimate authority — is identical. And the goal is the same for all: the soul freed from the tyranny of its own will and therefore capable of the total charity that constitutes Christian Perfection.
III. Obedience Within the Married State
The patristic teaching on obedience within the married state is rooted entirely in Saint Paul's letter to the Ephesians: "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church"; "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her."
Saint John Chrysostom teaches that the structure of the married state — the husband as head, the wife in submission — is not a human convention but a participation in the very order of divine love, a school of the charity which in its perfection is the total death of self for the sake of the beloved. The husband's headship is modeled on Christ's headship over the Church — a headship not of domination but of sacrifice, of a love that dies entirely to itself for the sake of the beloved. The husband who exercises headship in the manner of Christ is dying for his wife — ordering the whole of his life, his strength, and his resources toward her good and the good of his children, asking nothing for himself, giving everything. The wife's submission is equally a death of self-will — her obedience is modeled on the Church's submission to Christ. Both husband and wife are dying to self. Both are advancing, through the particular school of conjugal charity, toward the perfect charity to which all are called.
IV. Obedience to the Church and to Spiritual Direction
Beyond the structure of the married state, the counsel of obedience for the Christian in the world takes the form of complete submission to the Church — to her doctrinal definitions, her moral teaching, her liturgical order, and her pastoral governance. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the churches of Asia Minor as he was transported to Rome for martyrdom, returns again and again to submission to the bishop as the expression of submission to God. The soul that acts independently of the Church's authority — following its own spiritual impulses without submitting them to legitimate ecclesiastical discernment — has not yet died to its own spiritual self-will, which is the most dangerous form of self-will, presenting itself as devotion to God while serving the ego's desire to be its own spiritual authority and so blocking the very charity it claims to pursue.
Saint Cyprian of Carthage provides the formulation that has reverberated through the whole of subsequent tradition: "He cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother." Obedience to the Church is not an external addition to the spiritual life. It is constitutive of genuine Christian life and of the perfect charity that is its universal end. Beyond obedience to the Church herself, the Fathers consistently recommend submission to a wise spiritual father as the ordinary means of growth in obedience for every Christian. The soul that walks alone, guided only by its own judgment, is in grave danger — because self-love is the most pervasive and most subtle obstacle to perfect charity, and the soul cannot see clearly what self-love is doing in its own interior life without the corrective vision of another who stands outside it.
PART EIGHT: PURGATORY — THE FIRE THAT COMPLETES WHAT LOVE REFUSED TO BEGIN
The doctrine of Purgatory stands as the final and most solemn confirmation of everything the Fathers and the Scholastics teach about the universal call to perfect charity. It is the doctrine of God's infinite holiness and charity encountering the soul's remaining failure — what happens when a soul that belongs to God arrives at death still carrying attachments, carnal and earthly desires, and the persistence of self-will that the sacramental grace given to it in its state of life sought, and was not permitted, to remove.
Saint Augustine, in his Enchiridion and his commentary on the First Letter to the Corinthians, affirms the reality of a purifying fire after death by which souls not yet fully purified are prepared for the presence of God. He draws on Saint Paul's words: "Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire" (1 Corinthians 3:13–15). Augustine understands this fire as real and as the merciful instrument by which God completes in suffering what the soul refused to complete by love.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa understands purgation as the necessary completion of the soul's journey toward perfect charity — toward the image of God in which it was created and from which sin has distorted it. The soul that has not achieved poverty, chastity, and obedience in this life — that has not removed by love the three great obstacles to perfect charity that the Evangelical Counsels exist to remove — will be brought to the removal of those obstacles by a process of purification that strips away every attachment, every carnal and earthly desire, every remnant of self-will refused freely in this life. The stripping is merciful in its ultimate purpose. It is not gentle in its process.
Saint Caesarius of Arles, preaching to ordinary lay congregations, exhorts his people not to presume on this mercy as a license for complacency — not to live carelessly on the assumption that Purgatory will correct what the soul refused to address in this life with the sacramental grace it was given. The soul that chooses fire over the free cooperation with grace has chosen suffering over love, compulsion over freedom. It has squandered the sacramental grace given to it precisely in order to make Purgatory unnecessary.
