Clement:
Whosoever will candidly consider each particular, will recognise the greatness of the gifts which were given by him. For from him [i.e. Abraham] have sprung the priests and all the Levites who minister at the altar of God. From him also [was descended] our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh. (Romans 9:5) From him [arose] kings, princes, and rulers of the race of Judah. Nor are his other tribes in small glory, inasmuch as God had promised, “Your seed shall be as the stars of heaven.” All these, therefore, were highly honoured, and made great, not for their own sake, or for their own works, or for the righteousness which they wrought, but through the operation of His will. And we, too, being called by His will in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. (St. Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians, c. 32)
ANSWER:
But there are two things that must be noted. First, St. Clement is here making the same claim St. Paul makes in Romans 4, that what made Abraham right with God was not works of the law, but faith. St. Clement is not in this paragraph speaking about growing in righteousness, but about being transferred from the state of sin into which we are born as a result of the sin of the first Adam, to the state of grace and to the adoption of the sons of God through the second Adam, Jesus Christ. St. Clement is saying here that justification (in this sense) is not by our own works or by the righteousness we have wrought or by our wisdom or our understanding or our godliness or by works we have done in holiness of heart, but by faith.10
The second thing that must be kept in mind is the nature of this faith by which we are justified, whether it is living faith or dead faith. That is, is this a faith informed by the virtue of agape, or is it a faith not informed by the virtue of agape? In Catholic soteriology, agape is a virtue (i.e. habit) poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul says:
because the agape of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” [ὅτι ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ ἐκκέχυται ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡμῶν διὰ πνεύματος ἁγίου τοῦ δοθέντος ἡμῖν] (Romans 5:5)
“For faith, unless hope and charity be added to it, neither unites man perfectly with Christ nor makes him a living member of His body. For which reason it is most truly said that faith without works is dead (James 2:17, 20) and of no profit, and in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but faith that worketh by charity. (Gal 5:6, 6:15)11
If any one saith that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them; or even that the grace, whereby we are justified, is only the favour of God; let him be anathema.12
https://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/11/st-clement-of-rome-soteriology-and-ecclesiology/
In Catholic soteriology, only when faith is informed by the internal habit of agape in the soul is faith living faith, and hence justifying faith. The Council of Trent declared:
The saving faith of which St. Clement speaks is faith informed by agape, not faith uninformed by agape. We can see this in various places in his epistle. St. Clement writes:
On account of her faith and hospitality, Rahab the harlot was saved. (12)
Notice that it was not faith alone that saved her. The kind of faith that saved her was a faith working by agape. He continues:
Love unites us to God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love bears all things, is long-suffering in all things. There is nothing base, nothing arrogant in love. Love admits of no schisms: love gives rise to no seditions: love does all things in harmony. By love have all the elect of God been made perfect; without love nothing is well-pleasing to God. (49)
For St. Clement the person without love is not united to God, and is therefore not justified. The person without love remains unforgiven. The person without love is not “well-pleasing to God”. So the person with faith alone, but lacking agape, is not justified.
St. Clement continues:
Blessed are we, beloved, if we keep the commandments of God in the harmony of love; that so through love our sins may be forgiven us. (50)
According to St. Clement, love is not merely an expression of gratitude that our sins are forgiven. Only by the presence of agape in us are our sins forgiven. Hence faith alone (so long as it is not informed by agape) does not justify.
St. Clement continues:
Abraham, styled “the friend,” was found faithful, inasmuch as he rendered obedience to the words of God.(10)
The faith of Abraham was a faith working through agape, not just mere faith.
