Feria Sexta infra Hebdomadam XIV post Octavam Pentecostes — IV. classis (4 September)
Spiritu ambulate, et desideria carnis non perficietis. “Walk in the spirit, and you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.” — Galatians 5:16
I. Liturgical Context
Today is a feria of the fourth class. No saint claims the day in the General Calendar, and so the Church does what she has always done on such days: she turns back to Sunday and reads it again. The Mass is that of the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost — Protector noster — resumed in the quiet of a weekday, without Gloria, without Credo, the same Collect and the same two lessons that were heard five days ago, now set before a smaller congregation and a less distracted mind.
This resumption is not a mere economy of texts. The ferial repetition of the Sunday Mass is the Roman Rite’s way of insisting that the Sunday’s teaching has not been finished with. What was proclaimed to the whole parish is now to be chewed over by those who come on a Friday morning. And it happens that these two lessons — St. Paul’s war of flesh and spirit, and Our Lord’s word about the two masters — are exactly the kind of teaching that is easy to hear once and hard to hold. They ask to be read again.
The day itself adds a colour. It is Friday, and the Roman tradition keeps every Friday, however quietly, as the day of the Passion. The Epistle ends on a sentence that only Friday can fully hear: Qui autem sunt Christi, carnem suam crucifixerunt — “they that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh.” The Church does not choose the ferial day for the pericope; the calendar simply falls this way. But Providence keeps a liturgical calendar too.
II. The Epistle: Spiritu ambulate (Galatians 5:16-24)
St. Paul is writing to a church tempted to return to the Law, and his argument has just reached its climax: “you are called unto liberty” (5:13). Now he must say what that liberty is for, because he knows how the word will be misheard. Walk in the spirit, he says, and you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. Liberty is not licence; it is a road to be walked, and one walks it in the Spirit.
Then comes the verse that has troubled every serious reader since: “the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary one to another: so that you do not the things that you would.”
The Fathers were careful here, and their care is instructive. St. Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, insists that “flesh” in Paul’s mouth is not the body as such — the body is God’s work and will be raised — but the whole disordered inclination of fallen man, that in us which pulls downward. St. Augustine, treating the same verse in his own exposition of the Epistle, adds the point on which the Catholic reading of this passage turns: the war is real and it continues in the baptized, but the Apostle is describing a combat, not a defeat. The man in whom the two desires contend is the man in whom grace is already at work; the wholly carnal man feels no war at all. And the Council of Trent, in its decree on original sin, would later give this Augustinian reading its dogmatic form: concupiscence remains after baptism, but it remains ad agonem — for the contest — and is not itself sin in the regenerate unless consented to.
John Cassian devotes the whole of his fourth Conference, spoken by the Abbot Daniel, to this single verse, and his teaching is bracing. The contrariety of flesh and spirit, he argues, is providentially useful: the flesh drags the soul down from presumption, the spirit lifts it from sloth, and between the two the will is held in a kind of tension that keeps it honest. The man who felt no downward pull would fall into pride; the man who felt no upward call would fall into despair. Cassian’s counsel is not to expect the war to end this side of the grave but to fight it well.
Paul then gives his two catalogues, and the Fathers noticed a difference in grammar that is easy to pass over. The deeds of the flesh are called works — opera carnis — and they are plural, a rabble of seventeen. What the Spirit produces is called fruit — fructus Spiritus — and it is singular, though twelve things are named. St. Jerome and St. Augustine both draw the lesson. Works are what a man makes, and he makes many of them, scattered and at odds with one another. Fruit is what grows, from a single root, and its twelve names are so many aspects of one life: charity first, as the root, and the rest as its branches. St. John Chrysostom, in his commentary on the Epistle, adds that the Apostle deliberately withholds the word “works” from the good things, lest anyone imagine the Christian life to be a matter of his own manufacture; it is the Spirit’s fruit, borne in a man who has consented to be planted.
