By Robert Royal

But first a note: Controversy seems to be a constant feature of the contemporary Church. There are already divisions arising over the first steps of Pope Leo. Those are important matters to follow. But there are also deeper issues facing any Catholic today. And The Catholic Thing is committed to bringing you the best we can offer on both fronts. We can't do it without you. We're well into our mid-year fundraiser, so let's make this a quick success. Just click the button. You know the rest.

Not for today's column.

Catholic means universal, everything. A big claim, a crazy claim to the world. And the believer who aspires to be fully Catholic - especially in a fragmented age like ours - has a demanding vocation. Probably the most common phrase one hears about the Faith these days is the need for "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." And this is true. And essential. There's a lot packed into that short phrase. Jesus Himself told us: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (Matthew 22: 36-40)

Simple and familiar words, but what do they signify for us now?

Because what does "heart" mean here - merely emotions? Or soul - some "spiritual" thing? And what of mind? Also, the whole phrase is from the Jewish tradition going all the way back to Deuteronomy. (Chapter 6 verse 5) The Scripture scholars may help here. But maybe the most difficult term for us today is "mind." The phrase about the personal relationship with Jesus got a great deal of emphasis in recent decades as an antidote to a merely "propositional Christianity," almost a kind of ideology, that some thinkers believed had replaced the love of God with the kind of dry rational analysis that Thomists allegedly practiced before Vatican II.

Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on which philosophers and theologians you're talking about because the greatest modern figures, like Thomas himself, wrote treatises passionately and precisely out of the mind's love of God. Witnesses to the fact that, again, God Himself has told us we must love Him with our minds as well as our hearts and souls.

So how do we do that today?

In many ways, to be sure. Even as we develop that personal relationship, there are other things that we need to be doing and not only if we're philosophers or theologians. Everything we're engaged in - science, technology, medicine, law, business, education, domestic duties, sports - everything has to be marked by loving God with our whole minds, however difficult or improbable it might seem. Because the Faith is there both for the simple daily practices of the believer, but also must be present in the whole range of human things if it's to be true to itself in following the First Great Commandment.

We have a new and attractive Augustinian pope, and we will all doubtless be learning more about Augustine and Augustinianism in the coming months and years. Any authentically Catholic intellectual formation is all to the good these days. And Augustine is such an immense figure - he shifted the whole direction of Western Christian thought and thereby the whole history of our civilization - that close study of him and his work will enrich us all.

The one fault we must guard against, however, is to think that Augustine is all about the heart or the soul - and not also the mind. He got himself entangled with a formidable and disastrous philosophical current in his day, the Manichaeans (who believed there were two physical gods, one good and one evil, with all the consequences that follow for human beings and the world). It was only when he met with the group of Platonists around St. Ambrose in Milan that he finally shook free and came to understand what non-material, spiritual being means. All that is part of the background that enabled him to ...