Setting Things Right

These gifts (referenced in the last post) of "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control," (Gal. 5:22) are not come by easily, but are the fruit of hard work, askesis.  Here is how Philip Rieff (Charisma, p. 83) describes this most important way:

[The law] was a preparation for the more intense practice of faith, as free men -- free to "take the shape of Christ" (Galations 4:19).  In the charisms men are far more intensely guided to avoid "the kind of behavior that belongs to the lower nature: fornication, impunity and indecency; idolatry and sorcery; quarrels, a contentious temper, envy, fits of rage, selfish ambitions, dissentions, party intrigues, and jealousies; drinking bouts, orgies, and the like" (Galations 5:20-21).  If this practice is maintained, without external compulsion or fear of legal offense, then the result of such enactment of charismatic authority is "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control  There is no law [that can deal] with such things as these" (Galations 5:22-23).

But to make this ideal character takes relentless practice, through the charisms, and moreover, through each examining "his own conduct for himself."  Paul is perfectly straightforward about the moral discipline available in the charismatic organization.  In addition to constant self-examination, by which each "can measure his achievement by comparing himself [i.e., his ideal self] with himself and not with anyone else," all "brothers" in the cultic organization "endowed with the Spirit must set him [who is caught doing something wrong] right again very gently."  Paul says, "Everyone has his own proper burden to bear (Galations 6:1-5), but it is clear that everyone in the cultic organization must bear everyone else as an example of his self-burden -- gently.  How it grates on the modern ear, at least of those who believe they should be free to do anything, to hear the Pauline call to the energies of guilt: "So let us never tire of doing good." (Galations 6:7-8).  But the alternative is very clear to Paul: we may tire doing evil.  There is nothing indifferent.  "God is not to be fooled" (Galations 6:7-8).  If we are not enacting the interdictory form, in some particular, then we will transgress those forms.  In this sense, the law is better than nothing.  Where there is no faith, let there be fear of punishment.  In fact, Paul commands both.

Such is the cost of freedom, and the blessings it brings.