St. Clement continues:
For what reason was our father Abraham blessed? Was it not because he wrought righteousness and truth through faith? (31)
For St. Clement the faith by which Abraham was blessed, was a faith informed by agape, and which thereby wrought righteousness. So these other places in St. Clement’s epistle explain how the passage in chapter 32 should be interpreted as referring to a faith informed by agape, not faith alone. This is also how St. Augustine understood justification by faith, as I recently showed here.13
Does St. Clement mean that it is faith alone that justifies, but that justifying faith is always accompanied by or followed by works of love? No, because faith-informed-by-agape is not identical to faith-followed-by-works. The whole point is what is inside the person. Yes, of course, what is inside will manifest itself outside, in our works. The person who claims to have faith but has no works, is deceiving himself. And what we do in exercising the grace and virtues that God has infused into our soul, leads to their growth in the soul. We cannot just kick back and rest in the presence of grace and virtues within. But, the important point is that faith and agape are virtues. They are supernaturally infused habits within the soul.
So the question is this: Why kind of faith justifies? Is it faith (i.e. the virtue) alone, or is it faith (i.e. the virtue) informed by agape (i.e. also a virtue). The Catholic answer is that the faith that justifies is a faith (i.e. the virtue in the soul) informed by agape (i.e. also a virtue in the soul). The Protestant answer is: faith alone [i.e. faith simpliciter, not faith-informed-by-agape] justifies, but this faith that justifies is always followed by agape and works.
If a person thinks of agape as fundamentally external or works (and misses the fact that agape is fundamentally a virtue), he would not accurately grasp the Catholic-Protestant disagreement. That is, if he thinks of agape only as an act (or only as an external act), he would conceive of faith-informed-by-agape as though it means faith-accompanied-by-good-works. But that is not what faith-informed-by-agape means, even though good works necessarily follow faith-informed-by-agape. The Catholic Church teaches that we are justified by living faith, and what makes faith living is agape (as a supernaturally infused virtue). What makes faith to be non-living, or dead, is the absence of agape (as a virtue). Dead faith does not justify; only living faith justifies.
Protestant theology tends not to give conceptual space to agape as a virtue, seeing it only as a work. Scott Clark, for example, denies that faith and agape are virtues. And that tends to lead to a misunderstanding on the part of Protestants, who think that when Catholics talk about faith-informed-by-agape, it means faith accompanied by works. If it meant that, then we could have no confidence that baptized babies who die before reaching an age in which they can do any works, could be saved. But, we believe that at baptism, the virtues of faith, hope, and agape are infused into the soul by the Holy Spirit, and therefore that the infant is justified at that very moment, because he now has faith-informed-by-agape, even though has not yet done a single good work.
So when St. Clement says the following:
Similarly we also, who by His will have been called in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves or our own wisdom or understanding or godliness, nor by such deeds as we have done in holiness of heart, but by that faith through which Almighty God has justified all men since the beginning of time. Glory be to Him for ever and ever, amen.” (ch. 32)
The question is this: Is he talking about about living faith (i.e. faith informed by the virtue of agape), or is he talking about dead faith (i.e. faith where there is not the virtue of agape conjoined to faith)? As I have just shown in the passages cited, the evidence in the text points to the former. Recall that he says:
Love unites us to God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love bears all things, is long-suffering in all things. There is nothing base, nothing arrogant in love. Love admits of no schisms: love gives rise to no seditions: love does all things in harmony. By love have all the elect of God been made perfect; without love nothing is well-pleasing to God. (ch. 49)
If our faith were not informed by the virtue of agape, then it would follow (given what St. Clement says here) that such faith would not unite us to God and would not be pleasing to God. Only a faith informed by the virtue of agape unites us to God and is pleasing to God, and so therefore, we have good reason to believe that for St. Clement, “the faith through which Almighty God has justified all men since the beginning of time” is faith informed by the virtue of agape.
Sola Symbolica - The 6th Sola of Protestantism 
The Real Presence is, in my humble opinion; to be found in the born again believer. Those who have been redeemed and are being conformed to the image of God’s dear Son, don’t just display the real presence of Christ; they transmit it.
There are some aspects of the following article which I obviously would disagree with, but I also think that the writer misunderstands Chesterton as well. I believe Chesterton is speaking literally here, and truly believes that we, as image bearers of God, and the light of the world; are the real presence of Christ.