“Against such there is no law.” The Law forbids; it cannot produce. Where the fruit of the Spirit is, the Law has nothing to say, because everything it would have commanded is already present. And so the final verse: they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh. Not mortified only — Paul’s word is stronger. The flesh has been nailed. It is still alive on the cross, still capable of crying out; but it has been fixed, and it will not come down.
III. The Gospel: Nemo potest duobus dominis servire (Matthew 6:24-33)
Our Lord’s sentence is a piece of plain observation before it is a piece of theology. No man can serve two masters — not should not, but can not. The heart is one thing and can be given whole to only one lord. Then the two masters are named: God, and mammon.
St. Jerome, in his commentary on St. Matthew, tells us the word is Syriac and means simply riches, and St. Augustine, who knew the Punic of North Africa, adds that in his own countryside the word for gain was much the same. The Fathers do not make mammon into a demon; they leave it as what it is — wealth, treated as a master. Chrysostom, in his homilies on Matthew, presses the point that riches are not condemned but servitude to riches; a man may possess money, but the moment money possesses him he has changed masters, and the change will show.
Then follows the long, gentle argument against solicitude — the birds, the lilies, the grass of the field. The Douay word is exact: be not solicitous. Our Lord is not forbidding work, or foresight, or the prudent provision of a father for his household. St. Augustine, in his treatise on the Sermon on the Mount, distinguishes carefully: what is forbidden is the anxious care that makes temporal things the end for which we labour, so that the kingdom becomes at best a means to comfort. Aquinas follows him and gives the matter its Scholastic precision: solicitude for temporal things is sinful when they are sought as the final end, or when the care for them so absorbs the soul that it is drawn from the things of God, or when it is joined to a distrust of Providence; the ordinary care of a man for his daily bread is not touched.
Chrysostom’s reading of the birds and lilies is the most humane of the patristic treatments. Our Lord, he says, argues from the lesser to the greater: if the Father feeds creatures that cannot pray, will He forget those who can? And the lilies are chosen precisely because they are useless — they cannot be eaten or sold — and yet God dresses them beyond Solomon. The examples are meant to shame our anxiety, not our labour. St. Hilary of Poitiers, reading the same verses in his commentary on Matthew, sees the lily as a figure of the glorified body: the flesh that is “today, and tomorrow cast into the oven” is the same flesh that God will clothe in a glory beyond the king’s.
And the whole passage resolves into the sentence the Church gives us at the Communion of this Mass: Primum quaerite regnum Dei et iustitiam eius, et haec omnia adiicientur vobis. Seek first — primum. Augustine reads the adverb as an ordering, not an exclusion. The kingdom is to be sought as the end; the rest is to be added, which is to say received as a gift rather than grasped as a prize. The heathens, Our Lord says, seek “all these things”; the difference between the heathen and the Christian is not that one eats and the other does not, but what each seeks first.
IV. Synthesis
Set the two lessons side by side and they turn out to be one lesson.
St. Paul names two contrary desires — the flesh and the Spirit. Our Lord names two contrary masters — God and mammon. But a master is only a desire that has been enthroned. The flesh, left to itself, does not stay a mere inclination; it seeks a lord to serve, and the lord it finds is mammon, which promises to satisfy every one of the seventeen works Paul lists. And the Spirit, given room, does not stay a mere inclination either; it seeks the kingdom, and the kingdom sought first bears the twelvefold fruit. The Epistle describes the war within; the Gospel describes the allegiance that decides it.
The Collect of the day binds the two together with a single clause: quia sine te labitur humana mortalitas — “since without Thee our mortal nature falls.” Labitur: it slips, slides, goes down. That is the flesh of the Epistle, the downward pull that Cassian described; and the whole prayer is a petition that the Church be drawn away from what is harmful and directed toward what is saving — which is to say, that she be taught which master to serve. The Gradual answers: Bonum est confidere in Domino, quam confidere in homine — better to trust in the Lord than to trust in man, and better than to trust in princes. Mammon is only the most reliable of the princes.
