(LifeSiteNews) — What concrete impact on the human experience did the Incarnation of the Son of God have on humanity? We may sometimes be tempted to believe that what is recorded in Sacred Scripture is a collection of nice stories to help us deal with the challenges of daily life in a healthier way, providing some level of psychological support or the like.

But are these stories true, and how might we demonstrate a fundamental change in the world due to the birth of a helpless child in a Bethlehem cave who impacted history to the degree that He split it in two: the period of time prior to His birth, and the succeeding centuries after which we all date our calendars.

Having previously worked as a high school teacher at a Catholic classical education academy, I had the honor and pleasure of sharing with my students foundational texts in Western civilization, and this included Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

A pagan Greek philosopher who lived in the 4^th century B.C., many of Aristotle’s texts were rediscovered in the 13^th century and served as a foundation for the theology of the greatest Catholic theologian in history, St. Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa Theologiæ, the saint merely refers to Aristotle as “the Philosopher” and quotes him over 2,000 times.

Eventually, these concepts of Greek wisdom became adopted as a tool for the Catholic Church in articulating the nature of man, the harmony between faith and reason, including a certain demonstrable knowledge of God based on reason, and the means of the human person achieving happiness through a virtuous life.

The experience of pouring through these ancient texts with my students was one of amazement as we unpacked “the Philosopher’s” articulation of the nature of the human soul, of the virtues, particularly what we call the primary natural virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

We also focused on Aristotle’s description of how the human intellect and will train the passions and emotions to properly order them toward that which is good and virtuous as a means of building character within ourselves, leading to happiness.

Of course, individuals do not always choose virtuous actions but can instead foster vices which lead to what Aristotle calls incontinent or vicious (self-indulgent) moral states of character.

In reviewing these concepts with my students we marveled at how a pagan Greek philosopher, living centuries before Christ, was able to grasp and articulate with such precision so many aspects of truth which are continually confirmed as such by the life experience of the individual.

As with St. Thomas Aquinas, repeatedly my students experienced the writings of Aristotle ringing true in their hearts and souls, until we reached one passage which seemed problematic.

In Book III, Chapter 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Philosopher is explaining how individuals have it in their power to make deliberate repeated choices as a means of building virtue, or, on the contrary, of forging a character of vice through repeated acts of injustice or incontinence.

With regard to the latter scenario, where a person makes repeated deliberate choices building a vicious character which is driven by the lower passions and appetites, a point arrives, Aristotle teaches, where such a person can never change.

Using the analogy of one throwing and releasing a stone, Aristotle explains that once the rock is released from the hand, it cannot be retrieved, and in like manner this individual’s deliberate acts of injustice or incontinence have forged a vicious character which will remain as a permanent burden:

Just as when you have let a stone go it is too late to recover it; but yet it was in your power to throw it, since the moving principle was in you. So, too, to the unjust and to the self-indulgent man it was open at the beginning not to become men of this kind, and so they are unjust and self-indulgent voluntarily; but now that they have become so it is not possible for them not to be so.

At this point I would ask my students if, like everything else we had studied from Aristotle, they agreed that this also was true. Of course, unanimously, they would reject this description saying it is not true as even the worst of us in humanity always have the possibility of changing for the better.

Such change for the better is their clear experience and, thus, they concluded that Aristotle was obviously wrong on this point.

I would then ask how he could possibly be precisely right on so much and wrong to such a great degree on this aspect of the human experience for which they unanimously felt absolutely certain.

Eventually they arrived at the conclusion that Aristotle could only represent the state of humanity prior to the Incarnation of the Son of God in the Person of Jesus Christ, where now we may even take for granted His grace which may continually serve to transform our lives when we make even modest efforts to receive it.

And thus, from this one ancient source we are given a glimpse of the state of humanity prior to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

For these reasons, the Catechism of the Catholic Church confirms that grace sufficient for all of humanity to not only be forgiven for their sins but transformed interiorly from a life of vice to one of virtue, in service to God, has been merited by the Passion of Jesus Christ.

This grace ordinarily available in the sacraments of the Church, renews the interior man, purifies his heart of sin, heals and frees him from enslavement to sin, giving him the ability to follow the example of Christ.

“Healing the wounds of sin, the Holy Spirit renews us interiorly through a spiritual transformation,” the Catechism reads. “He enlightens and strengthens us to live as ‘children of light’ through ‘all that is good and right and true’” (1695).

So, this Christmas, when we may hear the Gospel of Matthew’s representation of the Nativity, and the angel’s command to St. Joseph in a dream to name the son born of his wife Mary “Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (1:21), we can perhaps better appreciate the enormous impact of this central event in world history and the infinite gifts it has bestowed upon each one of us.