The Risen Christ Walks With Us
By Rev. Mark A. Pilon
Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation
March 31, 2018
With that their eyes were opened and they recognized Him,
but He vanished from their sight.
LittlemoreTracts classic, 4/30/17 — The great English writer G. K. Chesterton was asked once by a reporter what he would do if the Risen Christ were now standing right behind him. The questioner knew of Chesterton’s firm belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ, but he was not prepared for the answer he got from Mr. Chesterton, who simply replied “but He is.”
Unfortunately, not many Christians today have this clear insight and deep faith when it comes to the Resurrection of Christ. For too many Christians, His Resurrection is simply something they profess their faith in, that is, an astounding event that happened two thousand years ago.
But Mr. Chesterton, who was a recent convert to Catholicism when this brief interview took place, well understood that the Resurrection is in fact an event that touches the life of the true believer right here and now, and Jesus Christ not only lives, but He will continue to live with us until the end of the world, as he promised his astonished disciples. True, we do not physically see Him standing behind us, or in front of us, but He nonetheless is present with us just as He promised so long ago. Orthodox Christian faith believes this truth fully, and thus a deep faith will sense His presence with us, within us, and it will understand why He is so near to us. He remains here with us to bring us safely home to His Father’s Kingdom.
All too often we Christians act not like men or women reborn from an Easter faith, but rather like the two downcast disciples on the Road to Emmaus. These good men were clearly in a depressed state of mind traceable to the utterly depraved condition of the world that they had just experienced in Jerusalem. They had hoped that Jesus was the Messiah, but, having experienced how the powers of this world had shamefully put Him to death, their great hope seemed to have been shattered, and the world around them understandably now seemed to them a lot darker than it had before the events of Good Friday.
So lacking in hope, so distressed in spirit were they now, that even the first reports of the Resurrection could not lift their spirits, and they were tempted to dismiss them as just empty tales with no foundation, and so their lives went on as before this news was brought to them. Indeed, they were so overwhelmed by the recent events that they could not recognize Jesus even when He quietly joined them on their journey.
How often we Christians today can allow the world and all its problems and evil, or allow just some serious problem in our personal lives to overwhelm us to the point that we can find no solace, no comfort, even in the truth of the Resurrection. And thus, like the two disciples that day we also cannot recognize the presence of Christ Who accompanies each of us on our journey in this world. As Chesterton insisted to the reporter, the truth is that Jesus Christ is indeed with us, here and now, and always. That in fact is the Easter faith of the Church, and it is a life transforming faith.
And if we cannot recognize His presence in our troubled world, it’s not because Christ has abandoned us, but because we either have abandoned Him, or we are so caught up in our own problems or the world’s problems that we can no longer sense His presence as the Risen Lord who remains with us on our journey to Heaven.
But the event in today’s Gospel reveals to us not only our faith problem, but also reveals to us the solution, that is, how we can once again become open to His presence and receive the help that Christ always offers us, just as much as He helped those two disciples on Easter Sunday to recover their joy, their active faith and their desire to be with Him always, “Stay with us,” they asked, “for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.”
To strengthen our own faith, we must first ask how did He help these two men to understand what troubled them, that is how to understand His death which had undermined their faith, their hope and their very lives. Jesus helped them understand His death by interpreting for them every passage of Scripture from the Prophets that had referred to Him, and to the necessity for His saving death.
We too must learn from this that we will not find true consolation or understanding without turning to God’s Word. And if we are to be taught by God, this turning to God’s Word has to be comprehensive and not piecemeal. It is not enough that we read this or that bit of Scripture. Note that Jesus interpreted for them “every” passage that referred to him. God speaks His Word to us, but His Word cannot be effectively understood except within the context of the whole of His teaching. That is why the early Christians devoted themselves immediately to the instruction of the Apostles in the Word of God.