The soul that dies still attached to material things will be stripped of those attachments by fire. The soul that dies still governed by the evil of carnal desire and pleasure — that received the sacramental grace of the married state and used the tolerated permission of the marriage bed not to advance toward perfect continence and charity but to indulge the wound of the Fall — will have carnal desire and pleasure wiped away by the purgative fire of divine charity that admits no rival. The soul that dies with self-will intact will have that will broken and surrendered in the purging fire. The three obstacles will be removed. Perfect charity will be achieved. The question is only whether the removal is accomplished here, by grace and love and full cooperation with sacramental life — or there, by a mercy that accomplishes by suffering what grace was offered and refused to achieve.
Every act of voluntary poverty, every mortification of the flesh, every death of self-will in obedience to God's order — every such act is a flame of love that removes by charity what Purgatory would otherwise have to remove by fire. The soul that understands this will not delay. It will not negotiate. It will begin now — in this state of life, in this married state or this cloister, in this ordinary household, in this very moment — the work that must be completed before it can see God face to face.
CONCLUSION: ONE END, ONE CHURCH, ONE STANDARD
The argument of this essay moves from its foundation to its confirmation along a single unbroken line. Scripture establishes the foundation: Christ commands the perfection of the heavenly Father and addresses that command to every soul without exception. The Fathers receive and transmit that command: they find in the Gospel not two standards of Christian life but one — demanding, total, and addressed to all. The Scholastics articulate what Scripture and the Fathers teach: perfect charity is the universal end, the Evangelical Counsels are its most direct means, and no soul in any state of life is excused from the pursuit of the end with the full intensity of all the means available to it. The doctrine of Purgatory confirms the argument eschatologically: the demand is real, it will be satisfied, and the only question is whether the soul satisfies it by love in this life or by fire in the next.
For the unmarried, the vowed consecrated life is the universal call of the Gospel — offered to all, accepted by those with the grace and the mortified will to receive it and the dispositions requisite to persevere. It adopts the most direct means to the universal end: the three counsels in their most complete and binding form, removing in the most systematic manner available in this life the three great obstacles to perfect charity. The married state is the merciful concession of God to fallen human nature — redeemed and elevated by the sacrament, which pours into the spiritual bond the grace necessary for the married soul to pursue, within the harder and less directly equipped state it has chosen, the same perfection of charity that is the destination of every baptized soul. The sacrament provides the means appropriate to the state: not necessarily the immediate removal of the obstacles to perfect charity, but the grace to fight them, to mortify them progressively, and to advance toward their ultimate removal — by love in this life, or by fire in the next.
The whole of the tradition speaks with one voice. The patristic witnesses — Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and Cyprian in North Africa, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa in the East, Ambrose and Jerome and Augustine in the Latin West, John Chrysostom in Antioch and Constantinople, the Desert Fathers in Egypt and Syria, John Cassian bridging East and West — teach by exhortation and by the force of the Gospel what the Scholastics — Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure — articulate with precise theological distinction: that perfect charity is the universal end of the Christian life; that the Evangelical Counsels are the most direct means to that end; that every soul in every state of life is called to pursue that end with the full intensity of its will and the full cooperation of its grace; and that no soul, in any state of life, is excused from the pursuit.
The invitation is issued to all. The grace is sufficient for all. What remains is the response — the choice between the will the soul has been, grasping and disordered and attached, and the will it was made to be: poor in spirit, pure in heart, empty of self-will, and therefore capable of the perfect charity that is both the universal end of the Christian life and the very life of God Himself.
"Be ye therefore perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
There is no footnote to that commandment. There is no exception clause. There is no soul to whom it was not addressed. In the scholastic register: perfect charity is the universal end, and no soul is dispensed from it. In the patristic register: every soul must be stripped — either by love in this life, or by fire in the next — of everything that is not God. In both registers the conclusion is the same: the work must begin now, in this life, in this state, in this moment — before the fire makes it necessary.