Not everything is grace, and on the danger of “little-flower”-ism

I had a moment of discouragement and lassitude the other day. A B12 deficiency maybe? (B12 is the cobalt vitamin; it’s essential, you can’t live without cobalt!) Or perhaps the being so beset by falsehoods, for the most part depressingly unoriginal, mere trite clichés, but still so stubbornly defended by people who seem never to tire of kicking against the goad if you dare offer them something different from what they’re accustomed to hearing. How tiresome!

And then there was Peter Kreeft! And St Therese! Et tu? (Et vos?)

I came across this sentence from the pen of Kreeft:

“Everything is grace”, said Saint Thérèse. This is neither pious exaggeration nor false humility; it is utter realism, the confession of clear and certain fact. (Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners (Ignatius, 2000), p. 116.)

Here’s what he was referring to, reportedly spoken by Therese four months before her death:

If you should find me dead one morning, be not troubled: it’s that Papa the good God would have come quite simply to get me. Without doubt, it’s a great grace to receive the Sacraments; but when the good God doesn’t permit it, it’s good all the same, all is grace.

[“Si vous me trouviez morte un matin, n'ayez pas de peine : c'est que Papa le bon Dieu serait venu tout simplement me chercher. Sans doute, c'est une grande grâce de recevoir les Sacrements ; mais quand le bon Dieu ne le permets pas, c'est bien quand même, tout est grâce.” (Carnet jaune, June 4, 1897)]

Commenting on the passage, in the introduction to his book Everything Is Grace, Joseph F. Schmidt writes:

By her comment that everything is grace, she was sharing her spirituality of the Little Way – the spiritual way of accepting with loving surrender and gratitude all the happenings of life as sent by divine providence. [All the happenings of life? Sent? Not just permitted but sent?] If the experiences of life, even the ordinary and trivial, are received in this attitude of surrender and gratitude as gifts of God, then not just appropriate religious devotions and sacramental activities communicate grace, but surely everything is grace.

(Joseph F. Schmidt, FSC, Everything is Grace (2007).)

Well, maybe. The first thing to note here is that that’s a pretty big “if”: If the ordinary and trivial experiences of life (this applies also to the Sacraments, by the way!) are received in the appropriate manner, then in a sense everything is grace (or rather: an occasion of grace). But unfortunately people – including people who are highly religiously and spiritually motivated and devoted – tend to skip right over the “if” and run instead with just the nakedly false claim: everything is grace.

This “utter realism,” this “confession of clear and certain fact,” as Peter Kreeft would have it, in fact looks like a plain contradiction of Catholic truth. Consider, for example, the following passage from Dei filius, Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic faith:

Unhappily, it has yet further come to pass that, while this impiety prevailed on every side, many even of the children of the Catholic Church have strayed from the path of true piety, and by the gradual diminution of the truths they held, the Catholic sense became weakened in them. For, led away by various and strange doctrines, utterly confusing nature and grace, human science and divine faith, they are found to deprave the true sense of the doctrines which our holy Mother Church holds and teaches, and endanger the integrity and the soundness of the faith.

Hac porro impietate circum quaque grassante, infeliciter contigit, ut plures etiam e Catholicæ Ecclesiæ filiis a via veræ pietatis aberrarent, in iisque, diminutis paullatim veritatibus, sensus Catholicus attenuaretur. Variis enim ac peregrinis doctrinis abducti, naturam et gratiam, scientiam humanam et fidem divinam perperam commiscentes, genuinum sensum dogmatum, quem tenet ac docet sancta mater Ecclesia, depravare, integritatemque et sinceritatem fidei in periculum adducere comperiuntur.

Now the claim everything is grace implies either that nature just is grace, or that nature is nothing. In other words, the unqualified claim everything is grace seems to “utterly confuse nature and grace.” Pace Kreeft, it is anything but a “confession of clear and certain fact.”

So should “little” Therese (apparently she was actually quite tall!) – for many the doctor of the 20^th/21^st-century Church par excellence – be condemned as a heretic? Hardly. But some of her writings and sayings – as also in the case of St Paul, so not necessarily in bad company! – are certainly easily liable to be misleading for “unlearned and unstable” minds (see 2Pet 3:16). And this observation about the theological caution required in approaching St Therese is not restricted to this one reported saying.