Secondly, we must note that these two disciples recognized Jesus conclusively only in the Eucharistic action of Jesus in the “breaking of the bread.” They sensed something of Him in His explaining of the Scriptures, and that’s why they asked Him to remain with them, but they came to know Him conclusively only in His “breaking of the bread, which is exactly the way in which the early Church came to describe the Eucharist. Jesus Himself is in control of this whole encounter, and He wills to be recognized, above all, in the action which points to the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. It is precisely there, in the Blessed Sacrament, that faith must recognize His remaining with us, if we are ever to recognize His presence in our daily life, standing behind us, with us, as Chesterton affirmed to that reporter.
If we do not recognize Him in the Eucharist, then we will not fully appreciate his presence in the Word, and we will likely lose our sense of His presence in our daily lives.
How often people who are having difficulties in this world, perhaps with this world, cut themselves off from the only true source of consolation and hope. They allow their problems to overwhelm them and they stop going to Church. It’s like the madness of a person who gets a physical disease deciding to stop seeing the doctor. Perhaps they look for some understanding, but they seem to think God will bypass the ordinary means of spiritual health, and speak directly to them. The disciples on the road needed to listen to Jesus, not just talk to each other about their problems – the blind leading the blind, as it were. And they needed to have the whole corpus of teaching to understand the details. That is what Jesus gave them as a pure gift.
We can see that the sequence of events in this Gospel account of Emmaus is very much like our Mass, spread over time. The Church gives us the corpus of God’s teaching in the Liturgy of the Word, but only spread over time. So when people only attend Mass sporadically, or absent themselves for long blocks of time, of course they find no consolation, no insight into their own problems from the Word of God! The details of Scripture give light only when seen in the light of the whole – that’s why Jesus had to interpret all the passages that referred to him for the two disciples to understand why he had to die! The Word of God gives light and comfort. but only if it is approached as God’s Word, a Word which is as unified as God is.
And, secondly, only if we are first nourished by God’s Word, truly nourished, over time, can we proceed to properly receive, recognize, Jesus in the second part of the Mass, the Breaking of the Bread, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and Holy Communion. So in today’s Gospel, Jesus is demonstrating, as it were, the Christian learning curve: first the encounter with the Word of God in Scripture, and then the encounter with the Word of God made flesh in the Sacrament of the Altar.
This Easter faith, coupled with the special encounter with Christ in the Eucharist is truly a life-transforming gift. It restores a joy to our life that cannot be taken away regardless of what the world does to us, just as Jesus promised: “I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.” (John 16:22) Those who have a living faith in the Resurrection and the Eucharist come to know this joy, and life truly becomes worth living, regardless of the circumstances. That is what I mean by a life transforming faith.
In short, if we are to maintain our mental equilibrium and Christian joy in a difficult world, we must learn to surrender ourselves to a comprehensive approach to the Sacred Word and to a living faith in the Eucharistic Sacrament of Christ’s sacrifice and Holy Communion. From Christ’s example on the road to Emmaus, we must learn that the two parts go absolutely hand in hand.
If we do not surrender to this ordered path to God, we will never recognize the Risen Lord, in the Eucharist, or, as Chesterton said, standing behind us in our daily life. If we do, then we poor souls will have not simply the wisdom of a man like Chesterton, who I’m sure would have considered himself the least in God’s kingdom, but we will discover the wisdom of the ages and of God’s holy ones.
Rev. Mark A. Pilon (1943-2018) was a priest of the Diocese of Arlington. He had several advanced degrees, including an STL, summa cum laude, from the John Paul II Institute at the Lateran University; an STD, magna cum laude, from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome; and an M.S. in education from Catholic University of America. At various times, he taught at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, Christendom College, Catholic University of America, and at the Christian Commonwealth Institute in Spain.
Copyright © 2018 by Rev. Mark A. Pilon and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. “The Risen Christ walks with us” was a homily delivered by Fr. Pilon on the 3rd Sunday of Easter on April 30, 2017. This article may be reprinted if credit is given to Fr. Pilon and fgfBooks.com.