And there is the Friday. “They that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh.” The Gospel asks which master we will serve; the Epistle tells us what serving the true one will cost. It is not a negotiation. The flesh is not persuaded to step down; it is nailed up. But it is nailed up with Christ — the verb is Paul’s own, from two chapters earlier, Christo confixus sum cruci — and what is crucified with Him is raised with Him. That is why the fruit of the Spirit is joy in the second place, right after charity. The crucified flesh does not produce a sour Christian. It produces a free one.
V. Devotional Application
Name the second master. The heathen seeks “all these things” and knows it; the Christian’s danger is subtler — to seek the kingdom sincerely and mammon also, and to tell himself the arrangement is workable. Our Lord says it is not. The examen for this feria is a single question, asked without flinching: what, this week, did I actually seek first? Not what I professed to seek, but what I lay awake over, arranged my day around, would have been most afraid to lose.
Distinguish care from solicitude. Many good Catholics suffer needlessly under this Gospel because they read it as forbidding prudence. It does not. Provide for your household; save; plan. Then examine whether the providing has become anxiety, and whether the anxiety has become a quiet disbelief that the Father knows what you need. The remedy for solicitude is not carelessness but trust, and trust is a virtue that grows by being exercised.
Choose one work of the flesh and one fruit of the Spirit. Paul’s lists are meant to be used. Read the seventeen and let one of them convict you; it is almost never one of the spectacular ones. Read the twelve and let one of them invite you. Then, for the coming week, refuse the first and cultivate the second, and let the Friday remind you that refusing it will hurt. The nail is not a metaphor for comfort.
Keep the Friday. Some abstinence, some small self-denial, offered explicitly for the crucifixion of the flesh that Paul describes. It is not the size of the act that matters but its direction.
VI. The Collect
Custodi, Domine, quaesumus, Ecclesiam tuam propitiatione perpetua: et quia sine te labitur humana mortalitas; tuis semper auxiliis et abstrahatur a noxiis, et ad salutaria dirigatur. Per Dominum.
“Keep, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy Church with Thy perpetual mercy: and since without Thee our mortal nature falls, by Thy help may it ever be drawn away from what is harmful and directed toward what is saving. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiration
Domine, doce me quaerere primum regnum tuum. “Lord, teach me to seek first Thy kingdom.”
Or, more briefly, the Gradual’s own confession, to be said whenever the second master makes his offer: Bonum est confidere in Domino.
VIII. Further Study
This feria opens on to two of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the Catholic teaching on concupiscence after baptism — why Trent insisted it is not sin in the regenerate, what it means that it remains for the contest, and how this differs from the reading of Galatians 5:17 that broke the Church in the sixteenth century. The Spiritual Practices path treats the discernment of solicitude from prudence, and the practice of the examen on a single point, which is older than St. Ignatius and was known to Cassian. Either would be a fitting next step; the first for the mind, the second for the will.
IX. Source Transparency
The scriptural text is that of the Douay-Rheims. The patristic readings are given by paraphrase with their locus rather than by direct quotation: St. Jerome, Commentarii in Epistolam ad Galatas, on chapter 5, and Commentarii in Matthaeum, Book I, on chapter 6; St. Augustine, Expositio Epistolae ad Galatas, on 5:17-22, and De sermone Domini in monte, Book II, on the two masters and on solicitude; St. John Chrysostom, Commentarius in Epistolam ad Galatas, on chapter 5, and Homiliae in Matthaeum, on 6:24-33; St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentarius in Matthaeum, on chapter 6; John Cassian, Collationes, IV (the Conference of Abbot Daniel on the concupiscence of flesh and spirit); the Council of Trent, Session V, decree on original sin; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 55, on solicitude. The identification of the day’s proper texts follows the 1962 Missale Romanum; readers are encouraged to check the Collect against a printed Missal, as this reflection was drafted from working notes.
Sancta Maria, Sedes Sapientiae, ora pro nobis.