In his Everything Is Grace book Schmidt notes that Therese was not extraordinarily gifted, as many saints have been. If anything, she was extraordinarily ordinary (if that makes any sense!). In fact, as Schmidt writes, “The one capacity Therese possessed is actually often an obstacle to holiness rather than a contributing factor – namely, a capability to be self-preoccupied and self-reflective.” 

Let that sink in: Therese’s outstanding character trait, that for which is admired and loved, is actually often an obstacle to holiness, namely: “a capability to be self-preoccupied and self-reflective” – which is very near to saying a tendency to be narcissistic. (In the myth, Narcissus falls in love with his own self-reflection… and is transformed (go figure!) into a little flower – as in the case of Therese, the question of how little is debatable.) Schmidt continues: “Therese noticed everything about herself, and she was willing to share that not as a display of ego-centeredness, but as a manifestation of God’s work in her.” However: “The difference between these two attitudes constitutes a very fine line, and the temptation to cross the line is always lurking.”

It seems that Schmidt’s observation here would imply that devotion to St Therese may be spiritually dangerous, especially for those with narcissistic tendencies – not necessarily in a clinical sense, of course, but just in the sense of a tendency to self-centeredness. But since most people indeed have a tendency to self-centeredness, it follows that St Therese may be spiritually dangerous for most people. And this implies also that (widespread) devotion to St Therese (“the little flower”) may be as much a symptom of a (widespread) tendency to narcissism (“little-flower”-ism, we might say), as it is of a sign of the extraordinary sanctity of Therese herself – even if it is true, as Schmidt writes, that “Therese’s glory is that she did not give in to that temptation,” that is, the temptation to cross the line from self-preoccupied and self-reflective to self-centered (and narcissistic).

“Little-flower”-ism (compare the recent term “snowflake” – as Schmidt writes of St Therese, “she suffered a great deal from her excessive sensitivity” – ah yes, don’t we all: je suis Therese!) may also be a manifestation of a sick form of Christianity (or more generally, a sick form of relating to the world) fueled by ressentiment, a phenomenon the real existence of which Nietzsche rightly identified, but which he mistakenly thought was essentially Christian.  Max Scheler (a philosopher admired by John Paul II) was taken by Nietzsche’s insight into the phenomenon of ressentiment and developed an extended, more insightful discussion of it, wherein he argues against Nietzsche’s artificial, animus-filled attempt to make of it a specifically and essentially Christian phenomenon. Against Nietzsche, Scheler argues that ressentiment is neither proper to nor characteristic of Christianity. Instead it is an endemic human tendency and not what Christ or Christianity is really about. Nietzsche, in any case, argued that the Christian ethos was nothing other than “le fine fleur [the delicate flower again!] du ressentiment” – an ingeniously insidious way for all that is base, weak, ugly, deformed, sick, inhibited, downtrodden, and needy (“blessed are the poor and hungry!”), and moreover envious and vengeful, to subvert all that shows up it baseness and aggravates its envy, that is, all that is noble, beautiful, strong, self-sufficient, free, powerful, flourishing. The weak and ignoble does this through the artifice of an essentially nature-despising claim to moral superiority. What is naturally good must be despised, and suffering, self-abnegation, and death must be embraced – claim those who are ignoble and powerless by nature’s standard – in order to pass beyond nature to the kingdom of God. The supposed goodness of nature has been swallowed up, according to this form of moralism, by the depravity of sin, and so nature must be rejected. If there is no goodness in nature, nature must be eliminated. By nature, man is totally depraved (Calvinism, anyone?), so grace becomes everything, that is, “everything (good!) is grace.”

But of course Nietzsche was right to condemn this view, just as the Catholic Church always has – even while individual Catholics remain ever susceptible to confusion on this point, with the result that “they are found to deprave the true sense of the doctrines which our holy Mother Church holds and teaches, and endanger the integrity and the soundness of the faith” (see above, Vatican I's Dei filius).

So to conclude: No, not everything is grace! Nature is not grace, although nature is good and necessary in its own right, within the plan of divine providence. Grace presupposes nature, and nature is perfected, not eliminated, by grace. And if you're going by the teaching of the Catholic Church, that, I take it, is a “confession of clear and certain fact.”